by Paul Auster
I took to eating my lunches in Abingdon Square, a little park about a block and a half east of Zimmer’s apartment. There was a rudimentary playground for children in there, and I enjoyed the contrast between the dead language of the report I was translating and the furious, hell-bent energy of the toddlers who stormed and squealed around me. I found that it helped to focus my concentration, and on several occasions I even took my work out there and translated while sitting in the midst of that bedlam. As it turned out, it was on one of those afternoons in mid-October that I finally saw Kitty Wu again. I was battling my way through a sticky passage, and I did not notice her until she had already sat down on the bench beside me. This was the first time I had seen her since Zimmer’s lecture in the bar, and the suddenness of the encounter caught me with my guard down. I had spent the past few weeks imagining all the brilliant things I would say when I saw her again, but now that she was there in the flesh, I could barely get a word out of my mouth.
“Hello there, Mr. Writer,” she said. “It’s good to see you up and about again.”
She was wearing sunglasses this time, and her lips were painted a bcopy shade of red. Because her eyes were invisible behind the dark lenses, it was all I could do not to stare directly at her mouth.
“I’m not really writing,” I said. “It’s a translation. Something I’m doing to earn a little money.”
“I know. I ran into David yesterday, and he told me about it.”
Bit by bit, I found myself relaxing into the conversation. Kitty had a natural talent for drawing people out of themselves, and it was easy to fall in with her, to feel comfortable in her presence. As Uncle Victor had once told me long ago, a conversation is like having a catch with someone. A good partner tosses the ball directly into your glove, making it almost impossible for you to miss it; when he is on the receiving end, he catches everything sent his way, even the most errant and incompetent throws. That’s what Kitty did. She kept lobbing the ball straight into the pocket of my glove, and when I threw the ball back to her, she hauled in everything that was even remotely in her area: jumping up to spear balls that soared above her head, diving nimbly to her left or copy, charging in to make tumbling, shoestring catches. More than that, her skill was such that she always made me feel that I had made those bad throws on purpose, as if my only object had been to make the game more amusing. She made me seem better than I was, and that strengthened my confidence, which in turn helped to make my throws less difficult for her to handle. In other words, I started talking to her rather than to myself, and the pleasure of it was greater than anything I had experienced in a long time.
As we went on talking there in the October sunlight, I began trying to think of ways to prolong the conversation. I was too excited and happy to want it to end, and the fact that Kitty was carrying a large shoulder bag with bits of dance paraphernalia sticking out from the top—a leotard sleeve, a sweatshirt collar, the corner of a towel—made me worry that she was about to get up and rush off to another appointment. There was a hint of chill in the air, and after twenty minutes of talking on the bench, I noticed her shiver ever so slightly. Plucking up my courage, I made some remark about how it was getting cold, and perhaps we should go back to Zimmer’s apartment where I could make us some hot coffee. Miraculously, Kitty nodded and said she thought that was a good idea.
I set about making the coffee. The living room was separated from the kitchen by the bedroom, and instead of waiting for me in the living room, Kitty sat down on the bed so that we could go on talking. The shift to the indoors had changed the tone of the conversation, and both of us became more quiet and tentative, as if searching for a way to interpret our new lines. There was an eerie sense of anticipation in the air, and I was glad to have the job of making coffee to mask the confusion that had suddenly taken hold of me. Something was about to happen, but I was too afraid to dwell on it, feeling that if I allowed myself to hope, the thing could be destroyed before it ever took shape. Then Kitty became very silent, said nothing for twenty or thirty seconds. I continued puttering around the kitchen, opening and closing the refrigerator, taking out cups and spoons, pouring milk into a pitcher, and so on. For a brief moment, my back was turned to Kitty, and before I was fully aware of it, she had left her seat on the bed and come into the kitchen. Without saying a word, she slid up behind me, put her arms around my waist, and leaned her head against my back.
“Who’s that?” I said, pretending I didn’t know.
“It’s the Dragon Lady,” Kitty said. “She’s coming to get you.”
I took hold of her hands, trying not to tremble as I felt the smoothness of her skin. “I think she’s got me already,” I said.
There was a slight pause, and then Kitty tightened her grip around my waist. “You do like me a little bit, don’t you?”
“More than a little bit. You know that. A lot more than a little bit.”
“I don’t know anything. I’ve been waiting too long to know anything.”
The whole scene had an imaginary quality to it. I knew that it was real, but at the same time it was better than reality, more nearly a projection of what I wanted from reality than anything I had experienced before. My desires were very strong, overpowering in fact, but it was only because of Kitty that they were given a chance to express themselves. Everything hinged on her responses, the subtle promptings and knowledge of her gestures, her lack of hesitation. Kitty was not afraid of herself, and she lived inside her body without embarrassment or second thoughts. Perhaps it had something to do with her being a dancer, but more than likely it was the other way around. Because she took pleasure in her body, it was possible for her to dance.
