by Auster, Paul
That’s right, I’m not. Question withdrawn.
Several places over the years. But when your mother was born, our apartment was on West Eighty-fourth Street, just off Riverside Drive. One of the windiest streets in the city.
What kind of baby was she?
Easy and difficult. Screaming and laughing. Great fun and a terrible pain in the ass.
In other words, a baby.
No. The baby of babies. Because she was our baby, and our baby was like no other baby in the world.
How long did Grandma wait until she went back to performing?
She took a year off from traveling, but she was singing in New York again when Miriam was just three months old. You know what a good mother she was—your own mother must have told you that a hundred times—but she also had her work. It was what she was born to do, and I never would have dreamed of trying to hold her back. Still, she had her doubts, especially in the beginning. One day, when Miriam was about six months old, I walked into the bedroom, and there was Sonia on her knees by the bed, hands together, head raised, murmuring to herself in French. My French was quite good by then, and I understood everything she said. To my astonishment, it turned out that she was praying. Dear God, give me a sign and tell me what to do about my little girl. Dear God, fill the emptiness inside me and teach me how to love, to forbear, to give myself to others. She looked and sounded like a child, a small, simpleminded child, and I have to say that I was a little thrown by it—but also moved, deeply, deeply moved. It was as if a door had opened, and I was looking at a new Sonia, a different person from the one I’d known for the past five years. When she realized I was in the room, she turned around and gave me an embarrassed smile. I’m sorry, she said, I didn’t want you to know. I walked over to the bed and sat down. Don’t be sorry, I told her. I’m just a little puzzled, that’s all. We had a long talk after that, at least an hour, the two of us sitting side by side on the bed, discussing the mysteries of her soul. Sonia explained that it started toward the end of her pregnancy, in the middle of the seventh month. She was walking down the street one afternoon on her way home, when all of a sudden a feeling of joy rose up inside her, an inexplicable, overwhelming joy. It was as if the entire universe were rushing into her body, she said, and in that instant she understood that everything was connected to everything else, that everyone in the world was connected to everyone else in the world, and this binding force, this power that held everything and everyone together, was God. That was the only word she could think of. God. Not a Jewish or Christian God, not the God of any religion, but God as the presence that animates all life. She started talking to him after that, she said, convinced that he could hear what she was saying, and these monologues, these prayers, these supplications—whatever you wanted to call them—always comforted her, always put her on an even keel with herself again. It had been going on for months now, but she didn’t want to tell me because she was afraid I would think she was stupid. I was so much smarter than she was, so superior to her when it came to intellectual matters—her words, not mine—and she was worried that I’d burst out laughing at my ignorant wife when she told me that she’d found God. I didn’t laugh. Heathen that I am, I didn’t laugh. Sonia had her own way of thinking and her own way of doing things, and who was I to make fun of her?
I knew her all my life, but she never spoke to me about God, not once.
That’s because she stopped believing. When our marriage broke up, she felt that God had abandoned her. That was a long time ago, angel, long before you were born.
Poor Grandma.
Yes, poor Grandma.
I have a theory about your marriage. Mother and I have talked about it, and she tends to go along with me, but I need confirmation, the inside dope from the horse’s mouth. How would you respond if I said: You and Grandma got divorced because of her career?
My answer would be: Nonsense.
All right, not her career per se. The fact that she traveled so much.
I would say you were getting warmer—but only as an indirect cause, a secondary factor.
