Starting Out in the Evening Page 13

  “I’m starting to feel like there’s a question I have to deal with. If I’m right, and his last two books were bad, then why? Why was he written out by the time he was forty years old?”

  “I don’t know if it’s such a mystery. It happens to a lot of people. Bob Dylan was brilliant until he was thirty-five. Rimbaud was finished by the age of nineteen.”

  “Those are poets. I thought novelists were supposed to grow into their gifts.”

  Sandra looked at a litchi nut at the end of her fork. “Maybe you should ask him why he went downhill.”

  “Have you read him?” Heather asked.

  “No.”

  “Have you heard of him?”

  “Yeah. But I was never very interested in that crowd. ‘The New York Intellectuals.’ For me, the interesting writers from that period were the Beats. Or Paul Goodman, who had a foot in both worlds. Or James Baldwin. But the New York Intellectuals . . . I imagine them all as a bunch of white guys in suits, going to bed early.”

  It occurred to Heather that she’d never seen Schiller without a tie.

  “But don’t take what I’m saying too seriously,” Sandra said. “I haven’t read him. He might be the greatest writer of the century, for all I know.”

  With no preliminaries, Sandra was entering into Heather’s questions as if they were important. Heather hadn’t expected her to be this generous.

  Sandra went to make a phone call, and it was only when Heather was alone that she was able to take the measure of her happiness. It felt wonderful to be taken so seriously by such an interesting person. When Sandra spoke to her, she clearly spoke from the point of view of someone who was older and more experienced, but there wasn’t a trace of condescension in her manner.

  When Sandra had urged her to be honest, she’d looked as if she were saying something it had taken her all her life to learn.

  It was time to leave: time to meet Schiller. She didn’t want to see Schiller, not now; she was too revved up. But Sandra was leaving also: she was going back to the Knitting Factory to see Aimee Mann. On the subway uptown, clinging to a pole because she was too wired to sit down, Heather tried to figure out whether she could catch up with Sandra again later that night.

  When Sandra talked there was an edgy intensity in her voice, as if she heard a clock ticking, or a bomb—as if this might be the last conversation she’d ever have.

  There was no bomb ticking when you spoke with Schiller. For Schiller, the bomb had gone off years ago.

  20

  She met him at his apartment. She sat in the kitchen, a 105-pound jumping bean, while he opened a bottle of seltzer. He opened it with the same methodical care that had impressed her the day they’d met—but now she wanted to say, “Open the damn bottle already! So what if it sprays on you? What are you, the Wicked Witch of the West? You’re gonna melt?”

  She was shocked at how changeable she was.

  She remembered what Sandra had suggested. Ask him about his books. Find out why the last two books were so different from the first two.

  But she didn’t want him to talk about that—not now. She didn’t want him to talk about his years of decline. She wanted him to talk about the days when he was as young as she was now, the days when his labor was blossoming and dancing.

  “Did you write anything before Tenderness?”

  “Oh yes. I wrote three unpublished novels—two of them when I was still in my twenties. I had a tremendous amount of energy when I was young. But they were all pretty bad.” He was moving around his kitchen; he wouldn’t sit. Was he nervous? She couldn’t tell, because she couldn’t concentrate: most of her mind was still downtown, waiting on line at the Knitting Factory. “It’s very hard to write a good novel when you’re young. You’re changing too fast. The central subject of a novel has to be something you care about deeply. And when you’re young, it can be hard to care deeply about one thing for a long time. I started my first novel at twenty-four; by the time I finished it, three years later, I was a different person.”

  They went to get a bite at his usual coffee shop, the Argo. It was frustrating to walk with him—he was so slow. He was the only person on the island of Manhattan who wouldn’t cross against the light.

  At the Argo Heather ordered a glass of wine. She knew the wine would be terrible at a place like this, but she wanted to keep drinking. She would have preferred a beer, but somehow she couldn’t see herself drinking beer around Schiller: it seemed too coarse. Schiller ordered a Sanka, an egg-white omelet, and whole-wheat toast without butter.

  He was looking at her with an expression of timid yearning. “There’s something I’d like to give you,” he said. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a pair of keys. ‘These are keys to my apartment. I thought since you spend so much time in the city, if there are some nights when you don’t want to go all the way back to Hoboken, you can come over and stay in the guest room. Or if you need somewhere to read in the afternoons. I just want you to know that you can always have a place to stay.”

  “Please,” she said. Her mind was blank. She felt herself shrinking away from him. It wasn’t voluntary: it was a purely instinctual reaction. Schiller kept his arm extended, holding out the keys, and Heather couldn’t think. She had a picture of herself being locked inside his apartment.

  There was silence. She knew they shouldn’t let it go on too long. If the silence went on too long, the refusal of the keys would seem momentous.

  It seemed momentous already. The Refusal of the Keys: it seemed like something from mythology, from medieval legend. The lady refused the keys, and the old king cried out and rent his garment, and for seven generations the vines of the land would bear no fruit.

