Starting Out in the Evening Read online

  She had decided to say frankly what she thought about Schiller’s work, and after she’d made that simple decision, everything had begun to flow.

  She wrote that Schiller had written two beautiful books. They were completely personal, yet completely in the American grain: they were books about people breaking away from their fates, making their own lives. They were books about freedom. She referred to Thoreau and Emerson and Whitman—not to say that Schiller belonged in their company, but that he breathed the same moral air.

  His last two books, she said, were much weaker. He seemed to have lost his compass somewhere along the line. She cited something F. Scott Fitzgerald had said: Most good writers “line themselves up along a solid gold bar,” like Hemingway’s courage, or Joseph Conrad’s art, or D. H. Lawrence’s “intense cohabitations.” Schiller, she said, had strayed from his solid gold bar: the theme of personal liberation.

  His third novel, Stories from the Lives of My Friends, was a well-meaning attempt to make sense of the social problems of America in the sixties, but he had tried to extend his imagination into territory where it couldn’t thrive. The central figure in the book was an earnest older man trying to make sense of the young, and in creating this neutral, camera-eye narrator, Schiller had deprived himself of his greatest resource: his skill at creating central characters who are willing to pay any price and break any bond in order to claim their freedom. His last book, The Lost City, was another honorable failure. A novel about Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side in the 1920s, it was a careful act of historical reconstruction, but it was too careful, too reverent. It seemed imitative of Call It Sleep, but without the startling atmosphere of spiritual violence that made Call It Sleep unforgettable.

  She wrote the second half of her thesis—the half that covered the works of his decline—with sadness. She kept this part short, because there was no point in dwelling on what he had failed to accomplish.

  She started to write a more theoretical last chapter: an attempt to explore the mystery of creativity. She asked why someone who started so strong should have wandered so far off course.

  She wrote it in the form of an imaginary dialogue between two writers: Henry James, whom Schiller loved, and D. H. Lawrence, whom she loved. James had cared for almost nothing except art. He never had a profession other than writing; he never married—he apparently never even had a lover; he allowed nothing to distract him from his novels and stories and plays. Lawrence, by contrast, had a fiery relationship with his strong-willed wife; he loved to paint almost as much as he loved to write; he wrote long tracts to announce the truth about sex, religion, psychoanalysis, and everything else; and he was filled with schemes for transforming the world—he was always dreaming of establishing communes where men and women could live in a more authentic way.

  Her point was that although James may have been the greater craftsman, Lawrence was the greater artist, precisely because his passion for art competed with other passions. The richness of his life enriched his art.

  She worked on this chapter for a few days, and then she gave it up. She felt it would be presumptuous to write as if she knew exactly why Schiller’s work had gone wrong. She wasn’t his biographer; she was a student of his work, not of his life. And in any case, she wanted her thesis to end on a high note, celebrating the enduring value of his first two books.

  She finished the thesis on a Saturday afternoon in early April. At almost 200 pages, it looked lean but substantial. She knew it was only a draft; she knew she had more work to do on it. But it was an accomplishment.

  She had managed to finish it just a few days before her twenty-fifth birthday, which was the goal she’d set when she’d begun.

  When she’d begun her project, she was so in love with Schiller’s first two books that she felt confident that she’d eventually find a way to love his last two. But it hadn’t happened, and the manuscript she’d produced would hurt him, which was the last thing she ever would have wanted to do. She believed in the worth of what she had written, but she was aching with a sense of her own disloyalty.

  And now the hardest part was coming. Weeks ago, she had told Schiller she’d show him the manuscript when it was done. He hadn’t even asked to see it—she’d volunteered. And now she felt she had to show it to him.

  She was afraid it would kill him.

  Well, it wasn’t all her fault. It was Schiller’s fault too. Because he had changed. If he had kept the flame of his life alive, then she wouldn’t have had to write about him like this.

  She took out the photograph of Schiller that she’d stolen on the day they’d met. She studied it closely. The young Schiller: laughing, bright with youth, bright with arrogance.

  “I love you,” she said to the photograph. “Where are you?”

  25

  Schiller was packing his bag. He was heading off to Paris in a week, to keep a fool’s appointment.

  No: he was keeping an appointment that had been made by a man in love.

  It made no sense for him to pack his bag this far in advance, since it meant packing away some of the things he’d normally wear during the week. But he was lit up with nervous energy and he needed to do something to work it off.

  He was meeting Heather for dinner tonight, and she was giving him a copy of her thesis.

  He wasn’t looking forward to reading it. They had talked this afternoon, and when she told him she’d finished a draft of it, he knew it wasn’t going to make him happy. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he knew.

  When you’ve been a writer for a long time, you develop an uncanny sensitivity to barely perceptible verbal signals of rejection. There was something a little off in Heather’s voice, though he would have been hard-pressed to define it.

  The memory of Edmund Wilson came into his mind, but he pushed it away. He didn’t want to think about Edmund Wilson now.

  Well, whatever it was, he wanted to be ready for the blow. He wanted to be perfectly warm to her, but perfectly armored.

