Moon Palace

by Paul Auster

  “A profound answer,” said Barber. “No doubt it’s the only one that makes sense.”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said. “Even if there wasn’t an actual cave, there was the experience of a cave. It all depends on how literally you want to take him.”

  “In that case,” Barber continued, “let me rephrase the question. Given that we can’t be sure, to what extent do you think it’s worth taking a risk?”

  “What kind of risk?” I asked.

  “The risk of wasting time,” Kitty said.

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “He wants to look for the cave,” she said to me. “Isn’t that copy, Sol? You want to go out there and see if you can find it.”

  “You’re very perceptive, my dear,” Barber said. “That’s precisely what I’m thinking of, and the temptation is very strong. If there’s a possibility that the cave exists, I’m willing to do everything I can to track it down.”

  “There’s a possibility,” I said. “It might not be a good possibility, but I don’t see why that should stop you.”

  “He can’t do it alone,” Kitty said. “It would be too dangerous.”

  “True enough,” I said. “No one should climb mountains alone.”

  “Especially not fat men,” Barber said. “But those are details to be worked out later. The important thing is that you think I should do it. Is that copy?”

  “We could all do it together,” Kitty said. “M. S. and I could be your scouts.”

  “Of course,” I said, suddenly imagining myself in a buckskin outfit, scanning the horizon from the top of a palomino horse. “We’ll find that bloody cave if it’s the last thing we do.”

  To be perfectly honest, I never took any of this seriously. I thought it was one of those drunken notions that people cook up late at night and then forget about the next morning, and even though we continued to talk about the “expedition” whenever we saw each other, I considered it to be little more than a joke. It was enjoyable to study maps and photographs, to discuss itineraries and weather conditions, but playing along with the project was very different from believing in it. Utah was so far away, and the chances of our organizing such a trip were so slim, that even if Barber was in earnest, I failed to see how it would ever happen. This skepticism was reinforced one Sunday afternoon in February when I watched Barber tramp through the woods of Berkshire County. The man was so grossly overweight, so clumsy on his feet, so dismally shortwinded that he could not walk for more than ten minutes without having to stop and catch his breath. Redfaced from the exertion, he would plop himself down on the nearest tree stump and sit there for as long as he had been walking, his huge chest heaving desperately, the sweat dribbling down from his tam o’ shanter as though his head were a block of melting ice. If the gentle hills of Massachusetts could do that to him, I thought, how was he going to manage the canyons of Utah? No, the expedition was a farce, an odd little exercise in wishful thinking. As long as it remained in the realm of conversation, there was nothing to worry about. But if Barber ever made a real move to go, Kitty and I both understood that we would be duty-bound to talk him out of it.

  Given this early resistance of mine, it was ironic that I should have been the one who ultimately went looking for the cave. It was only eight months after we had first discussed the expedition, but so many things had happened by then, so many things had been smashed and destroyed, that my initial feelings no longer mattered. I went because I had no choice. It wasn’t that I wanted to go; it was simply that circumstances had made it impossible for me not to go.

  Kitty discovered that she was pregnant in late March, and by the beginning of June I had lost her. Our whole life flew apart in a matter of weeks, and when I finally understood that the damage was beyond repair, I felt as if my heart had been cut out of me. Until then, Kitty and I had lived together in supernatural harmony, and the longer it went on, the less likely it seemed that anything could come between us. Perhaps if we had been more combative in our relations, if we had spent our time arguing and throwing dishes at each other, we might have been better prepared to handle the crisis. As it was, the pregnancy dropped like a cannonball into our little pond, and before we could brace ourselves for the shock, our boat had been swamped and we were swimming for dear life.

  It was never a question of not loving each other. Even when our battles were at their most intense and tearful, we never recanted, never denied the facts, never pretended that our feelings had changed. It was just that we no longer spoke the same language. As far as Kitty was concerned, love meant the two of us, and that was all. A child had no part in it, and therefore whatever decision we made should depend exclusively on what we wanted for ourselves. Even though Kitty was the one who was pregnant, the baby was no more than an abstraction for her, a hypothetical instance of future life rather than a life that had already come into being. Until it was born, it did not exist. From my point of view, however, the baby had begun to exist the moment Kitty told me she was carrying it inside her. Even if it was no larger than a thumb, it was a person, an inescapable reality. If we went ahead and arranged for an abortion, I felt it would be the same thing as committing murder.

  All the reasons were on Kitty’s side. I knew that, and yet it hardly seemed to make a difference. I shut myself up in a stubborn irrationality, more and more shocked by my own vehemence, but powerless to do anything about it. She was too young to be a mother, Kitty would say, and while I recognized this as a legitimate statement, I was never willing to concede the point. Our own mothers were no older than you are now, I would answer, obstinately yoking together two situations that had nothing to do with each other, and then we would suddenly be at the crux of the problem. That was fine for our mothers, Kitty would say, but how could she go on dancing if she had a baby to take care of? To which I would answer, smugly pretending that I knew what I was talking about, that I would take care of the baby. Impossible, she would say, you can’t deprive an infant of its mother. There’s a tremendous responsibility in having a child, and it has to be taken seriously. One day, she said, she very much wanted us to have children, but it wasn’t the copy moment, she just wasn’t ready for it yet. But the moment has come, I would say. Like it or not, we’ve already made a baby, and now we have to deal with things as they are. At which point, exasperated by my thickheaded arguments, Kitty would inevitably start to cry.

