Childish Loves

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘There’s a bathroom through the door at the end of the hall.’ But she stayed where she was.

  ‘Well, how are you doing,’ she said.

  ‘I’m fine, working.’

  ‘I bet you didn’t expect me,’ she repeated.

  ‘I didn’t know who to expect. Nobody ever knocks on my door.’

  ‘Until I did,’ she said. I had the sense for the first time that she was nervous, or high-spirited for some reason; or both. She took off her duffel coat and hung it on the back of the opened door. But she was over-heated from walking, and a minute later she took off her sweater, too, and sat there in jeans and T-shirt, still very red in the face. Her blonde reddish damp hair fell into her eyes and she pushed it away. ‘I bet I look something,’ she said, ‘don’t I? I went up to the guy at the desk and suddenly I couldn’t remember your last name. I always call you Ben, and I thought, here I am pretending to know the famous writer and I can’t even remember his name. So I just said, Is Ben around, and the guy said second floor. Elevator at the end of the hall. I’m glad they put your names on the door. I wouldn’t have had the guts to ask anyone else.’

  I said, ‘What do you mean, pretending.’

  She stood up and went to the window behind me. This involved pushing past me a little and standing with her back towards me; the office wasn’t large. Her presence made a perceptible change in the warmth of the room. ‘So this is one of those famous Harvard views,’ she said. Outside bright sunlight fell across the snow of the quad. Icicles hung from the eaves of the college library; a birch tree bent its snowy head. While we watched a maintenance truck backed its way along one of the paths, beeping. There was no one else around. ‘I practically walked the whole way from Lechmere,’ she went on. ‘We had one of those court meetings, and afterwards, I thought, I better get this kid to sleep and she never sleeps on the train. It’s too exciting. But by the time we got to Mount Auburn I really needed a pee. I haven’t seen you in months.’

  Maybe because of Jeffries’ warning, I felt unusually awkward around her; awkward and a little excited. ‘I’m flying to Austin next week,’ I said. This was true. A friend of mine at the university had arranged a reading – the English faculty was paying for my flight. The Harry Ransom Center had an interest in my visit, too. They have a large holding of contemporary manuscripts, and money to pay for them. One of the curators wanted to talk to me about Peter’s papers; I told her I was just going over them myself but could discuss it with her when I came through town. Really, the whole trip was just an excuse for me to go home for a few days. For some reason I felt the need of it.

  ‘To Wheeler Street?’ Kelly asked. This was the street we both grew up on.

  ‘Yes, I’m staying in my old bedroom.’

  ‘Will you do something for me,’ she said. ‘Will you knock on my parents’ door and tell them I’m okay. You know the house I mean, the red-brick house. Tell them you’ve seen me recently and that I look fine. I do look fine, don’t I? That’s what I keep telling myself. I look in the mirror and say, you look pretty normal to me.’

  She didn’t stay long. Shortly afterwards her daughter woke up and I sat with her for a minute while Kelly used the bathroom. Then she came back and wrapped them both up again. I saw them out as far as the elevator. Before the doors closed on her, she said, by way of goodbye, ‘You’ll have to watch out now. I know where you live.’ The doors didn’t close immediately and we stood there for a few seconds looking at each other until they did.

  *

  For several weeks, before my trip to Austin and after it, too, every time I sat down to work, I half expected Kelly to turn up. My solitude had a crack in it. I could feel the difference like you feel a drafty window. Whenever there was a knock at the door, my heart began to race a little, but it was never Kelly, who didn’t repeat her visit until the spring.

  I began to think about her unwillingly. Steve Heinz’s comment came back to me. ‘I thought maybe something had happened to you after ten years in England.’ He meant, repression, lovelessness. Meanwhile, Caroline and I continued to ‘try.’ A few times a month she spent ten dollars on a stick to pee on, and I lay in bed in the morning, waiting to hear some noise of reaction from her, good or bad. But she was always quiet and this was always bad. One of the side effects of our arguments about sex had been that even when we could agree to it I found myself sometimes in the awkward position of desiring to desire, and failing. Even now, when there was nothing to argue about, the problem persisted – not always, but enough to worry me. Eight hours alone in an office leaves a lot of time for worrying. And then there’d be a knock at the door, and I could feel my heart quicken, and a phrase from Byron or Peter (I wasn’t sure which yet) would come into my head: ‘That I should live again impassioned days.’ It seemed to me perfectly reasonable to believe there would be no problem with Kelly. I couldn’t be certain, of course, but somehow this cast a different light on the problem itself.

  Before I flew to Austin, I needed to look over the second batch of letters. Gerschon, a little unwillingly, had made copies and sent them by university post to the Radcliffe. They were waiting for me on my return from London, an innocent brown envelope in my office mailbox. After the lunch with Jeffries I finally got around to reading them. It occurred to me at last why none of Peter’s personal letters had survived – if he ever wrote any. Peter was a Luddite. He wrote everything out longhand, including the novels. Presumably it was only the business letters he bothered to type up on an actual typewriter. (So far as I know, he never owned a computer.) There may have been other letters, but no drafts survived their sending, and whatever there was remained with his correspondents, whoever they were.

