by Paul Auster
Sunday morning. A knock on the door. The bleary-eyed, unshaven Maurice, still recovering from his Saturday night binge. A telephone call for you, jeune homme.
W. walks downstairs to the reception desk and picks up the phone. Born’s voice says to him: I hear you’ve been saying bad things about me, Walker. I thought we had an understanding, and now you turn around and stab me in the back. Just like a Jew. Just like the stinking Jew you are, with your bogus Anglo-Saxon name and your filthy little mouth. There are laws against this kind of thing, you know. Slander, defamation of character, spreading lies about people. Why don’t you go home? Pack up and leave Paris. Quit the program and get out of here. If you stay around, you’ll regret it, Walker, I promise you. Your ass will be so cooked, you won’t be able to sit down again for the rest of your life.
Monday afternoon. He parks himself in front of the Lycée Fénelon, waiting for Cécile to emerge from the building. When she finally comes out, encircled by a throng of other students, she looks him in the eye and turns her head away. She begins walking toward the rue Saint-André des Arts. W. runs to catch up with her. He grabs her by the elbow, but she shrugs him off. He grabs her again, forcing her to stop. What’s wrong? he says. Why won’t you talk to me?
How could you? she answers, barking at him in a loud, strident voice. Saying all those monstrous things to my mother. You’re sick, Adam. You’re no good. Your tongue should be ripped out of your mouth.
He tries to calm her down, to make her listen to him.
I never want to see you again.
He makes one last effort to reason with her.
She begins to cry. Then she spits in his face and walks off. Monday night. The voluminous, gum-chewing whore on the rue Saint-Denis. It is his first experience with a prostitute. The room smells of insecticide, sweat, and traces of vomit.
Tuesday. He spends the entire day walking through Paris. He sees a priest playing cricket with a gang of schoolboys in the Luxembourg Gardens. He gives ten francs to a clochard on the rue Monge. The late-September sky darkens around him, turning from metallic blue to the deepest shade of indigo. He has run out of ideas.
Tuesday night. At 3 A.M., a loud noise just outside his room. He is fast asleep, exhausted from his marathon trek through the city. Someone is knocking. No, not someone, several someones. An army of fists is pounding on his door.
Two policemen in uniform, young French gendarmes with guns in their holsters and sticks in their hands. An older man in a business suit. Befuddled Maurice lurking at the door. They ask if his name is Adam Walker—Valk-air. They ask for his papers, meaning his American passport, and when he gives it to one of the gendarmes, it is not returned to him. Then the older man instructs the other gendarme to search the armoire. The bottom drawer is opened, and out comes a large brick wrapped in aluminum foil. The younger man gives it to the older man, who begins peeling back the foil. Hashish, he says. A good two and a half kilos, maybe three.
The exquisite irony of Born’s retaliation. The boy who never took drugs is charged with possession of drugs.
They take him away. In the backseat of the car, W. tells the older man that he is innocent, that someone planted the drugs in his room while he was out walking. The man tells him to shut up.
They lead him into a building, put him in a room, and lock the door. He has no idea where he is. All he knows is that he is sitting in a small, empty room somewhere in Paris and that handcuffs have been placed around his wrists. Has he been arrested? He isn’t sure. No one said a word to him, but he finds it odd that he hasn’t been photographed and fingerprinted, that he is sitting in this small, empty room and not in the lockup cell of some prison.
He sits there for close to seven hours. At ten-thirty, he is taken from the building and driven to the Palais de Justice. The handcuffs are removed from his wrists. He goes into an office and talks to a man who claims to be the juge d’instruction. It could be that the man is who he says he is, but W. suspects not. He is growing more and more convinced that he is in a farce directed by Rudolf Born, and all the men and women are merely players.
The examining magistrate, assuming he is the examining magistrate, tells W. that he is a lucky young man. Possession of such a large quantity of illicit drugs is a serious crime in France, punishable by X many years in prison. Fortunately for W., a man with considerable influence in government circles has interceded on his behalf, arguing for clemency in light of the accused’s heretofore unblemished record. The Ministry of Justice is therefore prepared to strike a bargain with W. They will drop the charges if he agrees to deportation. He will never be allowed to enter France again, but he will be a free man in his own country.
The juge d’instruction opens the top drawer of his desk and takes out W.’s passport (which he holds up in his right hand) and an airline ticket (which he holds up in his left). This is a one-time offer, he says. Take it or leave it.
W. will take it.
Good, the man says. A wise decision. The plane leaves this afternoon at three. That will give you just enough time to return to your hotel and pack. An officer will accompany you, of course, but once the plane takes off and leaves French soil, the affair will be closed. We earnestly hope that this is the last we’ll ever see of you. Have a pleasant journey, Mr. Walker.
And so ends W.’s brief sojourn in the land of Gaul—expelled, humiliated, banned for life.
He will never go back there, and he will never see any of them again.
Good-bye, Margot. Good-bye, Cécile. Good-bye, Hélène.
Forty years later, they are no more substantial than ghosts.
They are all ghosts now, and W. will soon be walking among them.
