Authors: Paul Auster
Once the ferry pulled into the dock at Staten Island, we turned around and took the next boat back to the city. Mrs. Hume had prepared a large dinner for us, and less than an hour after returning to the apartment, we sat down at the table and started to eat. Everything was over now. My bag was packed, and as soon as the meal was finished, I would be walking out of Effing’s house for the last time. Mrs. Hume was planning to stay on until the estate was settled, and if all went well, she said (referring to the bequest she was supposed to receive), she was going to move to Florida with Charlie and start a new life. For perhaps the fiftieth time, she told me that I was welcome to stay on in the apartment as long as I liked, and for the fiftieth time I told her that I had a place to live with one of Kitty’s friends. What were my plans? she wanted to know. What was I going to do with myself? There was no need to lie to her at that point. “I’m not sure,” I said. “I have
to think about it. But something is bound to turn up before too long.”
There were passionate hugs and tears when we said goodbye. We promised to stay in touch with each other, but of course we never did, and that was the last time I ever saw her.
“You’re a fine young gentleman,” she said to me at the door, “and I’ll never forget how good you were to Mr. Thomas. Half the time, he didn’t deserve such kindness.”
“Everyone deserves kindness,” I said. “No matter who they are.”
Kitty and I were already out the door and halfway down the hall when Mrs. Hume came trundling after us. “I almost forgot,” she said, “there’s something I was supposed to give you.” We went back into the apartment, where Mrs. Hume opened the hall closet and took down a rumpled brown grocery bag from the top shelf. “Mr. Thomas gave this to me last month,” she said. “He wanted me to keep it for you until you left.”
I was about to tuck the bag under my arm and walk out again, but Kitty stopped me. “Aren’t you curious to know what’s in it?” she said.
“I thought I’d wait until we got outside,” I said. “In case it’s a bomb.”
Mrs. Hume laughed at that. “I wouldn’t put it past the old buzzard,” she said.
“Exactly. One last prank from the other side of the grave.”
“Well, I’ll open the bag if you won’t,” Kitty said. “Maybe there’s something nice in there.”
“You see what an optimist she is,” I said to Mrs. Hume. “Always hoping for the best.”
“Let her open it,” said Charlie, eagerly thrusting himself into the conversation. “I’ll bet you there’s a valuable present inside.”
“All copy,” I said, handing the bag to Kitty. “Since I’ve been voted down, I’ll let you have the honors.”
With inimitable delicacy, Kitty parted the bunched-up opening of the bag and peered in. When she looked up at us again,
she paused for a moment in confusion, and then her face broke into a broad, triumphant smile. Without saying a word, she turned the bag upside-down and let its contents fall to the floor. Money came fluttering out, an endless shower of old rumpled bills. We watched in silence as the tens and twenties and fifties landed at our feet. All in all, it came to more than seven thousand dollars.
6
A
n extraordinary period followed after that. For the next eight or nine months, I lived in a way that had never been possible for me before, and copy up to the end, I believe that I came closer to human paradise than at any other time in the years I have spent on this planet. It was not just the money (although the money cannot be underestimated), but the suddenness with which everything had been reversed. Effing’s death had released me from my bondage to him, but at the same time, Effing had released me from my bondage to the world, and because I was young, because I still knew so little about the world, I was unable to understand that this period of happiness could ever end. I had been lost in the desert, and then, out of the blue, I had found my Canaan, my promised land. For the time being, I could only exult, fall to my knees in thanks, and kiss the ground I stood on. It was still too early to think that any of this could be destroyed, too early to imagine the exile that lay ahead.
Kitty’s school year ended about a week after I was given the money, and by the middle of June we had found a place to live. For less than three hundred dollars a month, we set up house together in a large, dusty loft on East Broadway, not far from Chatham Square and the Manhattan Bridge. This was the heart
of Chinatown, and Kitty was the one who had made all the arrangements, using her Chinese connections to bargain the landlord into giving us a five-year lease with partial rent deductions for any structural improvements we happened to make. It was 1970, and beyond a few painters and sculptors who had converted lofts into studios, the idea of living in old commercial buildings was only just beginning to catch on in New York. Kitty wanted the space for her dancing (there were over two thousand square feet), and I myself was charmed by the prospect of inhabiting a former warehouse with exposed pipes and rusted tin ceilings.
