by Paul Auster
She’s bound to find out eventually.
I know. But she seems to be doing a little better now, and I didn’t want to rock the boat.
You’re one tough cookie, kid.
No, I’m not. I’m a big soft jelly doughnut. All ooze and mush.
I take hold of Katya’s hand, and for the next half minute or so we look up into the dark without saying a word. I wonder if she might not drift off to sleep if I don’t resume the conversation, but a moment after I think that thought she breaks the silence by asking me another question:
When was the first time you saw her?
April fourth, nineteen fiftyfive—at two-thirty in the afternoon.
For real?
For real.
Where were you?
Broadway. Broadway and One Hundred-fifteenth Street, walking uptown on my way to Butler Library. Sonia went to Juilliard, which was near Columbia at the time, and she was walking downtown. I must have spotted her about half a block away, probably because she was wearing a red coat—red jumps out at you, especially on a city street, with nothing but drab bricks and stones in the background. So I catch sight of the red coat coming toward me, and then I see that the person wearing the coat is a short girl with dark hair. Quite promising from a distance, but still too far away to be sure of anything. That’s how it is with boys, you know that. Always looking at girls, always sizing them up, always hoping to run into the knockout beauty who will suck the breath out of you and make your heart stop beating. So I’ve seen the red coat, and I’ve seen that it’s worn by a girl with short dark hair who stands approximately five feet five inches tall, and the next thing I notice is that her head is bobbing around a little bit, as if she’s humming to herself, and that there’s a certain bounce to her step, a lightness in the way she moves, and I say to myself, This girl is happy, happy to be alive and walking down the street in the crisp, sun-drenched air of early spring. A few seconds later, her face begins to acquire more definition, and I see that she’s wearing bright red lipstick, and then, as the distance between us continues to narrow, I simultaneously absorb two important facts. One: that she is indeed humming to herself—a Mozart aria, I think, but can’t be certain—and not only is she humming, she has the voice of a real singer. Two: that she’s sublimely attractive, perhaps even beautiful, and that my heart is about to stop beating. By now, she’s only four or five feet away, and I, who have never stopped to talk to an unknown girl on the street, who have never in my life had the audacity to address a good-looking stranger in public, open my mouth and say hello, and because I’m smiling at her, no doubt smiling in a way that carries no threat or hint of aggression, she stops humming, smiles back at me, and returns my greeting with one of her own. And that’s it. I’m too nervous to say anything more, and so I keep on walking, as does the pretty girl in the red coat, but after six or seven steps I regret my lack of boldness and turn around, hoping there’s still time to initiate a conversation, but the girl is walking too quickly and is already out of range, and so, with my eyes on her back, I watch her cross the street and disappear into the crowd.
Frustrating—but understandable. I hate it when men try to pick me up on the street. If you’d acted more boldly, Sonia probably would have been turned off, and you wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with her.
That’s a generous way of looking at it. After she disappeared, I felt I’d blown the opportunity of a lifetime.
How long did it take before you saw her again?
Almost a month. The days dragged on, and I couldn’t stop thinking about her. If I had known she was a student at Juilliard, I might have been able to track her down, but I didn’t know anything. She was just a beautiful apparition who had looked into my eyes for a couple of seconds and then vanished. I was convinced I would never see her again. The gods had tricked me, and the girl I was destined to fall in love with, the one person who had been put on this earth to give my life meaning, had been snatched away and thrown into another dimension—an inaccessible place, a place I would never be allowed to enter. I remember writing a long, ridiculous poem about parallel worlds, lost chances, the tragic shittiness of fate. Twenty years old, and already I felt cursed.
But fate was on your side.
Fate, luck, whatever you want to call it.
Where did it happen?
On the subway. The Seventh Avenue IRT. Heading downtown on the evening on April twenty-seventh, nineteen fiftyfive. The car was crowded, but the seat next to mine was empty. We stopped at Sixty-sixth Street, the doors opened, and in she walked. Since there were no other seats available, she sat down beside me.
Did she remember you?
