Starting Out in the Evening Read online

  She stood next to the answering machine, listening to his smooth, rich, chocolatey, man-from-nowhere voice, and she wondered whether she could spend the rest of her life with that slightly too perfect voice.

  On the phone the other day he’d said that Husbands and Wives was his favorite movie. Ariel loved Woody Allen—Halt was her favorite movie—but she hated Husbands and Wives. She hated the part where one of the husbands has an affair with an aerobics teacher, who’s portrayed as a brainless bimbo. When Ariel saw it, everybody in the audience seemed to think the aerobics teacher scenes were hilarious. It didn’t seem to matter to them that the character was a caricature, a cliché. And it apparently hadn’t occurred to Woody Allen that your thoughts and your emotions and your life can be serious and worthy of respect even if you don’t know how to sit around talking about your problems in terms of the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre.

  It wasn’t really the fact that Victor liked the movie that bothered her: she didn’t expect him to go through life campaigning for the rights of aerobics teachers. But when she’d tried to explain how she felt, he’d told her she was overreacting.

  Nevertheless, he was the best prospect she’d come upon in months, and she was trying to give him a chance.

  Sometimes she thought about getting back in touch with Casey Davis—the most interesting, truest-hearted man she’d ever found. But things hadn’t worked out with Casey the first time, so there was no reason to think they could work out if they tried again. Anyway, he was probably married by now. Everyone was married by now.

  She was full of anxiety, full of self-pity, and she decided to try to calm herself through meditation. She was always trying to work meditation into her life, as an everyday discipline, but it was hard to find the time.

  The idea is to sit quietly with your eyes closed and pay attention only to your breath, letting your thoughts pass lightly across the stage of your mind. Ariel had always found this hard to do. Whenever she tried to meditate, all she could think about was that she didn’t meditate enough. She had no discipline; she couldn’t set a goal and stay with it. When she came east she’d planned to start afresh, maybe go to social-work school or find another way to become a therapist, but here she was, having done nothing to get closer to that goal, teaching aerobics again.

  She tried to focus on her breath, but the stage of her mind wouldn’t stay empty. Her father came on, limping, with his weak ligaments and his weak heart, and the miniskirted scholar came on, full of an obscure hunger, and Sancho came on—actually, he had jumped on her lap—and Victor Mature came on, smiling with an eager hopefulness, and everyone was milling around—it was like a housewarming party—and all Ariel could do, finally, was listen to them all, let them have their way, admit them.

  After she had been meditating for ten minutes, a new thought bubbled into her mind. She realized why she was so upset about this young woman. It wasn’t just possessiveness after all. When, a couple of weeks ago, her father had mentioned casually that he’d heard from someone who was writing a study of his work—he’d mentioned it so casually that she knew it was important to him—she’d immediately become afraid. Though it would be great if someone, even this Heather person, wrote a book about him someday—her father’s life had been so difficult for so long; he deserved something wonderful—Ariel didn’t believe it would happen. Maybe it was just a peculiarly Jewish sense of disaster that had been planted deep inside her by thousands of years of tribal memory, and that remained untouchable in the core of her, despite all her years of interest in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, yoga, tai chi, Codependents Anonymous, Rolfing, Authentic Movement, and the Alexander Technique, but the very fact that something good was seemingly going to happen for her father, after all this time, filled Ariel with a superstitious dread. It wasn’t the lipsticked scholar’s fault, but Ariel felt as if this young woman were the angel of death.

  7

  As Schiller walked through the hospital corridors toward the room of his dying friend, he felt his spirit expand with joy. Schiller was an atheist: his parents had raised him to be an atheist and his faithlessness had never wavered. But he had worshipful inclinations, and certain events and places were like temples to him. The kind of reverence that someone else might describe as religious came over him most strongly at weddings, at funerals, and in hospitals. Here you felt the fleetingness of life, and therefore its holiness; here you saw that life and death are married. Whenever he entered a hospital—whether to visit someone who was dying or someone who had given birth—he felt the touch of the sacred. He had even felt it, at moments, during his own long confinement in the spring.

  Or maybe he was joyful today simply because his friend Levin was still, for the moment, alive.

  Levin was sitting up in bed, reading. The table next to him was piled high with books.

  Schiller hung back in the doorway. Levin was reading the one-volume edition of Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James. As Schiller watched, Levin scribbled something in a notepad. He wrote with difficulty because of the I.V. tube in his arm.

  Schiller had always admired his friend, but never more than now. Levin didn’t have much time left, but this hadn’t dimmed the joy he took in learning. As long as he had the strength to follow his vocation, he would follow it, patiently and serenely.

  Schiller didn’t move. This was the way he wanted to remember his friend: reading, with perfect concentration, perfect calm. He would have liked the moment to last a long time.

  Levin finally looked up. “Leonard.” He took off his reading glasses. “Have you been spying on me?”

  “I was wondering how you do it,” Schiller said. He touched Levin’s hand and sat in a chair near the bed. “When I was sick last year I couldn’t even read the sports page.”

