‘I suppose you’ll be wanting your ten per cent,’ she said.
But I shook my head and after that she cheered up. ‘You’ve been a good friend to him. God knows, he didn’t have many.’
As I was leaving, she said to me, standing in her own doorway while I stood in the street, ‘Do you know what I mind most about all this? I saw that review in the New York Times a few years ago. Of the second book. A neighbor pointed it out to me; we get all kinds of neighbors now. Some of them even take the New York Times. I’ve got nothing to say against that review but I thought at the time, if only Peter had been alive to see it. It would have been something, to take a seat on the subway, minding your own business, and read that in the newspaper on your way to work.’
A few weeks after my visit to Walden, Kelly came to my office again. She was in tears when I opened the door and she sat down in tears. ‘As soon as I started to knock I started to cry,’ she said. ‘Just the thought of what I was going to tell you set me off.’ Her soft pink cheerful face looked red and childish. I went to the bathroom to get her toilet paper for blowing her nose. The judge had ruled against her. He had decided there was no compelling reason for her to relocate to Austin. It wasn’t in the interests of the children, and her husband had a right to enforce the terms of their custodial agreement. Now she was stuck here, with no prospects of a job and her family one thousand nine hundred and fifty-two miles away. (She had looked it up on Google Maps.) Then she stopped crying and said, ‘And you’re leaving too this summer.’ When I didn’t answer, into a slowly changing silence, she added, ‘This is hard for me. I have feelings for you. I don’t know if you have feelings for me.’
She was sitting in the armchair with her hands on her lap, like a good girl, sitting up straight and composed, in spite of her red eyes and streaked face, and staring back at me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I told her, standing up. ‘I don’t feel much about anything at the moment.’
‘That must be a real bitch for you,’ she said.
I don’t know how I got her out of my office, but I remember thinking that something had happened which I needed to tell Caroline about. Something that wasn’t just my imagination. That evening, after our daughter was in bed, I began to try. ‘Do you remember Kelly? The woman with the two kids I’ve mentioned to you. She’s had some bad news and she came to my office today to cry about it.’ And so on. ‘I feel like I need you to forgive me,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t do anything wrong.’
Caroline was silent at first, but when she started talking, this is the form her anger took. ‘It’s her I feel sorry for,’ she said. ‘I know the way you come on. As if you’re tremendously interested and caring, when really you don’t give a fuck about anyone else.’
We went to bed together that night, as we always do, reading for ten minutes in silence and then turning off the light. But after the lights were off the silence continued. In the morning our daughter woke us, by climbing over me into the middle of the bed, and we talked and played with her and breakfasted more or less as usual, and went to work. And after work we gave her dinner and put her to bed and ordered in and sat up a little later than normal watching TV. I thought the whole thing would blow over, but a few days later I came back from the office to find Caroline at home, sitting at the desk in the entrance hall where we kept our papers, reading. It’s my habit, at the end of every week, to print out whatever I’ve written and put it in a drawer, where I mostly forget it, unless there’s some reason for resorting to a hard copy. Caroline had been reading my book, and this time the argument lasted much deeper into the night and covered more ground, and when we went to bed at the end of it we clung together as we hadn’t in years – as we used to in New York before we were married, when Caroline was woken by the traffic on 2nd Avenue and saw with horror our whole strange lives stretching in front of us.
One of the things we agreed on before falling asleep is that I would make no attempt to publish this book. At least, the sections of the book I had written; what Peter had written she didn’t care about either way. So I stopped working on it. (I had just come to the end of my visit to Walden.) The first thing I felt was relief. I sat in my office every day and followed the news on the Internet. I took long lunches. I went to the gym. The image I had was of a runner, who, having worked through other resources, begins to draw on his own tissues for energy. This is what I had been doing, and when I stopped writing, I felt my energy for other things coming back to me. I slept better; my sexual anxieties declined. The weather was improving daily, and all but the last of the snow had disappeared from the public parks. My daughter and I spent hours wandering through the Mount Auburn cemetery, climbing on gravestones, which she particularly loved, getting lost among the endless indistinguishable lanes that curve between the hills and fields of the dead.
