Starting Out in the Evening Page 7

He had such a complicated reaction to this that he couldn’t speak. He disapproved of the metaphor: he wanted to tell her that one shouldn’t compare one’s personal unhappiness to the most horrible crime in history. Following closely behind that thought was a sense of sadness that his daughter wasn’t an intellectual, and that if he tried to tell her why he objected to her metaphor she would probably find him pedantic and cold. But competing with all this was the recognition that whatever he might think about the figure of speech she’d used, she was in pain. He was struck by his own obliviousness: she gave him so much delight, so much comfort, even when she was in misery herself, that he usually failed to see her misery until she called his attention to it with a shout. And he thought about how odd it was that Ariel could so often give joy when she wasn’t feeling any. Yeats wrote somewhere that “Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it.” Schiller had never understood what he’d meant by that, but the idea made sense when applied to Ariel. She gave joy more often than she felt it.

  He felt as if he should ask her over—that would be the fatherly thing to do. But he was looking forward to seeing the young woman tonight.

  Occasionally she could almost read his mind. “Can I come over?” she said.

  “I have an appointment tonight.” He didn’t want to say that he was seeing Heather; he didn’t want to say that the appointment was a party. “I should be home by eleven. I’d love to see you then.”

  “It’s okay,” she said forlornly. “I’m busy later. I have a date with Victor Mature. I have a client in your neighborhood tomorrow morning. Maybe we could have a little bite for lunch?”

  He hesitated, and she caught the hesitation. “I know. You have to write. A real writer doesn’t break for lunch. Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  In his own muted way, he was a tyrant, and he had always been a tyrant. Everyone around him had always been at the mercy of his inflexible schedule.

  “Maybe we could get together tomorrow night,” she said.

  “I’d like that.”

  “I’ll call you in the afternoon.”

  He felt ashamed of the way he had reduced her to begging for his time.

  When he got off the phone he felt dizzy and he lay down.

  Heather arrived a little before seven, and he buzzed her up. He was gift-wrapping a bottle of wine for the party; the elevators in the building were sluggish, and by the time she rang at his front door he was finished.

  She stood on his threshold, glowing from the cold. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose were touched with red; her eyes were so blue the blueness seemed unreal—tinted contact lenses, probably. With her cheeks so red you wanted to bite them, with her tigerishly glittering eyes, with her slightly sarcastic smile, she was almost unbearably full of life. “Hello old man,” she said, and even this, this meaningless greeting, he found wonderfully intimate and frank.

  “I’m glad the refrigerator took so long,” Schiller said. “I was still gift-wrapping the wine.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Did I say refrigerator?” he said. “I meant elevator.”

  “Refrigerator, elevator. It’s the same idea.”

  “Would you like a drink?” he said. He headed toward the kitchen; he wanted to hide his face. He was a senile old man, and someday he was going to leave the house without his pants. “I have some white wine,” he said, “here in the dishwasher.”

  The phone rang once—a tiny spurt, a half ring—and then stopped. He knew it was his daughter. When she was in distress she called people—not just him—and hung up before they could answer.

  Heather leaned against the refrigerator, smiling, as he opened the wine. She was alight with confidence, ambition, and an exhilarated consciousness of her own youth. She seemed ready to lay siege to the world.

  His daughter, even if the world began to show her its mildest face, would always be tangled in coils of unhappiness. He felt as if he bore the blame: he had failed as a father.

  The party was on 65th and Central Park West. In the cab Schiller felt proud to be able to give her this—a glimpse of literary New York. He wasn’t completely out of circulation yet.

  He also felt a little nervous about her. He wondered whether she’d impress people, or impress them merely as being very young. She impressed him, but in the cab he began to wonder whether this was just because she had touched his vanity. Would he look like an ass at the party—an elderly oaf trailing impotently after a teenybopper?

  “Teenybopper”: a word he thought of as newly coined, and which probably hadn’t been used by anyone else in twenty-five years.

