Starting Out in the Evening Page 11

  A crowd of people from the reading were going out for a drink; Heather, still talking to Sandra, fell in step with her, and although she hadn’t precisely been invited, she ended up sitting next to Sandra at a long table in a crowded bar.

  The music was too loud; they had to bend their heads together to hear each other speak. But no one sitting nearby could eavesdrop. It was curious, the intimacy of a conversation conducted in shouts.

  Heather knew all about Sandra. She was a former wunderkind: she’d been a staff writer at The New Yorker in the middle seventies, a protegee of William Shawn, and when Shawn was deposed, Sandra, along with a lot of other people, left in protest. When people think of the old New Yorker as staid and safe, they’re forgetting about writers like Sandra. She wrote about rock music with literacy and wit; she was one of the first people to discover Patti Smith; she was one of the first people to write intelligently about punk music. Heather had once spent an afternoon in the library digging up Sandra’s articles, and they still held up.

  After Sandra left The New Yorker she bounced around for a few years at other magazines, finally ending up at the Voice. She didn’t write much anymore—she published about an article a year. Supposedly she threw most of her energies into editing. She had a reputation as someone who nurtured young talent. And this was why Heather had approached her.

  “So what do you see yourself doing in five years?” Sandra said. “Are you planning to become a literary critic?”

  She hadn’t really thought abut it Five years seemed a long way away.

  “I’m not sure. Some days I want to be Elizabeth Bishop, some days I want to be Liz Phair. Some days I want to be Joan Didion, and some days I want to be—”

  “Joan of Arc,” Sandra said. “You’ve got the under-thirty disease. It’ll pass.”

  Sandra seemed to be taking her seriously. But she seemed to take everyone seriously. A guy who had come along from the reading was leaving the bar; he sat down to talk with Sandra for a minute on his way out, and though Heather couldn’t hear what they were saying, she saw that Sandra was speaking to him with complete absorption, as if he were the only person in the room. During the hour that Heather spent there, this happened several times: Sandra would engage in intense conversation with someone and Heather would sip her beer, biding her time, waiting for an opportunity to regain her attention.

  After two drinks, Heather was telling Sandra what she liked about her work. “I love the way you go from books to movies to literature to history to politics to music. It’s not like you’re saying that the Sex Pistols were as great as Dostoevsky. But you do seem to be saying that it’s perfectly fine to like the Sex Pistols and Dostoevsky. I love that. It’s very freeing.”

  Freeing, Heather thought drunkenly. Whenever I want to flatter an older person I tell them they freed me. But it’s true.

  During the next half hour their talk went from Laurie Anderson to Mary Gaitskill to Willa Cather to Chantal Ackerman to Robert Bresson. Heather had the sense that she was being tested—but this was a test she could pass.

  She flashed on Schiller, who was undoubtedly in bed by now. When she was with Schiller, she felt continually reproached—for not knowing enough about Delmore Schwartz, for never having heard of Harvey Swados, for not understanding the long-ago cultural centrality of Partisan Review. Not that Schiller ever actually reproached her—it was just that she could feel his sadness that the constellations he had steered by were so faint to her.

  “Time for bed,” Sandra said. “Give me a call at the Voice this week. Maybe we can find something for you to write about.”

  “Really? That’s really nice of you.” Heather wasn’t acting: she was genuinely thrilled.

  “I like to give young people a hand.”

  “I’ve heard that about you. I’ve always wondered why.”

  “When I was young a few older people gave me a hand. It’s the kind of thing you can’t really repay, because the people who help you may never need your help. But what you can do is pass it on. So I try to pass it on.”

  They left the bar; at almost two in the morning Second Avenue was still throbbing, and Heather felt the power and splendor of the city as vividly as if she’d just arrived. Sandra had said that maybe she could write for the Voice. Heather thought the world could stop right now. Life was perfect; how could it get any better than this? But maybe the world shouldn’t stop—because what made life perfect was this sense of possibility, this sense of the promise of the future. Maybe someday she could be like Sandra, welcoming some beginner, some young hopeful, to the pleasures of the life of the mind. She felt incredibly lucky. You can go from pleasure to pleasure to pleasure if you’re lucky enough.

  17

  Ariel met her father at Williams Bar-B-Que on Broadway and 86th. They were visiting his friend Levin at Beth Israel North on the East Side. Schiller bought some food to take to the hospital: a roast chicken, kasha varnishkes, a three-bean salad, and a quart of gefilte fish. Ariel bought a bag of peanuts to eat on their walk through the park.

  The day was oddly warm, wet, thick with mist.

  “I’m sorry about the other weekend,” he said. This was the first time she’d seen him since she’d stumbled into his love nest. She’d ended up sleeping that night at her exercise studio—a guard she knew had been on duty in the building—and she’d picked up her backpack the next day when she knew Schiller wouldn’t be home—Jeff, the doorman, had a set of keys.

  “Heather wasn’t feeling well, so I put her up in the guest room.”

  Well, maybe it was true. Certainly it was easier to believe that than to believe the two of them were lovers. But on the other hand her father had looked guilty and strange when she’d barged in on him that night, and even now he was mumbling in a way that wasn’t like him.

