Oracle Night

by Paul Auster

  2. John was fifty-six. Not young, perhaps, but not old enough to think of himself as old, especially since he was aging well and still looked like a man in his mid-to late forties. I had known him for three years by then, and our friendship was a direct result of my marriage to Grace. Her father had been at Princeton with John in the years immediately following the Second World War, and although the two of them worked in different fields (Grace’s father was a District Federal Court judge in Charlottesville, Virginia), they had remained close ever since. I therefore met him as a family friend, not as the well-known novelist I had been reading since high school – and whom I still considered to be one of the best writers we had.

  He had published six works of fiction between 1952 and 1975, but nothing now for more than seven years. John had never been fast, however, and just because the break between books had been somewhat longer than usual, that didn’t mean he wasn’t working. I had spent several afternoons with him since my release from the hospital, and sprinkled in among our conversations regarding my health (about which he was deeply concerned, unflagging in his solicitude), his twenty-year-old son, Jacob (who had caused him much anguish of late), and the struggles of the floundering Mets (an abiding mutual obsession), he had dropped enough hints about his current activities to suggest that he was thoroughly wrapped up in something, devoting the better part of his time to a project that was well under way – and perhaps now coming to an end.

  3. I happened to meet Grace in a publisher’s office as well, which might explain why I chose to give Bowen the job I did. It was January 1979, not long after I had finished my second novel. My first novel and an earlier book of stories had been brought out by a small publisher in San Francisco, but now I had moved on to a larger, more commercial house in New York, Holst & McDermott. About two weeks after I signed the contract, I went to the office to see my editor, and at some point during our conversation we started discussing ideas for the cover of the book. That was when Betty Stolowitz picked up the phone on her desk and said to me, ‘Why don’t we get Grace in here and see what she thinks?’ It turned out that Grace worked in the art department at Holst & McDermott and had been given the job of designing the dust jacket for Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother – which was what my little book of whims, reveries, and nightmare sorrows was called.

  Betty and I went on talking for another three or four minutes, and then Grace Tebbetts walked into the room. She stayed for about a quarter of an hour, and by the time she walked out again and returned to her office, I was in love with her. It was that abrupt, that conclusive, that unexpected. I had read about such things in novels, but I had always assumed the authors were exaggerating the power of the first look – that endlessly talked-about moment when the man gazes into the eyes of his beloved for the first time. To a born pessimist like myself, it was an altogether shocking experience. I felt as if I had been thrust back into the world of the troubadours, reliving some passage from the opening chapter of La Vita Nova (… when first the glorious Lady of my thoughts was made manifest to my eyes), inhabiting the stale tropes of a thousand forgotten love sonnets. I burned. I longed. I pined. I was rendered mute. And all this happened to me in the dullest of precincts, under the harsh fluorescent glare of a late-twentieth-century American office – the last place on earth where one would think to stumble upon the passion of one’s life.

  There is no accounting for such an event, no objective reason to explain why we fall for one person and not another. Grace was a good-looking woman, but even in those first tumultuous seconds of our first encounter, as I shook her hand and watched her settle into a chair by Betty’s desk, I could see that she was not inordinately beautiful, not one of those movie star goddesses who overpower you with the dazzle of their perfection. No doubt she was becoming, striking, pleasant to behold (however one chooses to define those terms), but fierce as my attraction was, I also knew that it was more than just a physical attraction, that the dream I was starting to dream was more than just a momentary surge of animal desire. Grace struck me as intelligent, but as the meeting wore on and I listened to her talk about her ideas for the cover, I understood that she wasn’t a terribly articulate person (she hesitated frequently between thoughts, confined her vocabulary to small, functional words, seemed to have no gift for abstraction), and nothing she said that afternoon was particularly brilliant or memorable. Other than making a few friendly remarks about my book, she gave no sign to suggest that she was even remotely interested in me. And yet there I was in a state of maximum torment – burning and longing and pining, a man trapped in the snares of love.

  She was five feet eight inches tall and weighed a hundred and twenty-five pounds. Slender neck, long arms and long fingers, pale skin, and short dirty-blond hair. That hair, I later realized, bore some resemblance to the hair shown in the drawings of the hero of The Little Prince – choppy juts of spikes and curls – and perhaps the association enhanced the somewhat androgynous aura that Grace projected. The mannish clothes she was wearing that afternoon must have played their part in creating the image as well: black jeans, white T-shirt, and a pale blue linen jacket. About five minutes into her visit, she removed the jacket and draped it over the back of her chair, and when I saw her arms, those long, smooth, infinitely feminine arms of hers, I knew there would be no rest for me until I was able to touch them, until I had earned the right to put my hands on her body and run them over her bare skin.