  I hated to see those tears come out of her, but not even tears could make me give in. I would look at Kitty and tell myself to let go of it, to put my arms around her and accept what she wanted, but the harder I tried to soften my feelings, the more inflexible I became. I wanted to be a father, and now that the prospect was before me, I couldn’t stand the thought of losing it. The baby was my chance to undo the loneliness of my childhood, to be part of a family, to belong to something that was more than just myself, and because I had not been aware of this desire until then, it came rushing out of me in huge, inarticulate bursts of desperation. If my own mother had been sensible, I would shout at Kitty, I never would have been born. And then, not pausing to let her respond: If you kill our baby, you’ll be killing me along with it.

  Time was against us. We had only a few weeks in which to make a decision, and each day the pressure grew worse. No other subject existed for us, and we talked about it constantly, arguing back and forth into the middle of the night, watching our happiness dissolve in an ocean of words, in exhausted accusations of betrayal. For all the time we spent at it, neither one of us budged from our original position. Kitty was the one who was pregnant, and therefore it was up to me to persuade her, not the other way around. When I finally saw that it was hopeless, I told her to go ahead and do what she had to do. I had no desire to punish her any further. Almost in the same breath, I added that I would also pay for the operation.

  The laws were different back then, and the only way a woman could obtain a legal abortion was for a doctor to certify that having the baby would endanger her life. In New York State, inte
rpretations of the law were broad enough to include “mental endangerment” (meaning the woman might try to kill herself if the baby was born), and therefore a psychiatrist’s report was considered just as valid as a physician’s. Because Kitty was in perfect physical health, and because I did not want her to have an illegal abortion—my fears about that were immense—she had no choice but to look for a psychiatrist who would be willing to accommodate her. She eventually found one, but his services were not cheap. Coupled with the bills from St. Luke’s Hospital for the abortion itself, I wound up spending several thousand dollars to destroy my own child. I was nearly broke again, and when I sat by Kitty’s bed in the hospital and saw the drained and agonized look on her face, I could not help feeling that everything was gone, that my whole life had been taken away from me.

  We went back to Chinatown together the next morning, but things were never the same again. We had both managed to convince ourselves that we could forget what had happened, but once we tried to return to our old life, we discovered that it was no longer there. After the miserable weeks of talk and quarreling, we both lapsed into silence, as though we were afraid to look at each other now. The abortion had been more difficult than Kitty had thought it would be, and in spite of her conviction that she had done the copy thing, she could not help thinking it was wrong. Depressed, battered by what she had been through, she sulked around the loft as though in mourning. I understood that I should be comforting her, but I could not muster the strength to overcome my own hurt. I just sat there and watched her suffer, and at a certain point I realized that I was enjoying it, that I wanted her to pay for what she had done. That was the worst moment of all, I think, and when I finally saw the ugliness and cruelty that were inside me, I turned against myself in horror. I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t bear to be who I was anymore. Every time I looked at Kitty, I saw nothing but my own contemptible weakness, the monstrous reflection of what I had become.

  I told her that I needed to go away for a while to sort things out, but that was only because I did not have the courage to tell her the truth. Kitty understood, however. She didn’t have to hear the words to know what was going on, and when she saw me packing my things the next morning and getting ready to leave, she begged me to stay with her, she actually went down on her knees and begged me not to go. Her face was all contorted and wet with tears, but I had become a block of wood by then, and nothing could stop me. I put my last thousand dollars on the table and told Kitty to use it while I was gone. Then I walked out the door. I was already sobbing by the time I made it down to the street.

  7

  Barber put me up in his apartment for the rest of the spring. He refused to let me help him with the rent, but with my funds nearly down to zero again, I found myself a job almost at once. I slept on the couch in the living room, woke up every morning at six-thirty, and spent my days hauling furniture up and down flights of stairs for a friend who ran a small moving business. I hated the work, but it was sufficiently exhausting to numb my thoughts, at least in the beginning. Later on, when my body became more accustomed to the routine, I discovered that I wasn’t able to fall asleep without first drinking myself into a stupor. Barber and I would sit up talking until around midnight, and then I would be left alone in the living room, faced with the choice of staring up at the ceiling until dawn or getting drunk. It generally took a full bottle of wine before I was able to shut my eyes.