A vague recollection. I reminded her of our little encounter on Broadway earlier that month, and then it came back to her. We didn’t have much time. I was on my way to the Village to meet some friends, but Sonia was getting off at Forty-second Street, so we were together for only three stops. We managed to introduce ourselves and exchange phone numbers. I learned that she was studying at Juilliard. I learned that she was French but had spent the first twelve years of her life in America. Her English was perfect, no accent at all. When I tried out some of my mediocre French on her, her French turned out to be perfect as well. We probably talked for seven minutes, ten minutes at the most. Then she got off, and I knew that something monumental had happened. For me, in any case. I couldn’t know what Sonia was thinking or feeling, but after those seven or ten minutes, I knew that I had met the one.
First date. First kiss. First . . . you know what.
I called her the next afternoon. Trembling hands . . . I must have picked up the receiver and put it down three or four times before I found the courage to dial. An Italian restaurant in the West Village, I can’t remember the name anymore. Inexpensive, I didn’t have much money, and this was the first time—it’s hard to believe—the first time I’d ever asked a girl out to dinner. I can’t see myself. I have no idea what kind of impression I made, but I can see her sitting across from me in her white blouse, her steady green eyes, watchful, alert, amused, and that superb mouth with the rounded lips, smiling, smiling often, and her low voice, a resonant voice that came from somewhere deep in her diaphragm, an extremely sexy voice, I found, always did, and then her laugh, which was much higher, almost squeaky at times, a laugh that seemed to emerge from her throat, even her head, and whenever something tickled her funny bone—I’m talking about later now, not that night—she would go into these wild giggling fits, laughing so hard that tears would come streaming from her eyes.
I remember. I never saw anyone laugh like her. When I was little, I sometimes got scared by it. She would go on for so long, I thought it would never stop, that she would actually die laughing. Then I grew to love it.
So there we were, two twenty-year-old kids in that restaurant on Bank Street, Perry Street, wherever it was, out on our first date. We talked about a lot of things, most of which I’ve forgotten, but I remember how taken I was when she told me about her family, her background. My own story seemed so dull by comparison, with my furniture-salesman father and fourth-grade schoolteacher mother, the Brills of upper Manhattan, who had never gone anywhere or done anything but work and pay the rent. Sonia’s father was a research biologist, a professor, one of the top scientists in Europe. Alexandre Weil—a distant relative of the composer—born in Strasbourg, a Jew (as you already know), and therefore what a fortunate turn when Princeton offered him a job in 1935 and he had the good sense to accept it. If the family had stayed in France during the war, who knows what would have happened to them? Sonia’s mother, Marie-Claude, was born in Lyon. I forget what her father did, but both of her grandfathers were Protestant ministers, which means that Sonia was hardly your typical French girl. No Catholics anywhere in sight, no Hail Marys, no visits to the confession box. Marie-Claude met Alexandre when they were students in Paris, and the marriage took place sometime in the early twenties. Four kids in all: three boys and then, five years after the last one was born, along came S
onia, the baby of the bunch, the little princess, who was only one month old when the family left for America. They didn’t go back to Paris until nineteen forty-seven. Alexandre was given an important position at the Pasteur Institute—directeur was his title, I think—and Sonia wound up going to the Lycée Fénelon. She had already made up her mind to become a singer and didn’t want to finish her bac, but her parents insisted. That’s why she went to Juilliard instead of the conservatory in Paris. She was pissed off at her parents for bearing down on her so hard and more or less ran away. But all was forgiven in the end, and by the time I met Sonia, peace had broken out among the Weils. The family welcomed me in. I think they were touched by the fact that I came from a mixed family, too—in my case a Jewish mother and an Episcopalian father—and so, according to some mystical, unwritten code about clans and tribal loyalties, they figured that Sonia and I would be a good match.
You’re getting ahead of yourself. Go back to nineteen fiftyfive. The first kiss. The moment when you realized that Sonia cared about you.
