Childish Loves

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘Who did you have in mind?’

  He stared at me, with a conscious smile, and lifted his hands. ‘Look, I’m no writer.’

  ‘It’s not just a question of length,’ I said. ‘There’s a problem with the ending. I know what he meant to do, but he hasn’t done it, and even if he had it wouldn’t have worked.’

  ‘Listen, don’t worry about the ending. That’s what I expected you to say. You mean, in real life, it’s the boy who dies, not the girl. Am I right? That’s what seemed to me the problem, too; I mean, if you want to sell this kind of thing on context. I’ll be honest with you. Publication for me is just a means to an end. What do you reach with your books, if you don’t mind me asking, by way of audience? Fifty, sixty thousand? If you’re doing well. Look at the box-office results they print in the Monday papers, after the first weekend of business. Even the flops take in a few hundred thousand, in two days. Publication for me is just a stepping-stone to the movies, and in the movies you see this kind of thing all the time. Right off the bat the hero dies, and then they show the rest of the picture to explain why. In this case there is no why; that’s what breaks your heart. What this kid went through for puberty every boy should see. God knows the difference it might have made in my life. It took me four years of college before I had the nerve or opportunity to stick my prick in anything other than my own hand. That means about ten years of unnecessary shame and frustration, but I didn’t have the words to describe them. You can imagine what I felt when I first read my son’s story. I discovered it a few days after his death on the computer I bought him for his bar mitzvah. Probably what you felt just now, only he wasn’t your son and he hadn’t just died. Shame on top of grief on top of loneliness. But I’ve been living with that story every day now for five years, and every time I look at it I see something else. This was not a bad kid. This was a kid going through a difficult transformation, who had the talent and the emotional maturity to step outside of himself and put it into words. But the girl he falls in love with doesn’t get it, and people in my personal opinion will happily pay out ten bucks fifty, or whatever it costs these days to go to the movies, to see if at the end of two hours she understands what it means to be a young man.’ Then he added: ‘Look and your food’s gone cold. While I’ve been chewing your ear off.’

  The girl from Queens College called out, ‘Let’s get started here. My sitter is costing me ten bucks an hour.’

  Mike stepped forward, taking up space in the center of the room, and introduced me. I chose to read my preface to Imposture. For two reasons – it’s what they wanted to hear, and I had written it. This preface tells the story of my inheritance: how I came to know Peter during a stint teaching high school in New York; how we lost touch; the resentment I felt at being saddled with a stack of manuscripts he hadn’t had the energy or the luck to see into print himself. Afterwards, in the Q and A, Mr Pantolini asked me why, since I didn’t know Mr Pattieson well, I had gone to so much trouble to get him published? ‘Since you seem to have little personal feeling for the man.’

  ‘Personal feeling doesn’t come into it. I might ask all of you the same thing. Why do you want these manuscripts to be published? It won’t bring the people you loved back to life. It will only mean that others can see them more coldly and clearly than you see them yourself.’

  ‘Is that what happens when you publish a book?’

  ‘More or less.’

  No one asked me about Peter’s novels. There was a smattering of applause, and I was allowed to refresh my drink at the bar. Mike pulled out, from under the piano, a small box of books my publicist had sent along and began to arrange them on the piano itself. ‘I almost forgot,’ he said. ‘These came for you.’ I told a joke I like to tell after readings, a line from a Dawn Powell letter about the difficult build-up to publication day, the anticipation, the waiting around. She used to call this period, I said, ‘the calm before the calm.’ A few laughs. But none of them cared about that kind of calm; they had another kind of calm on their minds. ‘Okay, since nobody’s asking, I’ll ask,’ said the woman with the short red hair. ‘You talk a lot in this preface about receiving the manuscripts, but you don’t say much about getting them published. That’s what we want to know. How did you get them published?’

  ‘I’m a writer,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t so hard for me. The truth is, people publish the people they know.’

  Mr Pantolini said, ‘Does that mean we know you now?’

  ‘I’m not an editor.’

  ‘Well, how did you get to know your editor?’

  ‘He was the friend of a friend of a friend.’

