by Paul Auster
There’s no question that it was a strange match. In almost every way that I can think of, Ben and Fanny seemed to exist in mutually exclusive realms. Ben was all arms and legs, an erector set of sharp angles and bony protrusions, whereas Fanny was short and round, with a smooth face and olive skin. Ben was ruddy by comparison, with frizzy, unkempt hair, and skin that burned easily in the sun. He took up a lot of room, seemed to be constantly in motion, changed facial expressions every five or six seconds, whereas Fanny was poised, sedentary, catlike in the way she inhabited her body. She wasn’t beautiful to me so much as exotic, although that might be too strong a word for what I’m trying to express. An ability to fascinate is probably closer to what I’m looking for, a certain air of self-sufficiency that made you want to watch her, even when she just sat there and did nothing. She wasn’t funny in the way Ben could be, she wasn’t quick, she never ran off at the mouth. And yet I always felt that she was the more articulate of the two, the more intelligent, the one with greater analytical powers. Ben’s mind was all intuition. It was bold but not especially subtle, a mind that loved to take risks, to leap into the dark, to make improbable connections. Fanny, on the other hand, was thorough and dispassionate, unremitting in her patience, not prone to quick judgments or ungrounded remarks. She was a scholar, and he was a wise guy; she was a sphinx, and he was an open wound; she was an aristocrat, and he was the people. To be with them was like watching a marriage between a panther and a kangaroo. Fanny, always superbly dressed, stylish, walking alongside a man nearly a foot taller than she was, an oversize kid in black Converse All-Stars, blue jeans, and a gray hooded sweatshirt. On the surface, it seemed to make no sense. You saw them together, and your first response was to think they were strangers.
But that was only on the surface. Underneath his apparent clumsiness, Sachs had a remarkable understanding of women. Not just of Fanny, but of nearly all the women he met, and again and again I was surprised by how naturally they were drawn to him. Growing up with three sisters might have had something to do with it, as if the intimacies learned in childhood had impregnated him with some occult knowledge, a way into feminine secrets that other men spend their whole lives trying to discover. Fanny had her difficult moments, and I don’t imagine she was ever an easy person to live with. Her outward calm was often a mask for inner turbulence, and on several occasions I saw for myself how quickly she could fall into dark, depressive moods, overcome by some indefinable anguish that would suddenly push her to the point of tears. Sachs protected her at those times, handling her with a tenderness and discretion that could be very moving, and I think Fanny learned to depend on him for that, to realize that no one was capable of understanding her as deeply as he did. More often than not, this compassion was expressed indirectly, in a language that outsiders couldn’t penetrate. The first time I went to their apartment, for example, the dinner conversation came around to the subject of children—whether or not to have them, when was the best time if you did, how many changes they caused, and so on. I remember talking strongly in favor of having them. Sachs, on the other hand, went into a long song and dance about why he disagreed. The arguments he used were fairly conventional (the world is too terrible a place, the population is too big, too much freedom would be lost), but he delivered them with such vehemence and conviction that I assumed he was speaking for Fanny as well and that both of them were dead-set against becoming parents. Years later, I discovered that just the opposite was true. They had desperately wanted to have children, but Fanny was unable to conceive. After numerous attempts to get her pregnant, they had consulted doctors, had tried fertility drugs, had gone through any number of herbal remedies, but nothing had helped. Just days before that dinner in 1975, they had been given definitive word that nothing they did would ever help. It was a crushing blow to Fanny. As she later confessed to me, it was her worst sorrow, a loss she would go on mourning for the rest of her life. Rather than make her talk about it in front of me that evening, Sachs had boiled up a concoction of spontaneous lies, a kettle of steam and hot air to obscure the issue on the table. I heard only a fragment of what he actually said, but that was because I thought he was addressing his remarks to me. As I later understood, he had been talking to Fanny all along. He was telling her that she didn’t have to give him a child to make him go on loving her.
I saw Ben more often than I saw Fanny, and the times when I did see her Ben was always there, but little by little we managed to form a friendship on our own. In some ways, my old infatuation made this closeness seem inevitable, but it also stood as a barrier between us, and several months went by before I was able to look at her without feeling embarrassed. Fanny was an ancient daydream, a phantom of secret desire buried in my past, and now that she had unexpectedly materialized in a new role—as flesh-and-blood woman, as wife of my friend—I admit that I was thrown off balance. It led me to say some stupid things when I first met her, and these blunders only compounded my sense of guilt and confusion. During one of the early evenings I spent at their apartment, I even told her that I hadn’t listened to a single word in the class we had taken together. “Every week, I would spend the whole hour staring at you,” I said. “Practice is more important than theory, after all, and I figured why waste my time listening to lectures on aesthetics when the beautiful was sitting there right in front of me.”
