by Paul Auster
She had grown up in Holyoke, Massachusetts, the only child of parents who divorced when she was six. After graduating from high school in 1970, she had gone down to New York with the idea of attending art school and becoming a painter, but she lost interest after one term and dropped out. She bought herself a secondhand Dodge van and took off on a tour of the American continent, staying for exactly two weeks in each state, finding temporary work along the way whenever possible—waitressing jobs, migrant farm jobs, factory jobs, earning just enough to keep her going from one place to the next. It was the first of her mad, compulsive projects, and in some sense it stands as the most extraordinary thing she ever did: a totally meaningless and arbitrary act to which she devoted almost two years of her life. Her only ambition was to spend fourteen days in every state, and beyond that she was free to do whatever she wanted. Doggedly and dispassionately, never questioning the absurdity of her task, Maria stuck it out to the end. She was just nineteen when she started, a young girl entirely on her own, and yet she managed to fend for herself and avoid major catastrophes, living the sort of adventure that boys her age only dream of. At one point in her travels, a co-worker gave her an old thirty-five-millimeter camera, and without any prior training or experience, she began taking photographs. When she saw her father in Chicago a few months after that, she told him that she had finally found something she liked doing. She showed him some of her photographs, and on the strength of those early attempts, he offered to make a bargain with her. If she went on taking photographs, he said, he would cover her expenses until she was in a position to support herself. It didn’t matter how long it took, but she wasn’t allowed to quit. That was the story she told me in any case, and I never had grounds to disbelieve it. All during the years of our affair, a deposit of one thousand dollars showed up in Maria’s account on the first of every month, wired directly from a bank in Chicago.
She returned to New York, sold her van, and moved into the loft on Duane Street, a large empty room located on the floor above a wholesale egg-and-butter business. The first months were lonely and disorienting for her. She had no friends, no life to speak of, and the city seemed menacing and unfamiliar, as if she had never been there before. Without any conscious motives, she began following strangers around the streets, choosing someone at random when she left her house in the morning and allowing that choice to determine where she went for the rest of the day. It became a method of acquiring new thoughts, of filling up the emptiness that seemed to have engulfed her. Eventually, she began going out with her camera and taking pictures of the people she followed. When she returned home in the evening, she would sit down and write about where she had been and what she had done, using the strangers’ itineraries to speculate about their lives and, in some cases, to compose brief, imaginary biographies. That was more or less how Maria stumbled into her career as an artist. Other works followed, all of them driven by the same spirit of investigation, the same passion for taking risks. Her subject was the eye, the drama of watching and being watched, and her pieces exhibited the same qualities one found in Maria herself: meticulous attention to detail, a reliance on arbitrary structures, patience bordering on the unendurable. In one work, she hired a private detective to follow her around the city. For several days, this man took pictures of her as she went about her rounds, recording her movements in a small notebook, omitting nothing from the account, not even the most banal and transitory events: crossing the street, buying a newspaper, stopping for a cup of coffee. It was a completely artificial exercise, and yet Maria found it thrilling that anyone should take such an active interest in her. Microscopic actions became fraught with new meaning, the driest routines were charged with uncommon emotion. After several hours, she grew so attached to the detective that she almost forgot she was paying him. When he handed in his report at the end of the week and she studied the photographs of herself and read the exhaustive chronologies of her movements, she felt as if she had become a stranger, as if she had been turned into an imaginary being.
