Childish Loves (2 page)

‘Well, we got through that time,' I said to Lee, when the final review was in. I meant, no one had noticed the book's obvious flaw; that it depends on a ridiculous mistake, the sort of mistake that in life would be cleared up in a minute, and which only in bad literature is allowed to fester and produce a plot. Peter grounds his story on the resemblance between its two main characters, between Lord Byron and Lord Byron's doctor. It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but none of his reviewers challenged Peter on this central conceit. Some of them even referred to their resemblance as historical fact. We were sitting over our pints in one of the florid crude Victorian pubs on the fringes of Bloomsbury, near the Faber offices. Pressed tin ceilings; cut-glass mirrors above the bar. Lee looked at me curiously, began to say one thing and then changed his mind. ‘It will get easier,' he said.

I don't know that it did, but then, my hopes for the second novel were so much higher. If
Imposture
was meant to make money,
A Quiet Adjustment
, by contrast, has the air of a book written entirely for its author's own pleasure. Peter manages to trace in it a history of nineteenth-century sensibility. He shows how the age that began with Austen produced in the end a Henry James. An argument he makes not only through the style of the novel itself, evolving from one to the other, but through the life of its central character. Lady Byron was caught up in the most famous scandal of the Romantic age. She presided over that scandal into a ripe and sanctimonious widowhood and became the perfect symbol for Victorianism. Reading Peter's novel, between the soft covers of the Faber first edition, I missed him – with a fresh pang of baffled friendship. Not the man I knew, who could never have written this book, but the man I didn't know, who had.

*

Which brings me back to New York: the American edition of
A Quiet Adjustment
was being launched. My publicist, a perfectly sensible woman named Anne, prepared me for the absence of reviews with the usual laments about the current state of literary fiction in America. I refused to believe that the story of a dead high-school teacher, survived by nothing but the unpublished manuscripts on which he had spent his private life, wouldn't arouse the imaginative sympathies of every books-page editor in the country. But books-page editors aren't in the business of imaginative sympathies, Anne said; they are in the business of filling advertising pages. What I
could
do was ‘reach out more directly to the readers.' You mean blogs, I said. No, not just blogs: reading groups. But she didn't really mean reading groups, either.

I had my first experience that fall of an ancient and sometimes respectable form of human association: the Literary Society. The Byron Society of America had an obvious interest in Peter's work – Peter himself used to be a member of it. They met occasionally for lectures or meals or drinks, in New York or Boston or Philadelphia, at restaurants and private clubs. Mostly academics, of course, but schoolteachers, too; booksellers, housewives, doctors; gentlemen of independent means; grad-school drop-outs suffering from intellectual nostalgia. One of the reasons I had come to New York was to find out more about my author. His two completed manuscripts were already in print. There was nothing left but a strange uncomfortable collection of chapters, which couldn't be published without some kind of context. The best context would be Peter's life – it was the thought of what I might learn that made me uncomfortable. I had come to realize just how odd his silence in the school halls
was
. Try spending a week or even a day refusing to talk. You would need a certain amount of resentment spurring you on, but also a few things worth keeping quiet about.

For two weeks I traveled up and down the eastern seaboard. The Austen Society met in Philadelphia at a building belonging to Penn. Seven people showed up: the president of the Austen Society, the treasurer of the Austen Society, three junior professors from the English department, and two friends of mine from college. I read some of the love letters from
Imposture
, which Peter had cribbed almost word for word from Claire Clairmont's correspondence with Lord Byron. Afterwards I stole a bottle of red wine from the refreshments table the English department had laid on and ended up spilling some of it on the futon where I spent the night. The Henry James Society in New York was slightly better attended. A family friend arranged the meeting at his club, and by force of, not will, exactly, but a kind of whimsy, managed to persuade a number of the members to take their cocktails into the club library where I gave my talk. I read the anal rape scene from
A Quiet Adjustment
. At the Club of Odd Volumes, in Boston, which admitted only men, I chose a passage from
Imposture
in which Peter describes the home of the bookseller Henry Colburn – the shoes that line the stairs leading from the shop floor to his private quarters.