  He was offering himself up to her, putting all his trust in her. If this had happened three weeks ago, she would have been thrilled. But now that she’d been meditating on the problem of his decline, everything seemed different.

  But then she had a memory—a memory of high school basketball, of all things. As small as she was, she’d been one of the best players on the girls’ team. The reason was simply that most of the other girls used to fall apart in the clutch: near the end of a close game, they didn’t want to be anywhere near the ball. They were afraid to take the shot. Heather was the only one who wanted the ball when the game was on the line, the only one who wanted to meet the moment.

  Meet the moment then. She had set all this in motion; she wanted to see where it led. If he was going to offer her the keys, then she was going to take them.

  “Thank you,” she said, putting out her hand and cradling them. “This is an honor.”

  The look in his eyes made her happy about what she had done. For a moment she thought he was about to weep.

  He must have been embarrassed by his own emotion; he put his head down and applied himself assiduously to his omelet. He used his knife and fork very carefully. It struck her that he was like Laurel and Hardy combined in one man: Laurel’s sweet and tender fussiness and Hardy’s girth.

  He was dressed ridiculously in a suit and tie that seemed to have come from the 1950s: probably they’d gone in and out of style several times, with Schiller remaining oblivious of each cycle.

  She was amazed that her mind was racing on at this level of trivial cattiness, when the man was before her like this: grave, respectful, and infatuated, all too willing to worship her.

  He glanced up at her shyly while taking a sip of his Sanka. She could feel his desire for her. It was immense, breaking over her like a wave. In high school she used to watch reruns of The Avengers, and she loved the way Mr. Steed would look at Mrs. Peel: a gaze that was appreciative but not acquisitive, a gaze filled with desire but without vulgarity. Because Mrs. Peel’s husband was not officially dead but missing somewhere in Africa, she and Mr. Steed, though they were mad about each other, never touched; they made love only with their eyes. And thinking about this now, she realized that Schiller would never ask for a repetition of their night together: he was content to be her Mr.
Steed.

  She felt crude in comparison—a creature of bare crude wanting, a creature who lunged after the things she desired and tossed them aside after she no longer desired them.

  He began to tell her about a documentary about Mike Nichols and Elaine May that he’d seen on PBS the other day. There was something odd about his voice—it was too rich, too resonant. She realized that she’d heard this tone of voice from him before. It was his name-dropping voice. He was going to tell her that he used to know them.

  She always found it sad when he tried to impress her this way, but she didn’t have the heart to cut him off.

  “It really brought me back,” he said. “There was a period of about a year when I saw a great deal of them. When Mike was just beginning to do some directing, he even suggested I try my hand at writing a play for him. I was very flattered.”

  “Did you write one?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why of course not?”

  “I was in the middle of a novel, for one thing. And in any case, Mike was thinking in terms of a collaboration. It wasn’t for me. Oscar Wilde once said that the problem with socialism was that it would involve too many meetings. That’s how I felt about writing a play.”

  “But didn’t you think it might be exciting to learn a new craft?”

  “The craft of writing novels was the only one I’ve ever wanted to master. I didn’t have any time to waste.”

  Purity of heart, she had once read, is to desire one thing; if this was the case then Schiller was the purest person she had ever known. But it was disappointing all the same. Weeks ago, when he’d talked about having declined an offer to write an advertisement, she’d admired his integrity. But now she was beginning to think he’d refused too many things.

  The characters in his early novels weren’t this pure; they didn’t guard their lives this closely. Part of their charm was that they didn’t resist temptation. Schiller had always resisted temptation; his every waking hour was mapped by strict routines. It was sad to think that it may have been precisely his single-minded devotion to his art that had drained his art of its freshness.

  After they left the coffee shop he walked her to the subway. She was still brooding on what she was going to write about the second half of his career; it was like a scab she couldn’t stop picking.

  “In your novels, have you ever written about someone you care for in a way that you knew would hurt them?”

  “Of course. I generally don’t like to admit that I ever work from real-life models, but I can admit it to you. Sometimes I do. And sometimes I’ve drawn unflattering portraits of people who mean a great deal to me.”

  “How did you feel about it?”

  “I regretted it. But it can’t be avoided. A writer has to use everything he has. If you want to write, you have to be willing to be a son of a bitch sometimes.”

  He was still thinking about this when they reached the subway entrance. “The same thing is true for critics, you know. You should give that some thought, if you’re really considering becoming a literary critic. You have to be prepared to say things that will hurt people’s feelings.”

  He was giving her permission to write about him harshly. She wondered if he realized this. She didn’t think so.

  21

  “Sorry I’m late,” Ariel said, kissing Sam in an ambiguous location: half on the mouth, half off. They were in an Italian restaurant on Columbus. “It takes about a year to get here from my neighborhood.”

  “Actually, there’s a reason for that,” he said, and her heart sank. The word “actually” was the infallible signal that he was about to embark on one of his lectures.

  Sam was a new man. Newish. They were on their second date.

