Starting Out in the Evening Read online

  He didn’t feel up to it, actually. He still had jet lag; waves of dizziness came over him whenever he stood up.

  On Saturday morning he tried to work for a few hours, but he still found it hard to concentrate. In the early afternoon he took a short walk, and then he came home and read for a few hours. After a brief nap he got ready to see Heather.

  His preparations were elaborate. He clipped his fingernails and toenails, cleaned out his ears with a Q-Tip, and took a shower. Then he flossed and brushed his teeth, brushed his tongue for bad breath, and gargled with mouthwash. Then he applied deodorant, and after that he ran a comb through his hair, pretending he had enough hair to comb. He found a pair of scissors and trimmed the hairs that grew like tusks from his nostrils and sprouted luxuriantly from his earlobes. Only after all this did he take up a razor and begin to shave his face.

  He was getting tired. “It’s hard work to keep yourself beautiful,” he said to the pale, doughy, multi-chinned face in the glass.

  He’d been standing at the mirror, examining himself, for almost fifteen minutes. In the same way that your name will seem unfamiliar if you repeat it over and over, his face began to seem strange to him now.

  He knew that if he looked away for just a minute, he could bring it back to its everyday shape. But he couldn’t look away.

  Stella’s face, once again, came floating before his eyes: Stella’s face as it had looked in the morgue, vacated of intelligence and wit and tenderness and anger. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them he saw only his own face. Looking at his own face, he was aware, as he had not previously been aware in other than a theoretical way, that before too many years were through, this face too would be vacated. This body, this face, would remain after his consciousness was gone. It was the kind of thought that stuns you when you’re a child, and that ceases to stun you only because as you age you lose your capacity for wonder.

  The vividness of the realization, and his tiredness, and the undercurrent of futility that he had felt during this afternoon’s effort to make himself something like handsome, gave rise to the thought that all he’d been doing during the last half hour was dressing the corpse.

  He had an odd feeling in the back of his head, as if something were pressing from inside, trying to get out. He put down the razor and sat on the lid of the toilet seat. The water was running in the sink. He would meet her, of course, but there was something else to think about first. He had a sudden tightness in his arm—that damnable feeling of water in his arm, where did it come from?—and then a tightness in his neck. There was something to think about here. There was something about getting Tolstoy out of the shoe box so he could write the postcard over again, which might not be fair. What? Things were swaying. Things were swaying very dear.

  41

  Heather made a point of getting to the Argo a few minutes early. She was looking forward to seeing him. His absence from New York, she thought, had been like a punctuation mark, bringing an end to the period when she had been his worshiper and, finally, his betrayer. Now she hoped they could start afresh, on a calmer note. He was important to her, and she hoped that she could continue to see him from time to time.

  By about ten after six, when he still hadn’t shown up, she realized that he was deliberately making her wait. He had never been late before.

  She didn’t mind. It would have been better if he’d found a less passive-aggressive way to show that he was hurt by what she’d written about him, but if this was how he wanted to do it, she could handle it.

  By twenty after six, she was annoyed. She called him and got his phone machine. She left a message.

  By six-thirty, she was worried. She walked to his building. It was a windy day; scraps of paper were skittering over the sidewalk. Keep this in your head. She had a sudden feeling that she should try to remember everything about this day.

  Jeff, the doorman she liked, was on duty. She asked him if Schiller had gone out.

  “He took a little walk around two, but he came home over an hour ago. He hasn’t been down since then. I would have seen him if he had.” He delivered this report with an air of professional pride.

  She told him there might be a problem. He came with her to the fifteenth floor. She opened Schiller’s door with the keys he had given her. There was water in the hall.

  “Maybe you’d better stay here,” Jeff said. She ignored this and walked ahead of him. She walked quickly to the bathroom, where Schiller, dressed in his robe, was sitting on the floor.

  He seemed preoccupied with something in his mouth. He kept opening and closing his mouth, with a look of worry.

  “Leonard?” she said. He looked up at her; there was an expression of urgency in his eyes.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  He didn’t answer her; he just kept looking urgently into her eyes.

  “Let me help you up,” Jeff said. He came into the room and kneeled and tried to put his arm around Schiller’s body.

  “You’re very ambitious,” Schiller murmured.

  This remark gave Heather hope. Maybe he was all right after all.

  Jeff, a small man, couldn’t get Schiller off the floor. Schiller didn’t seem concerned; he sat in the water moving his tongue around his mouth in an exploratory way. Heather went to help, and together she and Jeff lifted him onto the toilet seat.

  She left the bathroom and called 911. When she returned Jeff had turned off the water in the sink and was trying to calm Schiller down. “We’re getting an ambulance for you, Professor,” he said.

  Schiller looked confused. His fingers—his long, soft, white fingers—kept fluttering on Jeff’s sleeve.

  The paramedics arrived quickly. One of them, a scholarly-looking young man, shined a pencil flashlight into Schiller’s eyes and asked him to count backward from ten. “I’m too old for that,” Schiller said. “That’s a young man’s game.”

