Leviathan

by Paul Auster

  Not even his growing closeness to Maria seemed to affect her. It provoked no fits of jealousy, no smiles of encouragement, no response that he could measure. She would walk into the house while he and the little girl were curled up on the sofa reading a book, or crouched on the floor drawing pictures, or arranging a tea party for a roomful of dolls, and all Lillian would do was say hello, give her daughter a perfunctory kiss on the cheek, and then go off to her bedroom, where she would change her clothes and get ready to leave again. She was nothing more than a specter, a beautiful apparition who floated in and out of the house at irregular intervals and left no traces behind her. Sachs felt that she must have known what she was doing, that there must have been a reason for this enigmatic behavior, but none of the reasons he could think of ever satisfied him. At most, he concluded that she was putting him to a test, titillating him with this game of peekaboo to see how long he could stand it. She wanted to know if he would crack, she wanted to know if his will was as strong as hers.

  Then, with no apparent cause, everything suddenly changed. Late one afternoon in the middle of the third week, Lillian walked into the house carrying a bag of groceries and announced that she was taking charge of dinner that night. She was in high spirits, full of jokes and fast, amusing patter, and the difference in her was so great, so bewildering, that the only explanation Sachs could think of was that she was on drugs. Until then, the three of them had never sat down to a meal together, but Lillian seemed not to notice what an extraordinary breakthrough this dinner represented. She pushed Sachs out of the kitchen and worked steadily for the next two hours, preparing what turned out to be a delicious concoction of vegetables and lamb. Sachs was impressed, but given everything that had preceded this performance, he wasn’t quite prepared to accept it at face value. It could have been a trap, he felt, a ruse to trick him into letting down his guard, and while he wanted nothing more than to go along with her, to join in with the flow of Lillian’s gaiety, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was stiff and awkward, at a loss for words, and the blithe manner he had worked so hard to affect with her suddenly abandoned him. Lillian and Maria did most of the talking, and after a while he was scarcely more than an observer, a dour presence lurking around the edges of the party. He hated himself for acting like that, and when he refused a second glass of wine that Lillian was about to pour for him, he began to think of himself with disgust, as an out-and-out dunce. “Don’t worry,” she said as she poured the wine into his glass anyway. “I’m not going to bite you.” “I know that,” Sachs answered. “It’s just that I thought—” Before he could complete the sentence, Lillian interrupted him. “Don’t think so much,” she said. “Just take the wine and enjoy it. It’s good for you.”

  The next day, however, it was as though none of this had happened. Lillian left the house early, did not return until the following morning, and for the rest of that week continued to make herself as scarce as possible. Sachs grew numb with confusion. Even his doubts were now subject to doubt, and little by little he could feel himself buckling under the weight of the whole terrible adventure. Perhaps he should have listened to Maria Turner, he thought. Perhaps he had no business being there and should pack his bags and get out. For several hours one night, he even toyed with the idea of turning himself in to the police. At least the agony would be over then. Instead of throwing away the money on a person who didn’t want it, perhaps he should use it to hire a lawyer, perhaps he should start thinking about how to keep himself out of jail.

  Then, less than an hour after thinking these thoughts, everything turned upside-down again. It was somewhere between twelve and one o’clock in the morning, and Sachs was drifting off to sleep on the living room sofa. Footsteps began to stir on the second floor. He figured that Maria was on her way to the toilet, but just as he started to drift off again, he heard the sound of someone coming down the stairs. Before he could throw off the blanket and stand up, the living room lamp was turned on, and his makeshift bed was inundated with light. He automatically covered his eyes, and when he forced them open a second later, he saw Lillian sitting in the armchair directly opposite the sofa, dressed in her terrycloth robe. “We have to talk,” she said. He studied her face in silence as she pulled out a cigarette from the pocket of her robe and lit it with a match. The bright confidence and flagrant posing of the past weeks were gone, and even her voice sounded hesitant to him now, more vulnerable than it had ever been before. She put the matches down on the coffee table between them. Sachs followed the movement of her hand, then glanced down at the writing on the matchbook cover, momentarily distracted by the lurid green letters emblazoned against the pink background. It turned out to be an advertisement for telephone sex, and just then, in one of those unbidden flashes of insight, it occurred to him that nothing was meaningless, that everything in the world was connected to everything else.

