Leviathan (12 page)

“You’re kidding.”

“Wait, let me finish. It was more complicated than that. When I told Lillian about the address book and the people I was going to talk to, she thought it was fantastic, the greatest thing she’d ever heard. She wanted to help me. She wanted to go around and talk to the people in the book, just like I was going to do. She was an actress, remember, and the idea of pretending to be me got her all worked up. She was positively inspired.”

“So you switched. Is that what you’re trying to tell me? Lillian talked you into trading places with her.”

“No one talked anyone into anything. We decided on it together.”

“Still …”

“Still nothing. We were equal partners from beginning to end. And the fact was, Lillian’s life changed because of it. She fell in love with one of the people in the book and wound up marrying him.”

“It gets stranger and stranger.”

“It was strange, all right. Lillian went out with one of my cameras and the address book, and the fifth or sixth person she saw was the man who became her husband. I knew there was a story hidden in that book—but it was Lillian’s story, not mine.”

“And you actually met this man? She wasn’t making it up?”

“I was their witness at the wedding in City Hall. As far as I know, Lillian never told him how she’d been earning her living, but why should he have to know? They live in Berkeley, California, now. He’s a college teacher, a terrifically nice guy.”

“And how did things turn out for you?”

“Not so well. Not so well at all. The same day that Lillian went off with my spare camera, she had an afternoon appointment with one of her regular clients. When he called that morning to confirm, she explained that her mother was sick and she had to leave town. She’d asked a friend to fill in for her, and if he didn’t mind seeing someone else this once, she guaranteed he wouldn’t regret it. I can’t remember her exact words, but that was the general drift. She gave me a big buildup, and after some gentle persuasion the man went along with it. So there I was, sitting alone in Lillian’s apartment that afternoon, waiting for the doorbell to ring, getting ready to fuck a man I’d never seen before. His name was Jerome, a squat little man in his forties with hair on his knuckles and yellow teeth. He was a salesman of some sort. Wholesale liquor, I think it was, but it might have been pencils or computers. It doesn’t make any difference. He rang the doorbell on the dot of three, and the moment he walked into the apartment, I realized I couldn’t go through with it. If he’d been halfway attractive, I might have been able to pluck up my
courage, but with a charmer like Jerome it just wasn’t possible. He was in a hurry and kept looking at his watch, eager to get started, to get it over with and get out. I played along, not knowing what else to do, trying to think of something as we went into the bedroom and took off our clothes. Dancing naked in a topless bar had been one thing, but standing there with that fat, furry salesman was so intimate, I couldn’t even look him in the eyes. I’d hidden my camera in the bathroom, and I figured if I was going to get any pictures out of this fiasco, I’d have to act now. So I excused myself and trotted off to the potty, leaving the door open just a crack. I turned on both faucets in the sink, took out my loaded camera, and started snapping shots of the bedroom. I had a perfect angle. I could see Jerome sprawled out on the bed. He was looking up at the ceiling and wiggling his dick in his hand, trying to get a hard-on. It was disgusting, but also comical in some way, and I was glad to be getting it on film. I guessed there’d be time for ten or twelve pictures, but after I’d taken six or seven of them, Jerome suddenly bounced up from the bed, walked over to the bathroom, and yanked open the door before I had a chance to shut it. When he saw me standing there with the camera in my hands, he went crazy. I mean really crazy, out of his mind. He started yelling, accusing me of taking pictures so I could blackmail him and ruin his marriage, and before I knew it he’d snatched the camera from me and was smashing it against the bathtub. I tried to run away, but he grabbed hold of my arm before I could get out, and then he started pounding me with his fists. It was a nightmare. Two naked strangers, slugging it out in a pink tiled bathroom. He kept grunting and shouting as he hit me, yelling at the top of his lungs, and then he landed one that knocked me out. It broke my jaw, if you can believe it. But that was only part of the damage. I also had a broken wrist, a couple of cracked ribs, and bruises all over my body. I spent ten days in the
hospital, and afterward my jaw was wired shut for six weeks. Little Jerome beat me to a pulp. He kicked the living shit out of me.”

