Leviathan

by Paul Auster

  “You don’t have to do either one.”

  “No, I don’t suppose I do. I can forget all about you, can’t I? There’s always that option.”

  “You can do whatever you want, Maria.”

  “Right. And if you want to go off the deep end, that’s your business. But just remember that I told you so. Okay? Just remember that I tried to talk to you like a friend.”

  He was badly shaken after they hung up. Maria’s last words had been a kind of farewell, a declaration that she was no longer with him. It didn’t matter what had led to the disagreement: whether it had been provoked by jealousy or honest concern or a combination of the two. The result was that he wouldn’t be able to turn to her anymore. Even if she hadn’t meant for him to think that, even if she would welcome hearing from him again, the conversation had left behind too many clouds, too many uncertainties. How could he look to her for support when the very act of talking to him would cause her pain? He hadn’t intended to go that far, but now that the words had been spoken, he understood that he had lost his best ally, the one person he could have counted on for help. He had been in California for just over a day, and already his bridges were burning behind him.

  He could have repaired the damage by calling her back, but he didn’t do it. Instead, he returned to the bathroom and put on his clothes, brushed his hair with Lillian’s brush, and spent the next eight and a half hours cleaning the house. Every now and then he would pause for a snack, scavenging the refrigerator and kitchen cupboards for something edible (canned soup, liverwurst, cocktail nuts), but other than that he stuck with it, working without interruption until past nine o’clock. His goal was to make the house spotless, to turn it into a model of domestic order and tranquility. There was nothing he could do about the tattered furniture, of course, or the cracked ceilings in the bedrooms, or the rusted enamel in the sinks, but at least he could make the place clean. Tackling one room at a time, he scrubbed and dusted and scoured and rearranged, progressing methodically from the back to the front, from the first floor to the second, from large messes to small. He washed out toilets, he reorganized the silverware, he folded and put away clothes, he collected Lego pieces, miniature tea-set utensils, the amputated limbs of plastic dolls. Last of all, he repaired the legs of the dining-room table, fastening them back into position with an assortment of nails and screws he found at the bottom of a kitchen drawer. The only room he didn’t touch was Dimaggio’s study. He was reluctant to open the door again, but even if he had wanted to go in there, he wouldn’t have known what to do with all the debris. Time was running short by then, and he wouldn’t have been able to finish the job.

  He knew that he should be going. Lillian had made it clear that she wanted him out of the house before she returned, but instead of driving off to look for a motel, he went back to the living room, slid out of his shoes, and lay down on the sofa. He only wanted to rest for a few minutes. He was tired from the work he had done, and there didn’t seem to be any harm in lingering. By ten o’clock, however, he still hadn’t made a move for the front door. He knew that crossing Lillian could be dangerous, but the thought of going out into the night filled him with dread. The house felt safe to him, safer than anywhere else, and even if he had no right to take this liberty, he suspected that it might not be such a bad thing for her to walk in and find him there. She would be shocked, perhaps, but at the same time an important point would be established, the one point that needed to be made above all others. She would see that he meant for there to be no getting rid of him, that he was already an inescapable fact of her life. Depending on how she responded, he would be able to judge whether she understood that or not.

  His plan was to pretend to be asleep when she arrived. But Lillian came home late, long past the hour she had mentioned that morning, and by then Sachs’s eyes had closed on him and he was sleeping in earnest. It was an unpardonable lapse—sprawled out on the sofa with the lights burning all around him—but in the end it didn’t seem to matter. The noise of a slamming door jolted him awake at one thirty, and the first thing he saw was Lillian standing in the entranceway with Maria in her arms. Their eyes met, and for the briefest moment a smile flashed across her lips. Then, without saying a word to him, she marched up the stairs with her daughter. He assumed she would come down again after she put Maria to bed, but as with so many other assumptions he made in that house, he was wrong. He heard Lillian go into the upstairs bathroom and brush her teeth, and then, after a time, he followed the sound of her footsteps as she went into her bedroom and turned on the television. The volume was low, and the only thing he could make out was a blur of mumbling voices, a thump of music vibrating in the walls. He sat on the sofa, fully conscious now, expecting her to come down any minute and talk to him. He waited ten minutes, then twenty minutes, then half an hour, and at last the television went off. He waited another twenty minutes after that, and when she still hadn’t come down by then, he understood that she had no intention of talking to him, that she had already gone to sleep for the night. It was a triumph of sorts, he felt, but now that it was over, he wasn’t quite sure what to make of his victory. He turned off the lamps in the living room, stretched out on the sofa again, and then lay in the darkness with his eyes open, listening to the silence of the house.

