by Paul Auster
The telephone conversation ended, and when Tom explained who I was, Harry Brightman stood up from his chair and shook my hand. Perfectly friendly, flashing his jack-o’-lantern teeth with a welcoming smile, the very model of decorum and good manners.
“Ah,” he said, “the famous Uncle Nat. Tom’s spoken of you often.”
“I’m just Nathan now,” I said. “We dropped the uncle business a few hours ago.”
“Just Nathan,” Harry replied, furrowing his brows in mock consternation, “or Nathan pure and simple? I’m a little confused.”
“Nathan,” I said. “Nathan Glass.”
Harry pressed a finger against his chin, striking the pose of a man lost in thought. “How interesting. Tom Wood and Nathan Glass. Wood and Glass. If I changed my name to Steel, we could open an architecture firm and call ourselves Wood, Glass, and Steel. Ha ha. I like that. Wood, Glass, and Steel. You want it, we’ll build it.”
“Or I could change my name to Dick,” I said, “and people could call us Tom, Dick, and Harry.”
“One never uses the word dick in polite society,” Harry said, pretending to be scandalized by my use of the term. “One says male organ. In a pinch, the neutral term penis is acceptable. But dick won’t do, Nathan. It’s far too vulgar.”
I turned to Tom and said, “It must be fun working for a man like this.”
“Never a dull moment,” Tom answered. “He’s the original barrel of monkeys.”
Harry grinned, then shot an affectionate glance at Tom. “Yes, yes,” he said. “The book business is so amusing, we get stomachaches from laughing so hard. And you, Nathan, what line of work are you in? No, I take that back. Tom’s already told me. You’re a life insurance salesman.”
“Ex-life insurance salesman,” I said. “I took early retirement.”
“Another ex,” Harry said, sighing wistfully. “By the time a man gets to be our age, Nathan, he’s little more than a series of exes. N’est-ce pas? In my own case, I could probably reel off a dozen or more. Ex-husband. Ex-art dealer. Ex-navy man. Ex-window dresser. Ex-perfume salesman. Ex-millionaire. Ex-Buffalonian. Ex-Chicagoan. Ex-convict. Yes, yes, you heard me right. Ex-convict. I’ve had my spots of trouble along the way, as most men have. I’m not afraid to admit it. Tom knows all about my past, and what Tom knows, I want you to know, too. Tom’s like family to me, and since you’re related to Tom, you’re in my family as well. You, the ex-Uncle Nat, now known as Nathan, pure and simple. I’ve paid my debt to society, and my conscience is clear. X marks the spot, my friend. Now and forever, X marks the spot.”
I hadn’t been prepared for Harry to come out with such a naked admission of guilt. Tom had warned me that his boss was a man filled with contradictions and surprises, but in the context of such a farcical and rambunctious conversation, I found it baffling that he suddenly should have seen fit to confide in a total stranger. Perhaps it had something to do with his earlier confession to Tom, I thought. He’d found the courage to let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, and now that he’d done it once, maybe it wasn’t so difficult for him to do it a second time. I couldn’t be certain, but for the moment it seemed to be the only hypothesis that made sense. I would have preferred to ponder the question a little longer, but circumstances didn’t allow it. The conversation went charging ahead, full of the same silly remarks as before, the same ludicrous witticisms, the same blithering japery and pseudo-histrionic turns, and all in all I had to admit that I was favorably impressed by my pumpkin-headed rascal. He was somewhat exhausting to be with, perhaps, but he didn’t disappoint. By the time I left the bookstore, I had already invited Tom and Harry to join me for dinner on Saturday night.
It was a little past four when I returned to my apartment. Rachel was still on my mind, but it was too early to call her (she didn’t get home from work until six), and as I imagined myself picking up the phone and dialing her number, I realized that it was probably just as well. Relations had turned so bitter between us, I felt there was a good chance she would hang up on me again, and I dreaded the prospect of another rebuff from my daughter. Instead of calling, I decided to write her a letter. It was a safer approach, and if I kept my name and return address off the envelope, the odds were that she would open the letter and read it rather than tearing it up and throwing it in the garbage.
