Starting Out in the Evening Page 5

  The novel was about an American couple spending a year in France. The woman, Ellen, is completing a dissertation on the philosophy of existentialism. In combination with the intellectual and moral atmosphere of Paris, the ideas she is studying become combustible; she begins to discover that, if she means to take these ideas seriously, she must live in a different way.

  But living in a different way means making difficult choices. She decides to remain in France, putting both her academic career and her marriage at risk. She loves her husband; she loves her career; what she’s giving up is much clearer to her than what she’s seeking; and she knows that her choice will bring grief, to her husband and to herself. But she obscurely senses that she needs to stay.

  Near the end of the novel she learns that she’s pregnant. This makes the burden of her choice more difficult, but it doesn’t make her change her mind.

  It was very much a novel of the 1950s, but at the age of sixteen Heather didn’t understand this, and if she had understood it she wouldn’t have cared. She read the book in a day, and by the end of the day she had decided to go away to college the next year. Tenderness gave her courage; it taught her that she was responsible only for her own life, and that she couldn’t protect her boyfriend from his fate. In the heroine of the book, she could see herself—she could see herself not as a selfish girl, walking away from someone who needed her, but as a tragic figure, making a wrenching choice. It was as if Schiller had explained her life to her more sympathetically than she’d been able to explain it to herself.

  No one she knew had ever heard of him—not her parents, not her teachers. It surprised her, but it didn’t really displease her. It made her feel as if he were her secret.

  The novel stayed alive in her mind. The summer after her sophomore year in college she took a trip to Europe, and making her way around Paris she discovered that the book had formed her picture of the place, more than anything else she’d read, more than the movies she’d seen. When she sat in cafés there she didn’t think of Jean-Paul Sartre or Jean-Paul Belmondo: she thought of the couple from Tenderness. In the Luxembourg Garden, she remembered the conversation they had there near the end of the book—when Ellen told her husband that he was “angelic,” and he realized that she wasn’t going back home with him. Walking across the Pont Neuf, she realized that this was the bridge from which Ellen threw her watch into the Seine.

  For years the book was one of her closest companions. Once a year or so she reread it from cover to cover; more often she’d dip into it for ten- or twenty- or fifty-page visits. She loved to return to the world of the book, a world in which people were willing to let go of everything in order to follow their passions.

  It was a long time before she came upon another of Schiller’s books. In the fall of her senior year at Brown she spent a weekend in Manhattan. Rooting around in a used-book store on Broadway, she found Schiller’s second novel, Two Marriages.

  She bought it and took it back to the apartment where she was staying—a friend’s parents’ place—and instead of spending the afternoon visiting museums, as she’d planned, she stayed inside and spent the day with Schiller.

  She was in another time of confusion. She had no idea what she wanted to do with her life after college. Her mother was urging her to go to law school—she’d never stopped mourning the fact that she herself had not become a lawyer—but Heather wasn’t sure. When she came across Schiller’s second novel, she hoped it would speak to her as much as Tenderness had. She wasn’t disappointed.

  One of the characters in Two Marriages is a young man whose father was a gifted sculptor who died young. The young man has come to believe that his duty in life is to champion his father’s reputation. The turning point—not of the book, but of his strand of the book—comes during a conversation with his mother, when she helps him see that the only battles he needs to fight are his own.

  When the young man takes this in, his liberation is by no means simple or simply happy: the guiding purpose of his life is suddenly gone. But it’s clear that, in the moral scale of the novel, his new uncertainty represents growth.

  The book as a whole inspired her—the central characters were penniless young artists in New York, living the kind of life she’d always dreamed about—but the part that dealt with the young man seemed to be addressed to her directly. It was like a letter from a friend. For the second time, Schiller had helped her find the courage to live her own life.

  She finally decided to stay at Brown and get her M.A. in comparative literature. Brown gave her a full scholarship, which made the decision easier. During her senior year in the program, her thesis advisor, an aging hipster named James Bonner, who’d told her that she was the most brilliant student he’d worked with in twenty years of teaching, but who was probably just in love with her, began editing a series of book-length essays for the University of Chicago Press. The series had the general title Rediscoveries; each book was to be devoted to the work of some neglected American writer.

  This gave Heather the idea for her master’s thesis: she asked if she could write a study of Leonard Schiller. Bonner had heard of Schiller vaguely, but he hadn’t read his work. Heather lent him Tenderness and Two Marriages—she’d lifted Tenderness from the library the previous winter after ascertaining that she was the only person to have checked it out in the last twenty years. He read them over the weekend and delivered his verdict: “He’s seventh-rate.”

  In Bonner’s scale of literary merit, Shakespeare and Tolstoy were first-rate; Dostoevsky and George Eliot and Proust were second-rate. Melville was third-rate; Henry James fourth-rate; Virginia Woolf fifth-rate. To be called seventh-rate was high praise. He gave her permission to write her thesis about Schiller, and he even suggested that she might consider writing a book about him someday.

  Now she had to approach Schiller’s work not as an admirer, but as a scholar. She tracked down his last two books and read them—with disappointment. They were good . . . she told herself they were good; but they didn’t quite do for her what the first two had.