  “That’s not the way I remember it. I seem to remember you hunched over a little green notebook, working on the fifty-seventh draft of your novel.”

  It wasn’t true, but it was nice of Levin to remember it that way.

  “Thanks for the book, by the way.” Schiller had given him the James biography the week before.

  “How are you doing?” Schiller said.

  “I go in and out. They’re having a little trouble regulating the drugs. I spent most of the day yesterday staring at my feet.” He poked his toes out from under the blanket. “They’re not very interesting.”

  “Is there anything I can get you?”

  “Some apple juice would be good.”

  There was a bottle on the night table; Schiller poured some juice into a plastic glass and handed it to him. Levin gripped the cup with difficulty: his hands were bloated and stiff from chemotherapy.

  “What’s new in the world?” he said. “Did Murray finish his piece?”

  Murray was a friend whose healthy sense of his own importance had entertained them both for almost forty years.

  “Yes. Murray finished his piece. He called the other day to read some of it to me. He reads to me for about five minutes, and then he says, ‘There’s a lot more, and it’s just as moving!’”

  Schiller visited Levin once a week. He still couldn’t quite absorb the fact that his young friend was dying. Levin was in his sixties, but Schiller still thought of him, and would always think of him, as his young friend.

  Levin had never produced much—he’d never written a book, and he’d never been concerned about writing one. He had devoted himself to his teaching; he had written his elegant reviews and essays, three or four a year; and the very spareness of his output had finally begun to seem a mark of his intellectual delicacy, the fineness of his discriminations. Every writer writes with mixed motives, with some combination of purity and self-aggrandizement; Levin was no exception, but he was much more pure than most. He would have been reading and writing in the same way—for pleasure and self-clarification—if you had put him on a desert island. He had spent little time pushing himself forward in the world, “managing his career”; that would have been a disagreeable distraction from reading and
writing and teaching, from the work he loved.

  He was beautiful even in his refusals. In the sixties he’d signed a contract for a book on Leigh Hunt, the nineteenth-century essayist and friend of Keats; he wrote two hundred pages and finally decided that only in the twenty-page first chapter had he said anything new. He published the chapter in Partisan Review, returned his advance, and bowed out of the contract. The essay had become a minor classic; at least one scholar of the Romantic period had made his reputation by expanding on the hints Levin had dropped there.

  “Are you hungry?” he said. “There’s fruit.”

  Schiller detached a pear from a large fruit basket, found a knife, and went to work on the pear, sharing bite-sized pieces with Levin. When they were done he found a paper towel and cleaned off Levin’s hands.

  Schiller thought of mentioning his lunch with the young woman, whose name he couldn’t recall at the moment. He decided not to: it would sound as if he were boasting.

  They spent half an hour talking. They talked about sports; about Levin’s three children and Schiller’s daughter; about the latest controversy in what was left of their part of the literary world. Lionel Abel had insulted the memory of Harold Rosenberg in a letter to Commentary, Rosenberg’s literary executor had written an angry response, and everyone in the little crowd of people who remembered Rosenberg was all aflutter. It was an exciting feeling; it made everyone feel as if it were 1957 again.

  Schiller thought that such scuffles were ridiculous at this late date, but they still held his interest, as quarrels among younger writers did not. His world was ending, and it was hard not to feel as if the world of intelligent discourse itself was coming to an end. The younger generation seemed so bent on celebrity, as opposed to lasting achievement. But of course, every generation believes itself to be the last truly cultivated generation. It’s a form of vanity that’s hard to resist.

  Levin closed his eyes, and Schiller thought he had gone to sleep. But he hadn’t gone to sleep.

  “I’m trying not to be morbid,” he said, “but it’s difficult. I’ve been reading the James book. Did I thank you for that, by the way?”

  “Yes, you thanked me.”

  “After William died, Henry got a letter from H. G. Wells—I think it was Wells—in which he said . . . I can’t remember exactly what he said. But he said something about how unjust it was that all that ‘ripened understanding’ should be lost.” He reached for the book and looked through it for a minute, trying to find the passage, but with an expression of frustration he finally put it back down. “That’s how I feel now. About myself. I don’t feel like an old man. I feel as if I’m still ripening. I feel as if I’m just starting to understand things. But what’s the use of this ripeness? It doesn’t give birth to anything. It doesn’t nourish anything. It just disappears.”

  “You have given birth, George. Think of all your students. Think of your friends. Think of all the people who’ve profited from the things you’ve written. Think of all the people who’ve learned from your example.”

  Levin shook his head. “Oh please,” he said. “Don’t get corny on me now.”

  A tiny nurse came into the room. “Look at your hair,” she said. “It’s a disaster area.” This was true. His latest bout of chemotherapy had ravaged his hair. There were only a few sparse patches left, and not for long: he was sure to be bald within a day or two.

  “Karen is concerned about my grooming,” Levin said.

  “Someone has to be.” She opened the top drawer of his night table, extracted a comb, and ran it through the few sad tufts of hair that remained on his head.

  He closed his eyes and smiled weakly. “Ardent brushing does not mitigate my troubles. But thank you anyway, dear.”

