by Auster, Paul
Just like that? You just picked up the phone and called?
Not without trepidation. Not without a lump in my throat and a knot in my stomach. It was an exact reprise of the first time I’d called her—twenty-seven years before. I was twenty again, a jittery, lovesick juvenile plucking up his courage to call his dream girl and ask her out on a date. I must have stared at the phone for ten minutes, but when I dialed the number at last, Sonia wasn’t in. The answering machine clicked on, and I was so rattled by the sound of her voice that I hung up. Relax, I said to myself, you’re behaving like an idiot, so I dialed the number again and left a message. Nothing elaborate. Just that I wanted to talk to her about something, that I hoped she was well, and that I would be in all day.
Did she call back—or did you have to try again?
She called. But that didn’t prove anything. She had no idea what I wanted to talk about. For all she knew, it might have been about Miriam—or some trivial, practical matter. In any case, her voice sounded calm, a little reserved, but with no edge to it. I told her that I’d been thinking about her and wanted to know how she was. Hanging in there, she said, or words to that effect. It was good to see you at the wedding, I said. Yes, she answered, it was a remarkable day, she’d had a wonderful time. Back and forth we went, a bit tentatively on both sides, polite and cautious, not daring to say much of anything. Then I popped the question: would she have dinner with me one night that week. Dinner? As she repeated the word, I could hear the disbelief in her voice. There was a long pause after that, and then she said she wasn’t sure, she’d have to think it over. I didn’t insist. The important thing was not to come on too strong. I knew her too well, and if I started to push, the odds were that she’d start pushing back. That’s how we left it. I told her to take care of herself and said good-bye.
Not such a promising start.
No. But it could have been worse. She hadn’t turned down the invitation, she just didn’t know if she should accept it or not. Half an hour later, the phone rang again. Of course I’ll have dinner with you, Sonia said. She apologized for having hesitated, but I’d caught her with her guard down, and she’d been entirely flustered. So we made our dinner date, and that was the beginning of a long and delicate dance, a minuet of desire, fear, and surrender that went on for more than eighteen months. It took that much time before we started living together, but even though we made it through another twenty-one years, Sonia refused to marry me again. I don’t know if you were aware of that. Your grandmother and I lived in sin until the day she died. Marriage would have jinxed us, she said. We’d tried it once, and look what happened to us, so why not take another approach? After struggling so hard to get her back, I was happy to abide by her rules. I proposed to her every year on her birthday, but those declarations were no more than encrypted messages, a sign that she could trust me again, that she could go on trusting me for the duration. There was so much I never understood about her, so much she didn’t understand about herself. That second courtship was a tough business, a man wooing his ex-wife, and the ex-wife playing hard to get, not giving an inch, not knowing what she wanted, going back and forth between temptation and revulsion until she finally gave in. It took half a year before we wound up in bed. The first time we made love, she laughed when it was over, collapsing into one of those crazy giggling jags of hers that went on so long I began to grow frightened. The second time we made love, she cried, sobbing into the pillow for more than an hour. So many things had changed for her. Her voice had lost the indefinable quality that had made it her voice, that fragile, crystalline ache of unbridled feeling, the hidden god who had spoken through her—all that was gone now, and she knew it, but giving up her career had been a difficult blow, and she was still coming to terms with it. She taught now, giving private singing lessons in her apartment, and there were many days when she had no interest in seeing me. Other days, she would call in a fit of desperation: Come now, I have to see you now. We were lovers again, probably closer to each other than we’d ever been the first time around, but she wanted to keep our lives separate. I wanted more, but she wouldn’t give in. That was the line she wouldn’t cross and then, after a year and a half, something happened, and it all suddenly changed.
What was it?
You.
Me? What do you mean, me?
You were born. Your grandmother and I took the train to New Haven, and we were there when your mother went into labor. I don’t want to exaggerate or sound overly sentimental about it, but when Sonia held you in her arms for the first time, she glanced over at me, and when I saw her face—I’m stumbling here, groping for the right words—her face … was illuminated. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. She was smiling, smiling and laughing, and it looked as if she’d been filled with light. A few hours later, after we’d gone back to our hotel, we were lying in bed in the dark. She took hold of my hand and said: I want you to move in with me, August. As soon as we get back to New York, I want you to move in and stay with me forever.
I did it.
You did it. You were the one who got us together again.
Well, at least I’ve accomplished one thing in my life. Too bad I was only five minutes old and didn’t know what I was doing.
The first of many great deeds, with many more to come.
Why is life so horrible, Grandpa?
Because it is, that’s all. It just is.
All those bad times with you and Grandma. All the bad times with my mother and father. But at least you loved each other and had your second chance. At least my mother loved my father enough to marry him. I’ve never loved anyone.
What are you talking about?
