by Auster, Paul
“Is everything all right? You sound awfully down on yourself.”
“I’m fine. I’ve never felt better.”
“You’ve been here for six months now. You live in Joyce’s house, you work for Nancy, you take care of your girl, but maybe it’s time to think about the next step. You know, start making plans.”
“What kind of plans?”
“It’s not for me to say. Whatever you want.”
“But I like things the way they are.”
“What about singing? Aren’t you tempted to get back into it?”
“Sometimes. But I don’t want a career anymore. I wouldn’t mind doing some weekend stuff around the neighborhood, but no more traveling, no more big ambitions. It’s not worth it.”
“Are you happy making jewelry? Is it enough to satisfy you?”
“More than enough. I get to be with Nancy every day, and what can be better than that? There’s no one like her in the whole world. I love her to pieces.”
“We all love her.”
“No, you don’t understand. I mean, I really love her. And she loves me back.”
“Of course she does. Nancy is one of the most affectionate people I’ve ever known.”
“You still don’t get it. What I’m trying to say is that we’re in love. Nancy and I are lovers.”
“….”
“You should see your face, Uncle Nat. You look like you’ve swallowed a typewriter.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just that I didn’t know. I could see that you two hit it off. I could see that you liked each other, but … but I hadn’t realized that it had gone that far. How long has it been going on?”
“Since March. It started about three months after I moved in.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I was afraid you’d tell Joyce. And Nancy doesn’t want her to know. She thinks her mother will flip out.”
“So why tell me now?”
“Because I decided that you can keep a secret. You’re not going to let me down, are you?”
“No, I’m not going to let you down. If you don’t want Joyce to know, I won’t tell her.”
“And you’re not disappointed in me?”
“Of course not. If you and Nancy are happy, more power to you.”
“We have so much in common, you see. It’s like we’re sisters, and our minds are on the same wavelength. We always know what the other one is thinking and feeling. The men I’ve been with, it was always about words – talking, explaining, arguing, yacking all the time. With us, I just have to look at her, and she’s inside my skin. I’ve never had that with anyone before. Nancy calls it a magic bond – but I just call it love, pure and simple. The real deal.”
“JUST LIKE TONY”
I kept my promise and didn’t say anything to Joyce, but holding on to the secret had as much to do with protecting myself as it did with helping out the girls. If and when Joyce discovered the truth, I had no idea how she would react. I suspected that it wouldn’t be calmly, and if that turned out to be so, then one possible result of her ire would be to look for someone to blame. And who better to cast in the role of fall guy than Aurora’s uncle, the bungling moocher who had wrangled his unbalanced, corrupting niece into the heart of the Mazzucchelli household, whereupon she had connived to turn the innocent Nancy into a flaming, passionate lesbian? I imagined that Joyce would kick Rory and Lucy out of the house, and in the family mayhem that followed, I would be put in the position of having to defend my sister’s daughter, which would so alienate Joyce from me that I would be booted out as well. We had been together for a year by then, and God knows that was the last thing I wanted to happen.
On a warm, quiet Sunday just after the end of summer vacation, she joined me at my apartment for an evening of movie watching and Thai food. After we had phoned in our order to the restaurant, she turned to me and said, “You won’t believe what they’ve been up to.”
“Who are we talking about?” I asked.
“Nancy and Aurora.”
“I don’t know. Making and selling jewelry. Looking after their kids. The usual grind.”
“They’re sleeping together, Nathan. They’re having an affair.”
“How do you know?”
“I caught them. I stayed here Thursday night, remember? I got up early the next morning, and instead of going straight to work, I went back home to change my dress. The plumber was supposed to come that afternoon, and I went upstairs to remind Nancy about the appointment. I opened the door of her bedroom, and there they were, the two of them lying naked on top of the covers, fast asleep in each other’s arms.”
“Did they wake up?”