I thought it would be simple, but it took me six or seven shots before I felt I’d struck the right tone. Asking forgiveness from someone is a complicated affair, a delicate balancing act between stiff-necked pride and tearful remorse, and unless you can truly open up to the other person, every apology sounds hollow and false. As I worked on the successive drafts of the letter (growing more and more dejected in the process, blaming myself for everything that had gone wrong with my life, whipping my poor, rotten soul like some medieval penitent), I was reminded of a book Tom had sent me for my birthday eight or nine years back, in the golden age before June died and Tom was still the brilliant and promising Dr. Thumb. It was a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher I had heard of but never read – not an unusual circumstance, since most of my reading was confined to fiction, with nary the smallest dabble in other fields. I found it to be an absorbing, well-written book, but one story stood out from all the others, and it had stayed with me ever since. According to the author, Ray Monk, after Wittgenstein wrote his Tractatus as a soldier during World War One, he felt that he had solved all the problems of philosophy and was finished with the subject for good. He took a job as a schoolmaster in a remote Austrian mountain village, but he proved unfit for the work. Severe, ill-tempered, even brutal, he scolded the children constantly and beat them when they failed to learn their lessons. Not just ritual spankings, but blows to the head and face, angry pummelings that wound up causing serious injuries to a number of children. Word got out about this outrageous conduct, and Wittgenstein was forced to resign his post. Years went by, at least twenty years if I’m not mistaken, and by then Wittgenstein was living in Cambridge, once again pursuing philosophy, by then a famous and respected man. For reasons I forget now, he went through a spiritual crisis and suffered a nervous breakdown. As he began to recover, he decided that the only way to restore his health was to march back into his past and humbly apologize to each person he had ever wronged or offended. He wanted to purge himself of the guilt that was festering inside him, to clear his conscience and make a fresh start. That road naturally led him back to the small mountain village in Austria. All his former pupils were adults now, men and women in their mid- and late twenties, and yet the memory of their violent schoolmaster had not dimmed with the years. One by one, Wittgenstein knocked on their doors and asked them to forgive him for his intolerable cruelty two decades earlier. With some of them, he literally fell to his knees and begged, imploring them to absolve him of the sins he had committed. One would think that a person confronted with such a sincere display of contrition would feel pity for the suffering pilgrim and relent, but of all of Wittgenstein’s former pupils, not a single man or woman was willing to pardon him. The pain he had caused had gone too deep, and their hatred for him transcended all possibility of mercy.
In spite of everything, I felt reasonably certain that Rachel didn’t hate me. She was pissed off at me, she resented me, she was frustrated with me, but I didn’t think her animosity was strong enough to create a permanent rift between us. Still, I couldn’t take any chances, and by the time I got around to composing the final draft of the letter, I was in a state of full and utter repentance. “Forgive your stupid father for shooting his mouth off,” I began, “and saying things he now mortally regrets. Of all the people in the world, you’re the one who means the most to me. You’re the heart of my heart, the blood of my blood, and it torments me to think that my idiotic remarks could have caused any bad blood between us. Without you, I am nothing. Without you, I am no one. My darling, beloved Rachel, please give your moronic old man a chance to redeem himself.”
I went on in that vein for several more paragraphs, e
nding the letter with the good news that her cousin Tom had magically popped up in Brooklyn and was looking forward to seeing her again and meeting Terrence (her English-born husband, who taught biology at Rutgers). Perhaps we could all have dinner together in the city one night. Sometime soon, I hoped. In the coming days or weeks – whenever she was free.