Mother says she used to hate it when Grandma went on tour. She’d break down and cry, she’d scream, she’d beg her not to go. Hysterical scenes … unadulterated anguish … separation after separation …
That happened once or twice, but I wouldn’t make too big an issue of it. When Miriam was very young, say from one to six, Sonia never left for more than a week at a time. My mother would move in with us to take care of her, and things went rather smoothly. Your great-grandmother had a knack with little kids, she adored Miriam—who was her only granddaughter—and Miriam couldn’t wait for her to show up. It all comes back to me now … the funny things your mother used to do. When she was three or four, she became fascinated by her grandmother’s breasts. They were quite huge, I have to say, since my mother had grown into a fairly chunky broad by then. Sonia was small on top, with little adolescent breasts that filled out only when she was nursing Miriam, but after your mother was weaned, they got even smaller than they’d been before the pregnancy. The contrast was utterly stark, and Miriam couldn’t help noticing. My mother had a voluminous chest, twenty times the size of Sonia’s. One Saturday morning, she and Miriam were sitting on the sofa together watching cartoons. A commercial for pizza came on, which ended with the words: Now, that’s a pizza! A moment later, your mother turned to my mother, clamped her mouth on her grandmother’s right breast, and then came up shouting: Now, that’s a pizza! My mother laughed so hard, she let out a fart, a gigantic trumpet blast of a fart. That got Miriam laughing so wildly, she peed in her pants. She jumped off the sofa and started running around the room, yelling at the top of her lungs: Fart-pee, fart-pee, oui, oui, oui!
You’re making this up.
No, it really happened, I swear it did. The only reason I mention it is to show you that it wasn’t all gloom in the house when Sonia was gone. Miriam didn’t mope around feeling like some neglected Oliver Twist. She was mostly fine.
And what about you?
I learned to live with it.
That sounds like an evasive answer.
There were different periods, different stages, and each one had its own texture. In the beginning, Sonia was relatively unknown. She’d done a little singing in New York before we moved to Paris, but she had to start all over again in France, and then, just when things seemed to be taking off a bit, we came back to America, and she had to make another start. In the end, it all worked to her advantage, since she was known both here and in Europe. But it took time for her to develop a reputation. The turning point came in sixty-seven or sixty-eight, when she signed the contract to make those records with Nonesuch, but until then she didn’t go away that often. I was torn down the middle. On the one hand, I was happy for her whenever she got a booking to perform in a new city. On the other hand—just like your mother—I hated to see her go. The only choice was to learn to live with it. That’s not an evasion, it’s a fact.
You were faithful …
Totally.
And when did you start to slip?
Stray is probably the word to use in this context.
Or lapse. There’s a spiritual connotation to it that seems fitting.
All right, lapse. Around nineteen seventy, I suppose. But there was nothing spiritual about it. It was all about sex, sex pure and simple. Summer came, and Sonia went off on a three-month tour of Europe—with your mother, by the way—and there I was by myself, still just thirty-five years old, hormones roaring at full tilt, womanless in New York. I worked hard every day, but the nights were empty, colorless, stagnant. I began hanging out with a bunch of sportswriters, most of them heavy drinkers, playing poker until three in the morning, going out to bars, not because I especially liked any of them, but it was something to do, and I needed a little company after being alone all day. One night, after another boozy session in a bar, I was walking home from midtown to the Upper West Side, and I spotted a prostitute standing in the doorway of a building. A very attractive
girl, as it happened, and I was drunk enough to accept her offer of a good time. Am I upsetting you?
A little.
I wasn’t planning to give you any details. Just the general drift.
That’s okay. It’s my fault. I’ve turned this into Truth Night at Castle Despair, and now that we’ve started, we might as well go all the way.
Onward, then?
Yes, keep telling the story.
So I had my good time, which wasn’t a good time at all, but after fifteen years of sleeping with the same woman I found it fascinating to touch another body, to feel flesh that was different from the flesh I knew. That was the discovery of that night. The novelty of being with another woman.
Did you feel guilty?
No. I considered it an experiment. A lesson learned, so to speak.
So my theory is right. If Grandma had been home in New York, you never would have paid that girl to sleep with you.
