Starting Out in the Evening Page 2

  “Surely, even Oprah ventures a mistaken opinion on occasion,” Schiller said.

  Heather resented it that this woman was his daughter. How does a writer of the most subtle, serious fiction end up with a daughter who watches Oprah? I’d be a better daughter for him than she is.

  And she was mad at Schiller for dismissing her. “Heather was about to leave.” She was sure she could get him to reconsider if she spent more time with him.

  She didn’t need his cooperation to write her thesis. But she wanted his blessing.

  On the coffee table were some things that Ariel, slobly, had dumped there. Her scarf, her jacket, a Snickers wrapper, and a catalog for the Learning Annex, with the ridiculous headline: HARNESS THE POWER OF MIND CONTROL!

  She sat glumly with the phone at her ear, pretending to make a call.

  Harness the power of mind control. She decided to send Schiller a thought-message to come and sit down with her in the living room. If he responded, it would mean that he was psychically available to her, and that he might help her after all. If he didn’t respond, she would leave him alone.

  She sent her thoughts into the other room, where she could hear him talking; she imagined them rushing like a mighty river, the Monongahela or something, into his mind.

  She waited—one minute, two. He didn’t appear.

  Oh well. She decided to call her answering machine to see if she had any messages.

  Schiller appeared at the threshold of the room. She smiled at him, willing him to come in and sit down.

  “Well,” he said, and he came in. The mind control was working! Now she had to get him to sit down.

  “It was nice meeting you,” he said. “I’ll get your coat.”

  Apparently it hadn’t worked. Unhappily, she followed him into the hall. She had met him, but that was all. She wanted to get to know him; she wanted him to approve of her project. There was only a moment left. She didn’t know what to do. He carefully removed her coat from the hanger and extended it toward her, but instead of turning around to allow him to help her on with it, she clutched his hand and brought it to her lips. Absurdly, in the unlit hallway, she was kissing his hand.

  “Promise me you’ll give me a chance,” she said.

  Schiller pulled his hand away; he dropped her coat. He took a long step backward. She thought he was horrified. But then, in a gesture that, in Heather’s view, was just as odd as hers, he placed the palm of his other hand on her face, covering her eyes. She didn’t know if he was trying to commune with her or trying to hold her off.

  5

  Ariel had a graceful, gliding way of walking, and Heather realized that the girlish strivings that Schiller had described in his second book had come to fruition: she had become a dancer after all.

  They were on the street, walking toward Heather’s car—Heather still had the rental car she’d driven down from Providence. When Heather had gone back to the kitchen to say good-bye, Ariel had said that she was leaving too, and Heather had offered her a ride.

  “I love your father’s books,” Heather said when she got behind the wheel.

  “He says you’re writing something about them?” Ariel said.

  “I am. For graduate school. I hope to write a book about your father someday. I know an editor at the University of Chicago Press who’s very interested.”

  “Cool,” Ariel said.

  Heather was proud of herself for acting like a normal person. She didn’t feel like a normal person at the moment. Most of her mind was elsewhere: she was trying to absorb the meaning of that strange encounter in the hallway—if it had any meaning at all.

  “What’s it like to be the daughter of a great writer?” she said.

  “You think he’s a great writer?” Ariel looked delighted, but also, oddly, a little surprised.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I do, but he’s my father.” A pause. “I’m not much of a reader, actually. I’ve actually only read two of his books.”

  Heather’s estimation of her, low from the moment she’d set eyes on her, got lower.

  The streets were bright with ice; ahead of them, a van slid slowly, with a stately grace, into a taxi.

  “Are you a dancer?” Heather said.

  “I used to be. I’m an aerobics teacher now. That’s what happens to dancers when they die.” She ran her hands through her hair. “At the moment I don’t feel like anything. I’m not a dancer, I’m not a therapist, I’m not a mother. I feel like a collection of negatives.”

  If you really listen, you find that most people tell you their life stories as soon as they meet you. Ariel, clearly, was another boring forty-year-old obsessed with her “biological clock.”

  Heather couldn’t relate to this. If the point of your life is to produce another life, then what’s the point of your life? All you’re doing is passing the buck.

  They were near Columbus Circle, where the traffic merges confusingly. Heather was braking for the oncoming traffic when two men carrying what appeared to be a six-foot hoagie trotted in front of the car. She turned the wheel to the left, and the back of the car swerved to the right. They were out of control.

  “You have to go with the skid,” Ariel said.

  “That’s a myth,” Heather said, and she jerked the wheel to make the car go straight. She knew you were supposed to turn into the skid, but that seemed too wimpy to consider.

  The car lurched in the wrong direction, and Heather had a sickening feeling in her stomach. “You have to go with the skid,” Ariel said again, and this time Heather thought it might not be a bad idea to give the conventional wisdom a try. She turned into the skid, and the car, though still out of control, was suddenly moving more calmly. Two thousand pounds of calm, graceful metal, it glided, silent, majestic, slow, toward a U-Haul truck parked near the corner. Heather gently pressed the brake, but they kept moving.

