by Paul Auster
I’m not about to speculate on what did us in. Money was in short supply during our last couple of years together, but I wouldn’t want to cite that as a direct cause. A good marriage can withstand any amount of external pressure, a bad marriage cracks apart. In our case, the nightmare began no more than hours after we left the city, and whatever fragile thing that had been holding us together came permanently undone.
Given our lack of money, our original plan had been quite cautious: to rent a house somewhere and see if living in the country suited us or not. If it did, we would stay; if it didn’t, we would go back to New York after the lease ran out. But then Delia’s father stepped in and offered to advance us ten thousand dollars for a down payment on a place of our own. With country houses selling for as little as thirty or forty thousand at the time, this sum represented much more than it would now. It was a generous thing for Mr. Bond to do, but in the end it worked against us, locking us into a situation neither one of us was prepared to handle. After searching for a couple of months, we found an inexpensive place in Dutchess County, an old and somewhat sagging house with plenty of room inside and a splendid set of lilac bushes in the yard. The day after we moved in, a ferocious thunderstorm swept through the town. Lightning struck the branch of a tree next to the house, the branch caught fire, the fire spread to an electric line that ran through the tree, and we lost our electricity. The moment that happened, the sump pump shut off, and in less than an hour the cellar was flooded. I spent the better part of the night knee-deep in cold rain, working by flashlight as I bailed out the water with buckets. When the electrician arrived the next afternoon to assess the damage, we learned that the entire electrical system had to be replaced. That cost several hundred dollars, and when the septic tank gave out the following month, it cost us more than a thousand dollars to remove the smell of shit from our backyard. We couldn’t afford any of these repairs, and the assault on our budget left us dizzy with apprehension. I stepped up the pace of my translation work, taking any assignments that came along, and by midspring I had all but abandoned the novel I had been writing for the past three years. Delia was hugely pregnant by then, but she continued to plug away at her own job (free-lance copyediting), and in the last week before she went into labor, she sat at her desk from morning to night correcting a manuscript of over nine hundred pages.
After David was born, the situation only grew worse. Money became my single, overriding obsession, and for the next year I lived in a state of continual panic. With Delia no longer able to contribute much in the way of work, our income fell at the precise moment our expenses began to go up. I took the responsibilities of fatherhood seriously, and the thought of not being able to provide for my wife and son filled me with shame. Once, when a publisher was slow in paying me for work I had handed in, I drove down to New York and stormed into his office, threatening him with physical violence unless he wrote out a check to me on the spot. At one point, I actually grabbed him by the collar and pushed him against the wall. This was utterly implausible behavior for me, a betrayal of everything I believed in. I hadn’t fought with anyone since I was a child, and if I let my feelings run away from me in that man’s office, it only proves how unhinged I had become. I wrote as many articles as I could, I took on every translation job I was offered, but still it wasn’t enough. Assuming that my novel was dead, that my dreams of becoming a writer were finished, I went out and started hunting for a permanent job. But times were bad just then, and opportunities in the country were sparse. Even the local community college, which had advertised for someone to teach a full load of freshman composition courses at the paltry wage of eight thousand dollars a year, received more than three hundred applications for the post. Without any prior teaching experience, I was rejected without an interview. After that, I tried to join the staffs of several of the magazines I had written for, figuring I could commute down to the city if I had to, but the editors only laughed at me and treated my letters as a joke. This is no job for a writer, they answered back, you’d just be wasting your time. But I wasn’t a writer anymore, I was a drowning man. I was a man at the end of his rope.
Delia and I were both exhausted, and as time went on our quarreling became automatic, a reflex that neither one of us could control. She nagged and I sulked; she harangued and I brooded; we went days without having the courage to talk to each other. David was the only thing that seemed to bring us pleasure anymore, and we talked about him as if no other subject existed, wary of overstepping the boundaries of that neutral zone. As soon as we did, the snipers would jump back into their trenches, shots would be exchanged, and the war of attrition would begin all over again. It seemed to drag on interminably, a subtle conflict with no definable objective, fought with silences, misunderstandings, and hurt, bewildered looks. For all that, I don’t think that either one of us was willing to surrender. We had both dug in for the long haul, and the idea of giving up had never even occurred to us.
All that changed very suddenly in the fall of 1978. One evening, while we were sitting in the living room with David, Delia asked me to fetch her glasses from a shelf in her upstairs study, and when I entered the room I saw her journal lying open on the desk. Delia had been keeping a journal since the age of thirteen or fourteen, and by now it ran to dozens of volumes, notebook after notebook filled with the ongoing saga of her inner life. She had often read passages from it to me, but until that evening I had never so much as dared to look at it without her permission. Standing there at that moment, however, I found myself gripped by a tremendous urge to read those pages. In retrospect, I understand that this meant our life together was already finished, that my willingness to break this trust proved that I had given up any hope for our marriage, but I wasn’t aware of it then. At the time, the only thing I felt was curiosity. The pages were open on the desk, and Delia had just asked me to go into the room for her. She must have understood that I would notice them. Assuming that was true, it was almost as if she were inviting me to read what she had written. In all events, that was the excuse I gave myself that night, and even now I’m not so sure I was wrong. It would have been just like her to act indirectly, to provoke a crisis she would never have to claim responsibility for. That was her special talent: taking matters into her own hands, even as she convinced herself that her hands were clean.
