The Book of Illusions

by Paul Auster

  She told me she did not love him.

  That’s right. Because she loves someone else. And who do you think that person is?

  It is impossible for me to answer that question. I know nothing about Miss Nora’s feelings, sir.

  You’re not a pansy, are you, Herman?

  Excuse me, sir?

  A pansy. A homo fruit-boy.

  Of course not.

  Then why don’t you do something?

  You talk in riddles, Mr. O’Fallon. I cannot grasp.

  I’m tired, son. I have nothing to live for now except one thing, and once that thing is taken care of, all I want is to croak in peace. You help me out, and I’m willing to make a bargain with you. Just say the word, amigo, and everything is yours. The store, the business, the whole works.

  Are you offering to sell me your business? I have no money. I am in no position to make such bargains.

  You drift into the store last summer begging for work, and now you’re running the show. You’re good at it, Loesser. Nora was right about you, and I’m not going to stand in her way. I’m finished standing in anyone’s way. Whatever she wants, that’s what she gets.

  Why do you keep referring to Miss Nora? I thought you were making a business proposition.

  I am. But not unless you oblige me with this one thing. It’s not as though I’m asking you for something you don’t want yourself. I see the way you two look at each other. All you have to do is make your move.

  What are you saying, Mr. O’Fallon?

  Figure it out for yourself.

  I cannot, sir. I truly cannot.

  Nora, stupid. You’re the one she’s in love with.

  But I am nothing, nothing at all. Nora could not love me.

  You might think that, and I might think that, but we’re both wrong. The girl’s heart is breaking, and I’ll be damned if I sit by and watch her suffer anymore. I’ve lost two kids already, and it’s not going to happen again.

  But I must not marry Nora. I am a Jew, and such things are not permitted.

  What kind of a Jew?

  A Jew. There is only one kind of Jew.

  Do you believe in God?

  What difference does that make? I am not like you. I come from another world.

  Answer the question. Do you believe in God?

  No, I do not. I believe that man is the measure of all things. Both good and bad.

  Then we belong to the same religion. We’re the same, Loesser. The only difference is that you understand money better than I do. That means you’ll be able to take care of her. That’s all I want. Take care of Nora, and then I can die a good death.

  You put me in a difficult position, sir.

  You don’t know what difficult is, hombre. You propose to her by the end of the month, or else I’m going to fire you. Do you understand? I’m going to fire you, and then I’m going to kick your ass clear out of the goddamn state.

  Hector spared him the trouble. Four hours after leaving the Bluebell Inn, he closed up the store for the last time, then returned to his room and began packing his things. At some point during the evening, he borrowed his landlady’s Underwood and typed out a one-page letter to Nora, signing it at the bottom with the initials H. L. He couldn’t take the risk of leaving her with a sample of his handwriting, but neither could he walk off without an explanation, without inventing some story to account for his sudden, mysterious departure.

  He told her that he was married. It was the biggest lie he could think of, but in the long run it was less cruel than an out-and-out rejection would have been. His wife had fallen ill in New York, and he had to rush back there to deal with the emergency. Nora would be stunned, of course, but once she understood that there had never been any hope for them, that Hector had been unavailable to her from the beginning, she would be able to recover from her disappointment without any lasting scars. O’Fallon would probably see through the deception, but even if the old man figured out the truth for himself, it was doubtful that he would share it with Nora. He was in the business of protecting his daughter’s feelings, and why should he object to the removal of this inconvenient nobody who had wormed his way into her affections? He would be glad to be rid of Hector, and little by little, as the dust finally settled, young Sweeney would start coming around again, and Nora would return to her senses. In his letter, Hector thanked her for the many kindnesses she had shown him. He would never forget her, he said. She was a shining spirit, a woman above all other women, and just knowing her for the short time he had been in Spokane had permanently changed his life. All true, and yet all false. Every sentence a lie, and yet every word written with conviction. He waited until three o’clock in the morning, and then he walked to her house and slipped the letter under the front door—just as her dead sister, Brigid, on a similar errand two and a half years ago, had once slipped a letter under the door of his house.