  “I’ve decided that I don’t want you to think of me as a monster anymore,” Lillian said. Those were the words that started it, and in the next two hours she told him more about herself than in all the previous weeks combined, talking to him in a way that gradually eroded the resentments he had been harboring against her. It wasn’t that she came out and apologized for anything, nor was it that he jumped to believe what she said, but little by little, in spite of his wariness and suspicion, he understood that she was no better off than he was, that he had made her just as miserable as she had made him.

  It took a while, however. At first, he assumed it was all an act, yet another ploy to keep his nerves on edge. In the whirl of nonsense that stormed through him, he even managed to convince himself that she knew he was planning to run away—as if she could read his mind, as if she had entered his brain and heard him thinking those thoughts. She hadn’t come downstairs to make peace with him. She had done it to soften him up, to make sure he wouldn’t decamp before he had given her all the money. He was on the point of delirium by then, and if Lillian hadn’t mentioned the money herself, he never would have known how badly he had misjudged her. That was the moment when the conversation turned. She started talking about the money, and what she said bore so little resemblance to what he had imagined she would say, he suddenly felt ashamed of himself, ashamed enough to start listening to her in earnest.

  “You’ve given me close to thirty thousand dollars,” she said. “It keeps coming in, more and more of it every day, and the more money there is, the more scared of it I feel. I don’t know how long you’re planning to keep this up, but thirty thousand dollars is enough. It’s more than enough, and I think we should stop before things get out of hand.”

  “We can’t stop,” Sachs found himself saying to her. “We’ve only just started.”

  “I’m not sure I can take it anymore.”

  “You can take it. You’re the toughest person I’ve ever seen, Lillian. As long as you don’t worry, you can take it just fine.”

  “I’m not tough. I’m not tough, and I’m not good, and once you get to know me, you’ll wish you’d never set foot in this house.”

  “The money isn’t about goodness. It’s about justice, and if justice means anything, it has to be the same for everyone, whether they’re good or not.”

  She began to cry then, staring straight ahead at him and letting the tears run down her cheeks—without touching them, as if she didn’t want to acknowledge that they were there. It was a proud sort of crying, Sachs felt, at once a baring of distress and a refusal to submit to it, and he respected her for holding on to herself as tightly as she did. As long as she ignored them, as long as she didn’t wipe them away, those tears would never humiliate her.

  Lillian did most of the talking after that, chain-smoking her way through a long monologue of regrets and self-recriminations. Much of it was difficult for Sachs to follow, but he didn’t dare to interrupt, fearing that a wrong word or badly timed question might bring her to a halt. She rambled on for a while about a man named Frank, then talked about another man named Terry, and then, a momen
t later, she was going over the last years of her marriage to Dimaggio. That led to something about the police (who had apparently questioned her after Dimaggio’s body was discovered), but before she had finished with that, she was telling him about her plan to move, to leave California and start over again somewhere else. She had pretty much decided to do it, she said, but then he turned up on her doorstep, and the whole thing fell apart. She couldn’t think straight anymore, she didn’t know if she was coming or going. He expected her to continue with that a bit longer, but then she digressed onto the topic of work, talking almost boastfully about how she had managed to fend for herself without Dimaggio. She had a license as a trained masseuse, she told him, she did some modeling for department-store catalogues, and all in all she’d kept her head above water. But then, very abruptly, she waved off the subject as if it were of no importance and started crying again.

  “Everything will work out,” Sachs said. “You’ll see. All the bad things are behind you now. You just haven’t realized it yet.”

