Starting Out in the Evening Page 16

  These were fine questions, but he didn’t need to ask them. For him it was easier than that. Every time he got together with Ariel, when he had his first glimpse of her—on the street, or entering a restaurant, or at her door—he had a feeling of lightness, a feeling that the fun was about to begin.

  He was meeting her for a late dinner. When he saw her on Broadway, crossing against the light, with her graceful and nimble and somehow comic way of walking—she walked like a mime—he wondered how he had ever let her go, and he hoped that what had happened to them years ago wouldn’t happen again.

  “Hello, Happer,” she said, meaninglessly, except that maybe the word was derived from the fact that he made her happy.

  They went to a little place on Broadway—one of Ariel’s seedy bars. She liked the place because it was dark and the booths in the back were secluded and most of the food they served there was deep-fried. “Can we share?” she said as she took a menu, her eyes glittering hopefully above the candle flame.

  She always loved to share their meals. The pleasure she took in this was intense: as she speared a piece of his French toast in a diner on a Sunday morning, you would have thought from her expression that she had reached the summit of her life’s ambitions.

  More than anyone else he’d ever known, Ariel taught him the delights of everyday life. She was excited by the smallest things: sharing a meal; picking up catnip for Sancho; buying plastic earrings on the street. She had a way of making every occasion seem like a festival.

  She ordered fried chicken, cole slaw, “Sexy Fries”—whatever they were—and a Caesar salad. Casey ordered a steak.

  She eagerly laid into it all. It was wonderful to watch her eat. Alone among women, she’d never been on a diet in her life, she’d never had an eating disorder or a food hangup of any kind. He’d never even known her to step on a scale. If you asked her how much she weighed she’d give you a rough estimate. She was a full-bodied woman, a woman with meat on her bones, and she was beautiful.

  She was talking about her father and some young babe who was writing about him.

  “If he had money I’d think she was scheming to get put in his will. But he doesn’t have money. Maybe she thinks he has money.”

  Casey listened poker-faced. He’d always thought she was way too tied up, psychically, with her father. Whom he’d always thought of as a loser. Imagine: a man who had spent his entire life writing something like three books! It was pathetic. Casey had read one of them—the first or the second or the third one, he wasn’t sure. He finished it in one sitting—it was pretty light—and getting up he’d tossed it on the table and thought, Four people bothering each other. Who cares?

  “I think he’s actually having sex with her!” Ariel said. “It’s unbelievable. I mean, I love my dad, but I can’t understand how she could get naked with him. She’s, like, twenty-five.”

  “You really think they’re having fucking?” He’d meant to say “having sex,” but changed it to “fucking,” and it came out a little bit of both.

  “I don’t know if they were having fucking, Casey, but I know they were having something. I came over to his place one night and he was sitting in his bathrobe eating cookies and her little black booties were on the floor.”

  “So we don’t really know they were having fucking. All we really know is that he was eating cookies when her shoes were in the room.”

  “That’s bad enough,” Ariel said.

  They were silent for a moment. Casey felt oddly shy.

  “It’s incredible that we found each other again,” he said after a little while.

  “I know. I wasn’t even supposed to be at that restaurant. I was supposed to be meeting Sam downtown, but at the last minute I called him and said I’d rather meet at Perretti’s. I think God must have wanted us to find each other.”

  “God, eh? So you’ve finally learned to believe in God?”

  “No. But I still think it would be nice.”

  God was their private joke. She was looking for God when he met her—in fact, he met her because she was looking for God.

  They’d met eight or nine years ago, at a birthday party for a mutual friend in a chicken and ribs restaurant on West 57th Street. Life takes place in restaurants. The conversation that night was extraordinarily stupid: everyone was talking about “the yuppie murder case,” in which a prep-school student had strangled his girlfriend while they were having what he described as “rough sex” in Central Park. Casey didn’t have any interest in this kind of thing—he was a hard-news man. He was wondering how soon he could leave the party without being rude.

  Ariel was sitting across from him, talking to two guys; in a high-spirited way, as if she weren’t entirely serious, she said, “My yoga teacher says I’ll never be happy until I let God into my life. Do you think you need God to be happy?”

  Casey was an atheist, but her question, which sounded somehow both lighthearted and desperate, and which, unlike anything else that had been said at the party, was about something serious, captured his attention instantly. Sometimes he thought that it was at that moment that he’d begun to fall in love with her.

  “I don’t think you need God, no,” he said. “But I do think everybody needs something to keep themselves going.”

  “What keeps you going?” she said, flirtatiously.

  “What keeps me going,” he said—and he trembled with the sense of his own pretentiousness before he even finished the sentence—“is justice.”

  “Justice,” she said. “That sounds so . . . boring.”

  Maybe that was when he’d begun to fall in love with her.

  They left the party together and went to a bar for a drink. He didn’t ask her over to his place, because after a couple of lousy relationships in a row he was trying to be cautious.

  While they were having their second drink she leaned over and kissed him. “Maybe we can go to the park,” she said, “and you can strangle me.”

