by Paul Auster
Maria had brought along her camera that day, and she took a number of photographs of Lillian during the time they spent together. When she told me the story three years later, she spread out these pictures in front of me as we talked. There must have been thirty or forty of them, full-size black-and-white photographs that caught Lillian from a variety of angles and distances—some of them posed, some of them not. These portraits were my one and only encounter with Lillian Stern. More than ten years have gone by since that day, but I have never forgotten the experience of looking at those pictures. The impression they made on me was that strong, that lasting.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Maria said.
“Yes, extremely beautiful,” I said.
“She was on her way out to buy groceries when we bumped into each other. You see what she’s wearing. A sweatshirt, blue jeans, old sneakers. She was dressed for one of those five-minute dashes to the corner store and then back again. No makeup, no jewelry, no props. And still she’s beautiful. Enough to take your breath away.”
“It’s her darkness,” I said, searching for an explanation. “Women with dark features don’t need a lot of makeup. You see how round her eyes are. The long lashes set them off. And her bones are good, too, we mustn’t forget that. Bones make all the difference.”
“It’s more than that, Peter. There’s a certain inner quality that’s always coming to the surface with Lillian. I don’t know what to call it. Happiness, grace, animal spirits. It makes her seem more alive than other people. Once she catches your attention, it’s hard to stop looking at her.”
“You get the feeling that she’s comfortable in front of the camera.”
“Lillian’s always comfortable. She’s completely relaxed in her own skin.”
I flipped through some more of the photographs and came to a sequence that showed Lillian standing in front of an open closet, in various stages of undress. In one picture, she was taking off her blue jeans; in another, she was removing her sweatshirt; in the next one, she was down to a pair of minuscule white panties and a white sleeveless undershirt; in the next, the panties were gone; in the next one after that, the undershirt was gone as well. Several nude shots followed. In the first, she was facing the camera, head thrown back, laughing, her small breasts almost flattened against her chest, taut nipples protruding over the horizon; her pelvis was thrust forward, and she was clutching the meat of her inner thighs with her two hands, her thatch of dark pubic hair framed by the whiteness of her curled fingers. In the next one she was turned the other way, ass front, jutting her hip to one side and looking over her other shoulder at the camera, still laughing, striking the classic pinup pose. She was clearly enjoying herself, clearly delighted by the opportunity to show herself off.
“This is pretty racy stuff,” I said. “I didn’t know you took girlie pictures.”
“We were getting ready to go out for dinner, and Lillian wanted to change her clothes. I followed her into the bedroom so we could continue talking. I still had my camera with me, and when she started to undress, I took some more pictures. It just happened. I wasn’t planning to do it until I saw her peeling off her clothes.”
“And she didn’t mind?”
“It doesn’t look like she minded, does it?”
“Did it turn you on?”
“Of course it did. I’m not made of wood, you know.”
“What happened next? You didn’t sleep together, did you?”
“Oh no, I’m too much of a prude for that.”
“I’m not trying to force a confession out of you. Your friend looks pretty irresistible to me. As much to women as to men, I would think.”
“I admit that I was aroused. If Lillian had made some kind of move then, maybe something would have happened. I’ve never slept with another woman, but that day with her, I might have done it. It crossed my mind, in any case, and that’s the only time I ever felt like that. But Lillian was just fooling around for the camera, and it never got any farther than the strip-tease. It was all in fun, and both of us were laughing the whole time.”
“Did you ever get around to showing her the address book?”
“Eventually. I think it was after we came back from the restaurant. Lillian spent a long time looking through it, but she couldn’t really say who it belonged to. It had to be a client, of course. Lilli was the name she used for her work, but beyond that she wasn’t sure.”
“It narrowed down the list of possibilities, though.”
“True, but it might not have been someone she’d met. A potential client, for example. Maybe one of Lillian’s satisfied customers had passed on her name to someone else. A friend, a business associate, who knows. That’s how Lillian got her new clients, by word of mouth. The man wrote down her name in his book, but that doesn’t mean he’d gotten around to calling her yet. Maybe the man who’d given him the name hadn’t called either. Hookers circulate like that—their names ripple out in concentric circles, weird networks of information. For some men, it’s enough to carry around a name or two in their little black book. For future reference, as it were. In case their wife leaves them, or for sudden fits of horniness or frustration.”
“Or when they happen to be passing through town.”
“Exactly.”
“Still, you had your first clues. Until Lillian turned up, the owner of the book could have been anyone. At least you had a fighting chance now.”
“I suppose. But things didn’t work out that way. Once I started talking to Lillian, the whole project changed.”
“You mean she wouldn’t give you the list of her clients?”
