by Paul Auster
It took some time before his strategy had any effect. But what is a woman supposed to think when her husband tells her to fall in love with someone else, to get rid of him, to run away from him and never come back? In Fanny’s case, she dismissed this talk as nonsense, as further evidence of Ben’s growing instability. She had no intention of doing any of these things, and unless he told her straight out that he was finished, that he no longer wanted to be married to her, she was determined to stay put. The standoff lasted for four or five months. This feels like an unendurable length of time to me, but Fanny refused to back down. He was putting her to a test, she felt, trying to push her out of his life in order to see how tenaciously she would hold on, and if she let go now, his worst fears about himself would come true. Such was the circular logic of her struggle to save their marriage. Every time Ben spoke to her, she interpreted it to mean the opposite of what he said. Leave meant don’t leave; love someone else meant love me; give up meant don’t give up. In the light of what happened later, I’m not so sure that she was wrong. Sachs thought he knew what he wanted, but once he got it, it no longer had any value to him. But by then it was too late. What he had lost, he had lost forever.
According to what Fanny told me, there was never any decisive break between them. Sachs wore her down instead, exhausting her with his persistence, slowly debilitating her until she no longer had the strength to fight back. There had been a few hysterical scenes in the beginning, she said, a few outbursts of tears and shouting, but all that eventually stopped. Little by little, she had run out of counterarguments, and when Sachs finally spoke the magic words, telling her one day in early March that a trial separation might be a good idea, she just nodded her head and went along with him. At the time, I knew nothing about any of this. Neither one of them had opened up to me about their troubles, and since my own life was particularly frantic just then, I wasn’t able to see them as often as I would have wished. Iris was pregnant; we were searching for a new place to live; I was commuting to a teaching job in Princeton twice a week and working hard on my next book. Still, it seems that I played an unwitting part in their marital negotiations. What I did was to provide Sachs with an excuse, a way to walk out on her without appearing to have slammed the door shut. It all goes back to that day in February when I followed him around the streets. I had just spent two and a half hours with my editor, Ann Howard, and during the course of our conversation Sachs’s name had been mentioned more than once. Ann knew how close we were. She had been at the Fourth of July party herself, and since she knew about the accident and the tough times he had been going through since then, it was normal that she should ask me how he was. I told her that I was still worried—not so much by his mood anymore, but by the fact that he hadn’t done a stitch of work. “It’s been seven months now,” I said, “and that’s too long a holiday, especially for someone like Ben.” So we talked about work for a few minutes, wondering what it would take for him to get going again, and just as we started in on dessert, Ann came up with what struck me as a terrific idea. “He should put his old pieces together and publish them as a book,” she said. “It wouldn’t be very difficult. All he’d have to do is pick out the best ones, maybe touch up a couple of sentences here and there. But once he sits down with his old work, who knows what might happen? It could make him want to start writing again.”
“Are you saying you’d be interested in publishing this book?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said, “is that what I’m saying?” Ann paused for a moment and laughed. “I suppose I just said it, didn’t I?” Then she paused again, as if to catch herself before she went too far. “But still, why the hell not? It’s not as though I don’t know Ben’s stuff. I’ve been reading it since high school, for Christ’s sake. Maybe it’s about time someone twisted his arm and got him to do it.”
Half an hour later, when I caught sight of Sachs on Eighth Avenue, I was still thinking about this conversation with Ann. The idea of the book had settled comfortably inside me by then, and for once I was feeling encouraged, more hopeful than I had been in a long time. Perhaps that explains why I became so depressed afterward. I found a man living in what looked like a state of utter abjection, and I couldn’t bring myself to accept what I had seen: my once brilliant friend, wandering around for hours in a quasi-trance, scarcely distinguishable from the ruined men and women who begged coins from him in the street. I got home that evening feeling sick at heart. The situation was out of control, I told myself, and unless I acted fast, there wouldn’t be a prayer of saving him.
I invited him out to lunch the following week. The moment he sat down in his chair, I plunged in and started talking about the book. This notion had been bandied about a few times in the past, but Sachs had always been reluctant to commit himself. He felt his magazine pieces were things of the moment, written for specific reasons at specific times, and a book would be too permanent a place for them. They should be allowed to die a natural death, he’d once told me. Let people read them once and forget them—there was no need to erect a tomb. I was already familiar with this defense, so I didn’t present the idea in literary terms. I talked about it strictly as a money proposition, a cold-cash deal. He had been sponging off of Fanny for the past seven months, I said, and maybe it was time for him to start pulling his own weight. If he wasn’t willing to go out and find a job, the least he could do was publish this book. Forget about yourself for once, I told him. Do it for her.