  They were about to have an accident. There was nothing she could do to stop it. The black night air was clear, and every sound she heard—a car horn, the hum of the traffic—was distinct, and ghostly, and like music. Heather could almost hear the sound that was about to come, the peculiarly satisfying sound of metal on metal. And then, an inch or two away from the truck, the car stopped moving, as if it had decided it was just browsing, and didn’t really want to have an accident today.

  They sat there for a moment without speaking. Although they hadn’t hit anything, the impact had seemed so certain that Heather’s imagination had supplied the sound and feel of it, and in the moment of stupidity that follows any physical crisis she was wondering whether she could have gotten whiplash from the thought that they had been about to crash.

  During the rest of the drive, Heather drove slowly and carefully. When they reached 23rd Street, Ariel thanked her for the ride and got out of the car. But before she closed the door, she stuck her head back in.

  “We had an adventure,” she said.

  6

  Ariel let herself into her apartment and put her backpack down. Her cat, Sancho, hurried up to her and pushed his head against her shins.

  “Miracle cat,” she said absently.

  She was still musing about what had just happened. It was amazing.

  The little miniskirted biographer had almost killed them. But that wasn’t the amazing thing. The amazing thing was that she wouldn’t go with the skid. It was as if she knew what to do but refused to do it.

  How could something that was so natural to one person be so difficult for someone else? A couple of years ago Ariel had lost control of a car on an icy road in Vermont, and she’d turned toward the skid instinctively. It was so natural that she probably would’ve done it even if she hadn’t known it was the right thing to do. If life had taught her anything—if she had a philosophy of life—it probably boiled down to that: Go with the skid.

  The Lost City. She had no idea where the book was. During her year in California a small army of her friends had trooped through this apartment, and for all she knew someone had walked
off with it. She looked through her not too many books and couldn’t find it.

  Maybe it was in the closet. She had an enormous closet, and sometimes things ended up there because they made her feel guilty when they were out on view. She went into the closet, got down on her knees, and started going through the boxes.

  She was still annoyed about the way her father had acted around the miniskirted scholar. He’d acted like he wanted to date her. “Surely, even Oprah ventures a mistaken opinion on occasion.” That wasn’t even the way he talked. Nobody talked like that. He’d looked embarrassed that she’d even mentioned Oprah, and he’d changed the subject as fast as he could. He never would have dismissed her like that if the little biographer hadn’t been in the next room.

  It was strange, the way a new person can bring out a new, unpleasant side of someone you love.

  Sitting on her knees, going through her closet, she was trying to figure out why that hot-wired little intellectual had thrown her for a loop. It was probably her own possessiveness. When Ariel had returned to New York last fall, the rock she thought she could cling to was her father: his love of her, and his need of her.

  In the past year he’d had a heart attack—his second—and two operations: a quadruple bypass and then an operation to repair a damaged aorta, whatever that was. When he’d told her about the problem with his aorta, he said it was what Einstein had died of. “I suppose I should be flattered to be in such distinguished company, but it’s an honor I’d just as soon forgo.” She was touched by his good humor, his courage. Listening to him on the phone, three thousand miles away, she had resolved to be strong for him, to keep her own trivial problems in perspective.

  The resolution lasted five minutes—as soon as she got off the phone she was back into her crack-up. Peter, the guy she’d been living with, the guy she’d been talking about having a child with, had started sleeping with some underage cutie, a girl with noteworthy hair. Peter had come home one night and started criticizing Ariel’s hair.

  Which was nasty, because he knew that her hair was a source of perpetual woe.

  She got up from the closet and went into the bathroom to check her hair. Her hair was aimlessly frizzy, and there was nothing she could do to bring it to heel. In her nearly four decades on this planet, she’d never been able to figure out where to put the part in her hair. Her new hairdresser claimed that she didn’t need to worry about a part—he said she’d look great if she just gently “tossed” her hair, like a salad. It was a comforting theory, but Ariel wasn’t sure she believed it.

  “Lettuce head,” she said to herself in the mirror. Then she went back to the closet and resumed her search.

  So Peter gave her the old heave-ho, and her father was sick, and she was getting sick of her job, and finally she stopped working. For a month she mostly stayed in bed, ordering in Chinese food and watching Nick at Nite—she kept herself together every day by counting the hours till Mary Tyler Moore—and the only reason she got out of bed was to check her hair, and she began to suspect that she was having a nervous breakdown; and when her father had his second operation in three months, the one on his aorta, she came east to see him; and walking on Irving Place on a particularly nasty day in March she realized that she didn’t want to live in California anymore, land of the eternal sun, and that she could move back to New York, take care of her father in his convalescence, forget Peter, and start afresh.

  In the space of three months her father went from a vigorous seventy to a tottering seventy-one. He became a man who had outlived his body. His body was bloated and purple-veined and his legs didn’t look quite like legs anymore but like rotted logs, with inexplicable protrusions, and after he lost a little weight everything turned to flab and he somehow looked fatter than he’d looked when he was fatter. He hadn’t abused his body over the years so much as ignored it, but it came to the same thing. When she thought of some of the older dancers she knew, people who’d become choreographers but who still danced for pleasure—people who respected their bodies—her father seemed to belong to a different species. When she’d danced in Erick Hawkins’s company he was deep into his sixties and still a lithe, sexy man.