  He tried to kill himself in Montana the next day, Alma said, and three days after that he tried again in Chicago. The first time, he stuck the revolver in his mouth; the second time, he pressed the barrel against his left eye—but in neither instance was he able to go through with it. He had checked into a hotel on South Wabash at the fringes of Chinatown, and after the second failed attempt he walked out into the sweltering June night, looking for a place to get drunk. If he could pour enough liquor into his system, he figured it would give him the courage to jump into the river and drown himself before the night was over. That was the plan, in any case, but not long after he went out in search of the bottle, he stumbled onto something better than death, better than the simple damnation he’d been looking for. Her name was Sylvia Meers, and under her guidance Hector learned that he could go on killing himself without having to finish the job. She was the one who taught him how to drink his own blood, who instructed him in the pleasures of devouring his own heart.

  He ran into her in a Rush Street gin mill, standing against the bar as he was about to order his second drink. She wasn’t much to look at, but the price she quoted was so negligible that Hector found himself agreeing to her terms. He would be dead before the night was out anyway, and what could be more fitting than to spend his last hours on earth with a whore?

  She took him across the street to a room in the White House Hotel, and once they had finished their business on the bed, she asked him if he would care to have another go at it. Hector declined, explaining that he didn’t have the money for an additional round, but when she told him that there wouldn’t be any extra charge, he shrugged and said why not, then proceeded to mount her for a second time. The encore soon ended with another ejaculation, and Sylvia Meers smiled. She complimented Hector on his performance, and then she asked him if he thought he had the stuff to do it again. Not right away, Hector said, but if she gave him half an hour, it probably wouldn’t be any trouble. That wasn’t good enough, she said. If he could make it in twenty minutes, she would give him another treat, but he would have to get hard again within ten. She looked over at the clock on the bedside table. Ten minutes from now, she said, starting when the second hand swept past the twelve. That was the deal. Ten minutes to get going, and then another ten minutes to finish the job. If he went soft on her at any point along the way, however, he would have to reimburse her for the last time. That was the penalty. Three times for the price of one, or else he coughed up retail for the whole thing. What was it going to be? Did he want to walk away now, or did he think he could come through under pressure?

  If she hadn’t been smiling when she asked the question, Hector would have thought she was insane. Whores didn’t give away their services for free, and they didn’t issue challenges to the virility of their clients. That was for the whip specialists and the secret man-haters, the ones who trafficked in suffering and bizarre humiliations, but Meers struck him as a blowsy, lighthearted sort of girl, and she didn’t seem to be taunting him so much as trying to coax him into playing a game. No, not a game exactly, but an experiment, a scientific investigation into the co
pulative staying power of his twice-exhausted member. Could the dead be resurrected, she seemed to be asking him, and if so, how many times? Guesswork wasn’t allowed. In order to provide conclusive results, the study had to be conducted under the strictest laboratory conditions.

  Hector smiled back at her. Meers was sprawled out on the bed with a cigarette in her hand—confident, relaxed, perfectly at home in her nakedness. What was in it for her? Hector wanted to know. Money, she said. Lots of money. That was a good one, Hector said. There she was offering it for nothing, and in the same breath she was talking about getting rich. How dumb was that? Not dumb, she said, clever. There was money to be made, and if he could get it up again in the next nine minutes, he stood to make it with her.

  She put out her cigarette and started running her hands over her body, stroking her breasts and smoothing her palms along her stomach, trailing her fingertips along the insides of her thighs and angling them into contact with her pubic hair, her vulva, and her clitoris, spreading herself open for him as her mouth parted and she slid her tongue over her lips.