  What had survived was more amusing than informative. Amusing isn’t the right word, either. He finished a first draft of A Quiet Adjustment sometime in July 2001 – that is, two years after I met him and a month or two into his summer holidays. We know this from a date in one of his marbled notebooks. Probably he spent the rest of that summer at his Remington, turning the novel into something he could show to strangers. In October of that year, with the school term in full swing, he began to send out letters to editors, agents and publishers, as he had before. (On a whim, I called up Random House, Penguin, Little, Brown, etc., to see what they did with old manuscript submissions. None of them had any record of Peter’s.) These letters more or less closely resembled the ones he had written over a decade earlier, on behalf of Imposture. Maybe one reason he kept the drafts was to keep track of whom he had written to – I know from first-hand experience how easy it is to forget. But he also began to write directly to other authors, the writers of the day, to enlist their help. These included John Updike, Norman Mailer, John Irving, Philip Roth, James Michener, J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon and Saul Bellow.

  Some of these letters were no more revealing than the ones he wrote to agents and editors. Dear Mr. J.D. Salinger, I am an upper-school English master at Horatio Alger. But sometimes he broke out of his role for a minute and lost his pleading tone. He became intimate and confessional. To Bellow he wrote about the effect on him of his unpublished manuscripts, sitting in his desk drawer year after year – ‘emitting their rays at me.’ He went on to say:

  On all sides there are forces at work on me. In More Die of Heartbreak (not your best book, by the way), Mrs. Bedell cries out, What am I to do about my sexuality? A very moving cry, but forgive me, in her case, the answer seems obvious enough. Let it go. This is what I have done myself and with much greater temptation. Maybe you don’t see the connection between these two things. But writing is like a sexual act in which it becomes clear only later whether anyone else was involved. You have had a regular orgy – I congratulate you.

  To Roth, he strikes the same note.

  I was disappointed by Sabbath’s Theater. Maybe I came to it too late, after the others – after the Communist and the Pastoral, which are very fine. (Now that my novel is finished I read a great deal. One of the luxuries of a bachelor life, as yo
u know.) But it seems to me your argument in those books was that living without sex or sexuality was the only way to remain decent. This is not the argument of Mickey Sabbath. I wonder, should we trust the moral of the better book, because it is better? (Sabbath’s Theater is full of inferior passages.) Or does this have nothing to do with it? As for the morality of the author, that is another matter. I used to have a great respect for writers, but now that I have written a few novels myself (one of them, at least, what you might call a work of literature) I have lost a little of my admiration. No one could have managed his life any worse than I have, but I can shuffle my characters around. It turns out this is very easy, compared to the real thing. I wonder if you agree.

  Updike comes in for another little lecture, on Byron.

  He felt very strongly that what qualified him to write Don Juan (a poem, I would guess, you have an affinity for) is that he liked to put it about, as my mother would say. Probably you know the letter. Could any man have written it, he wrote, who has not lived in the world, and tooled in a post-chaise, in a hackney-coach, in a gondola, against a wall, etc. I wonder if you agree with him – if you consider this one of your qualifications. As for me, I have been very little in the world and by my own reckoning wonderfully chaste. But I write. You might almost say, I write in lieu of all the rest.

  So many of his letters come back to this phrase: ‘I wonder if you agree.’ The cry of the lonely man who wants an audience and hopes to provoke one into existence. He didn’t really expect their help and he didn’t get it. He wanted to shout out, I’m one of you, too. (To Norman Mailer he wrote, ‘Success seems to have made you angry. I wonder what failure would have made you.’) Updike and Bellow are dead, and Pynchon and Salinger hard to get hold of, but I emailed Roth’s agent to see if Peter’s letter ever reached him. An assistant wrote back to say that they had no record of Mr Sullivan’s letter. Mr Roth was at work on a novel and could not be interrupted. I tried his publisher. Another assistant explained to me that it was not their policy to archive any of their writers’ correspondence. What was not passed on was thrown away.

  *

  I flew to Austin out of New York because I wanted an excuse to look up Peter’s old apartment. It’s about four hours by train to Grand Central. The landscape outside the train window was draped in white like summerhouse furniture out of season. Only the sea, which occasionally glittered into sight, had any life or color in it. White clapboard houses, some of them new; factories; car lots; mansions. Harbors almost empty of boats. A few islands. Bare trees. My daughter begins shouting at six most mornings, and I had gotten up with her to make the early train. All the way to New York waves of suspended sleep kept breaking in me. Nocturnal rhythms persisted. I woke up at Harlem-125th Street with the uncomfortable sense that I had been dreaming of Kelly – that something had happened that shouldn’t have, or that I had done something I shouldn’t. Muddled with sleep and guilt I was too slow to make the platform and had to wait until Grand Central to get out and catch the subway uptown.