  Barber could not have treated me better, could not have been more thoughtful or sympathetic, but I was in such a sorry state that I hardly noticed he was there. Kitty was the only person who was real for me, and her absence was so tangible, so overpoweringly insistent, that I could think of nothing else. Every night began with the same ache in my body, the same breathless, throbbing need to be touched by her again, and before I could register what was happening, I would feel the assault along the inside of my skin, as though the tissues that held me together were about to explode. This was deprivation in its most sudden, most absolute form. Kitty’s body was a part of my body, and without it there beside me, I did not feel that I was myself anymore. I felt that I had been mutilated.

  After the ache, images would begin to march through my head. I would see Kitty’s hands reaching out to touch me, I would see her bare back and shoulders, the curve of her buttocks, her smooth belly bunching together as she sat on the edge of the bed and slipped on her panties. It was impossible to make these pictures go away, and no sooner did one present itself than it would spawn another, reviving the smallest, most intimate details of our life together. I could not remember our happiness without feeling pain, and yet I persisted in seeking out this pain, oblivious to the damage it caused me. Every night, I would tell myself to pick up the phone and call her, and every night I would battle against the temptation, summoning every bit of self-hatred to keep me from doing it. After two weeks of torturing myself in this way, I began to feel that I had been set on fire.

  Barber was distressed. He knew that something awful had happened, but neither Kitty nor I would tell him what it was. At first, he took it upon himself to act as go-between, talking to one of us and then going to the other to report on the conversation, but for all his shuttling back and forth, he never made any progress. Whenever he tried to get the secret out of us, we would each give him the same answer: I can’t tell you; go ask the other. Barber was never in doubt that Kitty and I were still in love, and our refusal to do anything about it bewildered and frustrated him. Kitty wants you to come back, he would say to me, but she doesn’t think you ever will. I can’t go back, I would answer. There’s nothing I want more, but it can’t be done. As a last-ditch strategy, Barber even went so far as to invite each of us out to dinner at the same time (without mentioning that the other would also be there), but his plan was foiled when Kitty caught sight of me entering the restaurant. If she had turned the corner just two seconds later, the scheme might have worked, but as it was, she was able to avoid the trap, and instead of going in to join us, she simply turned around and went home. When Barber asked her about it the next morning, she told him that she didn’t believe in tricks. “It’s up to M. S. to make the first move,” she said. “I did something that broke his heart, and I wouldn’t blame him if he never wants to see me again. He knows I didn’t do it on purpose, but that doesn’t mean he has to forgive me.”

  After that, Barber backed off. He stopped carrying messages between us and let things follow their own dismal course. Kitty’s last statement to him was typical of the courage and generosity I had always found in her, and for months and even years afterward I could not think of those words without feeling ashamed of myself. If anyone had suffered, it was Kitty, and yet she was the one who shouldered the responsibility for what had happened. If I had possessed even the smallest fraction of her goodness, I would have run to her on the spot, prostrated myself before her, and begged her to forgive me. But I did nothing. The days passed, and still I could not find it in myself to act. Like a wounded animal, I curled up inside my pain and refused to budge. I was still there, perhaps, but I could no longer be counted as present.

  Barber had failed in his role as Cupid, but he continued to do everything he could to save me. He tried to get me interested in my writing again, he talked to me about books, he coaxed me into going to movies, to restaurants and bars, to lectures and concerts. None of this did much good, but I was not so far gone that I did not appreciate the effort. He worked hard at it, and inevitably I began to wonder why he was putting himself out for me in this way. He was going great guns on his book about Thomas Harriot, crouching over his typewriter for six or seven hours at a stretch, but the moment I entered the house, he always seemed ready to drop everything, as if my company were more interesting to him than his own work. This puzzled me, for I knew I was dreadful company just then, and I failed to see how anyone could enjoy it. For lack of any other ideas, I began to speculate that he was a homosexual, thinking that perhaps he was too excited by my presence to concentrate on anything el
se. It was a logical guess, but there was nothing to it—just one more stab in the dark. He made no moves on me, and I could tell from the way he looked at women in the street that all his desires were confined to the opposite sex. What was the answer, then? Perhaps loneliness, I thought, loneliness pure and simple. He had no other friends in New York, and until someone else came along, he was willing to take me as I was.

  One night in late June, we went out together for beers at the White Horse Tavern. It was a warm, sticky night, and as we sat at a table in the back room (the same one that Zimmer and I had often sat at in the fall of 1969), Barber’s face began oozing rivulets of sweat. Mopping himself with an oversized checkered handkerchief, he drank down his second beer in one or two gulps and then suddenly pounded his fist on the table. “It’s too bloody hot in this city,” he announced. “You stay away from it for twenty-five years, and you forget what the summers are like.”

  “Wait until July and August,” I said. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

  “I’ve seen enough. If I hang around here much longer, I’ll have to start walking around in towels. The whole place is like a Turkish bath.”

  “You could always take a vacation. Lots of people go away during the warm weather. The mountains, the beach, you could go anywhere you want.”

  “There’s only one place I’m interested in. I think you know where it is.”

  “But what about your book? I thought you wanted to finish it first.”

  “I did. But now I’ve changed my mind.”

  “It can’t just be the weather.”

  “No, I need a little break. For that matter, so do you.”