by Paul Auster
“None of this ever shows.”
“That’s part of the problem. Fanny doesn’t talk enough. She bottles up things inside her, and when they do come out, it’s always in oblique ways. That only makes the situation worse. Half the time, she suffers without being aware of it.”
“Until last month, I always thought you had a perfect marriage.”
“We never know anything about anyone. I used to think the same thing about your marriage, and look what happened to you and Delia. It’s hard enough keeping track of ourselves. Once it comes to other people, we don’t have a clue.”
“But Fanny knows I love her. I must have said it a thousand times, and I’m sure she believes me. I can’t imagine that she doesn’t.”
“She does. And that’s why I think what happened is a good thing. You’ve helped her, Peter. You’ve done more for her than anyone else.”
“So now you’re thanking me for going to bed with your wife?”
“Why not? Because of you, there’s a chance that Fanny will start believing in herself again.”
“Just call Doctor Fixit, huh? He repairs broken marriages, mends wounded souls, saves couples in distress. No appointment necessary, house calls twenty-four hours a day. Dial our toll-free number now. That’s Doctor Fixit. He gives you his heart and asks for nothing in return.”
“I don’t blame you for feeling resentful. It can’t be a very good time for you now, but for whatever it’s worth, Fanny thinks you’re the greatest man who ever lived. She loves you. She’s never going to stop loving you.”
“Which doesn’t change the fact that she wants to go on being married to you.”
“It goes too far back, Peter. We’ve been through too much together. Our whole lives are bound up in it.”
“And where does that leave me?”
“Where you’ve always been. As my friend. As Fanny’s friend. As the person we care most about in the world.”
“So it starts up all over again.”
“If you want it to, yes. As long as you can stand it, it’s as if nothing has changed.”
I was suddenly on the verge of tears. “Just don’t blow it,” I said. “That’s all I’ve got to say to you. Just don’t blow it. Make sure you take good care of her. You’ve got to promise me that. If you don’t keep your word, I think I’ll kill you. I’ll hunt you down and strangle you with my own two hands.”
I stared down at my plate, struggling to keep myself under control. When I finally looked up again, I saw that Sachs was staring at me. His eyes were somber, his expression fixed in an attitude of pain. Before I could get up from the table to leave, he stretched out his right hand and held it in midair, unwilling to drop it until I took it in my own. “I promise,” he said, squeezing hard, steadily tightening his grip. “I give you my word.”
After that lunch, I no longer knew what to believe. Fanny had told me one thing, Sachs had told me another, and as soon as I accepted one story, I would have to reject the other. There wasn’t any alternative. They had presented me with two versions of the truth, two separate and distinct realities, and no amount of pushing and shoving could ever bring them together. I understood that, and yet at the same time I realized that both stories had convinced me. In the morass of sorrow and confusion that bogged me down over the next several months, I hesitated to choose between them. I don’t think it was a question of divided loyalties (although that might have been part of it), but rather a certainty that both Fanny and Ben had been telling me the truth. The truth as they saw it, perhaps, but nevertheless the truth. Neither one of them had been out to deceive me; neither one had intentionally lied. In other words, there was no universal truth. Not for them, not for anyone else. There was no one to blame or to defend, and the only justifiable response was compassion. I had looked up to them both for too many years not to feel disappointed by what I had learned, but I wasn’t disappointed only in them. I was disappointed in myself, I was disappointed in the world. Even the strongest were weak, I told myself; even the bravest lacked courage; even the wisest were ignorant.