  ‘I have friends of friends, too,’ Mr Pantolini said. ‘But it doesn’t help me.’

  Afterwards, in spite of anything I could say, they approached me with their manuscripts. Most of them bound, like Steven Lowenthal’s, with a cheap black spine and plastic covering. The queue took on an oddly formal shape: I might have been selling tickets. Only the red-haired woman had shown up empty-handed. She was on the edge of tears. ‘I didn’t know there would be a chance for that,’ she kept repeating and asked me for my card.

  ‘I don’t have a card,’ I said.

  ‘Then where are you staying in the city?’

  ‘I’ll be leaving in a few days. I’m flying back to England.’

  ‘A few days doesn’t matter. I can drive down tomorrow after work and drop something off, if you tell me where you’re staying.’

  ‘Please don’t drive down,’ I told her. ‘Not for my sake.’

  ‘Who are you kidding. It isn’t for your sake.’

  So I gave her my address in London, and she promised to send me ‘only one or two.’

  Novels, I supposed. ‘How many are there?’

  ‘I won’t tell you. I don’t like how many there are. It makes me unhappy, to see them piled up. I’ll send you the best.’

  Mike looked around for a bag I could carry the manuscripts in. I had eight in all, some of them hundreds of pages long. Too much for a paper shopping bag, even when we split the load in two. We gave the bags a trial run in the front hallway and on my second turn back to the piano one of the handles broke. The whole party had gathered round me, making suggestions. I felt like a sergeant on parade; my mood had lifted. Eventually, someone proposed the box Peter’s books had come in, which was made of stiff cardboard and about two feet deep and wide. But what should I do, I said, with all those copies of Imposture and A Quiet Adjustment, which were lying untouched on top of the piano? And Mike, with the sudden enthusiasm of a man rallying his troops, began very efficiently to auction them off – by naming names. ‘Sarah,’ he said, ‘one book or two books? How much dough you got on you?’ And so on, going all the way down the line. I ended up with something like two hundred and sixty dollars in my pocket, in cash and checks. Also, a few books left over, though we managed at last to pack the manuscripts around them.

  Then it was just a question of making it to the subway: with both arms stretched out underneath and my elbows propped against my ribs; with several brief stops along the way, every few hundred yards. I always dress up for readings in jacket and tie and could feel the sweat gathering on my neck and staining the collar. Mike had said to me something like Go forth. A number of the others stood in the doorway to wave me off – as if I were catching a boat, a long-haul steamer. Instead, I made it breathlessly to the train, which was standing at the station with open doors. There were three empty seats in the first car and I set my box down gratefully on two of them. Then the train continued stationary for another five minutes, and I could feel like a blush the heat coming off my neck and through my shirt. But nobody looked at me. Most people traveling back towards the city at the end of a long day don’t have very sociable reasons.

  It was almost midnight before we reached Manhattan. Steve Heinz had finally gotten in touch and invited me to lunch at Horatio Alger the next day. He had also apologized for his silence. There was nothing behind it but the fact that his wife’s sister was
staying with them. She wasn’t very well. He had reached the age, Heinz said, of medicalization, and most of the people he knew suffered from one kind of unmentionable disease or another. Anyway, this woman was a very simpatica, strong-minded, independent woman but at the moment the most important and noticeable fact of her personality was that she needed a lot of attention. His wife gave her the daily dose, but in the evenings he had also been on call. All of which was a roundabout way of saying could I come up to see him at work. He promised me ‘impossibilities: a free lunch.’ And it occurred to me on the long train ride that I should have some questions to ask him, about Peter, the right questions, the questions he wouldn’t mind answering.

  Why couldn’t the guy get himself published? I knew first-hand the luck involved, the almost willful persistence. Liking a book is like liking a human being: you need a good introduction. People publish people they know, not because editors are corrupt, but because there’s a big difference between spending two minutes on the first page of a manuscript and five minutes on it. Novels are only good or bad at certain speeds. I knew this, along with all the other excuses an unpublished writer thinks up to explain why nobody buys his work. After ten years of rejections, I had a lot of excuses. But I also knew, from the other side of the business, that if you can spell, and put one sentence after another, and tell a story that seems both unpredictable and inevitable; if you can do these difficult things and don’t mind the humiliations of self-promotion, you should find a publisher in the end. Especially with an income to support you and a life untroubled by dependents.