  He took a shower and shaved meticulously in front of the misty mirror. Normally he shaved with an ascetic briskness, as if it would be vain to do the job too carefully. Tonight he shaved so attentively that he felt as if he were seeing his own face clearly for the first time in years.

  Not that that was such a good thing.

  Tomorrow was her birthday: she was going to be twenty-five. He was taking her out for an early dinner and then to a Rembrandt exhibition at the Met.

  The doorman, Jeff, buzzed up and told him that “Miss Wolfe” was waiting for him downstairs. He met her in the lobby; her face was tight. She was holding a cardboard box under her arm.

  “Is this it?” he said.

  She nodded stiffly. “I hope . . .”

  “Don’t say a word,” he said. He said it to relieve her of the necessity of an apology. He handed the box to Jeff and asked him to keep it in the package room. “Take good care of this.”

  “You know I will, Professor,” Jeff said. Jeff had worked in the building for ten years, and he had always done his job with an impeccable style: his uniform was always perfectly clean and pressed; when you were carrying heavy packages he always met you on the street and relieved you of your burden. No matter what was going on in his life—Schiller knew him well enough to know that his life wasn’t easy: he had a large family to support—Jeff was always sunny and efficient. He was a professional, a craftsman, and for this reason Schiller had always felt a kinship with him. At this moment he felt that his bond with Jeff was more substantial than his bond with Heather. When he came home tonight Jeff would still be here, and they would say good night—one old pro to another.

  As he walked toward the restaurant with Heather, he felt a lumpy unhappiness. He knew that their strange shared time had come to an end. This little period in which he’d had a young admirer, a young adorer, was over.

  Well, there was no need to be bitter. There was nothing to be done but accept it gracefully. He would order a bottle of wine at dinner, w
ish her well, and bow gracefully out of her life.

  He asked her how she was, and when she answered, he didn’t listen. He was thinking about how astonishingly young she was. He was thinking that she would probably still be alive in the year 2050. Which meant that he would still be alive then, in her memory.

  But what would she remember? He couldn’t remember his own twenty-fifth birthday. He’d been living on Bleecker Street, working on his first novel, which was never published and which he later lost. He’d been seeing a woman named Molly, a cheerful mystic who liked to stay up late gossiping with her long-dead grandmother through the medium of a Ouija board. He assumed that he’d probably spent his birthday with Molly, but he couldn’t remember it. Maybe he’d seen his parents that day?

  He could only guess. He’d never kept a diary, so he couldn’t check. His parents were dead, Molly was unfindable; so Schiller was alone. And since he couldn’t remember that day, the day was gone, as if everyone who’d been alive in it, including himself, was dead.

  And now, as he walked with Heather, leaning on his cane, knowing that she was walking as slowly as she could for him but wishing she would walk a little slower, he felt as if he weren’t really there. He imagined her in the middle of the next century, thinking back on her own life. Would she remember this day? And if she didn’t, then what was this moment now? This moment, with its whitened sky, with the wind bone-grippingly groping through their clothing, was already gone.

  “Please remember this day,” he said, and she looked at him quizzically.

  “For how long?” she said.

  “How about forever?”

  “I think I can do that,” she said. “That should be no problem.”

  That was a moment of peace, but by the time they reached the restaurant she seemed jittery again. She kept unclasping her little bag and searching around in there, for God knows what.

  “I should remind you that it’s only a draft,” she said. “If there’s anything that doesn’t make sense, or anything that’s just plain wrong, please tell me. I still want to do a lot more work on it.”

  “Don’t worry so much,” Schiller said.

  The waiter came up, a bony boy in his twenties with a blond goatee. Reaching for his napkin, Schiller clumsily swept his fork to the floor. “No problemo,” the young man said, and grabbed one from another table, holding it not by the stem but by the tines. Schiller was repulsed by this—not merely by the slovenliness but by the lack of professionalism. No matter what you do, try to do it well: this simple idea, for Schiller, summed up half of life’s ethical obligations.

  “What can I do you for?” the waiter said, with a kind of frat-house jocularity. “Get you something to drink?”

  Schiller had intended to order a bottle of wine, but Heather asked the waiter what he had on tap, and he recited a long list of beers, and as he spoke he smiled at her, and she was smiling back, and there seemed to be a note of complicity between them, as if “Rolling Rock” and “Amstel Light” were coded phrases that gratified them both.

  “Someone you know?” Schiller said after the waiter left, and she smiled guiltily. Of course he wasn’t someone she knew, and the only complicity between them was the complicity between two people who are young and sexually alive. Schiller understood that Heather was withdrawing from him, had already withdrawn, and that she herself was so flustered by this that she felt driven to behave badly and make the situation even worse.

  At least that was what he thought was going on.

  He told himself to ignore it, to keep his moral armor on, to comport himself impeccably throughout the evening. Then, when he got home, he could collapse.

  The waiter returned with Heather’s beer and Schiller’s wine. Schiller had never seen her drink beer; as she took her first gulp and then used her fingers to wipe a spot of foam off her lip, it struck him that she had a touch of vulgarity he’d never noticed before.

