Sunset Park

by Paul Auster

  Little by little, he has been acclimating himself to Ellen’s eyes. He no longer feels threatened by her curiosity in him, and if she talks less than anyone else at their shared breakfasts and dinners around the kitchen table, she can be quite voluble when he is alone with her. She communicates largely by asking questions, not personal questions about his life or past history, but questions about his opinions on topics ranging from the weather to the state of the world. Does he like winter? Who does he think is a better artist, Picasso or Matisse? Is he worried about global warming? Was he happy when Obama was elected last month? Why do men like sports so much? Who is his favorite photographer? No doubt there is something infantile about her directness, but at the same time her questions often provoke spirited exchanges, and following the path of Alice and Bing before him, he feels an ever-growing responsibility to protect her. He understands that Ellen is lonely and would like nothing better than to spend every night in his bed, but he has already told her enough about Pilar for her to know that this won’t be possible. On one of her days off, she invites him to go walking with her in Green-Wood Cemetery, a visit to the City of the Dead, as she calls it, and for the first time since coming to Sunset Park, he feels something stir inside him. There were the abandoned things down in Florida, and now he has stumbled upon the abandoned people of Brooklyn. He suspects it is a terrain well worth exploring.

  With Alice, he has been given the chance to talk to someone about books, a thing that has happened to him only rarely in the years between college and Pilar. Early on, he discovers that she is mostly ignorant of Europeans an and South American literature, which comes as a small disappointment, but she is one of those specialized academics steeped in her narrow Anglo-American world, far more familiar with Beowulf and Dreiser than with Dante and Borges, but that hardly qualifies as a problem, there is still much they can talk about, and before many days have passed they have already developed a private shorthand to express their likes and dislikes, a language consisting of grunts, frowns, raised eyebrows, nods of the head, and sudden slaps to the knee. She doesn’t talk to him about Jake, and therefore he doesn’t ask her any questions. He has told her about Pilar, however, but not much, not much of anything beyond her name and the fact that she will be coming up from Florida to visit over Christmas break. He uses the word break instead of vacation, since break suggests college and vacation always means school, and he doesn’t want anyone in the house to know how young Pilar is until she is already here—at which point, he hopes, no one will bother to ask her age. But even if it happens, he isn’t worried. The only person to worry about is Angela, and Angela won’t know that Pilar is gone. He has discussed this detail with Pilar again and again. She mustn’t let any of her sisters know that she is leaving, not just Angela, but Teresa and Maria as well, for the minute one of them knows, they will all know, and even if the odds are against it, Angela might just be crazy enough to follow Pilar to New York.

  He has bought a small illustrated book about Green-Wood Cemetery, and he goes in there every day with his camera now, roaming among the graves and monuments and mausoleums, nearly always alone in the frigid December air, carefully studying the lavish, often bombastic architecture of certain plots, the marble pillars and obelisks, the Greek temples and Egyptian pyramids, the enormous statues of supine, weeping women. The cemetery is more than half the size of Central Park, ample enough space for a person to get lost in there, to forget that he is a prisoner serving out his time in a dreary part of Brooklyn, and to walk among the thousands of trees and plantings, to climb the hillocks and traverse the sweeping paths of this vast necropolis is to leave the city behind you and enclose yourself in the absolute quiet of the dead. He takes pictures of the tombs of gangsters and poets, generals and industrialists, murder victims and newspaper publishers, children dead before their time, a woman who lived seventeen years beyond her hundredth birthday, and Theodore Roosevelt’s wife and mother, who were buried next to each other on the same day. There is Elias Howe, inventor of the sewing machine, the Kampfe brothers, inventors of the safety razor, Henry Steinway, founder of the Steinway Piano Company, John Underwood, founder of the Underwood Typewriter Company, Henry Chadwick, inventor of the baseball scoring system, Elmer Sperry, inventor of the gyroscope. The crematory built in the mid-twentieth century has incinerated the bodies of John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, Edward R. Murrow, Eubie Blake, and how many more, both known and unknown, how many more souls have been transformed into smoke in this eerie, beautiful place? He has embarked on another useless project, employing his camera as an instrument to record his stray, useless thoughts, but at least it is something to do, a way to pass the time until his life starts again, and where else but in Green-Wood Cemetery could he have learned that the real name of Frank Morgan, the actor who played the Wizard of Oz, was Wuppermann?

