Starting Out in the Evening Page 4

  When the lights went down, his thoughts went back to the hospital. He kept thinking of Levin, alone now, staring up at the ceiling. He thought of his own long stay in the hospital last spring. He’d had plenty of visitors—Ariel, old friends, former students—but it didn’t make any difference. Every night he was left alone with his damaged heart, left alone to think about death.

  All he hoped was that he wouldn’t die slowly, as Levin was dying. He didn’t want to endure another prolonged spell of decrepitude. Let it come quickly when it comes.

  When he finally turned his attention to the dancers, he found that they annoyed him. Their very proficiency annoyed him: their fantastically muscular legs, their unbelievable lightness. It was such a deceptive representation of life, such a small part of it all. Somewhere on the stage, a dying man or woman should be lying on a bed, working hard for each breath.

  When the lights came up for the intermission Ariel asked him if he had enjoyed it.

  “Of course. It was wonderful.”

  “I’m not so sure,” she said. “I think you were writing or something.”

  The lobby was crowded; Schiller and his daughter went outside for some air. She took his hand and pulled him across the street, into a little Cuban-Chinese restaurant where she ordered a café con leche to go. “I need a pick-me-up,” she said. Schiller ordered a black coffee. Coffee was forbidden on his Pritikin diet, but he hadn’t been able to give it up completely.

  They went back into the cold night and stood outside the theater. The coffee was too hot to drink; Ariel blew on hers with a hopeful expression. He remembered how he’d taught her to blow on her soup, when she was four or five.

  The lights in the lobby started flashing. “So much for coffee,” Schiller said. He leaned over at the curb and started to pour his coffee into the sewer.

  “Why don’t we just leave it here?” Ariel said. “We can drink it after.” She put her cup on top of a green metal box, a signal box, attached to a traffic-light post. “We can drink it cold.”

  “Just leave it here on the street? We can’t do that.”

  “Why? What could happen?”

  “I don’t know. Anything.” He poured the rest of his coffee away. “I’ll buy you a fresh cup later. I can spring for the seventy-five cents.”

  He came close to his daughter and brushed a strand of hair from her face. “You trust the world,” he said.

  They smiled at each other—each of them quizzical, puzzled by the other’s sense of life.

  They found their seats, the concert resumed, but now Schiller couldn’t pay attention to the dance at all. He was stunned with tenderness for his daughter. The idea that they could leave the coffee outside, on a New York street, and find it safe an hour later! He hadn’t had an answer to her question, “What could happen?” In New York, what could happen was wilder than anything he could imagine. A few months ago, after getting a busy signal at a pay phone on 72nd Street, he’d put his finger in the coin-return slot to retrieve his quarter and dipped it into something soft and warm and sticky. Extracting the finger, he saw that whatever was on it was soft and warm and sticky and brown; he walked into a bar and went straight to the men’s room and spent a ridiculous five minutes washing and rewashing his hands. Why should anyone have gone to the trouble to stuff something revolting into a coin-return slot? In New York, such a question made no sense. The answer was simply “Because it is there.” What was surprising was that things like this didn’t happen more often. He wondered how civility survived in the city at all: when someone preceding him out the rear door of a bus held it open for him, or when the people on a subway platform waited until he left the train before they got on, Schiller always had a moment of baffled gratitude.

  As he watched the dancers—the beautiful long-legged women, the superfluous men—all he could think about was his daughter. He often worried that she wasn’t strong enough for the world. Was this just what any father thinks about his daughter, or was it the truth about Ariel? He feared it was the truth about Ariel. With her near breakdowns—she’d had two of them now, one during her first semester of college, and then another last year—and with her curiously tattered history of relationships, she was always on the edge of a fall. And he didn’t know how to help her.

  She was so unequipped for life—she was more like a child than a woman. Her habits weren’t New York habits: she kept her keys in the back pocket of her knapsack, and she usually kept the pocket unzipped; she talked to strangers on the street. They weren’t the habits of a woman who knew how to protect herself.

  When she came east last spring it was heartbreaking to see her. She had supposedly come to take care of him during his convalescence, but he could see that she was barely holding herself together, and that she needed those long nights of movies and togetherness as much as he did.

  After the concert they went to a Chinese restaurant on Hudson Street. When they were seated, under the unforgiving fluorescent light, he could see that she was suffering the harsh effects of winter. Her skin had temporarily lost its softness; the cold had made it taut; there were new lines around her eyes, lines of tense and tired white skin.

  Probably some of his dizzy protectiveness came from having seen her at his house the day before. It had been unsettling to see her alongside that young woman, Heather. Heather, who was fully a generation younger, seemed so much more self-possessed, more purposeful than his daughter.

  He wanted her to ask him about Heather; he wanted to mention that he’d decided to help her with her project. But she didn’t ask, and something warned him away from bringing up the young woman’s name.

  “So what’s your story, lass?” he said. His habit of calling younger people “lass” or “lad” was one of those things about himself that he found charming, but which, he sometimes suspected, charmed other people less. “What have you been up to?”

  “I’m storyless, Dad.”