“No. I closed the door as softly as I could, and then I tiptoed down the stairs. What am I going to do? I’m so devastated, I feel like slitting my wrists. Poor Tony. For the first time since he left me, I’m glad he’s dead. I’m glad he isn’t around to see this … this awful thing. It would have broken his heart. His own daughter sleeping with another woman. It makes me want to throw up every time I think about it.”
“There’s not a lot you can do, Joyce. Nancy is a grown woman, and she can sleep with any person she wants. The same with Aurora. They’ve both been through rough times. They’ve both had marriages break up on them, and they’re both probably a little sick of men. It doesn’t mean they’re gay, and it doesn’t mean it will last forever. If they can find some comfort in each other for the time being, where’s the harm?”
“The harm is that it’s disgusting and unnatural. I don’t see how you can be so cool about it, Nathan, I really don’t. It’s like you don’t even care.”
“People feel what they feel. Who am I to tell them they’re wrong?”
“You sound like a gay rights activist. Pretty soon, you’ll be telling me you’ve had affairs with men.”
“I’d rather cut off my right arm than go to bed with a man.”
“Then why defend Nancy and Aurora?”
“Because they’re not me, for one thing. And because they’re women.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m not sure. I’m so attracted to women myself, I guess I can understand why a woman would be attracted to another woman.”
“You’re a pig, Nathan. It turns you on, doesn’t it?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Is that what you do when you’re alone? Sit around here at night watching lesbo porn movies?”
“Hmmm. I never thought of that. It might be more fun than typing up my stupid book.”
“Don’t make jokes. Here I am on the brink of a nervous breakdown, and you’re cracking jokes.”
“Because it’s none of our business, that’s why.”
“Nancy’s my daughter …”
“And Rory’s my niece. So what? They don’t belong to us. We just have them on loan.”
“What am I going to do, Nathan?”
“You can pretend you don’t know anything about it and leave them in peace. Or else you can give them your blessing. You don’t have to like it, but those are your only two choices.”
“I could throw them out of the house, couldn’t I?”
“Yes, I suppose you could. And you’d wind up regretting it every day for the rest of your life. Don’t go there, Joyce. Try to roll with the punches. Keep your chin up. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Vote Democrat in every election. Ride your bike in the park. Dream about my perfect, golden body. Take your vitamins. Drink eight glasses of water a day. Pull for the Mets. Watch a lot of movies. Don’t work too hard at your job. Take a trip to Paris with me. Come to the hospital when Rachel has her baby and hold my grandchild in your arms. Brush your teeth after every meal. Don’t cross the street on a red light. Defend the little guy. Stick up for yourself. Remember how beautiful you are. Remember how much I love you. Drink one Scotch on the rocks every day. Breathe deeply. Keep your eyes open. Stay away from fatty foods. Sleep the sleep of the just. Remember how much I love you.”
> Her reaction to the news was more or less as I had predicted, but at least she hadn’t held me accountable for Rory’s actions, which was all I was concerned about just then. I was sorry she had opened that door, sorry the facts had been revealed to her in such a shocking, indelible way, but eventually she would have to come to terms with the situation, whether she liked it or not. The meal came, and for the next little while we stopped talking about Nancy and Aurora and concentrated on our food. I remember feeling exceptionally hungry that night, and I bolted down my appetizers and spicy shrimp with basil in just a few minutes. Then we turned on the TV and started watching a film called The Outriders, a Western from 1950 starring Joel McCrea. At one point, the cowboys were sitting around a campfire chewing the fat, and the old geezer of the bunch (played by James Whitmore, I believe) delivered a line that got a loud guffaw from me. “I kind of relish getting old,” he said. “It takes the bother out of living.” I kissed Joyce on the cheek and whispered, “That fathead doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” and for the first time that night, my still-rattled, unhappy darling laughed as well.