For her next project, Maria took a temporary job as a chambermaid in a large midtown hotel. The point was to gather information about the guests, but not in any intrusive or compromising way. She intentionally avoided them in fact, restricting herself to what could be learned from the objects scattered about their rooms. Again she took photographs; again she invented life stories for them based on the evidence that was available to her. It was an archeology of the present, so to speak, an attempt to reconstitute the essence of something from only the barest fragments: a ticket stub, a torn stocking, a blood stain on the collar of a shirt. Some time after that, a man tried to pick up Maria on the street. She found him distinctly unattractive and rebuffed him. That same evening, by pure coincidence, she ran into him at a gallery opening in SoHo. They talked once again, and this time she learned from the man that he was leaving the next morning on a trip to New Orleans with his girlfriend. Maria would go there as well, she decided, and follow him around with her camera for the entire length of his visit. She had absolutely no interest in him, and the last thing she was looking for was an amorous adventure. Her intention was to keep herself hidden, to resist all contact with him, to explore his outward behavior and make no effort to interpret what she saw. The next morning, she caught a flight from LaGuardia to New Orleans, checked into a hotel, and bought herself a black wig. For three days she made inquiries at dozens of hotels, trying to track down the man’s whereabouts. She discovered him at last, and for the rest of the week she walked behind him like a shadow, taking hundreds of photographs, documenting every place he went to. She kept a written diary as well, and when the time came for him to go back to New York, she returned on an earlier flight—in order to be waiting at the airport for a last sequence of pictures as he stepped off the plane. It was a complex and disturbing experience for her, and it left her feeling that she had abandoned her life for a kind of nothingness, as though she had been taking pictures of things that weren’t there. The camera was no longer an instrument that recorded presences, it was a way of making the world disappear, a technique for encountering the invisible. Desperate to undo the process she had set in motion, Maria launched into a new project just days after returning to New York. Walking through Times Square with her camera one afternoon, she got into a conversation with the doorman of a topless go-go bar. The weather was warm, and Maria was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, an unusually skimpy outfit for her. But she had gone out that day in order to be noticed. She wanted to affirm the reality of her body, to make heads turn, to prove to herself that she still existed in the eyes of others. Maria was well put together, with long legs and attractive breasts, and the whistles and lewd remarks she received that day helped to revive her spirits. The doorman told her that she was a pretty girl, just as pretty as the girls inside, and as their conversation continued, she suddenly found herself being offered a job. One of the dancers had called in sick, he said, and if she wanted to fill in for her, he’d introduce her to the boss and see if something couldn’t be worked out. Scarcely pausing to think about it, Maria accepted. That was how her next work came into being, a piece that eventually came to be known as “The Naked Lady.” Maria asked a friend to come along that night and take pictures of her as she performed—not to show anyone, but for herself, in order to satisfy her own curiosity about what she looked like. She was consciously turning herself into an object, a nameless figure of desire, and it was crucial to her that she understand precisely what that object was. She only did it that once, working in twenty-minute shifts from eight o’clock in the evening until two in the morning, but she didn’t hold back, and the whole time she was onstage, perched behind the bar with colored strobe lights bouncing off her bare skin, she danced her heart out. Dressed in a rhinestone G-string and a pair of two-inch heels, she shook her body to loud rock and roll and watched the men stare at her. She wiggled her ass at them, she ran her tongue over her lips, she winked seductively as they slipped her dollar bills and urged her on.
As with everything else she tried, Maria was good at it. Once she got herself going, there was hardly any stopping her.
As far as I know, she went too far only once. That was in the spring of 1976, and the ultimate effects of her miscalculation proved to be catastrophic. At least two lives were lost, and even though it took years for that to happen, the connection between the past and the present is inescapable. Maria was the link between Sachs and Lillian Stern, and if not for Maria’s habit of courting trouble in whatever form she could find it, Lillian Stern never would have entered the picture. After Maria turned up at Sachs’s apartment in 1979, a meeting between Sachs and Lillian Stern became possible. It took several more unlikely twists before that possibility was realized, but each of them can be traced directly back to Maria. Long before any of us knew her, she went out one morning to buy film for her camera, saw a little black address book lying on the ground, and picked it up. That was the event that started the whole miserable story. Maria opened the book, and out flew the devil, out flew a scourge of violence, mayhem, and death.