We made love for several hours in the fading afternoon light of Zimmer’s apartment. Without question, it was one of the most memorable things that had ever happened to me, and in the end I believe I was fundamentally altered by it. I am not just talking about sex or the permutations of desire, but some dramatic crumbling of inner walls, an earthquake in the heart of my solitude. I had become so accustomed to being alone that I did not think such a thing could ever happen. I had resigned myself to a certain kind of life, and then, for reasons that were totally obscure, this beautiful Chinese girl had dropped down in front of me, descending like an angel from another world. It would have been impossible not to fall in love with her, impossible not to be swept away by the simple fact that she was there.
After that, the days became more crowded for me. I worked on the translation in the morning and afternoon, and in the evening I would go off to meet Kitty, usually in the Columbia-Juilliard neighborhood uptown. If there was any difficulty, it was only because we didn’t have much chance to be by ourselves. Kitty lived in a dormitory room that she shared with another student, and there was no door in Zimmer’s apartment to shut off the bedroom from the living room. Even if there had been a door, it would have been unthinkable to take Kitty back there with me. Given the circumstances of Zimmer’s love life at the moment, I wouldn’t have had the heart to do it: inflicting the sounds of our lovemaking on him, forcing him to listen to our groans and sighs as he sat there in the next room. Once or twice, the Juilliard roommate went out for the evening, and we took advantage of her absence to stake out a claim to Kitty’s narrow bed. On a number of other occasions, we had trysts in empty apartments. Kitty was the one who worked out the details of these meetings, contacting friends and the friends of friends to ask them for the use of a bedroom for several hours. There was something frustrating about all this, but at the same time it was thrilling, a source of excitation that added an element of danger and uncertainty to our passion. We took chances with each other that strike me as impossible now, outrageous risks that easily could have led to the most embarrassing kind of trouble. Once, for example, we stopped an elevator between floors, and as the angry tenants of the building yelled and pounded because of the delay, I pulled down Kitty’s jeans and panties and brought her to an orgasm with my tongue. Another time, we did it on the bath
room floor at a party, locking the door behind us and paying no attention to the people who were lined up in the hall, waiting their turn to use the john. It was erotic mysticism, a secret religion restricted to just two members. All through that early period of our affair, we had only to look at each other to become aroused. The moment Kitty came near me, I would start to think about sex. I found it impossible to keep my hands off her, and the more familiar her body became to me, the more I wanted to touch it. Once, we even went so far as to make love after one of Kitty’s dance rehearsals, copy in the dressing room after the others had left. She was scheduled to be in a performance the following month, and I tried to go to the evening rehearsals whenever I could. Watching Kitty dance was the next best thing to holding her, and I would follow her body around the stage with a kind of delirious concentration. I loved it, but at the same time I did not understand it. Dancing was utterly foreign to me, a thing that stood beyond the grasp of words, and I was left with no choice but to sit there in silence, abandoning myself to the spectacle of pure motion.
I finished the translation at the end of October. Zimmer collected the money from his friend a few days later, and that night Kitty and I joined him for a meal at the Moon Palace. I was the one who chose the restaurant, more for its symbolic value than the quality of its food, but we ate well in spite of that, since Kitty spoke Mandarin to the waiters and was able to order dishes that were not on the menu. Zimmer was in good form that night, rattling on about Trotsky, Mao, and the theory of permanent revolution, and I remember how at a certain point Kitty put her head on my shoulder, smiling a languorous and beautiful smile, and how the two of us then leaned back against the cushions of the booth and let David run on with his monologue, nodding in agreement as he resolved the dilemmas of human existence. It was a superb moment for me, a moment of astonishing joy and equilibrium, as though my friends had gathered there to celebrate my return to the land of the living. Once the dishes had been cleared away, we all opened our fortune cookies and analyzed them with mock solemnity. Oddly enough, I can remember mine as though I were still holding it in my hands. It read: “The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.” As it turned out, I was to encounter this enigmatic phrase again, which in retrospect made it seem that my chance discovery of it in the Moon Palace had been fraught with a weird and premonitory truth. For reasons I did not examine at the time, I stuck the little slip of paper into my wallet and carried it around with me for the next nine months, holding onto it long after I had forgotten it was there.
In the morning, I started looking for a job. Nothing came of it that day, and the next day drew a similar blank. Realizing that the newspapers were not going to get me anywhere, I decided to go uptown to Columbia and try my luck at the student employment office. As an alumnus of the university, I was entitled to use this service, and since there were no fees to pay if they found you a job, it seemed like a sensible place to begin. Within ten minutes of entering Dodge Hall, I saw the answer to my problems typed out on an index card fastened to the lower left-hand corner of the bulletin board. The job description read as follows: “Elderly gentleman in wheelchair requires young man to serve as live-in companion. Daily walks, light secretarial duties. $50 per week plus room and board.” This last detail was what clinched it for me. Not only could I start earning some money for myself, but I would be able to leave Zimmer’s apartment at last. Even better, I would be moving to West End Avenue and Eighty-fourth Street, which meant that I would be much closer to Kitty. It seemed perfect. The job itself was not much to write home about, but the fact was that I had no home to write to anyway.