  The soil in the park was mushy and he had to walk slowly; his cane sank into the ground each time he leaned on it, and he had to struggle to extract it with each step.

  Why did she even care? He had his own life; whatever he was doing with that little freak was his own business.

  The Great Lawn was deserted except for a few people playing Frisbee in the distance.

  She didn’t have a right to care, but she cared.

  It was just weird, that’s all. It was against nature.

  By the time they reached Fifth Avenue he was tired, and they rested on a bench near the Metropolitan Museum.

  “I have something for you,” he said. He reached into an inside pocket of his suit jacket and withdrew a silver necklace, attached to which were two small pearls. “I was going through a trunk of your mother’s things. I hadn’t looked inside it in twenty years. I think I bought this for her the year you were born.”

  The pearls were beautiful: their purity, their subtlety, their modesty.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He unclasped the necklace and fitted it around her neck, and he examined her with a fatherly appreciativeness—his gaze moving from the pearls to her eyes to the pearls—and took a deep breath; and this long fluent breath reassured her more than anything he could have said to her. She needed to feel important to her father, and, in this moment, she did.

  “Pearls symbolize hope,” he said.

  She wanted to make the moment last somehow. She took a peanut out of the little bag she’d bought at Williams.

  “Did you ever see the man in the peanut?” she said. She shelled the peanut and then carefully broke it in half, along its seam. Inside was a little bump that looked like an old man with a beard. She showed it to her father.

  “Mom showed me that,” she said.

  After he rested they resumed their walk. The hospital was all the way over by the East River, near Gracie Mansion. The streets here were stunningly calm and well-tended; it was hardly like being in New York.

  The hospital itself was old-fashioned, neighborly, and quaint. In his room, Levin was sitting up in bed.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. “Stella.”

  “It�
��s not Stella,” Schiller said. “It’s Ariel. It’s my daughter.” His voice was soft, but his face was grim.

  “Goodness,” Levin said. He closed his eyes and pressed his lips together with an expression of self-reproach. “Don’t mind me. I’m just sloshing around through the decades here.”

  Another of her father’s old friends, Sol Booth, was sitting in the corner. He shook Schiller’s hand and gave Ariel a hug.

  “George is tired because he’s been taking an intellectual thrashing,” Booth said.

  “Sol waits until I’m in intensive care to lecture me about Israel.”

  Ariel had known these men all her life; she cared for them a great deal; but she had always been afraid of them as well. Their love of intellectual combat left her cold. They were always arguing about something; it seemed to make them feel more alive. She didn’t like to argue.

  “What’s going on?” her father said, putting the bags of food on the table.

  “Sol was calling me a political naif,” Levin said.

  “Look what I find on the man’s night table.” Booth held up a book. “Noam Chomsky!” he said.

  “So?” Schiller said.

  “Ach!” was all Booth could say.

  Levin smiled, but she could see he was in great pain.

  “I wasn’t even reading it,” he said. “My son sent it to me.”

  “You should have sent it back,” Booth said.

  “We brought some food,” Schiller said.

  Booth got up to help. He was noticeably sprier than her father and most of her father’s other friends. He took a plastic container out of the bag and waved it at Ariel. “Gefilte fish. Can I interest you in some refreshing gefilte fish, my dear?” She smiled and said no, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He took out a piece with a plastic fork, put it on a paper plate, and put the plate into her hand. “Eat, eat.”

  Gefilte fish was one of those Jewish specialties that had always baffled her. What was gefilte fish? Soft spongy slimy loaves of beige matter fixed in gelatin. Was it really even fish? No one knew.

  As Booth and her father spread out the fish and the kasha varnishkes and the roast chicken, she wondered who would eat these things after their generation was gone. She saw herself in the distant future, in some delicatessen on Broadway, ordering gefilte fish to commune with her father’s spirit.

  Her father and Booth were talking about Noam Chomsky, Israel, the peace process, and, somehow, linguistics; the conversation quickly found its way to realms where she couldn’t follow. “Chomsky’s linguistics never seemed much more to me than warmed-over Kant,” Booth said.

  She couldn’t tell whether Levin was following them either. He looked back and forth at his friends as they spoke, smiling encouragingly, but he seemed very tired, and she suspected that his mind was far away. She suspected that this was the old story: the dying person acting strong in order to keep up the courage of his friends.

  It was hard for her to understand how you could sit at the bedside of a dying friend and talk about politics. If she were in Levin’s state, she thought, she’d be thinking about death, the possibility of life after death, and little else. All worldly things would be slipping away. She wouldn’t want to have to pretend to pay attention while her friends talked about the Middle East. But these men coped with death by acting as if it didn’t exist. When Levin died, her father and Booth and the rest of them would attend his funeral, and then they would go to a coffee shop and talk about Kafka, Beckett, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and all the other things they talked about every day of their lives.

  To Ariel it seemed as if they were averting their eyes from the larger questions. But maybe their way was better than hers—maybe they were serving eternity precisely by staying faithful to daily life.