It was an attempt to apologize for my past behavior, I think, but it came out sounding awful. Such things should never be said under any circumstances, least of all in a flippant tone of voice. They put a terrible burden on the person they’re addressed to, and no good can possibly come of them. The moment I spoke those words, I could see that Fanny was startled by my bluntness. “Yes,” she said, forcing a little smile, “I remember that class. It was pretty dry stuff.”
“Men are monsters,” I said, unable to stop myself. “They have ants in their pants, and their heads are crammed with filth. Especially when they’re young.”
“Not filth,” Fanny said. “Just hormones.”
“Those too. But sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.”
“You always wore an earnest look on your face,” she said. “I remember thinking that you must have been a very serious person. One of those young men who was either going to kill himself or change the world.”
“So far, I haven’t done either. I guess that means I’ve given up my old ambitions.”
“And a good thing, too. You don’t want to get stuck in the past. Life is too interesting for that.”
In her own cryptic way, Fanny was letting me off the hook—and also giving me a warning. As long as I behaved myself, she wouldn’t hold my past sins against me. It made me feel as though I were on trial, but the fact was that she had every reason to be wary of her husband’s new friend, and I don’t blame her for keeping me at a distance. As we got to know each other better, the awkwardness began to fade. Among other things, we discovered that we had the same birthday, and though neither one of us had any use for astrology, the coincidence helped to form a link between us. That Fanny was a year older than I was allowed me to treat her with mock deference whenever the subject came up, a standing gag that never failed to get a laugh out of her. Since she was not someone who laughed readily, I took it as a sign of progress on my part. More importantly, there was her work, and my discussions with her about early American painting led to an abiding passion for such artists as Ryder, Church, Blakelock, and Cole—who were scarcely even known to me before I met Fanny. She defended her dissertation at Columbia in the fall of 1975 (one of the first monographs to be published on Albert Pinkham Ryder) and was then hired as an assistant curator of American art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she has continued to work ever since. As I write these words now (July 11), she still has no idea what happened to Ben. She went off on a trip to Europe last month and isn’t scheduled to return until after Labor Day. I suppose it would be possible for me to contact her, but I don’t see what purpose that would serve. There isn’t a damned thing s
he can do for him at this point, and unless the FBI comes up with an answer before she returns, it’s probably best that I keep it to myself. At first, I thought it might be my duty to call her, but now that I’ve had time to mull it over, I’ve decided not to ruin her vacation. She’s been through enough as it is, and the telephone is hardly an appropriate way to break this kind of news. I’ll hold off until she comes back, and then I’ll sit her down and tell her what I know in person.
Remembering the early days of the friendship now, I am struck most of all by how much I admired the two of them, both separately and as a couple. Sachs’s book had made a deep impression on me, and beyond simply liking him for who he was, I was flattered by the interest he took in my work. He was only two years older than I was, and yet compared to what he had accomplished so far, I felt like a rank beginner. I had missed the reviews of The New Colossus, but by all accounts the book had generated a good deal of excitement. Some critics slammed it—largely on political grounds, condemning Sachs for what they saw as his blatant “anti-Americanism”—but there were others who raved, calling him one of the most promising young novelists to have come along in years. Not much happened on the commercial front (sales were modest, it took two years before a paperback was published), but Sachs’s name had been put on the literary map. One would think he would have been gratified by all this, but as I quickly learned about him, Sachs could be maddeningly oblivious when it came to such things. He rarely talked about himself in the way other writers do, and my sense was that he had little or no interest in pursuing what people refer to as a “literary career.” He wasn’t competitive, he wasn’t worried about his reputation, he wasn’t puffed up about his talent. That was one of the things that most appealed to me about him: the purity of his ambitions, the absolute simplicity of the way he approached his work. It sometimes made him stubborn and cantankerous, but it also gave him the courage to do exactly what he wanted to do. After the success of his first novel, he immediately started to write another, but once he was a hundred pages into it, he tore up the manuscript and burned it. Inventing stories was a sham, he said, and just like that he decided to give up fiction writing. This was some time in late 1973 or early 1974, about a year before I met him. He began writing essays after that, all kinds of essays and articles on a countless variety of subjects: politics, literature, sports, history, popular culture, food, whatever he felt like thinking about that week or that day. His work was in demand, so he never had trouble finding magazines to publish his pieces, but there was something indiscriminate in the way he went about it. He wrote with equal fervor for national magazines and obscure literary journals, hardly noticing that some publications paid large sums of money for articles and others paid nothing at all. He refused to work with an agent, feeling that would corrupt the process, and therefore he earned considerably less than he should have. I argued with him on this point for many years, but it wasn’t until the early eighties that he finally broke down and hired someone to do his negotiating for him.
