Childish Loves

by Benjamin Markovits

So I went in the bathroom and opened an unexplained door, to a cupboard containing a vacuum cleaner and an ironing board. I looked at the sliding mirror over the sink. I stood at the wide living-room window and stared at the brown building opposite. Then pushed it open, with some difficulty, and leaned my head into the cold air: you could just catch a glimpse of the green of Gorman Park. In the bedroom I pulled up the blinds to the air-shaft and looked at that. For some reason the phrase came into my head again: ‘That I should live again impassioned days.’ Somewhere between these walls he had written that line or transcribed it from of one of Byron’s letters. And it occurred to me that, whatever else he felt, the loneliness he felt must have been passionate enough.

  *

  Afterwards, I caught the red line to Penn Station and then the shuttle to JFK. It always amazes me, when I make these trips on my own, how close at hand is the solitude in which I spent the first half of my twenties. As soon as I go away, it comes back; there it is, waiting. I stare at my reflection in the window of the airport bus. I mumble my destination to the woman at the check-in counter, because I haven’t said a word to anyone in three hours. I buy a root beer and a Sports Illustrated and turn the pages in peace and quiet till my row number is called at the gate.

  On the flight to Austin, I took out some of the papers Gerschon had copied for me and read them over. To prepare for my meeting at the Ransom Center. One of the reasons I thought Peter’s third novel was incomplete was the gap in time between the second and final sections. There is plenty of other material he might have used, which would have borne out his general theme – including the homosexual experiments of Byron’s first Continental tour, and after it, his affairs with Augusta and Caroline Lamb. (His general theme I took to be the uncomfortable relationship between innocence and sexual attraction.) But for some reason he chose to write the ending first, and he died or killed himself before he could finish the rest. Gerschon’s papers showed that Peter once intended to flesh out Byron’s middle years.

  For example, Peter had written out longhand a few paragraphs from what might have turned into a chapter of its own, relating to Byron’s exile in Italy. This is what he wrote, in Byron’s voice:

  My school friendships were with me passions (for I was always violent), but I do not know that there is one which has endured (to be sure, some have been cut short by death) till now. That with Lord Clare began one of the earliest and lasted longest, being only interrupted by distance, that I know of. I never hear the word Clare without a beating of the heart, even now.

  About a week or two ago I met him on the road between Imola and Bologna, after not having met him for seven or eight years. He was abroad in 1814 and came home just as I set out in 1816. This meeting annihilated for a moment all the years between the present time and the days of Harrow. It was a new and inexplicable feeling like rising from the grave to me. Clare, too, was much agitated, more in appearance than even myself, for I could feel his heart beat to the fingers’ ends, unless indeed it was the pulse of my own which made me think so. He told me that I should find a note from him left at Bologna. I did. We were obliged to part for our different journeys, he for Rome, I for Pisa, but with the promise to meet again in spring. We were but five minutes together, and in the public road, but I hardly recollect an hour of my existence which could be weighed against them.

  There were details in this I wanted to check against the history, but I had no books with me, apart from Marchand’s edition of the Selected Letters – which was in my backpack in the overhead locker. The man sitting next to me in the aisle had fallen asleep with his elbow on my armrest. After a half-hour I began to feel trapped and pretended to need the bathroom. He made a noise like an animal and shifted in his seat. So I went to the bathroom. I wanted a minute to myself anyway and crouched in the narrow cubicle and washed my face, wondering if Peter had seen Lee Feldman again before he died. You need to find Lee Feldman, I thought. Instead of wasting your time on whatever it is you’re wasting your time on.

