by Paul Auster
Rudolf, Margot said. That’s enough. Leave him alone.
I realize I’m being a bit harsh, Born said to her. But young Adam and I are partners now, and I need to know what he’s made of. Can he stand up to an honest insult, or does he crumble to pieces when he’s under attack?
You’ve had a lot to drink, I said, and from all I can gather you’ve had a rough day. Maybe it’s time for me to be going. We can pick up the conversation when you’re back from France.
Nonsense, Born replied, pounding the table with his fist. We’re still working on the stew. Then there’s the salad, and after the salad the cheese, and after the cheese dessert. Margot has already been hurt enough for one night, and the least we can do is sit here and finish her remarkable dinner. In the meantime, maybe you can tell us something about Westfield, New Jersey.
Westfield? I said, surprised to discover that Born knew where I had grown up. How did you find out about Westfield?
It wasn’t difficult, he said. As it happens, I’ve learned quite a bit about you in the past few days. Your father, for example, Joseph Walker, age fifty-four, better known as Bud, owns and operates the Shop-Rite supermarket on the main street in town. Your mother, Marjorie, a.k.a. Marge, is forty-six and has given birth to three children: your sister, Gwyn, in November nineteen forty-five; you in March nineteen forty-seven; and your brother, Andrew, in July nineteen fifty. A tragic story. Little Andy drowned when he was seven, and it pains me to think how unbearable that loss must have been for all of you. I had a sister who died of cancer at roughly the same age, and I know what terrible things a death like that does to a family. Your father has coped with his sorrow by working fourteen hours a day, six days a week, while your mother has turned inward, battling the scourge of depression with heavy doses of prescription pharmaceuticals and twice-weekly sessions with a psychotherapist. The miracle, to my mind, is how well you and your sister have done for yourselves in the face of such calamity. Gwyn is a beautiful and talented girl in her last year at Vassar, planning to begin graduate work in English literature right here at Columbia this fall. And you, my young intellectual friend, my budding wordsmith and translator of obscure medieval poets, turn out to have been an outstanding baseball player in high school, co-captain of the varsity team, no less. Mens sana in corpore sano. More to the point, my sources tell me that you’re a person of deep moral integrity, a pillar of moderation and sound judgment who, unlike the majority of his classmates, does not dabble in drugs. Alcohol yes, but no drugs whatsoever—not even an occasional puff of marijuana. Why is that, Mr. Walker? With all the propaganda abroad these days about the liberating powers of hallucinogens and narcotics, why haven’t you succumbed to the temptation of seeking new and stimulating experiences?
Why? I said, still reeling from the impact of Born’s astounding recitation about my family. I’ll tell you why, but first I’d like to know how you managed to dig up so much about us in such a short time.
Is there a problem? Were there any inaccuracies in what I said?
No. It’s just that I’m a little stunned, that’s all. You can’t be a cop or an FBI agent, but a visiting professor at the School of International Affairs could certainly be involved with an intelligence organization of some kind. Is that what you are? A spy for the CIA?
Born cracked up laughing when I said that, treating my question as if he’d just heard the funniest joke of the century. The CIA! he roared. The CIA! Why on earth would a Frenchman work for the CIA? Forgive me for laughing, but the idea is so hilarious, I’m afraid I can’t stop myself.
Well, how did you do it, then?
I’m a thorough man, Mr. Walker, a man who doesn’t act until he knows everything he needs to know, and since I’m about to invest twenty-five thousand dollars in a person who qualifies as little more than a stranger to me, I felt I should learn as much about him as I could. You’d be amazed how effective an instrument the telephone can be.
Margot stood up then and began clearing plates from the table in preparation for the next course. I made a move to help her, but Born gestured for me to sit back down in my chair.
Let’s return to my question, shall we? he said.
What question? I asked, no longer able to keep track of the conversation.
About why no drugs. Even the lovely Margot has a joint now and then, and to be perfectly frank with you, I have a certain fondness for weed myself. But not you. I’m curious to know why.