So I looked down at the open journal, and once I crossed that threshold, I wasn’t able to turn back. I saw that I was the subject of that day’s entry, and what I found there was an exhaustive catalogue of complaints and grievances, a grim little document set forth in the language of a laboratory report. Delia had covered everything, from the way I dressed to the foods I ate to my incorrigible lack of human understanding. I was morbid and self-centered, frivolous and domineering, vengeful and lazy and distracted. Even if every one of those things had been true, her portrait of me was so ungenerous, so mean-spirited in its tone, that I couldn’t even bring myself to feel angry. I felt sad, hollowed out, dazed. By the time I reached the last paragraph, her conclusion was already self-evident, a thing that no longer needed to be expressed. “I have never loved Peter,” she wrote. “It was a mistake to think I ever could. Our life together is a fraud, and the longer we go on like this, the closer we come to destroying each other. We never should have gotten married. I let Peter talk me into it, and I’ve been paying for it ever since. I didn’t love him then, and I don’t love him now. No matter how long I stay with Peter, I will never love him.”
It was all so abrupt, so final, that I almost felt relieved. To understand that you are despised in this way eliminates any excuse for self-pity. I couldn’t doubt where things stood anymore, and however shaken I might have been in those first moments, I knew that I had brought this disaster down on myself. I had thrown away eleven years of my life in search of a figment. My whole youth had been sacrificed to a delusion, and yet rather than crumple up and mourn what I had just lost, I felt strangely invigorated, set free by the bluntness and brutality of Delia’s wor
ds. All this strikes me as inexplicable now. But the fact was that I didn’t hesitate. I went downstairs with Delia’s glasses, told her that I had read her journal, and the next morning I moved out. She was stunned by my decisiveness, I think, but given how thoroughly we had always misread each other, that was probably to be expected. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing to talk about anymore. The deed had already been done, and there wasn’t any room for second thoughts.
Fanny helped me find a sublet in lower Manhattan, and by Christmas I was living in New York again. A painter friend of hers was about to go off to Italy for a year, and she had talked him into renting me his spare room for only fifty dollars a month—which was the absolute limit of what I could afford. It was located directly across the hall from his loft (which was occupied by other tenants), and until I moved in, it had served as a kind of enormous storage closet. All manner of junk and debris was stashed away in there: broken bicycles, abandoned paintings, an old washing machine, empty cans of turpentine, newspapers, magazines, and innumerable fragments of copper wire. I shoved these things to one side of the room, which left me half the space to live in, but after a short period of adjustment, that proved to be large enough. My only household possessions that year were a mattress, a small table, two chairs, a hotplate, a smattering of kitchen utensils, and a single carton of books. It was basic, no-nonsense survival, but the truth is that I was happy in that room. As Sachs put it the first time he came to visit me, it was a sanctuary of inwardness, a room in which the only possible activity was thought. There was a sink and a toilet, but no bath, and the wooden floor was in such poor condition that it gave me splinters whenever I walked on it with bare feet. But I started working on my novel again in that room, and little by little my luck changed. A month after I moved in, I won a grant of ten thousand dollars. The application had been sent in so long before, I had completely forgotten that I was a candidate. Then, just two weeks after that, I won a second grant of seven thousand dollars, which had been applied for in the same flurry of desperation as the first. All of a sudden, miracles had become a common occurrence in my life. I handed over half the money to Delia, and still there was enough to keep me going in a state of relative splendor. Every week, I would shuttle up to the country to spend a day or two with David, sleeping at a neighbor’s house down the road. This arrangement lasted for roughly nine months, and when Delia and I finally sold our house the following September, she moved to an apartment in South Brooklyn, and I was able to see David for longer stretches at a time. We both had lawyers by then, and our divorce was already in the works.
Fanny and Ben took an active interest in my new career as a single man. To the degree that I talked to anyone about what I was up to, they were my confidants, the ones I kept abreast of my comings and goings. They had both been upset by the breakup with Delia, but less so Fanny than Ben, I think, although she was the one who worried more about David, zeroing in on that aspect of the problem once she understood that Delia and I had no chance of getting back together. Sachs, on the other hand, did everything he could to talk me into giving it another try. That went on for several weeks, but once I moved back to the city and settled into my new life, he stopped belaboring the point. Delia and I had never let our differences show in public, and our separation came as a shock to most of the people we knew, particularly to close friends like Sachs. Fanny, however, seemed to have had her suspicions all along. When I announced the news in their apartment on the first night I spent away from Delia, she paused for a moment at the end of my story and then said, “It’s a hard thing to swallow, Peter, but in some ways it’s probably for the best. As time goes on, I think you’re going to be much happier.”