I tried to love Titus, but I couldn’t. He loved me, but I couldn’t love him back. Why do you think he joined that stupid company and went away?
To make money. He was going to put in a year and earn close to a hundred thousand dollars. That’s an awful lot of cash for a twenty-four-year-old kid. I had a long talk with him before he left. He knew he was taking a risk, but he thought it was worth it.
He left because of me. Don’t you understand that? I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore, and so he went off and got himself killed. He died because of me.
You can’t think that way. He died because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And I put him there.
You had nothing to do with it. Stop beating yourself up, Katya. It’s gone on long enough.
I can’t help it.
You’ve been stuck here for nine months now, and it isn’t doing you any good. I think it’s time for a change.
I don’t want anything to change.
Have you thought about going back to school in the fall?
Off and on. I’m just not sure I’m ready.
It doesn’t start for another four months.
I know. But if I want to go back, I have to tell them by next week.
Tell them. If you’re not feeling up to it, you can always change your mind at the last minute.
We’ll see.
In the meantime, we have to shake things up around here. Does the thought of a trip interest you?
Where would we go?
Anywhere you like, for as long as you like.
What about Mother? We can’t just leave her alone.
Her classes end next month. The three of us could go together.
But she’s working on her book. She wanted to finish it this summer.
She can write while we’re on the road.
The road? You can’t ride around in a car. Your leg would hurt too much.
I was thinking more along the lines of a camper. I have no idea what those things cost, but I have a nice chunk of money in the bank. The proceeds from the sale of my New York apartment. I’m sure I could afford one. If not new, then secondhand.
What are you saying? That the three of us drive around in a camper all summer?
That’s right. Miriam works on her book, and every day the two of us go off on a quest
.
What are we looking for?
I don’t know. Anything. The best hamburger in America. We make a list of the top hamburger restaurants in the country and then go around from one to the next and rate them according to a complex list of criteria. Taste, juiciness, size, the quality of the bun, and so on.
If you ate a hamburger every day, you’d probably have a heart attack.
Fish, then. We’ll look for the best fish joint in the Lower Forty-eight.
You’re pulling my leg, right?
I don’t pull legs. Men with bad legs don’t do that. It’s against our religion.
A camper would be pretty crowded. And besides, you’re forgetting one important thing.
What’s that?
You snore.
Ah. So I do, so I do. All right, we’ll scrap the camper. What about going to Paris? You can see your cousins, practice your French, and gain a new perspective on life.
No thanks. I’d rather stay here and watch my movies.
They’re turning into a drug, you know. I think we should cut down, maybe even stop for a while.
I can’t do that. I need the images. I need the distraction of watching other things.
Other things? I don’t follow. Other than what?
Don’t be so dense.
I know I’m dumb, but I just don’t get it.
Titus.
But we looked at that video only once—more than nine months ago.
Have you forgotten it?
No, of course not. I think about it twenty times a day.
That’s my point. If I hadn’t seen it, everything would be different. People go off to war, and sometimes they die. You get a telegram or a phone call, and someone tells you that your son or your husband or your ex-boyfriend has been killed. But you don’t see how it happened. You make up pictures in your mind, but you don’t know the real facts. Even if you’re told the story by someone who was there, what you’re left with is words, and words are vague, open to interpretation. We saw it. We saw how they murdered him, and unless I blot out that video with other images, it’s the only thing I ever see. I can’t get rid of it.
We’ll never get rid of it. You have to accept that, Katya. Accept it, and try to start living again.
I’m doing my best.
You haven’t stirred a muscle in close to a year. There are other distractions besides watching movies all day. Work, for one thing. A project, something to sink your teeth into.
Like what?
Don’t laugh at me, but after looking at all those films with you, I’ve been thinking that maybe we should write one of our own.
I’m not a writer. I don’t know how to make up stories.
What do you think I’ve been doing tonight?
I don’t know. Thinking. Remembering.
As little as possible. I’m better off if I reserve my thinking and remembering for the daytime. Mostly, I’ve been telling myself a story. That’s what I do when I can’t sleep. I lie in the dark and tell myself stories. I must have a few dozen of them by now. We could turn them into films. Co-writers, co-creators. Instead of looking at other people’s images, why not make up our own?
What kind of stories?
All kinds. Farces, tragedies, sequels to books I’ve liked, historical dramas, every kind of story you can imagine. But if you accept my offer, I think we should start with a comedy.
I’m not much into laughs these days.
Exactly. That’s why we should work on something light—a frothy bagatelle, as frivolous and diverting as possible. If we really put our minds to it, we might have some fun.
Who wants fun?
I do. And you do, too, my love. We’ve turned into a couple of sad sacks, you and I, and what I’m proposing is a cure, a remedy to ward off the blues.
