Starting Out in the Evening Read online

  She started to tidy up the kitchen. Languidly squeezing liquid soap on a dish, she composed her own elegy. Here lies Ariel, who died womb-withered, wind-weathered, womb-blighted, mother of nothing, mother of none.

  She tried to evaluate her situation politically, from a feminist point of view. Leaving a man to pursue the dream of having a child; putting aside the dream of having a child to be with a man—either way, from a feminist point of view she was a washout.

  A friend had advised her just to throw her diaphragm away. “You’ll get pregnant, and he’ll do the right thing. You know he will.”

  She wished she could do what her friend advised, but she didn’t think she could. She was incapable of duplicity, even in a good cause.

  There was no way to decide. Ariel tripped from one parallel universe to another, and in each of them she was unhappy.

  53

  Casey and his friends spent the afternoon trying to make a final decision about the name of their magazine. They went through Politics and Letters, American Pages, and five or ten other possibilities before settling on Arguments, which satisfied everyone.

  He was still on a high when he met Ariel for dinner; he couldn’t stop thinking about the magazine. “I feel like this was what I was made for,” he said.

  Ariel raised one eyebrow and didn’t say anything.

  “He said pretentiously,” Casey finally added.

  After dinner they went to play indoor miniature golf on 18th Street. She built up a huge lead and then handicapped herself by hitting left-handed or behind her back. She was a much better athlete than he was.

  “This is what I was made for,” she said. “Miniature golf is my life.”

  She carefully putted the ball up a ramp and through the eye of a Cyclops. “The only thing more fun than playing miniature golf,” she said, “would be playing miniature golf with the kiddies. Don’t you think?”

  A little while later: “It kind of makes you want to have kids, doesn’t it?”

  She was joking, but she wasn’t.

  “Don’t start,” he said.

  “I’ve been giving this a great deal of thought since this afternoon,” she said, “and it’s an open-and-shut case. With my physical gifts, and your intellectual gifts, we could have the most amazing children! They could be in the Olympics! They could win big money on Jeopardy! Casey, it’s our responsibility to the world!” Looking directly at him, not at the ball, she swung her club one-handed and somehow sent the ball smoothly through the open mouth of the grinning gargoyle on the seventh hole.

  “We could have such beautiful coffee-colored babies!” she said.

  He couldn’t help smiling at all this, but he shook his head.

  “You know,” she said, “I think you’re a fool.”

  He considered this, and decided that she was probably right. Because the feelings he had for her, he hadn’t had for anyone since . . . her.

  During the last week, not once but twice, he’d picked up the phone to call her and found that she was already on the line: she was calling him, and he’d picked it up before the first ring.

  Coincidence. But the eagerness to find meaning in such coincidences is love.

  His admiration for her had only grown over these past weeks. The way she took care of her father, steadily and without complaint, betraying no irritation, as if it weren’t a chore for her—apparently she didn’t find it a chore—amazed him. Her ability to keep her sense of humor, to take care of her father lovingly, but with a touch of roughness—a loving roughness, a healing roughness, as if she refused to see his condition as something that called for weepy protectiveness—was more than he’d expected. When this ordeal began, he’d half expected her to collapse. But she hadn’t collapsed. She’d become stronger.

  He was thinking of all this as he leaned on his golf club and watched her line up her next shot. She glanced up at him and saw something in his look. “You’re getting all googly-eyed,” she said. “You’ve never known what it is to be with a golfing genius.”

  When they went outside, the moon, low in the sky and nearly full, was enormous and pink. They walked across town to her apartment, stopping at the deli on the corner so she could buy Oreos for herself and cat food for Sancho. “He likes beef, cause he’s still a growing boy. Beastie Feast,” she said, and these words, so commonplace, were inexplicably touching to him. A million women care about their cats; a million women would tell you that their cats are partial to beef or chicken or whatever. Why was it that when Ariel said something like this, he was filled with tenderness and longing—longing for a life with her—and with the intuition that if he were to put anything above her, if he allowed his feeling for her to be less than the central fact of his life, it would be a mistake that he’d regret forever?

  She wanted to get a last glimpse of the moon before they went inside. But it was hidden. “Where’s that moon of ours?” she said, taking Casey’s arm and leading him to the end of the block so they could find it again.

  Back at her place, she fell asleep quickly; he couldn’t sleep at all. He prowled restlessly around her little studio. He spent a minute looking through her medicine cabinet: NyQuil; aspirin; condoms; her diaphragm case; spermicidal jelly; Valium; “ouchless” Band-Aids; Flintstones chewable vitamins. He couldn’t help smiling when he came across the Flintstones vitamins.

  He looked through her bookcase, took down one of her father’s books, went back into the bathroom, and sat on the floor. Her bathroom was the only place where he could read at night without waking her.

  This was her father’s third novel, Stories from the Lives of My Friends. It was about the alarms and disorders of the 1960s. He read the first forty-five pages, and found it much more interesting than the one he’d read years ago. That other one, his first or his second, was a trite little book about a couple trying to deal with their personal problems during a year in Paris. This later book was messier, but it took on larger subjects; it had more guts. He read until he felt tired; then he put it back on Ariel’s bookcase, intending to return to it another day.