They gave a lot of dinner parties that year, and I was invited to nearly all of them. Fanny and Ben knew an astounding number of people, and at one time or another it seemed that half of New York wound up sitting at the large oval table in their dining room. Artists, writers, professors, critics, editors, gallery owners—they all tramped out to Brooklyn and gorged themselves on Fanny’s food, drinking and talking well into the night. Sachs was always the master of ceremonies, an effusive maniac who kept conversations humming along with well-timed jokes and provocative remarks, and I grew to depend on these dinners as my chief source of entertainment. My friends were watching out for me, doing everything in their power to show the world that I was back in circulation. They never talked about matchmaking in so many words, but enough unmarried women turned up at their house on those evenings for me to understand that they had my best interests at heart.
Early in 1979, about three or four months after I returned to New York, I met someone there who played a central role in Sachs’s death. Maria Turner was twenty-seven or twenty-eight at the time, a tall, self-possessed young woman with closely cropped blond hair and a bony, angular face. She was far from beautiful, but there was an intensity in her gray eyes that attracted me, and I liked the way she carried herself in her clothes, with a kind of prim, sensual grace, a reserve that would unmask itself in little flashes of erotic forgetfulness—letting her skirt drift up along her thighs as she crossed and uncrossed her legs, for example, or the way she touched my hand whenever I lit a cigarette for her. It wasn’t that she was a tease or explicitly tried to arouse. She struck me as a good bourgeois girl who had mastered the rules of social behavior, but at the same time it was as if she no longer believed in them, as if she were walking around with a secret she might or might not be willing to share with you, depending on how she felt at that moment.
She lived in a loft on Duane Street, not far from my place on Varick, and after the party broke up that night, we shared a ride with a Brooklyn car service back to Manhattan. That was the beginning of what turned out to be a sexual alliance that lasted for close to two years. I use that phrase as a precise, clinical description, but that doesn’t mean our relations were only physical, that we had no interest in each other beyond the pleasures we found in bed. Still, what went on between us was devoid of romantic trappings or sentimental illusions, and the nature of our understanding did not change significantly after that first night. Maria wasn’t hungry for the sorts of attachments that most people seem to want, and love in the traditional sense was something alien to her, a passion that lay outside the sphere of what she was capable of. Given my own inner state at the time, I was perfectly willing to accept the conditions she imposed on me. We made no claims on each other, saw each other only intermittently, pursued strictly independent lives. And yet there was a solid affection between us, an intimacy that I had never quite managed to achieve with anyone else. It took me a while to catch on, however. In the beginning, I found her a little scary, perhaps even perverse (which lent a certain excitement to our initial contacts), but as time went on I understood that she was merely eccentric, an unorthodox person who lived her life according to an elaborate set of bizarre, private rituals. Every experience was systematized for her, a self-contained adventure that generated its own risks and limitations, and each one of her projects fell into a different category, separate from all the others. In my case, I belonged to the category of sex. She appointed me as her bed partner on that first night, and that was the function I continued to serve until the end. In the universe of Maria’s compulsions, I was just one ritual among many, but I was fond of the role she had picked for me, and I never found any reason to complain.
Maria was an artist, but the work she did had nothing to do with creating objects commonly defined as art. Some people called her a photographer, others referred to her as a conceptualist, still others considered her a writer, but none of these descriptions was accurate, and in the end I don’t think she can be pigeonholed in any way. Her work was too nutty for that, too idiosyncratic, too personal to be thought of as belonging to any particular medium or discipline. Ideas would take hold of her, she would work on projects, there would be concrete results that could be shown in galleries, but this activity didn’t stem from a desire to make art so much as from a need
to indulge her obsessions, to live her life precisely as she wanted to live it. Living always came first, and a number of her most time-consuming projects were done strictly for herself and never shown to anyone.
Since the age of fourteen, she had saved all the birthday presents that had ever been given to her—still wrapped, neatly arranged on shelves according to the year. As an adult, she held an annual birthday dinner in her own honor, always inviting the same number of guests as her age. Some weeks, she would indulge in what she called “the chromatic diet,” restricting herself to foods of a single color on any given day. Monday orange: carrots, cantaloupe, boiled shrimp. Tuesday red: tomatoes, persimmons, steak tartare. Wednesday white: flounder, potatoes, cottage cheese. Thursday green: cucumbers, broccoli, spinach—and so on, all the way through the last meal on Sunday. At other times, she would make similar divisions based on the letters of the alphabet. Whole days would be spent under the spell of b, or c, or w, and then, just as suddenly as she had started it, she would abandon the game and go on to something else. These were no more than whims, I suppose, tiny experiments with the idea of classification and habit, but similar games were just as likely to go on for many years. There was the long-term project of dressing Mr. L., for example, a stranger she had once met at a party. Maria found him to be one of the handsomest men she had ever seen, but his clothes were a disgrace, she thought, and so without announcing her intentions to anyone, she took it upon herself to improve his wardrobe. Every year at Christmas she would send him an anonymous gift—a tie, a sweater, an elegant shirt—and because Mr. L. moved in roughly the same social circles that she did, she would run into him every now and again, noting with pleasure the dramatic changes in his sartorial appearance. For the fact was that Mr. L. always wore the clothes that Maria sent him. She would even go up to him at these gatherings and compliment him on what he was wearing, but that was as far as it went, and he never caught on that she was the one responsible for those Christmas packages.