Starting Out in the Evening Read online

The incredible brownness of his eyes. Everything worldly in them was burned away: all vanity gone, all ambition, all disappointment.

  “You helped me a lot. That day you told me not to be afraid—remember? I’ll remember it always.”

  He smiled and closed his eyes, and she couldn’t tell if he knew what she was talking about. She heard Booth’s voice in the hall; he and her father were coming back.

  She touched the pearls her father had given her. It might be nice to get more pearls for the necklace, not because two were not enough, but because if she had more of them she would have a secret symbol, known only to herself, of what she believed about life. She was thinking that she was foolish to hope that someday, if she found the right path, she would be continuously happy. No one is that fortunate. The moments of beauty, the moments when you feel blessed, are only moments; but memory and imagination, treasuring them, can string them together like the delicate glories on the necklace her father had given her. Everything else passes away; that which you love remains. She had to believe this, even if she wasn’t sure it was true.

  18

  I have to toddle along now,” Ariel said. Evidently she had somewhere to go: a client to see, or a friend, or a boyfriend—Schiller didn’t know. She kissed them all good-bye, and leaving, she took her magic with her. Now they were three old men in a hospital room.

  He sat with his friends for another half hour. Levin was obviously tired, but Schiller was reluctant to say good-bye, and Booth seemed to feel the same way. It was hard to know when to leave.

  It was comfortable to be with these men. Schiller felt deeply accepted by them, deeply known. He had nothing to prove here.

  With people you’ve known all your life, you’re not just the person you are today. Today, sitting next to Sol Booth, he wasn’t just an old, semi-embittered man, with heart problems, arthritis, and several other chronic medical conditions; he was the boy who had taken a long walk with Booth on the night in 1939 when Booth, a politically hyperdeveloped fifteen-year-old, decided to leave the Communist party because of the Hitler-Stalin Pact; and he was the young man who had given the toast at Booth’s wedding, in 1947, to Florence, the woman who was still Booth’s partner, still his love; and he was the not-so-young man who, with his wife and daughter, had huddled around the television set with the Booths during the Cuban Missile Crisis, waiting to see if the world was about to come to an end.

  More. More than that. These friends were his anchor; they kept him from floating off into the uncharted realms of his own self-regard. Schiller was probably the most ambitious of the three, and certainly the most self-absorbed. Booth’s cheerfulness might have had something to do with the fact that he was abidingly concerned with matters larger than himself: he was a political creature down to his bones. Levin was the kind of old-fashioned literary critic who believed that the act of criticism was secondary to the act of creation—that the work of critics like himself was less important than the work of poets and novelists. As a critic he was primarily an enthusiast: he wrote his essays in order to pay homage to the writers he loved. Schiller, compared to both of them, was an egomaniac. He was a muted egomaniac—he tried to keep his grandiosity under cover—but an egomaniac nonetheless. He probably had to be: in order to accomplish anything merely good, an artist probably must consider himself capable of greatness. But he needed friends like these, to tease him out of his depressions and his wilder flights of self-regard, and to remind him, through the example of their lives, of what mattered.

  When Levin couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer, Schiller and Booth finally took the hint. They left the hospital together and walked a little while, ending up in a coffee shop on Second Avenue.

  “Do you remember what you said to me when Levin got married?” Schiller said. “He was having his wedding in—where the hell was it? Somewhere out in Jersey.”

  “Connecticut. That restaurant in Connecticut.”

  “And we were driving there with Florence and Stella. I was complaining about having to go all the way up to Connecticut, and you said, ‘Look at it this way: we have two obligations to our old friends. We have to go to their weddings and we have to go to their funerals. With George, we’re halfway home.’”

  Booth smiled at the joke that he’d made almost forty years ago. “I guess we’re almost all the way home now.”

  Booth took a cab downtown; Schiller walked west. Hobbling down the street, he passed a man wearing a sweatshirt that read DON’T MEAN SHIT TO ME.

  Why on earth would anyone wear a shirt like that?

  He hurt too much to walk any longer, and anyway he’d had enough exercise for one day. He stopped near Lexington at a bus shelter, which wasn’t much of a shelter at the moment: someone had smashed the glass, which lay scattered in fragments in the street.

  A crowded bus stopped and wheezingly knelt so Schiller could get on. This was one of the nicer changes the city had seen in recent years: the buses knelt for you now if you needed it, in one of the few marks of respect that age and infirmity still received.

  He squeezed toward the back of the bus and gripped one of the metal rings. He was crammed in between a nun and a baby-faced man with a Walkman, who was humming aggressively—something from The Magic Flute—and waving his hands around. Schiller had to tilt in the other direction to avoid getting clipped on the head. As the heavy bus shuddered back into the traffic, Schiller had a revelation. A theory of human nature blossomed between the bus stop on Lexington and the bus stop on Park.