I found it impossible to rebuff Sachs anymore. He had been so forthright during our conversation over lunch, so clear about wanting our friendship to continue, that I couldn’t bring myself to turn my back on him. But he had been wrong to assume that nothing would change between us. Everything had changed, and like it or not, our friendship had lost its innocence. Because of Fanny, we had each crossed over into the other’s life, had each made a mark on the other’s internal history, and what had once been pure and simple between us was now infinitely muddy and complex. Little by little, we began to adjust to these new conditions, but with Fanny it was another story. I kept my distance from her, always seeing Sachs alone, always begging off when he invited me to their house. I accepted the fact that she belonged with Ben, but that didn’t mean I was ready to see her. She understood my reluctance, I think, and though she continued to send me her love through Sachs, she never pressed me to do anything I didn’t want to do. It wasn’t until November that she finally called, a good six or seven months later. That was when she invited me to Thanksgiving dinner at Ben’s mother’s house in Connecticut. In the intervening half year, I had talked myself into thinking there had never been any hope for us, that even if she had left Ben to live with me, it wouldn’t have worked. That was a fiction, of course, and I have no way of knowing what would have happened, no way of knowing anything. But it helped to get me through those months without losing my mind, and when I suddenly heard Fanny’s voice again on the telephone, I figured the moment had come to test myself in a real situation. So David and I drove up to Connecticut and back, and I spent an entire day in her company. It wasn’t the happiest day I’ve ever spent, but I managed to survive it. Old wounds opened, I bled a little bit, but when I returned home that night with the sleeping David in my arms, I discovered that I was still more or less in one piece.
I don’t want to suggest that I accomplished this cure on my own. Once Maria returned to New York, she played a large part in holding me together, and I immersed myself in our private escapades with the same passion as before. Nor was she the only one. When Maria wasn’t available, I found still others to distract me from my broken heart. A dancer named Dawn, a writer named Laura, a medical student named Dorothy. At one time or another, each of them held a singular place in my affections. Whenever I stopped and examined my own behavior, I concluded that I wasn’t cut out for marriage, that my dreams of settling down with Fanny had been misguided from the start. I wasn’t a monogamous person, I told myself. I was too drawn by the mystery of first encounters, too infatuated with the theater of seduction, too hungry for the excitement of new bodies, and I couldn’t be counted on over the long haul. That was the logic I used on myself in any case, and it functioned as an effective smoke-screen between my head and my heart, between my groin and my intelligence. For the truth was that I had no idea what I was doing. I was out of control, and I fucked for the same reason that other men drink: to drown my sorrows, to dull my senses, to forget myself. I became homo erectus, a heathen phallus gone amok. Before long I was entangled in several affairs at once, juggling girlfriends like a demented acrobat, hopping in and out of different beds as often as the moon changes shape. In that this frenzy kept me occupied, I suppose it was successful medicine. But it was the life of a crazy person, and it probably would have killed me if it had lasted much longer than it did.
But there was more to it than just sex. I was working well, and my book was finally coming to the end. No matter how many disasters I created for myself, I managed to work through them, to push on without slackening my pace. My desk had become a sanctuary, and as long as I continued to sit there, struggling to find the next word, nothing could touch me anymore: not Fanny, not Sachs, not even myself. For the first time in all the years I had been writing, I felt as though I had caught fire. I couldn’t tell if the book was good or bad, but that no longer seemed important. I had stopped questioning myself. I was doing what I ha
d to do, and I was doing it in the only way that was possible for me. Everything else followed from that. It wasn’t that I began to believe in myself so much as that I was inhabited by a sublime indifference. I had become interchangeable with my work, and I accepted that work on its own terms now, understanding that nothing could relieve me of the desire to do it. This was the bedrock epiphany, the illumination in which doubt gradually dissolved. Even if my life fell apart, there would still be something to live for.
I finished Luna in mid-April, two months after my talk with Sachs in the restaurant. I kept my word and gave him the manuscript, and four days later he called to tell me that he’d finished it. To be more exact, he started shouting into the telephone, heaping me with such outlandish praise that I felt myself blush on the other end. I hadn’t dared to dream of a response like that. It so buoyed up my spirits that I was able to shrug off the disappointments that followed, and even as the book made the rounds of the New York publishing houses, collecting one rejection after another, I didn’t let it interfere with my work. Sachs’s encouragement made all the difference. He kept assuring me that I had nothing to worry about, that everything would work out in the end, and in spite of the evidence, I continued to believe him. I began writing a second novel. When Luna was finally taken (seven months and sixteen rejections later), I was already well into my new project. That happened in late November, just two days before Fanny invited me to Thanksgiving dinner in Connecticut. No doubt that contributed to my decision to go. I said yes to her because I’d just heard the news about my book. Success made me feel invulnerable, and I knew there would never be a better moment to face her.
