Oracle Night

by Paul Auster

  The other two tenants had also been spared. It seemed that everyone had bars on their back windows but us, and therefore we’d been the logical target – trusting dumbbells who hadn’t bothered to take the proper precautions. They all felt sorry for us, but the implicit message was that we’d deserved what we’d got.

  I went back into the apartment, even more horrified now that I could survey the mess in a calmer state of mind. One by one, details I had overlooked earlier suddenly jumped out at me, further aggravating the effect of the intrusion. A standing lamp to the left of the sofa had been tipped over and broken, a flower vase lay smashed on the rug, and even our pathetic, nineteen-dollar toaster had vanished from its spot on the kitchen counter. I called Grace at her office, wanting to prepare her for the shock, but no one answered, which seemed to imply that she had already left and was on her way home. Not knowing what else to do with myself, I began straightening up the apartment. It must have been about six-thirty at that point, and even though I was expecting Grace to walk through the door at any moment, I worked steadily for over an hour, sweeping up debris, returning the books to the shelves, righting the mattress and putting it back on the bed, sliding the drawers back into the bureau. At first, I was glad to be making so much progress while Grace was still gone. The more effectively I could put the place in order, the less disconcerting it would be for her when she walked into the apartment. But then I finished what I had set out to do, and she still hadn’t come home. It was seven-forty-five by then, long past the time when a subway breakdown could have accounted for her failure to reach Brooklyn. It was true that she sometimes worked late, but she always called to let me know when she would be leaving the office, and there was no message from her on the answering machine. I called her number at Holst & McDermott again, just to make sure, but again no one picked up. She wasn’t at work, and she hadn’t come home, and all of a sudden the break-in seemed to be of no importance, a minor irritation from the distant past. Grace was missing, and by the time eight o’clock rolled around, I had already worked myself into a feverish, all-out panic.

  I made a number of calls – to friends, co-workers, even to her cousin Lily in Connecticut – but only the last person I talked to had any information to give me. Greg Fitzgerald was head of the art department at Holst & McDermott, and according to him, Grace had called the office just after nine that morning to tell him she couldn’t make it to work that day. She was very sorry, but something urgent had come up that required her immediate attention. She didn’t say what the something was, but when Greg asked her if she was all right, Grace had apparently hesitated before answering. ‘I think so,’ she’d finally said, and Greg, who had known her for years and was extremely fond of her (a gay man half in love with his prettiest female colleague), had found the response puzzling. ‘Not like her’ was the phrase he used, I think, but when he heard the mounting alarm in my voice, he tried to reassure me by adding that Grace had ended the conversation by telling him she would be back in the office tomorrow morning. ‘Don’t worry, Sidney,’ Greg continued. ‘When Grace says she’s going to do something, she does it. I’ve been working with her for five years, and she hasn’t let me down once.’

  I sat up all night waiting for her, half out of my mind with dread and confusion. Before talking to Fitzgerald, I had convinced myself that Grace had been harmed in some violent way – mugged, molested, knocked down by a speeding truck or cab, a victim of one of the countless brutalities that can befall a woman alone on the streets of New York. That seemed unlikely now, but if she wasn’t dead or in physical danger, what had happened to her, and why hadn’t she called to tell me where she was? I kept going over the conversation we’d had that morning on our walk to the subway, trying to make sense of her curiously emotional statements about trust, remembering the kisses she’d given me and how, without warning, she’d broken free of my arms and started running along the sidewalk, not even bothering to turn around and wave good-bye before disappearing down the stairs. It was the behavior of someone who had come to an abrupt and impulsive decision, whose mind had been made up about something but who was still full of doubts and uncertainties, so shaky in her resolve that she hadn’t dared to pause for a single backward glance, fearing that one more look at me might destroy her determination to do whatever it was she was planning to do. I understood that much, I felt, but beyond that point I knew nothing. Grace had become a blank to me, and every thought I had about her that night quickly turned into a story, a gruesome little drama that played on my deepest anxieties about our future – which rapidly seemed to be turning into no future at all.

