by Paul Auster
A month later, when he made up his mind to do the impossible, to risk everything on the chance to live in a rent-free house for as long as it took the city to notice him and give him the boot, he was stunned when Ellen accepted his offer. He tried to talk her out of it, explaining how difficult it would be and how much trouble they might be getting themselves into, but she held her ground, saying yes meant yes, and why bother to ask if he wanted her to say no?
They broke in one night and discovered that there were four bedrooms, three small ones on the top floor and a larger one below, which was part of an extension built onto the back of the house. The place was in lamentable condition, every surface coated with dust and soot, water stains streaking the wall behind the kitchen sink, cracked linoleum, splintered floorboards, a team of mice or squirrels running relay races under the roof, a collapsed table, legless chairs, spiderwebs dangling from ceiling corners, but remarkably enough not one broken window, and even if the water from the taps spurted out brown, looking more like English Breakfast tea than water, the plumbing was intact. Elbow grease, Ellen said. That’s all it was going to take. A week or two of scrubbing and painting, and they would be in business.
He spent the next several days looking for people to fill the last two bedrooms, but no one from the band was interested, and as he went down the list of his other friends and acquaintances, he discovered that the idea of living as a squatter in an abandoned house did not have the broad appeal he had supposed it would. Then Ellen happened to talk to Alice Bergstrom, her old college roommate, and learned that she was about to be kicked out of her rent-controlled sublet in Morningside Heights. Alice was a graduate student at Columbia, already well into her dissertation, which she hoped to finish within a year, and moving in with her boyfriend was out of the question. Even if they had wanted to live together, it wouldn’t have been possible. His apartment was the smallest of small, postage-stamp studios, and there simply wasn’t enough space for two people to work in there at the same time. And they both needed to work at home. Jake Baum was a fiction writer, until now exclusively a writer of short stories (some of them published, most of them not), and he barely managed to scrape by on the salary he earned from his part-time teaching job at a community college in Queens. He had no money to lend Alice, could offer no help in her search for a new apartment, and since Alice herself was nearly broke, she didn’t know where to turn. Her fellowship came with a small stipend, but it wasn’t enough to live on, and even with her part-time job at the PEN American Center, where she worked for the Freedom to Write Program, she was subsisting on a diet of buttered noodles, rice and beans, and an occasional egg sandwich. After hearing out the story of her friend’s predicament, Ellen suggested that she have a talk with Bing.
The three of them met at a bar in Brooklyn the following night, and after ten minutes of conversation he was convinced that Alice would make a worthy addition to the group. She was a tall, big-boned Scandinavian girl from Wisconsin with a round face and meaty arms, a person of heft and seriousness who also happened to have a quick mouth and a sharp sense of humor—a rare combination, he felt, which made her a shoo-in from the word go. Just as important, he liked the fact that she was Ellen’s friend. Ellen had proven herself to be an admirable sidekick, for reasons he would never understand she had taken on his mad, quixotic venture as her own, but he still worried about her, was still troubled by the closed-in, unabated sadness that seemed to accompany her wherever she went, and he was heartened to see how she loosened up in Alice’s presence, how much happier and more animated she looked as the three of them sat there talking in the bar, and he hoped that sharing the house with her old friend would be good medicine for her.
Before he met Alice Bergstrom, he had already met Millie Grant, but it took him several weeks after that night in the bar to screw up his courage and ask her if she had any interest in taking over the fourth and last bedroom. He was in love with her by then, in love with her in a way he had never loved anyone in his life, and he was too frightened to ask her because the thought that she might turn him down was more than he could bear. He was twenty-nine years old, and until he ran into Millie after a Mob Rule gig at Barbès on the last day of spring, his history with women had been one of absolute, unending failure. He was the fat boy who never had a girlfriend in school, the bumbling naïf who didn’t lose his virginity until he was twenty, the jazz drummer who had never picked up a stranger in a club, the dumbbell who bought blow jobs from hookers when he was feeling desperate, the sex-starved moron who jerked off to pornography in the darkness of his bedroom. He knew nothing about women. He had less experience with women than most adolescent boys. He had dreamed of women, he had chased after women, he had declared his love to women, but again and again he had been rebuffed. Now, as he was about to take the biggest gamble of his life, as he stood on the brink of illegally occupying a house in Sunset Park and perhaps landing in jail, he was going into it with a team composed entirely of women. His hour of triumph had come at last.