  He went back out and lay down beside her. She was snoring softly. She hadn’t snored in the old days.

  Listening to a lover snore was a new experience. He knew that he had rattled the rafters for years—women had told him this often enough, with indulgence or exasperation, each according to her nature—but he’d never had a snoring girlfriend before.

  It was hard to believe it, but they were traveling into middle age.

  He was starting to feel drowsy, but he couldn’t sleep. This was nothing new: getting a good night’s sleep in her apartment was near-impossible. For one thing, there was the cat. Sancho was up half the night, and he liked to keep busy: he would hone his hunting skills by going after your feet, and then he might make a trip to the bathtub, where Ariel’s faucet was perpetually drizzling, and take a little shower—he was an eccentric among cats in that he liked to get wet—and then he’d come and lie down next to you in the dark, purring, and push his soaking fur against your face. This was his way of telling you he liked you.

  Ariel always woke up several times during the night, and she would wake him to tell him her dreams. “I dreamt Paula”—an old teacher—“was a dentist. I wanted her to be my dentist.” “I dreamt my father wrote a book called American Smells. He sampled the smells of all the different regions.”

  This morning he woke at about five; Ariel was tossing about in bed. “I can’t sleep,” she said. “Do you mind if I watch TV?”

  He didn’t mind. She played with the remote control for a while and finally settled on an ancient episode of Lassie. An embittered rancher was planning to kill his favorite cow, but Lassie somehow got him to change his mind. Drifting in and out of sleep, Casey couldn’t quite follow how she had done this.

  They slept for a few more hours, and woke around eight. Ariel always woke up in a loving frame of mind. That’s how you discover a person’s true nature: by the way she wakes up in the morning.

 
“Hello, Magic,” she said. “Beat you at golf.”

  They both had things to do. Casey needed to spend a few hours editing articles for the magazine, and Ariel had to take her father to a doctor’s appointment.

  They made pancakes together.

  “Explain your political views to me again?” she said. “My father was asking me.”

  “Why doesn’t he just ask me?”

  “I don’t know. He fears the rage of the black man.”

  Casey scowled at her.

  “Just jesting,” she said.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I think you’re sort of a socialist.”

  “That’s the right answer. I’m sort of a socialist.”

  “He seemed to want to know what that could mean, in this day and age.”

  “A socialist is someone who sits around pondering the question of whether it can possibly mean anything anymore to call yourself a socialist.”

  “I’ll tell him that.”

  He was surprised the old man was curious.

  “Why did he want to know?”

  “I guess he just wanted to know. I think he respects you.”

  After breakfast, washing the dishes with rubber gloves, she started doing a bump and grind, slowly peeling off one glove. She looked at him with astonishment: “I’m channeling Gypsy Rose Lee!” she said.

  He sat at her table, laughing as he watched her performance, feeling lucky to be there, lucky to have found her again.

  54

  While Ariel was dressing, Casey read the paper. “Did you know there’s going to be a comet in the sky tomorrow night?”

  “Is that Russell’s Comet? My father told me about it. He saw it when he was a kid.”

  “We should definitely see it then—we should see it with him. We can borrow a car and drive somewhere.”

  “Can’t we just go to Central Park?”

  “It won’t be visible in the city. Too many lights.”

  When they were getting ready to leave, the phone rang.

  “Damn,” Ariel said after she hung up.

  “What?”

  “They asked me to sub at the Saint Luke’s weight-loss clinic. I’ve been trying to get my foot in the door there for a long time.”

  He thought about it. “I can take your father to the doctor.”

  “Really?”

  “Why not?”

  There were many reasons why not. He had a million things to do, and he would have preferred not to spend the morning baby-sitting Ariel’s father. But he knew it was the right thing to do, and he didn’t have a moment’s hesitation about doing it.

  He picked Schiller up at 94th Street. Schiller was waiting in the lobby, sitting on a backless couch with his walker in front of him, looking grumpy because Casey was ten minutes late. But when Casey helped him up Schiller patted him on the hand and said, “This is good of you.” At least that was what Casey thought he said. He had trouble understanding the old man.

  They walked out to the sidewalk to catch a cab; Schiller was excruciatingly slow.

  They had to wait in the doctor’s office for about half an hour. Casey had brought something to read—Eric Foner’s book on Tom Paine. Schiller leaned forward and bent up the cover of the book to see what Casey was reading. Then he grunted, either approvingly or disapprovingly, or neither.

  He reached into his coat pocket: he had also brought something to read. Chekhov.

  The nurse called him in and he disappeared for half an hour. When he emerged, he looked as if he’d been through an ordeal.

  Casey raised his eyebrows.

  “Don’t grow old,” Schiller said. “That’s my advice.”

  He didn’t say anything else until they left the building. Then he said, “Let’s walk. Exercise.”

  The last thing Casey wanted to do was waste another hour watching Schiller take three and a half steps. “Are you sure you feel up to it?” he said.

  Schiller nodded gravely. They walked up Ninth Avenue, very slowly. Casey found it hard to walk this slowly. He was wondering, half-seriously, whether it would be bad manners to read as they walked.

