Sunset Park

by Paul Auster

  There were never any of the conflicts he witnessed so often with his friends and their fathers, the boys with the slapping fathers, the shouting fathers, the aggressive fathers who pushed their frightened six-year-old sons into swimming pools, the contemptuous fathers who sneered at their adolescent sons for liking the wrong music, wearing the wrong clothes, looking at them in the wrong way, the war-veteran fathers who punched out their twenty-year-old sons for resisting the draft, the weak fathers who were afraid of their grown-up sons, the shut-down fathers who couldn’t remember the names of their sons’ children. From beginning to end, there had been none of those antagonisms or dramas between them, no more than some sharp differences of opinion, small punishments doled out mechanically for small infractions of the rules, a harsh word or two when he was unkind to his sisters or forgot his mother’s birthday, but nothing of any significance, no slaps or shouts or angry insults, and unlike most of his friends, he never felt embarrassed by his father or turned against him. At the same time, it would be wrong to presume that they were especially close. His father wasn’t one of those warmhearted buddy fathers who thought his son should be his best pal, he was simply a man who felt responsible for his wife and children, a quiet, even-tempered man with a talent for making money, a skill his son failed to appreciate until the last years of his father’s life, when his father became the principal backer and founding partner of Heller Books, but even if they weren’t close in the way some fathers and sons are, even if the one thing they ever talked about with any passion together was sports, he knew that his father respected him, and to have that unflagging respect from beginning to end was more important than any open declaration of love.

  When he was very young, five years old, six years old, he felt disappointed that his father had not fought in the war, unlike the fathers of most of his friends, and that while they had been off in far-flung parts of the world killing Japs and Nazis and turning themselves into heroes, his father had been in New York, immersed in the petty details of his real estate business, buying buildings, managing buildings, endlessly repairing buildings, and it puzzled him that his father, who seemed so strong and fit, had been rejected by the army when he tried to join up. But he was still too young at that point to understand how badly his father’s eye was injured, to have been told that his father had been legally blind in his left eye since the age of seventeen, and because his father had so thoroughly mastered the art of living with and compensating for his handicap, he failed to understand that his powerhouse of a father was impaired. Later on, when he was eight or nine and his mother finally told him the story of the injury (his father never talked about it), he realized that his father’s wound was no different from a war wound, that a part of his life had been shot down on that Bronx ball field in 1932 in the same way a soldier’s arm can be shot off on a battlefield in Europe. He was the top pitcher for his high school baseball team, a hard-throwing left-hander who was already beginning to attract attention from major league scouts, and when he took the mound for Monroe that day in early June, he had an undefeated record and what appeared to be an unhittable arm. On the first pitch of the game, just as the fielders were settling into their positions behind him, he threw a low fastball to the Clinton shortstop, Tommy DeLucca, and the line drive that came flying back at him was struck so hard, with such ferocious power and speed, that he had no time to lift his glove and protect his face. It was the same injury that destroyed Herb Score’s career in 1957, the same bone-breaking shot that changes the course of a life. And if that ball hadn’t slammed his father in the eye, who is to say he wouldn’t have been killed in the war—before his marriage, before the birth of his children? Now Herb Score is dead, too, Morris thinks, dead as of six or seven weeks ago, Herb Score, with the prophetic middle name of Jude, and he remembers how badly shaken his father was when he read about Score’s injury in the morning paper, and how, for years after, right up to the end of his life, he would periodically refer to Score, saying that injury was one of the saddest things that ever happened in the history of the game. Never a word about himself, never the slightest hint of any personal connection. Only Score, poor Herb Score.

  Without his father’s help, the publishing house never would have been born. He knew he didn’t have the stuff to become a writer, not when he had the example of young Renzo to compare himself to, his dormitory roommate for four years at Amherst, the immense, grinding struggle of it, the long solitary hours, the everlasting uncertainty and compulsive need, and so he opted for the next best thing, teaching literature instead of making it, but after one year of graduate school at Columbia, he withdrew from the Ph.D. program, understanding that he wasn’t cut out for an academic life either. He wandered into publishing instead, spent four years rising through the ranks of two different companies, at last finding a place for himself, a mission, a calling, whatever word best applies to a sense of commitment and purpose, but there were too many frustrations and compromises at the top levels of commercial publishing, and when, in the space of two short months, his senior editor quashed his recommendation that they publish Renzo’s first novel (the one following the burned manuscript) and similarly rejected his proposal to publish Marty’s first novel, he went to his father and told him he wanted to quit the august company he was working for and start a little house of his own. His father knew nothing about books or publishing, but he must have seen something in his son’s eyes that persuaded him to throw a losable fraction of his money into a venture that was all but certain to fail. Or perhaps he felt this certain failure would teach the boy a lesson, help him work the bug out of his system, and before long he would return to the security of a normal job. But they didn’t fail, or at least the losses were not egregious enough to make them want to stop, and after that inaugural list of just four books, his father opened his pockets again, staking him to a new investment worth ten times the amount of his initial outlay, and suddenly Heller Books was off the ground, a small but viable entity, a real publishing house with an office on lower West Broadway (dirt-cheap rents back then in a Tribeca that was not yet Tribeca), a staff of four, a distributor, well-designed catalogues, and a growing stable of authors. His father never interfered. He called himself the silent partner, and for the last four years of his life he used those words to announce himself whenever they talked on the phone. No more This is your father or This is your old man but, without fail, one hundred percent of the time, Hello there, Morris, this is your silent partner. How not to miss him? How not to feel that every book he has published in the past thirty-five years is a product of his father’s invisible hand?

