Leviathan (15 page)

“That wasn’t what it sounded like to me. Every time Fanny talked about you, she was dead serious. Not a word about ‘imaginary conquests.’ They were all very real to her.”

“Because she’s jealous, and a part of her insists on believing the worst. It’s happened many times now. At any given moment, Fanny has me conducting a passionate affair with someone or other. It’s been going on for years, and the list of women I’ve slept with keeps getting longer. After a while, I learned it didn’t do any good to deny it. That only made her more suspicious of me, and so rather than tell her the truth, I tell her what she wants to hear. I lie in order to keep her happy.”

“Happiness is hardly the word I’d use for it.”

“To keep us together, then. To keep us in some kind of balance. The stories help. Don’t ask me why, but once I start telling them to her, things clear up between us again. You thought I’d stopped writing fiction, but I’m still at it. My audience is down to just one person now, but she’s the only one who really counts.”

“And you expect me to believe this?”

“Don’t think I’m enjoying myself. It’s not easy to talk about it. But I figure you have a right to know, and I’m doing the best can.”

“And Valerie Maas? You’re telling me that nothing ever went on with her?”

“That’s a name that used to come up often. She’s an editor at one of the magazines I’ve written for. A year or two ago, we had a number of lunches together. Strictly business. We’d discuss my pieces, talk about future projects, that kind of thing. Eventually, Fanny got it into her head that Val and I were having an affair. I can’t say that I wasn’t attracted to her. If the circumstances had been different, I might have done something stupid. Fanny sensed all that, I think. I probably mentioned Val’s name once too often around the house or made too many flattering remarks about what a good editor she was. But the truth is that Val isn’t interested in men. She’s been
living with another woman for the past five or six years, and I couldn’t have gotten anywhere with her even if I’d tried.”

“Didn’t you tell that to Fanny?”

“There wouldn’t have been any point. Once she’s made up her mind, there’s never any talking her out of it.”

“You make her sound so unstable. But Fanny isn’t like that. She’s a solid person, one of the least deluded people I’ve ever met.”

“She is. In many ways, she’s as strong as they come. But she’s also suffered a lot, and the last few years have been hard on her. She wasn’t always like this, you understand. Until four or five years ago, there wasn’t a jealous bone in her body.”

“Five years ago is when I met her. Officially, that is.”

“It’s also when the doctor told her she’d never have any children. Things changed for her after that. She’s been seeing a therapist for the past couple of years, but I don’t think it’s done much good. She feels undesirable. She feels that no man can possibly love her. That’s why she imagines I’m carrying on with other women. Because she thinks she’s failed me. Because she thinks I must be punishing her for having let me down. Once you turn against yourself, it’s hard not to believe that everyone else is against you, too.”

“None of this ever shows.”

“That’s part of the problem. Fanny doesn’t talk enough. She bottles up things inside her, and when they do come out, it’s always in oblique ways. That only makes the situation worse. Half the time, she suffers without being aware of it.”

“Until last month, I always thought you had a perfect marriage.”

“We never know anything about anyone. I used to think the same thing about your marriage, and look what happened to you and Delia. It’s hard enough keeping track of ourselves. Once it comes to other people, we don’t have a clue.”

“But Fanny knows I love her. I must have said it a thousand times, and I’m sure she believes me. I can’t imagine that she doesn’t.”

“She does. And that’s why I think what happened is a good thing. You’ve helped her, Peter. You’ve done more for her than anyone else.”

“So now you’re thanking me for going to bed with your wife?”

“Why not? Because of you, there’s a chance that Fanny will start believing in herself again.”

“Just call Doctor Fixit, huh? He repairs broken marriages, mends wounded souls, saves couples in distress. No appointment necessary, house calls twenty-four hours a day. Dial our toll-free number now. That’s Doctor Fixit. He gives you his heart and asks for nothing in return.”

“I don’t blame you for feeling resentful. It can’t be a very good time for you now, but for whatever it’s worth, Fanny thinks you’re the greatest man who ever lived. She loves you. She’s never going to stop loving you.”