“No, nothing like that. She would have done it if I’d asked her.”
“What was it, then?”
“I’m not quite sure how it happened, but the more we talked, the more definite our plan became. It didn’t come from either one of us. It was just floating in the air, a thing that already seemed to exist. Running into each other had a lot to do with it, I think. It was all so wonderful and unexpected, we were sort of beside ourselves. You have to understand how close we’d been. Bosom buddies, sisters, pals for life. We really cared about each other, and I thought I knew Lillian as well as I knew myself. And then what happens? After five years, I discover that my best friend has turned into a whore. It knocked me off balance. I felt awful about it, almost as if I’d been betrayed. But at the same time—and this is where it starts to get murky—I realized that I envied her, too. Lillian hadn’t changed. She was the same terrific kid I’d always known. Crazy, full of mischief, exciting to be with. She didn’t think of herself as a slut or fallen woman, her conscience was clear. That was what impressed me so much: her absolute inner freedom, the way she lived by her own rules and didn’t give a damn what anybody thought. I had already done some fairly excessive things myself by then. The New Orleans project, the ‘Naked Lady’ project, I was pushing myself a little farther along each time, testing the limits of what I was capable of. But next to Lillian I felt like some spinster librarian, a pathetic virgin who hadn’t done much of anything. I thought to myself: If she can do it, why can’t I?”
“You’re kidding.”
“Wait, let me finish. It was more complicated than that. When I told Lillian about the address book and the people I was going to talk to, she thought it was fantastic, the greatest thing she’d ever heard. She wanted to help me. She wanted to go around and talk to the people in the book, just like I was going to do. She was an actress, remember, and the idea of pretending to be me got her all worked up. She was positively inspired.”
“So you switched. Is that what you’re trying to tell me? Lillian talked you into trading places with her.”
“No one talked anyone into anything. We decided on it together.”
“Still …”
“Still nothing. We were equal partners from beginning to end. And the fact was, Lillian’s life changed because of it. She fell in love with one of the people in the book and wound up marrying him.”
“It was strange, all right. Lillian went out with one of my cameras and the address book, and the fifth or sixth person she saw was the man who became her husband. I knew there was a story hidden in that book—but it was Lillian’s story, not mine.”
“And you actually met this man? She wasn’t making it up?”
“I was their witness at the wedding in City Hall. As far as I know, Lillian never told him how she’d been earning her living, but why should he have to know? They live in Berkeley, California, now. He’s a college teacher, a terrifically nice guy.”
“And how did things turn out for you?”
“Not so well. Not so well at all. The same day that Lillian went off with my spare camera, she had an afternoon appointment with one of her regular clients. When he called that morning to confirm, she explained that her mother was sick and she had to leave town. She’d asked a friend to fill in for her, and if he didn’t mind seeing someone else this once, she guaranteed he wouldn’t regret it. I can’t remember her exact words, but that was the general drift. She gave me a big buildup, and after some gentle persuasion the man went along with it. So there I was, sitting alone in Lillian’s apartment that afternoon, waiting for the doorbell to ring, getting ready to fuck a man I’d never seen before. His name was Jerome, a squat little man in his forties with hair on his knuckles and yellow teeth. He was a salesman of some sort. Wholesale liquor, I think it was, but it might have been pencils or computers. It doesn’t make any difference. He rang the doorbell on the dot of three, and the moment he walked into the apartment, I realized I couldn’t go through with it. If he’d been halfway attractive, I might have been able to pluck up my courage, but with a charmer like Jerome it just wasn’t possible. He was in a hurry and kept looking at his watch, eager to get started, to get it over with and get out. I played along, not knowing what else to do, trying to think of something as we went into the bedroom and took off our clothes. Dancing naked in a topless bar had been one thing, but standing there with that fat, furry salesman was so intimate, I couldn’t even look him in the eyes. I’d hidden my camera in the bathroom, and I figured if I was going to get any pictures out of this fiasco, I’d have to act now. So I excused myself and trotted off to the potty, leaving the door open just a crack. I turned on both faucets in the sink, took out my loaded camera, and started snapping shots of the bedroom. I had a perfect angle. I could see Jerome sprawled out on the bed. He was looking up at the ceiling and wiggling his dick in his hand, trying to get a hard-on. It was disgusting, but also comical in some way, and I was glad to be getting it on film. I guessed there’d be time for ten or twelve pictures, but after I’d taken six or seven of them, Jerome suddenly bounced up from the bed, walked over to the bathroom, and yanked open the door before I had a chance to shut it. When he saw me standing there with the camera in my hands, he went crazy. I mean really crazy, out of his mind. He started yelling, accusing me of taking pictures so I could blackmail him and ruin his marriage, and before I knew it he’d snatched the camera from me and was smashing it against the bathtub. I tried to run away, but he grabbed hold of my arm before I could get out, and then he started pounding me with his fists. It was a nightmare. Two naked strangers, slugging it out in a pink tiled bathroom. He kept grunting and shouting as he hit me, yelling at the top of his lungs, and then he landed one that knocked me out. It broke my jaw, if you can believe it. But that was only part of the damage. I also had a broken wrist, a couple of cracked ribs, and bruises all over my body. I spent ten days in the hospital, and afterward my jaw was wired shut for six weeks. Little Jerome beat me to a pulp. He kicked the living shit out of me.”
