Starting Out in the Evening Page 22

  She didn’t want to go back to Hoboken. It was too lonely there. She didn’t know where to go. She walked to Ninth Avenue and went into a bar, but everybody was laughing and shouting. How can these people act like this? she thought.

  She took the IRT up to 96th Street. There was a different doorman in the lobby—she didn’t recognize him, but she must have met him before: he asked her how “the professor” was doing.

  She let herself in to his apartment and double-locked the door. She didn’t know why; she didn’t know who she was double-locking it against. She didn’t even know why she had come, except that it was the closest she could get to being with him.

  His apartment seemed quieter than other people’s apartments somehow.

  Except for the one dim light in the hallway, she didn’t turn on any lights. She tried to walk very lightly. He would probably never come back here. She felt the chill of how little a life might mean.

  She stood in his living room looking at his bookshelves. All these thousands of books were waiting for him. What would all these books do if he never came back?

  She looked out the window. You could see a slice of the river, although at this hour all you could see was the darkness where you knew the river was.

  She went into his bedroom and lay on his bed, remembering their night together. Then she went into his study and sat at his writing table.

  Here she could feel him. She could feel the force of his character she could feel the years of labor, the years of patience, the years of frustration, the years of devotion.

  What surprised her was that it felt calm.

  It was so strange to be here, with all of his things waiting for him, not knowing whether he would ever return. Maybe he’d be back here in a week, working at this desk, or maybe he’d never be back here again.

  The room was very bare. There was the writing table, there were the boxes of manuscript, and there was the big manual typewriter. Nothing else.

  She thought that it was time to read the book he had been writing.

  Would it be better not to read it? Would it be more respectful? His novel was still unfinished; she felt sure that he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to read it in this state.

  But if she didn’t read it, who would? Probably no one. His daughter hadn’t even read all the books he’d published. And Heather found it hard to imagine that publishers would be falling over themselves to get a look at Leonard Schiller’s unfinished last novel.

  She began to read the manuscript, which was apparently still untitled. The subject matter was familiar: the first part of the book, at least, was about the early years of his marriage. She was glad that he’d returned to this part of his life—in Heather’s mind, it was probably his one true subject.

  He wasn’t remembering the past through a haze of nostalgia. His point of view was, if anything, drier and more disillusioned than it used to be.

  In the first chapter, the wife—named Elizabeth in this book—is carrying on an affair with a French philosopher, and the husband, Stanley, is tamely, lamely putting up with it. In an early scene, just after Stanley and Elizabeth have finished making love, the phone rings, and, still naked, she answers it and chats calmly with her lover while her husband sits on the bed in despair.

  It was a sharp and not very flattering portrait of his wife. But Schiller wasn’t sparing himself either. In the third chapter, Elizabeth has been away for days, and Stanley is at home writing. Their daughter, Eve, sixteen months old, who has been cranky for days, is crying in her room. Stanley keeps on working, annoyed with her, assuming that she’s merely afraid of the dark. After ignoring her for hours, he finally looks in on her, and finds that she has a blisteringly high fever. He takes her to the hospital, enduring a nightmarish ride with a deranged taxi driver through the rain-swept night. Stanley’s negligence, his self-absorption, turn out to have serious consequences: Eve is suffering from an ear infection which, because he waited so long to get help, has left her with permanently damaged hearing in one ear.

  Heather had no idea whether any of this was true.

  The novel, or this part of it, didn’t seem to be a portrait of moral monsters. Rather, Schiller seemed to be trying to write in an unvarnished way about two complicated people—strong-willed and blundering people intent on living their lives.

  She read the first part of the novel with a mounting joy. She forgot that Schiller was in a hospital room, probably dying. All she could think about was that he had done it, he’d actually done it: at the end of his life, he had written his strongest book.

  This feeling didn’t last. She’d been reading for less than an hour when she started to realize that the book was fading. The problem, she thought, was simple: he was too damned old.

  The book was written in what she thought of as an old man’s style. For a few pages, a few chapters, this wasn’t a problem, but it grew to be a problem as the book wore on. When he reached passages that required force, strength, intensity, he couldn’t quite rise to the occasion.

  And the book was poorly organized. He would return to the same scenes in chapter after chapter, writing about them in a slightly different way. She couldn’t understand why he was doing this. All too often, the second and third versions of a scene had less power than the first. Why had he included the weaker versions? It was as if he’d lost his ability to discriminate between what was best and what was worst in his work.

  After a hundred and fifty pages, she couldn’t bring herself to read on. It made her too sad. She had the feeling that this could have been Schiller’s best book, because it was the least sentimental—he now approached his subject matter with the coldness of a surgeon—but that he simply lacked the physical strength to carry it off. He had begun it too late.

  She had once read that an artist is someone who stands outside in rainstorms hoping to be struck by lightning. Schiller had been struck by lightning twice in his life, with those first two books. He had spent the rest of his life waiting, but the lightning had never struck him again.

