Childish Loves (3 page)

A short story, then, or a novella – fifty-odd pages long. I wondered if he meant to suggest that the protagonist himself had been responsible for the girl's death. This is the kind of thing teenaged writers like to hint at. Regardless, the story was more or less unpublishable and contained many of the simple flaws, easy to spot but awkward to correct, which had become familiar to me in my teaching. Sudden shifts in tense and point of view. False oppositions; grammatical carelessness. A tendency to rely on the first phrase or thought that comes to hand, which is usually the phrase or thought left lying around on the surface of the imagination by bad movies and books: ‘Laura Salzburger had a beautiful smile that lit up not only most rooms but her own blue eyes.' It's common, in creative writing seminars, to talk about the difference between the reader's truth and the writer's truth – in other words, about the gap between what you see in your mind and what you can put on the page. But this difference matters little in practice. Most young writers put on the page exactly what it is they
do
see, a world of bright, textureless, unconnected parts, some of it borrowed from other books.

Then I thought, and he's dead, and he's been dead five years. And it's quite possible that this story is basically ‘true.' That Steven Lowenthal had a crush on a girl from his chemistry class, his first real sexual crush; and that he imagined doing all kinds of perfectly acceptable things with her, which he felt terrible about from the point of view of his decent, daylight, pre-sexual personality; and that he never got the chance to reconcile himself, as most of us do and should, to certain aspects of his human nature. One of the things I had learned after three years in teaching is that my training had taught me to distinguish between good and bad writing, but not between what was true and what wasn't. I'd had kids handing in stories about their alcoholic mothers you could have sworn were lifted from the plots of daytime television until you saw them shivering in your office, holding themselves by the arms to keep from crying. What's happening to these people, you think, that it comes out so badly written? Don't they suffer too?

For a minute I sat at Steven Lowenthal's desk, calming down. Saying to myself, what are you getting worked up about. Below me I heard Mike's voice, not the words themselves, but the muffled shape of the words, diminishing as he moved away from the stairs in the hall. More guests. And the feeling returned to me that I was lying half-asleep in my parents' house and listening to one of their parties. Another minute, I thought, another minute. Then decided I was probably angry about being somewhere I didn't want to be and doing something I didn't want to do; and at that point I stood up and went downstairs.

When I walked into the living room, there were nine or ten people sitting down, haphazardly, with food on their laps. The oldest was in his eighties, bald and straight-backed, with thick rolls of skin on his forehead and the back of his neck. I learned afterwards he had recently lost a great deal of weight. Henry Pantolini. He offered to make space for me on the piano seat.

‘There's not much of me,' he said, with a kind of pride. I sat down for a minute beside him. ‘I don't play any more because of my hands,' he added and held up his hands. ‘When I was your age I used to work nights sweeping floors at the Harry Eichler School in Richmond Hill. They kept a little upright Mason-Hamlin in a corner of the gym. Sometimes, when I had the place to myself, I played whatever they had on the stand, like “Bandstand Boogie”, that kind of thing. For ten, twenty minutes. Very spooky and loud. This was my second job, and the rest of my free time was taken up with an accounting degree. It's amazing how hard you can work when you have no choice. Now I get tired rolling out of bed.' I could think of nothing to say to any of this, and he took pity. ‘Why don't you get some food.'

The youngest was Sarah, in her mid-twenties; an undergraduate at Queens College. Permed hair; an accommodating blouse; and a dark skirt made of some synthetic material that clung to her thighs when she stood up. She told me within a few minutes of conversation that she was a single mother with a two-year-old child at home. ‘I come here to meet men, that's what I tell people,' she joked. ‘This is my fifth meeting, and you're the first one I've seen. Age-suitable, I mean.' Her father, before he died, had written her what started out as a long letter about the year and a half he spent as a teenager in Birkenau. The reason she started school so late is because he needed taking care of, and also because of her daughter. The letter by the time he was done was a hundred and fifty pages long. ‘Some letter,' she said. She didn't even look at it before he was dead, but by the time I met her she had read it ‘five or six times over, and always with tears in my eyes. The old bastard. If he does this to me, who had every reason to resent him, what will he do to people he
didn't
annoy?'