Why did Millie fall for him? He doesn’t quite know, cannot be sure of anything when it comes to the murky realms of attraction and desire, but he suspects it might be connected to the house in Sunset Park. Not the house itself, but the plan to move in there, which was already turning around in his head by the time he met her, already mutating from whim and vague speculation into a concrete decision to act, and he must have been burning with his idea that night, emitting a shower of mental sparks that surrounded him like a magnetic field and charged the atmosphere with a new and vital energy, an irresistible force, as it were, making him more attractive and desirable than usual perhaps, which could have been the reason why she was drawn to him. Not a pretty girl, no, not by the conventional standards that define prettiness (nose too sharp, left eye veering off slightly, too thin lips), but she had a terrific head of wiry red hair and a lithe, fetching body. They wound up in bed together that night, and when he understood that she wasn’t put off by his shaggy, overly round corpus horrendous, he asked her out to dinner the following night, and they wound up in bed again. Millie Grant, a twenty-seven-year-old part-time dancer, part-time restaurant hostess, born and raised in Wheaton, Illinois, a girl with four small tattoos and a navel ring, an advocate of numerous conspiracy theories (from the Kennedy assassination to the 9/11 attacks to the dangers of the public drinking-water system), a lover of loud music, a nonstop talker, a vegetarian, an animal rights activist, a vivacious, tightly sprung piece of work with a quick temper and a machine-gun laugh—someone to hold on to for the long haul. But he couldn’t hold on to her. He doesn’t understand what went wrong, but after two and a half months of communal living in the house, she woke up one morning and declared that she was going to San Francisco to join a new dance company. She had auditioned for them in the spring, she said, had been the last person cut, and now that one of the dancers was pregnant and had been forced to drop out, she had been hired. Sorry, Bing. It was nice while it lasted and all that, but this was the chance she’d been waiting for, and she’d be a fool not to jump at it. He didn’t know whether to believe her or not, whether San Francisco was simply a term that meant good-bye or if she was really going there. Now that she is gone, he wonders if he performed well enough in bed with her, if he was able to satisfy her sexually. Or, just the opposite, if she felt he was too interested in sex, if all his dirty talk about the bizarre couplings he had witnessed in porno films had finally driven her away. He will never know. She has not been in touch since the morning she left the house, and he is not expecting to hear from her again.
Two days after Millie’s departure, he wrote to Miles Heller. He got a little carried away, perhaps, claiming there were four people in the house rather than three, but four was a better number than three somehow, and he didn’t want Miles to think that his great anarchist insurrection had been whittled down to his own paltry self and a pair of women. In his mind, the fourth person was Jake Baum, the writer, and while it’s true that Jake comes around to visit Ali
ce once or twice a week, he is not a permanent member of the household. He doubts that Miles will care one way or the other, but if he does care, it will be easy enough to invent some fib to account for the discrepancy.
He loves Miles Heller, but he also thinks that Miles is insane, and he is glad his friend’s lonesome cowboy act is finally coming to an end. Seven years ago, when he received the first of the fifty-two letters Miles has written to him, he didn’t hesitate to call Morris Heller and tell him that his son wasn’t dead as everyone had feared but working as a short-order cook in a diner on the South Side of Chicago. Miles had been missing for over six months by then. Just after his disappearance, Morris and Willa had asked Bing over to their apartment to question him about Miles and what he thought could have happened to him. He will never forget how Willa broke down in tears, never forget the anguished look on Morris’s face. He had no suggestions to offer that afternoon, but he promised that if he ever heard from Miles or heard anything about him, he would contact them at once. He has been calling them for seven years now—fifty-two times, once after every letter. It grieves him that Morris and Willa have not jumped on a plane and flown off to any of the several spots where Miles has parked his bones—not to drag him back, necessarily, but just to see him and force him to explain himself. But Morris says there is nothing to be done. As long as the boy refuses to come home, they have no option but to wait it out and hope he will eventually change his mind. Bing is glad that Morris Heller and Willa Parks are not his parents. No doubt they are both good people, but they are just as stubborn and crazy as Miles.