It was one of those standard little address books manufactured by the Schaeffer Eaton Company, about six inches tall and four inches across, with a flexible imitation leather cover, spiral binding, and thumb tabs for each letter of the alphabet. It was a well-worn object, filled with over two hundred names, addresses, and telephone numbers. The fact that many of the entries had been crossed out and rewritten, that a variety of writing instruments had been used on almost every page (blue ballpoints, black felt tips, green pencils) suggested that it had belonged to the owner for a long time. Maria’s first thought was to return it, but as is often the case with personal property, the owner had neglected to write his name in the book. She searched in all the logical places—the inside front cover, the first page, the back—but no name was to be found. Not knowing what to do with it after that, she dropped the book into her bag and carried it home.
Most people would have forgotten about it, I think, but Maria wasn’t one to shy away from unexpected opportunities, to ignore the promptings of chance. By the time she went to bed that night, she had already come up with a plan for her next project. It would be an elaborate piece, much more difficult and complicated than anything she had attempted before, but the sheer scope of it threw her into a state of intense excitement. She was almost certain that the owner of the address book was a man. The handwriting had a masculine look to it; there were more listings for men than for women; the book was in ragged condition, as if it had been treated roughly. In one of those sudden, ridiculous flashes that everyone is prey to, she imagined that she was destined to fall in love with the owner of the book. It lasted only a second or two, but in that time she saw him as the man of her dreams: beautiful, intelligent, warm; a better man than she had ever loved before. The vision dispersed, but by then it was already too late. The book had been transformed into a magical object for her, a storehouse of obscure passions and unarticulated desires. Chance had led her to it, but now that it was hers, she saw it as an instrument of fate.
She studied the entries that first evening and found no names that were familiar to her. That was the perfect starting point, she felt. She would set out in the dark, knowing absolutely nothing, and one by one she would talk to all the people listed in the book. By finding out who they were, she would begin to learn something about the man who had lost it. It would be a portrait in absentia, an outline drawn around an empty space, and little by little a figure would emerge from the background, pieced together from everything he was not. She hoped that she would eventually track him down that way, but even if she didn’t, the effort would be its own reward. She wanted to encourage people to open up to her when she saw them, to tell her stories about enchantment and lust and falling in love, to confide their deepest secrets in her. She fully expected to work on these interviews for months, perhaps even for years. There would be thousands of photographs to take, hundreds of statements to transcribe, an entire universe to explore. Or so she thought. As it happened, the project was derailed after just one day.
With only one exception, every person in the book was listed under his or her last name. In among the Ls, however, there was an entry for someone named Lilli. Maria assumed it was a woman’s first name. If that were so, then this unique departure from the directory style could have been significant, a sign of some special intimacy. What if Lilli was the girlfriend of the man who had lost the address book? Or his sister, or even his mother? Rather than go through the names in alphabetical order as she had originally planned, Maria decided to jump ahead to L and pay a call on the mysterious Lilli first. If her hunch was correct, she might suddenly find herself in a position to learn who the man was.
She couldn’t approach Lilli directly. Too much hinged on the meeting, and she was afraid of destroying her chances by blundering into it unprepared. She had to get a sense of who this woman was before she talked to her, to see what she looked like, to follow her around for a while and discover what her habits were. On the first morning, she traveled uptown to the East Eighties to stake out Lilli’s apartment. She entered the vestibule of the small building to check the buzzers and mailboxes, and just then, as she began to study the list of names on the wall, a woman stepped out of the elevator and opened the inner door. Maria turned to look at her, but before the face had registered, she heard the woman speak her name. “Maria?” she said. The word was uttered as a question, and an instant later Maria understood that she was looking at Lillian Stern, her old friend from Massachusetts. “I can’t believe it,” Lillian said. “It’s really you, isn’t it?”
