Starting Out in the Evening Page 20

  There was nothing, of course. She hadn’t made the journey. But even so, it seemed to him that the air where he sat was charged, alive. He had been looking forward to this appointment so deeply, for so long, that the spot itself seemed to have been affected by his longing. It was hard to understand how the tourists bustling around him could fail to notice that there was something different about this patch of space: that it was charged, that it was saturated with love.

  The mind cannot sustain itself for long at a great pitch of reverence and yearning, especially a tired mind in a tired body, and after a few minutes he noticed that his foot was asleep. This felt like a betrayal; but he knew that it wasn’t really a betrayal. He could never betray her now. Not merely because she wasn’t alive to be hurt by him, but for a deeper reason. He would never leave her. He might be driven to move now by the need to restore the circulation in his foot and by simple distraction, but he would never leave her. She was his person; and this was the way it would be until he died.

  It seemed right that they had arranged to meet at this spot, near this monument, this huge and beautiful cliché. It seemed right because of what they had discovered about it many years ago: when you were in this city, you could never lose it. You could be wandering around through narrow winding streets in some unfamiliar district, utterly disoriented, and suddenly, when you turned a corner, you’d see it in the distance, glittering in the smokeless air. You could never lose it. It was always near. Exactly like you, my love. Exactly like you.

  38

  Heather had never seen Sandra in daylight before. She was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans—all black. Her skin was very pale.

  They were sitting under a tree at the edge of the Great Lawn in Central Park, watching a baseball game: The Village Voice against the National Writers Union.

  Now that her thesis was done, Heather had called Sandra to find out if she could write something for the Voice. In the course of the conversation Sandra had invited her to the game.

  “So you finished it,” Sandra said. “You must be thrilled.”

  “I guess.” Heather shrugged and tore a clump of grass from the earth.

  “Postpartum depression?”

  “Maybe. I’m not happy about what I said about Leonard. I meant what I said, but I’m not happy that I said it. I’m sure I must have hurt him.”

  Sandra smiled in an affectionate, almost maternal way. “Sidney Hook,” she said, and paused for a second to check for a sign of recognition. Not getting one, she said, “Sidney Hook—a philosopher about whom your friend Leonard Schiller undoubtedly has strong feelings, one way or the other—used to say that most of the difficult decisions in life don’t involve right against wrong, but right against right. That’s why life is tragic. It was right for you to write about him honestly, but it also would have been right for you to write something that would have spared his feelings. I can understand why you have mixed emotions.”

  They watched the softball game for a while. The Voice was going through hard times lately; there were rumors that it was going to close down. But the writers and editors and photographers who were here today, making jokes that you needed a graduate degree in semiotics to understand, didn’t seem like people who were troubled about their future; they seemed like the smartest, most self-confident group of people she’d ever seen.

  When she’d come to New York a few months ago, Heather had thought she was coming to Schiller’s New York. But Schiller’s New York didn’t exist anymore. It was Sandra’s New York now.

  Heather didn’t think that was such a bad thing. She was happy to be on good terms with this curious person, who was successful enough to be a mentor to ambitious younger people, but who behaved with none of the self-importance that one usually sees in people who assign themselves that role.

  The ball rolled their way and the third baseman, a pony-tailed Writers Union guy, said, “A little help?” Sandra scooped up the ball and threw it to him. It reached him on a bounce.

  “Do you still write poetry?” Heather said after Sandra sat down.

  “Poetry?” Sandra was looking at her with suspicion—almost with alarm.

  “What I’m asking,” Heather said, “is why you never published another book of poetry after Misplacing Marlene.”

  “What are you? A detective?”

  Misplacing Marlene was a book of poetry that Sandra had published with a small press in 1971, when she was still in college.

  “I thought that title had been obliterated from the historical record,” Sandra said. “At least I hoped so.”

  “I’ve looked for it,” Heather said. “I’ve never been able to find a copy.”

  “Thank God for small favors,” Sandra said.

  “Should I infer that you don’t think it was very good?”

  “The heartfelt effusions of a twenty-year-old with a highly developed sense of self-pity. How good could it have been?”

  “So you stopped writing poetry when you stopped pitying yourself?”

  “Not quite. I did stop writing poetry, though.”

  “Why?”

  “I stopped when I realized that it wasn’t going to lead to an exciting life.”

  “An exciting life?”

  Sandra walked over to a plastic cooler and got two cans of beer. “Now you get to hear the story of my life, you lucky girl.”

  She tossed a can to Heather and sat down. “For a long time, my sole ambition was to become a poet. When I published that book I thought I had everything I wanted in life. I thought all I had to do to be perfectly happy was keep doing what I was already doing. I thought I was going to go on writing poetry, and find a teaching job in some MFA program somewhere, and spend the summers in writers’ colonies, and become a grand old literary lady. I thought I was going to become Marianne Moore.

  “In the summer of . . . 1972, I guess it was, I visited a friend in Ecuador, and a few days after I got back I came down with a fever of a hundred and three. It didn’t go away, and I ended up in St. Vincent’s with what the doctors called a ‘fever of undetermined origin.’