  She really did want to go to the park. When they left the bar she led him to a bench in Riverside Park and said, “Let’s sit here and chat for a while.” He scratched his face hesitantly. “You’re not scared,” she said. “Are you?”

  “Scared, me?” It was about two in the morning, and the idea of sitting in the park didn’t strike him as very relaxing.

  “How can you be scared? You’re a black man!”

  She said this sweetly, with a drunken, innocent, and idiotic smile. Maybe this was when he fell in love with her.

  They sat on the park bench and kissed until five in the morning, and in the gathering light they walked to a coffee shop and he watched in amazement as she downed two fried eggs, hash browns, sausages, two-and-a-half waffles, and three cups of coffee.

  “I always have a good appetite after I take advantage of a guy on a park bench,” she said.

  And now, after all these years, here she was again, still looking for God, still polishing off enormous meals, and still beautiful. If he’d told her that he’d been thinking about her all these years, it would have been a lie. He’d thought about her often, but not all the time. He was too old to believe in true love, in the idea that there was one woman destined for him. But with Ariel, he could almost believe it.

  Ariel went to the jukebox to try to find something by Van Morrison; when she came back to their booth she slid in beside him. “Cozytown,” she said as she pressed her leg against his.

  A man can grow, he was thinking, a man can grow. Because he himself had grown. When he’d known Ariel years ago, if she had said “Cozytown” it would have bothered him. Ariel, then and now and forever, was a child-woman: in the deepest part of her being she was still a child of nine. She was the most guileless person he knew, the most trusting, the most tender, the most innocent.

  When he’d known her years ago he couldn’t reconcile himself to the fact that he was in love with a child-woman. She wasn’t the kind of woman he thought he should love. He thought he should be loving an activist, an intellectual, a cru
sader—some unholy combination of Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt, and Sojourner Truth.

  After his mother met Ariel, a year or so before she died, she said to Casey, “She seems sweet, but you can’t be serious about the girl. Do you really want to marry a flapper?”

  His mother didn’t really give a damn about whether Ariel was a flapper or not. She was in the last stages of her illness, shuttling around among a series of “alternative cancer specialists” who were subjecting her to barbarities far beyond the reach of mainstream medicine. She was in constant pain, and one of the few pleasures that remained to her was tearing down other people’s. With an unerring ability to find Casey’s weak spot, she knew just how to diminish his girlfriend in his eyes.

  Casey always used to think that he wanted to end up with an intellectual—a woman with whom he could discuss the question of why manumission rates declined in post-imperial Athens. Now he’d come to think that what he really wanted was a woman who would slide in beside you in a restaurant and press her leg against yours and say “Cozytown.” Cozytown had vanquished Athens.

  What matters, finally, isn’t finding the kind of person you think you should love. What matters is finding someone you feel more alive with. When he was with Ariel, he felt alive.

  30

  But. There’s always a “but” in life, isn’t there?

  Finding her again had made him happy, but his mind kept turning over in fretfulness, because of the fear that what had happened before was going to happen again.

  What happened before was that they’d had a wonderful year and a half, and then they’d started to fight about having kids. His position—that he already had a kid and didn’t want another—was not negotiable, and Ariel was equally unbudgeable in her desire to have one. They fought about it all the time, and finally they reached a point where they couldn’t talk about anything else. If he forgot to water the plants she told him he didn’t know how to take care of anything except himself; if she snuggled with Sancho he thought she was engaging in a creepy display of make-believe motherhood. After six months of this they’d accomplished what he would have thought impossible: they had destroyed their affection for each other.

  Though not permanently. Because here she was.

  Here, tonight, in the restaurant, he half-listened as she talked about Sancho’s worldview. “If there’s a fly in the apartment something major is happening. It’s a big day.”

  He was thinking: Don’t hurt her again.

  It wasn’t only that he cared for her; it wasn’t only that she was the tenderest soul in the world. It was that he thought she did need to have children. It was her telos, as Aristotle might have put it if he’d known her: it was the destination of her being. There weren’t many women of whom he believed this, but he believed it of Ariel.

  They’d talked about all this, of course, in these last few weeks of rediscovering each other. Ariel kept telling him not to worry. “I’m just using you for a while,” she’d said. “After I’ve toyed with you for a couple of months, I’ll leave you by the wayside. Let’s just keep things like they are right now. Hot and light.”

  But he knew it was easy to talk about hot and light, harder to keep things that way.

  Ariel had a spot of ketchup on her cheek; as Casey reached out with his napkin to dab it off she closed her eyes and brought her face forward trustingly. Most people, if you go to wipe something off their face, will draw back slightly, flinch. But Ariel offered herself up to you, trusting that you would treat her well. Don’t hurt her, he told himself. Don’t hurt her again.

  31

  Heather received a large brown package in the mail. Schiller had returned her thesis.

  She wasn’t sure she wanted to open it. She assumed there was a note inside, and she assumed it would be unpleasant to read. She thought it would be a howl of outrage.

  She thought of just dumping the package in the trash. She was still unhappy about having hurt him, and she didn’t want to read his howl of betrayed trust.