Alice Bergstrom
No one is watching them. No one cares that the empty house is now occupied. They have settled in.
When she took the plunge and decided to join forces with Bing and Ellen last summer, she imagined they would be forced to live in the shadows, slinking in and out the back door whenever the coast was clear, hiding behind blackout shades to prevent any light from seeping through the windows, always afraid, always looking over their shoulders, always expecting the boom to fall on them at any moment. She was willing to accept those conditions because she was desperate and felt she had no choice. She had lost her apartment, and how can a person rent a new apartment when the person in question doesn’t have the money to pay for it? Things would be easier if her parents were in a position to help, but they are barely getting by themselves, living on their Social Security checks and clipping coupons out of the newspaper in a perpetual hunt for bargains, sales, gimmicks, any chance to shave a few pennies from their monthly costs. She was anticipating a grim go of it, a scared and mean little life in a broken-down shithole of a house, but she was wrong about that, wrong about many things, and even if Bing can be intolerable at times, pounding his fist on the table as he subjects them to another one of his dreary exhortations, slurping his soup and smacking his lips and letting crumbs fall into his beard, she misjudged his intelligence, failed to realize that he had worked out a thoroughly sensible plan. No skulking around, he said. Acting as if they didn’t belong there would only alert the neighborhood to the fact that they were trespassers. They had to operate in broad daylight, hold their heads high, and pretend they were the legitimate owners of the house, which they had bought from the city for next to nothing, yes, yes, at a shockingly low price, because they had spared them the expense of having to demolish the place. Bing was right. It was a plausible story, and people accepted it. After they moved in last August, there was a brief fluster of curiosity about their comings and goings, but that passed soon enough, and by now the short, sparsely populated block has adjusted to their presence. No one is watching them, and no one cares. The old Donohue place has finally been sold, the sun continues to rise and set, and life goes on as if nothing ever happened.
For the first few weeks, they did what they could to make the rooms habitable, diligently attacking all manner of blight and decay, treating each small task as if it were a momentous human endeavor, and bit by bit they turned their wretchedly inadequate pigsty into something that might, with some generosity, be classified as a hovel. It is far from comfortable there, countless inconveniences impinge on them every day, and now that the weather has turned cold, bitter air rushes in on them through a thousand cracks in the walls and embrasures, forcing them to bundle up in heavy sweaters and put on three pairs of socks in the morning. But she doesn’t complain. Not having to pay rent or utility bills for the past four months has saved her close to thirty-five hundred dollars, and for the first time in a long while she can breathe without feeling her chest tighten up on her, without feeling that her lungs are about to explode. Her work is moving forward, she can see the end looming on the far horizon, and she knows that she has the stamina to finish. The window in her room faces the cemetery, and as she writes her dissertation at the small desk positioned directly below that window, she often stares into the quiet of Green-Wood’s vast, rolling ground, where more than half a million bodies are buried, which is roughly the same number as the population of Milwaukee, the city where she was born, the city where most of her family still lives, and she finds it strange, strange and even haunting, that there are as many dead lying under that ground across from her window as the number of people living in the place where her life began.
She isn’t sorry that Millie is gone. Bing is in shock, of course, still staggered by his girlfriend’s abrupt exit from the house, but she feels the group will be better off without that fractious, redheaded storm of gripes and thoughtless digs, she of the unwashed dinner plates and the blaring radio, who nearly pulverized poor, fragile Ellen with her comments about her drawings and paintings. A man named Miles Heller will be joining them tomorrow or the day after. Bing says he is hands down the smartest, most interesting person he has ever known. They met when they were teenagers apparently, all the way back in the early years of high school, so their friendship has gone on long enough for Bing to have some perspective on what he is saying—which is rather extreme in her opinion, but Bing is often given to hyperbole, and only time will tell if Señor Heller measures up to this powerful endorsement.