IV
Riding back on the plane from San Francisco to New York, I searched my memory for the exact moment when I had first spotted Walker in the fall of 1967. I hadn’t known that he had gone off to study in Paris for the year, but a few days into the semester, when we held our first editorial meeting of the Columbia Review (Adam and I were both on the board), I noticed that he wasn’t there. What happened to Walker? I asked someone, and that was when I learned he was in Europe, enrolled in the Junior Year Abroad Program. Not long after that (a week? ten days?), he suddenly appeared again. I was taking Edward Tayler’s seminar on sixteenth-and seventeenth-century poetry (Wyatt, Surrey, Raleigh, Greville, Herbert, Donne), the same Edward Tayler who had taught Milton back in the spring. Walker and I had been in that class together, and we were both of the opinion that Tayler was hands down the best professor in the English Department. Since the seminar was primarily for graduate students, I felt lucky to have been admitted as a third-year undergraduate, and I worked my head off for the sly, ironical, tight-lipped, ever-brilliant Tayler, wanting to earn the respect of this demanding, much-admired person. The seminar met twice a week for an hour and a half, and at the third or fourth session, with no explanation from anyone, there was Walker again, unexpectedly among us, the thirteenth member of a class officially limited to twelve.
We talked in the hall afterward, but Adam seemed distracted, unwilling to say much about his precipitous return to New York (I now know why). He mentioned that the program in Paris had been a disappointment to him, that the courses he was allowed to take had not been interesting enough (all grammar, no literature), and rather than waste a year in the sub-basement of the French educational bureaucracy, he had opted to come back. Quitting the program on such short notice had caused some upheavals, but Columbia had acted with unusual kindness, he felt, and even though classes had already begun when he bolted from Paris, a long talk with one of the deans had settled the matter, and he had been reinstated as a full-time student in good standing—which meant that he didn’t have to worry about the draft, at least not for another four semesters. The only problem was that he had no permanent place to live. He had shared his old apartment with his sister in July and August, but after he left for what he had thought would be a full year, she had found another roommate, and now he was out in the col
d. For the time being, he was crashing with different friends in the neighborhood while he hunted for a new apartment of his own. In fact, he said, glancing down at his watch, he had an appointment in twenty minutes to look at a small studio that had just opened up on 109th Street, and he had to be off. See you later, he said, and then he began running toward the stairs.
I knew that Adam had a sister, but this was the first I’d heard about her being in New York—a resident of Morningside Heights, no less, and doing graduate work in English at Columbia. Two weeks later, I caught my first sight of her on campus. She was walking past Rodin’s statue of the thinker on her way into Philosophy Hall, and because of the strong, almost eerie resemblance to her brother, I felt certain that the young woman flitting past me was Walker’s sister. I have already mentioned how beautiful she was, but saying that doesn’t do justice to the overwhelming impact she had on me. Gwyn was ablaze with beauty, an incandescent being, a storm in the heart of every man who laid eyes on her, and seeing her for the first time ranks as one of the most astonishing moments of my life. I wanted her—from the first second I wanted her—and, with the passionate obstinacy of a daydreaming fool, I went after her.
Nothing ever happened. I got to know her a little bit, we met for coffee a couple of times, I asked her out to the movies (she turned me down), I invited her to a concert (she turned me down), and then, accidentally, we both wound up at a large Chinese dinner one night and discussed the poems of Emily Dickinson for half an hour. A short time after that, I persuaded her to go for a walk with me in Riverside Park, tried to kiss her, and was pushed away. Don’t, Jim, she said. I’m involved with someone else. I can’t do this.
That was the end of it. Several swings of the bat, failure to make contact on any pitch, and the game was over. The world fell apart, the world put itself together again, and I muddled on. To my great good fortune, I have been with the same woman for close to thirty years now. I can’t imagine my life without her, and yet every time Gwyn enters my thoughts, I confess that I still feel a little pang. She was the impossible one, the unattainable one, the one who was never there—a specter from the Land of If.
An invisible America lay silent in the darkness beneath me. As I sat on the jet from San Francisco to New York, revisiting the bad old days of 1967, I realized that I would have to write her a condolence letter first thing the next morning.
It turned out that Gwyn had already been in touch. When I walked through the door of my house in Brooklyn, my wife gave me a warm, fervent hug (I had called from San Francisco, she knew Adam was dead), and then she told me that earlier in the day a message had been left for me on the answering machine by someone named Gwyn Tedesco.
Is that the Gwyn I think it is? she asked.
I called her at ten o’clock the next morning. I had wanted to write a letter, to express my feelings on paper, to give her something more than the empty platitudes we sputter forth at such times, but her message had sounded urgent, there was an important matter she needed to discuss with me, and so I called her back and never wrote the letter.
Her voice was the same, remarkably the same as the one that had mesmerized me forty years ago. A lilting gravity, crystal enunciation, the barest residue of the mid-Atlantic accent of her childhood. The voice was the same, but Gwyn herself was no longer the same, and as the conversation continued, I began projecting various pictures of her in my head, wondering how well or badly her beautiful face had fared over the course of time. She was sixty-one years old now, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had no desire to see her again. It could only lead to disappointment, and I didn’t want my hazy memories of the past to be blown apart by the hard facts of the present.
