Starting Out in the Evening Read online

  He’d put an end to these profitless musings and tried to reach Ariel. She wasn’t in, so he left a message on her machine. He left his office and walked downtown toward home, along a route that took him past her place, and he kept stopping at pay phones along the way to see if she’d come home yet.

  He was on the corner of 24th and Third, making his fifth and probably last try—he still had the receiver to his ear—when he saw her. She was walking down Third Avenue, wearing an orange beret. He knew she’d picked up his message because her face expressed everything: her joy on coming across him and her sorrow about his mother. “I was looking for you,” she said. “I wanted to make you a tuna casserole.”

  They went to the supermarket and bought tuna, peas, mushroom soup, and macaroni; after they took their place on the checkout line she dashed off and returned with a bag of potato chips. “It’s the finishing touch,” she said. “We need this for the crust.” They went up to her place, and he sat, drained, on her couch, while Ariel made the casserole, this meal from some mythical American childhood, and kept up a steady stream of jokes—jokes that were gentle enough to fit the moment, that didn’t seem tactless or disrespectful of his unhappiness—and while Sancho, who was only a kitten then, acted like a show-off, leaping from the top of the refrigerator to the top of the bookcase and balancing precariously as the fragile bookcase swayed. Ariel’s warmth—which was filled with humor, not drippily solicitous—comforted him as much as he could be comforted that night.

  When he remembered that day, he could still feel the pain of it. But he could also feel the sudden shock of joy that had risen in him when he spotted her, sauntering down the block in her beret, a vision of color and life and lightness in the gray day.

  He didn’t feel he had anything comparable to give to her now. He didn’t have the same intuitive knowledge of what she needed. He didn’t quite think that a tuna casserole would do the trick. If she asked him for anything, he could try to provide it; but she wasn’t asking.

  He slept for a while, waking at about one in the morning. She was still dressed, walking back and forth by the foot of the bed.

  “All I can do is pace,” she said.

  He got up and embraced her, but he could sense that she didn’t want to be embraced. He let her go, and stood there lamely next to her.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  It was a strange feeling: to care about her as much as he could care about anyone, but to be unable to share her experience.

  Her father would be dead soon; she was an orphan now. For most people her age, the word would be inappropriate, but for Ariel it fit.

  Casey thought of a phrase he’d once read in some collection of letters—he couldn’t remember whose. It was some great man of our age—Marx or Freud or someone like that. One of the founders. Writing to a friend whose father had died, the great man had said, “It will revolutionize your soul.” The death of Casey’s parents had revolutionized his soul. He had loved his parents, and he’d suffered deeply when each of them died; but in the years after they died, he came to feel he breathed a freer air.

  He knew that Ariel was at the beginning of the great and terrible journey, the journey into the experience of death. But everyone’s journey is different, and there was no way he could accompany her on hers. How lonely everyone is!

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. She sat in a little easy chair, a chair she had bought with great pride recently in an effort to make her apartment nicer.

  He wanted to say: “I’ll protect you.” But he kept silent, because he knew that he couldn’t protect her.

  48

  In the middle of the night, when the only light to see by was the thin dim line thrown from the nurses’ station, Schiller was awake.

  He was almost free.

  It had been hours since Ariel had come to tell him that she loved him. But time had no meaning in the realms through which he now moved, and she had visited him often during the night to repeat her message.

  He knew, somehow, that she feared that her words were inadequate. He wished he could have let her know that her fear was unfounded. In his new condition, the language had been swept clean, and it was as if the words she had spoken had never been spoken before. They glistened with the purity of her feelings.

  He wished he could tell her about all the things he had discovered in his new state.

  We are more than our bodies; we are other than our bodies. Schiller understood this now.

  He understood that we are not merely bodies and minds; each of us is, or has, a bundle of light. In and around the body, we are bundles of light. If you had to describe this light, you could say that it is warm, wet, blue; that it nourishes us, and is nourished by us; and that it is a sort of repository for our memories and our visions. Nothing of what we are is ever lost, for it is stored in the intelligence of the body’s light.

  He understood now why his arm, during the last week, had felt as if it were filled with water. It wasn’t water, it was the wet blue light. Without quite realizing it, he had been gradually becoming aware of this substance that protects us, contains us, and survives us.

  Schiller was floating somewhere above the bed. He looked down at his body: the hulking bulk of the torso, the gnarled, disappointed mouth, the nose as thick and twisted as a tree root. His body was worn out; he was ready to cast it off.

  He—his consciousness, his being—was attached to that body only by glowing threads of light.

  He understood that his task was to undo those threads. It was the finest, the noblest task he had ever undertaken—it was his true life’s work. And to think that it was only this evening that he had discovered it! For many years he had considered himself too old to learn anything new, yet now he was engaged in the most momentous learning of his life—more important, more surprising, more strange, than his discovery, at the age of two, of his power of speech.