  It was the correct thing to say, and it ended the conversation on a positive note. Nothing had been resolved, but Lillian seemed comforted by his remark, touched by his encouragement. When she gave him a quick hug of thanks before going up to bed, he resisted the temptation to squeeze any harder than he should have. Nevertheless, it was an exquisite moment for him, a moment of true and undeniable contact. He felt her naked body under the robe, he kissed her gently on the cheek, and understood that they were back at the beginning now, that everything that had come before this moment had been erased.

  The next morning, Lillian left the house when she always did, disappearing while Sachs and Maria were on their way to school. But this time there was a note in the kitchen when he returned, a brief message that seemed to support his wildest, most improbable hopes. “Thanks for last night,” it said. “XXX.” He liked it that she had used kiss marks instead of signing her name. Even if they had been put there with the most innocent intentions—as a reflex, as a variant on the standard salutation—the triple-X hinted at other things as well. It was the same code for sex he had seen on the matchbook cover the night before, and it excited him to imagine that she had done it on purpose, that she had substituted those marks for her name in order to plant that association in his mind.

  On the strength of this note, he went ahead and did something he knew he shouldn’t have done. Even as he was doing it, he understood that it was wrong, that he was beginning to lose his head, but he no longer had it in him to stop. After he finished his morning rounds, he looked up the address of the massage studio where Lillian had told him she worked. It was somewhere out on Shattuck Avenue in North Berkeley, and without even bothering to call for an appointment, he climbed into his car and drove over. He wanted to surprise her, to walk in unannounced and say hello—very casually, as if they were old friends. If she happened to be free at that moment, he would ask for a massage. That would give him a legitimate excuse to be touched by her again, and even as he savored the feel of her hands along his skin, he could still his conscience with the thought that he was helping her to earn her living. I’ve never been massaged by a professional, he would say to her, and I just wanted to know what it felt like. He found the place without difficulty, but when he walked inside and asked the woman at the front desk for Lillian Stern, he was given a curt, glacial response. “Lillian Stern quit on me last spring,” the woman said, “and she hasn’t shown her face in here since.”

  It was the last thing he had expected, and he walked out of there feeling betrayed, scorched by the lie she had told him. Lillian didn’t come home that night, and he was almost glad to be left to himself, to be spared the awkwardness of having to see her. There was nothing he could say, after all. If he mentioned where he had been that afternoon, his secret would be exposed, and that would destroy whatever chance he still had with her. In the long run, perhaps he was lucky to have been through this now rather than later. He would have to be more careful with his feelings, he told himself. No more impulsive gestures. No more flights of enthusiasm. It was a lesson he had needed to learn, and he hoped he wouldn’t forget it.

  But he did. And not just in due course, but the very next day. Again, it was after dark. Again, he had already put Maria to bed, and again he was camped out on the living room sofa—still awake this time, reading one of Lillian’s books about reincarnation. It appalled him that she could be interested in such claptrap, and he read on with a kind of vindictive sarcasm, studying each page as though it were a testament to her stupidity, to the breathtaking shallowness of her mind. She was ignorant, he told himself, a brainless muddle of fads and half-baked notions, and how could he expect a person like that to understand him, to absorb the tenth part of what he was doing? But then, just as he was about to put down the book and turn out the light, Lillian walked through the front door, her face flushed with drink, wearing the tightest, smallest black dress he had ever seen, and he couldn’t help but smile when he saw her. She was that ravishing. She was that beautiful to look at, and now that she was standing in the room with him, he couldn’t turn his eyes away from her.

  “Hi, kiddo,” she said. “Did you miss me?”

  “Nonstop,” he said. “From the minute I last saw you until now.” He delivered the line with enough bravura to make it sound like a joke, a bit of facetious banter, but the truth was that he meant it.

  “Good. Because I missed you, too.”

  She stopped in front of the coffee table, let out a short laugh, and then spun around in a full circle, arms spread like a fashion model, pivoting deftly on her toes. “How do you like my dress?” she asked. “Six hundred dollars on sale. A hell of a bargain, don’t you think?”

  “It was worth every penny. And just the right size, too. If it was any smaller, the imagination would be out of business. You’d hardly be wearing it when you put it on.”