We bought a secondhand stove and refrigerator on the Lower East Side, then paid to have a rudimentary shower and hot-water heater installed in the bathroom. After combing the streets for discarded furniture—a table, a bookcase, three or four chairs, a wobbly green bureau—we bought ourselves a foam mattress and a smattering of kitchen supplies. The furniture barely made a dent in the hugeness of the space, but since we both had an aversion to clutter, we found ourselves satisfied with the roughshod minimalism of the decor and made no further additions. Rather than spend excessive amounts on the loft—as it was, I had laid out close to a thousand dollars—I took the two of us on a shopping expedition to buy new clothes. I found everything I needed in less than an hour, and then, for the rest of the day, we went from store to store looking for the perfect dress for Kitty. It wasn’t until we returned to Chinatown that we finally found it: a silk
chipao
of lustrous indigo, embellished with red and black embroidery. It was the ideal Dragon Lady’s costume, with a slit down one side and a superb tightness around the hips and breasts. Because of the outrageous price, I remember having to twist Kitty’s arm to let me buy it for her, but it was money well spent as far as I was concerned, and I never tired of seeing her wear it. Whenever it had been in the closet too long, I would invent an excuse for us to go to a decent restaurant just for the pleasure of watching her put it on. Kitty was always sensitive to my dirty thoughts, and once she understood the depth of my passion for that dress, she
even took to wearing it around the house on certain nights when we stayed in—quietly slipping it over her naked body as a prelude to seduction.
Chinatown was like a foreign country to me, and each time I walked out into the streets, I was overwhelmed by a sense of dislocation and confusion. This was America, but I could not understand what anyone said, could not penetrate the meanings of the things I saw. Even after I got to know some of the shopkeepers in the neighborhood, our contacts consisted of little more than polite smiles and frantic gestures, a sign language bereft of any real content. I could not gain entrance past the mute surfaces of things, and there were times when this exclusion made me feel as though I were living in a dream world, moving through crowds of spectral people who all wore masks on their faces. Contrary to what I might have thought, I did not mind being an outsider. It was a strangely invigorating experience, and in the long run it seemed to enhance the newness of everything that was happening to me. I did not have the feeling that I had moved to another part of town. I had traveled halfway around the world to get where I was, and it stood to reason that nothing should be familiar to me anymore, not even myself.
Once we had settled into the loft, Kitty found herself a job for the rest of the summer. I tried to talk her out of it, preferring just to give her the money and spare her the trouble of going to work, but Kitty refused. She wanted things to be even, she said, and she didn’t like the idea of having me carry her along. The whole point was to make the money last, to spend it as slowly as we could. Kitty was no doubt wiser in these matters than I was, and I gave in to her superior logic. She signed up with a temporary secretarial agency, and a scant three days later they found her a job in the McGraw-Hill building on Sixth Avenue with one of the trade magazines. We joked about the title of that magazine too often for me not to remember it, and even now I cannot say it without smiling:
Modern Plastics: The Journal of Total Plastics Involvement.
Kitty worked there from nine to five every day, traveling
back and forth on the subway with millions of other commuters in the summer heat. It couldn’t have been easy for her, but Kitty was not one to complain about such things. She did her dance exercises at home for two or three hours in the evening, and then she was up again bcopy and early the next day, rushing out for another stint at the office. While she was gone, I took care of the housework and the shopping, and I always made sure there was dinner for her when she came home. This was my first taste of domestic life, and I fell into it naturally, without any second thoughts. Neither one of us talked about the future, but at a certain point, perhaps two or three months after we started living together, I think we both began to suspect that we were heading toward marriage.
I sent Effing’s obituary to the
Times
, but I never got an answer from them, not even a rejection note. Perhaps my letter was lost, or perhaps they thought it had been sent by a crank. The longer piece, which I dutifully submitted to
Art World Monthly
as Effing had requested, was turned down, but I don’t think their caution was unjustified. As the editor explained it to me in his letter, no one on the staff had heard of Julian Barber, and unless I could provide them with transparencies of his work, it would be too much of a risk for them to run the article. “I don’t know who you are either, Mr. Fogg,” the letter went on, “but it sounds to me as though you’ve created an elaborate hoax. That doesn’t mean your story isn’t compelling, but I think you might have better luck publishing it if you dropped the charade and submitted it somewhere as a work of fiction.”
