Starting Out in the Evening Page 24

  Ariel trudged back to her father and sat near him on the bench. He was calm, smiling, happy to be out in the warm daylight.

  She pushed him slowly back to his apartment. As soon as she had installed him in his easy chair, she went to his bedroom to check the phone machine for messages. There weren’t any. She was hoping Casey had called. She was also expecting to hear from a home-care agency: she was trying to arrange for someone to stay with her father a few hours a day.

  She also needed to call the hospital about a physical therapist. She kept forgetting to make the call.

  All of this was overwhelming her. She lay, exhausted, on her father’s bed. Blowing up at a stranger merely because she’d given her father a funny look—it wasn’t a good sign.

  She felt as if she were at a fork in the road, where you have to choose between becoming a grown-up or remaining a child.

  It was pretty late in life to be facing such a choice.

  When she was little, her father, just before he went to bed, used to check his watch and ask in surprise, “How did it get so late so early?”

  How did it get so late so early?

  50

  Lying in bed the next morning just after dawn, she heard something in the hall. It was her father, making his way slowly with his walker. Her impulse was to jump out of bed and ask him what he needed, but she thought better of it. What he needed was exactly this: to do things by himself; to become independent again. So she stayed in bed and listened.

  Slowly and effortfully—she could hear how heavily he was breathing—he made his way down the hall to his study. She heard something fall to the floor. Again she wanted to rush out and help; but it was only some object that had fallen—he hadn’t fallen—and she knew it would be wiser to leave him alone.

  After a few minutes she heard a new sound: the slow, weak, hesitant clacking of his typewriter.

  After his stroke, she had felt sure that it would have been easier for him to die, and that he had kept himself alive through sheer will. It was only now that she understood why he had kept himself alive.

  51

  Heather made her way through the weight of a July afternoon to the Upper West Side. She hadn’t seen Schiller in more than a month.

  She’d spoken to Ariel several times on the phone. Schiller never wanted to talk, but then he’d never been an enthusiast of the telephone. She supposed it was a generational thing.

  Ariel had told her not to expect too much from him. “He gets tired after about a half hour. And sometimes it’s still a little hard to understand him. He’s a lot better than he was a month ago, but he doesn’t have full control of his speech.”

  Thus warned, Heather went up to the apartment. Ariel let her in, and the two of them stood there, uncomfortable, in the hall.

  “He’s really looking forward to seeing you,” Ariel said. “Your visits have always meant a lot to him.”

  It seemed to Heather that there was a hint of triumph in Ariel’s eyes. She, Ariel, was the one who had stood by him.

  Schiller came out of his study, hanging over a walker. He had lost a great deal of weight, but it hadn’t improved his looks. The skin of his face was hanging down loosely; it looked as if you could pull his face off and find another, a trim face, underneath.

  He was wearing a suit and tie, but the tie was knotted about two inches below where it should have been knotted, and one of the tabs of his collar was unbuttoned.

  She didn’t know whether to be impressed by his effort to pull himself together or disturbed by the signs that he wasn’t all there.

  He said her name, sort of—it sounded like “Header”—and awkwardly grasped her hand.

  “Your snack is ready, Dad,” Ariel said. She was on her way out to visit a client. “I’ll be back in about an hour.”

  One of the kitchen chairs had been replaced by a big easy chair, into which Schiller now lowered himself. A mug of steaming coffee and two pieces of toast with apple butter were waiting for him on the table. He gestured with his head toward the refrigerator, and Heather, as in the old days—the old days of a few months ago—helped herself to some juice and sat across from him.

  The afternoon light streamed through the window, and didn’t help. She didn’t know whether he did his own shaving, but whoever was doing it was doing it badly: some parts of his face were smooth, but there were patches of unmowed hair on his chin and his cheekbone, and a long red gash on his neck.

  The left side of his face sagged yellowly—it was a different color than the right. When he lifted his coffee cup and slurped from it the steam gave him a runny nose; large droplets of wetness glistened on the bushy tufts that protruded from his nostrils.

  She didn’t want to be revolted by his decrepitude. He was still the man she knew. Heather looked steadily at his nose, at his deadened flesh, until the sight of him no longer had the power to disturb her.

  There was no air-conditioning in Schiller’s apartment; the room was oppressively humid. Outside the sky was filled with thick clouds that intermittently blocked the sun. Every few minutes the room was plunged into darkness.

  “How are you?” she said.

  “Hanging on.” He looked away, as if he were searching for the perfect phrase, but he didn’t say anything else.

  “Ariel tells me you’re working again.”

  He smiled dismissively—or at least that was how it appeared to her. With one side of his face frozen, it was hard to interpret his expressions.

  “I sit,” he said. “I look for the typewriter keys. Sometimes I can find them.”

  Each of these sentences took a long time for him to say.

  “Well I’m glad you’re working. I’m glad you’re going to finish your book.”

  Slowly, he turned his head and stared at her; beneath his drooping lids, his eyes had a lizardlike intensity.

  “Maybe I’ll finish it,” he said, “and maybe it’ll finish me.”