  She was sure that this was the truth about him, but she didn’t know what it added up to. She didn’t know if he was a hero or if he had wasted his life.

  45

  At about ten o’clock a doctor finally appeared. He told Ariel that her father had suffered a stroke, and that he was still unconscious. He wasn’t in a coma, which the doctor said was a good sign, but it was impossible to know how extensive the damage was. “It’ll be twenty-four hours or so before we really know where we are.”

  In the hours since she had arrived there, this was the first time she’d talked with someone her own age. Everyone else was much younger, as if high school students had taken over the hospital for a class play.

  Dr. Rubin seemed serious and sympathetic, so she could believe her father was in good hands.

  “Can I see him?” she said.

  “It wouldn’t be advisable for you to see him anytime soon.”

  “But I want to.”

  “You wouldn’t be doing him any good. He wouldn’t know you’re there.”

  She couldn’t bear the thought that some man who didn’t know her father, who didn’t love him, had the power to keep her away from him.

  “You can’t know that,” Ariel said. “I know you’re trying to do your job. Maybe you’re even trying to be nice to me. You don’t want me to be upset by what he looks like. But he’s my father. I’m scared for him, and I want to see him again. This may be the last chance I can get to see him alive. Isn’t that right?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Isn’t that right?”

  “I can’t make any promises,” he said.

  “So I’d like to see him now please.”

  Dr. Rubin brought her to Schiller’s room in the intensive care unit. Her father was lying under a thin sheet. When she entered, she couldn’t see his face; she recognized him by his feet—his oddly small and delicate white feet.

  He had a tube down his throat and another in his arm and another that
went under the sheet, God knows where. His soft fat face was laboring. He was half-shaved: parts of his face were clean-shaven and other parts bore a two-day growth of beard.

  He was attached to a machine of some sort, which was softly working away in the corner.

  Despite the labor of the machine and the tube down his throat and the terror that was clouding her thinking, she nevertheless believed that she could sense the activity of his soul. She felt that his soul was hesitating about whether to leave the room, and she believed that if he was reluctant it was because he was concerned about her: he didn’t want to leave her unguarded.

  She drew closer; she put her hands on his chest, very lightly. And with this touch her perception of him changed. Somehow she knew now that whether he struggled back to life or let go of life would not depend on her. He had his own soul’s journey. She would have liked to believe that his primary mission on earth was to take care of her, but she knew that that had never been true. She understood that her father, who had painfully learned tenderness toward her in the years since her mother died, was still radically alone in the world, and that his soul had its own itinerary.

  What could she say to him, in what might be their last moment together? She wished she could invent a new language: “I love you” seemed so inadequate. But she didn’t have a new language, so she said the old words to him, the inadequate words; she whispered them over and over and over.

  46

  Schiller could hear her.

  He would have liked to tell her that he loved her, but he was too far under. He thought he had written it down somewhere, maybe in his will, but he wasn’t sure.

  After a while she was gone, and other people were in the room with him, taking care of the tubes that were attached to his body.

  Skilled attendants have been ministering faithfully to his medical needs.

  Who said that?

  He tried to lift his head, but he couldn’t.

  Our own concerns lie elsewhere. We find ourselves called upon to comment on the aesthetic and “personal” achievements of the estimable personage who lies before us in this humbled state.

  Who was speaking? Who was that? Who? Schiller was alone in the hospital room, but someone was speaking—a man with a half-baked English accent. He tried to raise himself up, but he couldn’t.

  The desire to serve as a midwife to beauty, to bring forth works of high and lasting merit, has been, for Schiller, that which superseded all others. It has been an interesting effort, an interesting lifelong effort, and although we must sadly note that he has failed to leave behind the magnificent literary monuments of which, in the dear bright days of untested youth, he dreamed, he can nevertheless count himself among the ranks of the distinguished, simply in having been a votary, even if a not wholly competent votary, of a humane and transcendent ideal.

  There was this strange voice, and there was also an annoying clacking sound. With the greatest effort, Schiller managed to turn his head. Two figures were in the corner: an old man, standing, dressed with ridiculous formality in an antique three-piece suit, and a young woman, seated at a small desk, pounding effortfully at an ancient typewriter.

  To the eye of the unsympathetic observer, his may have seemed singularly devoid of the qualities that make a life “worth” living, but to Schiller and to others of our little tribe, a life like his, almost wholly consecrated to the art of the difficult, is rich in the subtlest and most valuable remunerations. In this there is experience, in this there are the deepest and most abiding joys!

  Schiller finally recognized the man. It was Henry James. Henry James was writing a letter about him. He was dictating it to his faithful secretary—what was her name? Miss Bosanquet? Henry James and Miss Bosanquet—still together after all this time! The thought almost made Schiller weep.

  But why is he speaking about me in the past tense?

  When speaking of the consecration of one’s life to the pursuit of the beneficent complexities of art, we do not of course intend to imply that this pursuit can honorably take pride of place before those cherished “natural ties” that can be said to lie near the heart of any disposition in which the qualities of tenderness and nobility of soul are prominent. The affection of the writer in question for his daughter has been a vivid and beautiful fixture in a life marked in the main by disappointment and uncertainty.