When I met Maria at Sachs’s apartment in 1979, she hadn’t slept with a man in close to three years. It took her that long to recover from the shock of the beating, and abstinence was not a choice so much as a necessity, the only possible cure. As much as the physical humiliation she had suffered, the incident with Jerome had been a spiritual defeat. For the first time in her life, Maria had been chastened. She had stepped over the boundaries of herself, and the brutality of that experience had altered her sense of who she was. Until then, she had imagined herself capable of anything: any adventure, any transgression, any dare. She had felt stronger than other people, immunized against the ravages and failures that afflict the rest of humanity. After the switch with Lillian, she learned how badly she had deceived herself. She was weak, she discovered, a person hemmed in by her own fears and inner constraints, as mortal and confused as anyone else.
It took three years to repair the damage (to the extent that it was ever repaired), and when we crossed paths at Sachs’s apartment that night, she was more or less ready to emerge from her shell. If I was the one she offered her body to, it was only because I happened to come along at the right moment. Maria always scoffed at that interpretation, insisting that I was the only man she could have gone for, but I would be crazy to think it was because I possessed any supernatural charms. I was just one man among many possible men, damaged goods in my own right, and if I corresponded to what she was looking for just then, so much the better for me. She was the one who set the rules of our friendship, and I stuck to them as best I could, a willing accomplice to her whims and urgent demands. At Maria’s request, I agreed that we would never sleep together two nights in a row. I agreed that I would never talk to her about any other woman. I agreed that I would never ask her to introduce me to any of her friends. I agreed to act as though our affair were a secret, a clandestine drama to be hidden from the rest of the world. None of these restraints bothered me. I dressed in the clothes that Maria wanted me to wear, I indulged her appetite for odd meeting places (subway token booths, Off-Track Betting parlors, restaurant bathrooms), I ate the same color-coordinated meals that she did. Everything was play for Maria, a call to constant invention, and no idea was too outlandish not to be tried at least once. We made love with our clothes off and our clothes on, with lights and without lights, indoors and outdoors, on her bed and under it. We put on togas, caveman suits, and rented tuxedos. We pretended to be strangers, we pretended to be married. We acted out doctor-and-nurse routines, waitress-and-customer routines, teacher-and-student routines. It was all fairly childish, I suppose, but Maria took these escapades seriously—not as diversions but as experiments, studies in the shifting nature of the self. If she hadn’t been so earnest, I doubt that I could have carried on with her in the way I did. I saw other women during that time, but Maria was the only one who meant anything to me, the only one who is still part of my life today.
In September of that year (1979), someone finally bought the house in Dutchess County, and Delia and David moved back to New York, settling into a brownstone apartment in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn. This made things both better and worse for me. I was able to see my son more often, but it also meant more frequent contacts with my soon-to-be ex-wife. Our divorce was well under way by then, but Delia was starting to have misgivings, and in those last months before the papers went through, she made an obscure, halfhearted attempt to win me back. If there had been no David in the picture, I would have been able to resist this campaign without any trouble. But the little boy was clearly suffering from my absence, and I held myself responsible for his bad dreams, his bouts with asthma, his tears. Guilt is a powerful persuader, and Delia instinctively pushed all the right buttons whenever I was around. Once, for example, after a man she was acquainted with had come to her house for dinner, she reported to me that David had crawled into his lap and asked him if he was going to be his new father. Delia wasn’t throwing this incident in my face, she was simply sharing her concern with me, but each time I heard another one of these stories, I sank a little deeper into the quicksand of my remorse. It wasn’t that I wanted to live with Delia again, but I wondered if I shouldn’t resign myself to it, if I wasn’t destined to be married to her after all. I considered David’s welfare more important than my own, and yet for close to a year I h
ad been cavorting like an idiot with Maria Turner and the others, ignoring every thought that touched on the future. It was difficult to justify this life to myself. Happiness wasn’t the only thing that counted, I argued. Once you became a parent, there were duties that couldn’t be shirked, obligations that had to be fulfilled, no matter what the cost.