Because drugs scare me. Two of my friends from high school are already dead from heroin overdoses. My freshman roommate went off the rails from taking too much speed and had to drop out of college. Again and again, I’ve watched people climb the walls from bad LSD trips—screaming, shaking, ready to kill themselves. I don’t want any part of it. Let the whole world get stoned on drugs for all I care, but I’m not interested.
And yet you drink.
Yes, I said, lifting my glass and taking another sip of wine. With immense pleasure, too, I might add. Especially with stuff as good as this to keep me company.
We moved on to the salad after that, followed by a plate of French cheeses and then a dessert baked by Margot that afternoon (apple tart? raspberry tart?), and for the next thirty minutes or so the drama that had flared up during the first part of the meal steadily diminished. Born was being nice to me again, and although he continued to drink glass after glass of wine, I was beginning to feel confident that we would get to the end of the dinner without another outburst or insult from my capricious, half-crocked host. Then he opened a bottle of brandy, lit up one of his Cuban cigars, and started talking about politics.
Fortunately, it wasn’t as gruesome as it could have been. He was deep in his cups by the time he poured the cognac, and after an ounce or two of those burning, amber spirits, he was too far gone to engage in a coherent conversation. Yes, he called me a coward again for refusing to go to Vietnam, but mostly he talked to himself, lapsing into a long, meandering monologue on any number of disparate subjects as I sat there listening in silence and Margot washed pots and pans in the kitchen. Impossible to recapture more than a fraction of what he said, but the key points are still with me, particularly his memories of fighting in Algeria, where he spent two years with the French army interrogating filthy Arab terrorists and losing whatever faith he’d once had in the idea of justice. Bombastic pronouncements, wild generalizations, bitter declarations about the corruption of all governments—past, present, and future; left, right, and center—and how our so-called civilization was no more than a thin screen masking a never-ending assault of barbarism and cruelty. Human beings were animals, he said, and soft-minded aesthetes like myself were no better than children, diverting ourselves with hairsplitting philosophies of art and literature to avoid confronting the essential truth of the world. Power was the only constant, and the law of life was kill or be killed, either dominate or fall victim to the savagery of monsters. He talked about Stalin and the millions of lives lost during the collectivization movement in the thirties. He talked about the Nazis and the war, and then he advanced the startling theory that Hitler’s admiration of the United States had inspired him to use American history as a model for his conquest of Europe. Look at the parallels, Born said, and it’s not as far-fetched as you’d think: extermination of the Indians is turned into the extermination of the Jews; westward expansion to exploit natural resources is turned into eastward expansion for the same purpose; enslavement of the blacks for low-cost labor is turned into subjugation of the Slavs to produce a similar result. Long live America, Adam, he said, pouring another shot of cognac into both our glasses. Long live the darkness inside us.
As I listened to him rant on like this, I felt a growing pity for him. Horrible as his view of the world was, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for a man who had descended into such pessimism, who so willfully shunned the possibility of finding any compassion, grace, or beauty in his fellow human beings. Born was just thirty-six, but already he was a burnt-out soul, a shattered wreck of a person, an
d at his core I imagined that he must have suffered terribly, living in constant pain, lacerated by the jabbing knives of despair, disgust, and self-contempt.
Margot reentered the dining room, and when she saw the state Born was in—bloodshot eyes, slurred speech, body listing to the left as if he was about to fall off his chair—she put her hand on his back and gently told him in French that the evening was over and that he should toddle off to bed. Surprisingly, he didn’t protest. Nodding his head and muttering the word merde several times in a flat, barely audible voice, he allowed Margot to help him to his feet, and a moment later she was guiding him out of the room toward the hall that led to the back of the apartment. Did he say good night to me? I can’t remember. For several minutes, I remained in my chair, expecting Margot to return in order to show me out, but when she didn’t come back after what seemed to be an inordinate length of time, I stood up and headed for the front door. That was when I saw her—emerging from a bedroom at the end of the hall. I waited as she walked toward me, and the first thing she did when we were standing next to each other was put her hand on my forearm and apologize for Rudolf’s behavior.
