Starting Out in the Evening Read online

  She wasn’t happy about this answer. She had never heard of Isaac Rosenfeld, and Mailer had never meant much to her—his writing seemed both too literary and too crude, a weird combination of filigree and sweat.

  But it wasn’t just that she wasn’t interested in those people. It unsettled her to hear Schiller putting himself in this context. When she thought about Schiller as a writer, she liked to imagine him in the “one big room” that E. M. Forster speaks of in Aspects of the Novel—the room in which all novelists, past and present, are writing side by side. In her mind Schiller’s place was somewhere in eternity, next to Lawrence and Melville, not in the 1950s, next to Isaac Rosenfeld.

  “I’m a little tired,” he said. He stood up—lifted himself up with an effort, keeping one hand on the table to steady himself. “Why don’t we make this your last question? We can get together again next week if you like.”

  “Ellen, in your first book, seems very similar to Beth in your second. But no character resembling her appears in either of your next two books. Why not?”

  It was an obvious question: it was a question, she would have thought, that he’d been asked many times before. But Schiller seemed surprised. “You really have read the books,” he said.

  “What did you think I’d read? The Cliff Notes?”

  And then she realized how stupid she’d been. She knew that his wife had died in the seventies. The character had never reappeared because she was drawn from life, and her real-life model had died. And he was still in mourning.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything, and this made her sure that she’d been right to apologize.

  Schiller looked unsettled. He went to the sink and ran the water and filled a glass. She understood that he was doing this so he could keep his back turned to her for a minute.

  She had the power to unsettle him. It was almost dizzying. This man, who had been reading and writing and thinking before her parents were born, still had the ability to be shaken.

  He sat back down at the table. She had arrived in the late afternoon, when there was still natural light in the room. Now it was early evening. They sat without speaking in the dimly lit room.

  She was touched by his delicacy. Maybe this is what an artist is, she thought. It reminded her of something she’d once read, about how an artist doesn’t really need a great deal of experience. One heartbreak can produce many novels. But you have to have a heart that can break.

  11

  She came to see him two afternoons a week. Her visits seemed to mean a lot to him. He seemed excited when he opened the door, and when she called on the phone she always heard a little lift in his voice, a note of happiness and surprise.

  She always came with questions. Sometimes he answered them, and sometimes he answered them with questions of his own, which she would answer, slowly, thoughtfully, as if it were she who was being interviewed. What began as a series of interviews became a series of conversations.

  She stopped bringing her notebook. She was flattered that he allowed her to keep visiting. When she mentioned this on the phone to a friend, her friend said, “You may not believe this, but he probably doesn’t have that many twenty-four-year-old women coming to worship him.”

  The more she saw of him, the more she was puzzled by his life.

  She had a mental picture of the artist’s life, and it was nothing like Schiller’s. He didn’t drink; he didn’t smoke; he didn’t seem to do anything to excess. The only thing excessive about him was his cautiousness.

  He was a man of routines. When she visited him, she couldn’t show up before four-fifteen, because he wrote—“tried to write,” as he put it—between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon, every day of the week.

  He seemed to have a dull life. She saw that his calendar was mostly blank. He got together with his daughter about once a week; he had a friend in the hospital he visited every Friday. But his life consisted, for the most part, of writing and reading. He wrote during the day, read at night, went to bed early, and did the same thing the next day.

  She would have thought his life would be more romantic. He seemed to know other writers, but he didn’t hang around with them. The high point of his social life, as far as she could determine, was when, after four, he took his daily “constitutional”—a little walk down Broadway, or into Riverside Park if the weather was nice—and then stopped off at the Argo coffee shop for a green salad, a baked potato, and a fruit cup, maybe with some Sanka as a treat. After that he went home, read, watched the news, and went to bed. And that was his life. The monotony of it, the unvarying sameness, would have driven her out of her skull.

  What did this man have to do with the man who had written the books? The books—the two she loved, at least—were about freedom, about the value of a certain kind of recklessness. She sometimes felt as if she were visiting, not the man who had written the books, but his grandfather. Don’t artists have to live, not just write?

  He had lived, apparently, twenty or thirty years ago. When he talked about his life as a writer, he all too often dropped the names of Famous Fossils He Had Known. It distressed her—first, because he was trying too hard (he’d tell her about how he had published his first stories in “Saul’s old magazine, The Noble Savage” as if he were racking up coolness points by not saying “Saul Bellow”), and second, because it showed how out of touch he was. He didn’t realize that these names didn’t impress her. In the academic circles in which she’d moved until now, most of these people were considered passé. They were old dead white men, even the ones who were still alive.

  But of course, if they were, he was too. One afternoon he excused himself to make a call about a doctor’s appointment and left her in the kitchen alone. She opened the refrigerator to put back a carton of juice. The inside of his refrigerator was a sad place. Skim milk, fat-free yogurt, Pritikin spaghetti sauce, carrots, seltzer, caffeine-free Diet Coke, medicine, not much else. It was the refrigerator of a man who was worried about his health.