Ten minutes after Joyce emitted that laugh, my own life was coming to an end. We were sitting on the sofa watching the film, and suddenly I felt a pain in my chest. At first, I took it for heartburn, indigestion brought on by the food I had eaten, but the pain continued to grow, spreading across my upper body as if my insides had caught fire, as if I had swallowed a gallon of hot molten lead, and before long my left arm had gone numb and my jaw was tingling with the pinpricks of a thousand invisible needles. I had read enough about heart attacks to know that these were the classic symptoms, and since the pain kept building, kept climbing to ever more unbearable stages of intensity, I figured my moment had come. I tried to stand up, but after two steps I fell down and began writhing around on the floor. I was clutching my chest with both hands, I was struggling for breath, and Joyce was holding me in her arms, looking down at my face and telling me to hang in there. Somewhere in the distance, I heard her say, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God, it’s just like Tony,” and then she wasn’t there anymore, and I heard her shouting at someone, telling him to send an ambulance to First Street. Remarkably enough, I wasn’t scared. The attack had carried me into another zone, and questions of life and death were of no importance in that place. You merely accepted. You merely took what you were given, and if death was what I had been given that night, I was prepared to accept it. As the paramedics lifted me into the ambulance, I noticed that Joyce was there again, standing next to me with tears pouring down her face. If I remember correctly, I think I managed to smile at her. “Don’t die on me, baby,” she said. “Please, Nathan, don’t die on me.” Then the doors closed, and a moment later I was gone.
INSPIRATION
I didn’t die. As it turned out, I didn’t even have a heart attack. An inflamed esophagus was the cause of my agony, but no one knew that at the time, and for the rest of the night and the bulk of the following day, I was convinced my life was over.
The ambulance took me to Methodist Hospital at Sixth Street and Seventh Avenue, and because all the beds on the upper floors were full just then, they put me in one of the small cubicles reserved for cardiac patients in the Emergency Room downstairs. A thin green curtain divided me from the main desk (when the nurses remembered to close it), and except for an early visit to the X-ray Unit down the hall, I did nothing but lie on a narrow bed the whole time I was there. My body was hooked up to a heart monitor, and with an IV needle planted in my arm and plastic oxygen tubes stuck into my nostrils, I had no choice but to remain on my back. Blood was drawn from me every four hours. If a coronary had taken place, small bits of damaged tissue would have broken loose from the heart and filtered into the bloodstream, and eventually those bits would begin showing up in the tests. A nurse explained that it would be twenty-four hours before they knew for certain. In the meantime, I had to lie there and wait it out, alone with my fear and morbid imagination as my blood gradually told the story of what had or hadn’t happened to me.
Paramedics kept wheeling in new patients, and one by one they passed before me with their epileptic seizures and intestinal blockages, their knife wounds and heroin overdoses, their fractured arms and bloody heads. Voices called out, telephones rang, food carts clattered along the floor. These things were happening no more than a body’s length from the tips of my feet, and yet for all the effect they had on me, they might have been happening in another world. I don’t think I’ve ever been more numb to my surroundings than I was that night, more locked into myself, more absent. Nothing felt real to me except my own body, and as I lay there wallowing in my brokenness, I became fixated on trying to visualize the circuits of veins and arteries that crisscrossed below my chest, the dense inner network of glop and blood. I was in there with myself, rooting around with a kind of scrambled desperation, but I was also far away, floating above the bed, above the ceiling, above the roof of the hospital. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but lying in that boxed-in enclosure with the beeping machines and the wires clamped to my skin was the closest I have come to being nowhere, to being inside myself and outside myself at the same time.
That’s what happens to you when you land in a hospital. They take off your clothes, put you in one of those humiliating gowns, and suddenly you stop being yourself. You become the person who inhabits your body, and what you are now is the sum total of that body’s failures. To be diminished in such a way is to lose all right to privacy. When the doctors and nurses come in and ask you questions, you have to answer them. They want to keep you alive, and only a person who didn’t want to live would give them false answers. If you happen to be in a small cubicle, and just three feet to your right another person is being questioned by a doctor or a nurse, you can’t help overhearing what that person says. It’s not that you necessarily want to know the answers, but you find yourself in a position that makes it impossible not to know them. That was how I was introduced to Omar Hassim-Ali, a fifty-three-year-old Egyptian-born car-service driver with a wife, four children, and six grandchildren. He entered the cubicle a little past one in the morning after experiencing chest pains while chauffeuring a fare across the Brooklyn Bridge. Within a matter of minutes, I had learned that he took pills for his high blood pressure, that he still smoked a pack a day but was trying to cut down, that he suffered from hemorrhoids and occasional bouts of dizziness, and that he had been living in America since 1980. After the doctor left, Omar Hassim-Ali and I talked for close to an hour. It didn’t matter that we were strangers. When a man thinks he’s about to die, he talks to anyone who will listen.