  “I ended up spending two months there. I was too weak to write, too weak to read, too weak to do anything except lie there and watch TV. I missed my life. But I was surprised to find that it wasn’t poetry I missed, or going to poetry readings. I missed movies. I missed music. I missed going to clubs and dancing and listening to music so loud that my ears would still be ringing the next morning. When my friends would visit me and talk about what was going on in the world, I noticed that none of them talked about books. They were talking about Mean Streets and The Godfather; they were talking about Bob Dylan and Patti Smith and that primal-scream album John Lennon made when the Beatles broke up. And even when they talked about the written word, they talked about a Joan Didion article in The New York Review of Books or a Tom Wolfe article in Esquire or a Hunter Thompson article in Rolling Stone. They weren’t talking about Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. And they weren’t talking about Leonard Schiller either, I might add.

  “But the point isn’t that my friends were talking about these things. It’s that these were the things I wanted to hear about. I didn’t want to know whether Muriel Rukeyser had published a new poem somewhere; I wanted to know whether Lou Reed was putting out a new record. I’d been going through life with the idea that I wanted to be a poet, but that wasn’t really where my passion was.

  “During those two months in bed, I made a vow. I told myself that if I ever got out of there, whatever I was going to do in life, I was going to do it only as long as it was fun.

  “That’s how I found my way into the work I do now. And now I’m having all the fun I can handle. And even in terms of adding something to the cultural conversation, if there is such a thing, I think I’m doing more as a journalist and an editor for the Voice than I ever would have done as a poet.”

  An old-time Voice writer, a woman who looked like someone who had traveled to Nicaragua in the 1980s to help the Sandinistas gather the coffee har
vest, picked up a bat and waved ineffectually at three pitches; the inning was over.

  “It’s time,” Sandra said, “for me to strike out a couple of labor lawyers.”

  The Voice people were going out on the field again; Sandra took over from the guy who’d pitched the previous inning. Heather was struck by Sandra’s physical awkwardness. She wasn’t much of an athlete. She would lob the ball toward the batter and then skitter backward, covering her face.

  After fouling off two pitches, the batter hit a looping line drive toward shallow left field. As the shortstop, running with his back to home plate, made a graceful over-the-shoulder catch, Sandra, on the pitcher’s mound, jumped up and down with delight.

  Heather sat on the grass, watching the game and thinking about Sandra’s theory of fun. Sandra had found a way to make sure that her labor was blossoming and dancing. It seemed to work for her: she was vital, happy, generous, interesting, and interested in life. But Heather didn’t think she could structure her own life that way.

  She was still thinking about it when Sandra came back and sat down. “You say you’re just out to have fun, but in fact you’ve made sacrifices for what you believe in. You quit The New Yorker when they got rid of William Shawn.”

  “You are with the FBI,” Sandra said. “You know more about me than I do.” She seemed embarrassed to be reminded of her good deed. “I still just file it under the category of fun. I couldn’t have enjoyed myself there after they canned the person who gave me my first break.”

  Heather didn’t quite believe her. It was as if she wanted to appear less serious than she was.

  But she didn’t really care, finally, about figuring out Sandra’s reason for living. She cared about figuring out her own.

  It was good to search for “an exciting life.” But is that enough? Don’t you have to have something that sustains you through periods when excitement is nowhere to be found? Don’t you have to have some guiding principle, some center?

  What’s your center? She didn’t know.

  It was maddening to be so unformed.

  She wanted to keep talking about all this, but she no longer had Sandra to herself. A young man had arrived, a man about Heather’s age.

  “Jedd!” Sandra hugged him. “I thought you were still in Mexico.” She looked happy to see him. As happy as she’d looked when Heather showed up? Not quite as happy? Happier?

  Jedd started telling Sandra about his travels. Heather, sitting a few feet off, couldn’t quite hear the words, but it was clear, somehow, that the main element of his conversational style was knowingness: he had the style of connoisseurship. This was a man who knew which wines to choose, which obscure poets to read and which to condescend to.

  He was knowing, but he was humble too. He was taller than Sandra, but when he spoke to her he managed to bend over so much that he had to look up at her. He looked, Heather thought, like a dog granting dominance to a more important dog.

  They talked for a few minutes; Heather, thoroughly ignored, studied them. His eyes were lively—with flirtatiousness, with ambition, with the desire to please. Sandra said something—Heather didn’t catch it—and he burst into a belly laugh.

  Heather thought of a research project: measuring the decibel level of laughter in social hierarchies. When Jedd made a joke, Sandra, the top dog, smiled; when Sandra made a joke, Jedd, the little dog, howled with laughter.

  He was another young striver, pasting together his own act—part Don Juan, part doormat. There was something repulsive about the routine when you saw it from the outside, performed by someone other than yourself.

  After the game a cluster of people headed over to Columbus Avenue for dinner. It would have been easy enough to drift along with them, but Heather didn’t want to.

  She hugged Sandra good-bye, perhaps too passionately. She was always hugging people too passionately. “Are you going away or something?” Sandra said.