  *

  What I remember most vividly from this short trip is the feeling building up inside me on the four-hour flight that I had something important to talk about with my parents, maybe even something to confess to, and my total inability to talk about it when I arrived. My father met me at the airport in the old Volvo and said, Nice to see you, how’re you doing. But what we talked about on the drive home was the economy. He’s an economist as well as a law professor and was still caught up in post-election news. He had strong fiscal feelings. My plane was a little delayed and we didn’t get home till after ten o’clock. There was food on the table waiting for me, but my mother and father and I took our plates into the TV room and ate in front of the Jim Lehrer NewsHour. Afterwards my father turned on a basketball game and fell asleep on the couch, and my mother ‘showed me to my room’ (she wanted to know if I needed a duvet; the weather in Austin, even at night, was somewhere in the 60s). She sat at the foot of my bed, as she used to; and instead of wishing me goodnight, she said to me, as she always used to say, Bessere dich. For nostalgic reasons. It means, better yourself.

  My father had two hours of lectures in the morning, but I saw him for lunch at Ruby’s, the barbecue joint behind our house. The smoker was near enough to our backyard we could smell it from the basketball court on windy afternoons. The restaurant itself isn’t much to look at. A typical Texas shack, the kind that looks like it was built in two days to last a few months and which lasts thirty years. Dirty pine walls with old posters nailed into them. A courtyard fenced in by corrugated metal. The waitress called out our names, and we picked up our trays – there were squares of greaseproof paper on them, covered in meat and onion shavings, with bowls of beans, sauce and potato salad on the side. We carried them to the courtyard. My father, a New Yorker by birth, wore the loose-laced leather shoes he always teaches in, chinos and a dress-jacket. I noticed for the first time the small nub of plastic in his ear, a hearing aid, which upset me more than it should have. Not that it bothered him much, except that he couldn’t figure out if it was turned on.

  Mid-February overcast mild Austin weather, the temperature of left-out milk. As we sat down to eat I told him about the meeting I had that afternoon with a woman from the Ransom Center. She wanted to buy Peter Sullivan’s papers, I said.

  What do you get for that kind of thing, he wanted to know.

  ‘I have no idea. A few thousand dollars. More than he deserves.’

  ‘What have you done with your own papers?’ he said.

  ‘Which ones do you mean?’

  ‘For example, what you used to keep in that chest I gave you.’

  ‘They’re still there. Still in my room.’

  ‘Maybe you should bring along a sample.’

  ‘Dad, I don’t think she’s interested in my high-school poems. I didn’t come here to talk about me. That’s not why they flew me in.’

  He looked up from his food. ‘It can’t hurt to ask. What did they fly you in for.’

  ‘To talk about Peter.’

  On the walk home, through straight narrow back streets, the houses smaller than the houses on our block, with narrower plots, many of them overgrown, the bamboo grasses growing through the chain-link fencing that separates one garden from the next, he said, ‘One of these is for sale, I can’t remember which. I thought, maybe I’ll buy it, for you kids. There’s always more kids coming along.’ And then, when I didn’t answer: ‘What’s happening with that book about me.’ This is often how he referred to Playing Days, my memoir about the year I spent in Germany after college. Fulfilling his old childhood dream of playing pro basketball. He flew out to visit me in Landshut, the small town outside Munich where I lived, and this visit takes up several chapters. Playing Days had come out in England a few summers ago, but my American publishers were still on the fence about it.

  ‘They want to see what happens with this thing I’m working on first.’

  ‘What thing is that?’

  ‘The book about Peter
.’

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to get back to the office, but not yet. Let’s take another turn around the block.’

  A few hundred yards from our house, there’s a small park with a creek running through it. Houses overlook it, some grand and new, some old and poky. A turn around the block usually means a walk from one end of the park to the other.

  ‘You remember my old friend Tom Vance,’ my father said. An active seventy-something southerner, he had once joined us for the all-you-can-eat at my father’s favorite Thai place. One of the friends my parents had picked up after the kids left home. ‘He used to be a lawyer in Houston then came in from the cold as he says. Now he teaches a semester a year at the law school – mostly corporate law. He bought a big house out by Mount Bonnell. One of those concrete boxes with a view. But this is not my point. He’s part of the poetry reading group, along with John Robertson, Philip Bobbitt, Steven Wiseman and the rest of the university bigwigs. They take it in turns to host. Bill Bradley sometimes comes along. He’s given a few lectures at the law school. When I mentioned the trouble you were having to Tom Vance, he offered to show the book to Bill.’

