Leviathan

by Paul Auster

  “Is there something I can do for you?” he said.

  “Tom Mueller,” the man said. “San Francisco Chronicle. I wonder if I could have a word with Mrs. Dimaggio.”

  “Sorry. She’s not giving any interviews.”

  “I don’t want an interview, I just want to talk to her. My paper is interested in hearing her side of the story. We’re willing to pay for an exclusive article.”

  “Sorry, no dice. Mrs. Dimaggio isn’t talking to anyone.”

  “Don’t you think the lady should have a chance to turn me down herself?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “And who are you, Mrs. Dimaggio’s press agent?”

  “A friend of the family.”

  “I see. And you’re the one who does her talking for her.”

  “That’s right. I’m here to protect her from guys like you. Now that we’ve settled that question, I think it’s time for you to leave.”

  “And how would you suggest that I get in touch with her?”

  “You could write her a letter. That’s how it’s generally done.”

  “A good idea. I’ll write her a letter, and then you can throw it away before she reads it.”

  “Life is filled with disappointments, Mr. Mueller. And now if you don’t mind, I think it’s time for you to be on your way. I’m sure you don’t want me to call the police. But you are standing on Mrs. Dimaggio’s property, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know. Thanks a lot, pal. You’ve been a tremendous help.”

  “Don’t feel too bad. This too shall pass. In another week’s time, there won’t be a person in San Francisco who can remember what this story was about. If someone mentions Dimaggio to them, the only person they’ll think of is Joe.”

  That ended the conversation, but even after Mueller had left the yard, Sachs went on standing in front of the door, determined not to move until he had seen the man drive away. The reporter crossed the street, climbed into his car, and started the engine. As a farewell gesture, he raised the middle finger of his right hand as he drove by the house, but Sachs shrugged off the obscenity, understanding that it was unimportant, that it merely proved how well he had handled the confrontation. As he turned to go back inside, he couldn’t help smiling at the man’s anger. He didn’t feel like a press agent so much as a town marshal, and when all was said and done, it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant feeling.

  The moment he entered the house again, he looked up and saw Lillian standing at the top of the stairs. She was dressed in a white terrycloth robe, looking puffy-eyed and touseled, struggling to shake the sleep out of her system.

  “I suppose I should thank you for that,” she said, running a hand through her short hair.

  “Thank me for what?” Sachs said, feigning ignorance.

  “For getting rid of that guy. You were very smooth about it. I was impressed.”

  “That? Aw shucks. T’weren’t nothin’, ma’am. Just doin’ my job, that’s all. Just doin’ my job.”

  She smiled briefly at his dumb hick’s twang. “If that’s the job you want, then you can have it. You’re a lot better at it than I am.”

  “I told you I’m not all bad,” he said, speaking in his normal voice again. “If you give me a chance, I might even turn out to be useful.”

  Before she could answer this last remark, Maria came running into the hallway. Lillian shifted her eyes away from Sachs and said, “Hi, baby. You were up early, weren’t you?”

  “You’ll never guess what we’ve been doing,” the little girl said. “You won’t believe your eyes, Mommy.”

  “I’ll be down in a few minutes. I have to take a shower first and then put on some clothes. Remember, we’re going to Billie and Dot’s house today, and we don’t want to be late.”

  She disappeared upstairs again, and in the thirty or forty minutes it took her to get ready, Sachs and Maria resumed their assault on the living room. They rescued pillows and cushions from the floor, tossed out newspapers and coffee-soaked magazines, vacuumed up cigarette ashes from the interstices of the woolen rug. The more areas they were able to clear (progressively giving themselves more space to move in), the faster they were able to work, until, at the very end, they began to resemble two speeded-up characters in an old film.

  It would have been hard for Lillian not to notice the difference, but once she came downstairs, she responded with less enthusiasm than Sachs had thought she would—if only for Maria’s sake. “Nice,” she said, pausing briefly on the threshold and nodding her head, “very nice. I should remember to sleep late more often.” She smiled, she made her small show of gratitude, and then, scarcely bothering to glance around her, she strode on into the kitchen to look for something to eat.

  Sachs felt minimally assuaged by the kiss she planted on her daughter’s forehead, but once Maria had been shooed upstairs to change her clothes, he didn’t know what to do with himself anymore. Lillian paid only the scantest attention to him, moving about the kitchen in her own private world, and so he clung to his spot in the doorway, standing there in silence as she dug out a bag of real coffee from the freezer (which he had managed to overlook) and placed a kettle of water on the stove to boil. She was dressed in casual clothes—dark slacks, white turtleneck, flat shoes—but she had put on lipstick and eye shadow, and there was an unmistakable smell of perfume in the air. Again, Sachs had no idea how to interpret what was going on. Her behavior was unfathomable to him—one moment friendly, one moment closed off, one moment alert, one moment distracted—and the more he tried to make sense of it, the less he understood.