  The other one, a man with his hair combed back slickly—he looked like Pat Riley—asked Heather a series of questions about Schiller’s medical condition, few of which she was able to answer.

  They put him on a gurney and took him out of the room. He was staring at the ceiling; he didn’t seem aware of Heather as he was wheeled past her.

  “Where are you taking him?” she said, at the last minute. They said they were taking him to Roosevelt Hospital.

  They wheeled him out of the apartment; he had a breathing mask on his face and little suction cups attached to his chest.

  “Don’t worry too much, Miss Wolfe,” Jeff said. “The professor’s a tough old bird.” Then he went back downstairs and she was left alone.

  She went to the kitchen, found a mop, and spent the next ten minutes cleaning up the water in his bathroom and hall. She needed to do something that didn’t require thought.

  She had an urge just to go home and pretend all this hadn’t happened. She didn’t want to follow him to the hospital; she didn’t want to sit by his bedside while he died. She didn’t want to see him in a devastated state, like some meal left out in the sun. She had a mental picture of a Mexican dinner on a picnic table in August: the guacamole turning sour, the cheese going globby and rancid, the refried beans looking like farts would look if farts had bodies.

  Schiller as a Mexican dinner. She wished she could scoop her mind out of her head and replace it with another mind, a mind more worthy of tragedy.

  She tried to organize herself. What did she need to do? She needed to call Ariel and she needed to go to the hospital.

  She called information but Ariel wasn’t listed. Heather thought she might be listed under her exercise business, but she couldn’t remember the business’s name.

  She found Schiller’s address book in his bedroom. Ariel was listed under S rather than under A, which Heather for some reason found surprising. She made an effort to compose herself before she picked up the phone.

  She called, got Ariel’s machine, and left a clear, calm message; when she hung up she was proud of herself. I’m coo
l in a crisis, she thought. I’m omni-competent. Then she remembered that she hadn’t mentioned which hospital Schiller was in. So she had to call again.

  She had never had to deal with the death or serious illness of anyone she loved. She sat on Schiller’s bed, and she tried to gather strength for what was ahead of her.

  42

  Heather was in the waiting room. Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die.

  He was in intensive care. That was all she knew.

  Their last encounter had been so miserable—when he had his attack in the museum, and they went to the coffee shop together, and she went half out of her mind with impatience as he told her about the great critics he had known. It was intolerable to think that that might turn out to have been the last time they’d ever see each other—after all that respect, all that learning, all that . . . love.

  She wanted to break into the intensive care unit and find him and say, “You can’t die now, damn it! Not after I hurt you like that!”

  She was on her fifth cup of vending-machine coffee when Ariel came in. She was dressed in flowered tights and sneakers and a torn sweatshirt. She looked like an off-duty clown.

  She walked up rapidly and, to Heather’s surprise, gave her a big hug.

  “How is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What happened to him? Did they tell you what happened?”

  “They said they can’t be sure yet. They think it was a stroke.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “I don’t know. You have to find his doctor.”

  Ariel was a generation older than Heather, but with her patterned leggings, with her hair all agog, with her purple knapsack and her thick white socks and her cross-training sneakers, she seemed, in Heather’s eyes, to be a child. She had an expression of five-year-old disbelief: she looked like a child who had just found out there was no Tooth Fairy.

  “If my father dies before I’ve had a baby, I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said.

  Heather pressed her hand and smiled with an air, she hoped, of sympathy. She was thinking: What a jerk. She supposed she should feel touched that this woman was speaking to her in such an unguarded way, but she couldn’t help wondering what having a baby had to do with anything. Your father is dying, for God’s sake.

  “You don’t know the doctor’s name?” Ariel said.

  Heather shook her head.

  Ariel walked off in search of the doctor. Heather put her head back and closed her eyes, and when she closed her eyes she saw Schiller sitting in the water on his bathroom floor.

  Everything would be all right if she could just erase the memory of those ten minutes from her head.

  She started to wonder what would happen to her thesis if Schiller died. She wondered if she’d have to revise it.

  She wondered briefly whether she should feel guilty for thinking about this. She decided that she shouldn’t. You can care about somebody’s illness and still be worrying about your own career.

  It made her think more charitably of Ariel, though. Worrying about having a baby might be stupid at a time like this, but worrying about your career was even worse.

  43

  When Casey got the call from Ariel, he was sitting at home browsing idly through the latest issue of Salmagundi.

  “Case?” she said. “My daddy’s in the hospital.”

  He would never forget that: “My daddy.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, he had a stroke. But I don’t really know what happened. They found him in the tub.”

  She asked him to come to the hospital. When he got off the phone he thought that things were suddenly different between them—different than they’d been the day before. A relationship that was still new—in this incarnation at least—was suddenly going to have to bear up under a great new weight.

  He thought of how good Ariel had been to him on the day he found out his mother was dying.

  He changed his clothes and got ready to go. As he was changing into a respectable pair of pants and a sport jacket—he had the feeling that situations of crisis had to be met with dignity—he felt as if he were preparing for battle.