I slept very little that night – a couple of catnaps of ten or fifteen minutes each – but an hour or so after dawn, I drifted off in earnest. At eight o’clock, a nurse came in to take my temperature, and when I looked over to my right, I saw that my roommate’s bed was empty. I asked her what had happened to Mr. Hassim-Ali, but she couldn’t give me an answer. Her shift had just come on duty, she said, and she didn’t know anything about it.
Every four hours, the blood tests came back negative. There were morning visits from Joyce, from Tom and Honey, and from Aurora and Nancy – but no one was allowed to stay for more than a few minutes. In the early afternoon, Rachel showed up as well. They all began by asking the same question – How was I feeling? – and I gave them all the same answer: Fine, fine, fine, don’t worry about me. The pain had vanished by then, and I was starting to feel more confident about my chances of getting out of there in one piece. I said, I didn’t live through cancer in order to die from some dumb-ass coronary infarction. It was an absurd statement, but as the day wore on and the blood tests continued to come in negative, I clung to it as logical proof that the gods had decided to spare me, that the attack of the previous night had been no more than a demonstration of their power to control my fate. Yes, I could die at any moment – and yes, I had been certain that I was about to die as I lay in Joyce’s arms on the living room floor. If there was an
ything to be learned from this brush with mortality, it was that my life, in the narrowest sense of the term, was no longer my own. I had only to remember the pain that had ripped through me during the terrible siege of fire to understand that every breath that filled my lungs was a gift from those capricious gods, that from now on every tick of my heart would be granted to me through an arbitrary act of grace.
By ten-thirty, the empty bed was occupied by Rodney Grant, a thirty-nine-year-old roofer who had passed out while climbing a flight of stairs earlier that morning. His co-workers had called for an ambulance, and there he was in his skimpy hospital gown, a burly, large-muscled black man with the face of a young boy, looking positively frightened out of his wits. After his interview with the doctor, he turned to me and said that he was dying for a smoke. Did I think he would get into trouble if he went to the men’s room and lit up a cigarette? You won’t know until you try, I said, and off he went, unhooking himself from the heart monitor and wheeling his IV line down the hall. When he returned a few minutes later, he smiled at me and said, “Mission accomplished.” At two o’clock, a nurse opened the curtain and informed him that he was being transferred to the Cardiac Unit upstairs. Never having fainted before, never having been diagnosed with anything more worrisome than chicken pox and a mild case of hay fever, the young man was confused. “It looks pretty serious, Mr. Grant,” the nurse said. “I know you’re feeling better now, but the doctor needs to run some tests.”
I wished him luck when he left, and then I was alone in the cubicle again. I thought about Omar Hassim-Ali, trying to remember the names of his various children, and wondered if he hadn’t been transferred to the upstairs unit as well. It was a reasonable supposition, but as I looked over at the empty cot to my right, I couldn’t help imagining that he was dead. I didn’t have a single scrap of evidence to confirm that hypothesis, but now that Rodney Grant had been escorted to his uncertain future, the bare bed seemed to be haunted by some mysterious force of erasure, blotting out the men who had lain on it and ushering them into a realm of darkness and oblivion. The empty bed signified death, whether that death was real or imagined, and as I pondered the implications of this idea, another idea gradually took hold of me, which overwhelmed all thoughts about everything else. By the time I saw where I was going, I understood that I had come up with the single most important idea I had ever had, an idea big enough to keep me occupied every hour of every day for the rest of my life.