  It’s not as if Peter was stuck in the foothills of Appalachia. He had a position of influence and authority over wealthy New York kids, themselves the children of influential people in diverse fields. I couldn’t help thinking, if he wants to get published, he gets published – he wasn’t Mike Lowenthal’s son or the redhead’s sister. Unless he decides that the humiliations of self-promotion are worse than I think they are, or he has other reasons for keeping a low profile.

  When I reviewed novels, for a half-living, I used to spend weeks going over the backlists of particular authors. Lying on a couch to ease the pressure on my spine, which had been badly reorganized by years of basketball. A cup of cold tea on the sofa arm and a heap of books on the floor. I remember being struck by the fact that most writers write the same novel again and again. Not just on the grand scale – they also repeat phrases, ideas, characters, events and places. So what? So the imagination even of gifted fantasists is limited, who cares? But it occurred to me that if you could somehow map these elements onto a transparency and lay them on top of each other, then the repetitions would solidify into a landscape of sorts – which might more closely resemble the literal truths of the author’s life. The houses he has lived in; the things his wife says; what his father was like.

  At Woodside a man in slovenly tied work boots came on with what at first glance I took to be his daughter, a child of darker skin, maybe twelve years old. But the way he put his arm around her arrested my attention. He wore the kind of comfortable red plaid jacket that remains fashionable both among people who care a great deal about their clothes and those who don’t. The girl was in tights and a short soft skirt; she might have just edged seventeen. I felt a certain amount of disapproval concentrated on them – she drowsed in his armpit – and before we reached Manhattan they got off again. An old guy a few seats down from me said, ‘What do you think that was about?’ To no one in particular; one of those old men who voices general concerns aloud because they have few people available for private conversation. Nobody answered him. Eventually, to prove he was uncowed, he added, ‘I’d like to see her mother, that’s all.’

  ‘What’s he done to you?’ someone called out.

  ‘Piqued my curiosity.’

  Then the car settled into silence again.

  I began, in my mind’s eye, gently to lay Peter’s books on top of each other. Mothers and fathers both featured in Imposture and A Quiet Adjustment. He didn’t flatter them, but they offered nothing consistent, either, to suggest the presence of real figures in his life. One mother was an alcoholic; another so faint a personality she was almost invisible. The fathers were either kindly and ineffectual or pompous and ineffectual, but not both at once. Grand houses occasionally appeared: Halnaby Hall, where the Byrons honeymooned; his apartments in Piccadilly; various mansions in St James’s and Mayfair. My personal knowledge of such historical details is poor, but I assumed he had borrowed them from fact. (As I thought these thoughts the warehouses and factories of Queens, lit from below by street lamps, rushed past, surrounded by tracks.)

  The literary influences were easier to trace. I could imagine most clearly from his life the books on his shelves. Byron, of course. James is prominent, too, especially in the second novel. Jane Austen. One reviewer mentioned the Silver Fork school, which I had never heard of and spent a few days in the British Library looking up: writers like Bulwer-Lytton and Disraeli, and novels like Tremaine: Or the Man of Refinement, many of them published by Henry Colburn, one of the villains in Imposture. But there seemed to me also a distinct American influence: the super-rational prose of Edgar Allan Poe, the clause-addiction of Melville. Of course, the greatest influence on any writer’s work is what I sometimes think of as the IKEA of his imagination, which disassembles the cheap materials of his reading and experience and puts them roughly back together. With some screws loose, others left over. Veneer effects, bad hinge-work, unbalanced feet. A few standard devices for solving the problems of construction.