  After that, there was no more talk of moving to a motel. The living room sofa became Sachs’s bed, and he started sleeping there every night. They all took this for granted, and the fact that he now belonged to the household was never so much as even mentioned. It was a natural development, a phenomenon as little worth discussing as a tree or a stone or a particle of dust in the air. That was precisely what Sachs had hoped for, and yet his role among them was never clearly defined. Everything had been set up according to some secret, unspoken understanding, and he instinctively knew that it would be a mistake to confront Lillian with questions about what she wanted of him. He had to figure it out on his own, to find a spot for himself on the strength of the smallest hints and gestures, the most inscrutable remarks and evasions. It wasn’t that he was afraid of what might happen if he did the wrong thing (although he never doubted that the situation could turn on him, that she could back up her threat and call the police), but rather that he wanted his conduct to be exemplary. That was the reason he had come to California in the first place: to reinvent his life, to embody an ideal of goodness that would put him in an altogether different relation with himself. But Lillian was the instrument he had chosen, and it was only through her that this transformation could be achieved. He had thought of it as a journey, as a long voyage into the darkness of his soul, but now that he was on his way, he couldn’t be sure if he was traveling in the right direction or not.

  It might not have been so hard on him if Lillian had been someone else, but the strain of sleeping under the same roof with her every night kept him permanently off balance. After just two days, it appalled him to discover how desperately he wanted to touch her. The problem wasn’t her beauty, he realized, but the fact that her beauty was the only part of herself she allowed him to know. If she had been less intransigent, less unwilling to engage him in a directly personal way, he would have had something else to think about, and the spell of desire might have been broken. As it was, she refused to reveal herself to him, which meant that she never became more than an object, never more than the sum of her physical self. And that physical self carried a tremendous power within it: it dazzled and assaulted, it quickened the pulse, it demolished every lofty resolve. This wasn’t the kind of struggle Sachs had prepared himself for. It didn’t fit into the scheme he had worked out so carefully in his head. His body had been added to the equation now, and what had once seemed simple was turned into a morass of feverish strategies and clandestine motives.

  He kept all this hidden from her. Under the circumstances, his only recourse was to match her indifference with an unflappable calm, to pretend that he was perfectly happy with the way things stood between them. He affected a lighthearte
d manner when he was with her; he was nonchalant, friendly, accommodating; he smiled often; he never complained. Since he knew that she was already on her guard, that she already suspected him of the feelings he was now guilty of, it was particularly important that she never see him looking at her in the way he wanted to look at her. A single glance could ruin him, especially with a woman as experienced as Lillian. She had spent her whole life being stared at by men, and she would be highly sensitive to his looks, to the smallest hint of meaning in his eyes. This produced an almost unbearable tension in him whenever she was around, but he hung on bravely and never abandoned hope. He asked nothing from her, expected nothing from her, and prayed that he would eventually wear her down. That was the only weapon at his disposal, and he brought it out at every opportunity, humiliating himself before her with such purpose, such passionate self-denial, that his very weakness became a form of strength.

  For the first twelve or fifteen days, she scarcely said a word to him. He had no idea what she did during her long and frequent absences from the house, and though he would have given almost anything to find out, he never dared to ask. Discretion was more important than knowledge, he felt, and rather than run the risk of offending her, he kept his curiosity to himself and waited to see what would happen. On most mornings, she would leave the house by nine or ten o’clock. Sometimes, she would return in the evening, and at other times she would stay out late, not returning until well past midnight. Sometimes, she would go out in the morning, return to the house in the evening to change her clothes, and then vanish for the rest of the night. On two or three occasions, she did not return until the following morning, at which point she would walk into the house, change her clothes, and then promptly leave again. Sachs assumed that she spent those late nights in the company of men—perhaps one man, perhaps different men—but it was impossible to know where she went during the day. It seemed likely that she had a job of some kind, but that was only a guess. For all he knew, she could have spent her time driving around in her car, or going to the movies, or standing by the water and looking at the waves.

  In spite of these mysterious comings and goings, Lillian never failed to tell him when he could expect her to turn up again. This was more for Maria’s sake than for his, and even if the hours she gave were only approximate (“I won’t be back until late,” “See you tomorrow morning”), it helped him to structure his own time and keep the household from falling into confusion. With Lillian gone so often, the job of looking after Maria fell almost entirely to Sachs. That was the strangest twist of all, he found, for however curt and standoffish she might have been when they were together, the fact that Lillian showed no hesitation in letting him care for her daughter proved that she already trusted him, perhaps more than she even realized herself. Sachs tried to take heart from this anomaly. He never doubted that on one level she was taking advantage of him—palming off her responsibilities on a willing dupe—but on another level the message seemed quite clear: she felt safe with him, she knew that he wasn’t there to hurt her.

  Maria became his companion, his consolation prize, his indelible reward. He cooked breakfast for her every morning, he walked her to school, he picked her up in the afternoon, he brushed her hair, he gave her baths, he tucked her in at night. These were pleasures he couldn’t have anticipated, and as his place in her routine became more firmly entrenched, the affection between them only deepened. In the past, Lillian had relied on a woman who lived down the block to look after Maria, but amiable as Mrs. Santiago was, she had a large family of her own and rarely paid much attention to Maria except when one of her children was picking on her. Two days after Sachs moved in, Maria solemnly announced that she was never going to Mrs. Santiago’s house again. She preferred the way he took care of her, she said, and if it didn’t bother him too much, she would just as soon spend her time with him. Sachs told her he would enjoy that. They were walking down the street just then, on their way home from school, and a moment after he gave that answer, he felt her tiny hand grab hold of his thumb. They walked on in silence for half a minute, and then Maria stopped and said: “Besides, Mrs. Santiago has her own children, and you don’t have any little girls or boys, do you?” Sachs had already told her that he didn’t, but he shook his head to show her that her reasoning was correct. “It’s not fair that someone has too many and another person is all alone, is it?” she continued. Again, Sachs shook his head and didn’t interrupt. “I think this is good,” she said. “You’ll have me now, and Mrs. Santiago will have her own children, and everyone will be happy.”