A clear memory, because physical contact occurred that same night, in front of the door of her apartment. She shared a place on One Hundred-fourteenth Street with two other girls from Juilliard, and after riding back uptown on the subway, I walked her to her building. Two short blocks, from One Hundred-sixteenth to One Hundred-fourteenth, but during that brief trajectory, very close to the beginning, with perhaps the tenth or twelfth step we took, your grandmother slipped her arm around mine, and the thrill of that moment has lingered in your grandfather’s heart to this day. Sonia made the first move. There was nothing overtly erotic about it—merely a silent declaration that she liked me, that she had enjoyed our evening together, and that she had every intention of seeing me again—but that gesture meant so much . . . and made me so happy, I nearly fell to the ground. Then the door. Saying good night at the door, the classic scene of every budding courtship. To kiss or not to kiss? To nod or shake hands? To brush your fingers against her cheek? To take her in your arms and hug her? So many possibilities, so little time to choose. How to read someone else’s desires, how to enter the thoughts of someone you barely know? I didn’t want to scare her off by acting too forward, but neither did I want her to think I was some timid soul who didn’t know his own mind. The middle road, then, which I improvised as follows: I put my hands on her shoulders, leaned forward and down (down because she was shorter than I was), and pressed my lips against hers—rather hard. No tongue involved, no enveloping hug, but a good solid buss for all that. I heard a quiet rumbling in Sonia’s throat, a low-pitched m-sound, mmmm, and then a slight catch to her breath, a drop to another register, and something that resembled a laugh. I backed away, saw that she was smiling, and put my arms around her. An instant later, her arms were around me, and then I dove in for a real kiss, a French kiss, a French kiss with the French girl who was suddenly the only person who counted anymore. Just one, but a long one, and then, not wanting to overplay my hand, I said good night and headed for the stairs.
Pas mal, mon ami.
A kiss for the ages.
Now I need a sociology lesson. We’re talking about nineteen fifty-five, and from all I’ve heard and read, the fifties weren’t the best time for young people. I’m talking about young people and sex. These days, most kids start screwing in their teens, and by the time they’ve hit twenty, they’re old pros at it. So there you are at twenty. Your first date with Sonia has just ended with a triumphant, slobbering kiss. You clearly have the hots for each other. But the prevailing wisdom of the period says: no sex before marriage, at least if you’re a girl. You didn’t get married until nineteen fifty-seven. You’re not going to tell me you held back for two years, are you?
Of course not.
That’s a relief.
Horniness is a human constant, the engine that drives the world, and even back then, in the dark age of the mid-twentieth century, students were fucking like rabbits.
Such language, Grandpa.
I thought you’d appreciate it.
That’s just it. I do.
On the other hand, I’m not going to pretend there weren’t a lot of girls who believed in the myth of the virgin bride, middle-class girls mostly, the so-called good girls, but we mustn’t exaggerate either. The obstetrician who delivered your mother in nineteen sixty had been a doctor for almost twenty years. As she was stitching up Sonia’s episiotomy after Miriam was born, she assured me that she was going to do a terrific job. She was an expert with the needle, she said, because she’d had so much practice: sewing up girls for their wedding nights to make the husbands think they’d married a virgin.
The things I never knew . . .
That was the fifties. Sex everywhere, but people closed their eyes and made believe it wasn’t happening. In America anyway. What made things different for me and your grandmother was the fact that she was French. There are countless hypocrisies in French life, but sex isn’t one of them. Sonia moved back to Paris when she was twelve and stayed there until she was nineteen. Her education was far more advanced than mine, and she was prepared to do things that would have sent most American girls shrieking from the bed.
Such as?
Use your imagination, Katya.
You’re not going to shock me, you know. I went to Sarah Lawrence, remember? The sex capital of the Western world. I’ve been all around the block, believe me.
The body has a limited number of orifices. Let’s just say that we explored every one of them.
In other words, Grandma was good in bed.
That’s a blunt way of putting it, but yes, she was good. Uninhibited, comfortable in her body, sensitive to the shifts and swerves of her own feelings. Every time we did it, it seemed to be different from the time before. Fierce and dramatic one day, slow and languid the next, the surprise of it all, the endless nuances . . .
I remember her hands, the gentleness of her hands when she touched me.
Gentle hands, yes. But strong hands, too. Wise hands. That’s how I used to think of them. Hands that could speak.
Did you live together before you were married?
No, no, that was out of the question. We had to sneak around a lot. It had its exciting aspects, but most of the time it was frustrating. I was still living with my parents in Washington Heights, so I didn’t have a place of my own. And Sonia had her two roommates. We’d go there whenever they were gone, but that didn’t happen often enough to satisfy us.