  Leslie greeted him at the door; she looked as fresh as she had when she was his student, twenty years ago. She could have been the Ivory Girl. He introduced her to Heather, and Leslie, with her matchless social grace, greeted her as if she were a valued friend.

  Leslie put her arm through Schiller’s as she led them to a bedroom to leave their coats. “How are you?” she said. She had been his student in an American literature class in 1975, at Hunter College. After she graduated she went into publishing; she’d been an editor for twenty years now.

  The company she worked for didn’t value serious writing. For a few years she’d struggled to carve out a space for higher standards: she’d even started her own imprint, which, however, quickly succumbed to the pressures of the market. Eventually she accepted defeat, and tried to keep her spirits up by publishing amusing nonsense rather than pernicious nonsense. Much of her company’s revenue came from self-help books and celebrity confessions; she liked to publish parody self-help books, parody confessions.

  The way she treated Schiller varied according to how she was feeling about herself. She was always friendly, pleasant, interested; but he could tell that there were times when he had power in her mind, and times when he didn’t. Every year or two, when her literary conscience was aching, when she was in mourning for the life she’d envisioned when she’d gone into publishing in the first place, Schiller would rise up in her mind as a figure of lonely integrity, and she would call him up and ask him out to dinner at Aquavit or the Union Square Café—restaurants he never would have ventured into otherwise: they were beyond his means—and she’d compulsively tell him about how unhappy she was to be publishing the stuff she published. But when things were going well at work, when she was being praised around town as a gifted editor of hip and wicked satires, then she regarded Schiller—he could sense it—as an amiable fossil, a figure of fun. He was sure she sometimes joked about him behind his back. But the thought didn’t bother him much, because he was also sure that beneath all this wavering, at the core of her feelings for him, there was a steady affection and respect.

  The only thing that stayed constant was that she didn’t publish him. He didn’t take this personally: he knew that his work simply didn’t sell much, and that she had an obligation to publish things that would sell. Of course in his worst moods he lay awake cursing her and every other editor he knew, remembering how William Kennedy had been “discovered” after four novels, and Barbara Pym, and Henry Roth, and Daniel Fuchs—he would go over that long list of once-obscure writers who, because of one impassioned editor, had been rediscovered and turned into “hot,” best-selling authors, with profiles in Vanity Fair and front-page reviews in the Times Book Review of books they had written years or decades earlier. He would lie awake at three in the morning, burning with a sense of having been wronged. But tonight he kissed Leslie on the cheek and said, “Marvelous. You look wonderful.”

  “Are you working on a novel?” she asked brightly.

  “Always.”

  “What’s it about?” She said this with a teasing smile: he had always told his students that writers shouldn’t talk about what they were writing; that one was all too likely to talk one’s books away. He didn’t bother answering; she didn’t expect an answer. And really, she didn’t care.

  He looked around the room. There were several people he knew: editors, writers, critics. Only one person in th
e room was older than Schiller—Alfred Kazin, who was standing in a corner with a few young people, holding forth with his usual curious mixture of aggressiveness and shyness.

  “A man resembles his time more than he resembles his father,” says the Arab proverb: if this was true, then Schiller and Kazin resembled each other. They had been formed in the same fires. Children of immigrant parents, children of the Depression, mad for writing—in all these ways, they were members of the same tribe.

  Which is not to say that they were friends. Kazin had never paid Schiller any mind. For one thing, Kazin was almost ten years older than Schiller; for another, with his lifelong immersion in the work of the Great Dead—Thoreau and Whitman and Melville and Faulkner and Hemingway and Dreiser—he’d barely looked up at the living. He had admitted a few living novelists into his canon—Bellow, Mailer, Roth—but not Schiller. The only public notice Kazin had ever taken of his work was a passing remark in a broad overview of the literary scene he’d written in 1967, in which he’d lumped Schiller together with several other writers who were “conscientious craftsmen” but who were too preoccupied with their own personal questions to shed any light on the larger problems of the time.

  Schiller greeted him with a wave, and didn’t try to talk to him.

