by Paul Auster
I didn’t witness the accident, but I was there the night it happened. There must have been forty or fifty of us at the party, a mass of people crowded into the confines of a cramped Brooklyn Heights apartment, sweating, drinking, raising a ruckus in the hot summer air. The accident took place at around ten o’clock, but by then most of us had gone up to the roof to watch the fireworks. Only two people actually saw Sachs fall: Maria Turner, who was standing next to him on the fire escape, and a woman named Agnes Darwin, who inadvertently caused him to lose his balance by tripping into Maria from behind. There is no question that Sachs could have been killed. Given that he was four stories off the ground, it seems almost a miracle that he wasn’t. If not for the clothesline that broke his fall about five feet from the bottom, there’s no way he could have escaped without some permanent injury: a broken back, a fractured skull, any one of countless misfortunes. As it was, the rope snapped under the weight of his falling body, and instead of tumbling head-first onto the bare cement, he landed in a cushioning tangle of bathmats, blankets, and towels. The impact was still tremendous, but nothing close to what it could have been. Not only did Sachs survive, but he emerged from the accident relatively unharmed: a few cracked ribs, a mild concussion, a broken shoulder, some nasty bumps and bruises. One can take comfort from that, I suppose, but in the end the real damage had little to do with Sachs’s body. This is the thing I’m still struggling to come to terms with, the mystery I’m still trying to solve. His body mended, but he was never the same after that. In those few seconds before he hit the ground, it was as if Sachs lost everything. His entire life flew apart in midair, and from that moment until his death four years later, he never put it back together again.
It was July 4, 1986, the one hundredth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. Iris was off on a six-week tour of China with her three sisters (one of whom lived in Taipei), David was spending two weeks at a summer camp in Bucks County, and I was holed up in the apartment, working on a new book and seeing no one. Ordinarily, Sachs would have been in Vermont by then, but he had been commissioned by the Village Voice to write an article about the festivities, and he wasn’t planning to leave the city until he handed in the article. Three years earlier, he had finally succumbed to my advice and entered into an agreement with a literary agent (Patricia Clegg, who also happened to be my agent), and it was Patricia who threw the party that night. Since Brooklyn was ideally situated for watching the fireworks, Ben and Fanny had accepted Patricia’s invitation. I had been invited as well, but I wasn’t planning to go. I was too inside my work to want to leave the house, but when Fanny called that afternoon and told me that she and Ben would be there, I changed my mind. I hadn’t seen either of them for close to a month, and with everyone about to disperse for the summer, I figured it would be my last chance to talk to them until the fall.
As it happened, I scarcely talked to Ben. The party was in full swing by the time I got there, and within three minutes of saying hello to him we had been pushed to opposite corners of the room. By pure chance, I was jostled up against Fanny, and before long we were so engrossed in conversation that we lost track of where Ben was. Maria Turner was also there, but I didn’t see her in the crowd. It was only after the accident that I learned she had come to the party—had in fact been standing with Sachs on the fire escape before he fell—but by then there was so much confusion (shrieking guests, sirens, ambulances, scurrying paramedics) that the full impact of her presence failed to register with me. In the hours that preceded that moment, I enjoyed myself a good deal more than I had been expecting to. It wasn’t the party so much as being with Fanny, the pleasure of talking to her again, of knowing that we were still friends in spite of all the years and all the disasters that stood behind us. To tell the truth, I was feeling rather mawkish that night, in the grip of oddly sentimental thoughts, and I remember looking into Fanny’s face and realizing—very suddenly, as if for the first time—that we were no longer young, that our lives were slipping away from us. It could have been the alcohol I had drunk, but this thought struck me with all the force of a revelation. We were all growing old, and the only thing we could count on anymore was each other. Fanny and Ben, Iris and David: this was my family. They were the people I loved, and it was their souls I carried around inside me.
We went up to the roof with the others, and in spite of my initial reluctance, I was glad not to have missed the fireworks. The explosions had turned New York into a spectral city, a metropolis under siege, and I savored the sheer mayhem of it all: the incessant noise, the corollas of bursting light, the colors wafting through immense dirigibles of smoke. The Statue of Liberty stood off to our left in the harbor, incandescent in its floodlit glory, and every so often I felt as if the buildings of Manhattan were about to uproot themselves, just take off from the ground and never come back again. Fanny and I sat a little behind the others, heels dug in to balance ourselves against the pitch of the roof, shoulders touching, talking about nothing in particular. Reminiscences, Iris’s letters from China, David, Ben’s article, the museum. I don’t want to make too much of it, but just moments before Ben fell, we drifted onto the story that he and his mother had told about their visit to the Statue of Liberty in 1951. Under the circumstances, it was natural that the story should have come up, but it was gruesome just the same, for no sooner did we both laugh at the idea of falling through the Statue of Liberty than Ben fell from the fire escape. An instant later, Maria and Agnes started screaming below us. It was as if uttering the word fall had precipitated a real fall, and even if there was no connection between the two events, I still gag every time I think of what happened. I still hear those screams coming from the two women, and I still see the look on Fanny’s face when Ben’s name was called out, the look of fear that invaded her eyes as the colored lights of the explosions continued to ricochet against her skin.