Then came my meeting with Iris, and the madness of those two years abruptly ended. That was on February 23, 1981: three months after Thanksgiving, one year after Fanny and I cut off our affair, six years after my friendship with Sachs had begun. It strikes me as both strange and fitting that Maria Turner should have been the person who made that meeting possible. Again, it had nothing to do with intentionality, nothing to do with a conscious desire to make things happen. But things did happen, and if not for the fact that February twenty-third was the night that Maria’s second exhibition opened in a small gallery on Wooster Street, I’m certain that Iris and I never would have met. Decades would have passed before we found ourselves standing in the same room again, and by then the opportunity would have been lost. It’s not that Maria actually brought us together, but our meeting took place under her influence, so to speak, and I feel indebted to her because of that. Not to Maria as flesh-and-blood woman, perhaps, but to Maria as the reigning spirit of chance, as goddess of the unpredictable.
Because our affair continued to be a secret, there was no question of my serving as her escort that night. I showed up at the gallery just like any other guest, gave Maria a quick kiss of congratulations, and then stood among the crowd with a plastic cup in my hand, sipping cheap white wine as I scanned the room for familiar faces. I didn’t see anyone I knew. At one point, Maria looked over in my direction and winked, but other than the brief smile I threw her in return, I kept my end of the bargain and avoided contact with her. Less than five minutes after that wink, someone came up from behind and tapped me on the shoulder. It was a man named John Johnston, a passing acquaintance whom I hadn’t seen in a number of years. Iris was standing next to him, and after he and I exchanged greetings, he introduced us to each other. Based on her appearance, I gathered that she was a fashion model—an error that most people still make when seeing her for the first time. Iris was just twenty-four back then, a dazzling blond presence, six feet tall with an exquisite Scandinavian face and the deepest, merriest blue eyes to be found between heaven and hell. How could I have guessed that she was a graduate student in English literature at Columbia University? How could I have known that she had read more books than I had and was about to begin a six-hundred-page dissertation on the works of Charles Dickens?
Since I assumed that she and Johnston were intimate friends, I shook her hand politely and did my best not to stare at her. Johnston had been married to someone else the last time I’d seen him, but I figured he was divorced now, and I didn’t question him about it. As it happened, he and Iris scarcely knew each other. The three of us talked for several minutes, and then Johnston suddenly turned around and started talking to someone else, leaving me alone with Iris. It was only then that I began to suspect how casual their relations were. Unaccountably, I pulled out my wallet and showed her some snapshots of David, bragging about my little son as though he were a well-known public figure. To listen to Iris recall that evening now, it was at that moment that she decided she was in love with me, that she understood I was the person she was going to marry. It took me a little longer to understand how I felt about her, but only by a few hours. We continued talking over dinner in a nearby restaurant and then on through drinks at yet another place. It must have been past eleven o’clock by the time we finished. I waved down a cab for her on the street, but before I opened the door to let her in, I reached out and grabbed her, drawing her close to me and kissing her deep inside the mouth. It was one of the most impetuous things I have ever done, a moment of insane, unbridled passion. The cab drove off, and Iris and I continued standing in the middle of the street, wrapped in each other’s arms. It was as though we were the first people who had ever kissed, as though we invented the art of kissing together that night. By the next morning, Iris had become my happy ending, the miracle that had fallen down on me when I was least expecting it. We took each other by storm, and nothing has ever been the same for me since.
Sachs was my best man at the wedding in June. There was a dinner after the ceremony, and about halfway through the meal he stood up from the table to make a toast. It turned out to be very short, and because he said so little, I can bring back every word of it. “I’m taking this out of the mouth of William Tecumseh Sherman,” he said. “I hope the general doesn’t mind, but he got there before I did, and I can’t think of a better way to express it.” Then, turning in my direction, Sachs lifted his glass and said: “Grant stood by me when I was crazy. I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other always.”
