by Auster, Paul
You’re joking. Come on, Virginia, why would you do something that awful to me?
I wanted to see you again. And I also thought you’d be the perfect man for the job.
What job?
Don’t be coy, Owen. You know what I’m talking about.
Tobak. The clown who calls himself Sarge Serge.
And Lou Frisk. You were supposed to go to him straightaway, remember?
I was tired. I’d been walking all day on an empty stomach, and I needed to eat something and take a nap. I was about to climb into bed when you knocked on the door.
Bad luck. We’re working on a tight schedule, and we have to go to Frisk now.
I can’t. I’m just too exhausted. Let me sleep for a couple of hours, and then I’ll go with you.
I really shouldn’t …
Please, Virginia. For old times’ sake.
All right, she says, looking down at her wristwatch. I’ll give you an hour. It’s four-thirty now. Expect a knock on your door at five-thirty sharp.
Thank you.
But no funny business, Owen. Okay?
Of course not.
After giving him a warm, affectionate smile, Virginia opens her arms and hugs Brick good-bye. It’s so good to see you again, she whispers into his ear. Brick remains mute, his arms at his sides, a hundred thoughts darting through his head. Finally, Virginia lets go of him, pats him on the cheek, and makes her way to the door, which she opens with a quick, downward thrust on the handle. Before letting herself out, she turns and says: Five-thirty.
Five-thirty, Brick echoes, and then the door bangs shut, and Virginia Blaine is gone.
Brick already has a plan—and a set of principles. Under no circumstances does he want to meet Frisk or carry out the job they’ve assigned him. He is not going to murder anyone, he will not do anyone’s bidding, he will keep himself out of sight for as long as necessary. Since Virginia knows where he is, he will have to leave the hotel at once and never return. Where to go next is the most immediate problem, and he can think of only three possible solutions. Return to the diner and ask Molly Wald for help. If she isn’t willing to give it, then what? Roam the streets and look for another hotel, or else wait for nightfall and then slip out of Wellington.
He gives himself ten minutes, more than enough time for Virginia to get down the four flights of stairs and leave the Exeter. She could be waiting in the lobby, of course, or keeping watch on the hotel entrance from across the street, but if she isn’t in the lobby, he will make his exit through a back door, assuming there is a back door and he can find it. And what if she happens to be in the lobby, after all? He will make a run for it, pure and simple. Brick might not be the fastest man in the world, but during his conversation with Virginia he noticed that she was wearing high-heeled boots, and surely a man in flat shoes can outrun a woman in high-heeled boots any day of the week.
As for the hug and the affectionate smile, as for professing to want to see him again and her regret at not having gone out with him in high school, Brick is nothing if not skeptical. Virginia Blaine, the heartthrob of his fifteen-year-old self, was the prettiest girl in the class, and every boy swooned with lust and silent longing whenever she walked by. He wasn’t telling the truth when he said he was about to ask her out on a date. There was no question that he wanted to ask, but at that point in his life, he never would have dared.
Leather jacket zipped, backpack slung over his right shoulder, down Brick goes, taking the rear stairwell, the fire exit, which mercifully allows him to bypass the lobby altogether and leads to a metal door that opens onto a street parallel to the front entrance of the hotel. No sign of Virginia anywhere, and so heartened is our frazzled hero by his successful escape, he feels a momentary surge of optimism, sensing that he can finally add the word hope to the lexicon of his miseries. He walks along quickly, sliding past knots of pedestrians, dodging a boy on a pogo stick, slackening his pace briefly at the approach of four soldiers carrying rifles, listening to the ever-present clank of bicycles rolling down the street. A turn, another turn, and then one more, and there he is, standing in front of the Pulaski Diner, the restaurant where Molly works.
Brick goes in, and once again the place is empty. Now that he understands the circumstances, this hardly comes as a surprise to him, since why would anyone bother to go to a restaurant that has no food? Not a customer to be seen, therefore, but more distressing is the absence of Molly as well. Wondering if she hasn’t gone home early, Brick calls out her name, and when she fails to appear, he calls it out again. After several anxious seconds, he is relieved to see her walk into the room, but once she recognizes him, the boredom in her face instantly turns to worry, perhaps even anger.