  But I want to go deeper than Grace’s body, deeper than the incidental facts of her physical self. Bodies count, of course – they count more than we’re willing to admit – but we don’t fall in love with bodies, we fall in love with each other, and if much of what we are is confined to flesh and bone, there is much that is not as well. We all know that, but the minute we go beyond a catalogue of surface qualities and appearances, words begin to fail us, to crumble apart in mystical confusions and cloudy, insubstantial metaphors. Some call it the flame of being. Others call it the internal spark or the inner light of self hood. Still others refer to it as the fires of quiddity. The terms always draw on images of heat and illumination, and that force, that essence of life we sometimes refer to as soul, is always communicated to another person through the eyes. Surely the poets were correct to insist on this point. The mystery of desire begins by looking into the eyes of the beloved, for it is only there that one can catch a glimpse of who that person is.

  Grace’s eyes were blue. A dark blue flecked with traces of gray, perhaps some brown, perhaps some hints of hazelish contrast as well. They were complex eyes, eyes that changed color according to the intensity and timbre of the light that fell on them at a given moment, and the first time I saw her that day in Betty’s office, it occurred to me that I had never met a woman who exuded such composure, such tranquillity of bearing, as if Grace, who was not yet twenty-seven at the time, had already moved on to some higher state of being than the rest of us. I don’t mean to suggest that there was anything withheld about her, that she floated above her circumstances in some beatific haze of condescension or indifference. On the contrary, she was quite animated throughout the meeting, laughed readily, smiled, said all the appropriate things, and made all the appropriate gestures, but underneath a professional engagement in the ideas that Betty and I were proposing to her, I felt a startling absence of inner struggle, an equilibrium of mind that seemed to exempt her from the usual conflicts and aggressions of modern life: self-doubt, envy, sarcasm, the need to judge or belittle others, the scalding, unbearable ache of personal ambition. Grace was young, but she had an old and weathered soul, and as I sat with her that first day in the offices of Holst & McDermott, looking into her eyes and studying the contours of her lean, angular body, that was what I fell in love with: the sense of calm that enveloped her, the radiant silence burning within.

  4. John was the only person in the world who still called her Gracie. Not even her parents did that anymore, and I myself, who had been involved with her for more than three years, had never
once addressed her by that diminutive. But John had known her all her life – literally from the day she was born – and a number of special privileges had accrued to him over time, elevating him from the rank of family friend to unofficial blood relation. It was as if he had achieved the status of favorite uncle – or, if you will, godfather-without-portfolio.

  John loved Grace, and Grace loved him back, and because I was the man in Grace’s life, John had welcomed me into the inner circle of his affections. During the period of my collapse, he had sacrificed much of his time and energy to helping Grace through the crisis, and when I finally recovered from my brush with death, he started turning up at the hospital every afternoon to sit by my bed and keep me company – to keep me (as I later realized) in the land of the living. When Grace and I went to visit him for dinner that night (September 18, 1982), I doubt that anyone in New York was closer to John than we were. Nor was anyone closer to us than John. That would explain why he considered our Saturday nights so important and hadn’t wanted to break the date, in spite of the problem with his leg. He lived alone, and since he rarely circulated in public, seeing us had become his principal form of social entertainment, his only real chance to indulge in a few hours of uninterrupted conversation.

  5. Tina was John’s second wife. His first marriage had lasted ten years (from 1954 to 1964) and had ended in divorce. He never talked about it in my presence, but Grace had told me that no one in her family had been particularly fond of Eleanor. The Tebbetts had seen her as a stuck-up Bryn Mawr girl from a long line of Massachusetts bluebloods, a ‘cold fish’ who had always looked down her nose at John’s working-class Paterson, New Jersey, family. No matter that Eleanor was a respected painter whose reputation was nearly as important as John’s. They weren’t surprised when the marriage ended, and not one of them was sorry to see her go. The only pity, Grace said, was that John had been forced to remain in contact with her. Not through any desire on his part, but because of the ongoing antics of their troubled, wildly unstable son, Jacob.

  Then he had met Tina Ostrow, a dancer-choreographer twelve years younger than he was, and when he married her in 1966, the Tebbetts clan applauded the decision. They felt confident that John had finally found the woman he deserved, and time proved them right. The small and vibrant Tina was an adorable person, Grace said, and she had loved John (in Grace’s words) ‘to the point of worship.’ The only problem with the marriage was that Tina didn’t live long enough to see her thirty-seventh birthday. Uterine cancer slowly took her from him over the course of eighteen months, and after John buried her, Grace said, he shut down for a long time, ‘just froze up and sort of stopped breathing.’ He moved to Paris for a year, then to Rome, then to a small village on the northern coast of Portugal. When he returned to New York in 1978 and settled into the apartment on Barrow Street, it had been three years since his last novel had been published, and the rumor was that Trause hadn’t written a word since Tina’s death. Four more years had passed since then, and still he hadn’t produced anything – at least not anything he was willing to show anyone. But he was working. I knew he was working. He’d told me as much himself, but I didn’t know what kind of work it was, for the simple reason that I hadn’t found the nerve to ask.