  He remembered what it was to be an infant and to learn to speak. He had never realized that he could remember this, but now he remembered it clearly. He was under the kitchen table, lying on his stomach, in the apartment on Cruger Avenue. There were sounds, and after the sounds his mother picked him up. When she was lifting him, he realized . . . he realized everything. He realized that he had made the sounds, and that she wasn’t just picking him up after the sounds, but because of them. The birth of his understanding of language was also the birth of his understanding of the laws of cause and effect, and it was also the birth of his understanding of time. It was everything.

  That moment of comprehension was wonderful, but this one was incomparably richer. The understanding he was gaining now was at least as vast, and now he could appreciate what he was learning, as he could not when he was a child. Now he understood that our birth into the world of the body is only our first birth, and by no means the most important. He was laboring—this beautiful labor—on his second birth. He was undoing the threads that kept him bound to the body. To dissolve them was to become a creature of light. He thought about one of the threads, and it dissolved. He never knew that liberation could be so simple, so full of joy. This was the work he was made for, the work we are all made for.

  He labored at this—if it could be called labor, it was so pleasant—all through the night. You think about each thread, each blue stream of glowing light, and you take the light into you.

  Death was so easy, so pleasant, and it involved so much learning, such beautiful learning. He wondered if everyone’s death was like this. Had it been like this for his father? Had it been like this for Stella? He had the sense that he shouldn’t be thinking about any of this now—it was a distraction from his work—but now that he’d started he couldn’t stop.

  He thought that death might have been like this, all those years ago, for his father—comfortable in his hospital bed, dying sweetly in the night. But for Stella, in the burning hotel room in Pittsburgh, it could not have brought such pleasure. Death must greet each of us differently.

&n
bsp; The thought of Stella interrupted his progress. The blistering heat, the confusion, the terror: it couldn’t have been joyful. Stella had been cheated of a joyful death. It was unfair, and he wouldn’t stand for it.

  What was happening to him? Suddenly he didn’t know whether the experience of the last few hours had happened at all. It could have been delirium, mirage. He didn’t know where he was. He thought he was still hovering above his body, but he couldn’t be sure.

  The last stream of light that bound him to his body was still glowing wetly, glowing blue. It originated in a spot just below the navel of the man on the bed. He didn’t want to undo it; he didn’t want to dissolve that last stream. Not without Stella, he thought. He had the wild thought that he could rescue her from that burning building in Pittsburgh. But that was more than twenty years ago!

  He felt utterly confused, and he wanted to cry.

  He had reached the point in his labor at which the stream was dissolving by itself. In order to die, all he had to do was let it happen. But he couldn’t let it happen; he had to hold on. He had to stay alive. He had work to do; he had that book to finish. It was his last tribute to Stella, damn it, and he’d be damned if he was going to let go of it now. He felt himself sinking back toward his body. The body exerted a gravitational force; the closer he sank toward it, the more fiercely it pulled him in. He began to lose the knowledge of what he was doing in the air; he fell back toward the body sickeningly, with anguish, and his mind began to shut down, because he had seen too much to be allowed to keep the vision. As his being—that vast and warm and liquid blue intelligence—poured back into the limited, stricken, pain-wracked body, he realized he was forgetting everything he had just learned.

  49

  Ariel wheeled her father out the big automatic doors and onto the sidewalk near Ninth Avenue. It was a beautiful day in June. The warm spring wind blew a few long strands of his hair over his eyes. To Ariel, it looked enjoyable, but she had no idea whether he was enjoying it at all.

  Casey hailed a cab; he and Ariel helped Schiller into the backseat and Ariel slid in beside him while Casey folded up the wheelchair and put it in the trunk.

  As they turned the corner Schiller tilted heavily against her. He felt extraordinarily heavy. He’d lost a little weight in the hospital; why did he feel so heavy now?

  Maybe it wasn’t just heaviness: it was that there was a new, peculiarly inert quality to his weight.

  You can know everything. If you’re sensitive enough, alert enough, you can know everything about everyone. The feel of her father’s body was enough to tell her that much of his life force had fled.

  When they got to 94th Street, Casey took the wheelchair out of the trunk and Jeff came out of the building and the three of them helped Schiller back into the wheelchair.

  “Great to have you back, Professor,” Jeff said.

  Casey was prepared to wheel Schiller in, but Schiller took Jeff’s hand and squeezed it. Casey and Ariel waited. Schiller didn’t let go. Ariel began to feel embarrassed—enough already—but Jeff didn’t try to take away his hand.

  Ariel had visited her father in the hospital every day, and she’d stayed at his apartment, alone or with Casey, on the weekends. Every Friday night she had put Sancho in his traveling box, taken a cab uptown, and camped out here until Sunday. She was trying to give the apartment a lived-in feeling, trying to keep it warm for her father’s return.

  Probably it hadn’t mattered. If the place had been left shuttered and airless, Schiller probably wouldn’t have cared. But it mattered to Ariel. It mattered intensely to be able to believe, as she sat in the living room with Sancho in her lap, crying through a Bette Davis movie, that she was doing something to help her father get well.

