Starting Out in the Evening Page 18

She was also, of course, speaking about them.

  He sipped his beer. “I guess that’s what this magazine is for me,” he said. “A second chance.”

  It bothered her that he wasn’t thinking what she was thinking.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I think of myself as being in the second phase of life. In the first phase you have these grand ideas about all the things you want to accomplish, and you get a day job to support yourself in the meantime. But after ten years, fifteen years, you haven’t accomplished the grand things, and you start to realize that what you’ve been doing in the meantime might be all you’ll ever do. And then you have to decide—do you really want to go for the grand things, or do you just accept the life you’ve already made?”

  “So what’s the answer?”

  “For me the answer is the magazine.”

  “The magazine is your grand idea? You never used to talk about starting a magazine.”

  “That’s true. I used to think I’d be a political activist. But I don’t see any political community that I want to be a part of right now. So I thought I could try to create one. A place where people on the left can argue with each other.”

  “But why a magazine? Why not a community of people who are doing things?”

  Chewing his bread slowly, he thought about this.

  She watched him as he thought, and she was happy. She loved the fact that he was introspective. She loved the fact that he talked.

  Most men, in her experience, didn’t know how to talk. They lectured you, or else they didn’t talk at all.

  “I feel like I have more questions than answers. It’s hard to build a movement around questions. So that’s why a magazine. I thought it might be possible to start building a community around people who have enough in common to be asking the same questions.”

  “Can’t we be our own community? You and me?” She was editing herself: her ideal community wouldn’t be just the two of them—it would include one or two little ones.

  “I think people need to be part of something larger.”

  She didn’t want to take this conversation further. She wanted him to know she was glad to have him back in her life, but she didn’t want him to know how glad. She didn’t want him to know, for example, that her ambitions had flown out the window the moment she got back together with him, and that her only ambition for the moment was to make sure that this thing grew. If he knew this it would scare him away. A man can’t understand how a woman feels—how she can offer up her entire life to him. The man thinks she’s bringing him a burden. He doesn’t understand that she’s trying to give him a gift.

  It alarmed her a little, how much he meant to her. Having Casey in her life had the effect that you’re supposed to get from Prozac. Everything seemed easier; she felt more confident, more intelligent, more serene. But why did it take a man to make her feel like this? What would her role models of yesteryear have said about that—her women’s studies teachers, for example? “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”—that was the slogan her feminist-minded classmates used to scrawl on the toilet stalls in college. You weren’t supposed to need a man to complete you. Yet here she was, a tender little grouper, happy at last because she had a bicycle she could call her own.

  She knew that this relationship wasn’t as important to him as it was to her. If he was being honest he’d probably admit that she was the second most important thing in his life right now. The first most important thing was this fledgling magazine.

  When she knew him years ago he was still reeling from his divorce, and though he used to talk a lot about how he wanted to make some larger contribution, it was all talk. Now he was absorbed by the effort to get this magazine off the ground. When they got together they usually got together late, because he was trying to wheedle an article out of someone or following up some tip about getting hold of a used computer.

  Sometimes she fantasized about falling for some easygoing guy, a guy who forgot all about his work when he got home. But if she’d really wanted that she would have stuck with Victor Mature. She liked a man who was living a passion, even if it meant she had to compete with it.

  They finished dinner and walked up Seventh Avenue, holding hands and laughing. A police car slowed down as it passed, and the cop in the passenger seat looked them over closely. Ariel could feel Casey tightening—a subtle inner flinch.

  Ariel never really thought about the racial thing except at times like this—when strangers gave them the evil eye. It wasn’t an issue for her, and she knew that Casey felt the same way. Years ago, when everything was falling apart between them, she once overheard him talking on the phone with his ex-wife. She heard him saying, “You want me to tell you it’s because she’s white? You’re looking for a drama about how racial differences make it hard for two people to love each other? I’m sorry, but you’ll have to look somewhere else for that. Ariel and I have our problems, but that’s not one of them. That’s not our story.”

  It might have been different if Casey had had a less complicated family background. But his mother was white—not only that, she was Jewish; she was closer to the stereotype of the Jewish mother than Ariel’s mother had ever been. Casey knew more Yiddish words than Ariel did.

  Blackness and whiteness was their story only when the outside world made it their story. It was their story, for instance, when Ariel talked about visiting friends in Boston together. Casey never wanted to. When he was in graduate school he’d had a girlfriend in Boston; he used to borrow his parents’ car and drive up there on weekends, and not once or twice but three times he was stopped on the Massachusetts Turnpike and hassled by state troopers, apparently for the crime of Driving While Black. Ever since then he’d been allergic to Massachusetts.

  Back in her apartment, they made love. She loved the way he made love—with a rare combination of passion and patience. There was just one thing wrong with him in bed: he didn’t know how to kiss. Never did. In the old days she’d managed to teach him a little—tactfully, by example—but he’d forgotten most of what he’d learned. She’d have to start over again. His kisses were too rote; they were assembly-line kisses. She wanted complex kisses; she wanted each kiss to be a conversation.