  Morris Heller

  1

  It is the last day of the year, and he has come home from England a week early to attend the funeral of Martin Rothstein’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, who committed suicide in Venice the night before Christmas Eve. He has been publishing Rothstein’s work since the founding of Heller Books. Marty and Renzo were the only Americans on the first list, two Americans along with Per Carlsen from Denmark and Annette Louverain from France, and thirty-five years later he is still publishing them all, they are the core writers of the house, and he knows he would be nothing without them. The news came on the evening of the twenty-fourth, a mass e-mail sent to hundreds of friends and acquaintances, which he read on Willa’s computer in their room at the Charlotte Street Hotel in London, the grim, naked message from Marty and Nina that Suki had taken her own life, with further information to follow about the date of the funeral. Willa didn’t want him to go. She thought the funeral would be too hard on him, there had been too many funerals in the past year, too many of their friends were dying now, and she knew how ravaged he was by the losses, that was the word she used, ravaged, but he said he had to be there for them, it wouldn’t be possible not to go, the duties of friendship demanded it, and four days later he was on a plane back to New York.

  Now it is December thirty-first, late morning on the final day of 2008, and as he steps off the No. 1 train and climbs the stairs to Broadway and Seventy-ninth Street, the air is clogged with snow, a wet, heavy snow is falling from the white-gray sky, thick flakes tumbling through the blustery dimness, muting the colors of the traffic lights, whitening the hoods of passing cars, and by the time he reaches the community center on Amsterdam Avenue, he looks as if he is wearing a hat of snow. Suki Rothstein, birth name Susanna, the baby girl he first glimpsed sleeping in the crook of her father’s right arm twenty-three years ago, the young woman who graduated summa cum laude from the University of Chicago, the budding artist, the precociously gifted thinker, writer, photographer who went to Venice this past fall to work as an intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and it was there, in the women’s room of that museum, just days after conducting a seminar about her own work, that she hanged herself. Willa was right, he knows that, but how not to feel ravaged by Suki’s death, how not to put himself inside her father’s skin and suffer the ravages of this pointless death?

  He remembers running into her some years back on Houston Street in the brightness of a late afternoon at the end of spring, the beginning of summer. She was on her way to her high school prom, decked out in a flamboyant red dress, as red as the reddest Jersey tomato, and Suki was all lit up with smiles when he chanced upon her that afternoon, surrounded by her friends, happy, affectionately kissing him hello and good-bye, and from that day forward he held that picture of her in his mind as the quintessential embodiment of youthful exuberance and promise, a singular example of youth on fire. Now he thinks about the dank chill of Venice in the dead of winter, the canals overflowing onto streets knee-deep in water, the shivering loneliness of unheated rooms, a head splitting open from the sheer force of the darkness within it, a life broken apart by the too-much and too-little of this
world.

  He shuffles into the building with the other people, a slowly gathering crowd that builds to two or three hundred, and he sees any number of familiar faces in the throng, Renzo’s among them, but also Sally Fuchs, Don Willingham, Gordon Field, any number of old friends, writers, poets, artists, editors, and many young people as well, dozens and dozens of young men and women, Suki’s friends from childhood, from high school, from college, and everyone is speaking in low voices, as if speaking above a whisper would be an offense, an insult against the silence of the dead, and as he looks at the faces around him, everyone seems numb and depleted, not quite fully there, ravaged. He makes his way to a small room at the end of the corridor where Marty and Nina are welcoming the visitors, the guests, the mourners, whatever word is used to describe people who come to a funeral, and as he steps forward to put his arms around his old friend, tears are pouring down Marty’s face, and then Marty throws his arms around him and presses his head against his shoulder, saying Morris, Morris, Morris as his body convulses against him in a spasm of breathless sobs.