  Ardent brushing does not mitigate my troubles. Schiller thought he recognized the phrase. It was from the Henry James biography. It was something James said to his sister-in-law during his last illness—one of the few coherent remarks he made during the last months of his life.

  Levin was one of the people Schiller had taken the entire journey with. Who would there be to talk to after he was gone?

  Many years before, in the late fifties, the two of them had played chess almost every week. Levin was maddeningly slow, and when the game wasn’t going well for him, he became slower. He was preoccupied with the thought that at every point of the game there was at least one perfect move, one “brilliancy,” which he could find if he pondered the position deeply enough. Even when he found himself in an impossible fix, when there was nothing to do except resign, he would sit for twenty minutes studying the board. “What are you waiting for?” Schiller would finally say. “You lost.”

  Levin would slowly, abstractedly lift his eyes from the board. “I’m searching for a brilliancy,” he would say.

  Now, as the young nurse shifted him in his bed with careful hands, making sure not to disturb the I.V. tube in his arm or the catheter in his penis, Levin looked at Schiller and raised his hands in a gesture of gentle patient helplessness and said, “I’m searching for a brilliancy.”

  Schiller excused himself and went to a lounge down the hall. What he had said to Levin was true: he would be wrong to feel as if his life had come to nothing. The people who knew him had been permanently enriched by his example. But he could understand Levin’s feeling that this was not enough. His work wouldn’t live on. He would never find his brilliancy. This was where it would end for him, in this room. He would be remembered by the people who loved him, but he would never pass his existence on to the future. He was trapped in his time, trapped in his body, and when his body and the bodies of those who loved him were gone, all trace of him would be lost.

  Schiller thought of the young woman he had seen the day before. Wolfe. Something Wolfe. Heather Wolfe.

  It was strange to think that his work meant something to anyone that young. She was so young that it was almost as if she were an emissary from the future. It was hard to imagine how his work could mean anything to her when she didn’t know anything about his milieu, about the world he had come of age in.

  But then again, then again. There was something intoxicating about that thought—that this emissary from the future felt strongly about his work. As if she had traveled back in time to pluck him out, to liberate him from his context, to carry him forward into the next century.

  It was an exhilarating feeling.

  The lounge overlooked the East River; the midmorning sun was burning; the river seemed to be on fire. He felt an intense, selfish joy. She might carry him into the future. She might keep him alive. Even if she did write a book about him someday, he knew there wasn’t much chance that it would make a difference, but any small chance was better than nothing. It was like a message in a bottle. One more chance that he’d be remembered; one more chance that he would find a fate like that of Henry Roth or Nathanael West, like that of any of those writers who were “discovered” in their dotage or after they died. When he’d talked with her on the phone last week he’d been skeptical—why waste time talking about your work with some overheated young academic who wanted “background” for her thesis, when the thing that mattered was not what he had to say about it, but the work itself? He’d carried that skepticism into their meeting, but she had seemed so bright and so energetic and so . . . daring, that she’d overturned his doubts. That strange scene in the hallway—as he thought about it now, his hand still seemed to be buzzing on the spot where, bizarrely, she had kissed it. She was an unusual young woman, and he found it exciting to think that she wanted to write about his work. And thinking about Levin, how Levin in a few months would be powder while he himself would have a chance of living on, he was shaken by a horrible guilty flooding feeling of triumph. His friendship with Levin had always had an element of rivalry, and he felt drunk with the thought that he might have won the race with his old friend after all. His friend was dying fifty feet away, but he felt like dancing.

  After a few minutes he made his way back to Levin’
s room. The nurse was gone. Schiller settled back into the chair; he felt his bad conscience pouring out of him in waves, and he wondered if Levin, with the sharpened senses of a dying man, might be able to smell it.

  “Are you still in the mood to do me a favor?” Levin said.

  Schiller raised his eyebrows obligingly.

  “My feet are killing me.”

  Schiller drew his chair closer to the bed and began to massage his friend’s feet. His feet were very white and dry.

  “Thank you,” Levin said. “Thank you.”

  8

  Schiller met his daughter that evening outside the Joyce Theater, on 19th Street and Eighth Avenue. He was taking her to a dance concert for a belated birthday present. As he approached he saw her waiting on the street: dressed in a baggy purple jumpsuit, she looked as if she was ready to strap on a parachute and leap from a plane.

  “Happy birthday, my dear,” he said, and he kissed her dryly on the cheek. Whenever he saw her, he tried to give his affection a dry, formal, almost ironic cast. What he felt was precisely the opposite: the sight of his daughter always brought on a dizzying rush of tenderness and protectiveness and love. He tried to appear less moved than he was, because he believed that fathers should be a little distant, should give their children room to breathe.

  “You snuck up on me,” she said. “On little cat feet.”

  They found their seats. They were attending a performance of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company. Ariel had been a member of the company during her twenties and early thirties, until the protests of her knees became too insistent to ignore; now she liked to see them at least once a year.

  Schiller took off his coat and settled in for an hour or two of dreaming. He knew he wouldn’t be able to concentrate tonight.