Marte had made two kinds of stew, one with meat and one without, which bubbled thickly in the kitchen, still in their pots. I moved vaguely towards it, through an arch in the living room. Next to the pots were bowls and slices of cheap white bread. ‘I don't know you,' a woman said to me, ladle in hand – middle-aged, round-bellied, with a girlish, unpretty face. She wore her red hair in a bob. ‘You're the new kid.'

‘Do you normally know everybody?'

‘It's a pretty good crew,' she said. Crowd; crew. They had found odd, affectionate ways of referring to each other.

‘I'm sure it is.' I stood waiting for her to finish serving herself. ‘I don't know what the thing you say here is. To new members, I mean.'

‘You mean, who died? My sister. She didn't have any specially awful story, except she wanted to be a writer and couldn't get published. I teach high-school English in Forest Hills. What she wrote is not bad. I don't have any illusions about it, either. She died last February, not this year's but the one before. Forty-five years old. You know how many manuscripts she left behind? But what do you care; let me ask you. Who died for you.'

‘A guy I used to teach with. In Riverdale. I was also a high-school English teacher.'

Mike interrupted me, with a hand on her shoulder. ‘This is our distinguished speaker,' he said. And then: ‘Can I have a word?' He led me to a sidebar in the sitting room, where the drinks were kept. The house reminded me of my grandmother's house and suggested a touching Jewish faith in material quality. I could hear her commenting, ‘the best of everything,' and meaning, the most expensive. Thick white carpets; club chairs; the carpet still white and the chairs recently re-upholstered. All of which struck me as evidence that either Mike Lowenthal was doing okay or Marte was more helpful than he pretended. The television lived in a mahogany wall-cupboard, which was built out of the fireplace and matched the piano stationed prominently in the bay window. So passers-by could look at it and admire. It was also a fact about my grandmother that she played beautifully, with real feeling.

‘I don't know if you had a chance to look at … what I showed you,' Mike said to me. His voice had dropped.

‘Do you mind talking about your son?'

‘Believe me, that's one thing you
do
get used to. I understand your concerns, though. So far as I know he was no kind of sexual pervert. But then, he was a seventeen-year-old boy: what I don't know about him could fill a much bigger book than he wrote. Such a vocabulary. In conversation, you were lucky to get a yes or no.' He picked up a lemon and began to cut. ‘Gin and tonic? Isn't that what you English types like to drink?' He handed me a tall glass, and we shifted slightly into a corner of the room. ‘I can guess your next question,' he went on. ‘My wife was literary, that's where he gets it from. When I was a young man, just in practice, I joined what has since become, so people tell me, a very fashionable kind of association. I mean, a book group. Mostly I was on the lookout for girls. Whenever I made any kind of comment about wouldn't it be nice to clear up this point with the author, you can't believe the grief they gave me. Now everybody I show it to, these publishing guys, want to know the same thing. There was no Laura Salzburger in his high-school graduating class. But was there a Meira Schulzman, a Rachel Littman, a Deborah Leibowitz? Of course there was. More than that I couldn't say.'

I wasn't sure if he was angry or enjoying himself, or both; his voice had risen again. ‘Next question,' he said.

‘Can you tell me anything about how he died?'

‘Like I said, a car accident. This isn't an interesting or dramatic kind of death, not like cancer, which seems to get so much press these days. I mean from you people, the writers. (You see, I've been reading your books.) There wasn't even some drunk running a red light I could devote myself to putting behind bars. My wife hit a patch of black ice coming off the White Stone Expressway five years ago last December. Nobody's fault but dumb luck's; she was going about forty miles an hour. They had just been to visit her mother in Florida –
she
had the cancer, and outlived them both to see the funeral. Somebody, I think it was Delta, used to run a very reasonable shuttle from Fort Lauderdale to La Guardia. I came back late from work to nobody home, but you know how it is with flights; there's always delays. Even if the flight comes in, they lose the luggage. Till about midnight, I was perfectly calm and sensible. I brushed my teeth like a good boy; I went to bed. First I can't sleep and then, after twenty minutes of fighting the sheets, my heart begins pounding and I start making calls. It turns out when I stopped being sensible I was more or less on the money, but I didn't invite you here to talk to you about this.'