  “How could that be? A lively young woman like yourself?”

  “I am storyless. That’s exactly the word for me. I was thinking about it the other day. I went to MoMA to see a show by some hot young artist. That German guy. It turned out to be really stupid—it was all gimmicks. One piece had a TV in it, another had a trash basket that you could throw stuff in.

  “When you leave the exhibit you walk right into the permanent collection. Just behind me there was this kid in his twenties, with this scraggly beard. He comes storming out of the trash basket show and goes up to a Van Gogh and says to himself, ‘Finally! Fucking art!’”

  She nodded, as if the point of this story were obvious.

  “And?” Schiller said.

  “That’s one of the stories the world likes to hear. The young man burning with promise. The young beginner, burning to make fucking art. And that used to be my story. I was the young dancer, and all I thought about was fucking art. But what am I now? What do I do now? I’m an exercise teacher. I jump around all day yelling, ‘One more time, ladies!’ If you’re thirty-nine, and you’re not successful, and you still don’t know what you want to do with your life, that’s not a story the world wants to hear. It’s not a story I want to hear.

  “When you’re in your twenties, when you’re in your early thirties, you can tell yourself a nice story about your life: ‘I’m young, I have promise, I have everything going for me.’ But when you can’t tell yourself that story anymore, what are you? You’re storyless.”

  “That can’t be true. There has to be a story for your time of life.”

  “Tell me what it is then.”

  He tried to think of what it could be. “A beautiful, intelligent young woman, who’s already had two successful careers, as a dancer and an exercise teacher, is searching for a new life.”

  “And a decent boyfriend,” she put in quickly. It reminded him of the days when he used to tuck her in and tell her a bedtime story, and she’d eagerly add the crucial details.

  “And a decent boyfriend. One of the remarkable things about this young w
oman is that she’s always known what she’s wanted to do in life. She wanted to be a dancer from the age of five, and she became one. Then she wanted to combine her dance abilities with some kind of helping work, and she did that too.” Ariel’s aerobics class was for overweight women and older women; she gave them a place where they could work out without feeling judged. “Now she wants to do something new, and she’s in the unfamiliar position of not knowing exactly what she wants. It’s scary, but she knows that growth is always scary. She’s struggling, but she knows that without struggle there’s no life.”

  Ariel brightened momentarily. He was happy to see her happy, but he wished she weren’t so susceptible to the appeal of pop psychology.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly. “When you tell me I’m doing okay, I can almost believe it.”

  “Of course you are,” he said, almost believing it himself.

  She did seem cheered. The waiter arrived with their food, and Ariel eagerly reached for the dumplings. “I love this restaurant,” she said. “It’s a dumpling haven.”

  “How’s the boyfriend situation?” Schiller said. “Any prospects?”

  “Yes. I’ve met my future husband, in fact,” she said.

  “Congratulations. Anyone I know?”

  “I’ve told you about him. That guy Victor. That lawyer.”

  He remembered vaguely. “You didn’t seem that taken with him.”

  “Maybe you reach an age where you have to compromise. Isn’t that the essence of maturity?”

  He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t like to see her selling herself short, but he knew how much she wanted to have kids. He had no advice about such matters. He’d been alone for so many years that he’d lost all sense of what to do about the quandaries of longing.

  More than once he’d thought of asking if she’d considered having a child on her own. If she were a different kind of woman, he would have asked. But he didn’t think she was strong enough to undertake that.

  “I do know what I’d like to do next in life, actually. I want to be a healer.”

  “You are a healer. You give a great deal to your clients.”

  “Don’t humor me. I’m a glorified gym teacher. I want to be a real therapist, but I can’t afford it. I never even paid off my student loans from college.”

  He knew this already, and she knew he knew it, but she couldn’t help telling him again. It made him feel miserable, though he was sure that wasn’t her intention. A father worth his salt would be able to pay his daughter’s way through social-work school. A father who hadn’t spent his prime earning years on the poverty line, living like Raskolnikov, indulging himself in the effort to make fucking art.

  “But anyway, even if I don’t marry Victor Mature, I’m going to have everything figured out pretty soon. Did I tell you I made an appointment to see a psychic?”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Millie Meeker. She’s supposed to be famous in the psychic community. She’s the psychic that all the other psychics consult. They swear by her.”

  “They swear by her, do they? That sounds marvelous.”

  “Oh yeah—marvelous. You think your daughter is a ditz.”

  “Not at all. Marxism is dead, Freudianism is dead—all the great explanatory systems have broken down. We all need to find new myths. I wouldn’t mind consulting a psychic myself.”

  “You’re a nice man,” Ariel said.

  “I’m not being nice. I’m being serious. Almost.”

  On the street, having carried the conversation further in her mind, she said, “I guess you’ve been known to do an unconventional thing or two yourself. Are you going to keep your date in Paris?”

  “I plan to. Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “You’re not crazy. You’re a romantic.”

  Many years ago, he and Stella—Ariel’s mother, his wife—had picked a far-off date and agreed to spend it together in Paris. Now the day was near. Stella was no longer alive to keep the appointment, but he intended to keep it himself, for both of them. He supposed he was a romantic at that.