  She came home a few minutes past seven, roughly two hours after I had resigned myself to the fact that I would never see her again. She was wearing different clothes from the ones she’d had on the previous morning, and she looked fresh and beautiful, with bright red lipstick, elegantly made-up eyes, and a hint of rouge on her cheeks. I was sitting on the sofa in the living room, and when I saw her walk in I was so taken aback that I couldn’t speak, was literally unable to get any words out of my mouth. Grace smiled at me – calmly, resplendently, in full possession of herself – and then walked over to where I was sitting and kissed me on the lips.

  ‘I know I’ve put you through hell,’ she said, ‘but it had to be this way. It won’t ever happen again, Sidney. I promise.’

  She sat down next to me and kissed me again, but I couldn’t bring myself to put my arms around her. ‘You have to tell me where you were,’ I said, startled by the anger and bitterness in my voice. ‘No more silence, Grace. You have to talk.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said.

  ‘Yes you can. You have to.’

  ‘Yesterday morning, you said you trusted me. Go on trusting me, Sid. That’s all I ask.’

  ‘When people say that, it means they’re hiding something. Always. It’s like a mathematical law, Grace. What is it? What are you holding back from me?’

  ‘Nothing. I just needed to be alone yesterday, that’s all. I needed time to think.’

  ‘Fine. Go ahead and think. But don’t torture me by not calling to tell me where you are.’

  ‘I wanted to, but then I couldn’t. I don’t know why. It was like I had to pretend I didn’t know you anymore. Just for a little while. It was a rotten thing to do, but it helped me, it really did.’

  ‘Where did you spend the night?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that, believe me. I was alone. I checked into a room at the Gramercy Park Hotel.’

  ‘What floor? What was the number of the room?’

  ‘Please, Sid, don’t do that. It’s not right.’

  ‘I could call them and find out, couldn’t I?’

  ‘Of course you could. But that would mean you didn’t believe me. And then we’d be in trouble. But we’re not in trouble. That’s the whole point. We’re good, and the fact that I’m here now proves it.’

  ‘I suppose you were thinking about the baby….’

  ‘Among other things, yes.’

  ‘Any new thoughts?’

  ‘I’m still on the fence. I’m still not sure which way to jump.’

  ‘I spent a few hours with John yesterday, and he thinks you should have an abortion. He was very insistent about it.’

  Grace looked both surprised and upset. ‘John? But he doesn’t know I’m pregnant.’

  ‘I told him.’

  ‘Oh, Sidney. You shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘Why not? He’s our friend, isn’t he? Why shouldn’t he know?’

  She hesitated for several seconds before answering my question. ‘Because it’s our secret,’ she finally said, ‘and we haven’t decided what we’re going to do about it. I haven’t even told my parents. If John talks to my father, things could get awfully complicated.’

  ‘He won’t. He’s too worried about you to do that.’

  ‘Worried?’

  ‘Yes, worried. In the same way I’m worried. You haven’t been yourself, Grace. Anyone who loves you is bound t
o be worried.’

  She was becoming slightly less evasive as the conversation continued, and I meant to go on prodding her until the full story came out, until I understood what had driven her to run off on her mysterious twenty-four-hour fugue. So much was at stake, I felt, and if she didn’t come clean and tell me the truth, how was I going to be able to trust her anymore? Trust was the one thing she demanded of me, and yet ever since she’d broken down in the cab on Saturday night, it had become impossible not to feel that something was wrong, that Grace was slowly crumbling under the pressure of a burden she refused to share with me. For a little while, the pregnancy had seemed to account for it, but I was no longer certain about that now. It was something else, something in addition to the baby, and before I started tormenting myself with thoughts about other men and clandestine affairs and sinister betrayals, I needed her to tell me what was going on. Unfortunately, the conversation was suddenly interrupted at that point, and I was no longer in a position to pursue my line of thought. It happened just after I told Grace how worried I was about her. I took hold of her hand, and as I pulled her toward me to kiss her on the cheek, she finally noticed that the standing lamp wasn’t where it was supposed to be, that the area to the left of the sofa was vacant. I had to tell her about the burglary, and just like that the entire mood shifted, and instead of talking to her about one thing, I had no choice but to talk to her about another.

