Starting Out in the Evening Page 15

  27

  She paced among the Rembrandts not knowing what to do. Maybe he was already lying dead on the steps.

  She wildly threw her glance over the paintings, as if they could tell her something, but they were dark and unwelcoming.

  Schiller had told her not to stay with him, but he didn’t know what he needed. He might be dying. She should go back and get help for him. He was already dead, and it was because of her.

  Apparently he wasn’t dead. Here he was. Schiller was making his way toward her, leaning on his cane, smiling with stoical embarrassment; his head bobbing slightly with each painful step, he looked like some unprecedented turtle.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  He assured her that he was fine.

  “Do you want to sit down?” Against the wall was a bench where two kneesocked schoolgirls sat sketching.

  “Thank you. I’m fine. I’d rather walk. I’d rather look.”

  They went through the exhibit slowly. Schiller paused for a long time before the self-portraits, but Heather couldn’t see a thing. She kept expecting him to collapse, and it was all because of her: because she’d been too guilty and unhappy and tense to pay attention to him in the restaurant, and above all because he knew somehow that she had written critically about his work.

  When he was finished looking at the pictures, he asked if she wanted to get a cup of coffee with him. “I’m not ready to go home, but I wouldn’t mind sitting down for a while,” he said.

  He took her to a coffee shop he knew on Madison Avenue. “This place always makes me mournful,” he said after they sat down. “I used to have lunch with Irving Howe here sometimes.”

  Under the table, Heather’s knees were jumping around madly. As she had all evening, she was finding it hard to concentrate. It was painful to be with him, knowing that her thesis was waiting for him back at his house.

  “He was really the last of the New York Intellectuals,” Schiller said. “He was the grumpiest, orneriest, busiest man I’ve ever known. But also one of the most impressive. You’d sit down to have lunch with him, and within five minutes he’d be looking at his watch. But if you knew him at all, you weren’t offended. It was just that he had this compulsion to get back to work. And the work he did was important, so you didn’t begrudge him. He was a serious man.”

  Schiller was in an expansive mode. “He was two years older than I was, and he was the wunderkind of that group—you know, the New York Intellectuals. That’s one of the reasons I went to Paris. I felt I could never out-wunderkind him, and it seemed to me in any case that the New York literary scene was dying. What I didn’t realize, of course, was that the expatriate literary scene in Paris had been dead for years. By the time I got there, Paris wasn’t Paris anymore. The writers who’d made it such a thrilling place were long gone. That was my fate. I think that’s why I called my first novel—my first unpublished novel—Starting Out in the Evening. At the time, I didn’t even know what I meant by the phrase. But I think I understand it now. I think I was giving expression to this feeling of being historically late.”

  New York was dead by the time he was in his twenties, so he went to Paris; but Paris was dead too. She didn’t believe a word of it. She had come here fifty years later and she didn’t think New York was dead. She thought New York was Paris.

  Starting out in the evening! It’s only evening if you think it is. She was starting out fifty years later than he had, but the world was in its blinding morning dazzlingness to her.

  Schiller was not only wrong, she thought: he was unfair to his own past. In his first two books he’d brought Paris and New York to life for her—he never could have written about those cities so vividly if he’d believed they were dying. The truth, she thought, was that the disappointments of old age lay so heavily on his mind that he couldn’t even remember what he’d believed when he was young. The young man who had written those early books knew more about life than the man who was sitting before her.

  Starting Out in the Evening. Whatever he’d meant by that title at the time, it was probably far different from the meaning he was giving to it now.

  “I’m going to have another Sanka,” he said. “Would you like another coffee? You still have some time tonight, don’t you?”

  She didn’t want another coffee: she wanted to leave. But she made herself stay put. To leave too quickly would be brutal. He was still recovering from whatever had hit him in the museum, and he was about to return home to read a manuscript that would break his heart.

  “Sure,” she said. “I have time.”

  Later, after he paid their bill, she walked him to the bus stop. He was no longer the young man he’d been, but the young man was somewhere inside him. She had the sense that he was surprised by the fierceness with which she hugged him good night.

  28

  When Schiller got home, Jeff went into the package room and retrieved the cardboard box with Heather’s manuscript. Schiller took it upstairs, put it on the coffee table, sat down on the couch and closed his eyes. When he felt strong enough, he opened the box, and he read the manuscript over the course of the next two hours.

  It was fairly well written, it was intelligent, and it made large claims for his first two novels. The last two, she said, were not very good. She tried to say this tactfully—too tactfully, because in this part of her thesis the language was often unclear. It was as if she wouldn’t allow herself to be as blunt as she wanted to be, so the second half of the manuscript seemed bloodless and indirect.