Is he always like that when he drinks? I asked.
No, almost never, she said. But he’s very upset right now and has many things on his mind.
Well, at least it wasn’t dull.
You comported yourself with great discretion.
So did you. And thank you for the dinner. I’ll never forget the navarin.
Margot gave me one of her small, fleeting smiles and said: If you want me to cook for you again, let me know. I’ll be happy to give you another meal while Rudolf is in Paris.
Sounds good, I said, knowing I would never find the courage to call her but at the same time feeling touched by the invitation.
Again, another flicker of a smile, and then two perfunctory kisses, one on each cheek. Good night, Adam, she said. You will be in my thoughts.
I didn’t know if I was in her thoughts or not, but now that Born was out of the country, she had entered mine, and for the next two days I could barely stop thinking about her. From the first night at the party, when Margot had trained her eyes on me and studied my face with such intensity, to the disturbing conversation Born had provoked at the dinner about the degree of my attraction to her, a sexual current had been running between us, and even if she was ten years older than I was, that didn’t prevent me from imagining myself in bed with her, from wanting to go to bed with her. Was the offer to give me another dinner a veiled proposition, or was it simply a matter of generosity, a desire to help out a young student who subsisted on the wretched fare of cheap diners and warmed-over cans of precooked spaghetti? I was too timid to find out. I wanted to call her, but every time I reached for the phone, I understood that it was impossible. Margot lived with Born, and even though he had insisted that marriage wasn’t in their future, she was already claimed, and I didn’t feel I had the right to go after her.
Then she called me. Three days after the dinner, at ten o’clock in the morning, the telephone rang in my apartment, and there she was on the other end of the line, sounding a little hurt, disappointed that I hadn’t been in touch, in her own subdued way expressing more emotion than at any time since we’d met.
I’m sorry, I lied, but I was going to call you later today. You beat me to it by a couple of hours.
Funny boy, she said, seeing right through my fib. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.
But I do, I answered, meaning every word of it. Very much.
Tonight?
Tonight would be perfect.
You don’t have to worry about Rudolf, Adam. He’s gone, and I’m free to do whatever I like. We all are. Nobody can own another person. Do you understand that?
I think so.
How do you feel about fish?
Fish in the sea or fish on a plate?
Grilled sole. With little boiled potatoes and choux de Bruxelles on the side. Does that appeal to you, or would you rather have something else?
No. I’m already dreaming about the sole.
Come at seven. And don’t trouble yourself with flowers this time. I know you can’t afford them.
After we hung up, I spent the next nine hours in a torment of anticipation, daydreaming through my afternoon classes, pondering the mysteries of carnal attraction, and trying to understand what it was about Margot that had worked me up to such a pitch of excitement. My first impression of her had not been particularly favorable. She had struck me as an odd and vapid creature, sympathetic at heart, perhaps, intriguing to look at, but with no electricity in her, a woman lost in some murky inner world that shut her off from true engagement with others, as if she were some silent visitor from another planet. Two days later, I had run into Born at the West End, and when he told me about her reaction to our meeting at the party, my feelings for her began to shift. Apparently she liked me and was concerned about my welfare, and when you’re informed that a person likes you, your instinctive response is to like that person back. Then came the dinner. The languor and precision of her gestures as she cut the flowers and put them in the vase had stirred something in me, and the simple act of watching her move had suddenly become fascinating, hypnotic. There were depths of sensuality in her, I discovered, and the bland, uninteresting woman who seemed not to have a thought in her head turned out to be far more astute than I had imagined. She had defended me against Born at least twice during the dinner, intervening at the precise moments when things had threatened to fly out of control. Calm, always calm, barely speaking above a whisper, but each time her words had produced the desired effect. Thrown by Born’s prodding insinuations, convinced that he was trying to lure me into some voyeuristic mania of his—watching me make love to Margot?—I’d assumed that she was in on it as well, and therefore I had held back and refused to play along. But now Born was on the other side of the Atlantic, and Margot still wanted to see me. It could only be for one thing. I understood now that it had always been that one thing, right from the moment she’d spotted me standing alone at the party. That was why Born had behaved so testily at the dinner—not because he wanted to instigate an evening of depraved sexual antics, but because he was angry at Margot for telling him she was attracted to me.