  During her first two weeks back in New York, when her father was in the hospital, she stayed in his apartment while the guy who was subletting her place looked for something else. It was an oddly comforting way to come home. Though she was terrified that her father was going to die, it was calming to live in his apartment.

  Whenever she visited her father she liked to check out his night table to see what he was reading. When he was in the hospital, the book he’d left on his night table at home was the autobiography of William Butler Yeats. Leafing through it, she came across a passage he’d underlined: “In Paris Synge once said to me, ‘We should unite stoicism, asceticism and ecstasy. Two of them have often come together, but the three never.’”

  She was surprised that he’d underlined this. She knew that her father was a stoic and an ascetic, but she wouldn’t have thought of him as someone who yearned for ecstasy.

  For Ariel, ecstasy was the only one of those qualities that mattered.

  She was touched to learn that he was still spiritually youthful enough to be underlining passages like this. Young enough to be seeking guidelines for living.

  After the operation there was no ecstasy; there wasn’t even stoicism. He was depressed for months: he didn’t write; he didn’t return phone calls; he read nothing more taxing than the newspaper. He spent most of his time watching TV—which amazed her, because he’d hardly ever watched TV before. But she thought she understood what he was going through. She’d once heard that when you have heart surgery—your chest sawed open, your ribs cracked, the action of your heart replaced for hours by the action of a machine—the suffering you undergo for the next few months, that peculiarly spiritual sorrow, is the sorrow of a body in mourning for itself, a body that believes it has died.

  Somehow even times of grief can be sweet to remember. She visited him every day in the hospital, bringing him little fat-free treats, sitting by his bed and kibitzing with him and the old friends of his who dropped by; and when he was back home, in his depression, she was there constantly, shopping for him, cooking for him, keeping him company. It was a terrible time, but it was also a loving, cozy time. She bought him a VCR and rented movies for him; in the more than two decades since her mother died, he’d gone to the movies about once a year, so there was a lot of great stuff he’d never seen. They watched a lot of Woody Allen movies, a few by John Sayles, and a bunch of old Bette Davis weepers that he’d ignored in his youth. She was amazed by how out of it he was, movie-wise. He reminded her of one of those Japanese soldiers who used to wander out of the hills after spending thirty years in hiding, thinking that the Second World War was still on. Her father had been hiding out for thirty years in his writing room, thinking that the war of high culture versus low was still raging away. He hadn’t gotten the news that the war was over: that high culture, which he had cherished, fought for, given his life for, had been crushed.

  Despite the circumstances, it was delicious just to be with him. He’d never had much time for her when she was growing up. Through most of her childhood and youth her father had been represented by a closed door and the thin metallic slapping noise of his typewriter keys.

  She couldn’t find the damn book.

  She was embarrassed that she’d never read it. And that lipsticked intellectual had made her feel worse. “I’ve already read it. I just want to be able to refer to it when I’m writing.” Fuck you.

  Heather. Even her name was idiotic. Every third jerk on the street was named Heather.

  Ariel had disliked her on sight: she’d had a sneaky, guilty look in her eyes during that first moment in the kitchen. She must have been stealing cookies.

  But it wasn’t just that. After that first awkward second, you could tell that she was extremely pleased with herself. She was one of those people—you could tell—for whom everything
had gone right in life. She radiated smugness; she radiated success. “I know an editor who’s very interested.” When she’d said that, in a smug, fake-blasé tone of voice, Ariel had wanted to smack her.

  She did have a certain style—that was undeniable. Her compact little body—a swimmer’s body; her Mr. Spock haircut; the three tiny earrings in her right ear; the mysterious little scar under her lip: even her imperfections had style. Ariel had noticed everything about her, the way one woman notices another.

  She was further along in life than Ariel was. How could that be? By the time Heather was born, Ariel had already had about ten years of dance lessons, had seemed well along on the road of life—she’d seemed precocious, even. And now this girl was full of energy and promise, and Ariel was a has-been, a washed-up former dancer, yesterday’s news. How did that little girl get ahead of me, when I had a fifteen-year head start?

  But on the other hand, Heather couldn’t go with the skid. And if not for Ariel, all that bright promise would have ended up in a bony bloody pulp on the windshield.

  While she was still on her knees, rustling around in the closet, she heard her answering machine going through its conniptions—she had an ancient answering machine that hurled itself around on her desk when it took a call. She hadn’t heard the phone ring. She went out to pick up the phone, but when she heard who was leaving the message she decided not to.

  It was Victor. Victor Mature.

  Victor was a guy she’d had dinner with twice. She was beginning to think he was her fate. There was something uninspiring about him, but he seemed like a decent guy, and he seemed to like her, and he’d mentioned, on their second date, that he was at the time of life when he wanted to start a family. So she was beginning to think that marrying him would be the mature thing to do. That was why she thought of him as Victor Mature.

  He was the first guy she’d met in a while who wasn’t disgusting. That was a point in his favor. And though some part of her mind, when she contemplated marrying him—when she even contemplated sleeping with him—though some clear voice in her mind shouted “No!,” she thought the voice could be overruled.