But after a few weeks the thought of those manuscript pages began to worry me. Peter’s phrase kept running through my head – they were ‘emitting their rays.’ This was a subject, of course, in which he was expert: what it’s like to have all those public thoughts stay private. I would see him sometimes in the faces of strangers: a man with an uncut beard, wearing out his best suit and waiting for the public library to open; or maybe sitting on a street bench over the lunch hour, reading. And Caroline relented. We were getting on much better by this point, and the marriage described in this memoir seemed to her almost as fictional as anything else that’s out of date. ‘Just don’t do it again,’ she said. She didn’t want me or her or any of our children to appear in anything else that I wrote, because by that point she knew she was pregnant; and as for me I was relieved to get the book off my hands, and out of the desk drawer, and more than willing to exchange the pleasures of this kind of writing, such as they are, for the happiness that writes white.
Benjamin Markovits grew up in Texas, London and Berlin. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics. Since then he has taught high-school English, edited a left-wing cultural magazine, and written essays, stories and reviews for, among other publications, the New York Times, the Guardian, the London Review of Books and the Paris Review. His novels include The Syme Papers, Either Side of Winter, Imposture and A Quiet Adjustment. Markovits has lived in London since 2000 and is married with a daughter and a son. He teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Praise for the Byron Novels
“Beautifully drawn …, portrayed with moral clarity as well as complexity.”
—Jay Parini, New York Times
“A worthy addition to the literature of the Byron legend, and an excellent novel in its own right … an absorbing portrait of the celebrity couple and an unworkable marriage to an exhilarating but unmanageable man.”
—Toby Lichtig, New Statesman
“Most extraordinary about Markovits’s achievement … is the sustained voice, a careful imitation of 19th-century prose that barely sounds a wrong note.”
—Stephanie Merritt, The Observer
“What Markovits has achieved here … is a startling, psychologically terrifying portrait of an individual with the capacity to destroy lives.”
—Lesley McDowell, Independent on Sunday
“Markovits tells his tale with incredible style.”
—Melissa Katsoulis, The Times
“[The novel’s narration] is brilliantly achieved. It asks the reader to relish its artifice … and the artifice repays the attention it demands.”
—John Mullan, The Guardian
“A Quiet Adjustment is a lovely novel, as finely textured, nuanced, and vivid as Balzac.… Benjamin Markovits writes with an uncanny sensibility that is at once classic yet contemporary.”
—Katharine Weber
“A psychological masterpiece.”
—Amy Mathieson, The Scotsman
“Delicate and sinewy and richly felt, Imposture is the rare novel of ideas that pulses with real blood.… The prose is marvelous—not a misshapen sentence, not a mispla
ced emphasis—but the author’s real triumph is to transform a figure from literature’s margins into something suspiciously universal. Something that looks an awful lot like us.”
—Louis Bayard, Washington Post Book World
“Thoughtful and enjoyable.… Markovits teases out the suspense with wit and sensitivity.… A quirky, psychologically perceptive love story.… Admirers of the Romantics will find plenty to enjoy; other readers will too.”
—The Economist
“A masterful chronicle of a doomed 19th-century romance that begins in deception and ends in tragedy.… Markovits is a remarkably economic writer who neatly conveys his characters’ inner whirlwinds.… A powerful climax underscores the misery and longing at the core of this impressive novel.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Markovits is extraordinarily perceptive and extraordinarily evocative.… Much of the pleasure of a Markovits novel lies in the acuteness of its observation, the subtlety of its expression, the ingenuity of its form. Once you start marking brilliant passages or noting curious structures, it can be hard to stop.”
—Susan Eilenberg, London Review of Books
“Markovits is an intriguing, sophisticated and accomplished writer.… Not since Fitzgerald, to my mind, has there been a prose stylist who is so in love with things, the stuff and sensuality of privilege. Markovits renders, like Fitzgerald, the bright glitter that Fitzgerald, he also shows exactly the dullness, the grey-cuffed shame of not having money’s careless sense of leisured ease.”
—Kirsty Gunn, The Observer
“Imposture is the best-written novel of its kind since Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, and I was thrilled by the way it moved and developed, page by page, shining a light into the dark corners of the Romantic period as well as into the life of one man and his dreams of selfhood. It may easily turn out to be the best novel published this year. It’s a beautiful piece of work.”
—Andrew O’Hagan, author of Our Fathers
Copyright © 2011 by Benjamin Markovits
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Markovits, Benjamin.
Childish loves / Benjamin Markovits.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN 978-0-393-34627-5
1. Markovits, Benjamin—Fiction. 2. Byron, George Gordon Byron,
Baron, 1788—1824—Fiction. 3. Publishers and publishing—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3613.A7543C47 2011
813’.6—dc22
2011018341
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