What about hotels?
Off-limits. Even if we could have afforded them, it was too dangerous. There were laws in New York that made it illegal for unmarried couples to be alone together in the same room. Every hotel had a detective—the house dick—and if he caught you, you’d be thrown in jail.
Lovely.
So what to do? Sonia had lived in Princeton as a child, and she still had friends there. There was one couple—the Gontorskis, I’ll never forget them—a physics professor and his wife, refugees from Poland who loved Sonia and didn’t give a damn about American sexual customs. They let us stay in their guest room on the weekends. And then there was the outdoor sex, the warm-weather sex in fields and meadows outside the city. A large element of risk. Someone finally found us naked in the bushes, and we got cold feet after that and stopped taking chances. Without the Gontorskis, we would have been in hell.
Why didn’t you just get married? Right then, while you were still students.
The draft. The minute I graduated from college, I was going to be called up for my physical, and we figured I’d have to spend two years in the army. Sonia was already singing professionally by my senior year, and what if they shipped me off to West Germany or Greenland or South Korea? I couldn’t have asked her to follow me. It wouldn’t have been fair.
But you never were in the army, were you? Not if you were married in nineteen fifty-seven.
I flunked the exam. A false diagnosis, as it turned out—but no matter, I was free, and a month later we were married. We didn’t have mu
ch money, of course, but the situation wasn’t quite desperate. Sonia had dropped out of Juilliard and started her career, and by the time I left college I had already published about a dozen articles and reviews. We sublet a railroad flat in Chelsea, sweated out one New York summer, and then Sonia’s oldest brother, Patrice, a civil engineer, was hired to build a dam somewhere in Africa and offered us his Paris apartment rent-free. We jumped. The minute his telegram arrived, we started packing our bags.
I’m not interested in real estate, and I already know about your careers. I want you to tell me about the important things. What was she like? How did it feel being married to her? How well did you get along? Did you ever fight? The nuts and bolts, Grandpa, not just a string of superficial facts.
All right, let me change gears and think for a moment. What was Sonia like? What did I discover about her after we were married that I hadn’t known before? Contradictions. Complexities. A darkness that revealed itself slowly over time and made me reassess who she was. I loved her madly, Katya, you have to understand that, and I’m not criticizing her for being who she was. It’s just that as I got to know her better, I came to realize how much suffering she carried around inside her. In most ways, your grandmother was an extraordinary person. Tender, kind, loyal, forgiving, full of spirit, with a tremendous capacity for love. But she would drift off every now and then, sometimes right in the middle of a conversation, and start staring into space with this dreamy expression in her eyes, and it was as if she didn’t know me anymore. At first, I imagined she was thinking some profound thought or remembering something that had happened to her, but when I finally asked her what was going through her head at those moments, she smiled at me and said, Nothing. It was as if her whole being would empty out, and she’d lose contact with herself and the world. All her instincts and impulses about other people were deep, uncannily deep, but her relation to herself was strangely shallow. She had a good mind, but essentially she was uneducated, and she had trouble following a train of thought, couldn’t concentrate on anything for very long. Except her music, which was the most important thing in her life. She believed in her talent, but at the same time she knew her limits and refused to tackle pieces she felt were beyond her ability to perform well. I admired her honesty, but there was also something sad about it, as if she thought of herself as second-rate, doomed always to be a notch or two below the best. That’s why she never did any opera. Lieder, ensemble work in choral pieces, undemanding solo cantatas—but she never pushed herself beyond that. Did we fight? Of course we fought. All couples fight, but she was never vicious or cruel when we argued. Most of the time, I have to admit, her criticisms of me were spot-on. For a Frenchwoman, she turned out to be a rather lousy cook, but she liked good food, so we ate in restaurants fairly often. An indifferent housekeeper, absolutely no interest in possessions—I say that as a compliment—and even though she was a beautiful young woman with an adorable body, she didn’t dress very well. She loved clothes, but she never seemed to choose the right ones. To be frank, I sometimes felt lonely with her, lonely in my work, since all my time was spent reading and writing about books, and she didn’t read much, and what she did read she found difficult to talk about.