  It is nine-thirty. He meant to call Willa to say happy new year, but it is two-thirty in England now, and no doubt she has been asleep for hours. He returns to the kitchen to pour himself another scotch, his third since coming back to the apartment, and it is only now, for the first time all evening, that he remembers to check the answering machine, suddenly thinking that Willa might have called while he was at Marty and Nina’s or on his way home from the Upper West Side. There are twelve new messages. One by one, he listens to them all—but no word from Willa.

  He is being punished. That is why she accepted the job at Exeter for the year, and that is why she never calls—because she is punishing him for the meaningless indiscretion he committed eighteen months ago, a stupid act of sexual weakness that he regretted even as he was crawling into bed with his partner in crime. Under normal circumstances (but when is anything ever normal?) Willa never would have found out, but not long after he did what he did, she went to her gynecologist for her semi-annual checkup and was told she had something called chlamydia, a mild but unpleasant condition that can be contracted only through sexual intercourse. The doctor asked her if she had slept with anyone besides her husband lately, and because the answer was no, the culprit could have been none other than said husband, and when Willa confronted him with the news that evening, he had no choice but to confess. He didn’t provide any names or details, but he admitted
that when she was in Chicago delivering her paper on George Eliot, he had gone to bed with someone. No, he wasn’t having an affair, it had happened only that one time, and he had no intention of ever doing it again. He was sorry, he said, deeply and truly sorry, he had been drinking too much, it was a terrible mistake, but even though she believed him, how could he blame her for feeling angry, not just because he had been unfaithful to her for the first time in their marriage, no, that was bad enough, but because he had infected her as well. A venereal disease! she shouted. It’s disgusting! You stick your dumb-ass penis into another woman’s vagina, and you wind up infecting me! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Morris? Yes, he said, he was horribly ashamed, more ashamed than he had ever been in his life.

  It torments him to think about that evening now, the idiocy of it all, the frantic little coupling that led to such enduring havoc. A dinner invitation from Nancy Greenwald, a literary agent in her early forties, someone he had been doing business with for six or seven years, divorced, not unattractive, but until that night he had never given her much thought. A dinner for six at Nancy’s apartment in Chelsea, and the only reason he accepted was because Willa was out of town, a fairly tedious dinner as it turned out, and when the four other guests gathered up their things and left, he agreed to stay on for a last drink before walking home to the Village. That was when it happened, about twenty minutes after the others disappeared, a quick crazy fuck of no earthly importance to anyone. After Willa’s announcement about chlamydia, he wondered how many other dumb-ass penises had found comfort in Nancy’s vagina, although the truth was that there hadn’t been much comfort for him, and even as they went at it together, he had felt too wretched about betraying Willa to lose himself in the supposed pleasure of the moment.

  After his confession, after the round of antibiotics that purged the venereal microbes from Willa’s system, he thought that would be the end of it. He knew she believed him when he told her it had happened only once, but this tiny lapse of attention, this breach of solidarity after close to twenty-four years of marriage, had shaken Willa’s confidence in him. She doesn’t trust him anymore. She believes he is on the prowl, searching for younger and more beautiful women, and even if he isn’t up to anything at this particular moment, she has convinced herself that sooner or later it is bound to happen again. He has done everything he can to reassure her, but his arguments seem to have no effect. He is too old for adventures now, he says, he wants to live out the rest of his days with her and die in her arms. And she says: A sixty-two-year-old man is still young, a sixty-year-old woman is old. He says: After all they’ve been through together, all the nightmares and sorrows, all the poundings they’ve taken, all the miseries they’ve survived, how can a little thing like this make any difference? And she answers: Maybe it’s been too much for you, Morris. Maybe you want a fresh start with someone else.