When I met Maria at Sachs’s apartment in 1979, she hadn’t slept with a man in close to three years. It took her that long to recover from the shock of the beating, and abstinence was not a choice so much as a necessity, the only possible cure. As much as the physical humiliation she had suffered, the incident with Jerome had been a spiritual defeat. For the first time in her life, Maria had been chastened. She had stepped over the boundaries of herself, and the brutality of that experience had altered her sense of who she was. Until then, she had imagined herself capable of anything: any adventure, any transgression, any dare. She had felt stronger than other people, immunized against the ravages and failures that afflict the rest of humanity. After the switch with Lillian, she learned how badly she had deceived herself. She was weak, she discovered, a person hemmed in by her own fears and inner constraints, as mortal and confused as anyone else.

It took three years to repair the damage (to the extent that it was ever repaired), and when we crossed paths at Sachs’s apartment that night, she was more or less ready to emerge from her shell. If I was the one she offered her body to, it was only because I happened to come along at the right moment. Maria always scoffed at that interpretation, insisting that I was the only man she could have gone for, but I would be crazy to think it was because I possessed any supernatural charms. I was just one man among many possible men, damaged goods in my own right, and if I corresponded to what she was looking for just then, so much the better for me. She was the one who set the rules of our friendship, and I stuck to them as best I could, a willing accomplice to her whims and urgent demands. At
Maria’s request, I agreed that we would never sleep together two nights in a row. I agreed that I would never talk to her about any other woman. I agreed that I would never ask her to introduce me to any of her friends. I agreed to act as though our affair were a secret, a clandestine drama to be hidden from the rest of the world. None of these restraints bothered me. I dressed in the clothes that Maria wanted me to wear, I indulged her appetite for odd meeting places (subway token booths, Off-Track Betting parlors, restaurant bathrooms), I ate the same color-coordinated meals that she did. Everything was play for Maria, a call to constant invention, and no idea was too outlandish not to be tried at least once. We made love with our clothes off and our clothes on, with lights and without lights, indoors and outdoors, on her bed and under it. We put on togas, caveman suits, and rented tuxedos. We pretended to be strangers, we pretended to be married. We acted out doctor-and-nurse routines, waitress-and-customer routines, teacher-and-student routines. It was all fairly childish, I suppose, but Maria took these escapades seriously—not as diversions but as experiments, studies in the shifting nature of the self. If she hadn’t been so earnest, I doubt that I could have carried on with her in the way I did. I saw other women during that time, but Maria was the only one who meant anything to me, the only one who is still part of my life today.

In September of that year (1979), someone finally bought the house in Dutchess County, and Delia and David moved back to New York, settling into a brownstone apartment in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn. This made things both better and worse for me. I was able to see my son more often, but it also meant more frequent contacts with my soon-to-be ex-wife. Our divorce was well under way by then, but Delia was starting to have misgivings, and in those last months before the papers went through, she made an obscure, halfhearted attempt to win me back. If there had been no David in
the picture, I would have been able to resist this campaign without any trouble. But the little boy was clearly suffering from my absence, and I held myself responsible for his bad dreams, his bouts with asthma, his tears. Guilt is a powerful persuader, and Delia instinctively pushed all the right buttons whenever I was around. Once, for example, after a man she was acquainted with had come to her house for dinner, she reported to me that David had crawled into his lap and asked him if he was going to be his new father. Delia wasn’t throwing this incident in my face, she was simply sharing her concern with me, but each time I heard another one of these stories, I sank a little deeper into the quicksand of my remorse. It wasn’t that I wanted to live with Delia again, but I wondered if I shouldn’t resign myself to it, if I wasn’t destined to be married to her after all. I considered David’s welfare more important than my own, and yet for close to a year I had been cavorting like an idiot with Maria Turner and the others, ignoring every thought that touched on the future. It was difficult to justify this life to myself. Happiness wasn’t the only thing that counted, I argued. Once you became a parent, there were duties that couldn’t be shirked, obligations that had to be fulfilled, no matter what the cost.