  Hector was not immune to these classic provocations. Slowly but steadily the dead man inched himself out from his grave, and when Meers saw what was happening, she made a naughty little humming sound in her throat, a single prolonged note that seemed to combine both approval and encouragement. Lazarus was breathing again. She rolled over onto her stomach, muttering a string of four-letter words and moaning in feigned arousal, and then she lifted her ass into the air and told him to go into her. Hector wasn’t quite ready, but as he pressed his penis against the scarlet folds of her labia, he stiffened enough to achieve penetration. He didn’t have much left by the end, but something came out of him besides sweat, enough to prove the point at any rate, and when he finally slid off her and sank onto the sheets, she turned and kissed him on the mouth. Seventeen minutes, she said. He had done it three times in less than an hour, and that was all she had been looking for. If he wanted in, she was willing to make him her partner.

  Hector had no idea what she was talking about. She explained it, and when he still didn’t understand what she was trying to tell him, she explained it again. There were men, she said, rich men in Chicago, rich men all over the Midwest who were willing to pay good money to watch people fuck. Oh, Hector said, you mean stag films, blue movies. No, Meers replied, none of that fake stuff. Live performances. Real fucking in front of real people.

  She had been doing it for a while, she said, but last month her partner had been arrested on a botched breaking-and-entering job. Poor Al. He drank too much and was having trouble getting it up anyway. Even if he hadn’t put himself out of commission, it probably would have been time to start looking for a replacement. In the past couple of weeks, three or four other candidates had survived the test, but none of those fellows could measure up to Hector. She liked his body, she said, she liked the feel of his cock, and she thought he had a terrifically handsome face.

  Oh no, Hector said. He would never show his face. If she wanted him to work with her, he would have to wear a mask.

  He wasn’t being squeamish. His films had been popular in Chicago, and he couldn’t take the risk of being recognized. Holding up his end of the bargain would be hard enough, but he didn’t see how he could go through with it if he had to perform in a state of fear, if every time he walked in front of an audience he would have to worry that someone was about to call out his name. That was his only condition, he said. Let him hide his face, and she could count him in.

  Meers was dubious. Why would he show his dick to the world and then not let anyone see who he was? If she were a man, she said, she’d be proud to have what he had. She’d want everyone to know that it belonged to her.

  But they wouldn’t be there to look at him, Hector said. She was the star, and the less the audience thought about who he was, the hotter their performances would be. Put a mask on him, and he would have no personality, no distinguishing characteristics, nothing to interfere with the fantasies of the men who were watching them. They didn’t want to see him fuck her, he said, they wanted to imagine they were fucking her themselves. Make him anonymous, and he would be turned into an engine of male desire, the representative of every man in the audience. The stiff-boned Sir Stud, banging away at the body of the insatiable Lady Cunt. Every man, and therefore any man. But just one woman, he said, ever and always just one woman, and her name was Sylvia Meers.

  Meers bought the argument. It was her first lesson in the tactics of show business, and even if she couldn’t follow everything that Hector said to her, she liked the way it sounded, she liked it that he wanted her to be the star. By the time he called her Lady Cunt, she was laughing out loud. Where had he learned to talk like that? she asked him. She’d never known a man who could make something sound so dirty and so beautiful at the same time.

  Squalor has its own rewards, Hector said, purposely talking over her head. If a man decides to crawl into his tomb, who better to keep him company than a warm-blooded woman? He dies more slowly that way, and as long as his flesh is joined to her flesh, he can live off the smell of his own corruption.

  Meers laughed again, unable to grasp the meaning of Hector’s words. It sounded like Bible talk to her, the stuff of preachers and roadside evangelists, but Hector’s little poem on death and degeneration was delivered so calmly, with such a kind and friendly smile on his face, that she assumed he was making a joke. Not for a moment did she understand that he had just confessed his innermost secrets to her, that she was looking at a man who four hours earlier had sat down on the bed in his hotel room and pressed a loaded gun against his brain for the second time that week. Hector was glad. When he saw the lack of comprehension in her eyes, he felt lucky to have fallen in with such a dim, lusterless tart. No matter how much time he spent with her, he knew that he would always be alone when they were together.