  It was also the refrigerator of a man from another generation. The kind of man who, though he might live alone for thirty years, would never really learn how to cook.

  “Are you looking for something to eat?” Schiller said, standing at the kitchen door.

  She closed the refrigerator, with what she was sure was a guilty look on her face.

  “Ah,” he said. “You were engaging in refrigerator analysis.”

  One evening she took a walk with him and they ended up in the Argo. While Schiller was sipping his Sanka, a man walked over to their table—a very tall man with an expensive suit and an expensive tan. “I got your message,” he said to Schiller. “Morally earnest as always. That’s why I offer you these things. I love to hear how considerately you say no.” He was bouncing on his toes, as if he was nervous. He didn’t seem worthy of the suit.

  “It was nice of you to think of me, though,” Schiller said.

  The man patted Schiller on the shoulder. “Well, if you ever do decide to sell your soul, you know where to find me.”

  “What was that about?” Heather said after he left.

  “A high school friend of my daughter’s. He edits some sort of advertising supplement for American Express. He asked me to write something for it.”

  “He wanted you to write advertising copy?” Heather was amused.

  “Not exactly. Just a few paragraphs about Central Park. I wouldn’t have had to mention American Express, but the piece would have been part of the supplement, so it would have been advertising all the same.”

  “A few paragraphs about Central Park? That’s all?”

  “Yes. It would have paid nicely, too.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad to me. Why didn’t you do it?”

  “I have this old-fashioned idea that art and commerce are at war.”

  She sipped her coffee and tried to take this in. The younger man, despite his Armani suit and his midwinter tan, had seemed nervous—jangly and eag
er to please. Schiller, old and pale and fat and frail, had seemed rocklike. If you stick to your guns in life—this was the moral she drew—you become strong.

  She was moved by his dedication to the life he had chosen. She wondered if she could turn down easy money for the sake of an ideal.

  She decided that yes, she could.

  The people she admired in his books were people who walked away from the lives that other people expected them to live—Ellen in his first novel, the bohemian painters in his second. He had dwelled—in those early books, at least—on the glory of choosing your own life, even when it takes ruthlessness to do it.

  But now it occurred to her that he had only written about the beginning of the journey. He had never shown the consequences of the choice—never shown what happened to these people ten and twenty and thirty years down the line. And she felt that she was seeing the consequences, every day, in what she was seeing of him.

  You seize your freedom in a spirit of rebelliousness, exuberance, defiant joy. But to live that choice—over the weeks and months and years to come—requires different qualities. It requires that you turn hard, turn rigid. Because it isn’t a choice that the world encourages, you have to wear a suit of armor to defend it.

  When they were leaving the restaurant, he held the door for her, and he continued to hold it open for a scruffy teenage boy in an army surplus jacket who was leaving at the same time. In her five or six visits, which had included two or three trips to coffee shops, Heather had never seen Schiller precede anyone, male or female, through a door. He lived by his own code, with intricate proprieties and prohibitions. It might have been outmoded, but it was his. His social bearing seemed of a piece, somehow, with his unwillingness to write advertising copy. Even in your smallest gestures, you express your sense of honor, if you have one.

  They walked in silence across the street, and as she mused on all this her feeling of respect for him grew, and her feeling of sympathy for him—he seemed like a modern Don Quixote.

  Back in his living room, he looked at his watch, but she didn’t feel ready to leave.

  “I’ve never told you why I liked your work so much,” she said. “Your novels set me free.”

  She told him about it: how his books had helped her find the courage to live her own life, not anyone else’s. “I felt as if your books were written just for me. I’ve always thought the subject of your books was freedom. And freedom has always been my theme in life.”

  It was only after she said this that she realized it was the same thing she had said to herself in the mirror on her fourteenth birthday. She felt her face grow warm, but Schiller was smiling, and he wasn’t smiling unkindly.

  And though this wasn’t quite what she’d had in mind at the time—he wasn’t the man she’d pictured when she first spoke those words—it was close enough. He could have been the man for her, if only he’d been about four hundred years younger. Whenever she spoke to him, she could feel the pleasure he took in looking at her, and she could feel how carefully, how closely, he listened. And if she looked only at his eyes—ignoring the great Humpty Dumpty dome of his skull and the layers of his cheeks and chins—she could see the young man he used to be, the man with whom anything might have been possible.

  They were standing awkwardly in the middle of the living room. She was looking into his eyes. There was something soft and welcoming and puzzled there.

  She almost wanted him to touch her. She didn’t desire him, she didn’t want to touch him, but she almost wanted him to touch her. She wanted to close her eyes and imagine that he was the man he used to be. His eyes were the eyes he’d had when he was young; and if, in his youth, he had known how to touch a woman, his hands must have retained that knowledge. How strange.