In that particular case, yes. But there was more to our downfall than infidelity, more to it than Sonia’s absences. I’ve thought about this for years, and the only half-reasonable explanation I’ve ever come up with is that there’s something wrong with me, a flaw in the mechanism, a damaged part gumming up the works. I’m not talking about moral weakness. I’m talking about my mind, my mental makeup. I’m somewhat better now, I think, the problem seemed to diminish as I grew older, but back then, at thirty-five, thirty-eight, forty, I walked around with a feeling that my life had never truly belonged to me, that I had never truly inhabited myself, that I had never been real. And because I wasn’t real, I didn’t understand the effect I had on others, the damage I could cause, the hurt I could inflict on the people who loved me. Sonia was my ground, my one solid connection to the world. Being with her made me better than I actually was—healthier, stronger, saner—and because we started living together when we were so young, the flaw was masked for all those years, and I assumed I was just like everyone else. But I wasn’t. The moment I began to wander away from her, the bandage dropped off my wound, and then the bleeding wouldn’t stop. I went after other women because I felt I’d missed out on something and had to make up for lost time. I’m talking about sex now, nothing but sex, but you can’t run around and act the way I did and expect your marriage to hold together. I deceived myself into thinking it would.
Don’t hate yourself so much, Grandpa. She took you back, remember?
I know … but all those wasted years. It makes me sick to think about them. My dumb-ass flings and dalliances. What did they add up to? A few cheap thrills, nothing of any importance—but there’s no question that they laid the groundwork for what happened next.
Oona McNally.
Sonia was so trusting, and I was so discreet, our life went on together without any crucial disturbances. She didn’t know, and I didn’t tell, and not for one second did I ever think of leaving her. Then, in nineteen seventy-four, I wrote a favorable review of a first novel by a young American author. Anticipation, by the aforementioned O.M. It was a startling book, I felt, highly original and written with great command, a strong, promising debut. I didn’t know anything about the writer—only that she was twenty-six years old and lived in New York. I read the book in galleys, and since galleys didn’t have author photos on them in the seventies, I didn’t even know what she looked like. About four months later, I went to a poetry reading at the Gotham Book Mart (without Sonia, who was at home with Miriam), and when the reading was over and we all started walking down the stairs, someone grabbed me by the arm. Oona McNally. She wanted to thank me for the nice review I’d given her novel. That was the extent of it, but I was so impressed by her looks—tall and lithe, an exquisite face, the second coming of Virginia Blaine—that I asked her out for a drink. How many times had I betrayed Sonia by then? Three or four one-night stands, and one mini-affair that lasted roughly two weeks. Not such a gruesome catalogue when compared to some men, but enough to have taught me that I was prepared to seize opportunities whenever they presented themselves. But this girl was different. You didn’t sleep with Oona McNally and say good-bye to her the next morning—you fell in love with her, you wanted her to be part of your life. I won’t bore you with the tawdry incidentals. The clandestine dinners, the long talks in out-of-the-way bars, the slow mutual seduction. She didn’t jump into my arms immediately. I had to go after her, win her confidence, persuade her that it was possible for a man to be in love with two women at the same time. I still had no intention of leaving Sonia, you understand. I wanted both of them. My wife of seventeen years, my comrade, my innermost heart, the mother of my only child—and this ferocious young woman with the burning intelligence, this new erotic charm, a woman I could finally share my work with and talk to about books and ideas. I began to resemble a character in a nineteenth-century novel: solid marriage in one box, lively mistress in another box, and I, the master magician, standing between them, with the skill and cunning never to open both boxes at the same time. For several months I managed to make it work, and I was no longer a mere magician, I was an aerialist as well, prancing along my high wire, shuttling between ecstasy and anguish every day, growing more and more certain that I would never fall.
And then?
December nineteen seventy-four, two days after Christmas.
You fell.
I fell. Sonia did a Schubert recital at the Ninety-second Street Y that night, and when she came home she told me she knew.
How did she find out?
She wouldn’t say. But all her facts were correct, and I saw no point in denying them. The thing I remember best about that conversation was how composed she was—at least until the end, when she stopped talking. She didn’t cry or shout, she didn’t carry on, she didn’t punch me or throw things across the room. You have to choose, she said. I’m willing to forgive you, but you have to go to that girl right now and break it off. I don’t know what will happen to us, I don’t know if we’ll ever be the same again. Right now, I feel as if you’ve stabbed me in the chest and ripped out my heart. You’ve killed me, August. You’re looking at a dead woman, and the only reason I’m going to pretend to be alive is because Miriam needs her mother. I’ve always loved you, I’ve always thought you were a man with a great soul, but it turns out that you’re just another lying shit. How could you have done it, August?… Her voice broke then, and she put her face in her hands and started crying. I sat down beside her on the sofa and put my arm around her shoulder, but she pushed me away. Don’t touch me, she said. Don’t come near me until you’ve talked to that girl. If you don’t come back tonight, don’t bother to come back at all—not ever.