  Parts of her manuscript were cracklingly intelligent—she made connections between his works that he himself had never made. And yet it finally wasn’t very good. She simply didn’t know enough. She was too young. Even when she praised him, her praise was excessive. She compared him to Whitman and Thoreau; she compared Tenderness to Women in Love and The Red and the Black. This of course was flattering, but it didn’t make much sense. If she’d compared his work to the work of his contemporaries; if she’d argued that he deserved a place beside Bellow and Malamud—claims like this, though more modest than the claims she’d made, would have been more coherent, more persuasive, and, to him at least, more satisfying. But she’d probably never read Bellow and Malamud; she compared him to the writers she knew.

  So this was what these past two months had come to. A bright but rather half-baked master’s thesis, which ended on a dismissive note.

  He knew that she’d never write a book about him. He knew that his four novels would never be disinterred.

  It was ridiculous to have hoped that Heather might transform his fate. What was his fate? To keep writing. That was all that mattered.

  He closed his eyes, and when he opened them he realized that there had been a brownout in the building: the lights in his apartment were dimmed; the walls looked grayer; the room seemed to press in on him. He waited for the lights to go back up to full power, but they didn’t. And then he realized that there hadn’t been a brownout at all. It was his disappointment that had made the room seem dim and small.

  He wasn’t going to be translated to another literary realm. There would be no brilliancy.

  He laughed at himself. From Edmund Wilson to Heather Wolfe.

  In 1968, at a party on Central Park West, he was introduced to Edmund Wilson, whom he considered the most formidable literary critic of the age. To his surprise, Wilson had heard of him; to his astonishment, Wilson told him that he’d enjoyed his second novel, and asked him to send him the first. He sent Tenderness to Wilson’s house in Talcottville, and a few weeks later Wilson sent him a note telling him that it was a “gem.”

  About a month later someone passed on the word that Wilson was thinking of writing an article about Schiller’s work for The New York Review of Books.

  This was unbelievable news. Schiller had received some glowing reviews, but a review by someone like Wilson could put him on the literary map for good. For days he couldn’t concentrate on his work: he kept writing and rewriting Wilson�
�s review in his mind. Phrases like “the most interesting novelist alive” occurred with an unlikely frequency.

  A month passed, and then another month, and then another. The review didn’t appear. Other pieces by Wilson did appear: an attack on the Modern Languages Association, a brief review of a new biography of Hemingway. Schiller’s second novel had been out for more than two years at that point, so it made sense that these more topical pieces had pushed aside the article about his books. He imagined that Wilson’s piece about his work had already been submitted and was sitting on some shelf in the magazine’s office. He kept haunting the newsstands, waiting for each new issue, which reached the streets a few days before it arrived in the mailboxes of subscribers.

  A year passed; no review. By this time, Schiller understood that it would never appear, that it had never been written. Wilson had moved on to other things. But even so, with each new issue of the magazine he had a moment of hope, and then a brief silent tantrum—invisible, but as intense as the tantrum he threw when he was eight years old and his father reneged on a promise to take him to the Polo Grounds to see Carl Hubbell pitch against Dizzy Dean.

  One day in the spring of 1972, Schiller woke, showered, picked up The New York Times from his doormat, and sat down to breakfast. He liked to glance at the paper before getting to work. Wilson’s obituary was on the front page.

  Schiller read it slowly and carefully—it was a long article, treating Wilson’s career in detail.

  Years before this, he thought he had stopped hoping for anything from Wilson, but somehow all his fantasies—about fame, immortality, riches, and the love of beautiful women—seemed to have clustered around the never quite extinguished dream that the review might yet appear. And now, with Wilson gone, he lost the last lingering trace of hope that his books would ever kick off their tombstones, that the messages he had placed in those two bottles would reach anyone in any future time.

  He was at a low point in his life and work. Stella had died two years earlier; his daughter was unhappy; he was groping blindly through the tenth draft of his third novel; his first two books had recently gone out of print.

  Sitting in the kitchen that morning in 1972, it occurred to him that he could simply walk away.

  The folklore of the writing life includes many stories of people who walked away from their occupations in order to become writers. Sherwood Anderson, who worked as an advertising copywriter until well into his forties, supposedly put on his coat one afternoon, left the office, and never came back: he had decided to devote himself to art. Henry Miller did much the same: in middle age he sailed to Paris, cut his ties with America, and invented a new life.

  Schiller knew of no stories celebrating the reverse journey. But this is what he was considering. In the lowness of that moment, sitting at his table with the Times in front of him, he made a mental balance sheet of his professional life and concluded that the frustrations had outnumbered the accomplishments by far. He had been writing devotedly for twenty years, and he had given the world two slim novels. He hadn’t received much in return. Not that the world was under any obligation to appreciate the gifts he’d tried to give—but the question remained: if what you offer the world isn’t needed, then why continue to bring it your offerings?

  He decided to walk away. He closed the door of his study and kept it closed. He decided to see what life would be like without writing.

  He found that it was wonderful. For the first time in decades he felt free. Life seemed oddly . . . easy. There was no reason for him to spend most of his waking hours struggling to repair the broken-backed sentences of his early drafts—struggling not only to repair them, but to give them limberness and grace. All he needed to do was his wage-work—he was teaching literature at Hunter—and the rest of his time was his own. He could read as much as he wanted, go to movies, concerts, lectures, take long morning walks. He could enjoy himself.