  At first, Grace seemed to take the news calmly. I showed her the gap in the bookshelf where the first editions had been, pointed to the end table on which the portable TV had stood, then led her into the kitchen and informed her that we would have to buy a new toaster. Grace opened the drawers below the counter (which I had neglected to do) and discovered that our best set of silverware, which had been given to us by her parents as a first-anniversary present, was also missing. That was when anger took hold of her. She kicked the bottom drawer with her right foot and started to curse. Grace seldom used four-letter words, but for a minute or two that morning she was beside herself, and she let go with a barrage of invective that surpassed anything I’d heard from her lips before. Then we went into the bedroom, and her anger spilled over into tears. Her lower lip started to tremble when I told her about the jewelry box, but when she saw that the lithograph was gone as well, she sat down on the bed and started to cry. I did my best to comfort her, promising to look for another van Velde as soon as possible, but I knew that nothing could ever replace the one she’d bought as a twenty-year-old on her first trip to Paris: a swooping configuration of variegated, glowing blues, punctuated by a roundish blank in the center and a broken streak of red. I had been living with it for several years by then, and I had never grown tired of looking at it. It was one of those works that kept giving you something, that never seemed to use itself up.12

  It took her about fifteen or twenty minutes to pull herself together, and then she went into the bathroom to wash away the streaked mascara and reassemble her face. I waited for her in the bedroom, thinking we would be able to go on with our conversation there, but when she returned it was only to announce that she was running late and had to go to work. I tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t relent. She’d promised Greg she would be there this morning, she said, and after he’d been nice enough to give her yesterday off, she didn’t want to take further advantage of his friendship. A promise was a promise, she said, to which I answered that we still had things to talk about. Maybe we did, she replied, but they could wait until she came home from work. As if to prove her good intentions, she sat down on the bed before leaving, threw her arms around me, and hugged me tightly for what felt like a long time. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said. ‘I’m really okay now. Yesterday did me a lot of good.’

  I took my morning pills, returned to the bedroom, and slept until the middle of the afternoon. I didn’t have any plans for the day, and the sole business on my agenda was to pass the time as quietly as possible until Grace returned home. She had promised to go on talking to me that evening, and if a promise was a promise, then I meant to hold her to it and do what I could to pull the truth from her. I wasn’t terribly optimistic, but whether I failed or not, I wasn’t going to get anywhere unless I buckled down and made an effort.

  The sky was bright and clear that afternoon, but the temperature had dropped down into the 40s, and for the first time since the day in question, I could feel a touch of winter in the air, a foretaste of things to come. Once again, my normal sleep pattern had been disrupted, and I was in worse shape than usual – unsteady in my movements, at a loss for breath, tottering precariously with each step I took. It was as though I had regressed to some earlier stage of my recovery and was back in the period of swirling colors and fractured, unstable perceptions. I felt exceedingly vulnerable, as though the very air were a threat, as though an unexpected gust of wind could blow right through me and leave my body scattered in pieces on the ground.

  I bought a new toaster in an appliance store on Court Street, and that simple transaction used up nearly all my physical resources. By the time I’d chosen one we could afford and had dug the money out of my wallet and handed it to the woman behind the counter, I was trembling and felt close to tears. She asked if anything was wrong. I said no, but my answer must have been unconvincing, for the next thing I knew she was asking me if I wanted to sit down and drink a glass of water. She was a fat woman in her early sixties with the faint trace of a mustache on her upper lip, and the shop she presided over was a dim and dusty hole-in-the-wall, a run-down family business with nearly half the shelves denuded of stock. Generous as her offer was, I didn’t want to stay there another minute. I thanked her and moved on, staggering toward the exit and then leaning against the door to shove it open with my shoulder. I stood on the sidewalk for a few moments after that, gulping down deep drafts of the chilly air as I waited for the spell to pass. In retrospect, I realized it must have looked as if I’d been on the verge of blacking out.