  ‘What can Bill Bradley do?’

  My father gave me a look. ‘What do you think a man like Bill Bradley can do? Bill Bradley can do whatever he wants to do. All these Washington types have connections in publishing. It doesn’t hurt he won a championship with the Knicks.’

  ‘I once got stopped in the street in New York. A homeless guy told me I looked like him.’

  ‘I met him once myself. Sometimes Tom invites me to these shindigs and your mother makes me go. A very pleasant man; large hands. I told him, do you want to know an interesting fact. My son broke all your scoring records at Oxford.’

  ‘That’s just not true. What did he say?’

  ‘I didn’t know I had any scoring records at Oxford. As I said, a very pleasant man. But I don’t know him well enough to ask a favor. Tom says he does.’

  ‘I don’t need favors,’ I said. At the age of thirty-five, married, with a daughter and three published books to my name, I thought I had outgrown this sort of conversation with my father. This was the conversation I spent my twenties having. ‘This isn’t what I feel like talking about,’ I said.

  ‘What do you feel like talking about?’

  But we had come to the end of the block, and I could easily put him off a little longer, as we walked together up the bend in the road to our front yard.

  *

  I had promised Kelly to knock on her parents’ door, and after lunch, with the house to myself and nothing to do until three o’clock, I wondered if I should get it over with. Instead I wandered from room to room with the lights off, looking out windows, sitting in all the chairs. Remembering what it was like-to be at home. Kelly had said she would tell her parents to come to my talk. I could meet them there, though I didn’t much like the thought of introducing them to mine and explaining the connection. This is what I told myself as I put on jacket and tie and walked out: Get it over with; but I didn’t get farther than her front yard. I looked at her house, the house Kelly grew up in. Pretty Georgian façade, red bricks and white pillars. Green lawn sloping into the street, with the heads of sprinklers poking out of the grass. The kind of house, I vaguely remembered thinking as a kid, in which a real American family would live. But time on my hands always makes me late, and in the end I had to hurry, sweating into my undershirt, to make my appointment at the Ransom Center.

  Ms Niemetz met me at the museum lobby then took me to the student canteen. She was hardly more than a student herself and wore her pale hair short; her glasses had bright red rims. This was her first year out – she had just finished a PhD on Middleton Murry. Originally she came from Jamaica Plain, but she liked Austin and had recently bought her first pair of cowboy boots. Still, the Boston connection is part of what attracted her to Sullivan; her brother had friends who went to Beaumont Hill. The novels themselves she could take or leave. Historical fiction left her cold; her interests were more political. But she had a passion for obscurity – ‘for its own sake,’ she said, ‘like art.’ Over the plastic cafeteria table, between salt-cellars and napkin-dispensers, I showed her my copies of Peter’s letters. These she loved, especially his letters to famous writers. Already whatever was private about them had disappeared. They were objects, and she handled them (even the Xeroxes) as if they were frail as lace.

  She told me it was a good time to be selling manuscripts. Their budgets were set at the beginning of the academic year, and whatever they didn’t spend, they lost. Around February the sense of urgency began to set in. Even without consulting her boss, she felt comfortable offering two thousand dollars – just for the manuscripts. She was interested in the books, too, but buying books wasn’t her department. Besides with books there were other market considerations; the process was more complex. I told her that a friend of mine at the Houghton in Harvard was also interested in the manuscripts. Well, she would talk to her boss. Maybe they could go as high as five.

  Then she looked at me and said, ‘Of course, part of what they’re worth depends on you. You’re writing a biography of him, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not really a biography,’ I said. ‘I don’t know that it will help his reputation.’