  Meers was in her early twenties, a South Dakota farm girl who had run away from home at sixteen, landed in Chicago a year later, and started working the streets the same month that Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic. There was nothing compelling about her, nothing to set her apart from a thousand other whores in a thousand other hotel rooms at that same moment. A peroxide blonde with a round face, dull gray eyes, and the remnants of acne scars dotting her cheeks, she carried herself with a certain sluttish bravura, but there was no magic in her, no charm to keep one’s interest alive for very long. Her neck was too short for the proportions of her body, her small breasts drooped a little, and there was already a slight buildup of flab around her hips and buttocks. As she and Hector worked out the terms of their agreement (a sixty-forty split, which Hector found more than generous), he suddenly turned away, realizing that he wouldn’t be able to go through with it if he went on looking at her. What’s the matter, Herm, she asked him, ain’t you feelin’ well? I’m fine, Hector said, his eyes still fixed on a patch of crumbling plaster at the opposite end of the room. I’ve never felt better in my life. I’m so happy, I could open the window and start screaming like a madman. That’s how good I feel, baby. I’m out of my mind, out of my mind with joy.

  Six days later, Hector and Sylvia put on their first public performance. Between that initial engagement in early June and their final show in mid-December, Alma calculated that they appeared together some forty-seven times. Most of the work took place in and around Chicago, but some bookings came in from as far away as Minneapolis, Detroit, and Cleveland. The venues ranged from nightclubs to hotel suites, from warehouses and brothels to office buildings and private homes. Their largest audience consisted of about a hundred spectators (at a fraternity party in Normal, Illinois), and the smallest had just one (repeated on ten separate occasions for the same man). The act varied according to the wishes of the clients. Sometimes Hector and Sylvia put on little plays, complete with costumes and dialogue, and at other times they did nothing more than walk in naked and screw in silence. The skits were based on the most conventional erotic daydreams, and they tend
ed to work best in front of small-to medium-sized crowds. The most popular one was the nurse and patient routine. People seemed to like watching Sylvia take off the starched white uniform, and they never failed to applaud when she began unwrapping the gauze bandages froto medium-sized crowds. The most popularm Hector’s body. There was also the Confession Box Scandal (which ended with the priest ravishing the nun) and, more elaborately, the tale of the two libertines who meet at a masked ball in pre-revolutionary France. In almost every instance, the spectators were exclusively male. The larger gatherings were usually quite raucous (bachelor parties, birthday celebrations), while the smaller groups rarely made any noise at all. Bankers and lawyers, businessmen and politicians, athletes, stockbrokers, and representatives of the idle rich: they all watched in spellbound fascination. More often than not, at least two or three of them would open their trousers and begin to masturbate. A married couple from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who engaged the duo’s services for a private performance in their home, went so far as to undress during the act and begin making love themselves. Meers had been right, Hector discovered. There was good money to be made from daring to give people what they wanted.

  He rented a small efficiency apartment on the North Side, and for every dollar he earned, he gave away seventy-five cents of it to charity. He slipped ten-and twenty-dollar bills into the collection box at Saint Anthony’s Church, sent in anonymous donations to Congregation B’nai Avraham, and dispensed untold quantities of loose change to the blind and crippled beggars he encountered on the sidewalks of his neighborhood. Forty-seven performances averaged out to just under two performances a week. That left five days free, and Hector spent most of them in seclusion, holed up in his apartment reading books. His world had split in two, Alma said, and his mind and body were no longer talking to each other. He was an exhibitionist and a hermit, a mad debauchee and a solitary monk, and if he managed to survive these contradictions in himself for as long as he did, it was only because he willed his mind to go numb. No more struggles to be good, no more pretending to believe in the virtues of self-denial. His body had taken control of him, and the less he thought about what his body was doing, the more successfully he was able to do it. Alma noted that he stopped writing in his journal during this period. The only entries were dry little jottings that recorded the times and places of his jobs with Sylvia—a page and a half in six months. She took it as a sign that he was afraid to look at himself, that he was acting like a man who had covered up all the mirrors in his house.