  The primary human need, he decided—stronger than the need for food or sex or love—is the need for recognition, the need to make a mark in the world. One makes one’s mark according to one’s capacities. If you have talents, you exercise them: if you’re Mozart you write The Magic Flute. And if you don’t have any talents, you thrust yourself into the path of others in cruder ways: you wear stupid T-shirts or you become the impresario of the back of the bus. And if your life has been stunted from the first by violence and harsh surroundings, then you steal things or destroy things or hurt people: anything, anything, to leave an image of yourself in other people’s minds.

  Why was he coming up with crackpot theories? Because he was meeting Heather in a few hours, and he was so excited that his brain had started to overheat. All day long he’d been refreshed by a delicious current of anticipation, but now he was starting to feel feverish.

  It was still hard to believe that someone so young found him interesting. But he was beginning to believe it.

  And he was also beginning to believe in her abilities—beginning to think she really might be able to keep his name alive.

  He got off at Broadway and waited at the bus shelter for a transfer. He took off his overcoat. The unexpected warmth of the day made him realize that spring was near.

  He didn’t really need the weather to remind him; the condition of his bones was enough to tell him what season it was. Spring was bursting into painful birth. Every joint in his body ached, from his toes to his knees to his knuckles. He felt at one, in his pain, with nature—with the pain of the natural world. The sparse young trees on Broadway were aching also, from the life tensing furiously inside them. Spring was approaching, and every living being must respond or die.

  He wanted to respond. He wanted to open himself—open himself like some . . . He didn’t know what simile to use. Everything that came to mind was a cliché. Maybe that’s the problem: when you open yourself to life, you begin to think in clichés. It’s better to be guarded.

  But that can’t be true. The thing is to let life assault you, make yourself as defenseless as you can. If it bruises you, don’t protest. Love your fate.

  He boarded a northbound bus and got off at 94th Street. He had to cross the street to get to his house. During the last year he’d lost the ability to get all the way across Broadway on one traffic light. When the sign said WALK he turtled his way painfully to the median; by the time he got there the DON’T WALK sign was blinking, and he waited for the light to begin
another cycle before completing his trek across the street.

  At home he started to remove his clothes. He thought he’d try to take a nap before seeing Heather. With his stiff arthritic hands, it hurt to undo each button. He hadn’t seen her since their strange night.

  For years all the people in his life had been people he’d known for a long time; it was strange, at this late date, to face the challenge of impressing someone new.

  But why do you feel you have to impress her? He didn’t know why, but he did. Often, when he was with her, he found that his desire to seem interesting took the form of an urge to make generalizations about himself. He didn’t know why he thought generalizations would make him interesting—he didn’t think so, on a rational level, but on some deep subconscious plane he was obviously convinced that the way to a woman’s heart was to make statements that began with phrases like “I am a man who . . .” I am a man who works slowly. I am a man who rarely worries about success. I am a patient man. I am a man who has loved only a few people, but who has loved them deeply. He hadn’t said any of these things, thank God, but he was always on the verge of saying them. Perhaps he wanted to prove how reliable he was, how consistent. But often the statements that came to his lips were merely ridiculous: two weeks ago he’d had to stop himself from telling her that he was a man who didn’t like soup.

  But he didn’t need to do any of that; he didn’t need to enthrall her with the revelation that he was a man who didn’t like soup. She found him interesting already. She had given him an astonishing gift, the gift of her interest. If it weren’t for the fact that he was seventy pounds overweight and staggered by two heart attacks and so hobbled by arthritis that he sometimes had trouble lifting himself up from the toilet seat, he could have danced. For Heather had accomplished the impossible: she had made him feel young.

  For the first time in the seven years since he’d begun this latest book, he thought that maybe it wouldn’t be his last.

  He took his nap and woke with a new thought. He wanted to give her something.

  He wanted to show his appreciation in some tangible way. His first idea was jewelry—earrings, maybe. She seemed to like to wear five or six of them at a time; she could always find room for a few more.

  But he didn’t really know her taste, and in any case he’d just given those pearls as a peace offering to Ariel; he didn’t want to give jewelry to Heather on the same day. He rummaged around in a dresser drawer, not knowing what he was looking for. Until he found it.

  He had one extra set of house keys there. The keys that used to be Stella’s.

  He picked them up, trying to feel, through the decades, the pressure of her touch. She had once used these casually, every day.

  As soon as he thought about giving the keys to Heather, he knew it was what he wanted to do.

  It wasn’t as if he wanted her to replace Stella. The thought was absurd. No one could replace Stella. Stella was his person.

  He would have to make it clear that he wasn’t asking for anything. He wouldn’t want her to think he was asking her to move in, or even to spend more time here. And he wouldn’t want her to think he was asking to relive the other night: he was sure that that was a one-time-only miracle, like any miracle worthy of the name.

  He simply wanted to show her that if she ever needed a place where she could come without explaining herself, without asking anyone’s permission, she could come here. He wanted to show her that he trusted her.

  It had been a long time since he’d trusted someone new.

  Barefoot and bare-chested, dressed only in his boxer shorts, with his large breasts sagging and his enormous stomach bulging like a sack of fruit, he stood in front of the dresser drawer, holding the keys in his open hand. Stella used to say he had boyish hands. And now he was seventy-one years old. Could anyone ever think of him as boyish again? And yet he felt like a boy. Life!