  Leslie was talking with Heather. “Technically, I’m still in school,” he heard Heather say. “I’m writing my master’s thesis.”

  Leslie looked genuinely interested. There was something wonderful about her, about the way she was so welcoming to someone she didn’t know. Even if her warmth was to some degree a social mask, it was the loveliest mask imaginable. “About what?”

  Heather pointed toward Schiller. “Him.”

  “Fantastic,” Leslie said, squeezing Schiller’s arm. “It’s about time, too. Soon they’ll have courses about your work.”

  “There’ll be entire departments devoted to the study of my work,” Schiller said.

  “Has he actually told you anything about himself?” Leslie said to Heather. “Have you managed to solve any of Leonard’s mysteries? Have you persuaded him to explain why he never leaves the house before dark?”

  “He can’t go out,” Heather said. “He only writes for ten minutes a day, but it’s an important ten minutes, and he never knows when they’ll come.”

  This was not so far from true—all too much of his day was spent pacing—but he didn’t know how she knew it.

  Leslie introduced Heather to Sam Dreier, an editor at Farrar Straus. Dreier was an extremely self-confident young man who wrote long, dyspeptic essays on the state of contemporary culture for The New York Review of Books, and who had turned down Schiller’s last novel. Schiller began to wonder whether bringing Heather here had been such a good idea. He was throbbing with a sense of his grievances; he couldn’t let them go. There had to be a mind exercise, a meditation, that would help you to stop seeing all things and all people through the lens of your own self-interest. All he could think was: that woman did me a good turn; that man let me down. It was all so irrelevant, really: each of us stoking our own little furnaces of ambition; but he couldn’t let it go.

  “Oh my God,” he heard Heather saying. She was kissing someone on the cheek. It was someone Schiller didn’t know: a heavyset woman in her middle or late thirties, in warriorlike makeup and leather pants.

  “This is Harriet Bandler,” Heather said to Schiller. “She’s an editor at Bomb. We met at a poetry reading last week.” The woman nodded at him; it was a chilling experience. There wasn’t a hint of interest in her eyes, not even a pretense.

  Bomb. An East Village literary magazine that he’d heard about but never seen. He retreated to the buffet and busied himself with a complicated seafood salad. Impaling a squirmy chunk of lobster meat and trying to wipe it onto a piece of bread, he felt stunned. Bomb! He had thought he was the only literary person Heather knew—he’d thought he was literature, in Heather’s eyes. But in the evenings, while he was in his kitchen heating up his pan of skim milk before bed, she was in bars in the East Village, making postmodern remarks with people from Bomb.

  With no one to talk to, he examined Leslie’s bookshelves. Bitterly.

  Every young editor in New York, Schiller had often thought, has the same library. All the books on their shelves are glossy hardcovers. There’s nothing wrong with their books: they’ve got Updike and Carver and Roth, Atwood and Drabble and Munro, Rushdie and Amis and Barnes: the cream of the last three generations. But that’s all they’ve got. The most ancient writer on their shelves is F. Scott Fitzgerald; or if they have anything older than that, it’s because they’ve mooched free copies of the new Library of America series, so they have James and Melville in those enormous tomes—two or three novels per volume—that are so unwieldy they can only be displayed, not read. What appalled Schiller about these libraries was that they featured nothing off the beaten track: no tattered paperbacks; no evidence of distinctive personal interests; no tokens of long intellectual detours passionately explored. If under cover of night you switched the libraries of any two young editors in New York, neither of them would notice.

  This, at least, was how it seemed to Schiller. But part of what was making him so mad, he knew, was that Leslie’s alphabetized collection went from J. D. Salinger to Mona Simpson. She used to have his books on her shelf, but he’d been removed to make room for the young.

  Across the room, Heather was still talking to the woman from Bomb, whose name he had already forgotten. Heather was looking at her with the same intensity she habitually trained on Schiller. She was running her hands through her own hair. Somehow she looked as if she’d just gone swimming.

