Leviathan (16 page)

Because our affair continued to be a secret, there was no question of my serving as her escort that night. I showed up at the gallery just like any other guest, gave Maria a quick kiss of congratulations, and then stood among the crowd with a plastic cup in my hand, sipping cheap white wine as I scanned the room for familiar faces. I didn’t see anyone I knew. At one point, Maria looked over in my direction and winked, but other than the brief smile I threw her in return, I kept my end of the bargain and avoided contact with her. Less than five minutes after that wink, someone came up from behind and tapped me on the shoulder. It was a man named John Johnston,
a passing acquaintance whom I hadn’t seen in a number of years. Iris was standing next to him, and after he and I exchanged greetings, he introduced us to each other. Based on her appearance, I gathered that she was a fashion model—an error that most people still make when seeing her for the first time. Iris was just twenty-four back then, a dazzling blond presence, six feet tall with an exquisite Scandinavian face and the deepest, merriest blue eyes to be found between heaven and hell. How could I have guessed that she was a graduate student in English literature at Columbia University? How could I have known that she had read more books than I had and was about to begin a six-hundred-page dissertation on the works of Charles Dickens?

Since I assumed that she and Johnston were intimate friends, I shook her hand politely and did my best not to stare at her. Johnston had been married to someone else the last time I’d seen him, but I figured he was divorced now, and I didn’t question him about it. As it happened, he and Iris scarcely knew each other. The three of us talked for several minutes, and then Johnston suddenly turned around and started talking to someone else, leaving me alone with Iris. It was only then that I began to suspect how casual their relations were. Unaccountably, I pulled out my wallet and showed her some snapshots of David, bragging about my little son as though he were a well-known public figure. To listen to Iris recall that evening now, it was at that moment that she decided she was in love with me, that she understood I was the person she was going to marry. It took me a little longer to understand how I felt about her, but only by a few hours. We continued talking over dinner in a nearby restaurant and then on through drinks at yet another place. It must have been past eleven o’clock by the time we finished. I waved down a cab for her on the street, but before I opened the door to let her in, I reached out and grabbed her, drawing her close to me and kissing her deep
inside the mouth. It was one of the most impetuous things I have ever done, a moment of insane, unbridled passion. The cab drove off, and Iris and I continued standing in the middle of the street, wrapped in each other’s arms. It was as though we were the first people who had ever kissed, as though we invented the art of kissing together that night. By the next morning, Iris had become my happy ending, the miracle that had fallen down on me when I was least expecting it. We took each other by storm, and nothing has ever been the same for me since.

Sachs was my best man at the wedding in June. There was a dinner after the ceremony, and about halfway through the meal he stood up from the table to make a toast. It turned out to be very short, and because he said so little, I can bring back every word of it. “I’m taking this out of the mouth of William Tecumseh Sherman,” he said. “I hope the general doesn’t mind, but he got there before I did, and I can’t think of a better way to express it.” Then, turning in my direction, Sachs lifted his glass and said: “Grant stood by me when I was crazy. I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other always.”

The era of Ronald Reagan began. Sachs went on doing what he had always done, but in the new American order of the 1980s, his position became increasingly marginalized. It wasn’t that he had no audience, but it grew steadily smaller, and the magazines that published his work became steadily more obscure. Almost imperceptibly, Sachs came to be seen as a throwback, as someone out of step with the spirit of the time. The world had changed around him, and in the present climate of selfishness and intolerance, of moronic, chest-pounding Americanism, his opinions sounded curiously harsh and moralistic. It was bad enough that the
Right was everywhere in the ascendant, but even more disturbing to him was the collapse of any effective opposition to it. The Democratic Party had caved in; the Left had all but disappeared; the press was mute. All the arguments had suddenly been appropriated by the other side, and to raise one’s voice against it was considered bad manners. Sachs continued to make a nuisance of himself, to speak out for what he had always believed in, but fewer and fewer people bothered to listen. He pretended not to care, but I could see that the battle was wearing him down, that even as he tried to take comfort from the fact that he was right, he was gradually losing faith in himself.

If the movie had been made, it might have turned things around for him. But Fanny’s prediction proved to be correct, and after six or eight months of revisions, renegotiations, and ditherings back and forth, the producer finally let the project drop. It’s difficult to gauge the full extent of Sachs’s disappointment. On the surface, he affected a jocular attitude about the whole business, cracking jokes, telling Hollywood stories, laughing about the large sums of money he had earned. This might or might not have been a bluff, but I’m convinced that a part of him had set great store in the possibility of seeing his book turned into a film. Unlike some writers, Sachs bore no grudge against popular culture, and he had never felt any conflict about the project. It wasn’t a question of compromising himself, it was an opportunity to reach large numbers of people, and he didn’t hesitate when the offer came. Although he never said it in so many words, I sensed that the call from Hollywood had flattered his vanity, stunning him with a brief, intoxicating whiff of power. It was a perfectly normal response, but Sachs was never easy on himself, and chances are that he later regretted these overblown dreams of glory and success. That would have made it more difficult for him to talk about his true feelings once the project failed. He had looked to Hollywood as
a way to escape the impending crisis growing inside him, and once it became clear that there was no escape, I believe he suffered a lot more than he ever let on.