  The frustrating thing was that she couldn’t tell whether the last two books were objectively worse. The problem may have been simply that they weren’t addressed to her condition.

  His third book, Stories from the Lives of My Friends, was a social novel about New York at the end of the sixties, and she had no interest in it at all.

  “It feels like it was written by a different person,” she said to Bonner.

  “The sixties drove a lot of people crazy,” Bonner said.

  He didn’t seem inclined to say more: he liked to make gnomic pronouncements. But she asked him what he meant.

  “What was he then, in his forties? All his life he was probably looking forward to being middle-aged, because those were the days when middle-aged white men were supposed to inherit the earth. But as soon as his generation attained that condition, the rug was pulled out from under them. All of a sudden the world belonged to the young.”

  Schiller’s fourth novel, The Lost City, seemed to be a return to his family roots. It was about his parents, or people who could have been his parents: a Jewish couple living on New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1920s. Garment workers, labor struggles, the Yiddish theater—it was tender, and loving, and careful, and it meant very little to her.

  These last two books brought her news about the world. That was fine, she supposed, but his first two had done something more valuable: they had brought her news about herself.

  This wasn’t a fair way to judge an author’s work. Probably.

  Her disappointment didn’t change the way she felt about his first two novels, and it didn’t dim her desire to write her thesis about his work.

  After she finished her course work, she decided to move to New York, write the thesis, and, if possible, meet Schiller. She called his publishing company, but no one there had ever heard of him. Maybe that shouldn’t have been shocking—his last book had come out in the early eighties—but she was shocke
d. She didn’t know how to proceed, until Bonner suggested she call New York City information.

  She was surprised when this worked. She knew that Schiller wasn’t famous, but he was famous in her mind, and therefore she didn’t think his phone number would be listed. “It’s nice to be naive,” Bonner said.

  She had enough money to live on for a few months. She couldn’t afford Manhattan, but she found a nice little studio in Hoboken on the block where Frank Sinatra was born. At least that was what her landlady told her. Later she learned that everybody in Hoboken thinks they’re living on the block where Frank Sinatra was born.

  Other than Tenderness, all of Schiller’s books were set in New York. During her first few weeks there, she felt as if she were living inside his mind. Sometimes she walked on streets he’d mentioned just because he’d mentioned them. The city was just as he’d described it: the mazy streets of the West Village; the long brown reaches of the Upper West Side. In one scene in his third novel, an elderly Jewish immigrant from Czechoslovakia makes his first visit to New York; walking on Broadway, he is stunned to see so many men and women who have the same features as the people he lost in his youth. On the Upper West Side, Heather examined the old people closely. Two old men playing chess in a delicatessen on 72nd Street—without Schiller’s book, she wouldn’t have noticed them; now she watched them, haunted, for a long time.

  This was the second city he had given to her; the second city to which he’d been her guide.

  Two days after they met, Schiller called her. He told her he’d found a copy of his last book. “And I’ve given the matter more thought. It would be my pleasure to help you with your project, if you’re still interested.”

  She wasn’t surprised to learn he’d changed his mind. She’d had a feeling he would. Taking the bus into New York to see him again, she felt that life was scandalously easy. If you know what you want, you can get it.

  10

  When Heather arrived at his apartment, Schiller seemed both courtly and nervous. He stood at arm’s length from her as he took her coat. He seemed to be trying to keep a lot of space between them, as if he were afraid she’d make another lunge at him to kiss his hand.

  Just as on her first visit, she was impressed by the library and depressed by the smell.

  The smell of the place—the smell, the smell, the smell! It wasn’t that it smelled bad. it didn’t smell rank or foul or unclean. It just smelled like a place where an old man lived.

  So much of human life is animal life: we respond to each other as animals. She felt as if she loved this man, but the animal in her was repelled by him.

  Without being obvious about it, Heather took several deep breaths of the sour, heavy air: so she could take it in, so she could experience it to the utmost, so she could forget it.

  “Usually,” he said, “when I see a fellow writer, I ask how the work is going. But if I were to ask you, it would sound self-interested.”

  As he said this he sounded owlish, professorial, arch. But she was thrilled to hear him call her a fellow writer.

  They went to the kitchen and he asked if she’d like something to drink. She asked if he had any club soda.

  “Jewish club soda,” he said. He poured two glasses of seltzer. But to put it this way is to describe too coarsely a subtle and elaborate procedure.

  He brought two glasses down from the cupboard, and he put ice cubes in each, handling the ice with metal tongs. Then he took a bottle of seltzer from the refrigerator.

  She’d never seen anyone open a bottle of seltzer as patiently as Schiller opened his. He turned the cap slightly; a hiss of air was released from the bottle, and, inside, a team of bubbles raced madly to the surface. He waited until the race was done, and then he turned the cap, very slightly, again. Another hiss of air, but weaker; another bubble race, but not so furious. Again he waited, and after he had waited, again he carefully released more air. The whole process took about a minute.

  This is what an artist is, she thought. This is the temperament you need to spend a whole day tinkering with a sentence, making sure that both the meaning and the music are right; to spend three or seven or ten years working on a book.