I was always astonished by how quickly he worked, by his ability to crank out articles under the pressure of deadlines, to produce so much without seeming to exhaust himself. It was nothing for Sachs to write ten or twelve pages at a single sitting, to start and finish an entire piece without once standing up from his typewriter. Work was like an athletic contest for him, an endurance race between his body and his mind, but since he was able to bear down on his thoughts with such concentration, to think with such unanimity of purpose, the words always seemed to be there for him, as if he had found a secret passageway that ran straight from his head to the tips of his fingers. “Typing for Dollars,” he sometimes called it, but that was only because he couldn’t resist making fun of himself. His work was never less than good, I thought, and more often than not it was brilliant. The better I got to know him, the more his productivity awed me. I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand. Language has never been accessible to me in the way that it was for Sachs. I’m shut off from my own thoughts, trapped in a no-man’s-land between feeling and articulation, and no matter how hard I try to express myself, I can rarely come up with more than a confused stammer. Sachs never had any of these difficulties. Words and things matched up for him, whereas for me they are constantly breaking apart, flying off in a hundred different directions. I spend most of my time picking up the pieces and gluing them back together, but Sachs never had to stumble around like that, hunting through garbage dumps and trash bins, wondering if he hadn’t fit the wrong pieces next to each other. His uncertainties were of a different order, but no matter how hard life became for him in other ways, words were never his problem. The act of writing was remarkably free of pain for him, and when he was working well, he could put words down on the page as fast as he could speak them. It was a curious talent, and because Sachs himself was hardly even aware of it, he seemed to live in a state of perfect innocence. Almost like a child, I sometimes thought, like a prodigious child playing with his toys.
2
The initial phase of our friendship lasted for approximately a year and a half. Then, within several months of each other, we both left the Upper West Side, and another chapter began. Fanny and Ben went first, moving to an apartment in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. It was a roomier, more comfortable place than Fanny’s old student digs near Columbia, and it put her within walking distance of her job at the museum. That was the fall of 1976. In the time that elapsed between their finding the apartment and moving into it, my wife Delia discovered that she was pregnant. Almost at once, we began making plans to move as well. Our place on Riverside Drive was too cramped to accommodate a child, and with things already growing rocky between us, we figured we might have a better chance if we left the city altogether. I was translating books full-time by then, and as far as work was concerned, it made no difference where we lived.
I can’t say that I have any desire to talk about my first marriage now. To the extent that it touches on Sachs’s story, however, I don’t see how I can entirely avoid the subject. One thing leads to another, and whether I like it or not, I’m as much a part of what happened as anyone else. If not for the breakup of my marriage to Delia Bond, I never would have met Maria Turner, and if I hadn’t met Maria Turner, I never would have known about Lillian Stern, and if I hadn’t known about Lillian Stern, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this book. Each one of us is connected to Sachs’s death in some way, and it won’t be possible for me to tell his story without telling each of our stories at the same time. Everything is connected to everything else, every story overlaps with every other story. Horrible as it is for me to say it, I understand now that I’m the one who brought all of us together. As much as Sachs himself, I’m the place where everything begins.
The sequence breaks down like this: I pursued Delia off and on for seven years (1967–1974), I convinced her to marry me (1975), we moved to the country (March 1977), our son David was born (June 1977), we separated (November 1978). During the eighteen months I was out of New York, I stayed in close touch with Sachs, but we saw each other less often than before. Postcards and letters took the place of late-night talks in bars, and our contacts were necessarily more circumscribed and formal. Fanny and Ben occasionally drove up to spend weekends with us in the country, and Delia and I visited their house in Vermont for a short stretch one summer, but these get-togethers lacked the anarchic and improvisational quality of our meetings in the past. Still, it wasn’t as if the friendship suffered. Every now and then I would have to go down to New York on business: delivering manuscripts, signing contracts, picking up new work, discussing projects with editors. This happened two or three times a month, and whenever I was there I
would spend the night at Fanny and Ben’s place in Brooklyn. The stability of their marriage had a calming effect on me, and if I was able to keep some semblance of sanity during that period, I think they were at least partly responsible for it. Going back to Delia the next morning could be difficult, however. The spectacle of domestic happiness I had just witnessed made me understand how seriously I had botched things for myself. I began to dread plunging back into my own turmoil, the deep thickets of disorder that had grown up all around me.