  Eventually, she invited him in for a cup of coffee, but even then she barely spoke, continuing to act as if she wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to be there or to vanish. For want of anything else to say, he started talking about the five thousand dollars he’d found on the table that morning, opening up the cupboard and pointing to where he had stored the cash. It didn’t seem to make much of an impression on her. “Oh,” she said, nodding at the sight of the money, and then she turned and gazed out the window into the backyard, drinking her coffee in silence. Undaunted, Sachs put down his cup and announced that he was going to give her that day’s installment. Without waiting for an answer, he went outside to his car and collected the money from the bowling bag in the trunk. When he returned to the kitchen three or four minutes later, she was still standing in the same position, staring out the window with one hand on her hip, following some secret train of thought. He walked right up to her, flapped the thousand dollars in her face, and asked her where he should put it. Wherever you like, she said. Her passivity was beginning to unnerve him, and so rather than place the money on the counter, Sachs went over to the refrigerator, opened the top door, and tossed the bills into the freezer. This produced the desired result. She turned to him with a puzzled look on her face and asked him why he had done that. Instead of answering her, he walked back to the cupboard, removed the original five thousand dollars from the shelf, and put that bundle in the freezer as well. Then, patting the freezer door, he turned to her and said: “Frozen assets. Since you won’t tell me if you want the money or not, we’ll just put your future on ice. Not bad, huh? We’ll bury your nest egg in the snow, and when spring comes and the ground starts to thaw, you’ll look in here and discover that you’re rich.”

  A vague smile began to form at the corners of her mouth, signaling that she had weakened, that he had managed to draw her into the game. She took another sip of coffee, buying herself a little time as she prepared her comeback. “It doesn’t sound like such a good investment to me,” she finally said. “If the money just sits there, it won’t collect any interest, will it?”

  “I’m afraid not. There’s no interest until you start to get interested. After that, the sky’s the limit.”

  “I haven’t said I’m not interested.”

  “True. But you haven’t said you are, either.”

  “As long as I don’t say no, it could be I’m saying yes.”

>   “Or it could be you aren’t saying anything. That’s why we shouldn’t talk about it anymore. Until you know what you want to do, we’ll keep our mouths shut, okay? We’ll just pretend it isn’t happening.”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  “Good. In other words, the less said the better.”

  “We won’t say a word. And one day I’ll open my eyes, and you won’t be there anymore.”

  “Exactly. The genie will crawl back into his bottle, and you’ll never have to think about him again.”

  His strategy seemed to have worked, but other than causing a general change in the mood, it was difficult to know what this conversation had accomplished. When Maria came bouncing into the kitchen a few moments later, decked out in a pink-and-white jumper and patent-leather shoes, he discovered that it had accomplished a great deal. Breathless and excited, she asked her mother if Sachs was going with them to Billie and Dot’s house. Lillian said no, he wasn’t, and Sachs was about to take that as his cue to drive off and look for a motel when Lillian added that he was nevertheless welcome to stay, that since she and Maria would be gone until late that night, there was no rush for him to leave the house. He could shower and shave if he wanted to, she said, and as long as he shut the door firmly behind him and made sure it was locked, it didn’t matter when he left. Sachs hardly knew how to respond to this offer. Before he could think of anything to say, Lillian had coaxed Maria into the downstairs bathroom to brush her hair, and by the time they came out again, it was somehow a foregone conclusion that they would be going before he did. All this struck Sachs as remarkable, a turnaround that defied understanding. But there it was, and the last thing he wanted to do was object. Less than five minutes later, Lillian and Maria were walking out the front door, and less than a minute after that, they were gone, driving down the street in their dusty blue Honda and vanishing into the bright midmorning sun.

  He spent close to an hour in the upstairs bathroom—first soaking in the tub, then shaving in front of the mirror. It was altogether odd to be there, he found, lying naked in the water as he stared up at Lillian’s things: the endless jars of creams and lotions, the lipstick containers and eye-liner bottles, the soaps and nail polishes and perfumes. There was a forced intimacy to it that both excited him and repulsed him. He had been allowed into her secret realm, the place where she enacted her most private rituals, and yet even here, sitting in the heart of her kingdom, he was no closer to her than he had been before. He could sniff and delve and touch all he liked. He could wash his hair with her shampoo, he could shave his beard with her razor, he could brush his teeth with her toothbrush—and yet the fact that she had let him do those things only proved how little they meant to her.