* * *
I launch into a story I sketched out last week—the romantic adventures of Dot and Dash, a chubby waitress and a grizzled short-order cook who work in a New York City diner—but less than five minutes into it, Katya falls asleep, and our conversation comes to an end. I listen to her slow, regular breathing, glad that she’s finally managed to conk out, and wonder what time it is. Well past four, probably, perhaps even five. An hour or so until dawn, that incomprehensible moment when the blackness starts to thin out and the vireo who lives in the tree beside my window delivers his first chirp of the day. As I mull over the various things Katya has said to me, my thoughts gradually turn to Titus, and before long I’m inside his story again, reliving the disaster I’ve been struggling to avoid all night.
Katya blames herself for what happened, falsely linking herself to the chain of cause and effect that ultimately led to his murder. One mustn’t allow oneself to think that way, but if I succumbed to her faulty logic, then Sonia and I would be responsible as well, since we were the ones who introduced her to Titus in the first place. Thanksgiving dinner five years ago, just after her parents’ divorce. She and Miriam drove down to New York to spend the long weekend with us, and on Thursday Sonia and I cooked turkey for twelve people. Among the guests were Titus and his parents, David Small and Elizabeth Blackman, both painters, both old friends of ours. The nineteen-year-old Titus and the eighteen-year-old Katya seemed to hit it off. Did he die because he fell in love with our granddaughter? Follow that thought through to the end, and you could just as easily blame his parents. If David and Liz hadn’t met, Titus never would have been born.
He was a bright boy, I thought, an open-hearted, undisciplined boy with wild red hair, long legs, and big feet. I met him when he was four, and since Sonia and I visited his parents’ place fairly often, he felt comfortable around us, treating us not as family friends so much as a surrogate aunt and uncle. I liked him because he read books, a rare kid with a hunger for literature, and when he started writing short stories in his mid-teens, he would send them to me and ask for my comments. They weren’t very good, but I was touched that he had turned to me for advice, and after a while he began coming to our apartment about once a month to talk about his latest efforts. I would suggest books for him to read, which he would plow through diligently with a kind of lunging, scattershot enthusiasm. His work gradually improved somewhat, but every month it was different, bearing the marks of whatever writer he happened to be reading at the moment—a normal trait in beginners, a sign of development. Flashes of talent began to glimmer through his ornate, overwritten prose, but it was still too early to judge whether he had any genuine promise. When he was a senior in high school and announced that he wanted to stay in the city to attend college at Columbia, I wrote a letter of recommendation for him. I don’t know if that letter made any difference, but my alma mater accepted him, and his monthly visits continued.
He was in his second year when he showed up at that Thanksgiving dinner and met Katya. They made an odd and fetching duo, I thought. The floppy, grinning, arm-waving Titus and the small, slender, dark-haired daughter of my daughter. Sarah Lawrence was in Bronxville, just a short train ride into the city, and Katya stayed with us quite often during her undergraduate days, most weekends in fact, escaping dormitory life for a comfortable bed in her grandparents’ apartment and nights out in New York. She now claims that she didn’t love Titus, but all during the years they were together, there were dozens upon dozens of dinners at our place, usually just the four of us, and I never felt anything but affection between them. Maybe I was blind. Maybe I took too much for granted, but except for an occasional intellectual disagreement and one breakup that lasted under a month, they struck me as a happy, thriving couple. When Titus came to see me on his own, he never hinted at any trouble with Katya, and Titus was a garrulous boy, a person who spoke whatever was on his mind, and if Katya had called it quits with him, surely he would have mentioned it to me. Or maybe not. It could be that I didn’t know him as well as I thought I did.
When he started talking about going off to work in Iraq, his parents went into a tailspin of panic. David, normally the gentlest and most tolerant of men, screamed a
t his son and called him pathologically disturbed, a know-nothing dilettante, a suicidal maniac. Liz wept, took to her bed, and started gorging herself with heavy doses of tranquilizers. That was in February last year. Sonia had died the previous November, and I was in awful shape just then, drinking myself into oblivion every night, not fit for human contact, out of my mind with grief, but David was so distraught, he called me anyway and asked if I would talk some sense into the boy. I couldn’t refuse. I had known Titus for too long, and the fact was that I felt concerned for him as well. So I pulled myself together and did the best I could—which was nothing, nothing at all.
I had lost touch with Titus after Sonia became ill, and he seemed to have changed in the intervening months. The talkative, goofy optimist had turned sullen, almost belligerent, and I knew from the start that my words would have no effect on him. At the same time, I don’t think he was unhappy to see me, and when he spoke about Sonia and her death, there was true compassion in his voice. I thanked him for his words, poured us two glasses of neat scotch, and then led him into the living room, where we had had so many conversations in the past.