It had taken me over three hours to finish the job, and I felt exhausted, both physically and mentally drained. It wouldn’t do to have the letter sitting around the apartment, however, so I immediately went out and mailed it, dropping it into one of the boxes in front of the post office on Seventh Avenue. It was dinnertime by then, but I didn’t feel the least bit hungry. Instead, I walked on for several more blocks and went into Shea’s, the local liquor store, and bought myself a fifth of Scotch and two bottles of red wine. I am not a heavy drinker, but there are moments in a man’s life when alcohol is more nourishing than food. This happened to be one of them. Reconnecting with Tom had given a big boost to my morale, but now that I was alone again, it suddenly hit me what a pathetic, isolated person I had become – an aimless, disconnected lump of human flesh. I am not normally prone to bouts of self-pity, but for the next hour or so I pitied myself with all the abandon of a morose adolescent. Eventually, after two Scotches and half a bottle of wine, the gloom began to lift, and I sat down at my desk and added another chapter to The Book of Human Folly, a choice anecdote about the toilet bowl and the electric razor. It went back to the time when Rachel was in high school and still living at home, a chilly Thanksgiving Thursday, roughly three-thirty in the afternoon, with a dozen guests about to descend on the house at four. At no small expense, Edith and I had just remodeled the upstairs bathroom, and everything in it was spanking new: the tiles, the cupboards, the medicine cabinet, the sink, the bathtub and shower, the toilet, the whole works. I was in the bedroom, standing before the closet mirror and knotting my tie; Edith was down in the kitchen, basting the turkey and attending to last-minute details; and the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Rachel, who had spent the morning and early afternoon writing up a physics lab report, was in the bathroom, scrambling to get ready before the guests arrived. She had just finished showering in the new shower, and now she was standing in front of the new toilet, her right foot perched on the rim of the bowl, shaving her leg with a battery-operated Schick razor. At some point, the machine slipped out of her hand and fell into the water. She reached in and tried to pull it out, but the razor had lodged itself tightly in the flush-hole of the toilet, and she couldn’t get a purchase on it. That was when she opened the door and cried out, “Daddy,” (she still called me Daddy then) “I need some help.”
Daddy came. What tickled me most about our predicament was that the razor was still buzzing and vibrating in the water. It was a strangely insistent and irritating noise, a perverse aural accompaniment to what was already a bizarre, perhaps even unprecedented conundrum. Add in the noise, and it became both bizarre and hilarious. I laughed when I saw what had happened, and once Rachel understood that I wasn’t laughing at her, she laughed along with me. If I had to choose one moment, one memory to hoard in my brain from all the moments I’ve spent with her over the past twenty-nine years, I believe that one would be it.
Rachel’s hands were much smaller than mine. If she couldn’t get the razor out, there was little hope that I could do any better, but I gave it a shot for form’s sake. I removed my jacket, rolled up my sleeves, flung my tie over my left shoulder, and reached in. The buzzing instrument was locked in so firmly, I didn’t have a chance.
A plumber’s snake might have been useful, but we didn’t have a plumber’s snake, so I undid a wire hanger and stuck that in instead. Slender as the wire was, it was far too thick to help.
The doorbell rang then, I remember, and the first of Edith’s many relatives arrived. Rachel was still in her terry-cloth robe, sitting on her knees as she watched my futile attempts to trick the razor out with the wire, but time was marching on, and I told her she should probably get dressed. “I’m going to disconnect the toilet and turn it upside down,” I said. “Maybe I can poke the little fellow out from the other end.” Rachel smiled, patted me on the shoulder as if she thought I’d gone mad, and stood up. As she was leaving the bathroom, I said, “Tell your mother I’ll be down in a few minutes. If she asks you what I’m doing, tell her it’s none of her business. If she asks again, tell her I’m up here fighting for world peace.”
There was a toolbox in the linen closet next to the bedroom, and once I’d turned off the valve to the toilet, I took out a pair of pliers and detached the toilet from the floor. I don’t know how much the thing weighed. I managed to lift it off the ground, but it was too heavy for me to feel confident that I could turn it over without dropping it, especially in such a cramped space. I had to get it out of the room, and because I was afraid of damaging the wood floor if I put it down in the hall, I decided to carry it downstairs and take it into the backyard.
With every step I took, the toilet seemed to become a few pounds heavier. By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, I felt as if I were holding a small white elephant in my arms. Fortunately, one of Edith’s brothers had just entered the house, and when he saw what I was doing, he came over and lent a hand.
“What’s going on, Nathan?” he asked.