Is everything okay? she asks, her voice sounding tight and defensive.
Yes and no, Brick says.
What does that mean? Did they give you any trouble at the hotel?
No trouble. They were expecting me. I paid for one night in advance and went upstairs.
What about the room? Any problem with that?
Let me tell you, Molly, Brick says, unable to suppress the smile that is spreading across his lips, I’ve traveled all over the world, and when it comes to first-class accommodations, I mean top-of-the-line comfort and elegance, nothing comes close to room four-oh-six at the Exeter Hotel in Wellington.
Molly smiles broadly at his facetious remark, and all at once she looks like a different person. Yeah, I know, she says. It’s a classy place, isn’t it?
Seeing that smile, Brick suddenly understands the cause of her alarm. Her initial assumption was that he marched back here to complain, to accuse her of having swindled him, but now that she knows otherwise, she has let down her guard, relaxed into a more amiable attitude.
It has nothing to do with the hotel, he says. It’s about that situation I mentioned to you before. A bunch of people are after me. They want me to do something I don’t want to do, and now they know I’m staying at the Exeter. Which means I can’t stay there anymore. That’s why I came back. To ask for your help.
Why me?
Because you’re the only person I know.
You don’t know me, Molly says, shifting the weight of her body from her right leg to her left. I served you some eggs, I found a room for you, we talked for about five minutes. I hardly call that knowing me.
You’re right. I don’t know you. But I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.
Why should I stick my neck out for you? You’re probably in some kind of trouble. Police trouble or army trouble. Or maybe you escaped from that hospital. The loony bin would be my guess. Give me one good reason why I should help you.
I can’t. Not a single one, Brick says, dismayed at how badly he misjudged this girl, how foolish he was to think he could count on her. The only thing I can offer you is money, he adds, remembering the envelope of fifties in the backpack. If you know of a place where I could hide out for a while, I’ll be glad to pay you.
Ah, well, that’s different, isn’t it? says the transparent, not-so-cunning Molly. How much money are we talking about?
I don’t know. You tell me.
I suppose I could put you up in my apartment for a night or two. The sofa’s long enough to hold that body of yours, I think. But no hanky-panky. My boyfriend lives with me, and he has a bad temper, if you know what I mean, so don’t get any dumb ideas.
I’m married. I don’t go in for stuff like that.
That’s a good one. There isn’t a married man in this world who’d pass up some extra nooky if it came his way.
Maybe I don’t live in this world.
Yeah, maybe you don’t at that. That would explain a lot of things, wouldn’t it?
So, how much are you going to charge? Brick asks, eager to complete the transaction.
Two hundred bucks.
Two hundred? That’s pretty steep, don’t you think?
You don’t know crap, mister. Around here, that’s rock bottom, as low as it gets. Take it or leave it.
All right, Brick says, bowing his head and letting out a long, mournful sigh. I’ll take it.
* * *
Suddenly, an urgent need to empty my bladder. I shouldn’t have drunk that last glass of wine, but the temptation was too strong, and the fact is I like going to bed a little tipsy. The apple juice bottle is sitting on the floor next to the bed, but as I reach out and grope for it in the dark, I can’t seem to find it. The bottle was Miriam’s idea—to spare me the pain and difficulty of having to get out of bed and hobble off to the bathroom in the middle of the night. An excellent idea, but the whole point is to have the bottle close at hand, and on this particular night my waving, extended fingers make no contact with the glass. The only solution is to turn on the bedside lamp, but once that happens, any chance I have of falling asleep will be gone for good. The bulb is just fifteen watts, but in the ink-black dark of this room, switching it on will be like exposing myself to a searing blast of fire. I’ll go blind for a few seconds, and then, as my pupils gradually expand, I’ll be wide awake, and even after I turn off the lamp, my brain will go on churning until dawn. I know this from long experience, a lifetime of battling against myself in the trenches of night. Oh well, nothing to be done, not one bloody thing. I switch on. I go blind. I blink slowly as my eyes adjust, and then I catch sight of the bottle, standing on the floor a mere two inches from its usual spot. I lean over, extend my body a little farther, and take hold of the damn thing. Then, throwing back the covers, I inch myself into a sitting position—carefully, carefully, so as not to rouse the ire of my shattered leg—twist off the top of the bottle, stick my pecker into the hole, and let the pee come pouring out. It never fails to satisfy, that moment when the gush begins, and then watching the bubbling yellow liquid cascade into the bottle as the glass grows warm in my hand. How many times does a person urinate over the course of seventy-two years? I could do the calculations, but why bother now that the job is nearly done? As I remove my penis from the hole, I look down at my old comrade and wonder if I’ll ever have sex again, if I’ll ever run across another woman who will want to go to bed with me and spend a night in my arms. I push down the thought, tell myself to desist, for therein lies the way to madness. Why did you have to die, Sonia? Why couldn’t I have gone first?