  He knows nothing of kissing theory, she thought.

  That was a small sad thing. But there was also a big sad thing, which kept her up worrying after Casey had fallen asleep. The big sad thing was that she knew they weren’t going to last. On the morning after their first night together, a month ago, Casey had let her know that he hadn’t changed his mind about having kids. She’d told him not to worry about it, it wasn’t a problem. But of course she was lying.

  35

  Schiller installed himself in his hotel room slowly and carefully. He laid out his clothing in the drawer, with an inward shiver of distaste at the thought of how many other people had put their clothes there. He took a shower, and was displeased by the lukewarm water. These were things that never bothered him when he was young. He had grown too old for Paris.

  He went to bed in the afternoon, with the sun burning in through the blinds. Every object in the room was painful to look at, shatteringly bright. Jet-lagged, he fell into a heavy, drugged sleep, and woke twelve hours later in the chilly dark with a stiff neck, aching joints, and an aching spine. Why was it the bones that hurt? He wished he could be deboned like a chicken, and make his way through the world in the form of pain-free meat.

  He showered again, left the hotel, and took a walk in the cold spring day. It was morning; people were hurrying to work. But they seemed to be hurrying in slow motion.

  When you leave New York you realize you’re a New Yorker. On the sidewalks of New York he always felt that everyone was whizzing past him; he felt in danger of getting knocked over. But in Paris, he felt as if he was part of the pace: everyone in Paris walked slowly. Somehow, instead of making him comfortable, this annoyed him.

  He took a seat in a café and ordered a croissant and “du café”—some coff
ee. The waiter came back with a croissant and two cups of coffee—deux cafés. Schiller decided that he should stick to English.

  The café was crowded; he drank his two coffees and listened to the conversations around him, which he could only half understand. Two heavyset, rough-looking men were arguing about politics, and he was struck anew by a thought he used to have often when he lived here: there is no such thing as a French tough guy. A French tough guy, even if he’s tough as nails, speaks French, and therefore isn’t very tough at all. These men looked like boxers, but they were speaking a feminine language and sipping daintily from tiny espresso cups. Schiller, six-foot-something and wide, always felt terribly manly in France, the land of fragile men.

  He walked much of the day. Paris seemed smaller, more provincial than he’d remembered it.

  It grew warmer in the afternoon. He sat on a bench in the Luxembourg Garden, watching children put little wooden boats in the pond.

  Sometimes he used to have lunch here with Stella.

  He and Stella had spent the first two years of their marriage in Paris. They weren’t children: he was in his early thirties and she was just a few years younger. The freedom and the foreignness were all the sweeter precisely because they weren’t young: they both knew what it was to be nailed to desks in unfulfilling jobs.

  Every morning they worked side by side at the long table in their apartment—she was writing her dissertation and he was working on what was to become his third unpublished novel. Around noon they would leave for their jobs—she was giving English lessons to French businessmen and he was working as a copy editor for an English-language tourist magazine. They would meet in the early evening and take long walks, getting to know the city street by street.

  For two years they had a perfect life. It was hard to say why they felt so free here. If they’d lived in New York they would have been doing the same things: she would have been working on her dissertation, he would have been writing his novel; they’d both have been working at day jobs to pay the bills. But somehow Paris made everything different. Being in a new place and speaking a new language made every encounter more interesting. A trip to the market in the morning to buy bread, an afternoon spent reading in a cafe—nothing was routine; a strange place helped you find the poetry in everyday life.

  Now, almost forty years later, he had spent the day visiting their personal landmarks. Most of the things he remembered were still here: Paris preserves its past. But his mind was too stunned to contemplate persistence and change: all he could think about was that she was alive then and she was no longer alive. That once they were young, and now he was old, and now she was gone.

  How could it be?

  In The Ambassadors, when Lambert Strether, a sheltered, middle-aged American, pays a visit to France, he is rejuvenated by its broader moral atmosphere, and he realizes that he has never really lived. In the central scene of the novel, he sits with a young friend in a quiet garden in the Faubourg-Saint-Germain and implores the young man to live while he’s still young, to live all he can.

  Schiller didn’t have the same regret. He and Stella had valued their youthfulness—they had lived, they’d lived intensely. But no matter how deeply you live, it comes to this in the end: one of you will be gone and the other will be in mourning.

  He had no doubt that if he had died and she were still alive, Stella would be mourning him with an equal intensity. Stella would be keeping this appointment.

  They should have been keeping it together. Stella had died an absurd death. She’d died in a fire in a hotel in Pittsburgh, where she’d been attending a conference of the American Philosophical Association. She hadn’t even been sure she wanted to go; she’d made up her mind at the last minute, because it didn’t seem that important either way.