3
The era of Ronald Reagan began. Sachs went on doing what he had always done, but in the new American order of the 1980s, his position became increasingly marginalized. It wasn’t that he had no audience, but it grew steadily smaller, and the magazines that published his work became steadily more obscure. Almost imperceptibly, Sachs came to be seen as a throwback, as someone out of step with the spirit of the time. The world had changed around him, and in the present climate of selfishness and intolerance, of moronic, chest-pounding Americanism, his opinions sounded curiously harsh and moralistic. It was bad enough that the Right was everywhere in the ascendant, but even more disturbing to him was the collapse of any effective opposition to it. The Democratic Party had caved in; the Left had all but disappeared; the press was mute. All the arguments had suddenly been appropriated by the other side, and to raise one’s voice against it was considered bad manners. Sachs continued to make a nuisance of himself, to speak out for what he had always believed in, but fewer and fewer people bothered to listen. He pretended not to care, but I could see that the battle was wearing him down, that even as he tried to take comfort from the fact that he was right, he was gradually losing faith in himself.
If the movie had been made, it might have turned things around for him. But Fanny’s prediction proved to be correct, and after six or eight months of revisions, renegotiations, and ditherings back and forth, the producer finally let the project drop. It’s difficult to gauge the full extent of Sachs’s disappointment. On the surface, he affected a jocular attitude about the whole business, cracking jokes, telling Hollywood stories, laughing about the large sums of money he had earned. This might or might not have been a bluff, but I’m convinced that a part of him had set great store in the possibility of seeing his book turned into a film. Unlike some writers, Sachs bore
no grudge against popular culture, and he had never felt any conflict about the project. It wasn’t a question of compromising himself, it was an opportunity to reach large numbers of people, and he didn’t hesitate when the offer came. Although he never said it in so many words, I sensed that the call from Hollywood had flattered his vanity, stunning him with a brief, intoxicating whiff of power. It was a perfectly normal response, but Sachs was never easy on himself, and chances are that he later regretted these overblown dreams of glory and success. That would have made it more difficult for him to talk about his true feelings once the project failed. He had looked to Hollywood as a way to escape the impending crisis growing inside him, and once it became clear that there was no escape, I believe he suffered a lot more than he ever let on.
All this is speculation. As far as I could tell, there were no abrupt or radical shifts in Sachs’s behavior. His work schedule was the same mad scramble of overcommitments and deadlines, and once the Hollywood episode was behind him, he went on producing as much as ever, if not more. Articles, essays, and reviews continued to pour out of him at a staggering rate, and I suppose it could be argued that far from having lost his direction, he was in fact barreling ahead at full tilt. If I question this optimistic portrait of Sachs during those years, it’s only because I know what happened later. Immense changes occurred inside him, and while it’s simple enough to pinpoint the moment when these changes began—to zero in on the night of his accident and blame everything on that freakish occurrence—I no longer believe that explanation is adequate. Is it possible for someone to change overnight? Can a man fall asleep as one person and then wake up as another? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t be willing to bet on it. It’s not that the accident wasn’t serious, but there are a thousand different ways in which a person can respond to a brush with death. That Sachs responded in the way he did doesn’t mean I think he had any choice in the matter. On the contrary, I look on it as a reflection of his state of mind before the accident ever took place. In other words, even if Sachs seemed to be doing more or less well just then, even if he was only dimly aware of his own distress during the months and years that preceded that night, I am convinced that he was in a very bad way. I have no proof to offer in support of this statement—except the proof of hindsight. Most men would have considered themselves lucky to have lived through what happened to Sachs that evening and then shrugged it off. But Sachs didn’t, and the fact that he didn’t—or, more precisely, the fact that he couldn’t—suggests that the accident did not change him so much as make visible what had previously been hidden. If I’m wrong about this, then everything I’ve written so far is rubbish, a heap of irrelevant musings. Perhaps Ben’s life did break in two that night, dividing into a distinct before and after—in which case everything from before can be struck from the record. But if that’s true, it would mean that human behavior makes no sense. It would mean that nothing can ever be understood about anything.