It is a Saturday, a gray Saturday in early December, and she is the only person in the house. Bing left an hour ago to rehearse with his band, Ellen is spending the day with her sister and the little twins on the Upper West Side, and Jake is in Montclair, New Jersey, visiting his brother and sister-in-law, who have just had a child as well. Babies are popping out all over, in every part of the globe women are huffing and heaving and disgorging fresh battalions of newborns, doing their bit to prolong the human race, and at some point in the not-too-distant future she hopes to put her womb to the test and see if she can’t contribute as well. All that remains is choosing the right father. For close to two years, she felt that person was Jake Baum, but now she is beginning to have doubts about Jake, something seems to be crumbling between them, small daily erosions have slowly begun to mar their patch of ground, and if things continue to deteriorate, it won’t be long before entire shorelines are washed away, before whole villages are submerged under water. Six months ago, she never would have asked the question, but now she wonders if she has it in her to carry on with him. Jake was never an expansive person, but there was a gentleness in him that she admired, a charming, ironical approach to the world that comforted her and made her feel they were well matched, comrades under the skin. Now he is pulling away from her. He seems angry and dejected, his once lighthearted quips have taken on a new edge of cynicism, and he never seems to tire of denigrating his students and fellow teachers. LaGuardia Community College has turned into Pifflebum Tech, Asswipe U, and the Institute for Advanced Retardation. She doesn’t like to hear him talk that way. His students are mostly poor, working-class immigrants, attending school while holding down jobs, never an easy proposition as she damned well knows, and who is he to make fun of them for wanting an education? With his writing, it’s more or less the same story. A flood of caustic remarks every time another piece is rejected, an acid contempt for t
he literary world, an abiding grudge against every editor who has failed to recognize his gifts. She is convinced that he has talent, that his work has been progressing, but it is a small talent in her eyes, and her expectations for his future are equally small. Perhaps that is part of the problem. Perhaps he senses that she doesn’t believe in him enough, and in spite of all the pep talks she has given him, all the long conversations in which she has cited the early struggles of one important writer after another, he never seems to take her words to heart. She doesn’t blame him for feeling frustrated—but does she want to spend the rest of her life with a frustrated man, a man who is rapidly becoming a failure in his own eyes?
She mustn’t exaggerate, however. More often than not, he is kind to her, and he has never once hinted that he is weary of their affair, has never once suggested that they break it off. He is still young, after all, not yet thirty-one, which is extremely young for a fiction writer, and if his stories keep improving, chances are that something good will happen, a success of one kind or another, and with that turn his spirits would undoubtedly improve as well. No, she can weather his disappointments if she has to, that isn’t the problem, she can put up with anything as long as she feels he is solidly with her, but that is precisely what she doesn’t feel anymore, and even if he seems content to glide along with her out of old habits, the reflex of old affections, she is becoming ever more certain, no, certain is probably too strong a word for it, she is becoming ever more willing to entertain the idea that he has stopped loving her. It isn’t anything he ever says. It’s the way he looks at her now, the way he has been looking at her for the past few months, without any noticeable interest, his eyes blank, unfocused, as if looking at her were no different from looking at a spoon or a washcloth, a speck of dust. He rarely touches her anymore when they are alone, and even before she moved to the house in Sunset Park, their sex life was in precipitous decline. That is the crux of it, without question the problem begins and ends there, and she blames herself for what has happened, she can’t help believing that the fault rests entirely on her shoulders. She was always a big person, always bigger than the other girls at school—taller, broader, more robust, more athletic, never chubby, never overweight for her size, just big. When she met Jake two and a half years ago, she was five feet ten inches tall and weighed one hundred and fifty-seven pounds. She is still five-ten, but now she weighs one-seventy. Those thirteen pounds are the difference between a strong, imposing woman and a mountain of a woman. She has been dieting ever since she landed in Sunset Park, but no matter how severely she limits her intake of calories, she has not managed to lose more than three or four pounds, which she always seems to gain back within a day or two. Her body repulses her now, and she no longer has the courage to look at herself in the mirror. I’m fat, she says to Jake. Again and again she says it, I’m fat, I’m fat, unable to stop herself from repeating the words, and if she is repulsed by the sight of her own body, imagine what he must feel when she takes off her clothes and climbs into bed with him.