  He began to cough, violently and protractedly, he reached into his back pocket—it was a long, slow labor—and retrieved a much-used handkerchief, mottled with brown and yellow and gray. He brought it up to his face, released some sputum into it, folded it carefully, and put it back in his pocket. At a certain time of life, she thought, a man is no more than the sum of his discharges.

  He broke off a slice of toast and brought it toward his mouth, but his hand was trembling so badly that he had to bring his mouth toward the toast to meet it halfway.

  It was too sad to bear, and she felt herself detaching from the scene. She began to feel as if she were in a movie, a movie about an old man and a young woman. The man, of course, was Schiller, but the woman—the woman was someone a little different from herself.

  During the rest of this visit, she decided, she wouldn’t exactly be herself: she would be someone a little more considerate, a little purer of heart.

  She started to talk, with the intention of filling up the room with good cheer, and once she got started she couldn’t stop. She chattered on brightly about her life; she told him that she was papering the town with résumés, and that she’d lined up interviews for entry-level positions at Harper’s and Lingua Franca. She told him some gossip: a story she’d heard about a feud between Gore Vidal and George Plimpton; an anecdote about a woman who’d spent the night in bed with Camille Paglia—the woman had been hoping for hot, “transgressive” sex, but instead Paglia spent the night lecturing her about the inanities of French poststructuralism. Telling these stories, Heather found herself delightfully entertaining, and she was sure that Schiller felt the same way.

  It wasn’t enough to be entertaining. She also wanted to massage Schiller’s ego a bit. He must be so demoralized; she wanted to lift his spirits. “I wanted to tell you that my thesis advisor, James Bonner, really loved Two Marriages. He said it was an American classic.” He hadn’t quite said this, but he had liked the book. “I was thinking that after you’re done with your new book you might be able to get the other ones published. I was reading about how
Rosellen Brown got all her early books back in print after she hit it big with Before and After. I think that could happen for you.”

  Schiller didn’t say anything. He was still negotiating with his toast.

  “It’s really wonderful that you’re going on. I have a good feeling about this new book. I have a feeling that this is going to be your best.” She realized that she was going overboard, but once you get started in this vein it’s hard to stop.

  If I can just make it through this afternoon, she thought, I’ll deserve an Academy Award. Maybe I should actually be an actress. Maybe that’s my true career.

  Schiller, obviously, was deeply moved. He looked at her for a long time. Then he reached out toward her. She was touched by this. He was going to caress her face, or perhaps, as on the unusual night they had spent together, he was going to caress the air around her face. The wheel, she thought, has come full circle.

  Lost in this reverie, she was unprepared when Schiller, using the meaty center of his palm, slapped her full on the mouth.

  It wasn’t hard enough to hurt her, but it was hard enough to sting. In his effort he’d had to lean on the table, and when he sat back down his cup and saucer rattled and his butter knife fell to the floor. But he seemed quite composed now; he seemed satisfied.

  “I didn’t deserve that,” she said. “I was trying to be nice.”

  Schiller didn’t look at her. She didn’t know what to do. She wanted to hit him back, but that wouldn’t be fair. She thought of maybe just getting up and leaving. The one thing she wasn’t going to do was cry. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. And yet somehow, with all this, she was crying.

  She felt perfectly stoical, perfectly composed, and she wasn’t making a sound, but the tears were coming steadily down her face.

  Schiller took up his coffee cup and drew it unsteadily toward his mouth. He made no move to comfort her; he didn’t seem to be taking any notice of her at all.

  He placed his cup carefully in the saucer. She had the taste of salt on her lips. Neither of them said a word. She watched him through the wetness, noticing how he had to exert himself for every breath. She was all stuffed up from crying, and she had to take a deep breath through her mouth; at the moment when she did so, Schiller too was struggling for a breath. The room, again, was plunged for a moment into a humid purple darkness—she felt as if she were on board a ship. Something about the convergences of this moment—the two of them at the climax of a difficult indrawn breath; the brightness dropping a notch, so that they both were cast into shadow—made her feel as if they were joined; made her feel, for a fraction of a second, as if the boundaries of her individuality were melting away. Not melting away, but wavering. She was herself, she was Heather Wolfe, but she was also Leonard Schiller. It was unlike anything she’d ever experienced. She had never lost herself in life: even at the wildest heights of sex or drugs or reading, she’d never misplaced the compass of self-regard, reminding her of who she was and what she was out for. But now, for just a moment, she was no longer a young woman with more energy than she knew what to do with and decades to make a life for herself—or she was all that, but she was also a huge, wheezing, time-addled, sorrow-darkened, stroke-stunned, and unbreakably tenacious old man.

  The feeling passed quickly, and then she was herself again.

  “I’m sorry everything got so fucked up,” she said.

  “You gave an old man some excitement.”

  Schiller looked at her searchingly, and she knew that he was taking her in as fully as he could because they would never see each other again.

  “It’s been good knowing you.”

  “I got the best of the bargain,” she said. This time, she meant what she said.

  Was there anything else to say? No, there wasn’t. The only thing left was to leave. She found, however, that she couldn’t do it. She had always thought of herself as a virtuoso of leaving, but now she couldn’t quite leave.