“I’m carrying a toilet,” I said. “We’re going to take it outside and put it in the backyard.”
All the guests had arrived by then, and everyone gawked at the weird spectacle of two men in ties and white shirts carrying a musical toilet through the rooms of a suburban house on Thanksgiving Day. The smell of turkey was everywhere. Edith was serving drinks. A Frank Sinatra song was playing in the background (“My Way,” if I remember correctly), and dear, overly self-conscious Rachel looked on with a mortified expression on her face, knowing that she was responsible for disrupting her mother’s carefully planned party.
We got the elephant outside and turned it over on the brown autumn grass. I can’t recall how many different tools I pulled out of the garage, but not one of them worked. Not the rake handle, not the screwdriver, not the awl and hammer – nothing. And still the razor buzzed on, singing its interminable one-note aria. A number of guests had joined us in the yard, but they were becoming hungry, cold, and bored, and one by one they all drifted back into the house. But not me, not the single-minded, see-it-to-the-end Nathan Glass. When I finally understood that all hope was lost, I took a sledgehammer to the toilet and smashed it to bits. The indomitable razor slid out onto the ground. I switched it off, put it in my pocket, and handed it to my blushing daughter when I returned to the house. For all I know, the damned thing is still working today.
After throwing the story into the box labeled “Mishaps,” I polished off the other half of the bottle and then climbed into bed. Truth be told (how can I write this book if I don’t tell the truth?), I put myself to sleep by masturbating. Doing my best to imagine what Marina Gonzalez looked like without any clothes on, I tried to trick myself into believing that she was just about to enter the room and slip under the covers with me, impatient to coil her smooth, warm flesh around mine.
THE SPERM BANK SURPRISE
As it happened, masturbation turned out to be one of the topics Tom and I discussed over lunch the following afternoon (in a Japanese restaurant this time, since it was Marina’s day off at the diner). It started when I asked him if he had managed to reestablish contact with his sister. As far as I knew, the last time anyone in the family had seen her was before June’s death, when she had come home to New Jersey to reclaim the infant Lucy. That was in 1992, a good eight years ago now, and from the fact that Tom hadn’t mentioned her to me the day before, I assumed my niece had somehow dropped off the face of the earth, never to be heard from again.
Not so. In late 1993, less than a year after my sister’s burial, Tom and a pair of his graduate student buddies came up with a scheme to earn some quick cash. There was an artificial-insemination clinic on the outskirts of
Ann Arbor, and the three of them decided to offer their services as donors to the sperm bank. It was undertaken as a lark, Tom said, and not one of them stopped to consider the consequences of what they were doing: filling up vials of ejaculated semen in order to impregnate women they would never see or hold in their arms, who in turn would give birth to children – their children – whose names, lives, and destinies would remain forever unknown to them.
They were each led into a small, private room, and in order to get them into the spirit of the project, the clinic had thoughtfully provided the donors with a stack of dirty magazines – picture after picture of young naked women in alluring erotic poses. Given the nature of the male beast, such images rarely fail to induce stiff and pulsing erections. Always serious about his work, Tom diligently sat down on the bed and began flipping through the magazines. After a minute or two, his pants and underwear were down around his ankles, his right hand was gripping his cock, and as his left hand continued to turn the pages of the magazines, it was only a matter of time before the job would be finished. Then, in a publication he later identified as Midnight Blue, he saw his sister. There was no doubt that it was Aurora – one glance, and Tom knew who it was. Nor had she even bothered to disguise her name. The six-page spread of more than a dozen photos was entitled “Rory the Magnificent,” and it featured her in various stages of undress and provocation: decked out in a transparent nightie in one picture, a garter belt and black stockings in another, knee-high patent-leather boots in another, but by the fourth page it was pure Rory from top to bottom, fondling her small breasts, touching her genitals, sticking out her ass, opening her legs so wide as to leave nothing to the imagination, and in every picture she was grinning, at times even laughing, her eyes all lit up in an exuberant rush of happiness and abandon, with no trace of reluctance or anxiety, looking as if she were having the time of her life.