  This line of thinking suggested to me what his novels really have in common. They both turn on sex-acts involving dubious consent. In the climax of Imposture, Polidori deflowers Eliza, who thinks he’s Lord Byron, at their Brighton hotel. She shrieks at him childishly after he reveals himself: ‘This is not what I wanted at all!’ And he can think of nothing else to do but leave a handful of money on her bed and run away. In A Quiet Adjustment, Annabella gives herself up wholeheartedly to marriage only after Byron has sodomized her in his sister’s house. She realizes that she has become involved in a species of sinfulness that can corrupt even her own cold virtue; there is no way out. And on top of these examples, the unpublished stories. What was darkening into shape was something unhappy in the bedroom. I thought of Peter’s famous reserve, how much it had to do with shyness or arrogance. His silence might have been the silence of the victim or the exploiter; silences sound alike. And I recalled my own sexual discomfort around him. Some instinct had warned me against Peter, but if it was just the stupid, red-faced, heterosexual suspicion of gay friendship, or something sharper, I couldn’t be sure.

  In Manhattan I transferred at 42nd Street for the number 9 train – the same train I would take in the morning up to Riverdale and Horatio Alger. I was staying for a couple nights at an apartment on the Upper West Side. When I lived in New York, I lived east of the Park and rarely had to navigate the platforms, alleys, stairwells and ramps of Times Square. Even at that hour, the station was full of its New York types. Under the sign for the uptown red line, I saw a short, tired man in a suit trying to undo the knot in his tie; his elbow held a briefcase against his ribs. As he tore it loose, I felt suddenly unencumbered worried and unencumbered, and realized I had left the box of manuscripts in the subway car. It was too late to go back for them. The only novels that reached me came in the post several weeks later, from the red-haired schoolteacher. Out of guilt, I looked them over more carefully than I otherwise might have. The first ten pages; a middle chapter; the endings. She was right about her sister’s work. It wasn’t bad or particularly good, and there was nothing I could do for her.

  ***

  Around eleven o’clock the next morning, I made my way up the hill from the subway at Van Cortlandt Park – a broad flat green at the foot of Riverdale, just across the river from the warehouses of northern Manhattan. Sometimes in the spring I used to see cricket played there on Friday afternoons. Friday was the only day I didn’t tak
e the school bus. A few of the teachers met at Dorney and Malone’s, a bar underneath the elevated tracks, and drank beer (rarely more than one) and ate popcorn from wooden bowls, before taking the train into town and beginning the weekend. Students passed by us on their way home and sometimes caught us going in. It pleased them, to see signs of ordinary life in their teachers; they felt they had something over us.

  The hill is steep enough that I paused at a bend in the drive to catch my breath and look back. Van Cortlandt expands as you rise above it; the dirty industrial face of Inwood appears over the treetops. The last time I walked up that hill I was twenty-three years old, and most of the things that now define my life had not yet occurred. I was unmarried, daughterless; I had never published a book. But as I approached the school gates, the strong original sense of my first impressions returned to me – including the dread I always felt each Monday morning on re-entering a world of children.

  Peter and I, whenever we could, used our free periods to wander the streets. ‘Shuttered with branches,’ as he once put it, and away from them. We stopped sometimes in front of the gabled houses, set back behind driveways and driveway hoops; looked at the expensive cars, the lawns maintained by men in overalls, filling the daylight hours with slow work. Peter had the trick of falling in step with the kind of conversation I might have had with myself. We described the weather or talked about some of the kids. We also discussed the deep restlessness of a schoolmaster’s life: the things we thought about while we lectured or looked at out of the classroom window. Teachers are sometimes granted a second chance at the friendships of youth, which are based on the small intimacies of people bounded on all sides by unwanted tasks.

  I entered the grounds through the parking lot (Peter always stood just outside the gates to smoke his pipe) and climbed over a low wall. Two or three concrete steps led to the back door. Classes, at least, were in session; most of the halls were empty. Only a few of the older kids had gathered around their bags in the corridors. I used to reckon up in the first few years after teaching the number of students who would remember me if I came back. Diminishing year by year: teachers and students alike pass slowly through the bloodstream of school life after they leave and then disappear altogether. It was actually a relief when my youngest class graduated, though I still dream sometimes about entering a room full of kids whose names I have forgotten, about losing my way in the halls.