All this is speculation. As far as I could tell, there were no abrupt or radical shifts in Sachs’s behavior. His work schedule was the same mad scramble of overcommitments and deadlines, and once the Hollywood episode was behind him, he went on producing as much as ever, if not more. Articles, essays, and reviews continued to pour out of him at a staggering rate, and I suppose it could be argued that far from having lost his direction, he was in fact barreling ahead at full tilt. If I question this optimistic portrait of Sachs during those years, it’s only because I know what happened later. Immense changes occurred inside him, and while it’s simple enough to pinpoint the moment when these changes began—to zero in on the night of his accident and blame everything on that freakish occurrence—I no longer believe that explanation is adequate. Is it possible for someone to change overnight? Can a man fall asleep as one person and then wake up as another? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t be willing to bet on it. It’s not that the accident wasn’t serious, but there are a thousand different ways in which a person can respond to a brush with death. That Sachs responded in the way he did doesn’t mean I think he had any choice in the matter. On the contrary, I look on it as a reflection of his state of mind before the accident ever took place. In other words, even if Sachs seemed to be doing more or less well just then, even if he was only dimly aware of his own distress during the months and years that preceded that night, I am convinced that he was in a very bad way. I have no proof to offer in support of this statement—except the proof of hindsight. Most men would have considered themselves lucky to have lived through what happened to Sachs that evening and then shrugged it off. But Sachs didn’t, and the fact that he didn’t—or, more precisely, the fact that he couldn’t—suggests
that the accident did not change him so much as make visible what had previously been hidden. If I’m wrong about this, then everything I’ve written so far is rubbish, a heap of irrelevant musings. Perhaps Ben’s life did break in two that night, dividing into a distinct before and after—in which case everything from before can be struck from the record. But if that’s true, it would mean that human behavior makes no sense. It would mean that nothing can ever be understood about anything.

I didn’t witness the accident, but I was there the night it happened. There must have been forty or fifty of us at the party, a mass of people crowded into the confines of a cramped Brooklyn Heights apartment, sweating, drinking, raising a ruckus in the hot summer air. The accident took place at around ten o’clock, but by then most of us had gone up to the roof to watch the fireworks. Only two people actually saw Sachs fall: Maria Turner, who was standing next to him on the fire escape, and a woman named Agnes Darwin, who inadvertently caused him to lose his balance by tripping into Maria from behind. There is no question that Sachs could have been killed. Given that he was four stories off the ground, it seems almost a miracle that he wasn’t. If not for the clothesline that broke his fall about five feet from the bottom, there’s no way he could have escaped without some permanent injury: a broken back, a fractured skull, any one of countless misfortunes. As it was, the rope snapped under the weight of his falling body, and instead of tumbling head-first onto the bare cement, he landed in a cushioning tangle of bathmats, blankets, and towels. The impact was still tremendous, but nothing close to what it could have been. Not only did Sachs survive, but he emerged from the accident relatively unharmed: a few cracked ribs, a mild concussion, a broken shoulder, some nasty bumps and bruises.
One can take comfort from that, I suppose, but in the end the real damage had little to do with Sachs’s body. This is the thing I’m still struggling to come to terms with, the mystery I’m still trying to solve. His body mended, but he was never the same after that. In those few seconds before he hit the ground, it was as if Sachs lost everything. His entire life flew apart in midair, and from that moment until his death four years later, he never put it back together again.

It was July 4, 1986, the one hundredth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. Iris was off on a six-week tour of China with her three sisters (one of whom lived in Taipei), David was spending two weeks at a summer camp in Bucks County, and I was holed up in the apartment, working on a new book and seeing no one. Ordinarily, Sachs would have been in Vermont by then, but he had been commissioned by the
Village Voice
to write an article about the festivities, and he wasn’t planning to leave the city until he handed in the article. Three years earlier, he had finally succumbed to my advice and entered into an agreement with a literary agent (Patricia Clegg, who also happened to be my agent), and it was Patricia who threw the party that night. Since Brooklyn was ideally situated for watching the fireworks, Ben and Fanny had accepted Patricia’s invitation. I had been invited as well, but I wasn’t planning to go. I was too inside my work to want to leave the house, but when Fanny called that afternoon and told me that she and Ben would be there, I changed my mind. I hadn’t seen either of them for close to a month, and with everyone about to disperse for the summer, I figured it would be my last chance to talk to them until the fall.

As it happened, I scarcely talked to Ben. The party was in full swing by the time I got there, and within three minutes of saying hello to him we had been pushed to opposite corners of the room. By pure chance, I was jostled up against Fanny, and before long we were so engrossed in conversation that we lost track of where Ben
was. Maria Turner was also there, but I didn’t see her in the crowd. It was only after the accident that I learned she had come to the party—had in fact been standing with Sachs on the fire escape before he fell—but by then there was so much confusion (shrieking guests, sirens, ambulances, scurrying paramedics) that the full impact of her presence failed to register with me. In the hours that preceded that moment, I enjoyed myself a good deal more than I had been expecting to. It wasn’t the party so much as being with Fanny, the pleasure of talking to her again, of knowing that we were still friends in spite of all the years and all the disasters that stood behind us. To tell the truth, I was feeling rather mawkish that night, in the grip of oddly sentimental thoughts, and I remember looking into Fanny’s face and realizing—very suddenly, as if for the first time—that we were no longer young, that our lives were slipping away from us. It could have been the alcohol I had drunk, but this thought struck me with all the force of a revelation. We were all growing old, and the only thing we could count on anymore was each other. Fanny and Ben, Iris and David: this was my family. They were the people I loved, and it was their souls I carried around inside me.