  Martin Rothstein is not a man built for tragedies of this magnitude. He is a person of wit and effervescent charm, a comic writer of baroque, hilariously constructed sentences and spot-on satirical flair, an intellectual agitator with grand appetites and countless friends and a sense of humor equal to the best of the Borscht Belt wise guys. Now he is weeping his heart out, overcome by grief, by the cruelest, most lacerating form of grief, and Morris wonders how anyone can expect a man in this condition to stand up and talk in front of all these people when the service begins. And yet, sometime later, when the mourners have taken their seats in the auditorium and Marty climbs onto the stage to deliver his eulogy, he is calm, dry-eyed, completely recovered from his breakdown in the reception room. He reads from a text he has written, a text no doubt made possible by the length of time it took for Suki’s body to be shipped from Venice to New York, making the gap between death and burial longer than usual, and in those empty, unsettled days of waiting for his daughter’s corpse to arrive, Marty sat down and wrote this text. With Bobby, there had been no words. Willa hadn’t been capable of writing or saying anything, he hadn’t been capable of writing or saying anything, the accident had crushed them into a state of mute incomprehension, a dumb, bleeding sorrow that had lasted for months, but Marty is a writer, his whole life has been spent putting words and sentences together, paragraphs together, books together, and the only way he could respond to Suki’s death was to write about her.

  The coffin is on the stage, a white coffin surrounded by red flowers, but it is not a religious service. No rabbi has come to officiate, no prayers are recited, and no one who appears onstage tries to draw any meaning or consolation from Suki’s death—there is nothing more than the fact of it, the horror of it. Someone plays a solo piece for saxophone, someone else plays a Bach chorale on the piano, and at one point Suki’s younger brother, Anton, wearing red nail polish in honor of his sister, performs an unaccompanied, dirgelike rendition of a Cole Porter song (Ev’ry time we say good-bye / I die a little) that is so drastically slowed down, so drenched in melancholy, so painful to listen to that most of the gathering is in tears by the time he comes to the end. Writers walk up to the lectern and read poems by Shakespeare and Yeats. Friends and classmates tell stories about Suki, reminisce, evoke the burning intensity of her spirit. The director of the gallery where she had her one and only exhibition talks about her work. Morris follows every word spoken, listens to every note played and sung, on the verge of disintegration throughout the entire one-and-a-half-hour service, but it is Marty’s speech that comes closest to destroying him, a brave and stunning piece of eloquence that shocks him with its candor, the brutal precision of its thinking, the rage and sorrow and guilt and love that permeate each of its articulations. All during Marty’s twenty-minute talk, Morris imagines himself trying to talk about Bobby, about Miles, about the long-dead Bobby and the absent Miles, but he knows he would never have the courage to stand up in public and express his feelings with such naked honesty.

  Afterward, there is a pause. Only the Rothsteins and their closest relatives will be going to the cemetery in Queens. Everyone is invited to Marty and Nina’s apartment at four o’clock, but for now the mourners must disperse. He is glad to have been spared the ordeal of watching the coffin being lowered into the ground, the bulldozer pushing the dirt back into the hole, the sight of Marty and Nina collapsing into tears again. Renzo tracks him down in the entrance hall, and the two of them go back out into the snow together to look for a place to have lunch. Renzo is intelligent enough to have brought along an umbrella, and as Morris squeezes in beside him, Renzo puts his arm around his shoulder. Neither one of them says a word. They have been friends for fifty years, and each knows what the other is thinking.