She cooked us dinner for five straight nights, and for five straight nights we slept together in the spare bedroom at the end of the hall. We could have used the other bedroom, which was larger and more comfortable, but neither one of us wanted to go in there. That was Born’s room, the world of Born’s bed, and for those five nights we made it our business to create a world of our own, sleeping in that tiny room with the single barred window and the narrow bed, which came to be known as the love bed, although love finally had nothing to do with what happened to us during those five days. We didn’t fall for each other, as the saying goes, but rather we fell into each other, and in the deeply intimate space we inhabited for that short, short time, our sole preoccupation was pleasure. The pleasure of eating and drinking, the pleasure of sex, the pleasure of taking part in a wordless animal dialogue that was conducted in a language of looking and touching, of biting, tasting, and stroking. That doesn’t mean we didn’t talk, but talk was kept to a minimum, and what talk there was tended to focus on food—What should we eat tomorrow night?—and the words we exchanged over dinner were wispy and banal, of no real importance. Margot never asked me questions about myself. She wasn’t curious about my past, she didn’t care about my opinions on literature or politics, and she had no interest in what I was studying. She simply took me for what I represented in her own mind—her choice of the moment, the physical being she desired—and every time I looked at her, I sensed that she was drinking me in, as if just having me there within arm’s reach was enough to satisfy her. What did I learn about Margot during those days? Very little, almost nothing at all. She had grown up in Paris, was the youngest of three children, and knew Born because they were second cousins. They had been together for two years
now, but she didn’t think it would last much longer. He seemed to be growing bored with her, she said, and she was growing bored with herself. She shrugged when she said that, and when I saw the distant expression on her face, I had the terrible intuition that she already considered herself to be half dead. After that, I stopped pressing her to open up to me. It was enough that we were together, and I cringed at the thought of accidentally touching on something that might cause her pain.
Margot without makeup was softer and more earthbound than the striking female object she presented to the public. Margot without clothes proved to be slight, almost meager, with small, pubescent-like breasts, slender hips, and sinewy arms and legs. A full-lipped mouth, a flat belly with a slightly protruding navel, tender hands, a nest of coarse pubic hair, firm buttocks, and extremely white skin that felt smoother than any skin I had ever touched. The particulars of a body, the irrelevant, precious details. I was tentative with her at first, not knowing what to expect, a bit awed to find myself with a woman so much more experienced than I was, a beginner in the arms of a veteran, a fumbler who had always felt shy and awkward in his nakedness, who until then had always made love in the dark, preferably under the blankets, coupling with girls who had been just as shy and awkward as he was, but Margot was so comfortable with herself, so knowledgeable in the arts of nibbling, licking, and kissing, so unreluctant to explore me with her hands and tongue, to attack, to swoon, to give herself without coyness or hesitation that it wasn’t long before I let myself go. If it feels good, it’s good, Margot said at one point, and that was the gift she gave me over the course of those five nights. She taught me not to be afraid of myself anymore.
I didn’t want it to end. Living in that strange paradise with the strange, unfathomable Margot was one of the best, most unlikely things that had ever happened to me, but Born was due to return from Paris the next evening, and we had no choice but to cut it off. At the time, I imagined it was only a temporary cease-fire. When we said good-bye on the last morning, I told her not to worry, that sooner or later we’d figure out a way to continue, but for all my bluster and confidence Margot looked troubled, and just as I was about to leave the apartment, her eyes unexpectedly filled with tears.