  Schiller, after a minute, realized that she wasn’t leaving. “Strange girl,” he murmured. He adjusted his pillow, leaned back in his easy chair, and closed his eyes.

  She sat across from him and drank her juice, and this was the best part of her visit. She no longer felt the need to humor him, or cheer him, or judge him. She kept him company, for five minutes, ten minutes, without saying a word.

  He didn’t open his eyes. Finally she realized that he was sleeping.

  The madness of art was sleeping, dressed in a suit and tie.

  She took out the keys he’d given her and put them on the kitchen table. Good-bye, Schiller. She walked through the living room. Good-bye, Schiller’s books. Jeff wasn’t on duty, so she didn’t get to say good-bye to him. Out on the street she decided to say good-bye to their old meeting place, the Argo.

  She sat at the booth where they had first met—where she’d told him that if he gave her a chance, he might fall in love with her.

  She had an iced coffee and put on some lipstick, and her mood began to lift. For months she’d been burdened by the thought that she’d betrayed him. But now it occurred to her that that might not be true. She had written about his work, after all, as seriously as she knew how. And wasn’t that the highest word of praise in Schiller’s vocabulary—“seriousness”? The decision to write critically about his books hadn’t been easy for her—it might have been the hardest choice she’d ever had to make. If those characters in Schiller’s early novels were heroes and heroines because of the difficult choices they’d made, she supposed she was a heroine too.

  She thought it would have been nice if someone else had said this to her—Sandra, perhaps, or Schiller himself. But on second thought, she decided it was probably better that she had discovered it for herself.

  52

  Ariel tried to keep up a life. She taught her dance-exercise class five nights a week and saw her private clients during the day. Through Medicare and a Jewish home-care agency she arranged to have someone visit her father seven days a week, but she continued to see him almost every day herself. She did his shopping and his laundry and she cooked for him, and sometimes, when he was feeling very weak, she shaved him. Her father was getting better—slowly, slowly. He could speak well enough to be understood. He was doing his exercises faithfully, and beginning to regain some mobility on his left side. She knew he’d never be the same as he used to be—the smallest tasks were strugglesome, and he slept more than ten hours a day. But he was fighting steadily to get better.

  A few old friends and former students visited him once in a while. His friend Levin, miraculously, had been released from the hospital. He looked like a wreck, and he wasn’t expected to live long—his cancer was still spreading—but for a few weeks he was back in the world. One day he and Schiller ventured out on a two-block trip to Riverside Park; Ariel, heading back to her place, accompanied them out of the apartment. She watched them making their way across West End Avenue—very cautiously, like two small boys who had only recently learned how to cross the street on their own.

  During these weeks, she found herself giving more thought to her future. She began to send away for applications to masters programs in dance therapy. But that wasn’t the important thing.

  She and Casey went to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden one Sunday morning; on their way back to Manhattan, they waited in the Grand Army Plaza station for the 3 train. They waited for five minutes, ten, fifteen. Finally, all the way down the dark tunnel, she saw the faint white glow.

  She watched the light growing brighter and larger as it approached.

  She would turn forty in a few months, and she had to have a child soon or forget about having one at all.

  “I can’t wait forever, you know,” she said.

  Casey didn’t say anything. But she was sure he knew what she was referring to.

  Ariel got off the train at 14th Street and walked home alone. Casey was spending the afternoon with a few friends who were working with him on the magazine. Their first issue was coming out in Septembe
r.

  At home she fed Sancho and sat down to pay some bills. Sancho was pacing and meowing, trying to get his ideas across. “Sancho,” she murmured, “don’t you know I don’t like noise from a cat? I like a quiet cat.”

  She made a few phone calls, tidied up the house, lay down on the couch and watched a rerun of Star Trek. She half-dozed as she watched. Jean-Luc Picard, the tragic, stoic, noble, bald-headed captain, had been given a chance by some omnipotent being to relive his youth and make different choices.

  She knew she had to do some serious thinking.

  She tried to examine her soul, but instead she found herself thinking about Star Trek. In every few episodes, because of transporter accidents, “spatial anomalies,” or some other reason, someone gets hurled into a parallel universe. According to Star Trek, you and I—or rather, our slightly different counterparts—are alive in many parallel universes, living the lives we would have had if things had turned out differently.

  Beaming down to the planet Rigel 12 to set up an exercise program for the Romulan colony there, Ariel Schiller, the lovely though slightly weathered fitness instructor of the Starship Enterprise, is caught in a time-space anomaly, and finds herself tumbling from one universe to another.

  She imagined a life in which she had a child on her own. She saw herself raising the child in a spirit of grim fortitude. She’d be a heartwarming inspiration for feminists from coast to coast, and she’d be unhappy.

  That wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to be in love with a man, and to bring forth a child from that love.

  She imagined a life in which she set off again in search of another guy to fall in love with. The future stretched ahead of her: years of bad dates. And even if she imagined a happy ending to her story, the happy ending meant finding a guy like Casey.

  She imagined a life in which she came back to Casey and said, “Having a child isn’t the important thing: the important thing is to be with you.” She saw herself alone with Casey, childless. Childless at fifty, at sixty.