‘No, you wanted to talk about publication.'

He looked up at me and waited. Eventually, I said, ‘I can anticipate several difficulties about publication. Let me add, this is a line I've heard myself in one way or another more than thirty times. You see, I keep count. Also, I'm not a publisher, I'm a writer, and what I know about is the trouble I might have selling my own work.' It seemed to me that people were listening in, so I continued as quietly as I could. ‘Here is the first problem. Nobody wants long short stories. Nobody wants short short stories, either, but at least they don't take up much space.'

‘What I was thinking of was somebody might write some kind of introduction and bulk it up a little. Like you did.'

‘Who did you have in mind?'

He stared at me, with a conscious smile, and lifted his hands. ‘Look, I'm no writer.'

‘It's not just a question of length,' I said. ‘There's a problem with the ending. I know what he meant to do, but he hasn't done it, and even if he had it wouldn't have worked.'

‘Listen, don't worry about the ending. That's what I expected you to say. You mean, in real life, it's the boy who dies, not the girl. Am I right? That's what seemed to me the problem, too; I mean, if you want to sell this kind of thing on context. I'll be honest with you. Publication for me is just a means to an end. What do you reach with your books, if you don't mind me asking, by way of audience? Fifty, sixty thousand? If you're doing well. Look at the box-office results they print in the Monday papers, after the first weekend of business. Even the flops take in a few hundred thousand,
in two days
. Publication for me is just a stepping-stone to the movies, and in the movies you see this kind of thing all the time. Right off the bat the hero dies, and then they show the rest of the picture to explain why. In this case there is no why; that's what breaks your heart. What this kid went through for puberty every boy should see. God knows the difference it might have made in my life. It took me four years of college before I had the nerve or opportunity to stick my prick in anything other than my own hand. That means about ten years of unnecessary shame and frustration, but I didn't have the words to describe them. You can imagine what I felt when I first read my son's story. I discovered it a few days after his death on the computer I bought him for his bar mitzvah. Probably what you felt just now, only he wasn't your son and he hadn't just died. Shame on top of grief on top of loneliness. But I've been living with that story every day now for five years, and every time I look at it I see something else. This was not a bad kid. This was a kid going through a difficult transformation, who had the talent and the emotional maturity to step outside of himself and put it into words. But the girl he falls in love with doesn't get it, and people in my personal opinion will happily pay out ten bucks fifty, or whatever it costs these days to go to the movies, to see if at the end of two hours she understands what it means to be a young man.' Then he added: ‘Look and your food's gone cold. While I've been chewing your ear off.'

The girl from Queens College called out, ‘Let's get started here. My sitter is costing me ten bucks an hour.'

Mike stepped forward, taking up space in the center of the room, and introduced me. I chose to read my preface to
Imposture
. For two reasons – it's what they wanted to hear, and I had written it. This preface tells the story of my inheritance: how I came to know Peter during a stint teaching high school in New York; how we lost touch; the resentment I felt at being saddled with a stack of manuscripts he hadn't had the energy or the luck to see into print himself. Afterwards, in the Q and A, Mr Pantolini asked me why, since I didn't know Mr Pattieson well, I had gone to so much trouble to get him published? ‘Since you seem to have little personal feeling for the man.'

‘Personal feeling doesn't come into it. I might ask all of you the same thing. Why do you want these manuscripts to be published? It won't bring the people you loved back to life. It will only mean that others can see them more coldly and clearly than you see them yourself.'