  Sitting in the Luxembourg Garden, he thought of Heather’s manuscript, and her view that he had lost his literary compass after the second book. He didn’t quite see it that way, but she might have been right. It was hard to say. Certainly his work changed after Stella died. He wrote less nakedly; he became more guarded—or maybe it was simply that his own life began to interest him less. The third book, the book about the sixties, was rather impersonal; it was his first, his only, attempt to work on a large social canvas. Writing it was a ten-year struggle; he had high hopes for it after it was done, but it had the bad fortune to be published not too long after Mr. Sammler’s Planet. He still liked to think that his was the better novel, but Bellow’s reputation was an ocean liner that capsized his own small craft. The fourth book, the one about his parents, was filled with passion—he thought it was, at any rate—but it was a passion to preserve the memory of their lives and their time; he was no longer exploring his own personal life, as he had in the first two books, and evidently that was what Heather had loved.

  Some people had told him they liked his last two books the most.

  Maybe Heather would look more favorably on his next book, if he managed to complete it.

  He was near the end of it—of the book he thought of simply as the Stella book. It was six hundred pages long, and it was a mess: he wasn’t sure if the parts fit together, and he’d written about some of the events they had lived through in five different ways, finally deciding to leave in all the alternative versions and hope that his readers—if he ever had readers—would at least find the novel an interesting mess. But interesting or not, the important thing was that it was almost done. He had just one more appointment to keep, and all he wanted to do was transcribe the feelings he had when he kept it, and then the book would be over, and his life’s task would be complete.

  After resting, he continued his walk, and in the late afternoon he found himself near the Rodin Museum.

  When they’d lived here, he’d go to the museum once a month or so to look at Rodin’s sculptures of Balzac. There was one in particular that he always paid his respects to. Balzac used to write in a huge robe that resembled a monk’s cowl, and one of Rodin’s statues depicted Balzac in this robe: fat, arrogant, gifted, grinning, wholly at ease.

  When Schiller was young, he drew inspiration from the thought of Balzac. Perhaps he valued the idea of Balzac more than he valued Balzac’s books. In a career that lasted only twenty years, Balzac wrote more than forty novels; with a feverish desire to put “all of France” into his books, he crowded them with representative figures and made sure to include portraits of every region and every sector of society. He was a passionate monarchist—he mourned the death of the old regime—and yet he kept a bust of Napoleon on his mantel, for he admired Napoleon’s world-conquering ambitions: he sought to become the Napoleon of literature. Schiller hadn’t had such grand desires—he’d never sought to become the Napoleon of literature—but he’d cherished the example of Balzac’s dedication and his immersion in his creative world. When Balzac was on his deathbed he supposedly cried out for a doctor who existed only in his books—one of his recurring characters, Bianchon.

  When Schiller paid those monthly visits to the Rodin Museum, he came full of hope and anxiety. In his middle thirties, with two unpublished novels behind him, he had no idea whether he would become a novelist at all. He wasn’t sure how long he could keep going.

  And how had it turned out? With his four published books, he hadn’t exactly matched the master: Balzac once wrote five books in a single year. At seventy-one, he was as fat as Balzac, but that was the only realm in which he rivaled him. But he had certainly kept going. Schiller had no illusions about the scale of his own achievement, but he had tried, through art, to bring a little more beauty, a little more tolerance, a little more coherence into the world, and now he felt he had earned the right to look back at the statue with an unembarrassed eye.

  36

  Casey got to Penn Station a few minutes before the train was due, bought a papaya drink, and started pacing around the waiting area. He was tapping the bottom of the cup to get the last few pieces of ice into his mouth when he saw William coming up the stairway. He watched the bo
y for a moment, without trying to get his attention. William had grown taller in the last six months, but not much else had changed: he was still pudgy, awkward-looking, sincere-looking—he looked like a person who bore the world no ill.

  “Hello, young man,” Casey said as his son approached. Casey wanted to give him a hug, but instead he squeezed him on the shoulder; and in that momentary touch, the love and the guilt and the sadness and the distance came together in such a confused flood that he could hardly think.

  He took one of William’s bags, and as they walked toward the subway he realized that his son was quite a bit bigger than he was. This wasn’t saying much—Casey was five-eight—but it was new.

  Casey was amused at the way people—that is, white people—were getting out of their path. Apparently the fact that William bore the world no ill was obvious only to his father. On the subway platform, people gave them a great deal of space, which wasn’t true when Casey stood by himself in a jacket and tie with his nose in a copy of The Last Intellectuals. He was often shadowed by security guards in bookstores and record stores; he often saw white women cross the street to avoid him after dark; but he’d forgotten what it was like to see white people of all descriptions scurry out of your path in broad daylight, and he’d forgotten the mixed feelings it engendered: anger, because people were making assumptions about you, and pleasure, because you had the power to inspire fear.

  “I should keep you around as a bodyguard,” Casey said.

  He might not have been a bad one. William was a strapping boy, and he walked with that badass slouch, that shitkicker limp, that young black males had favored since the beginning of time. Casey used to walk that walk himself. When he was growing up he heard a rumor that there was one original kid somewhere, Badleg John, who was the baddest kid in the world, who dragged one leg behind him because he had polio, and that everybody else who walked like that was unwittingly imitating the polio-stricken gait of Badleg John.