  I should go so far as to hazard that if at the end of the journey upon which he seems fated, on no very distant day, to embark, he were to be informed by the receiving angel that although his accomplishments in the realm of art have been viewed from that height as lamentably insignificant, closer in kind to the scribblings in the sand of a child than to the sublime productions of a Bach or a Tolstoy—productions which sound their notes of deep unceasing felicity not merely in mortal domains but even through the high bright vaults of the eternal—he was nevertheless to be fondly welcomed into the reposeful and blessed hereafter, having been judged to merit that distinction by virtue of the shining solidity of his affection for his daughter and wife, then he would be glad to be admitted on those terms, and would rest content with the knowledge that a life spent loving these two had been a life eminently well spent.

  Henry James was in the corner, dictating Schiller’s letter of recommendation to heaven. But it was so difficult to make sense of James’s late style! His sentences always made sense after you read them a few times, but when you heard them spoken they were almost impossible to follow. What had Ariel said when she’d read that passage from James at the airport? He couldn’t remember.

  Schiller got the impression that James was trying to set up a double argument: Schiller should be admitted to heaven because he was an artist; but if his art was maybe not good enough to qualify, then he should be admitted anyway, because he had loved Stella and Ariel.

  Again he wanted to lift himself up—this time in protest: How dare you say that my art wasn’t good enough! “The not wholly competent votary of a humane and transcendent ideal.” Fuck you!

  And who the hell are you to speak about me in the past tense—you’re the one who’s dead!

  But he couldn’t rise, and he couldn’t speak.

  Anyway, it was impossible to stay angry for long. That was just the way James was—he never gave false praise. And even so, with all that, James had spoken of Schiller as a member of “our little tribe”—that in itself was a grander compliment than he ever could have hoped for.

  Another thing that got in the way of his anger was his interest in the fact that James had apparently changed his mind about Tolstoy. . . .

  It was all very interesting . . . but it was too difficult to think about it all now. It was too much of a strain. Schiller lapsed back—he would have lapsed back if he could move—and tried to think of what he had to do.

  47

  Casey and Ariel took a taxi down to her place. They stopped at the deli, as they often did. Usually Ariel bought snacks for herself and treats for Sancho, but tonight she just hung back by the door. Casey hadn’t eaten anything since lunch; he got two roast beef sandwiches on sesame rolls with cole slaw, tomato, and Russian dressing, and two bottles of beer.

  They walked up to her apartment in silence. Sancho greeted them at the door, smoothing his flank against their shins as they tried to pass. Ariel dumped her backpack on the floor, fell on the couch, grabbed the remote control and turned on the TV. A rerun of Sisters was on Lifetime; Swoosie Kurtz’s daughter had joined the Moonies and Swoosie didn’t know what to do. Ariel stared blankly at the screen; Sancho jumped on her lap and she pushed him away.

  Casey sat at her table eating his dinner. He felt guilty to be eating. That he could eat two sandwiches while her father was dying, that he could polish off a beer, condemned him in his own eyes as a brute. Into his mind strayed a phrase from nowhere: “Absence of grief eats.”

  He wasn’t, in fact, a brute; he wasn’t absent of grief. He cared about her, and he cared about her father. But he didn’t know how to help.

 
She touched her clicker again and the TV went off. She lay back and closed her eyes.

  He wasn’t even sure she wanted him here. She was ignoring him. He felt hurt by this, even as he realized the feeling was ridiculous.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I don’t even know what to want. Do I want him to get better? But how much better is he ever gonna get? Do I want him to die, so he won’t have to suffer anymore? Anything that happens from now on will be bad.”

  “You don’t know that,” he said. “I think you should want him to get better. He’s still got a lot of life left in him, your old man.” Casey didn’t quite believe this, but it seemed like a good thing to say.

  “I can accept it that he’s going to die,” Ariel said. “But I can’t accept it that he’s going to be dead forever.”

  He didn’t understand this, and he didn’t try to. There are certain situations in which you can’t convey what you mean. Words don’t always work.

  She had helped him in a comparable time. Years ago, after he and Ariel had broken up but before they’d lost touch with each other, he’d received word one day that his mother’s cancer had returned. It had metastasized in her liver, which meant that she only had a few months to live. It was a frigid afternoon in December when he got the news; he was in his office at the Graduate Center on 42nd Street, grading papers. He booked a seat on a flight to Florida for the next morning, and when he got off the phone he sat there looking out the window. There was nothing you could do to slow life down. His mother was alive, and in a few months she wouldn’t be alive, and there was nothing he could do about it. And though he told himself that when he went to see her he would cherish every moment, cherish it so fiercely that time would come to a halt, he knew that that wouldn’t happen, and that just as surely as he was sitting there in his office at that moment he would be sitting there in a week, having returned from his trip, and he’d be sitting there in a few months, having returned from putting her in the ground.