“Which doesn’t change the fact that she wants to go on being married to you.”

“It goes too far back, Peter. We’ve been through too much together. Our whole lives are bound up in it.”

“And where does that leave me?”

“Where you’ve always been. As my friend. As Fanny’s friend. As the person we care most about in the world.”

“So it starts up all over again.”

“If you want it to, yes. As long as you can stand it, it’s as if nothing has changed.”

I was suddenly on the verge of tears. “Just don’t blow it,” I said. “That’s all I’ve got to say to you. Just don’t blow it. Make sure you take good care of her. You’ve got to promise me that. If you
don’t keep your word, I think I’ll kill you. I’ll hunt you down and strangle you with my own two hands.”

I stared down at my plate, struggling to keep myself under control. When I finally looked up again, I saw that Sachs was staring at me. His eyes were somber, his expression fixed in an attitude of pain. Before I could get up from the table to leave, he stretched out his right hand and held it in midair, unwilling to drop it until I took it in my own. “I promise,” he said, squeezing hard, steadily tightening his grip. “I give you my word.”

After that lunch, I no longer knew what to believe. Fanny had told me one thing, Sachs had told me another, and as soon as I accepted one story, I would have to reject the other. There wasn’t any alternative. They had presented me with two versions of the truth, two separate and distinct realities, and no amount of pushing and shoving could ever bring them together. I understood that, and yet at the same time I realized that both stories had convinced me. In the morass of sorrow and confusion that bogged me down over the next several months, I hesitated to choose between them. I don’t think it was a question of divided loyalties (although that might have been part of it), but rather a certainty that both Fanny and Ben had been telling me the truth. The truth as they saw it, perhaps, but nevertheless the truth. Neither one of them had been out to deceive me; neither one had intentionally lied. In other words, there was no universal truth. Not for them, not for anyone else. There was no one to blame or to defend, and the only justifiable response was compassion. I had looked up to them both for too many years not to feel disappointed by what I had learned, but I wasn’t disappointed only in them. I was disappointed in myself, I was disappointed in the
world. Even the strongest were weak, I told myself; even the bravest lacked courage; even the wisest were ignorant.

I found it impossible to rebuff Sachs anymore. He had been so forthright during our conversation over lunch, so clear about wanting our friendship to continue, that I couldn’t bring myself to turn my back on him. But he had been wrong to assume that nothing would change between us. Everything had changed, and like it or not, our friendship had lost its innocence. Because of Fanny, we had each crossed over into the other’s life, had each made a mark on the other’s internal history, and what had once been pure and simple between us was now infinitely muddy and complex. Little by little, we began to adjust to these new conditions, but with Fanny it was another story. I kept my distance from her, always seeing Sachs alone, always begging off when he invited me to their house. I accepted the fact that she belonged with Ben, but that didn’t mean I was ready to see her. She understood my reluctance, I think, and though she continued to send me her love through Sachs, she never pressed me to do anything I didn’t want to do. It wasn’t until November that she finally called, a good six or seven months later. That was when she invited me to Thanksgiving dinner at Ben’s mother’s house in Connecticut. In the intervening half year, I had talked myself into thinking there had never been any hope for us, that even if she had left Ben to live with me, it wouldn’t have worked. That was a fiction, of course, and I have no way of knowing what would have happened, no way of knowing anything. But it helped to get me through those months without losing my mind, and when I suddenly heard Fanny’s voice again on the telephone, I figured the moment had come to test myself in a real situation. So David and I drove up to Connecticut and back, and I spent an entire day in her company. It wasn’t the happiest day I’ve ever spent, but I managed to survive it. Old wounds opened, I bled a little bit, but when I returned home that night with
the sleeping David in my arms, I discovered that I was still more or less in one piece.