  She almost said, “Do you want to touch me?”

  You could transform any relationship with a word or two.

  “It’s time for you to go,” he said.

  On the bus, heading back toward Hoboken, she said to herself: “Are you crazy? What were you thinking?”

  Her unconscious mind did nothing to clarify matters: that night she dreamed she was having an affair with a four-year-old girl.

  “This is wrong,” she told the girl, whose name, for whatever reason, was Bean.

  “We love each other,” Bean said. “How can that be wrong?”

  12

  In one of the dialogues of Plato, Socrates remarks that the task of the philosopher is to “practice dying.” The philosopher must wean himself from his attachments to the phenomenological world—the realm of mere appearances—and turn his thoughts toward the realm of the unchanging, the transcendent, the eternal.

  By this standard, Schiller would have made a good philosopher. He had practiced dying for a long time.

  During the years in which he had learned his craft, he had gone without most of the normal material comforts. He and Stella and Ariel had lived without a television until Ariel was in her teens. He still didn’t have an air conditioner. His manual typewriter had served him well since the 1960s. He hadn’t bought a new suit in fifteen years.

  When his books went out of print he had learned, painfully, to starve his own need for recognition, until he thought he had finally killed it.

  And after Stella died, he had weaned himself, he thought, of the need for romantic love. Ariel, a few old friends, and a few old students who had become old friends provided all the warmth he desired.

  All that remained was his work. And now he just wanted to finish one book. If he could finish the thing he was working on, he thought, he would be ready to die.

  He thought he’d be able to finish it shortly after his trip to France. If he’d wanted to, he could have simply imagined what it would be like to keep the appointment he’d made with Stella, and saved himself the expense of actually keeping it. But honoring their agreement was important to him. There are obligations that extend beyond the grave.

  He was acutely conscious of the uncertain state of his health: he knew he might not have much time. He wanted to live without distractions; he wanted to focus all the life-force he had left on this last book. But now it was hard to concentrate. There was something new in his life. There was the painful distraction of desire.

  He had found himself ridiculously interested in impressing this young woman. She would blow in like a little whirlwind, eager to hear him say wise things; and he wanted to have wise things to say—he wanted to be worthy of her admiration.

  More than that. He wanted her to be in love with him. Idiotic, but true.

  “Ah, to be sixty again,” he said, as he stooped, with difficulty, to pick up a little piece of fluff from the floor.

  No: even sixty would be too old. If he were forty, or even fifty, he could be a dashing older man; he could introduce her to a wider life. But as it was, what could he give her? Not very much. He could give her his back issues of Modern Maturity . . .

  It was absurd. There was something undignified about this feeling. He was almost fifty years older than she was. Shouldn’t those years have given him wisdom, wisdom that would make it impossible for him to be interested in a mere girl? Well, they hadn’t.

  She wasn’t even beautiful. If someone else, someone less spirited, less bold, had inhabited her body, she wouldn’t have been attractive at all. But as it was she had a sort of radiant ugliness that he found captivating.

  Sometimes he had the odd feeling that she was somehow attracted to him. But that was impossible. Put it out of your mind. If you can’t put it out of your mind, then look at your face in the mirror. That will cure you of your delusions.

  She was picking him up that evening, and he was taking her to a party.

  At about two in the afternoon he gave up all pretense of trying to work, and he took another shower, brushed his teeth again, gargled with Listerine, clipped a few hairs from his nostrils and earlobes, tidied up the house, and opened the windows to freshen the air.

  The stirrings of desire, after a long frost. One morning
this week, for the first time in months, he’d awakened with an erection.

  He had to be careful not to make a fool of himself.

  As he was tidying up he got a call from Ariel.

  “Pain,” she said.

  “What pain, my dear?”

  “Spiritual pain. Emotional pain. The pain of being thirty-nine.”

  He was smiling. “It’s not nice to complain about being thirty-nine to a man who’s past seventy.”

  “You’re a young seventy-one. I’m an old thirty-nine.”

  Neither statement was true.

  Behind her he heard traffic, sirens, horns.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at my office.”

  Which was her way of saying she was at a pay phone. With the exception of drug dealers and the city’s few remaining bookies, she was the foremost patron of Manhattan’s pay phones: she’d call you from the street and chat for half an hour, feeding nickels into the phone every five minutes when the mechanical voice cut in.

  “Pain,” she sang.

  “I’m sorry you’re in pain,” he said, but he was laughing.

  “It’s not funny! You don’t know what it’s like. I’m thirty-nine, and my womb is drying up.”

  He felt a sudden spasm of discomfort. It wasn’t the kind of thing a daughter should say to a father.

  “I’m coming to the end of the line here,” she said. “There’s a Holocaust on my womb.”