I recap the bottle, return it to its proper place on the floor, and pull the blankets over me. What now? To turn off the light or not to turn off the light? I want to go back to my story and discover what happens to Owen Brick, but the latest installments of Miriam’s book are lying on the lower shelf of the bedside table, and I promised to read them and give her my comments. After all the movie watching with Katya, I’ve fallen behind, and it irks me to think I’ve let her down. Just for a while, then, another chapter or two—for Miriam’s sake.
Rose Hawthorne, the youngest of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s three children, born in 1851, just thirteen when her father died, redheaded Rose, known to the family as Rosebud, a woman who lived two lives, the first one sad, tormented, failed, the second one remarkable. I’ve often asked myself why Miriam chose to take on this project, but I think I’m beginning to understand now. Her last book was a life of John Donne, the crown prince of poets, the genius of geniuses, and then she embarks on an investigation of a woman who floundered through the world for forty-five years, a truculent and difficult person, a confessed “stranger to herself,” trying her hand first at music, then at painting, and after getting nowhere with either of those pursuits, turning to poetry and short stories, some of which she managed to publish (no doubt on the strength of her father’s name), but the work was heavy and awkward, mediocre at best—excluding one line from a poem quoted in Miriam’s manuscript, which I like enormously: As the weird world rolls on.
Add to the public portrait the private facts of her elopement at twenty with young writer George Lathrop, a man of talent who never fulfilled his promise, the bitter conflicts of that marriage, the separation, the reconciliation, the death of their only child at the age of four, the final separation, Rose’s protracted squabbles with her brother and sister, and one begins to think: why bother, why spend your time exploring the soul of such an insignificant, unhappy person? But then, in midlife, Rose underwent a transformation. She became a Catholic, took holy vows, and founded an order of nuns called the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer, devoting her last thirty years to caring for the terminally ill poor, a passionate defender of every person’s right to die with dignity. The weird world rolls on. In other words, as with Donne, Rose Hawthorne’s life was a story of conversion, and that must have been the attraction, the thing that sparked Miriam’s interest in her. Why that should interest her is another question, but I believe it comes directly from her mother: a fundamental conviction that people have the power to change. That was Sonia’s influence, not mine, and Miriam is probably a better person for it, but brilliant as my daughter is, there’s also something naïve and fragile about her, and I wish to God she would learn that the rotten acts human beings commit against one another are not just aberrations—they’re an essential part of who we are. She would suffer less that way. The world wouldn’t collapse every time something bad happened to her, and she wouldn’t be crying herself to sleep every other night.
I’m not going to pretend that divorce isn’t a cruel business. Unspeakable suffering, crippling despair, demonic rage, and the constant cloud of sorrow in the head, which gradually turns into a kind of mourning, as if one were grieving a death. But Richard walked out on Miriam five years ago, and you’d think by now that she would have adjusted to her new circumstances, put herself back in circulation, attempted to reconfigure her life. But all her energy has gone into her teaching and writing, and whenever I bring up the subject of other men, she bristles. Luckily, Katya was already eighteen and off at college when the breakup happened, and she was old enough and strong enough to absorb the shock without going to pieces. Miriam had a much harder time of it when Sonia and I split up. She was just fifteen, a far more vulnerable age, and even though Sonia and I got back together nine years later, the damage had already been done. It’s hard enough for grown-ups to live through a divorce, but it’s worse for the kids. They’re entirely powerless, and they bear the brunt of the pain.