  “That’s the look. Simple and seductive.”

  “I’m not so sure about simple. The other thing, yes, but definitely not simple.”

  “But not vulgar.”

  “No, not at all. It’s too well made for that.”

  “Good. Someone told me it was vulgar, and I wanted to get your opinion before I took it off.”

  “You mean the fashion show is over?”

  “All over. It’s getting late, and you can’t expect an old broad like me to stand on her feet all night.”

  “Too bad. Just when I was beginning to enjoy it.”

  “You’re kind of thick sometimes, aren’t you?”

  “Probably. I’m often good at complicated things. But simple things tend to confuse me.”

  “Like taking off a dress, I suppose. If you drag it out much longer, I’m going to have to take it off myself. And that wouldn’t be so good, would it?”

  “No, not so good. Especially since it doesn’t look very hard. No buttons or snaps to fiddle with, no zippers to snag. Just pull from the bottom and slide it off.”

  “Or start from the top and work your way down. The choice is yours, Mr. Sachs.”

  A moment later, she was sitting beside him on the sofa, and a few moments after that the dress was on the floor. Lillian went at him with a mixture of fury and playfulness, attacking his body in short, breathless surges, and at no point did he do anything to stop her. Sachs knew that she was drunk, but even if it was all an accident, even if it was only booze and boredom that had pushed her into his arms, he was willing to settle for it. There might never be another chance, he told himself, and after four weeks of waiting for precisely this one thing to happen, it would have been unimaginable to turn her down.

  They made love on the sofa, and then they made love in Lillian’s bed upstairs, and even after the effects of the alcohol had worn off, she remained as ardent as she had been in the first moments, offering herself to him with an abandon and a concentration that nullified any lingering doubts he might have had. She swept him away, she emptied him out, she dismantled him. And the remarkable thing was th
at early the next morning, when they woke up and found each other in bed, they went at it again, and this time, with the pale light spreading into the corners of the small room, she said that she loved him, and Sachs, who was looking straight into her eyes at that moment, saw nothing in those eyes to make him disbelieve her.

  It was impossible to know what had happened, and he never found the courage to ask. He simply went with it, floating along on a wave of inexplicable happiness, wanting nothing else but to be exactly where he was. Overnight, he and Lillian had become a couple. She stayed home with him during the day now, sharing the chores of the household, taking on her responsibilities as Maria’s mother again, and every time she looked at him, it was as though she were repeating what she had told him that first morning in bed. A week passed, and the less likely it seemed that she would recant, the more he came to accept what was happening. For several days in a row, he took Lillian out on buying sprees—showering her with dresses and shoes, with silk underwear, with ruby earrings and a strand of pearls. They binged on good restaurants and expensive wines, they talked, they made plans, they fucked until the cows came home. It was too good to be true, perhaps, but by then he was no longer able to think about what was good or what was true. When it came right down to it, he was no longer able to think about anything.

  There’s no telling how long it could have gone on. If it had just been the two of them, they might have made something of this sexual explosion, this bizarre and wholly implausible romance. In spite of its demonic implications, it’s possible that Sachs and Lillian could have settled down somewhere and had a real life together. But other realities impinged on them, and less than two weeks after this new life began, it was already being called into question. They had fallen in love, perhaps, but they had also upset the balance of the household, and little Maria wasn’t the least bit happy with the change. Her mother had been given back to her, but she had lost something as well, and from her point of view this loss must have felt like the crumbling of a world. For nearly a month, she and Sachs had lived together in a kind of paradise. She had been the sole object of his affections, and he had coddled her and doted on her in ways that no one else had ever done. Now, without a single word of warning, he had abandoned her. He had moved into her mother’s bed, and rather than stay at home and keep her company, he left her with babysitters and went out every night. She resented all this. She resented her mother for coming between them, and she resented Sachs for letting her down, and by the time she had put up with it for three or four days, the normally obliging and affectionate Maria had turned into a horror, a tiny engine of sulks and tantrums and angry tears.