Fanny was the one who saved me from what would have been a terrible decision. I can say that now in the light of what happened later, but back then nothing was clear to me. When the lease on my Varick Street sublet ran out, I rented an apartment just six or seven blocks from Delia’s place in Brooklyn. I hadn’t been intending to move so close to her, but the prices in Manhattan were too steep for me, and once I started looking on the other side of the river, every apartment I was shown seemed to be in her neighborhood. I wound up with a shabby floor-through in Carroll Gardens, but the rent was affordable, and the bedroom was large enough for two beds—one for me and one for David. He started spending two or three nights a
week with me, which was a good change in itself, but one that pushed me into a precarious position with Delia. I had allowed myself to slip back into her orbit, and I could feel my resolve beginning to waver. By an unfortunate coincidence, Maria had left town for a couple of months at the time of my move, and Sachs was gone as well—off to California to work on a screenplay of
The New Colossus
. An independent producer had bought the film rights to his novel, and Sachs had been hired to write the script in collaboration with a professional screenwriter who lived in Hollywood. I will return to that story later, but for now the point is that I was alone, stranded in New York without my usual companions. My whole future was being thrown into question again, and I needed someone to talk to, to hear myself think out loud.

One night, Fanny called me at my new apartment and invited me to dinner. I assumed it would be one of her standard parties, with five or six other guests, but when I showed up at her house the following evening, I discovered that I was the only person she had asked. This came as a surprise to me. In all the years we had known each other, Fanny and I had never spent any time by ourselves. Ben had always been around, and except for the odd moments when he left the room or was called away to the telephone, we had scarcely even spoken to each other without someone else listening to what we said. I had become so accustomed to this arrangement, I didn’t bother to question it anymore. Fanny had always been a remote and idealized figure for me, and it seemed fitting that our relations should be indirect, perpetually mediated by others. In spite of the affection that had grown up between us, it still made me a little nervous to be with her. My self-consciousness tended to make me rather whimsical, and I often went out of my way to make her laugh, cracking bad jokes and delivering atrocious puns, translating my awkwardness into a blithe and puerile banter. All this disturbed me, since I never
acted that way with anyone else. I am not a jocular person, and I knew that I was giving her a false impression of who I was, but it wasn’t until that night that I understood why I had always hidden myself from her. Some thoughts are too dangerous, and you mustn’t allow yourself to get near them.

I remember the white silk blouse she wore that evening and the white pearls around her brown neck. I think she noticed how puzzled I was by her invitation, but she didn’t let on about it, acting as though it were perfectly normal for friends to have dinner in this way. It probably was, but not from my point of view, not with the history of evasions that existed between us. I asked her if there was anything special she wanted to talk about. No, she said, she just felt like seeing me. She had been working hard ever since Ben left town, and when she woke up yesterday morning, it suddenly occurred to her that she missed me. That was all. She missed me and wanted to know how I was.

We started with drinks in the living room, mostly talking about Ben for the first few minutes. I mentioned a letter he had written to me the week before, and then Fanny described a phone conversation she’d had with him earlier that day. She didn’t believe the movie would ever get made, she said, but Ben was earning good money for the script, and that was bound to help. The house in Vermont needed a new roof, and maybe they’d be able to go ahead with it before the old one caved in. We might have talked about Vermont after that, or else her work at the museum, I forget. By the time we sat down for dinner, we had somehow moved on to my book. I told Fanny that I was still making progress, but less than before, since several days a week were now given over entirely to David. We lived like a couple of old bachelors, I said, shuffling around the apartment in our slippers, smoking pipes in the evening, talking philosophy over a glass of brandy as we studied the embers in the fireplace.