  “Do you think you’re going to write more critical studies?” he said.

  “I’m not sure. I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve thought that I might like to write a critical biography of Tillie Olsen.”

  He had discreetly refrained from asking whether she still planned to write a book about him; nevertheless he was wounded by her response.

  Tillie Olsen. A writer who made Schiller seem prolific by comparison. But no one held it against her, since she’d shrewdly turned her lifelong writing block into a badge of feminist honor.

  “If you’re going to make a career of literary criticism,” he said, “I should lend you some books by the great critics of my era. I doubt if they’re taught in the academy these days. Which is all to their credit: they weren’t theorists, they were readers.” He began to tell her about the literary critics he admired most: Wilson and Kazin and Howe and Trilling and Rahv. He thought he might be talking too much, but he also thought this was good for her: if she wanted to write about literature, she should know something about the best critics of our time, and much of what there was to know about them couldn’t be found in books. He had met these men; he had interesting stories about them all.

  But he knew he was talking too much. The older you get, the harder it is to be concise. It’s no longer adequate merely to say what you know; it’s urgent to explain how you came to know it.

  She smiled politely as he spoke; at one point he thought she was suppressing a yawn; the waiter showed up all too often to refill her water glass; and Schiller could tell that he was boring her. Yet he kept talking. As if he thought that if he just kept talking, he might finally say something that would recapture her interest.

  After dinner they took a cab to the museum. Turning into the Central Park Transverse the cab swerved wildly and they were thrown against each other in the backseat, and, because he thought he might never see her again, he took a deep but surreptitious breath in order to drink in her scent. But he smelled nothing. He didn’t know whether to blame today’s womanhood, because they don’t believe in perfume, or to blame himself, because his sense of smell was gone; but in any case, if you can’t even smell someone you probably shouldn’t feel hurt about the fact that she doesn’t love you. Even if the young women of today don’t wear perfume, the young men of today can undoubtedly smell them. The young waiter, that bony goat, could probably smell Heather’s scent when he’d leaned over to serve her her shark steak.

  Schiller paid for Heather and himself at the museum. The suggested six-dollar admission charge is optional; you can pay what you wish. When he went there alone he usually gave a dollar, but tonight, because he wanted to be an urbane companion, he paid the full twelve. They proceeded up the central staircase. This is when Schiller became William James.

  26

  In his biography of Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones recounts the story of Freud’s only meeting with William James. It took place in 1908, when Freud was in America to give a lecture at Clark College. Freud was in his early fifties, and James—the father of American psychology, and the older brother of Henry James—was in his seventies. The two of them were walking up a hill when James felt a recurrence of the angina that had troubled him for several years. He handed Freud a bag he was carrying and told him to walk ahead, saying that he needed a moment to rest and that he’d join him shortly. James knew that he was a dying man, and Freud knew that he knew. James caught up with Freud a few minutes later, and they resumed their conversation, exploring their intellectual differences with energy and good humor. James didn’t say a word about his illness. “I have always wished,” Freud later wrote, “that I might be as fearless as he was in the face of approaching death.”

  As Schiller and Heather were walking up the long main staircase at the museum, he felt something go wrong in his chest. After two heart attacks, he knew what heart attacks felt like, and this was something milder. He felt reasonably certain that this was only angina: it was painful but it wouldn’t kill him.

  He touched Heather’s arm. “I need to hold on for a moment,” he said, and leaned against
the wall.

  John Berryman once wrote mordantly that in today’s America it’s possible to live your entire life without ever finding out whether or not you’re a coward. Schiller had always thought this a childish idea. Every day, there are occasions when one can discover—when one is forced to discover—whether one is a hero or a coward.

  Now, though the pain in his chest was alarming—maybe it was a heart attack—he felt triumphant. His time had come; his test had come; and he was meeting it as bravely as William James.

  “Can I help you?” Heather said. “How can I help you?”

  “Please.” He put his hand over hers and clasped it tightly to reassure her. “I just need to rest for a minute. I’m fine. Go on ahead. Meet me at the Rembrandt exhibit. In ten minutes. I’ll be fine.”

  As Schiller said this, he felt proud of himself, and thankful for his lifelong engagement with literature. He had read the anecdote about Freud and James many years ago, but it had always remained vivid in his mind. Now he was William James. He felt horrible, but he felt magnificent. Heather walked up the long staircase, and he hoped that she wouldn’t look back; magnificently, she did not. She was also a hero.

  The only question now was whether he should sit down on the steps or not. If he sat, the pain might be easier to endure. But to sit down on this polished staircase struck him as unseemly. Already people were looking at him strangely as they passed. He didn’t want to make a scene. The thought crossed his mind that if greatness had eluded him as a writer, perhaps this was why: because he’d never wanted to make a scene. Subtlety and indirection arc important tools, but you can’t scale the highest peaks with these tools alone.

  It would be very helpful to sit. Perhaps he could walk back down to the lobby and find a chair. But the journey down the staircase seemed too difficult. Looking all the way down, he wondered how he’d made it up so far.