  Nothing much came of this excursion. The last address Gerschon had for Peter was W. 189th Street between Wadsworth and Gorman Park. I got off at 191st Street and walked slowly through the strange shadowy quiet of Washington Heights. By this point it was a few minutes after noon, but very little light made its way to the pavement between the tall apartment blocks – although the sky above me was a clear winter blue. What was strange was just the contrast between the size of the buildings (suggesting a high density of lived life) and the absence of people. I had an impression of privacy and obscurity in quantity. Wadsworth Avenue was a little livelier: sunlight fell on it, and there was plenty of traffic. But 189th Street was very quiet indeed. The entrance to his building was set back between two pillars, and I went up to the locked doors and rang the buzzer of his old apartment, eight floors up, and waited a few minutes in the cold. When no one answered I went for a walk.

  Gorman Park was just at the end of the road. It turned out to be one of these small stately New York spaces, surrounded by thick walls, gloomily paved, and shaded by high trees. Not much room to kick a ball around in but good for an hour’s green cool in summer. As it was winter there was almost no one there: just a man in an overcoat on one of the long benches, warming his hands in a newspaper. I imagined Peter himself coming there after school to stretch his legs and work out a few ideas. Deciding whether or not to walk on to Fort Tryon, for a larger view, which is what I eventually did. But I couldn’t find my way up the hill – the rock-face kept interposing itself.

  Twenty minutes later, carrying my luggage with me (only a backpack filled with papers and clothes), I discovered the funny elevator at the A-train stop. The attendant wore a warden’s jacket and sat down for the journey on a wooden chair, the kind of chair people leave out on the street when they move house. We rode together (it was just the two of us) above the city, and when I got out it seemed twice as cold as it had below. The wind blew through me, but I walked along Fort Washington and into the park until I could see where it was blowing from: south down the Hudson from New England. Since the cafe was closed, I had to walk back almost as far as I had come to find somewhere to eat – a grocery store and taqueria on the corner of 190th Street, with a few chairs and a table pushed together behind the shop door. After lunch I tried Peter’s bell again and this time somebody answered.

  I explained myself through the entry-phone – that a friend of mine once rented the apartment. He had died a few years ago, and I wanted to see for myself where he used to live.

  ‘Listen, I’ve just gotten in,’ a woman said. ‘I have to pick up my daughter from school in an hour. I want to have lunch. I want to sit down for a minute.’

  ‘I won’t be much more than a minute.’

  ‘This is the kind of thing they tell you not to do in New York,’ she said, and buzzed me in.

  The lobby, which might have been grand, was empty and dark; several of the marbled tiles needed replacing. But still the building had charm – the charm of something on which money had once been lavished. Each of the brass-fronted mailboxes had its own little window and a slot for names above it. It gave me a shock to see ‘P Sullivan’ picked out in rubber lettering on one of the boxes. He’d been dead only four years; nobody had bothered to change the name. The elevator itself was narrow and badly lit. Soft quilted padding hung from three of its walls, covering the mirrors. On the way up I tried to calculate how often Peter must have stood where I was standing. Twice a day at least every day of the year; and sometimes double that, if he went out for a shop or a walk. About a thousand times a year. Unless he stayed at home on weekends, when he wasn’t teaching, and in the summer – on the days he had no reason for getting out of the house.

  These buildings weren’t designed for visitors. They were designed to make visitors lose their way. I had come up the wrong elevator and had to go back down again to the lobby – there was another elevator for Peter’s side of the building. Eventually I found his apartment at the end of a long pink-walled corridor covered in brown carpeting. Little scalloped lights, set into the walls and spaced a dozen feet apart, cast shadows against the ceiling. The numbers on the doors climbed into the thousands: Peter lived at eight hundred and seventy something. The woman who answered his door was frizzy-haired and large-breasted and short. She wore a red button-down shirt and a blue cardigan with shoulder pads. I could see behind her a chaos of toys, books, washing, and a wide sliding window with a view of the brown apartment block on the other side of the street. She had a cup of coffee in her hand and a little smear of jam on her mouth.

  ‘So who was this friend of yours anyway?’ she said, letting me in.

  ‘His name’s still on your mailbox slot. Peter Sullivan.’

  ‘P Sullivan, the great P Sullivan!’ This put her in a good mood and she offered me some coffee.

  The apartment was small. One wall of the living room was the kitchen; there was just about room for a sofa, a small breakfast table, and a television set.
She showed me her bedroom, too, which was covered in more toys and books and had a child’s colorful duvet falling off the double bed. This is where her daughter slept. The bedroom had a window, but it gave on to the air-shaft and was always closed. They kept the blinds drawn over it, because it used to scare her daughter, who didn’t like the thought of something climbing through. Probably she wouldn’t care now, but it didn’t let in much light and they never bothered putting her to the test. Her husband and she made do with the sofa-bed; it’s the only way they could go to sleep when they wanted to, and he came home late and liked to watch a little TV.

  ‘He needs to get in his TV time,’ she said.

  I asked her how long ago they moved in.

  Four years, she said. Their daughter was one when they moved.

  ‘What did it look like when you moved in?’

  ‘It looked like all these places look. Empty and not very clean. They cleaned the floors and the top of the oven, but the inside was disgusting. And the windows haven’t been touched in years. But there wasn’t anything left if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Do you mind if I look round for a minute by myself?’

  ‘Go ahead. He must have been a pretty good friend.’

  ‘I didn’t know him that well. That’s why I want to look.’