  Life went along this way for a week, two weeks. Then, one afternoon, an odd thing happened when he was sitting in the Hunter cafeteria with some other faculty members. One of them, a psychology teacher, was telling a long story . . . and Schiller couldn’t understand what he was talking about. The words were familiar, but they didn’t add up. At first he thought the man was conducting an experiment to see if people really listen—talking nonsense to see if anyone would notice. But the other people at the table were nodding and responding, and they couldn’t all have been in on the joke.

  The next day he was at the grocery store when a tiny man in a huge blue hat came up to him and said, “Magazine?”

  “Beg pardon?” Schiller said.

  “Magazine?” he repeated.

  “What magazine?”

  The man waggled his eyebrows disapprovingly and stalked away.

  A few days after that he had a long conversation with a woman he was seeing, in which she told him how much she valued their friendship. She clasped his hand warmly, led him to the door, and kissed him good night.

  He walked a few blocks toward home, and then he called her from a pay phone.

  “Did you just break up with me?” he said.

  Once, long before, he and Stella had smoked hashish. The drug scrambled up his categories of understanding: space and time spent the evening at war. A friend who was leaving the room disappeared down a hole; time, in certain parts of the room, blew backward, so that at midnight Stella was younger than she’d been at dusk.

  During the weeks after he stopped writing, he felt the same way. There were moments in every day when his understanding gave out. He felt as if his mind had been drained of its power to grasp the significance of things.

  While he was still in this disoriented state, he dreamed that someone in the next apartment was tapping out coded messages on the wall. When he woke he realized that the tapping was real: there was construction under way on 94th Street. And then he had a revelation. He understood why we dream. During the night the body shuts down, and the mind receives little information from the outside world; but the narrative function of the mind remains awake, laboring to make stories out of the little information it receives—out of hints and scents and glimmers and tapping sounds from fifteen floors below. The story-making organ never sleeps.

  When he awoke from his dream, Schiller felt as if he’d seen into the structure of existence. The world, the human world, is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories. Nothing has meaning in itself: all the objects in the world would be shards of bare mute blankness, spinning wildly out of orbit, if we didn’t bind them together with stories.

  If he had felt intellectually dizzy during those last few weeks, it was because he’d been starving the narrative function of his mind. He’d spent the previous twenty years single-mindedly trying to make stories; now it was as if he were depriving himself of water, or air, or light.

  He thought he’d feel better if he gave himself time. The problem was that he’d stopped writing too abruptly, like a deep-sea diver who gives himself the bends by coming too quickly to the surface.

  But in the next few days, instead of getting better, he began to develop a new symptom. He began to be hit with enormous waves of loneliness.

  He couldn’t understand where the feeling came from. He spoke to his daughter regularly; his friends were all in touch. He missed Stella terribly—he’d never stopped mourning her—but this loneliness was something new.

  He opened the door of his study. The several thousand pages of intractable manuscript, the book that hadn’t cohered, was still on the table, where it had remained untouched for weeks.

  The novel was a picture of life in the mad America of the late 1960s. It was confused, unwieldy, wild, altogether too ambitious. It had a large cast of characters. He had been struggling with them for seven years. He had come to hate them, almost, because they’d been unremittingly resistant to his wishes and unwilling to disclose their own. But he realized that it was they whom he missed.

  He sat at his desk and looked through the man
uscript again. He didn’t have any sudden insights about what to do with the book—but he knew that he couldn’t leave these characters half-born. They were his people, his community. If he walked away from this writing life, no one else would take up their stories.

  He went back to work. And in the days and weeks and months that followed, he found that he was no longer so troubled by the question of whether he was or ever would be a “successful writer.” It was beside the point. He was a writer. He knew that he’d keep going even if he were sure that nothing he wrote would ever be published again. He couldn’t understand the world, couldn’t live, without putting stories on paper.

  Over the decades since then, this feeling had remained with him. The craving for wider recognition never vanished: when he wasn’t actually writing, it was almost always near. Wilson’s unwritten review still ached sometimes, as a bone broken long ago will ache on a damp day. But these discontents rarely touched him when he was working. When he was at his writing table, the labor was its own reward.

  At the heart of the greatest disappointment of his professional life, he had found a lesson in how to keep on. Heather’s thesis, this fresh disappointment, was one that he would weather soon enough.

  Though he thought it was off the mark, Heather’s manuscript was certainly intelligent. She offered a clear interpretation of his work and vigorously argued her case. But the writing was not always as lucid or direct as it might be. It could use some help. Despite the lateness of the hour, he started to go through it again, slowly, with his pen in his hand.

  29

  Casey’s grandmother once told him that if he ever wanted to figure out whether he was really in love, all he’d have to do was ask himself two questions: “Do we laugh a lot? Does she kiss good?”