My lectures were often followed by dinner of some kind. Members gathered in the club dining room or a nearby ‘pub' and talked quite childishly about what is after all a rather childish love: I mean, the love of books. The oddest, saddest reading I ever gave was at something called the Society for the Publication of the Dead, one of those vague grand titles that shows up just what it's meant to conceal. Humbleness, obscurity, insignificance. The Society was run out of the home of the club president, Mike Lowenthal, a tax lawyer who lived in Queens. Once a quarter the members got together in his living room and ate unidentifiable stews and talked about their ‘progress.' Progress was a big word with them; I heard it again and again.

Lowenthal had founded the society, he told me over the phone, ‘in order to bring into one boat people who could be of mutual support and service to each other.' He meant, people who had inherited unpublished manuscripts: the children of memoirists and closet novelists; the parents of precocious suicides. So far, he said, there had been a lot of support but not much service. They were very excited to have a speaker.

‘In this business,' he said, ‘there aren't many success stories.'

‘Is that what I am?' I asked.

I was staying with my sister in New Haven and got the commuter service into Grand Central, then transferred to the 7 train and rode it all the way out to Flushing. For some reason I found this journey especially dispiriting. To come into Manhattan and go out of it again – to feel yourself diminishing on the way to the suburbs, into a different kind of anonymity. Mike's enthusiasm for my success had touched a nerve. Since taking up Peter's cause, I had published little of my own work. Nothing but
Playing Days
, a quiet memoir of my first long year after college, which I spent playing minor-league basketball in Germany. It came out in England first; my American publishers were still undecided about it. The book had received a more muted critical reception than Peter's novels, and I found myself struggling, on the long train ride to Queens, against the inevitable comparisons. A dull overcast late summer day, as pale as December, and in the course of my journey the street lamps came on without discernible effect on the general whiteness.

After five years in the fiction business I should have learned my lesson. Writers get rewarded according to their exaggerations. This explains why, compared with the real thing, most novels seem so vivid and unnatural – the qualities by which critics and readers tend to recognize ‘good writing.' What I aimed at in
Playing Days
wasn't vividness, it was the mildly unusual, overcomplicated quality of the story you tell on coming home from work. Our lives are governed mostly by technicalities; literature ignores them because they are boring. We stopped at 33rd Street, 40th Street, 51st Street stations. I'm inventing the numbers but the impression they made somehow reinforced my case. The streets below us, viewed sidelong from the elevated tracks and partly obscured by window-shine, seemed more or less indistinguishable. Sometimes I even saw the same shopping chains reproduced in slightly different order. The variations in people are hardly more significant. After an hour of self-justification, I had the stuffed-up, hungry feeling you get from eating too much of the same thing. So I rested my head against the glass and closed my eyes.

Flushing was the last stop. There was no danger of overshooting, and I was plenty early in any case to be at Lowenthal's house by seven thirty. Drifting off, I played over again a sort of internal dialogue, which originated God knows where, but had become familiar to me over the past few weeks. It's what I thought about sometimes instead of sleeping; maybe it was the same thing as sleep. Someone said, Do you find this passage of time acceptable? A voice not exactly my own – maybe my father's or brother's. Yes, I always answered. After a moment it spoke again. Is there anything you have to do? No, I said. There is nothing I have to do. Then why not accept it? said the voice. Then other people intruded themselves. I could hear them like you hear your parents' guests arrive while you lie upstairs in bed. Is this where you get off for Shea Stadium? That's why they call it Shea Station, lady. I beg your pardon, that's not what they call it, and so on. By the time I woke up, the artificial light of the subway car was sharp enough to hurt my eyes. It was dark outside, and I felt oddly intimidated by the hurry of the commuters going home.