They hadn’t seen each other in more than five years. After Maria set off on her strange journey around America, they had lost contact, but until then they had been close, and their friendship went all the way back to childhood. In high school, they had been nearly inseparable, two offbeat girls struggling through adolescence together, plotting their escape from small-town life. Maria had been the serious one, the quiet intellectual, the one who had trouble making friends, whereas Lillian had been the girl with a reputation, the wild one who slept around and took drugs and played hooky from school. For all that, they were unshakable allies, and in spite of their differences there was much more that drew them together than pulled them apart. Maria once confessed to me that Lillian had been a great example to her, and it was only by knowing her that she had ever learned how to be herself. But the influence seemed to work both ways. Maria was the one who talked Lillian into moving down to New York after high school, and for the next several months they had shared a cramped, roach-filled apartment on the Lower East Side. While Maria went to art classes, Lillian studied acting and worked as a waitress. She also took up with a rock-and-roll drummer named Tom, and by the time Maria left New York in her van, he had become a permanent fixture in the apartment. She wrote Lillian a number of postcards during her two years on the road, but without an address there was no way that Lillian could write back. When Maria returned to the city, she did everything she could to find her friend, but someone else was living in the old apartment, and there was no listing for her in the phone book. She tried calling Lillian’s parents in Holyoke, but they had apparently moved to another town, and suddenly she was out of options. By the time she ran into Lillian in the vestibule that day, she had given up hope of ever seeing her again.
It was an extraordinary encounter for both of them. Maria told me that they both screamed, then fell into each other’s arms, then broke down and wept. Once they were able to talk again, they took the elevator upstairs and spent the rest of the day in Lillian’s apartment. There was so much catching up to do, Maria said, the stories just poured out of them. They ate lunch together, and then dinner, and by the time she went home and crawled into bed, it was close to three o’clock in the morning.
Curious things had happened to Lillian in those years, things that Maria never would have thought possible. My knowledge of them is only secondhand, but after talking to Sachs last summer, I believe
that the story Maria told me was essentially accurate. She could have been wrong about some of the minor details (as Sachs could have been), but in the long run that’s unimportant. Even if Lillian is not always to be trusted, even if her penchant for exaggeration is as pronounced as I’m told it is, the basic facts are not in question. At the time of her accidental meeting with Maria in 1976, Lillian had spent the past three years supporting herself as a prostitute. She entertained her clients in her apartment on East Eighty-seventh Street, and she worked entirely on her own—a part-time hustler with a thriving, independent business. All that is certain. What remains in doubt is exactly how it began. Her boyfriend Tom seems to have been involved in some way, but the full extent of his responsibility is unclear. In both versions of the story, Lillian described him as having a serious drug habit, an addiction to heroin that eventually got him thrown out of his band. According to the story Maria heard, Lillian remained desperately in love with him. She was the one who cooked up the idea herself, volunteering to sleep with other men in order to provide Tom with money. It was fast and painless, she discovered, and as long as she kept his connection happy, she knew that Tom would never leave her. At that point in her life, she said, she was willing to do anything to hold on to him, even if it meant going down the tubes herself. Eleven years later, she told Sachs something altogether different. Tom was the one who talked her into it, she said, and because she was scared of him, because he had threatened to kill her if she didn’t go along with it, she’d had no choice but to give in. In this second version, Tom was the one who arranged the appointments for her, literally pimping for his own girlfriend as a way to cover the costs of his addiction. In the end, I don’t suppose it matters which version was true. They were equally sordid, and they both led to the same result. After six or seven months, Tom vanished. In Maria’s story, he ran off with someone else; in Sachs’s story, he died of an overdose. One way or another, Lillian was alone again. One way or another, she continued sleeping with men to pay her bills. What astonished Maria was how matter-of-factly Lillian talked to her about it—with no shame or embarrassment. It was just a job like any other, she said, and when push came to shove, it was a damn sight better than serving drinks or waiting on tables. Men were going to drool wherever you went, and there was nothing you could do to stop them. It made a lot more sense to get paid for it than to fight them off—and besides, a little extra fucking never harmed anyone. If anything, Lillian was proud of how well she had done for herself. She met with clients only three days a week, she had money in the bank, she lived in a comfortable apartment in a good neighborhood. Two years earlier, she had enrolled in acting school again. She felt that she was making progress now, and in the past few weeks she had begun to audition for some parts, mostly in small downtown theaters. It wouldn’t be long before something came her way, she said. Once she managed to build up another ten or fifteen thousand dollars, she was planning to close down her business and pursue acting full-time. She was just twenty-four years old, after all, and everything was still in front of her.