  On the first Monday, he rented a mailbox at the Berkeley post office to give himself an address, returned the Plymouth to the local branch of the car agency, and bought a nine-year-old Buick Skylark for less than a thousand dollars. On Tuesday and Wednesday, he opened eleven different savings accounts at various banks around town. He was wary of depositing all the money in one place, and starting multiple accounts seemed more prudent than walking in somewhere with a bundle of over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash. Besides, he would call less attention to himself when he made his daily withdrawals for Lillian. His business would be kept in permanent rotation, and that would prevent any of the tellers or bank managers from getting to know him too well. At first, he figured he would visit each bank every eleven days, but when he discovered that withdrawals of one thousand dollars required a special signature from the manager, he started going to two different banks every morning and using the automatic cash machines, which disbursed a maximum of five hundred dollars per transaction. That amounted to weekly withdrawals of just five hundred dollars from each bank, a piddling sum by any standard. It was an efficient arrangement, and in the end he much preferred slipping his plastic card into the slot and pushing buttons than having to talk to a living person.

  The first few days were hard on him, however. He suspected that the money he had found in Dimaggio’s car was stolen—which could have meant that the serial numbers on the bills had been circulated by computer to banks around the country. But faced with a choice between running that risk or keeping the money in the house, he had decided to run the risk. It was too early to know if Lillian could be trusted, and leaving the money under her nose would hardly be an intelligent way to find out. At each bank he went to, he kept expecting the manager to glance down at the money, excuse himself from the conversation, and return to the office with a policeman in tow. But nothing like that ever happened. The men and women who opened his accounts were exceedingly courteous. They counted his money with swift, robotlike skill; they smiled, shook his hand, and told him how happy they were to have him as a customer. As a bonus for coming in with initial deposits of over ten thousand dollars, he received five toaster ovens, four clock radios, a portable television set, and an American flag.

  By the beginning of the second week, his days had fallen into a regular pattern. After taking Maria to school, he would walk back to the house, clean up the breakfast dishes, and then drive off to the two banks on his list. Once he had completed his withdrawals (with an occasional visit to a third bank to take out money for himself), he would go to one of the espresso bars along Telegraph Avenue, settle into a quiet corner, and spend an hour drinking cappuccinos as he read through the San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times. As it turned out, surprisingly little was reported about the case in either paper. The Times had stopped talking about Dimaggio’s death even before Sachs’s departure from New York, and except for a short follow-up interview with a captain from the Vermont State Police, nothing further was published. As for the Chronicle, they seemed to be tiring of the business as well. After a flurry of articles about the ecology movement and the Children of the Planet (all of them written by Tom Mueller), Dimaggio’s name was no longer mentioned. Sachs was comforted by this, but in spite of the diminishing pressure, he never went so far as to suppose it couldn’t tighten again. All during his stay in California, he continued to study the papers every morning. It became his private relig
ion, his form of daily prayer. Scan the newspapers and hold your breath. Make sure they weren’t after you. Make sure you could go on living another twenty-four hours.

  The rest of the morning and early afternoon were devoted to practical tasks. Like any other American housewife, he shopped for food, he cleaned, he took dirty clothes to the Laundromat, he worried about buying the right brand of peanut butter for school lunches. On days when he had some time to spare, he would stop in at the local toy store before picking up Maria. He showed up at school with dolls and hair ribbons, with storybooks and crayons, with yoyos, bubble gum, and stick-on earrings. He didn’t do this to bribe her. It was a simple outpouring of affection, and the better he got to know her, the more seriously he took the job of making her happy. Sachs had never spent much time with children, and it startled him to discover how much effort was involved in taking care of them. It required an enormous inner adjustment, but once he settled into the rhythm of Maria’s demands, he began to welcome them, to relish the effort for its own sake. Even when she was gone, she kept him occupied. It was a remedy against loneliness, he found, a way to relieve the burden of always having to think about himself.

  Every day, he put another thousand dollars in the freezer. The bills were stored in a plastic bag to protect them from moisture, and each time Sachs added a new allotment, he would check to see if any of the money had been removed. As it happened, not a single bill was ever touched. Two weeks passed, and the sum kept growing by increments of a thousand dollars a day. Sachs had no idea what to make of this detachment, this strange disregard for what he had given her. Did it mean that she wanted no part of it, that she was refusing to accept his terms? Or was she telling him that the money was unimportant, that it had nothing to do with her decision to allow him to live in her house? Both interpretations made sense, and therefore they canceled each other out, leaving him with no way to understand what was happening in Lillian’s mind, no way to decipher the facts that confronted him.