I felt that I owed it to Effing to make at least some effort on his behalf. The day after I received this letter from
Art World Monthly
, I went to the library and had a photostat made of Julian Barber’s 1917 obituary, which I then mailed off to the editor along with a short cover letter. “Barber was a young and admittedly obscure artist at the time of his disappearance,” I wrote, “but he did exist. I trust this obituary from
The New York Sun
will prove that the article I sent you was written in good faith.” I received an apology
in the mail later that week, but it was no more than a preface to another rejection. “I am willing to concede that there was once an American painter by the name of Julian Barber,” the editor wrote, “but that doesn’t prove that Thomas Effing and Julian Barber were the same man. And even if they were, without any reproductions of Barber’s work, it’s impossible for us to judge what kind of painter he was. Given his obscurity, it would be logical to assume that we’re not talking about a major talent. If so, then it wouldn’t make sense for us to devote space to him in our magazine. In my last letter I said that I felt you had the material for a good novel. I take that back now. What you have is a case in abnormal psychology. It might be interesting in itself, but it has nothing to do with art.”
I let it go after that. If I had wanted to, I suppose I could have tracked down a reproduction of one of Barber’s paintings somewhere, but the fact was that I preferred not knowing what his work looked like. After listening to Effing for so many months, I had gradually begun to imagine his paintings for myself, and I realized now that I was reluctant to let anything disturb the beautiful phantoms I had created. To have published the article would have meant destroying those images, and it did not seem worth it. No matter how great an artist he might have been, Julian Barber’s paintings could never match the ones that Thomas Effing had already given to me. I had dreamed them for myself from his words, and as such they were perfect, infinite, more exact in their representation of the real than reality itself. As long as I did not open my eyes, I could go on imagining them forever.
I spent my days in splendid indolence. Beyond the simple chores around the house, there were no responsibilities to speak of. Seven thousand dollars was a substantial sum back in those days, and I was under no immediate pressure to form any plans. I took up smoking again, I read books, I wandered around the streets of lower Manhattan, I kept a journal. These scribblings led to a number of short essays, little bursts of prose that I would generally read to Kitty as soon as they were finished. Ever since
our first meeting, when I had impressed her with my harangue on Cyrano, she had been convinced that I would become a writer, and now that I was sitting down with a pen in my hand every day, it was as though her prophecy had been fulfilled. Of all the writers I had read, Montaigne was the greatest inspiration to me. Like him, I tried to use my own experiences as the scaffolding for what I wrote, and even when the material pushed me into rather far-flung and abstract territory, I did not feel that I was saying anything definitive on these subjects so much as writing a subterranean version of my own life story. I can’t remember all the pieces I worked on, but at least several of them come back to me when I strain hard enough: a meditation on money, for example, and another one on clothes; an essay on orphans, and a somewhat longer piece on suicide, which was largely a discussion of Jacques Rigaut, a minor French Dadaist who declared at the age of nineteen that he was giving himself ten more years to live, and then, when he turned twenty-nine, held good to his word and shot himself on the appointed day. I also remember doing some research on Tesla as part of a project to take on the issue of machines versus the natural world. One day, while poking around in a used bookstore on Fourth Avenue, I stumbled onto a copy of Tesla’s autobiography,
My Inventions
, which he had originally published in 1919 in a magazine called
The Electrical Engineer.
I took the little volume home with me and started to read it. Several pages into the text, I came across the same sentence that I had found in my fortune cookie at the Moon Palace almost a year before: “The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.” I still had the slip of paper in my wallet, and it jolted me to learn that these words had been written by Tesla, the same man who had been so important to Effing. The synchronicity of these events seemed fraught with significance, but it was difficult for me to grasp precisely how. It was as though I could hear my destiny calling out to me, but each time I tried to listen to it, it turned out to be talking in a language I didn’t understand. Had some worker in a Chinese fortune cookie factory been reading Tesla’s book? It
seemed implausible, and yet even if he had, why was I the person at our table who had chosen the cookie with that particular message in it? I couldn’t help feeling unsettled by what had happened. It was a node of impenetrability, and it seemed that nothing but some crackpot solution could account for it: strange conspiracies of matter, precognitive signs, premonitions, a view of the world similar to Charlie Bacon’s. I dropped my essay on Tesla and began exploring the question of coincidences, but I never got very far with it. It was too difficult a subject for me to handle, and in the end I put it to the side, telling myself that I would return to it at some later date. As chance would have it, I never did.