  She felt that something was finished here. She still admired Sandra; she still wanted to get to know her; but she didn’t want to become her protegee.

  It wasn’t that the spectacle of Jedd had transformed her. He was just the finishing touch.

  Heather walked through the park, furiously thinking. Not quite thinking, really: it was more like a train wreck in her mind. Sandra, Schiller, this Jedd person . . .

  Ever since she’d met her, Heather had been thinking, in the back of her mind, that she could glide from Schiller to Sandra without a hitch. For years she’d gone from mentor to mentor, like someone who crosses a stream by stepping from rock to rock. But she didn’t want a mentor anymore.

  She stopped at the pond near the statues of Alice and the Mad Hatter. She watched three ducks making their way across the pond: calm, matronly, inane. A gaggle of schoolgirls in uniforms—blazers, pleated skirts—passed by. They were threatening one another with ice cream cones, happily trying to push their cones into one another’s faces.

  Heather sat on a bench and thought of how far she had come. She remembered herself as she was at fourteen, talking to herself in front of the mirror. “Freedom has always been my theme in life.” She had her freedom . . . but what came next? For the first time in her life, she had no idea.

  39

  Schiller took the A train from the airport back to Manhattan. He was very tired. It was three in the afternoon, but it felt like three in the morning, and in his state of jet-lagged stupidity he kept wondering why so many children were riding the train so late.

  The train was crowded, not with airport commuters, but with people going about their normal lives. Most of them were black people. There was a great deal of activity here. A family was traveling with its belongings—was this what people did now instead of using moving vans? To Schiller’s left, a scary-looking teenager was smoking. No one said a word to him. In Paris he had seen a shriveled old lady admonish a young man for smoking on the Metro platform, and the young man had obediently tossed the cigarette away.

  A little Asian man hustled into the car carrying a box filled with trinkets: he placed a wind-up toy on the floor—a drum-major monkey—and it strutted merrily around, banging on its drum. “Five dollars! Five dollars!” Then he put down three yellow birds, battery-powered chickadees, and they flapped their wings.

  A gangly teenager scooped up the closest chicken and dropped it down his shirt. The toy seller, a small man in his fifties, started yelling at the boy in fractured English. The boy smirked and tossed the chicken behind his back to one of his friends. The boys were in full glee; the toy man looked unintimidated, ready to fight for his rights; Schiller had no sense of whether this was a conflict that could lead to violence, or whether it was a more innocuous form of urban friction, a ritual familiar to each of the parties involved.

  Examining the people in the subway car—people with black skin, people with brown skin—he was thinking about the fact that he couldn’t imagine anything about their lives. This thought wasn’t new to him: it often occurred to him when he rode the subways or walked around New York. He could never write about these lives; they were beyond the reach of his imagination.

  This used to disturb him. But it didn’t disturb him now—now that he was so close to the end. He had been put on earth to tell a few stories, and he was almost finished with the last of them.

  He had a strange feeling in his arm. It felt empty and somehow sloshy, as if it were hollow and filled with water. Maybe he had a cold in his arm. Can there be such a thing as a cold in your arm? He had slept for a long time on the plane; maybe he’d slept on his arm.

  When he got home, he dropped his bag in the hall with relief. He felt as if he could sleep for a week. He glanced through his mail and played back his messages. There was one from Ariel, and one—this surprised him—from Heather. She sounded sweet. She thanked him for his comments about her thesis and asked him to call her.

  He ran a bath and eased himself in. He didn’t know why he was in the mood for a bath; he hadn’t had one in years.

  He
should have had a blissful feeling of completion. He’d kept his appointment, and now he could finish his book.

  He closed his eyes, and he saw his wife’s face. Not as she was in life, but as she was the last time he saw her.

  Stella had died in a fire, but her body had been untouched by flames; she died of smoke inhalation. Her body was brought back to New York, and before she was cremated, he had asked to see her one last time. In the damp basement of a funeral home on the Lower East Side, he had stood over the body of the woman he loved.

  Stella’s beauty, when she lived, was marred by a terribly crooked row of lower teeth. One of her teeth in particular jutted up above the others; she used to refer to it as her “renegade tooth,” and in moments of nervous self-assessment—when they were dressing for a party, for example—the sight of it in the mirror would make her frantically unhappy. She was always talking about having it pulled out or ground down, but somehow she never got around to doing it.

  In the morgue Schiller maintained his grip on himself until he noticed that, with her mouth slightly open, he could see the tooth. Her renegade tooth had outlived her. The occasion for so many jokes, the focus of so much pointless worry—it meant nothing now.

  Tonight, in the bath, her face kept floating in front of him when he closed his eyes.

  He told himself it was only jet lag. He would feel better in a few days.

  40

  For the next few days Schiller rested. He sat in front of his typewriter each morning, but he didn’t get much done. Maybe he had mixed feelings about bringing his book to an end. What would he do, who would he be, when it was finished?

  He didn’t return Heather’s call—he was too tired—but she called him again. This surprised him. She sounded friendly and eager to see him, which surprised him still more. They arranged to have coffee on Saturday evening.