  19

  Heather had a line of poetry stuck in her head. Usually when a phrase lodged in her head it was some idiotic thing from the radio, but today it was Yeats.

  “Labour is blossoming or dancing where . . .”

  She couldn’t remember what came next; she couldn’t remember where labor was supposed to be blossoming or dancing. She could have looked it up—she knew it was from “Among School Children”—but she didn’t want to. She preferred to let it simmer in her mind without its context.

  The reason the line had lodged in her head, she thought, was that she was still trying to puzzle out why Schiller’s work had declined.

  Was labor blossoming or dancing in Schiller’s life? She didn’t think so. Whenever she met Schiller after his workday, he looked gray and spent; he looked as if he’d just paid a visit to the casket of a friend.

  She was meeting Schiller in the evening, but she had something else to do before that. The Knitting Factory was sponsoring a weeklong benefit series for a local musician who’d been paralyzed in a car accident and who didn’t have health insurance. About forty acts were playing, and all the revenue was going toward his medical expenses.

  There was a band playing tonight that she’d been wanting to see for a long time. Yo La Tengo, a three-piece rock band that mixed dreamy acoustic ballads with long feedback orgies, had been a favorite of hers since college. But that was only half the reason she was going. In an article in the Voice a year ago, Sandra Bennett had said that Yo La Tengo was one of the few bands she tried to see every time they played in New York. So Heather was hoping to bump into Sandra there—accidentally.

  Heather got there just as the band was taking the stage. They opened with something very loud. She bought a beer and leaned against a wall and listened.

  About fifteen minutes into the set, Sandra arrived. With her amazing cheekbones and her thick black hair pulled back, she looked imperious, Egyptian, eternal. Heather was delighted to see that she was alone.

  Heather approached her, trying to look surprised. Sandra recognized her immediately—she even kissed her. This was surprising: Sandra looked so cool that you didn’t expect her to be affectionate. She seemed too hip to be nice.

  It was too loud to talk while Yo La Tengo was playing, and as soon as they left the stage another band came out and started tuning up. Heather had never heard of them, but she took Sandra’s arm and said, “These people are no good. Why don’t we go out and have a drink?”

  Sandra seemed to be amused by Heather’s aggressiveness; at any rate, she cheerfully agreed to leave.

  Maybe it was because she was hungry. She suggested they go to a Chinese restaurant down the block.

  “How’s your work going?” Sandra said after they ordered. Which was the same thing Schiller had asked her the second time they’d met.

  She was excited to be part of a world in which the most natural way to greet people was to ask them about their work.

  “You’re writing a biography, right?” Sandra said. “About your friend William Schiller.”

  “Leonard Schiller,” Heather said. And then she had to make a decision. She could remind Sandra that she wasn’t writing a book, only a thesis; or she could allow Sandra to persist in her misconception. It wouldn’t be lying, really: she did hope to write a book about him someday.

  But she didn’t want to start this relationship off with a lie. So she admitted that it was only a thesis so far.

  And she admitted that it wasn’t going well. This wasn’t easy either, because she would have liked Sandra to think that she was awesomely gifted. But there was something about Sandra that invited you to speak freely.

  “I’m done with the part about his first two books,” Heather said. “That was easy, because I love his first two books. But I don’t know how to write about the last two. I’ve read both of them three times, but I just don’t get them.”

  “You don’t get them or you don’t like them?”

  “Maybe I don’t like them.”

  “What don’t you like about them?”

  Their food arrived as they were talking;
Heather ate, but paid no attention to what she was eating.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe the first two books were about defining yourself, the last two were about defending yourself? Maybe the first two books were about freedom, the next two were about order? I’m not sure.” She was finishing her second beer of the day. “I don’t know what to do. I feel like, if I write honestly, I’ll hurt him. So I’m trying to figure out how I can say nice things about the last two books without being completely dishonest.”

  Heather was surprised at herself: she was being much more open than she’d planned. Normally her self-revelations were strictly calculated; she didn’t like to give too much away. But Sandra had an unusual air—a mixture of the motherly and the mysterious—that made you want to tell her things.

  “You have to write honestly,” Sandra said. She was leaning forward and speaking with a special intensity. “If you don’t do it honestly it’s not worth doing. You’re not doing him any favors if you praise him in a dishonest way.

  “Let’s say you do end up writing a book about him. You’ll just have to face the same problem all over again, so you might as well deal with it now.

  “Think about it. If you write a book about him, and you say he’s a great writer and all his books are masterpieces, the falseness will show through. No one will take you seriously. It won’t help him, and it won’t help you. If you think his first two books were good and his last two books were bad, then say so. You’ll be speaking with conviction, and when you speak with conviction people notice. They’ll notice your book, and that may lead them to rediscover his first two books.” Sandra examined Heather closely, as if trying to make sure she’d absorbed this.

  “And two good books, by the way, is nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “I know that,” Heather said, though in fact she didn’t know it. From her point of view, two good books was a skimpy legacy. The more she’d thought about Schiller’s career, the smaller his achievement seemed.