Miriam and Richard made the same mistake that Sonia and I did: they married too young. In our case, we were both twenty-two—not such an uncommon occurrence back in 1957. But when Miriam and Richard walked down the aisle a quarter of a century later, she was the same age her mother had been. Richard was a little older, twenty-four or twenty-five, I think, but the world had changed by then, and they were little more than babies, two crackerjack baby students doing postgraduate work at Yale, and within a couple of years they had a baby of their own. Didn’t Miriam understand that Richard might eventually grow restless? Didn’t she realize that a forty-year-old professor standing in front of a room of female undergraduates could become entranced by those young bodies? It’s the oldest story in the world, but the hardworking, loyal, high-strung Miriam wasn’t paying attention. Not even with her own mother’s story burned deeply in her mind—that awful moment when her wretch of a father, after eighteen years of marriage, ran off with a woman of twenty-six. I was forty then. Beware of men in their forties.
Why am I doing this? Why do I persist in traveling down these old, tired paths; why this compulsion to pick at old wounds and make myself bleed again? It would be impossible to exaggerate the contempt I sometimes feel for myself. I was supposed to be looking at Miriam’s manuscript, but here I am staring at a crack in the wall and dredging up remnants from the past, broken things that can never be repaired. Give me my story. That’s all I want now—my little story to keep the ghosts away. Before switching off the lamp, I turn at random to another page in the manuscript and fall upon this: the final two paragraphs of Rose’s memoir of her father, written in 1896, describing the last time she ever saw him.
It seemed to me a terrible thing that one so peculiarly strong, sentient, luminou
s as my father should grow feebler and fainter, and finally ghostly still and white. Yet when his step was tottering and his frame that of a wraith, he was as dignified as in the days of greater pride, holding himself, in military self-command, even more erect than before. He did not omit to come in his very best black coat to the dinner-table, where the extremely prosaic fare had no effect on the distinction of the meal. He hated failure, dependence, and disorder, broken rules and weariness of discipline, as he hated cowardice. I cannot express how brave he seemed to me. The last time I saw him, he was leaving the house to take the journey for his health which led suddenly to the next world. My mother was to go to the station with him—she who, at the moment when it was said that he died, staggered and groaned, though so far from him, telling us that something seemed to be sapping all her strength; I could hardly bear to let my eyes rest upon her shrunken, suffering form on this day of farewell. My father certainly knew, what she vaguely felt, that he would never return.
Like a snow image of an unbending but old, old man, he stood for a moment gazing at me. My mother sobbed as she walked beside him to the carriage. We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.
* * *
I switch off, and once again I’m in the dark, engulfed by the endless, soothing dark. Somewhere in the distance, I hear the sounds of a truck driving down an empty country road. I listen to the air rushing in and out of my nostrils. According to the clock on the bedside table, which I checked before turning off the lamp, the time is twenty past twelve. Hours and hours until daybreak, the bulk of the night still in front of me.… Hawthorne didn’t care. If the South wanted to secede from the country, he said, let them go and good riddance. The weird world, the battered world, the weird world rolling on as wars flame all around us: the chopped-off arms in Africa, the chopped-off heads in Iraq, and in my own head this other war, an imaginary war on home ground, America cracking apart, the noble experiment finally dead. My thoughts drift back to Wellington, and suddenly I can see Owen Brick again, sitting in one of the booths at the Pulaski Diner, watching Molly Wald wipe down the tables and counter as six o’clock approaches. Then they’re outdoors, walking together in silence as she leads him toward her place, the sidewalks clogged with exhausted-looking men and women shuffling home from work, soldiers with rifles standing guard at the main intersections, a pinkish sky gloaming overhead. Brick has lost all confidence in Molly. Realizing that she can’t be trusted, that no one can be trusted, he ducked into the men’s room at the diner about twenty minutes before they left and transferred the envelope of fifty-dollar bills from the backpack to the right front pocket of his jeans. A smaller chance of being robbed that way, he felt, and when he goes to bed that night, he has every intention of keeping his pants on. In the men’s room, he finally took the trouble to examine the money and was encouraged to see the face of Ulysses S. Grant engraved on the front of each bill. That proved to him that this America, this other America, which hasn’t lived through September 11 or the war in Iraq, nevertheless has strong historical links to the America he knows. The question is: at what point did the two stories begin to diverge?