  She opened the envelope. It was one of those padded envelopes, thickly stuffed with gray clumps of weirdness that pour out of the lining when you open it up. The gray junk spilled all over her jeans.

  Schiller had enclosed a note. It had been typewritten, on his old manual.

  I can’t say that your study filled me with elation, but I appreciate your honesty, your kind remarks about the first two books, and, especially, the seriousness with which you’ve thought about my work.

  I’m grateful that you looked for a common thread in my work, a figure in the carpet, although I do wonder whether it was precisely your conclusion that my true theme is “freedom” that left you unable to appreciate the two most recent books. But I suppose it’s not for me to say: a writer isn’t the best judge of his own work. There’s room enough in the world for both of us to be wrong.

  I once knew a literary critic who, when asked to characterize his critical “method,” said that he simply tried to read the hell out of a book. You’ve read the hell out of mine, and that’s all that a writer can ask.

  Yours,

  Leonard

  P.S. Your prose is good, but here and there it could be more direct. I made a few suggestions on the manuscript.

  She looked through the thesis. He had edited it closely: there were suggestions—mostly suggestions for cuts—on every page. He had strengthened her arguments, eliminating most of the qualifiers, the bland attempts to be nice. He hadn’t tried to rewrite her prose; he’d merely scraped away the fuzz that blurred her judgments. He had made it stronger—and he had made it much more clearly critical of his work.

  She’d never been more impressed by him than she was now.

  It was a Saturday afternoon in the middle of April. She didn’t know what to do.

  She decided to go into the city. She was thinking about visiting Schiller. She didn’t know if he’d left for France yet.

  She couldn’t make up her mind. His note seemed friendly enough, but she didn’t know if he would want to see her.

  She took a train into New York, wandered east, and then took the subway uptown. She was near the Metropolitan Museum. She decided to go in and have another look at the Rembrandts.

  Somehow they seemed more arresting than they had the other day. The colors he favored—browns and blacks and grays—had struck her, the other day, as drab, washed-out, dead. Today they seemed beautifully somber.

  Schiller had seemed to have a special fondness for the self-portraits, so she examined them closely now. She saw an interesting progression. In the early self-portraits he looked like a red-faced fool: a ruddy, puffy master of good cheer. He seemed like someone you’d see at a fraternity beer blast, hanging around the keg and bellowing “Party!”—a sort of late-Renaissance John Belushi.

  In the later self-portraits, she could see a change. When he was old he had the face of a man whose life had been marked by tragedy.

  She was especially stuck by a self-portrait from 1667. He’s at his easel, but he’s looking away from it, toward the viewer; he looks as if a visitor has momentarily distracted him from his work. He doesn’t appear to be happy about the interruption. With his eyes he seems to be asking, “Well, what is it?” He can’t attend to you now; he has work to do.

  She was struck by the objectivity of the portrait. He doesn’t make himself out to be physically handsome: he pitilessly records the way his face has been ravaged by time. Neither does he make himself out to be morally better than he is. We see him as a man of complexity, sympathy, and deep feeling; but we also see him as impatient, curt, capable of harshness.

  Something about his expression reminded her of Schiller. Schiller was no Rembrandt, but like Rembrandt, he was a serious man.

  She remembered that he had described Irving Howe in that way: as a “serious man.” The simple phrase seemed to mean a lot to him; from his tone, it sounded like the highest praise he could bestow. She wondered whether he would refer to her as a serious woman.

  She wanted to
see him. She called his apartment, but got his machine. That didn’t mean anything, though: she knew he left it on when he was working. She decided to go over and ring on his doorbell.

  She took a taxi to the West Side; she was excited to see him. But when she got there, Jeff, the doorman, told her that she was half an hour too late. Schiller was already gone.

  32

  Ariel was accompanying her father to the airport.

  “I can’t believe you’re only taking one bag. You’re like a Zen master, Dad.”

  She knew why he was taking this trip, and she wanted to be part of it, at least to the extent of escorting him to the airport. She wondered if she should have gone along all the way to Paris. He had asked her if she wanted to, but she’d told him that this was his trip. This was his reunion, not hers.

  He was moving more slowly than ever, depending more than ever on his cane. He told her that both his legs felt stiff and that when he came home he might start using a walker.

  Not a walker, she thought. I don’t want to see my father struggling along half-collapsed over a walker.

  He looked so terribly fragile: with his bloated torso and his tiny little feet, he looked as if he was going to keel over. Walking beside him, Ariel, as she had a hundred times in the past six months, began thinking up an exercise regimen that would restore him to health. If he walked just half an hour every day, and worked out three times a week with some free weights—not monster weights, just some light weights to increase his upper-body strength . . .

  He’d do no such thing, and she knew it, but she couldn’t let go of the longing. She wanted to see him become a supple old man, radiant with well-being, like those eighty-year-old yoga guys she sometimes saw at the Whole Life Expo, sitting on little throw pillows in the lotus position. She clung to the dream that her father might grow young again.