I don’t want to suggest that I accomplished this cure on my own. Once Maria returned to New York, she played a large part in holding me together, and I immersed myself in our private escapades with the same passion as before. Nor was she the only one. When Maria wasn’t available, I found still others to distract me from my broken heart. A dancer named Dawn, a writer named Laura, a medical student named Dorothy. At one time or another, each of them held a singular place in my affections. Whenever I stopped and examined my own behavior, I concluded that I wasn’t cut out for marriage, that my dreams of settling down with Fanny had been misguided from the start. I wasn’t a monogamous person, I told myself. I was too drawn by the mystery of first encounters, too infatuated with the theater of seduction, too hungry for the excitement of new bodies, and I couldn’t be counted on over the long haul. That was the logic I used on myself in any case, and it functioned as an effective smoke-screen between my head and my heart, between my groin and my intelligence. For the truth was that I had no idea what I was doing. I was out of control, and I fucked for the same reason that other men drink: to drown my sorrows, to dull my senses, to forget myself. I became
homo erectus
, a heathen phallus gone amok. Before long I was entangled in several affairs at once, juggling girlfriends like a demented acrobat, hopping in and out of different beds as often as the moon changes shape. In that this frenzy kept me occupied, I suppose it was successful medicine. But it was the life of a crazy person, and it probably would have killed me if it had lasted much longer than it did.

But there was more to it than just sex. I was working well, and my book was finally coming to the end. No matter how many disasters I created for myself, I managed to work through them, to push on
without slackening my pace. My desk had become a sanctuary, and as long as I continued to sit there, struggling to find the next word, nothing could touch me anymore: not Fanny, not Sachs, not even myself. For the first time in all the years I had been writing, I felt as though I had caught fire. I couldn’t tell if the book was good or bad, but that no longer seemed important. I had stopped questioning myself. I was doing what I had to do, and I was doing it in the only way that was possible for me. Everything else followed from that. It wasn’t that I began to believe in myself so much as that I was inhabited by a sublime indifference. I had become interchangeable with my work, and I accepted that work on its own terms now, understanding that nothing could relieve me of the desire to do it. This was the bedrock epiphany, the illumination in which doubt gradually dissolved. Even if my life fell apart, there would still be something to live for.

I finished
Luna
in mid-April, two months after my talk with Sachs in the restaurant. I kept my word and gave him the manuscript, and four days later he called to tell me that he’d finished it. To be more exact, he started shouting into the telephone, heaping me with such outlandish praise that I felt myself blush on the other end. I hadn’t dared to dream of a response like that. It so buoyed up my spirits that I was able to shrug off the disappointments that followed, and even as the book made the rounds of the New York publishing houses, collecting one rejection after another, I didn’t let it interfere with my work. Sachs’s encouragement made all the difference. He kept assuring me that I had nothing to worry about, that everything would work out in the end, and in spite of the evidence, I continued to believe him. I began writing a second novel. When
Luna
was finally taken (seven months and sixteen rejections later), I was already well into my new project. That happened in late November, just two days before Fanny invited me to Thanksgiving dinner in Connecticut.
No doubt that contributed to my decision to go. I said yes to her because I’d just heard the news about my book. Success made me feel invulnerable, and I knew there would never be a better moment to face her.

Then came my meeting with Iris, and the madness of those two years abruptly ended. That was on February 23, 1981: three months after Thanksgiving, one year after Fanny and I cut off our affair, six years after my friendship with Sachs had begun. It strikes me as both strange and fitting that Maria Turner should have been the person who made that meeting possible. Again, it had nothing to do with intentionality, nothing to do with a conscious desire to make things happen. But things did happen, and if not for the fact that February twenty-third was the night that Maria’s second exhibition opened in a small gallery on Wooster Street, I’m certain that Iris and I never would have met. Decades would have passed before we found ourselves standing in the same room again, and by then the opportunity would have been lost. It’s not that Maria actually brought us together, but our meeting took place under her influence, so to speak, and I feel indebted to her because of that. Not to Maria as flesh-and-blood woman, perhaps, but to Maria as the reigning spirit of chance, as goddess of the unpredictable.