by Auster, Paul
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly
I gotta love one man ’til I die …
That evening, Rufus boarded a plane and flew home to Jamaica. To the best of my knowledge, he has not been back since.
FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS
Tom was confused. So much had happened in such a short period of time, he felt unprepared to deal with the wealth of possibilities that had opened before him. Did he want to take over Harry’s business and spend the rest of his days trafficking in rare and used books from a Park Slope storefront? Or, as he had proposed on the night of Harry’s death, should he simply sell the whole operation and split the proceeds with Rufus? The fact that Rufus didn’t want the money was of little importance. The building was a valuable piece of property, and if Rufus persisted in turning down his half of the sale, Tom would see to it that his grandmother accepted for him. Selling would generate a large sum of cash, no less than several hundred thousand dollars for each of them, and with his share Tom would be able to reinvent himself from the bottom up, to take off in any direction he wanted. But what did he want? That was the fundamental question, and for the time being it was the one question that had no answer. Was Tom still interested in pursuing the idea of the Hotel Existence? Or would he prefer to return to his original post-Michigan plan and look for a job as a high school English teacher? And, if so, where? Did he want to stay in New York, or was he ready to pack it in and move to the country? We discussed these matters a hundred times in the days that followed, but other than giving up his tiny apartment and temporarily installing himself in Harry’s place above the store, Tom continued to waffle, to brood, to sulk. Fortunately, he was under no immediate pressure to make a decision. Harry’s will was about to commence its laborious journey through probate, and it would be months before the deed to the building was turned over to the beneficiaries. As for Harry’s other assets – his meager bank account, a few stocks and bonds – those were frozen as well. Tom was sitting on a mountain of gold, but until the lawyers at Flynn, Bernstein, and Vallaro wrapped up the affairs of Harry’s estate, he would actually be worse off than he had been before. He had lost his weekly salary, and unless he kept Brightman’s Attic running at full tilt, he would scarcely have any income at all. I offered to lend him money, but he refused to consider it. Nor was he terribly keen on my suggestion that he shut down the business for the summer and go on a long vacation with Lucy and me. He owed it to Harry to keep the Attic alive, he said. It was a moral debt, and he felt honor-bound to stick it out to the end. Fine, I said. But how are you going to run the store on your own? Rufus is gone, which means you don’t have a salesclerk. And you can’t afford to hire a new one, can you? Where’s his salary going to come from?
For the first time in all the years I had known him, Tom lost his temper. “Fuck it, Nathan,” he said. “Who the hell cares? I’ll figure something out. Just mind your own business, okay?”
But Tom’s business was also my business, and it pained me to see him in such a difficult spot. That’s when I volunteered my services to the cause – for the nominal salary of one dollar a month. I would take over for Rufus, I said, and for as long as necessary I would suspend my retirement to carry out the taxing responsibilities of salesclerk on the ground floor of Brightman’s Attic. If Tom wanted me to, I would even be happy to call him Boss.
And so it was that a new era of our lives began. I enrolled Lucy in a summer arts camp at the Berkeley Carroll School on Lincoln Place, and every morning after walking her the seven and a half blocks between apartment and camp, I would stroll back down the avenue and take my place behind the counter of the store. My work on The Book of Human Follies suffered from this altered routine, but I kept my hand in as best I could, scribbling during the late-night hours after Lucy had gone to bed, stealing fifteen minutes here or twenty minutes there whenever business in the store was slow. Much to my regret, the daily lunches with Tom were discontinued. There simply wasn’t enough time to indulge in long, sit-down meals anymore, so we turned ourselves into brown baggers instead, eating our sandwiches and drinking our iced coffees in the stuffy confines of the Attic, polishing off the food in a matter of minutes. At four o’clock, Tom would relieve me of my duties behind the counter so I could fetch Lucy at camp. I would bring her back to the shop, and until we closed up at six, she would entertain herself by reading one of the four thousand two hundred books that lined the shelves on the ground floor.
Lucy remained a puzzle to me. In many respects, she was a model child, and the better we got to know each other, the more I liked her, the more I enjoyed having her around. Forgetting the question of her mother for a moment, there were a thousand positive things to be said about our girl. A complete stranger to big-city life, she adapted quickly to her new surroundings and began to feel at home in the neighborhood almost at once. Wherever Carolina Carolina might have been, the only language spoken there was English. Now, as we took our walks up and down Seventh Avenue, passing the dry cleaner, the grocery store, the bakery, the beauty parlor, the newsstand, the coffee shop, she was assaulted by a plethora of different tongues. She heard Spanish and Korean, Russian and Chinese, Arabic and Greek, Japanese, German, and French, but rather than feel intimidated or perplexed, she exulted in this variety of human sound. “I want to talk like that,” she said to me one morning as we walked by the open door of some establishment or other and saw a dumpy little woman screaming at an old man. “Mira! Mira! Mira!” Lucy said, aping the woman’s voice with uncanny exactitude. “Hombre! Gato! Sucio!” A minute later, she was doing a similar rendition of a man calling out to someone across the street in Arabic – words I wouldn’t have been able to pronounce if my life had depended on it. The kid had an ear, and eyes to see with, and a mind to think with, and a heart to feel with. She had no trouble making friends at the camp, and by the end of the first week she had already been invited over by three different girls for so-called play dates. She didn’t recoil from my good-night kisses and hugs; she wasn’t picky about her food; she rarely made a fuss about anything. In spite of her frequently atrocious grammar (which I decided not to correct) and in spite of her fixation with watching TV cartoons (I put my foot down and limited her to one hour a day), I never once regretted having taken her in.