  There was only one thing wrong with Sam. He was a pontificator. He was the Village Explainer. But Ariel was trying to persuade herself, once again, that it was time to cut her losses, time to settle down with a man who, though uninspiring, was at least better than dreadful.

  “Originally,” he said, “the subways were run by private companies, with very little coordination between them. That’s why they have those apparently meaningless names: the BMT, the IRT, and so on. The city government took over the system—actually, bought the system—when the owners realized that running the subways was a money-losing venture. It was really just a bailout of private industry: the taxpayers ended up subsidizing the capitalists’ mistakes.” He spoke about the subway system for the next ten minutes, providing a political and economic analysis of its origins, and finally broadening his lecture to embrace the theme of the structural limitations of the New Deal–era reforms.

  He was a very knowledgeable man, and some of what he talked about was interesting. The problem was that he couldn’t shut up. Often, she was beginning to notice, he would ask a question not because he wanted to hear your answer, but because he wanted to speak about the subject himself. On the night they met, he’d asked whether her family roots were German or Eastern European; the only reason he asked was because he wanted to deliver two lectures: one on the poet Schiller, another on his own complex family tree. Sometimes she felt like suggesting that he cut out the middleman: he should just ask himself a question and say, “That’s an interesting question,” and then proceed with his response.

  She ordered some wine and braced herself for another learning experience. They were sitting near the glass wall of the restaurant and she could see people strolling past on Columbus.

  He was now talking about Fiorello La Guardia. “One of his opponents accused him of being an anti-Semite, and La Guardia challenged him to debate the matter—in Yiddish.” This made Ariel smile, and if he had stopped there she would have been charmed. But then he launched into a discussion of how La Guardia transformed coalition politics, complete with a demographic breakdown of changes in New York City voting patterns from the immigration wave of the 1840s through the influx of displaced rural African Americans in the 1920s and ’30s.

  He wasn’t a bad guy. She just wasn’t that interested in what he had to say.

  She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them she looked out the window. Casey Davis was standing on the street—skinnier than he used to be, and with a lot less hair, but otherwise unchanged. He was standing with his hands in his pockets, looking at her with a bittersweet smile.

  The waiter appeared at their table. “Are you ready to order, or do you need another minute?”

  “I don’t need any more time at all,” she said. She was standing. “So long, Sam. It’s been nice meeting you. You certainly have a lot of knowledge. Good luck.” And then she left the restaurant and took Casey’s arm.

  22

  “I thought you were in California,” Casey said.

  He was amazed by the coincidence. He’d been thinking of her just the other day—or maybe it was a week ago, or two weeks . . . at any rate, he’d been thinking of her recently, when he was browsing through his mental file of old girlfriends. He’d been thinking that, though all of them had been interesting women in one way or another, Ariel was the only one who’d actually been fun. Most of the rest of them had been clench-fisted leftist scholars. He’d been indicting himself for walking away from the only woman who could always make him laugh.

  But here she was, in the flesh. Ariel Schiller.

  “This is like a dream,” she said.

  Casey felt the same way. She had floated out of the restaurant as if the man sitting across from her didn’t exist.

  They were walking, and she was lightly touching his elbow, exactly as she used to do in the old days. That light perpetual contact always used to amuse him: he used to feel as if she were guarding him in basketball. He remembered how in the old days, because of this habit—they were a couple during the basketball heyday of Magic Johnson—he used to call her Magic.

  He remembered that it was a good nickname for other reasons—for example, the way she used to show up, unexpected, on street corners. She had a way of appearing before your eyes
a few minutes after you’d been thinking about her.

  “Hello, Magic,” he said.

  They always used to share nicknames. “Hello, Magic,” she said.

  23

  Whatever you do, don’t sing. Walking down Columbus, touching Casey’s arm, Ariel was telling herself not to engage in any operatic demonstrations of joy. But she wanted to sing.

  She walked around him in a semicircle so he would be to her left. She did this almost unconsciously, out of ancient habit. Casey tended to speak softly, and she didn’t hear well out of her right car; in the old days, when she was outdoors with him, she would always keep him to her left.

  “I was wondering about something,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Should we have dinner first, or should we go bowling?”

  He laughed. “What makes you think I have the time? What makes you think I’m not on my way to an important meeting?”

  “Even if you are, I know you wouldn’t want to pass up the chance to spend a few hours with a bowling genius.”

  He stopped walking and took a long look at her. “Christ,” he said. “How long has it been? What have you been up to? What’s new?”

  “What’s new?” she said. She couldn’t think of what was new. The last five years of her life—since she had last seen him—all seemed to have vanished. Finally a sentence came rising up to her lips. “I joined a glee club,” she said.

  “When?”

  “Just now.”

  Casey looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  She didn’t know what she meant. She thought about it for a moment, and then she knew.

  “I just mean I’m happy to see you.”

  24

  Heather had moved into a zone of brilliance. She was working harder than she’d ever worked in her life. And yet it didn’t feel like work. She was completing her thesis in a state of creative frenzy; she slept only four or five hours a night and woke up every morning burning to get back to her desk.