I called for an interview on the spot, afraid that someone else would beat me out for the position. Within two hours, I was sitting with my prospective employer in his living room, and by eight o’clock that night he called me at Zimmer’s to tell me I had the job. He made it sound as though it had been a difficult decision for him and that I had been chosen over several other worthy candidates. In the long run, I doubt that it would have changed anything, but if I had known that he was lying then, I might have had a better idea of what I was getting into. For the truth was that there were no other candidates. I was the only person who had applied for the job.
4
The first time I set eyes on Thomas Effing, he struck me as the frailest person I had ever seen. All bones and trembling flesh, he sat in his wheelchair covered in plaid blankets, his body slumped to one side like some minuscule broken bird. He was eighty-six years old, but he looked older than that, a hundred or more, if that is possible, an age beyond counting. Everything about him was walled off, remote, sphinxlike in its impenetrability. Two gnarled, liver-spotted hands gripped the armrests of the chair and occasionally fluttered into movement, but that was the only sign of conscious life. You could not even make visual contact with him, for Effing was blind, or at least he pretended to be blind, and on the day I went to his house for the interview, he was wearing two black patches over his eyes. As I look back on this beginning now, it seems appropriate that it should have taken place on November first. November first: the Day of the Dead, the day when unknown saints and martyrs are remembered.
It was a woman who answered the door to the apartment. She was a dowdy, heavyset person of indeterminate middle age, dressed in a billowy house frock decorated with pink and green flowers. Once she was quite certain that I was the Mr. Fogg who had called for an appointment at one o’clock, she extended her hand to me and announced that she was Rita Hume, Mr. Effing’s nurse and housekeeper of the past nine years. As she did so, she looked me over thoroughly, studying me with the unabashed curiosity of a woman meeting her mail-order husband for the first time. There was something so forthcopy and amiable about these stares, however, that I did not take offense. It would have been hard to dislike Mrs. Hume, with her broad and doughy face, her powerful shoulders, and her two gigantic breasts, breasts so large that they seemed to be made of cement. She hauled around this cargo with an expansive, waddling sort of stride, and as she led me down the hallway toward the living room, I could hear her breath whistling in and out of her nostrils.
It was one of those enormous West Side apartments with long corridors, sliding oak partitions between rooms, and ornate moldings on the walls. There was a dense, Victorian clutter about the place, and I found it difficult to absorb the sudden plenitude of objects around me: the books and pictures and little tables, the jumble of carpets, the hodgepodge of woody dimness. Halfway down the hall, Mrs. Hume took hold of my arm and whispered into my ear. “Don’t be put off if he acts a little strange,” she said. “He often gets carried away, but it doesn’t really mean anything. He’s had a rough time of it these past few weeks. The man who took care of him for thirty years died in September, and it’s been hard for him to adjust.”
I felt I had an ally in this woman, and that served as a kind of protection against whatever strange thing was about to happen. The living room was inordinately large, with windows that looked out onto the Hudson and the New Jersey Palisades beyond. Effing was sitting in his wheelchair in the middle of the room, positioned across from a sofa with a low table in between. Perhaps my initial impression of him was caused by the fact that he did not respond to us when we entered the room. Mrs. Hume announced that I had arrived, that “Mr. M. S. Fogg is here for the interview,” but he did not say a word to her, did not even stir a muscle. It was a supernatural inertness, and my first reaction was to think he was dead. Mrs. Hume merely smiled at me, however, and gestured for me to take a seat on the sofa. Then she was gone, and I found myself alone with Effing, waiting for him to break the silence.
It took a long time, but when it finally came, his voiced filled the room with surprising force. It did not seem possible that his body could emit such sounds. The words crackled out of his windpipe with a furious, rasping kind of energy, and all of a sudden it was as if some radio had been switched on, tuned to one of those distant stations you sometimes capture in the middle of the n
ight. It was totally unexpected. A chance synapse of electrons was carrying this voice to me from a thousand miles away, and the clarity of it stunned my ears. For a moment or two, I actually wondered if a ventriloquist wasn’t hiding somewhere in the room.
“Emmett Fogg,” the old man said, spitting out the words with contempt. “What kind of sissy name is that?”
“M. S. Fogg,” I replied. “The M stands for Marco, the S is for Stanley.”
“That’s no better. If anything, it’s worse. What are you going to do about it, boy?”
“I’m not going to do anything about it. My name and I have been through a lot together, and I’ve grown rather fond of it over the years.”