  He was jealous. The realization made him put down his plate.

  He told himself that it wasn’t logical to be jealous: she was talking, after all, to a woman. But then he realized how naive that was. So what if it was a woman? The sexuality of the young was incomprehensible. Browsing aimlessly through a list of academic job openings the other day, he’d noticed that Cornell University was seeking a specialist in “queer theory.” A branch of thought that wasn’t part of the canon when he was going to school. People under thirty, in Schiller’s view, were probably all versed in queer theory. They were sexually fluid: they didn’t care if their mates were male or female, because they thought the very idea of gender was an arbitrary social fiction.

  Though one might have thought that the fact that Heather was talking to a woman would give his jealousy a slightly new inflection, a new texture, he discovered now that jealousy comes in only one flavor.

  And the flavor doesn’t fade with time. It felt exactly as it had always felt. He remembered an afternoon of agony at Camp Kinder Ring—a socialist youth camp he went to in the mid-1930s—after he saw Rachel Solomon holding hands with Bernie Sachs. He had stalked away in anguish when everyone was singing folk songs, and he’d spent a long afternoon on the mountain, throwing rocks at birds.

  He talked to a few people, for ten minutes, twenty; Heather was still in animated conversation with her friend. She was puzzlingly well connected for someone who’d come to New York only last month. He wanted to slip out without letting her know—which, of course, would be nothing more than a bid for her attention. At a party in Montrouge in 1956, Stella had spent the evening flirting with a young philosopher; Schiller abruptly told her he was going home, and she blithely said she could get a ride later from . . . what was his name? Pierre-Antoine. What stupid faggy names those Frenchmen had! Schiller went out and sat in their little car, that tiny white Renault, without putting the key in the ignition; he sat huddled up in his coat as the snow battered the windshield, covering it up completely so he couldn’t see.

  And now Heather was laughing with this woman, rolling her head around as if she had a crick in her neck—in some ritual of body language that Schiller didn’t comprehend, but that was probably second nature to the young.

  Schiller finally got into a conversation he could enjoy, with a couple named Paula and Martin Cohen
. Paula Cohen was one of the few editors Schiller respected: she was a woman who fought for her convictions. A few of her writers had brought in a great deal of money for her company; this gave her the freedom to publish and nurture the other writers in her stable, most of whom didn’t sell much. She fought for her writers; she kept their work in print. Schiller would have liked to work with her, but his novels had never been her cup of tea: she preferred more avant-garde stuff. He regretted this, but he wasn’t bitter about it, because he respected her integrity: if she didn’t publish him it was for literary rather than commercial reasons. Schiller liked her a great deal. He spent ten or fifteen minutes catching up with her and her husband, and his soul was rested.

  He drifted back toward Heather, who was still talking with that scary young woman from Bomb. A violent light of pleasure was in Heather’s eyes. She looked up as he approached; he was on the alert for evidence that she didn’t want him there, but he didn’t detect any.

  “I need to go,” he said. “It’s late for an old man.” Which was a stupid thing to say: there’s nothing more annoying than an old person who makes lame jests about his age. “When I was young, back in the Middle Ages.” “When I was young—I was young once, you know.” Remarks like this irritate you when you’re young, but somehow you can’t help making them when you’re old.

  “But there’s no need for you to leave,” he said.

  “No, I need to come back with you,” she said. “I left my bag in your kitchen.”

  As they got their coats he was seething, and he could barely look at her. She was leaving with him because she’d forgotten her bag. Yes: it was the same feeling, down to the sensation of being physically bruised, that he’d had when Rachel Solomon toyed with his emotions more than fifty years ago. Rachel Solomon, whom he had stayed in touch with. Whose grandchildren he had met. Whose burial he had attended, seven years ago, on a hilltop graveyard in Paramus.

  And he himself was still alive, at the mercy of the same emotions she had stirred in him sixty years earlier. The child he had been was still alive in him, and Rachel was dead. Simple, banal, unfathomable.