  She was aware that it might be a little extreme to be impressed by the way a man opens a bottle of seltzer, but she couldn’t help but be impressed. When she opened a seltzer bottle, she usually ended up wet.

  Sitting at his kitchen table, she took off her sweater. She was wearing a sleeveless shirt; she wanted to show off her bare arms. She had muscular arms for a woman, from years of working out.

  This is what a seductress is, she thought.

  It wasn’t that she wanted to seduce him—not literally. But flirting was a pleasure, and flirting with intelligent people—male or female—was one of the supreme pleasures of life. Ever since she was in high school—ever since fifth grade, really, with her failed poet of an English teacher—intellectual communion and intense flirtation had grown from the same root. She’d always had a love of learning, a love of knowledge, but it was always an embodied love: she desired this man’s learning or that woman’s. The desire to learn from people was always bound up with the desire to seem special to them. Heather didn’t merely want her teachers to teach her: she wanted them to single her out.

  She had broken a few of her teachers’ hearts with all this.

  “Shall we begin?” she said. She opened up her notebook. “I thought I’d start by asking some questions about how you write.”

  This was to break the ice. From reading the interviews in The Paris Review, she knew that writers like to talk about their work habits, perhaps more than about their work. Do you do your first drafts in longhand? (No, he said. Typewriter.) Do you prefer to work in the morning or at night? (Morning and afternoon.) Do you break for lunch?

  Here Schiller looked at her skeptically. “Do I break for lunch,” he said. It was clear he didn’t intend to answer.

  “Thomas Mann,” he said, “used to write fiction in a suit and tie. Now that you know that, do you know anything more about his work? I don’t think so. At any rate, it’s no substitute for two or three close readings of The Magic Mountain.”

  She didn’t know him well enough to know whether he was irritated with her or just teasing, but she understood that she shouldn’t ask him any more trivial questions.

  “When you start a book, what do you start with? Do you have the story clearly in mind?”

  This question, apparently, was permitted. “Never. I wish I did. I start with a character. Usually just a fleeting glimpse of a character. With Tenderness, I had a picture of a woman being asked to leave a museum because she’d run her hand over one of the statues. I had no idea who she was or why she was touching the statue. I wrote the book to find out.”

  “How do you find out?”

  “You just sit down at the typewriter and follow the character around. It’s like being a detective. You write page after page after page just finding out who they are. You wait for them to do something interesting.” He sighed. “That’s one reason why it takes me so long. Sometimes they don’t do anything interesting for a long time. And sometimes they never do. There are five or six books that I’ve begun but never finished. I would spend a year or two, even longer, following these characters around, but they finally never did anything that was interesting enough.”

  He looked unhappy. Try something else. “When you wrote Tenderness, were you reading a lot of D. H. Lawrence?”

  “D. H. Lawrence?”

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “A New York Jew,” he said, “imitates D. H. Lawrence at his peril.”

  “I didn’t say you imitated him. But there’s something in the flavor of your early work that reminds me of him.”

  “And what would that be?” He was trying to look amused, but he was interested. She could tell.

  She had first read Women in Love shortly after she’d read Tenderness. Reading the way you read when you’re sixteen, when you immerse yourself so deepl
y in a book that you hardly even notice the author’s name, she had put the two books together in her mind, and it never occurred to her that they were vastly different in stature. Even now, though she’d never admit this to any of her old literature professors, she still didn’t think of them as vastly different in stature. Maybe it was only because she’d read them at the same time of life, but the two books still kept each other company in her mind.

  “You remind me of Lawrence in the way you give your characters room. Room to reject things—even the things I suspect you value. Like the way Ellen walks away from her marriage. I had the feeling that you sympathized most of all with Ira. But you let Ellen walk away from him without portraying her as cruel.”

  “She did what she needed to do.”

  “That’s what I mean. You give your characters freedom. I think you’d give them the freedom to walk right out of your books if they wanted to.”

  “And that reminds you of D. H. Lawrence?”

  “I think D. H. Lawrence does the same thing. He doesn’t hover over them with judgments. At least not the characters he loves. What other people might see as cruelty, he sees as . . . people doing what they need to do.”

  Schiller considered this silently. Not quite silently: he was a large, overweight man, and he made a lot of noise when he breathed. Simply sitting and thinking seemed to require great labor.

  “I’m flattered and all that, but . . . no. In the fifties I was reading Chekhov, James, Turgenev—the great hesitators. At that time in my life I wouldn’t go near Lawrence.”

  “Why?” She felt hurt, the way you feel when you introduce two of your friends to each other and they don’t get along.

  “There was a period, in the fifties, when almost every writer in New York was trying to relinquish his mind. Everybody wanted to be intoxicated with ‘the wisdom of the blood.’ Isaac Rosenfeld sitting in an orgone box, trying to gather up his psychosexual energy. Norman Mailer writing ‘The White Negro,’ telling us that when a hoodlum robs a grocery store and beats the owner to death, he’s engaging in an act of existential bravery. I thought it was unseemly for Jewish intellectuals, of all people, to comport themselves that way. I know there’s more to Lawrence than the wisdom of the blood, but I was a very straitlaced young man, and in those days I simply had no time for him.”