  After coffee, she led me back across campus to the museum and up several stairs to a conference room. Then left me alone for a few minutes to prepare my talk. Blinds covered the windows; there were too many lights on. The air conditioning seemed to be running, too. Folding chairs had been arranged in rows in front of a lectern, but the rest of the furniture, a seminar table and several upholstered chairs, was expensively made. They looked like they belonged in the dining hall of a newly built stately home. I had a headache; I sat down on one of the chairs and waited. Eventually people started to wander in. I counted them from the lectern: about a dozen. All but three I could account for – my parents and their colleagues, my sister and her friends. Ms Niemetz had made two stacks of Peter’s novels on the table. Not a single one was bought and none of the three unknowns was related to Kelly. Two were an Asian couple who came late and left early. The third was a man in his thirties who took notes and had trouble gathering all his loose-leaf papers, his water bottle, his paperbacks and notebooks together, in his various bags, after the talk was over.

  I had chosen several passages from the new book: the bit about Mike Lowenthal and his Society, the opening few pages of ‘Fair Seed-Time.’ It surprised me how uncomfortable I felt. Mostly the questions had to do with Peter’s Byron, but on the ride home, my mother, who was sitting in the front seat, said without turning, ‘I liked what you wrote, but it’s odd, I never like you as much as a character in one of your books as I do in life. You seem to me nicer in life. You seem to me happier.’

  My sister said, ‘That’s an awful thing to say. I can’t believe you said that. What a terrible thing to say.’ She was sitting next to me in the back seat, as we used to. The only one of us to settle in Austin, she had kept up something of the old childish intensity of her relations with my mother.

  ‘It’s not an awful thing to say. I don’t even think it’s a critical thing to say. I like the books very much. Whether I like the narrator as much doesn’t matter one way or another. When I said it was odd, that’s really what I meant. I meant that I find it curious.’

  ‘You find it curious that you dislike your son.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant or what I said.’ My mother was very upset by this point. I could see her in the rear-view mirror. Her round face, with its top of silver hair, looked flushed with suppressed feeling. ‘Ben, tell me du bist nicht beleidigt,’ she said, switching halfway into German, as she often did. It is the language of her childhood and ours, and she uses it to express the old deep sympathy. Tell me you are not offended.

  ‘Leave me out of this,’ I said. ‘This is between you two.’

  *

  My father planned on taking us out for dinner, to celebrate he sa
id, but I wanted to go home first to change out of my jacket and tie. I never feel at ease in formal clothes; I never feel like myself. The bedroom I moved into when I was seven years old is outside the main house, under the stretch of roofing where the garden tools used to be kept. My parents decided to incorporate it after my mother found out, at the age of forty-four, that she was having twins. This meant that for most of my childhood I went to bed two locked doors away from the rest of my family. What I looked out on each night was the darkened garden and the short concrete stairway to the back entrance. After changing into jeans and T-shirt, I walked along the side of the house to the front yard. My flight was early in the morning and we probably wouldn’t get back from the restaurant till after ten o’clock. Too late to knock on the door of an old retired couple. If I wanted to look up Kelly’s parents I had to go now.

  It’s less than a hundred yards from my front door to hers, but by the time I reached the Manzes’ house my heart was beating as fast as it would have if I were back in high school and going to visit a girl. Though the truth is, when I was in high, school, I never had the courage to do anything more than eavesdrop on her conversations at the school bus stop. I stood under the pillared portico and rang the bell and wished I had kept on my jacket and tie. The doorbell made a deep artificial bell sound; it echoed through the house. After a minute I heard steps and then I saw, through the clouded glass panes running either side of the doorway, a hesitant beige figure in beige skirts approaching under a bright hall light. Refractions in the glass made her slip suddenly from one pane to the next. But when the door opened a man stood in the doorway, with his shirt unbuttoned and his shirt tails hanging out of his trousers. He had a tie in his hand.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘My name is – I used to live down the road from you. Probably you don’t remember me. My name is Ben Markovits. I’m a friend of Kelly’s. From Boston; I didn’t know her well in high school. I told her I was coming to Austin and she said I should look you up.’