Did you come back?
I’m afraid not.
This is getting rather grim, isn’t it?
I’ll stop if you want me to. We could always talk about something else.
No, keep going. But let’s skip ahead, all right? You don’t have to tell me about your marriage to Oona. I know you loved her, I know you had a stormy time of it, and I know she left you for that German painter. Klaus Something.
Bremen.
Klaus Bremen. I know how hard it was for you, I know you went through a really bad period.
The alcohol period. Primarily scotch, single-malt scotch.
And you don’t have to talk about your troubles with my mother. She’s already told me about them. They’re finished, and there’s no reason to go over them again, is there?
If you say so.
The only thing I want to hear about is how you and Grandma got back together.
This is all about her, isn’t it?
It has to be. Because she’s the one who isn’t here anymore.
Nine years apart. But I never turned against her. Regret and remorse, self-contempt, the corrosive poison of uncertainty, those were the things that undermined my years with Oona. Sonia was too much a part of me, and even after the divorce, she was still there, still talking to me in my head—the ever-present absent one, as I sometimes call her now. We were in contact,
of course, we had to be because of Miriam, the logistics of shared custody, the weekend arrangements, the summer holidays, the high school and college events, and as we slowly adjusted to our new circumstances, I felt her anger against me turn to a kind of pity. Poor August, the champion of fools. She had men. That goes without saying, n’est-ce pas? She was only forty when I walked out on her, still radiant, still the same shining girl she’d always been, and one of her entanglements became quite serious, I think, although your mother probably knows more about it than I do. When Oona waltzed off with her German painter, I was shattered. Your tactful reference to a bad period doesn’t begin to describe how bad it was. I’m not going to delve into those days now, I promise, but even then, at a time when I was absolutely alone, it never occurred to me to reach out to Sonia. That was nineteen eighty-one. In nineteen eighty-two, a couple of months before your parents’ wedding, she wrote me a letter. Not about us, but about your mother, worried that Miriam was too young to be rushing into marriage, that she was about to make the same mistake we did in our early twenties. Very prescient, of course, but your grandmother always had a nose for such things. I wrote back and said she was probably right, but even if she was right, there was nothing we could do about it. You can’t meddle with other people’s feelings, least of all your own child’s, and the truth is that kids learn nothing from their parents’ mistakes. We have to leave them alone and let them thrash out into the world to make their own mistakes. That was my answer, and then I concluded the letter with a rather trite remark: The only thing we can do is hope for the best. On the day of the wedding, Sonia walked up to me and said: I’m hoping for the best. If I had to pinpoint the moment when our reconciliation began, I would choose that one, the moment when your grandmother said those words to me. It was an important day for both of us—our daughter’s wedding—and there was a lot of emotion in the air—happiness, anxiety, nostalgia, a whole range of feeling—and neither one of us was in a mood for bearing grudges. I was still a wreck at that point, by no means fully recovered from the Oona debacle, but Sonia was going through a hard time as well. She’d retired from singing earlier that year, and as I later found out from your mother (Sonia never shared any secrets with me about her private life), she had recently parted ways with a man. So, on top of everything else, we were both at a low ebb that day, and seeing each other somehow had a consoling effect. Two veterans who’d fought in the same war, watching their child march off to a new war of her own. We danced together, we talked about the old days, and for a few moments we even held hands. Then the party was over, and everyone went home, but I remember thinking when I was back in New York that being with her that day was the best thing that had happened to me in a long time. I never made a conscious decision about it, but one morning about a month later, I woke up and realized that I wanted to see her again. No, more than that. I wanted to win her back. I knew my chances were probably nil, but I also knew that I had to give it a try. So I called.