  He kissed his daughter good-bye, and she ran off to catch a bus that was just opening its doors near the bus shelter. He took pleasure in watching her run. When she was a kid she was a bit of a clown, and he used to tell her that she was the greatest physical comedian since Chaplin; and through all the disappointments of her life—she’d endured more than her share of disappointments—she’d retained the physical exuberance of her youth. Beneath the struggling, churning surface, she seemed to have an inalienable core of well-being; when you watched her move, you found it hard to believe she could ever be unhappy.

  9

  When Heather was ten years old, her fifth-grade teacher—a would-be poet who had long ago endured some sort of literary drubbing in New York and retreated to Cleveland Heights to nurse his psychic wounds—took the class to a lecture that Jorge Luis Borges was giving at Oberlin College. He said that Borges was the greatest writer alive.

  Most of what Borges talked about that day was over her head, but he told one story that she never forgot. He said that he had once encountered a young man who said he had no interest in reading about Hamlet, “because Hamlet wasn’t real.” Borges took a sip of water and paused dramatically, looking around the crowded hall. “I said, ‘You are mistaken, my young friend. Prince Hamlet is more real than you are.’”

  There was a reception after the event; Borges was sitting in a tiny chair, surrounded by admirers. Squeezing nimbly between the grown-ups, Heather made her way to his side.

  “Are you as real as Hamlet?” she demanded.

  Blind, frail, ancient, the writer smiled at her mournfully. “No, my dear. Hamlet is more real than I am. Even the Borges in my stories is more real than I.”

  He asked her her name, and, bowing slightly in his chair, he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it.

  A few years later, when she heard he had died, she thought, If it wasn’t true then, it’s true now. The Borges in his stories is still alive.

  As a young girl, Heather lived in books. She read at the dinner table; she read as she walked to the grocery store; she tried to figure out a way to read in the shower. She didn’t really belong to the modern world: when she read magazine articles that offered portraits of her generation she didn’t recognize herself at all. She would discover that she was supposed to be “affectless,” when what she felt in herself was a wild intensity. She would discover that she was supposed to lack the attention span for “linear narratives,” when in fact she loved nothing more than to lose herself in mammoth books. At thirteen she read Middlemarch and imagined herself as Dorothea Brooke, trying to find a way to live virtuously; at fourteen she read The Rainbow and became Ursula Brangwen, passionately searching for a wider life.

  She was a wild, rebellious, intense, unhappy girl with a conviction that she was fated for great things. She didn’t know what she wanted, but she felt sure that the stage on which she would play out her aspirations was far from Cleveland Heights.

  Heather’s parents were good people—warm-hearted and generous—but their lives were lives of comfortable disappointment. Her mother had dreamed of being a lawyer, but she’d sacrificed herself to be her husband’s helpmate while he went through medical school. He, in turn, had had plans to do important research, but he’d fribbled away his gifts and become a dermatologist. Heather loved them without ever quite believing she was their natural daughter.

  On her fourteenth birthday, she stood in front of the mirror with a cigarette in her hand. She didn’t like the way it tasted, but she liked the way she looked when she held it. “Freedom has always been my theme in life,” she said, imagining a day when she could speak these words to a man. A man who would understand her.

  During her high school years she spent every Saturday in the Cleveland Heights Public Library, looking for books that would release her, that would spring her from her life. This was where she fell in love with Leonard Schiller.

  On a sl
eety, gray Saturday in late November, Heather was prowling around in the library stacks, picking out novels at random, reading a few pages of each, hoping to find something that would speak to her. She came across a book called Tenderness. She liked the cover—a mild, faded blue. When she turned to the first page, she immediately found herself drawn in by the description of a young couple having coffee in a café in Paris—their conversation humorous, loving, but also somehow tense.

  The light in the stacks was bad, but she didn’t want to bring the book out to the reading room; she didn’t want to break the spell. She sat on the floor in the weak light and read until closing time.

  On the day when Heather discovered the book, she was suffering. She’d been suffering for weeks. She’d been admitted to Brown that fall through a special “early entrance” program that allowed you to skip your last year of high school. She was eager to go, but now there was a complication. Her boyfriend was having problems. He was a brilliant but high-strung boy whom she’d been seeing for a year and a half; he had always been the star in their relationship, Heather the sidekick; but now, at the prospect of losing her, he was coming apart. He tried to paste himself together through an elaborate series of rituals, but this was only making things worse. One day he forgot to pat his dog on the head before leaving for school, and he spent the next week convinced that this meant he’d do horribly on his SATs; and when the day of the tests arrived he was too sick with worry to even take them.

  Heather had never been confronted by anything as alarming as her boyfriend’s deterioration; she didn’t understand that she was only the occasion for it, not the cause. She’d just about decided to change her plans and stay in high school for another year, to help him maintain his equilibrium; but she was miserably unhappy about it.

  This was what she was going through when she discovered Schiller’s novel.

  Sometimes, said Thoreau, you can date a new era in your life from the reading of a book. Heather dated an era in her life from the reading of Tenderness.