He was taken to Long Island College Hospital, still unconscious. Even though he woke up within an hour, they kept him there for the better part of two weeks, conducting a series of brain tests to measure the precise extent of the damage. They would have discharged him sooner, I think, but Sachs said nothing for the first ten days, uttering not a single syllable to anyone—not to Fanny, not to me, not to Maria Turner (who came to visit every afternoon), not to the doctors or nurses. The garrulous, irrepressible Sachs had fallen silent, and it seemed logical to assume that he had lost the power of speech, that the jolt to his head had caused grave internal damage.
It was’ a hellish period for Fanny. She took off from work and spent every day sitting in the room with Ben, but he was unresponsive to her, often closing his eyes and pretending to be asleep when she came in, returning her smiles with blank stares, seeming to take no comfort from her presence. It made an already difficult situation nearly intolerable for her, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so worried, so distraught, so close to full-scale unhappiness as she was then. Nor did it help that Maria kept turning up as well. Fanny imputed all kinds of motives to these visits, but the fact was that they were unfounded. Maria scarcely knew Ben, and many years had gone by since their last encounter. Seven years, to be exact—the last time having been at the dinner in Brooklyn where Maria and I first met. Maria’s invitation to the Statue of Liberty party had nothing to do with her knowing Ben or Fanny or myself. Agnes Darwin, an editor who was preparing a book about Maria’s work, happened to be a friend of Patricia Clegg’s, and she was the one responsible for bringing her to the gathering that night. Watching Ben fall had been a terrifying experience for Maria, and she came to the hospital out of alarm, out of concern, because it wouldn’t have felt right to her not to come. I knew that, but Fanny didn’t, and as I watched her distress whenever she and Maria crossed paths (understanding that she suspected the worst, that she had convinced herself that Maria and Ben were carrying on a secret liaison), I invited the two of them to lunch in the hospital cafeteria one afternoon in order to clear the air.
According to Maria, she and Ben ha
d talked for a while in the kitchen. He had been animated and charming, regaling her with arcane anecdotes about the Statue of Liberty. When the fireworks began, he suggested that they climb through the kitchen window and watch from the fire escape instead of going to the roof. She hadn’t thought he’d been drinking excessively, but at a certain point, completely out of the blue, he jumped up, swung himself over the railing, and sat down on the edge of the iron banister, legs dangling below him in the darkness. This frightened her, she said, and she rushed over and put her arms around him from behind, grabbing hold of his torso to prevent him from falling. She tried to talk him into coming down, but he only laughed and told her not to worry. Just then, Agnes Darwin walked into the kitchen and saw Maria and Ben through the open window. Their backs were turned, and with all the noise and commotion outside, they didn’t have the slightest clue that she was there. A chubby, high-spirited woman who had already drunk more than was good for her, Agnes got it into her head to go out and join them on the fire escape. Carrying a glass of wine in one hand, she maneuvered her ample body through the window, landed on the platform with the heel of her left shoe caught between two iron slats, tried to right her balance, and suddenly lurched forward. There wasn’t much room out there, and half a step later she had stumbled into Maria from behind, crashing squarely into her friend’s back with the full force of her weight. The shock of the blow caused Maria’s arms to fly open, and once she lost her grip on Sachs, he went hurtling over the edge of the railing. Just like that, she said, without any warning at all. Agnes bumped into her, she bumped into Sachs, and an instant later he was falling head-first into the night.
It relieved Fanny to learn that her suspicions were groundless, but at the same time nothing had really been explained. Why had Sachs climbed onto the banister in the first place? He had always been scared of heights, and it seemed like the last thing he would have done under the circumstances. And if all had been well between him and Fanny before the accident, why had he turned against her now, why did he recoil from her every time she entered the room? Something had happened, something more than the physical injuries caused by the accident, and until Sachs was able to speak, or until he decided he wanted to speak, Fanny would never know what it was.
It took nearly a month before Sachs told me his side of the story. He was home then, still recuperating but no longer forced to lie in bed, and I went over to his apartment one afternoon while Fanny was at work. It was a sweltering day in early August. We drank beer in the living room, I remember, watching a baseball game on television with the sound off, and whenever I think of that conversation now, I see the silent ballplayers on the small, flickering screen, prancing about in a procession of dimly observed movements, an absurd counterpoint to the painful confidences that my friend poured out to me.