I don’t think I’d ever spoken to him so emphatically. I was so wound up, so filled with passionate good sense, that Sachs started smiling before I was halfway into my harangue. I suppose there was something comical about my behavior that afternoon, but that was only because I hadn’t expected to win so easily. As it turned out, Sachs needed little convincing. He made up his mind to do the book as soon as he heard about my conversation with Ann, and everything I said to him after that was unnecessary. He tried to get me to stop, but since I thought that meant he didn’t want to talk about it, I kept on arguing with him, which was a bit like telling someone to eat a meal that was already inside his stomach. I’m sure he found me laughable, but none of that makes any difference now. What matters is that Sachs agreed to do the book, and at the time I felt it was a major victory, a gigantic step in the right direction. I knew nothing about Fanny, of course, and therefore I had no idea that the project was simply a ploy, a strategic move to help him bring his marriage to an end. That doesn’t mean Sachs wasn’t planning to publish the book, but his motives were quite different from the ones I imagined. I saw the book as a way back into the world, whereas he saw it as an escape, as a last gesture of goodwill before he slipped off into the darkness and disappeared.
That was how he found the courage to talk to Fanny about a trial separation. He would go to Vermont to work on the book, she would stay in the city, and meanwhile they would both have a chance to think about what they wanted to do. The book made it possible for him to leave with her blessings, for both of them to ignore the true purpose of his departure. Over the next two weeks, Fanny organized Ben’s trip to Vermont as if it were still one of her wifely duties, actively dismantling their marriage as if she believed they would go on being married forever. The habit of caring for him was so automatic by then, so deeply ingrained in who she was, that it probably never occurred to her to stop and consider what she was doing. That was the paradox of the end. I had lived through something similar with Delia: that strange postscript when a couple is neither together nor not together, when the last thing holding you together is the fact that you are apart. Fanny and Ben acted no differently. She helped him move out of her life, and he accepted that help as the most natural thing in the world. She went down to the cellar and lugged up sheafs of old articles for him; she made photocopies of yellowed, crumbling originals; she visited the library and searched through spools of microfilm for errant pieces; she put the whole mass of clippings and tear sheets and jagged pages into chronological order. On the last day,
she even went out and bought cardboard file boxes to store the papers in, and the next morning, when it came time for Sachs to leave, she helped him carry these boxes downstairs and load them into the trunk of the car. So much for making a clean break. So much for giving off unambiguous signals. At that point, I don’t think either one of them would have been capable of it.
That was sometime in late March. Innocently accepting what Sachs had told me, I assumed that he was going to Vermont in order to work. He had gone there alone before, and the fact that Fanny was staying behind in New York didn’t strike me as unusual. She had her job, after all, and since no one had mentioned how long Sachs would be gone, I figured it would be a relatively short trip. A month maybe, six weeks at the most. Putting together the book would not be a difficult task, and I didn’t see how it could take him longer than that. And even if it did, there was nothing to prevent Fanny from visiting him in the meantime. So I didn’t question any of their arrangements. They all made sense to me, and when Sachs called to say good-bye on the last night, I told him how glad I was that he was going. Good luck, I said, I’ll see you soon. And that was it. Whatever he might have been planning then, he didn’t say a word to make me think he wouldn’t be back.
After Sachs left for Vermont, my thoughts turned elsewhere. I was busy with work, with Iris’s pregnancy, with David’s troubles in school, with deaths of relatives on both sides of the family, and the spring passed very quickly. Perhaps I felt relieved that he was gone, I don’t know, but there’s no doubt that country life had improved his spirits. We talked on the phone about once a week, and I gathered from these conversations that things were going well for him. He had started work on something new, he told me, and I took this as such a momentous event, such a turnaround from his previous state, that I suddenly allowed myself to stop worrying about him. Even when he kept putting off his return to New York, prolonging his absence through April, then May, and then June, I didn’t feel any alarm. Sachs was writing again, I told myself, Sachs was healthy again, and as far as I was concerned, that meant all was right with the world.
Iris and I saw Fanny on several occasions that spring. I remember at least one dinner, a Sunday brunch, and a couple of outings to the movies. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t detect any signs of distress or unease in her. It’s true that she talked about Sachs very little (which should have alerted me to something), but whenever she did talk about him, she sounded pleased, even excited by what was happening in Vermont. Not only was he writing again, she told us, but he was writing a novel. This was so much better than anything she could have imagined, it made no difference that the essay book had been shunted to the side. He was working up a storm, she said, scarcely even pausing to eat or sleep, and whether these reports were exaggerated or not (either by Sachs or by her), they put an end to all further questions. Iris and I never asked her why she didn’t go up to visit Ben. We didn’t ask because the answer was already obvious. He was on a roll with his work, and after waiting so long for this to happen, she wasn’t about to interfere.
She was holding back on us, of course, but more to the point was that Sachs had been cut out of the picture as well. I only learned about this later, but all during the time he spent in Vermont, it seems that he knew as little about what Fanny was thinking as I did. She hardly could have expected it to work out that way. Theoretically, there was still some hope for them, but once Ben packed the car with his belongings and drove off to the country, she realized that they were finished. It didn’t take more than a week or two for this to happen. She still cared about him and wished him well, but she had no desire to see him, no desire to talk to him, no desire to make any more efforts. They had talked about keeping the door open, but now it seemed as if the door had vanished. It wasn’t that it had closed, it simply wasn’t there anymore. Fanny found herself looking at a blank wall, and after that she turned away. They were no longer married, and what she did with her life from then on was her own business.