  He took a cab up to Roosevelt and made his way to the ICU. Ariel was pacing in front of the nurses’ station; when she saw him she ran up to him and flew into his arms; but her embrace, which he’d expected would be whole-souled, was curiously distracted and insubstantial. She’d barely put her arms around him before she stepped back and said, “I’m so scared.”

  “How is he?”

  “They don’t know. He had a stroke. They don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  A young woman was sitting near the coffee machine, looking at him. At first he thought it was one of his old students; then he wondered if it was just some stranger who found him attractive. Then she came forward and said, “Hi, I’m Heather Wolfe. I’m a friend of Leonard’s.” This was the woman Ariel had told him about, the woman who was writing something about Ariel’s father.

  He’d heard so much about this girl from Ariel, who always spoke about her with spikiness and envy, that he’d desired her without ever having met her. You desire the woman who intimidates the woman you desire.

  The young woman had an air of confidence and purpose. It seemed, perhaps, excessive—what seemed excessive was that she had come up to introduce herself while he and Ariel were having a private moment—but it was attractive too.

  Ariel, by contrast, looked haggard, ragged, old. He never would have used these words to describe her before, but her grief made her face red and blotchy; there were clingy clumps of cat hair all over her leotard; and the younger woman beside her was so vivid—just glancing at her made you feel as if you’d inhaled a hit of pure oxygen—that Ariel looked blurred around the edges.

  This was an annoyance. He wished the young woman wasn’t here. He didn’t like having a foxy young thing around when he wanted to be giving all his attention to Ariel.

  Ariel took Casey’s arm and deposited it on her shoulder and led him a few steps away from Heather so they could talk.

  “I’m so scared,” she said again.

  No matter what happened to her father now, their lives were going to be changed. His guess was that her father wasn’t coming back from this one. Love, during the middle years, is in great part a matter of accompanying your beloved through life’s disasters.

  “If I fall apart,” she said, “will you take care of me?”

  “I would if you did, but you won’t.”

  Please don’t, he thought. Please don’t fall apart.

  This isn’t precisely what I’d bargained for, he thought.

  And then he thought: This isn’t precisely what I’d bargained for, but I’ll take it.

  He had no right to be surprised by her question. This was who she was: a woman who falls apart. He knew this; he had always known it. He had known about her college breakdown, and as soon as they got back together she’d told him about her California breakdown of a year ago. This is a woman who needs to be taken care of. During these last two months together she’d been perpetually buoyant—all laughter, lightness, and lust—but he should have known that that couldn’t last forever.

  “They’re calling it a stroke,” Ariel said, “but I wonder if they really know. I’m wondering if it might just be stress. I know he’s been having a hard time finishing his book. Sometimes you can have too much stress and it’s like you just snap, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. You kind of snap just to get the pressure off yourself, but it can be like . . . it can be like going on a vacation.”

  A little vacation, which leaves the man unconscious and on life support. Casey drew his breath in slowly, not knowing what to say. He was astonished at her powers of self-deception.

  44

  Who was this little black guy, so proper and perfect, with his carefully pressed chinos and his tasteful tweeds? Obviously he was Ariel’s boyfriend, but what was his story? Heather couldn’t figure out his
body language; she couldn’t figure out what he was. He looked like the kind of black guy you might see in an L.L. Bean catalog, modeling some corny plaid shirt. He looked as if he were impersonating a professor. He looked, she thought, like a black guy imitating a white guy imitating a black guy.

  She had nothing better to think about because for the last two hours she had been breaking her brain on the thought that Schiller was going to die. Her mind had gone mute; there was nothing more to think about the subject.

  So maybe it was time to leave. Clearly these two didn’t want her here. Ariel had steered her boyfriend into the corner, as smoothly as if he had wheels, and now the two of them were huddled together and he was comforting her.

  She felt lonely. There was no one to comfort her.

  She wanted to talk to them. She’d had a strange ride with Schiller this winter and spring, but he was still an important person in her life. These two were the only other people she knew who cared about him, and she wished that they would let her in.

  She drifted up to them again, which took an effort, because it would be humiliating if they ran away again.

  She stood awkwardly near them, but they stayed in their huddle. She sensed that the guy was aware of her, that he was sympathetic—she didn’t know how she knew this—but Ariel kept her head close to his and seemed to tighten her grip on the guy’s arms. Heather had forgotten his name.

  I’m hurting too, she wanted to say. But she couldn’t say it. It was too corny, for one thing, and for another thing, she wasn’t the star of this show. Ariel was the man’s daughter. Compared to that bond, Heather was just passing through.

  “I guess I’ll go,” Heather said. She wanted them to tell her not to, but Ariel nodded distractedly and the man didn’t react at all.

  Out on the street she was surprised to find that it was only nine o’clock. It was nine o’clock on a Saturday. She felt as if it were about three o’clock in the morning, and it certainly didn’t feel like a Saturday. It felt like a day they didn’t have a name for.