  If she didn’t understand her father’s friends, she felt that they didn’t even come close to understanding her. Though as intellectuals they probably liked to think that “nothing human was alien to them,” she found them narrow in their interests: the only thing they thrilled to, really, was the written word. Ariel was outside their radar. When she was a dancer, they had occasionally tried to talk to her about her work, but the conversations never got very far: they were interested in dance in a theoretical or historical way—Diaghilev, Balanchine—and she loved dance only because she loved to do it. Now that she taught dance exercise, her conversations with them rarely passed beyond “How are you?” It wasn’t that they were cold—they were quite the opposite. Booth and Levin, like most of her father’s other friends, were always happy to see her, she didn’t think it would be putting it too strongly to say that they loved her. It was just that they were all so relentlessly intellectual that she existed in a realm that had no meaning for them.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” her father asked Levin.

  “For about a week I’ve had a yen for Mission orange soda,” he said.

  Schiller looked at his friend for a long time. “Mission orange soda,” he said to Ariel, “is a drink they probably haven’t made since 1940. We used to drink it after we played stickball.” He patted Levin on the hand. “I’ll try to hunt up a reasonable substitute.”

  “I’ll stretch my legs with you,” Booth said; and she was alone in the room with Levin.

  When she was a girl, Levin and his wife Abby used to come around about once a month. Ariel liked them, but she never saw them alone, and she never really had a conversation with either of them. Except once.

  It was during her first semester of college, when she was home for fall break. She was desperately unhappy at Carnegie Mellon, and she wanted to drop out and travel for a while, and her father was freaking out about it. Maybe he thought that if she left school she’d never go back; maybe he thought that if she went traveling she’d wind up in trouble—it was impossible to tell what he thought. He was barely coherent about it; her desire to leave school was a blow to his inmost, most inarticulate soul. Their conversations during that period usually ended in shouts and tears—his shouts, her tears.

  Levin dropped by to see her father one afternoon, but Schiller was out, so he sat around and talked with Ariel. He must have sensed that she was upset about something, and he encouraged her to talk. She told him her story, and he listened patiently—much more patiently than her father could have listened at the time.

  In retrospect, the reasons she gave for wanting to drop out—she wanted to see more of “Life” outside the classroom, and so on—weren’t the real reasons. Really, it was just that she’d been shaken by the sudden changes in her life. She’d been a star at the High School of Music and Art, and now, in her first semester of college, she was a nobody; she’d been happy living at home, and being in a strange place with strange people was more of a shock than she’d anticipated.

  After listening to her story, Levin told her to do what she needed to do and not take her father’s opinions too seriously. “He’ll love you whatever you do. You just have to decide for yourself; he’ll come around. And one thing you should keep in mind is that although he doesn’t want you to do anything unconventional, he was doing the same things when he was your age.”

  She thought he was sweet to say this, but she didn’t believe him. Her father was the high priest of sobriety.

  She said something like this to Levin.

  “Your father?” he said. “When I was a kid, I looked up to him, and the reason I looked up to him was that he was a maniac. If I told you about some of the stunts he used to pull, it would upset you. And even after he started to become serious and sober-minded and all that, do you think his parents approved of his choices? His father wanted him to be a rabbi. When he told him he wanted to be a writer, your grandfather, whom you’re fortunate never to have met, stood up and said, ‘My son is driving a stake through my heart.’ I’m translating roughly, from the Yiddish. Your father made his own mistakes in his time, and you have to make your own mistakes in yours.”

  She only half-believed all this—she couldn’t imagine her fa
ther as a wild man—but even so, it helped.

  Sitting alone with Levin in his hospital room, she remembered that afternoon. She realized that when they had that conversation, he was only a little older than she was now. It was difficult to take this in. She felt very much in the disorderly middle of life. But at the time she had thought of Levin as a grown-up, a settled man, an old man.

  She hadn’t known it at the time, but during that period Levin’s marriage was going through its death throes; he and Abby split up for good about a year after that, around the time Ariel went back to college. So when he and Ariel had that conversation, he was suffering at least as deeply as she was. But in the midst of all that, in the midst of life’s perplexities, they had shared a moment of calm. Everyone else she knew at the time was barking at her, telling her what to do. She could still remember the feeling of blessed relief at finding a grown-up who would simply listen.

  Maybe the moment was alive somewhere. Levin was sitting upright in his bed with his eyes closed; he seemed to be listening to his pain. But Ariel felt sure that every moment is indestructible, and that somewhere in the universe, tucked away in some hidden fold of time, their moment together still endured. Somewhere she was still a young girl, hurled about by life, confessing her troubles, and he was a calm older man, listening to her as her father couldn’t listen and telling her to have courage. Somewhere the two of them were still talking in the quiet of that fall afternoon.

  Levin, in his bed, opened his eyes. He had huge beautiful brown eyes—Ariel had always loved his eyes. “Sorry I called you Stella,” he said. “These drugs take the pain away, but they take everything else away too.”

  “I didn’t mind.”

  “It’s no insult. Your mother was pretty too.”

  “It must be terrible to be here,” she said.

  He smiled weakly. “It takes a long time to die,” he said.