Still, there was the unsettling fact of her refusal to talk about her mother. Aurora was the unseen presence who dominated our little household, and no matter how many questions I asked, no matter how often I tried to trick Lucy into divulging some scrap of pertinent information, I continued to get nowhere. I suppose there was something admirable about such willpower in one so young, but I found it infuriating, and the longer the standoff went on, the more frustrated I became.
“You miss your mother, Lucy, don’t you?” I asked her one night.
“I miss her something terrible,” she said. “I miss her so bad, my heart aches.”
“You want to see her again, don’t you?”
“More than anything. Every night I pray to God she’ll come back to me.”
“She will. All you have to do is tell me where we can find her.”
“I’m not supposed to, Uncle Nat. I keep telling you the same thing, but it’s like you don’t hear what I’m saying.”
“I hear you. It’s just that I don’t want you to be sad anymore.”
“I can’t talk about it. I made a promise, and if I break my promise, I’ll burn in hell. Hell is forever, and I’m still a little girl. I’m not ready to burn forever.”
“There is no hell, Lucy. And you’re not going to burn, not for one minute. Everyone loves your mother, and all we want to do is help her.”
“No, sir. That ain’t the way it is. Please, Uncle Nat. Don’t ask me any more questions about Mama. She’s all right, and one day she’ll come back to me. That’s what I know, and that’s the only thing I can tell you. If you keep it up, I’ll just go back to the way I was when I first came here. I’ll clamp my lips shut and won’t say a word to you. And where would that get us? We have s
uch a nice time when we talk together. As long as you’re not asking me about Mama, it’s about the best fun I have. Talking to you, I mean. You’re such a jolly old soul, Uncle Nat. We don’t want to spoil a good thing, do we?”
Outwardly, she appeared to be the happiest, most contented of children, but it disturbed me to think of the torments she must have been living through in order to hold on to her secret. It was too much to ask a nine-and-a-half-year-old person to walk around with such a heavy responsibility. Damage was being done to her, and I couldn’t figure out a way to stop it. I talked to Tom about sending her to a psychiatrist, but he thought it would only be a waste of time and money. If Lucy wouldn’t talk to us, then she certainly wouldn’t talk to a stranger. “We have to be patient,” he said. “Sooner or later, it will become too much for her, and then everything will come pouring out. But she won’t say a word until she’s good and ready.” I took Tom’s advice and temporarily bagged the idea of a doctor, but that didn’t mean I thought much of his opinion. The kid was never going to be ready. She was so tough, so stubborn, so damned unbreakable, I was convinced she could hold out forever.
I started working for Tom on the fourteenth, three days after Harry’s ashes were scattered in Prospect Park and Rufus went home to his Jamaican granny. The day after that, my daughter returned from England. I had been thinking about the fifteenth ever since my disastrous conversation with the now unmentionable one who had mothered my child, but in the maelstrom of events that followed our abrupt departure from the Chowder Inn, I had been too preoccupied to keep track of dates. It was indeed the fifteenth of June, but I was too out of it by then to know that. After closing up the store at six, Tom, Lucy, and I had an early dinner at the Second Street Café, and then Lucy and I returned to my apartment, where we were planning to spend the evening battling each other at a game of Monopoly or Clue. That was when I heard Rachel’s message on the answering machine. Her plane had landed at one; she had walked into her house at three; she had read my letter at five. From the tone of her voice when she spoke the word letter, I understood that all was forgiven. “Thank you, Dad,” she said. “You have no idea how important it is to me. So much bad stuff has been happening lately, it’s exactly what I needed to hear. If I can count on you now, I think I’ll be able to get through anything.”
The next night, Tom babysat for Lucy, and I had dinner with Rachel in midtown Manhattan, not far from my old office at Mid-Atlantic Accident and Life. How rapidly the world shifts around us; how rapidly one problem is replaced by another, with scarcely a moment to bask in our victories. For close to a month, I had been fretting over the note I’d sent to my angry, alienated daughter, praying that my abject words of apology would cut through years of resentment and give me a second chance with her. By some miracle, the letter had accomplished everything I had hoped it would. We were back on solid ground together, and with all the acrimonies of the past now forgotten, the dinner that night should have been a joyous reunion, a time for jokes and laughter and whimsical recollections. But no sooner had I reestablished myself as Rachel’s father than I was called upon to help her through the worst predicament of her adult life. My girl was going through “bad stuff.” She was in crisis, and who else could she turn to but her old man – incompetent fool though he might have been?