We exchanged the customary platitudes, rambling on for several minutes about Adam and his death, about how difficult it was for her to accept what had happened, about the rough blows life deals us. Then we caught up on the past for a little while, talking about our marriages, our children, and our work—a comfortable back-and-forth, very friendly on both sides, so much so that I even found the nerve to ask her if she remembered the day in Riverside Park when I tried to kiss her. Of course she remembered, she said, laughing for the first time, but how was she to know that scrawny Jim the college boy would grow up to become James Freeman? I never grew up, I said. And I’m still just Jim. Not so scrawny anymore, but still just Jim.
Yes, it was all quite amiable, and even though we had vanished from each other’s lives decades earlier, Gwyn talked as if little or no time had elapsed, as if those decades amounted to nothing more than a month or two. The familiarity of her tone lulled me into a kind of drowsy openness, and because my defenses were down, when she finally got to the business at hand, that is, when she finally explained why she had called me, I made a terrible blunder. I told her the truth when I should have lied.
Adam sent me an e-mail, she said, a long e-mail written a few days before he . . . just a few days before the end. It was a beautiful letter, a farewell letter I now realize, and in one of the paragraphs toward the bottom he mentioned that he was writing something, a book of some kind, and if I wanted to read it, I should contact you. But only after he was dead. He was very insistent about that. Only after he was dead. He also warned me that I might find the manuscript extremely upsetting. He apologized for that in advance, asking me to forgive him if the book hurt me in any way, and then he said no, I shouldn’t bother to read it, I should forget the whole thing. It was terribly confusing. In the very next sentence, he changed his mind again and told me to go ahead if I wanted to, that I had a right to see it, and if I did want to see it, I should contact you, since you had the only copy. I didn’t understand that part. If he wrote the book on a computer, wouldn’t he have saved it on his hard drive?
He told Rebecca to delete it, I said. It’s gone from the computer now, and the only copy is the one he printed out and sent to me.
So the book really exists.
Sort of. He meant to write it in three chapters. The first two are in fairly good shape, but he didn’t manage to finish the third. Just some notes for it, a hastily written outline.
Did he want you to help him get it published?
He never talked about publishing, not directly in any case. All he wanted was for me to read the manuscript, and then it would be up to me to decide what to do with it.
Have you decided?
No. To tell you the truth, I haven’t even thought about it. Until you mentioned publishing just now, the idea had never crossed my mind.
I think I should have a look at it, don’t you?
I’m not sure. It’s your call, Gwyn. If you want to see it, I’ll make a copy and FedEx it to you today.
Will I be upset?
Probably.
Probably?
Not by all of it, but one or two things might upset you, yes.
One or two things. Oh dear.
Don’t worry. As of this moment, I’m putting the decision in your hands. Not a word of Adam’s book will ever be published without your approval.
Send it, Jim. Send it today. I’m a big girl now, and I know how to swallow my medicine.
How simple it would have been to cover my tracks and deny the existence of the book, or tell her that I had lost it somewhere, or claim that Adam had promised to send it to me but never did. The subject had caught me by surprise, and I couldn’t think fast enough to start spinning out a fake story. Even worse, I had told Gwyn there were three chapters. Only the second one had the potential to wound her (along with a couple of remarks in the third, which I easily could have crossed out), and if I had said that Adam had written only two chapters, Spring and Fall, she would have been spared from having to go back to the apartment on West 107th Street and relive the events of that summer. But she was expecting three chapters now, and if I sent her only two, she would call right back and ask for the missing pages. So I photocopied everything I had—Spring, Summer, and the notes for Fall—and shipped them off to her address in Boston that afternoon. It w
as a rotten thing to do to her, but by then I no longer had a choice. She wanted to read her brother’s book, and the only copy in the world belonged to me.
She called two days later. I don’t know what I was expecting from her, but I had taken it for granted somehow that intense emotions would be involved—angry tears, threats, shame that her secret had been exposed—but Gwyn was unnaturally subdued, more numb than insulted, I think, as if the book had clobbered her into a state of puzzled disbelief.
I don’t understand, she said. Most of it is so accurate, so exactly right, and then there are all those things he made up. It doesn’t make any sense.
What things? I asked, knowing full well what she was referring to.
I loved my brother, Jim. When I was young, he was closer to me than anyone else. But I never slept with him. There was no grand experiment when we were kids. There was no incestuous affair in the summer of 1967. Yes, we lived together in that apartment for two months, but we had separate bedrooms, and there was never any sex. What Adam wrote was pure make-believe.
It’s probably not my place to ask, but why would he do such a thing? Especially if the other parts of the story are true.
I don’t know that they’re true. At least I can’t verify that they’re true. But all those other things tally with what Adam told me back then, forty years ago. I never met Born or Margot or Cécile or Hélène. I wasn’t with Adam in New York that spring. I wasn’t with him in Paris that fall. But he did talk to me about those people, and everything he said about them in 1967 matches up with what he says about them in the book.