  6. Much of her graphic work was inspired by looking at art, and before my collapse at the beginning of the year, we had often spent our Saturday afternoons wandering in and out of galleries and museums together. In some sense, art had made our marriage possible, and without the intervention of art, I doubt that I would have found the courage to pursue her. It was fortunate that we had met in the neutral surroundings of Holst & McDermott, a so-called work environment. If we had been thrown together in any other way – at a dinner party, for example, or on a bus or a plane – I wouldn’t have been able to contact her again without exposing my intentions, and I instinctively felt that Grace had to be approached with caution. If I tipped my hand too early, I was almost certain I would lose my chance with her forever.

  Luckily, I had an excuse to call. She had been assigned to work on the cover of my book, and under the pretext of having a new idea to discuss with her, I rang up her office two days after our initial meeting and asked if I could come in and see her. ‘Anytime you like,’ she said. Anytime proved to be difficult to arrange. I had a regular job then (teaching history at John Jay High School in Brooklyn), and I couldn’t make it to her office before four o’clock. As it happened, Grace’s agenda was clogged with late-afternoon appointments for the rest of the week. When she suggested that we meet the following Monday or Tuesday, I told her I was going out of town to give a reading (which happened to be true, but I probably would have said it even if it wasn’t), so Grace relented and offered to squeeze in some time for me after work on Friday. ‘I have to be somewhere at eight,’ she said, ‘but if we met for an hour or so at five-thirty, it shouldn’t be a problem.’

  I had stolen the title of my book from a 1938 pencil drawing by Willem de Kooning. Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother is a small, delicately rendered piece that depicts two boys standing side by side, one a year or two older than the other, one in long pants, the other in knickers. Much as I admired the drawing, it was the title that interested me, and I had used it not because I wanted to refer to de Kooning but because of the words themselves, which I found highly evocative and which seemed to fit the novel I had written. In Betty Stolowitz’s office earlier that week, I had suggested putting de Kooning’s drawing on the cover. Now I was planning to tell Grace that I thought it was a bad idea – that the pencil strokes were too faint and wouldn’t be visible enough, that the effect would be too muted. But I didn’t really care. If I had argued against the drawing in Betty’s office, I would have been for it now. All I wanted was a chance to see Grace again – and art was my way in, the one subject that wouldn’t compromise my true purpose.

  Her willingness to see me after office hours gave me hope, but at the same time the news that she was going out at eight o’clock all but destroyed that hope. There was little question that she had an appointment with a man (attractive women are always with a man on Friday night), but it was impossible to know how deeply connected she was to him. It could have been a first date, and it could have been a quiet dinner with her fiancé or live-in boyfriend. I knew she wasn’t married (Betty had told me as much after Grace left her office following our first meeting), but the range of other intimacies was boundless. When I asked Betty if Grace was involved with anyone, she said she didn’t know. Grace kept her private life to herself, and no one in the company had the smallest inkling of what she did outside the office. Two or three editors had asked her out since she’d started working there, but she’d turned them all down.

  I quickly learned that Grace was not someone who shared confidences. In the ten months I knew her before we were married, she never once divulged a secret or hinted at any prior entanglements with other men. Nor did I ever ask her to tell me something she didn’t seem willing to talk about. That was the power of Grace’s silence. If you meant to love her in the way she demanded to be loved, then you had to accept the line she’d drawn between herself and words.

  (Once, in an early conversation I had with her about her childhood, she reminisced about a favorite doll her parents had given her when she was seven. She named her Pearl, carried her everywhere for the next four or five years, and considered her to be her best friend. The remarkable thing about Pearl was that she was able to talk and understood everything that was said to her. But Pearl never uttered a word in Grace’s presence. Not because she couldn’t speak, but because she chose not to.)

  There was someone in her life at the time I met her – I’m sure of that – but I never learned his name or how seriously she felt about him. Quite seriously, I would imagine, for the first six months proved to be a tempestuous time for me, and they ended badly, with Grace telling me she wanted to break it off and that I shouldn’t call her anymore. Through all the disappointments of those months, however, all the
ephemeral victories and tiny surges of optimism, the rebuffs and capitulations, the nights when she was too busy to see me and the nights when she allowed me to share her bed, through all the ups and downs of that desperate, failed courtship, Grace was always an enchanted being for me, a luminous point of contact between desire and the world, the implacable love. I kept my word and didn’t call her, but six or seven weeks later she contacted me out of the blue and said she had changed her mind. She didn’t offer any explanation, but I gathered that the man who had been my rival was now out of the picture. Not only did she want to start seeing me again, she said, but she wanted us to get married. Marriage was the one word I had never spoken in her presence. It had been in my head from the first moment I saw her, but I had never dared to say it, for fear it would frighten her off. Now Grace was proposing to me. I had resigned myself to living out the rest of my life with a shattered heart, and now she was telling me I could live with her instead – in one piece, my whole life in one piece with her.