  Ariel and Casey wheeled Schiller out of the elevator and toward his door. She was about to insert the key in the lock but he put out his hand: he wanted to do it himself.

  She pushed the wheelchair down the hall and into the living room, which was filled with spring light. Schiller looked around the room: the thousands of books, the couch and the chairs and the tables that he had lived with for decades.

  She brought him into the kitchen. “Can I get you something to drink? Would you like some tea?”

  He shook his head heavily, as if she had asked him a tragic question, a question of Shakespearean resonance. No tea.

  Casey was standing awkwardly near the door.

  “I should get back to work,” he said. His school year was over, but he was working day and night on his magazine. “Take care now,” he said to Schiller. “Good to have you back home.”

  Schiller made a low sound in his throat and attempted a smile.

  Ariel walked Casey to the door and they kissed good-bye in the hall.

  “How does he seem to you?” she said.

  “Well, he’s home. That’s the important thing,” Casey said, and the elevator came, and without answering her question he was gone.

  Back in the kitchen her father was trying to open a jar of jelly. He was giving it all he had. She reached out to help him, but he turned away from her, bringing the jar closer to his body.

  She made a phone call to one of her clients. When she came back to the kitchen he was intently spreading jelly over a piece of toast. The toaster was overturned on the counter. She watched him as, concentrating hard, he manipulated the blunt butter knife, and she finally understood what he was doing. When he was finished with his snack he would laboriously and methodically wash the dishes, and then he would apply himself, with the same grim intentness, to setting the toaster right. He was training himself to be self-sufficient again.

  He said “Thank you,” in a loud, barking voice, with all the consonants mangled. He was a quiet man, normally, and this shout was unlike him. She didn’t know what he was thanking her for.

  After he had cleaned up, he asked for his walker. At his doctor’s suggestion, she had bought a walker for him. She carried it into the kitchen and he haltingly made his way into the living room with it. She helped him down into his easy chair, he pointed to the newspaper and she gave it to him. He put it on his lap.

  He hadn’t read anything in the last month, and he didn’t read the newspaper now. He just wanted to have it in his lap, apparently, to remind himself who he was.

  Then he put his head back against the chair and closed his eyes. His efforts in the kitchen had exhausted him.

  He slept for two hours; when he woke she made him a pasta salad and they ate together. He gripped the fork tightly with his left hand—his bad hand—and brought it to his mouth with a laborious effort. Then he chewed. It was as if he had to instruct his mouth to chew.

  Because he had difficulty guiding his fork, by the time he was through he had food on his chin and his shirt.

  Ariel wasn’t neat herself and she didn’t care about other people’s personal habits. But seeing her father eat disturbed her, because she thought it must be disturbing to him. He was normally a fastidious man.

  They talked a little at lunch. She asked if there was anything she could get him—books or magazines or some special food or something for the house—and he said that maybe she could take him to the bookstore later in the week. She asked him if he’d like to go to the park for a while that afternoon, and he said he would.

  The stroke had almost completely immobilized the left side of his body. When he smiled, the right side of his face looked happy, but the left side was dead.

  He braced himself against his walker and moved slowly to his bedroom for another nap. When he had reached his door, he turned around as much as he could, and, in a thick, slurred voice, as if there were a rag in his mouth, he said, “My daughter.”

  After he woke from his nap, they went to the park. He wanted to take his walker, but she convinced him it was too soon for anything that ambitious—the park was two blocks away—and he let her wheel him there.

  Ariel locked the wheels in place and sat on a bench beside him at the top of the grassy hill that led down t
o the park. Two toddlers were tossing a Nerf ball around while their mothers sat on another bench, and when the ball rolled away from them, Schiller, with great difficulty, bent over in his seat and picked it up. One of the children, a boy of about two with a Prince Valiant haircut—a gorgeous little kid, a future heartthrob—wobbled up on legs that he was not yet fully in control of and looked at Schiller with friendliness and interest. “Baw,” he said, reaching out with both arms.

  His mother, tall and elegant, a long thin line of a woman—she was simply dressed but she radiated moneyed satisfaction—snatched up her son and took the ball roughly from Schiller’s hands. “Don’t bother the man,” she said to her son—but she looked as if she were afraid that Schiller, or the mere sight of Schiller, would damage the boy.

  It happened so quickly that Ariel’s feelings didn’t catch up with her until the women and children were halfway down the hill toward the playground.

  Let it go, she said to herself. Let it go.

  She couldn’t let it go. “I’ll be back in a second,” she said to her father. She walked quickly down the path. The women were walking about ten feet behind the two children. When Ariel caught up to them she said, “Why did you look at my father that way?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the woman said.

  “You walk around with your kid and everyone smiles at you. Why do we smile at children? Because they’re helpless, and we want to protect them. Well he’s helpless too.” She threw her arm back toward her father. “Why didn’t you smile at him? You looked like he was going to infect your kid with some disease. What disease did you have in mind? Old age? Your kid is going to be old someday too, I hope, and I hope when he’s old people don’t look at him like you looked at my father.”

  The woman looked regally untroubled. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.