  I bought a slice of pizza and a large Coke at Vinny’s two doors down, and by the time I stood up and left I was feeling a little better. It was about three-thirty then, and Grace wouldn’t be home until six at the earliest. I didn’t have it in me to trudge around the neighborhood and shop for groceries, and I knew I wasn’t up to preparing dinner. Eating out was an indulgence for us then, but I figured we could order in some take-out food from the Siam Garden, a Thai restaurant that had just opened up near Atlantic Avenue. I knew that Grace would understand. Whatever difficulties we might have been having, she was concerned enough about my health not to hold that kind of thing against me.

  Once I’d polished off the last of my pizza, I decided to walk over to the Clinton Street branch of the public library to see if they had any books by the novelist Trause had mentioned the day before, Sylvia Monroe. Two titles were listed in the card catalogue, Night in Madrid and Autumn Ceremony, but neither one had been checked out in over ten years. I skimmed them both, sitting at one of the long wooden tables in the reading room, and quickly discovered that Sylvia Monroe had nothing in common with Sylvia Maxwell. Monroe’s books were conventional mystery stories, written in the style of Agatha Christie, and as I read through the arch, wittily contrived prose of the two novels, I felt increasingly disappointed, angry with myself for having assumed there could be a similarity between the two Sylvia M. s. At the very least, I thought maybe I’d read a book by Sylvia Monroe as a boy and had since forgotten about it, only to dredge up an unconscious memory of her in the person of Sylvia Maxwell, the pretend author of the pretend Oracle Night. But it seemed I’d plucked Maxwell out of thin air and Oracle Night was an original story, with no connection to any novel other than itself. I probably should have felt relieved, but I didn’t.

  When I returned to the apartment at five-thirty, there was a message from Grace on the answering machine. Bluntly and quietly, in a series of simple, forthright sentences, she dismantled the architecture of unhappiness that had been growing up around us for the past seve
ral days. She was calling from her office, she said, and had to talk in a low voice, ‘but if you can hear me, Sid,’ she began, ‘there are four things I want you to know. First, I haven’t stopped thinking about you since I left the house this morning. Second, I’ve decided to have the baby, and we’re never going to use the word abortion again. Third, don’t bother to make dinner. I’m leaving the office at five sharp, and from there I’m going down to Balducci’s to buy some nice ready-made stuff that we can heat up in the oven. If the subway doesn’t break down, I should be home by six-twenty, six-thirty. Fourth, make sure Mr. Johnson’s ready for action. I’m going to attack you the minute I walk in the door, my love, so be prepared. Miss Virginia’s achin’ to get naked with her man.’

  Miss Virginia was one of my pet names for her, but I hadn’t used it since the first or second year of our marriage, and certainly not since my return from the hospital. Grace was evoking early good times with that phrase, and it moved me to know that she remembered it, since it had generally been reserved for moments of postcoital decompression: Grace rising from the bed after we had finished making love and strolling across the floor on the way to the bathroom, immodest, languid, happy in the nakedness of her body, and sometimes (it was coming back to me now), I would jokingly call her Miss Nude Virginia, which always made her laugh, and then, inevitably, she would stop to strike a comic cheesecake pose, which in turn would always get a laugh from me. In effect, Miss Virginia was shorthand for Miss Nude Virginia, and whenever I called her Miss Virginia in public, it was always a secret communication about our sex life, a reference to the bare skin under her clothes, an homage to her beautiful, much-adored body. Now, immediately after announcing that she wasn’t going to end the pregnancy, she had reanimated the mythic personage of Miss Virginia, and by juxtaposing the one statement against the other, she was telling me that she was mine again, mine as before and yet mine in a different way as well, subtly announcing (as only Grace could) that she was prepared to enter the next phase of our marriage, that a new era of our life together was about to begin.