In June, she met a man named Charles Spector. I don’t feel I have a right to talk about this, but to the degree that it affected Sachs, it’s impossible to avoid mentioning it. The crucial thing here is not that Fanny wound up marrying Charles (the wedding took place four months ago) but that once she started falling in love with him that summer, she didn’t come forward and let Ben know what was happening. Again, it’s not a matter of affixing blame. There were reasons for her silence, and under the circumstances I think she acted properly, with no hint of selfishness or deceit. The affair with Charles caught her by surprise, and in those early stages she was still too confused to know what her feelings were. Rather than rush into telling Ben about something that might not last, she decided to hold off for a while, to spare him from further dramas until she was certain of what she wanted to do. Through no fault of her own, this waiting period lasted too long. Ben found out about Charles purely by accident—returning home to Brooklyn one night and seeing him in bed with Fanny—and the timing of that discovery couldn’t have been worse. Considering that Sachs was the one who had pushed for the separation in the first place, this probably shouldn’t have mattered. But it did. Other factors were involved as well, but this one counted as much as any of those others. It kept the music playing, so to speak, and what might have ended at that point did not. The waltz of disasters went on, and after that there was no stopping it.
But that was later, and I don’t want to run ahead of myself. On the surface, things purred along as they had for the past several months. Sachs worked on his novel in Vermont, Fanny went to her job at the museum, and Iris and I waited for our baby to be born. After Sonia arrived (on June twenty-seventh), I lost touch with everyone for the next six or eight weeks. Iris and I were in Babyland, a country where sleep is forbidden and day is indistinguishable from night, a walled-off kingdom governed by the whims of a tiny, absolute monarch. We asked Fanny and Ben to be Sonia’s godparents, and they both accepted with elaborate declarations of pride and gratitude. Gifts poured in after that, Fanny delivering hers in person (clothes, blankets, rattles) and Ben’s turning up by mail (books, bears, rubber ducks). I was particularly moved by Fanny’s response, by the way she would stop in after work just to hold Sonia for fifteen or twenty minutes, cooing at her with all kinds of affectionate nonsense. She seemed to glow with the baby in her arms, and it always saddened me to think how none of this had been possible for her. “My little beauty,” she would call Sonia, “my angel girl,” “my dark passion flower,” “my heart.” In his own way, Sachs was no less enthusiastic than she was, and I took the small packages that kept appearing in the mail as a sign of real progress, decisive proof that he was well again. In early August, he began urging us to come up to Vermont to see him. He was ready to show me the first part of his book, he said, and he wanted us to introduce him to his goddaughter. “You’ve kept her from me long enough,” he said. “How can you expect me to take care of her if I don’t know what she looks like?”
So Iris and I rented a car and a baby seat and drove up north to spend a few days with him. I remember asking Fanny if she wanted to join us, but it seemed that the timing was bad. She had just started her catalogue essay for the Blakelock exhibition she was curating at the museum that winter (her most important show to date), and she was anxious about meeting the deadline. She planned to visit Ben as soon as it was done, she explained, and because this seemed like a legitimate excuse, I didn’t press her to go. Again, I had been confronted with a significant piece of evidence, and again I had ignored it. Fanny and Ben hadn’t seen each other in five months, and it still hadn’t dawned on me that they were in any trouble. If I had bothered to open my eyes for a few minutes, I might have noticed something. But I was too wrapped up in my own happiness, too absorbed in my own little world to pay any attention.
Still, the trip was a success. After spending four days and three nights in his company, I concluded that Sachs was on firm ground again, and I went away feeling as close to him as I had ever felt in the past.
I’m tempted to say that it was just like old times, but that wouldn’t be quite accurate. Too much had happened to him since his fall, there had been too many changes in both of us for our friendship to be exactly what it had been. But that doesn’t mean these new times were less good than the old. In many ways, they were better. In that they represented something I felt I had lost, something I had despaired of ever finding again, they were much better.
Sachs had never been a well-organized person, and it startled me to see how thoroughly he had prepared for our visit. There were flowers in the room where Iris and I slept, guest towels were neatly folded on the bureau, and he had made the bed with all the precision of a veteran innkeeper. Downstairs, the kitchen had been stocked with food, there was an ample supply of wine and beer, and, as we discovered each night, the dinner menus had been worked out in advance. These small gestures were significant, I felt, and they helped set the tone of our stay. Daily life was easier for him than it had been in New York, and little by little he had managed to regain control of himself. As he put it to me in one of our late-night conversations, it was a bit like being in prison again. There weren’t any extraneous preoccupations to bog him down. Life had been reduced to its barebones essentials, and he no longer had to question how he spent his time. Every day was more or less a repetition of the day before. Today resembled yesterday, tomorrow would resemble today, and what happened next week would blur into what had happened this week. There was comfort for him in that. The element of surprise had been eliminated, and it made him feel sharper, better able to concentrate on his work. “It’s odd,” he continued, “but the two times I’ve sat down and written a novel, I’ve been cut off from the rest of the world. First in jail when I was a kid, and now up here in Vermont, living like a hermit in the woods. I wonder what the hell it means.”