  The trip to England didn’t help. They had been apart for three and a half months when he finally went over there for the Christmas break, and he understood that she was using this enforced separation as a test, to see whether it would be possible for her to live without him over the long haul. So far, the experiment seems to be working rather well. Her anger toward him has changed into a kind of willed detachment, an aloofness that made him feel awkward around her for much of the visit, never quite sure what he should say or how he should act. The first night, she was reluctant to have sex with him, but then, just as he was drifting off, she reached out for him in bed and started kissing him in the old way, giving herself up to the old intimacies as if there were no trouble between them. That was the thing that so confounded him—their silent companionship in bed at night followed by moody, disjointed days, tenderness and irritability alternating in wholly unpredictable patterns, a feeling that she was both pushing him away from her and trying to hold on to him at the same time. There was only one vicious outburst, one full-blown argument. It occurred on the third or fourth day, when they were still in her Exeter flat, taking out their bags to prepare for their trip to London, and the quarrel began as many others had in the past few years, with Willa attacking him for not wanting to have children of their own, for being content with her son and his son as their only family, but no family of their own, just the two of them and their own boy or girl, without the specters of Karl and Mary-Lee hovering in the background, and now that Bobby was dead and Miles had gone missing, just look at them, she said, they were nothing, they had nothing, and it was his fault for talking her out of another child all those years ago, and she was a goddamned fool for listening to him. In principle, he didn’t disagree with her, had never disagreed with her, but how could they have known what would happen, and by the time Miles took off, they were too old to think about having babies. He didn’t resent her for bringing up the subject again, it was altogether natural for her to feel this grief, this loss, the history of the past twelve years could have produced no other outcome, but then she said something that shocked him, that hurt him so badly he still hasn’t recovered from it. But Miles is back in New York, he said. He’ll be contacting them any day now, any week, and before long the whole miserable chapter will come to an end. Instead of answering him, Willa picked up her suitcase and threw it angrily on the floor—a furious gesture, more violent than any response he had ever seen from her. It’s too late, she shouted. Miles is sick. Miles is no good. Miles has wrecked them, and from this day forward she cuts him out of her heart. She doesn’t want to see him. Even if he calls, she doesn’t want to see him. Never again. It’s finished, she said, it’s finished, and every night she will get down on her knees and pray he doesn’t call.

  It was somewhat better in London. The hotel was neutral ground, a no-man’s-land devoid of any associations with the past, and there were some good days of walking through museums and sitting in pubs, seeing old friends for dinner, browsing in bookstores, not to mention the sublime indulgence of doing nothing at all, which seemed to have a restorative effect on Willa. One afternoon, she read aloud to him from the most recent chapter of the book she is writing on the late novels of Dickens. The next morning, over breakfast, she asked him about his search for a new investor, and he told her about his meeting with the German at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, his conversation with the Israeli in New York last month, the steps he has taken to find the needed cash. Several good days, or at least not bad days, and then came the e-mail from Marty and the news of Suki’s death. Willa didn’t want him to go back to New York, she argued fiercely and persuasively why she thought the funeral would be too much for him, but when he asked her to make the trip with him, her face tensed up, she seemed thrown by the suggestion, which was an entirely reasonable suggestion to his mind, and then she said no, she couldn’t. He asked her why. Because she couldn’t, she said, repeating her answer as she searched for the right words, clearly at war with herself, unprepared to make any crucial decisions at that moment, because she wasn’t ready to go back, she said, because she needed more time. Again, she asked him to stay, to remain in London until January third as originally planned, and he understood that she was testing him, forcing him to make a choice between her and his friends, and if he didn’t choose her, she would feel betrayed. But he had to go back, he said, it was out of the question not to go back.

  One week later, as he sits in his New York apartment on New Year’s Eve, sipping scotch in the darkened living room and thinking about his wife, he tells himself that a marriage can’t stand or fall on a simple matter of leaving London a few days early to attend a funeral. And if it does stand or fall on that matter, perhaps it was destined to fall in the first place.

  He is in danger of losing his wife. He is in danger of losing his business. As long as there is breath in him, he says to himself, remembering that homely, worn-out phrase, which he has always been fond of, as long as there is breath in him he will not allow either one of those things to happen.

  Where is he now? Straddling the border between inevitable extinction and the possibility of
continued life. Overall, the situation is bleak, but there are some encouraging signs that have given him cause for hope—or, if not quite hope, a sense that it is still too early to succumb to resignation and despair. How much he reminds himself of his mother whenever he starts thinking like this, how obstinately she goes on living inside him. Let the house come crashing down around him, let his marriage burst into flames, and Connie Heller’s son will find a way to rebuild the house and put out the fire. Lucky Lohrke walking calmly through a barrage of bullets. Or else the ghost dance of the Oglala Sioux—and the conviction that the white man’s bullets would evaporate into thin air before they ever touched them.