At first, he said, he was only vaguely aware of who Maria Turner was. He recognized her when he saw her at the party, but he couldn’t recall the context of their previous meeting. I never forget a face, he told her, but I’m having trouble attaching a name to yours. Elusive as ever, Maria just smiled, saying that it would probably come to him after a while. I was at your house once, she added, by way of a hint, but she wouldn’t divulge more than that. Sachs understood that she was playing with him, but he rather enjoyed the way she went about it. He was intrigued by her amused and ironic smile, and he had no objection to being led into a little game of cat and mouse. She clearly had the wit for it, and that was already interesting, already something worth taking the trouble to pursue.
If she had told him her name, Sachs said, he probably wouldn’t have acted in the way he did. He knew that Maria Turner and I had been involved with each other before I met Iris, and he knew that Fanny still had some contact with her, since every now and then she would talk to him about Maria’s work. But there had been a mixup the night of the dinner party seven years earlier, and Sachs had never properly understood who Maria Turner was. Three or four young women artists had been sitting at the table that evening, and since Sachs was meeting all of them for the first time, he had made the common enough error of jumbling up their names and faces, assigning the wrong name to each face. In his mind, Maria Turner was a short woman with long brown hair, and whenever I had mentioned her to him, that was the image he saw.
They carried their drinks into the kitchen, which was somewhat less crowded than the living room, and sat down on a radiator by the open window, thankful for the slight breeze blowing against their backs. Contrary to Maria’s statement about his sober condition, Sachs told me that he was already quite drunk. His head was spinning, and even though he kept warning himself to stop, he belted back at least three bourbons in the next hour. Their conversation developed into one of those mad, elliptical exchanges that come to life when people are flirting with each other at parties, a series of riddles, non sequiturs, and clever jabs of one-upmanship. The trick is to say nothing about oneself in as elegant and circuitous a manner as possible, to make the other person laugh, to be deft. Both Sachs and Maria were good at that: kind of thing, and they managed to keep it up through the three bourbons and a couple of glasses of wine.
Because the weather was hot, and because Maria had been hesitant about going to the party (thinking it would be dull), she had put on the skimpiest outfit in her wardrobe: a sleeveless, skin-tight crimson leotard with a plunging neckline on top, a tiny black miniskirt below, bare legs, spike heels, a ring on each finger, and a bracelet on each wrist. It was an outrageous, provocative costume, but Maria was in one of those moods, and if nothing else it guaranteed that she wouldn’t be lost in the crowd. As Sachs told it to me that afternoon in front of the silent television, he had been on his best behavior for the past five years. He hadn’t looked at another woman in all that time, and Fanny had learned how to trust him again. Saving his marriage had been hard work; it had called for an immense effort from both of them over a long and difficult period, and he had vowed never to put his life with Fanny in jeopardy again. Now here he was, sitting on the radiator next to Maria at the party, pressed up against a half-naked woman with splendid, inviting legs—already half out of control, with too much drink circulating in his bloodstream. Little by little, Sachs was engulfed by an almost uncontrollable urge to touch those legs, to run his hand up and down the smoothness of that skin. To make matters worse, Maria was wearing an expensive and dangerous perfume (Sachs had always had a weakness for perfume), and as their teasing, bantering conversation continued, it was all he could do to fight against committing a serious, humiliating blunder. Fortunately, his inhibitions won out over his desires, but that did not prevent him from imagining what would have happened if they had lost. He saw his fingertips falling gently on a spot just above her left knee; he saw his hand as it traveled up into the silky regions of her inner thigh (those small areas of flesh still hidden by the skirt), and then, after allowing his fingers to roam there for several seconds, felt them slip past the rim of her undies into an Eden of buttocks and dense, tingling pubes. It was a lurid mental performance, but once the projector started rolling in his head, Sachs was powerless to turn it off. Nor did it help that Maria seemed to know precisely what he was thinking. If she had looked offended, the spell might have been broken, but Maria evidently liked being the object of such lascivious thoughts, and from the way she looked at him whenever he looked at her, Sachs began to suspect that she was silently egging him on, daring him to go ahead and do what he wanted to do. Knowing Maria, I said, I could think of any number of obscure motives to account for her behavior. It could have been connected to a project she was working on, for example, or else she was enjoying herself because she knew something that Sachs didn’t know, or else, somewhat more perversely, she had decided to punish him for not remembering her name. (Later on, when I had a chance to talk to her about it in private, she confessed that this last reason was in fact true.) But Sachs wasn’t aware of any of this at the time. He could only be certain of what he felt, and that was very simple: he was lusting after a s
trange, attractive woman, and he despised himself for it.
“I don’t see that you have anything to be ashamed of,” I said. “You’re human, after all, and Maria can be pretty fetching when she puts her mind to it. As long as nothing happened, it’s hardly worth reproaching yourself for.”
“It’s not that I was tempted,” Sachs said slowly, carefully choosing his words. “It’s that I was tempting her. I wasn’t going to do that kind of thing anymore, you see. I’d promised myself that it was over, and here I was doing it again.”