  They wind up in a Jewish delicatessen on Broadway in the low Eighties, a throwback to their New York childhoods, the all but vanished cuisine of chopped liver, matzo-ball soup, corned beef and pastrami sandwiches, pot roasts, cheese blintzes, sour pickles. Renzo has been traveling, they haven’t seen each other since the publication of The Mountain Dialogues in September, and Morris feels that Renzo is looking tired, more haggard than usual. How did they get to be so old? he wonders. They are both sixty-two now, and while neither of them is in bad health, neither one of them fat or bald or ready for the glue factory, their heads have turned gray, their hairlines are receding, and they have reached that point in their lives when women under thirty, perhaps even forty, look right through them. He remembers Renzo as a young, young writer just out of college, living in a forty-nine-dollar-a-month apartment on the Lower East Side, one of those tenement railroad flats with a tub in the kitchen and six thousand cockroaches holding political conventions in every cupboard, so poor that he had to limit himself to one meal a day, working for three years on his first novel, which he destroyed because he felt it wasn’t good enough, destroyed in the face of Morris’s protests, his girlfriend’s protests, who both felt it was very good indeed, and now look at him, Morris thinks, after how many books since that burned manuscript (seventeen? twenty?), published in every country of the world, even Iran, for God’s sake, with how many literary prizes, how many medals, keys to cities, honorary doctorates, how many books and dissertations written about his work, and none of it matters to him, he is glad to have some money now, glad to be free of the suffocating hardships of the early years, but his fame leaves him cold, he has lost all interest in himself as a so-called public figure. I just want to disappear, he once told Morris, muttering in the lowest of low voices, staring off with a pained look in his eyes, as if he were talking to himself. I just want to disappear.

  They order their soups and sandwiches, and when the Latino waiter walks off with their menus (a Latino waiter in a Jewish restaurant, they both like that), Morris and Renzo start talking about the funeral, sharing their impressions of what they have just witnessed in the community center auditorium. Renzo didn’t know Suki, he met her only once when she was a small child, but he agrees with Morris that Rothstein’s talk was a powerful piece of work, almost unimaginable when you consider that it was written under the most appalling duress, at a time when few people would have the strength to pull themselves together and write a single word, let alone the passionate, complex, and clear-sighted eulogy they heard this morning. Renzo has no children, two ex-wives but no children, and given what Marty and Nina are going through now, given what he and Willa have already gone through, first with Bobby and then with Miles, Morris feels something close to envy, thinking that Renzo made the right decision all those years ago to steer clear of the kid business, to avoid the unavoidable mess and potential devastation of fatherhood. He is half-expecting Renzo to start talking about Bobby now, the parallel is so evident, and surely he understands how difficult this funeral has been for him, but precisely because Renzo does understand, he does not talk about it. He is too discreet for that, too aware of what Morris is thinking to barge in o
n his pain, and just seconds afterward Morris himself understands his friend’s reluctance to intrude on him when Renzo changes the subject, skirting past Bobby and the gloomy realm of dead children, and asks him how he is weathering the crisis, meaning the economic crisis, and whither Heller Books in this storm of trouble?

  Morris tells him that the ship is still afloat, but listing somewhat to the starboard side now, and for the past few months they have been throwing excess equipment overboard. His primary concern is to keep the staff intact, and so far he hasn’t had to let anyone go, but the list has been reduced, cut down by twenty or twenty-five percent. Last year, they published forty-seven books, this year thirty-eight, but their profits have gone down by only eleven percent, in large part thanks to The Mountain Dialogues, which is in its third printing, with forty-five thousand hardcovers sold. The Christmas sales figures won’t be in for a while, but even if they turn out to be lower than expected, he isn’t predicting out-and-out disaster. Louverain, Wyatt, and Tomesetti all published strong books this fall, and the paperback crime series seems to be off to a good start, but it’s a rough time for first novels, very rough, and he’s been forced to reject some good young writers, books he would have taken a chance on a year or two ago, and he finds that troubling, since the whole point of Heller Books is to encourage new talent. They’re planning only thirty-three books for 2009, but Carlsen is on the list, Davenport is on the list, and then, needless to say, there is Renzo’s novella, the little book he wrote just after The Mountain Dialogues, the unanticipated bonus book he has such high hopes for, and who knows, if every independent bookstore in America doesn’t go bankrupt in the next twelve months, they might be in for a decent year. Listening to himself talk, he almost begins to feel optimistic, but he is telling Renzo only part of the story, leaving out the fact that when the returns start coming in on The Mountain Dialogues sales will fall by seven to ten thousand, leaving out the fact that 2008 will be the worst year for the house in three decades, leaving out the fact that he needs a new investor to put additional capital into the company or the ship will go down within two years. But there is no need for Renzo to know any of this. Renzo writes books, and he publishes them, and Renzo will go on writing and publishing books even if he is no longer in business.