  Still, the bath relaxed him, made him feel almost drowsy, and for several minutes he wandered in and out of the upstairs rooms, absentmindedly drying his hair with a towel. There were three small bedrooms on the second floor. One of them was Maria’s, another belonged to Lillian, and the third, scarcely bigger than a large closet, had once evidently served as Dimaggio’s study or office. It was furnished with a desk and bookcase, but so much junk had been squeezed into its narrow confines (cardboard boxes, piles of old clothes and toys, a black-and-white television set) that Sachs did no more than poke his head in there before shutting the door again. He went into Maria’s room next, browsing among her dolls and books, the nursery school photos on the wall, the board games and stuffed animals. Disordered as the room was, it turned out to be in better shape than Lillian’s. That was the capital of mess, the headquarters of catastrophe. He took note of the unmade bed, the clumps of discarded clothes and underwear, the portable television crowned with two lipstick-stained coffee cups, the books and magazines scattered on the floor. Sachs scanned a few of the titles at his feet (an illustrated guide to Oriental massage, a study of reincarnation, a couple of paperback detective novels, a biography of Louise Brooks) and wondered if any conclusions could be drawn from this assortment. Then, almost in a trance, he began to pull open the drawers of the bureau and look through Lillian’s clothes, examining her panties and bras, her stockings and slips, holding each article in his hand for a moment before moving on to the next one. After doing the same with the things in the closet, he turned his attention to the bedside tables, suddenly remembering the threat she had made the night before. After looking on both sides of the bed, however, he concluded that she had been lying. There was no gun anywhere to be found.

  Lillian had disconnected the phone, and the instant he plugged it back into the wall, it started to ring. The sound made him jump, but rather than lift the receiver off the hook, he sat down on the bed and waited for the caller to give up. The phone rang another eighteen or twenty times. As soon as it stopped, Sachs grabbed the receiver and dialed Maria Turner’s number in New York. Now that she had talked to Lillian, he couldn’t put it off any longer. It wasn’t just a matter of clearing the air between them, it was a matter of clearing his own conscience. If nothing else, he owed her an explanation, an apology for having run out on her in the way he did.

  He knew that she would be angry, but he wasn’t prepared for the barrage of insults that followed. The moment she heard his voice, she started calling him names: idiot, bastard, double-crosser. He had never heard her talk like that before—not to anyone, not under any circumstances—and her fury became so large, so monumental, that several minutes passed before she allowed him to speak. Sachs was mortified. As he sat there listening to her, he finally understood what he had been too stupid to recognize in New York. Maria had fallen for him, and beyond all the obvious reasons for her attack (the suddenness of his departure, the affront of his ingratitude), she was talking to him like a jilted lover, like a woman who had been spurned for someone else. To make matters worse, she imagined that that someone else had once been her closest friend. Sachs struggled to disabuse her of this notion. He had gone to California for his own private reasons, he said, Lillian meant nothing to him, this wasn’t what she thought it was, and so on—but he made a clumsy job of it, and Maria accused him of lying. The conversation was in danger of turning ugly, but Sachs somehow managed to resist answering her, and in the end Maria’s pride won out over her anger, which meant that she no longer had the will to keep insulting him. She started to laugh at him instead, or perhaps laugh at herself, and then, without any perceptible transition, the laughter changed to tears, a fit of awful sobbing that made him feel every bit as wretched as she did. It took some time before the storm passed, but after that they were able to talk. Not that the talk led them anywhere, but at least the rancor was gone. Maria wanted him to call Fanny—just to let her know that he was alive—but Sachs wouldn’t do it. Contacting her would be risky, he said. Once they started to talk, he was bound to tell her about Dimaggio, and he didn’t want to implicate her in any of his troubles. The less she knew, the safer she would be, and why drag her into it when it wasn’t necessary? Because it was the right thing to do, Maria said. Sachs went through his argument all over again, and for the next half hour they continued to talk in circles, with neither one of them able to convince the other. There was no right and wrong anymore, only opinions and theories and interpretations, a swamp of conflicting words. For all the difference it made, they could just as well have kept those words to themselves.

  “It’s no use,” Maria finally said. “I’m not getting through to you, am I?”

  “I hear you,” Sachs answered. “It’s just that I don’t agree with what you’re saying.”

  “You’re only going to make things worse for yourself, Ben. The longer you keep it to yourself, the harder it’s going to be when you have to talk.”

  “I’m never going to have to talk.”

  “You can’t know that. They might find you, and then you won’t have any choice.”

  “They’re never going to find me. The only way that could happen is if someone tips them off, and you wouldn’t do that to me. At least I don’t think you would. I can trust you that far,
can’t I?”

  “You can trust me. But I’m not the only person who knows. Lillian’s in on it now, too, and I’m not sure she’s as good at keeping promises as I am.”

  “She wouldn’t talk. It wouldn’t make sense for her to talk. She’d stand to lose too much.”

  “Don’t count on sense when you’re dealing with Lillian. She doesn’t think the way you do. She doesn’t play by your rules. If you haven’t figured that out yet, you’re only asking for trouble.”

  “Trouble’s all I’ve got anyway. A little more won’t hurt me.”

  “Clear out now, Ben. I don’t care where you go or what you do, but get into your car and drive away from that house. Right now, before Lillian comes back.”

  “I can’t do that. I’ve already started this thing, and I have to see it through to the end. There’s no other way. This is my chance, and I can’t blow it by being scared.”

  “You’ll be in over your head.”

  “That’s where I am now. The whole point of this is to get out from under.”

  “There are simpler ways.”

  “Not for me there aren’t.”

  There was a long pause on the other end, an intake of breath, another pause. When Maria spoke again, her voice was trembling. “I’m trying to decide if I should pity you or just open my mouth and scream.”