*

Mike Lowenthal lived in a gray clapboard row-house about ten minutes' walk from the station. His wife and seventeen-year-old son had died in a car accident five years before. This is one of the first things he told me as he showed me inside. There was a woman he called his Super Maid hustling around the kitchen, a middle-aged Polish woman named Marte, bulky, sweating, with the wide shoulders and hips of a Matisse or a Henry Moore. ‘Don't introduce me,' she said. ‘I don't have time to talk. My hands are dirty. Don't shake my hands.'

‘My wife was the only one who could get her to do anything,' Mike said. ‘Now she bosses me around.'

‘Look at me, bossing,' she called out.

‘Listen, you're a little early. Before the rest of this crowd arrive, why don't I show you something.'

I followed his back up the staircase running through the center of the house. He had the ordinary, loose-skinned face of a middle-aged working man, but from behind he looked like some strange vegetable, with all its weight gathered in the middle and tapering away to the top and bottom. When he reached the landing, he turned towards the rear of the house into a boy's bedroom. Pinned to the door, a large official-looking sign: Beware of the Teenager. There was an unmade single bed in the room, under a window that overlooked the backs of the row-houses: porch lights glared as regular as street lamps. Mike sat down at his son's desk, wheezing a little from the stairs. There was nowhere for me to sit but the bed. Something about it, however, made me hesitate, and the awful thought crossed my mind that the sheets hadn't been changed in five years.

He lifted a thin sheaf of papers from a drawer, cheaply bound and covered in clear plastic, and laid it out carefully on the leather of his son's desk. It looked like a senior essay and was titled: NOT THE FIRST LOVE STORY IN THE WORLD, BY STEVEN LOWENTHAL. It cost him some effort to rise to his feet again. ‘I'm going to get out of your hair. What you don't need is me standing over your shoulder.' Then, in a sudden change of tone: ‘What are we doing here. Let me get you a drink.' He put his hands quietly together, an effeminate gesture; it struck me that he was waiting for me to make room. At that moment the doorbell rang and Marte called up to him something unintelligible. ‘They're playing my song,' he said and moved awkwardly past me to the head of the stairs, where he stopped and turned again. We looked at each other for a moment and I felt strongly the need to add something. Then the bell rang again, the quick double-ring of social, light-hearted impatience. ‘Take as long as you want,' he said. ‘This crowd is good for nothing till the food arrives.'

Once he was gone, I closed his son's door and spent a few minutes looking over the bedroom, which still smelled of sleep. It struck me that Mike probably used it as a guest room or slept in it himself when his marriage bed seemed too large for one. The desk, square and old-fashioned, crowded out a corner of the window and seemed like a recent addition. Maybe Mike used the room as an office and napped there when he got tired. On the wall over Steven's bed was a poster of Norm Duke, a big-eared, red-faced grinning young man, stuck on with Blu-Tack. The poster said, Winner of the 2000 PBA National Championship, Toledo, Ohio; and I noticed on the top shelf of the narrow bookcase a row of bowling trophies, several honorable mentions and a 2nd place finish in the father/son category. The books were mostly the books you'd expect to see on the shelf of a high-school senior:
A Tale of Two Cities, The Great Gatsby, The Norton Anthology of Poetry
. There were also a few more personal touches:
The Big Lebowski
on VHS, and a series of fantasy novels, with women on the cover entwined around swords, etc.

I sat down to read NOT THE FIRST LOVE STORY IN THE WORLD. The opening paragraph was a single sentence:
They say that grief is transient
. As I skimmed the rest of it, the doorbell continued to ring. A young man, who seems to be unnamed, falls in love with a girl from his high-school chemistry class, Laura Salzburger. He is a very nice young man, in most public ways, a good student, but he imagines doing all kinds of unspeakable things to her. Because of his terrible imagination, he breaks out in a sweat whenever he sees her and can never manage more than the most perfunctory conversation. Eventually he decides to announce his feelings for her ‘in prose.' He writes a story about a beautiful girl named Laura Salzburger, who dies tragically and mysteriously and is mourned for the rest of his life by the awkward young man who never had the courage to ‘express his feelings for her.'