I booked a table for us at La Grenouille, the same exorbitantly priced, fussily decorated old New York-style French restaurant where (name deleted) and I had taken her to celebrate her eighteenth birthday. She showed up wearing the necklace I had sent her, the twin to the one that had caused so much grief at the Cosmic Diner, and glad as I was to see how well it suited her, how attractive it looked against the darkness of her eyes and hair, I couldn’t help thinking about the other necklace at the same time, which provoked several pangs of remorse as I relived the disaster I had brought down on Marina Gonzalez. So many young women in their late twenties and early thirties, I said to myself, so many young female lives swirling around me. Marina. Honey Chowder. Nancy Mazzucchelli. Aurora. Rachel. Of all the women in that group, my daughter struck me as the most balanced and successful, the most solid, the one least likely to be swamped with difficulties, and yet there she was sitting across the table from me with tears in her eyes, telling me that her marriage was falling apart.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “The last time I saw you, everything was going well. Terrence was terrific. You were terrific. You’d just had your second anniversary, and you told me they’d been the happiest two years of your life. When was that? Late March? Early April? Marriages don’t crumble that fast. Not when people are in love.”
“I’m still in love,” Rachel answered. “It’s Terrence I’m worried about.”
“The guy chased you halfway around the world to talk you into marrying him. Remember? He was the one who went after you. At first, you weren’t even sure if you liked him.”
“That was a long time ago. This is now.”
“The last time we talked about now, you said you were thinking about having babies. You said Terrence was dying to become a father. Not a father in the abstract – but the father of your child. That’s what men say when they’re in love with the woman they live with.”
“I know. That’s what I thought, too. But then we went to England.”
“America, England. What’s the difference? You’re still the same people wherever you are.”
“Maybe so. But Georgina isn’t in America. She’s in England.”
“Ah. So that’s where we’re going. Why didn’t you come right out and say it?”
“It’s hard. Just mentioning her name turns my stomach.”
“If it’s any comfort, I find it a ridiculous name. Georgina. It makes me think of some giggly Victorian girl with golden ringlets and fat red jowls.”
“She’s a mousy little brunette with greasy hair and bad skin.”
“Doesn’t sound like much competition to me.”
“She and Terrence went to university together. She was his first big love. Then she fell for someone else and broke up with him. That’s when he came to America. He was so depressed, Dad. He told me he thought of committing suicide.”
“And now the someone else is out of the picture.”
“I’m not sure. All I know is that when we were in London, the three of us had dinner together, and Terrence couldn’t take his eyes off her. It was like I wasn’t even there. After that, he wouldn’t stop talking about her. Georgina is so smart. Georgina is so funny. Georgina is such a good person. Two days later, he had lunch with her alone. Then we went to Cornwall to visit his parents, but after three or four days he took the train back to London to talk to his publisher about the book he’s been writing. Or so he said. I think he went back to be with stupid Georgina Watson, the love of his life. It was so awful. He just left me out there in the country with his right-wing, anti-Semitic parents, and all I could do was pretend I was enjoying every minute of it. He slept with her. I know he did. He slept with her, and now he doesn’t love me anymore.”
“Did you ask him?”
“You bet I did. The minute he came back to his parents’ house. We had a terrible fight. The worst fight since I’ve known him.”
“And what did he say?”
“He denied it. He said I was jealous and making up stories.”
“That’s a good sign, Rachel.”
“Good? What do you mean good? He was lying to me, and now I’m never going to be able to trust him again.”
“Assume the worst. Assume that he slept with her and then came back and lied to you. It’s still a good sign.”
“How can you keep saying that?”
“Because it means he doesn’t want to lose you. He doesn’t want the marriage to end.”
“What kind of marriage is that? When you can’t trust the man you’re married to, it’s like not being married at all.”
“Look, dumpling, far be it from me to offer you advice. When it comes to marriage, I’m the least qualified person in th
e world to tell anyone what to do. You lived in the same house with me for the first eighteen years of your life, and I don’t have to remind you what a botch of it I made with your mother. There were moments when I felt so sick of her, I actually wished she would die. I would imagine car crashes, train wrecks, falls down enormous flights of stairs. This is a terrible confession to make, and I don’t want you to think I’m proud of myself – but it’s important that you understand what a bad marriage is. Your mother and I had a bad marriage. We loved each other for a while, and then it all went bad. But still, we stuck it out for a long time, and bad as we were together, we managed to make you. You’re the happy ending to the whole tragic story, and because you are who you are, I don’t have a single regret about anything. Do you understand me, Rachel? I don’t know Terrence well enough to have an opinion about him. But I do know that you don’t have a bad marriage. People slip up. They do dumb things. But Georgina is on the other side of the ocean now, and unless you’ve linked yourself up with an incurable skirt chaser, I suspect this little episode is over and done with. Stick it out for a while and see what happens. Don’t do anything rash. He told you he was innocent, and who’s to say he wasn’t telling the truth? Old loves are hard to get out of your system. Maybe Terrence had his head turned for a couple of moments, but now he’s back in America with you, and if you love him as much as you say you do, there’s a good chance everything will work out. As long as he doesn’t turn into the kind of shit husband your father was, there’s hope. Lots of hope. Hope for a happy future together. Hope for babies. Hope for cats and dogs. Hope for trees and flowers. Hope for America. Hope for England. Hope for the world.”