  “Oh my,” Schiller said.

  “Is anything wrong?”

  Schiller’s face was contorted; he gripped the pads of his walker.

  “My stomach.”

  Casey didn’t understand what he meant at first. Then he understood. Ariel’s father had soiled himself.

  “My body is not my own,” Schiller said grimly. He closed his eyes. “It’s time to die.”

  “It’s not time to die,” Casey said. “It’s time to get you to a rest room.”

  He had never used the term “rest room” in his life, but somehow it seemed the most tactful expression he could find.

  There was a bar across the street. He led Schiller to the crosswalk. Schiller was trying to speed up his pace, but with his physical disabilities, with the awkwardness of the walker, and with the special distress of the moment, he found it difficult. He was sweating terribly. When the effort to walk across the street is almost too much for you—when the effort to control your bowels is too much for you—then it probably is time to die, Casey thought.

  But is it? Is it really? Casey put his hand under Schiller’s elbow to support him as they stepped off the curb, but Schiller shrugged him off. “Thank you, but I think I can make it,” he said. From Schiller’s expression as he proceeded across the street, you might have thought it was the most challenging task he had ever faced. As it probably was. But did that mean it was time to die? Wasn’t the important thing, the impressive thing, the very fact that he was trying to meet the challenge? He was making his slow, implacable way across the street.

  Casey helped him into the bar and back toward the bathroom.

  “You got a problem here?” the bartender said to Schiller. It was clear that he thought Casey might be the problem.

  “We’re fine,” Schiller said, with his stricken voice, as if he had a bone lodged permanently in his throat.

  “Rest rooms for customers only,” the man said. He was a red-faced man in his fifties with thick, violent eyebrows. Casey dug into his pocket and slapped a few dollars on the bar. “We’re customers,” he said, helping Schiller into the men’s room.

  The room was smelly and ill-tended; the toilet seat was sticky-looking, layered with the urine of men who’d been too drunk or too lazy to lift it. “Hold on,” Casey said. He grabbed a few paper towels and ran them quickly under the water faucet and wiped down the toilet seat.

  The bartender had followed them in. “Is this guy giving you any trouble?” he said to Schiller.

  “This guy,” Schiller said, “is my son-in-law.”

  Casey was touched and uncomfortable at the same time. Schiller, as far as Casey knew, knew nothing about the complexities of his relationship with Ariel.

  The bartender shrugged and left the room.

  “If you could help me get these down,” Schiller said. He was struggling with his pants.

  Casey undid Schiller’s belt and helped him sit on the toilet seat.

  “Thank you,” Schiller said. “It seems to be all I can say to you today.”

  “Let that thank you stand for all other thank yous.”

  Casey closed the door of the stall from the outside. He heard the liquid gassy sound of Schiller’s shitting.

  Ariel’s father was a very private, very proper man. There could probably be nothing more painful for him than to endure this sort of indignity.

  Schiller was breathing heavily. Casey thought the old man might need his help, but he didn’t want to barge in.

  “Can you use any help?” Casey said.

  Silence. Then: “Maybe yes. If you can stand it.”

  Casey pushed the stall door open. Schiller looked mournful. He gestured with his chin. There was a blob of golden shit on his shoe.

  “I’m sorry you had to be here,” Schiller said.

  “Look, it’s . . .” Casey was about to give him words of cou
rage and support, but he thought better of it. Surely the old man didn’t need them. If he offered any pithy maxims, he would sound condescending. He wet down a few more paper towels and cleaned off Schiller’s shoe, and then he cleaned off his leg.

  “Ariel once mentioned to me that you knew Ralph Ellison,” Casey said.

  “A little.”

  “I could never figure out why he only wrote that one book. He was so talented.”

  “His house burned down.”

  “Excuse me?” Casey stood up and got some dry paper towels and returned to the task.

  “His house with his book in it.”

  “I know,” Casey said, cleaning him off. “But that was in the sixties. He still had twenty-five years left after that.”

  “He was a perfectionist,” Schiller said—at least that was what Casey thought he said. It sounded more like “percussionist.” “And . . . success. It was hard for him. Second-book jinx.”

  In the months since Schiller’s stroke, this was probably the longest speech Casey had heard him give. He could feel how relieved the old man was that they could pretend to be doing nothing more than having a literary discussion right now.

  After Schiller was cleaned up, they left the bar and took a cab uptown. When they got back to the apartment Casey helped him off with his shoes and his socks and his pants and his underwear. He turned his head away respectfully so as not to see the old man’s spent sad genitals. He ran a bath and helped Schiller into it, and twenty minutes later he lifted him out and helped him into his robe.

  Casey was exhausted. Schiller had a good seventy-five pounds on him, maybe more: all this heavy lifting was an ordeal. The entire morning had been an ordeal.

  There was a guest room that Casey and Ariel used when they stayed there. He wanted to sleep for about fifteen years. But he stayed in the living room, thinking he’d wait to take a nap until Schiller took his. He sat on the couch, too tired to move, listening to Schiller moving around in the bedroom. He heard drawers opening and closing.