Leviathan (20 page)

As far as I am able to judge, it never really amounted to anything. Unlike Maria’s other projects, this one had no organizing principle or clearly defined purpose, and rather than start with a fixed idea as she always had in the past (to follow a stranger, for example, or to look up names in an address book), “Thursdays with Ben” was essentially formless: a series of improvisations, a picture album of the days they spent in each other’s company. They had agreed beforehand that they wouldn’t follow any rules. The only condition was that Sachs arrive at Maria’s house promptly at ten o’clock, and from then on they would play it by ear. For the most part, Maria took pictures of him, maybe two or three rolls’ worth, and then they would spend the rest of the day talking. A few times, she asked him to dress up in costumes. At other times, she recorded their conversations and took no pictures at all. When Sachs cut off his beard and shortened his hair, it turned out that he was acting on Maria’s advice, and the operation took place in her loft. She recorded the whole thing with
her camera: the before, the after, and all the steps in between. It begins with Sachs in front of a mirror, clutching a pair of scissors in his right hand. With each successive shot, a little more of his hair is gone. Then we see him lathering up his stubbled cheeks, and after that he gives himself a shave. Maria stopped shooting at that point (to put the finishing touches on his haircut), and then there’s one last picture of Sachs: short-haired and beardless, grinning into the camera like one of those slick hairdo boys you see on barbershop walls. I found it a nice touch. Not only was it funny in itself, but it proved that Sachs was able to enjoy the fun. After I saw that picture, I realized there were no simple solutions. I had underestimated him, and the story of those months was finally much more complicated than I had allowed myself to believe. Then came the shots of Sachs outside. In January and February, Maria had apparently followed him around the streets with her camera. Sachs had told her that he wanted to know what it felt like to be watched, and Maria had obliged him by resurrecting one of her old pieces: only this time it was done in reverse. Sachs took on the role she had played, and she turned herself into the private detective. That was the scene I had stumbled across in Manhattan when I saw Sachs walking along the other side of the street. Maria had been there as well, and what I had taken as conclusive evidence of my friend’s misery was in fact no more than a charade, a little bit of play-acting, a silly reenactment of Spy versus Spy. God knows how I managed to miss seeing Maria that day. I must have been concentrating so hard on Sachs that I was blind to everything else. But she saw me, and when she finally told me about it when we talked last fall, I felt crushed with shame. Luckily, she didn’t manage to take any pictures of me and Sachs together. Everything would have been out in the open then, but I had been following him from too far away for her to catch us in the same shot.

She took several thousand pictures of him in all, most of which were still on contact sheets when I saw them last September. Even if the Thursday sessions never developed into a coherent, ongoing work, they had a therapeutic value for Sachs—which was all Maria had hoped to accomplish with them in the first place. When Sachs came to visit her in October, he had withdrawn so far into his pain that he was no longer able to see himself. I mean that in a phenomenological sense, in the same way that one talks about self-awareness or the way one forms an image of oneself. Sachs had lost the power to step out from his thoughts and take stock of where he was, to measure the precise dimensions of the space around him. What Maria achieved over the course of those months was to lure him out of his own skin. Sexual tension was a part of it, but there was also her camera, the constant assault of her cyclops machine. Every time Sachs posed for a picture, he was forced to impersonate himself, to play the game of pretending to be who he was. After a while, it must have had an effect on him. By repeating the process so often, he must have come to a point where he started seeing himself through Maria’s eyes, where the whole thing doubled back on him and he was able to encounter himself again. They say that a camera can rob a person of his soul. In this case, I believe it was just the opposite. With this camera, I believe that Sachs’s soul was gradually given back to him.

He was getting better, but that didn’t mean he was well, that he would ever be the person he had been. Deep down, he knew that he could never return to the life he had led before the accident. He had tried to explain that to me during our conversation in August, but I hadn’t understood. I had thought he was talking about work—to write or not to write, to abandon his career or not—but it turned
out that he had been talking about everything: not just himself, but his life with Fanny as well. Within a month of coming home from the hospital, I think he was already looking for a way to break free of his marriage. It was a unilateral decision, a product of his need to wipe the slate clean and start over again, and Fanny was no more than an innocent victim of the purge. Months passed, however, and he couldn’t bring himself to tell her. This probably accounts for many of the puzzling contradictions in his behavior during that time. He didn’t want to hurt Fanny, and yet he knew he was going to hurt her, and this knowledge only increased his despair, only made him hate himself more. Thus the long period of waffling and inaction, of simultaneous recovery and decline. If nothing else, I believe it points to the essential goodness of Sachs’s heart. He had convinced himself that his survival hinged on committing an act of cruelty, and for several months he chose not to commit it, wallowing in the depths of a private torment in order to spare his wife from the brutality of his decision. He came close to destroying himself out of kindness. His bags were already packed, and yet he stayed on because her feelings meant as much to him as his own.

When the truth finally emerged, it was scarcely recognizable anymore. Sachs never managed to come out and tell Fanny that he wanted to leave her. His nerve had failed him too badly for that; his shame was too profound for him to be capable of expressing such a thought. Rather, in a much more oblique and circuitous manner, he began to make it known to Fanny that he was no longer worthy of her, that he no longer deserved to be married to her. He was ruining her life, he said, and before he dragged her down with him into hopeless misery, she should cut her losses and run. I don’t think there’s any question that Sachs believed this. Whether on purpose or not, he had manufactured a situation in which these words could be spoken in good faith. After months of conflict and indecision, he had
hit upon a way to spare Fanny’s feelings. He wouldn’t have to hurt her by announcing his intention to walk out. Rather, by inverting the terms of the dilemma, he would convince her to walk out on him. She would initiate her own rescue; he would help her to stand up for herself and save her own life.

Even if Sachs’s motives were hidden from him, he was at last maneuvering himself into a position to get what he wanted. I don’t mean to sound cynical about it, but it strikes me that he subjected Fanny to many of the same elaborate self-deceptions and tricky reversals he had used with Maria Turner out on the fire escape the previous summer. An overly refined conscience, a predisposition toward guilt in the face of his own desires, led a good man to act in curiously underhanded ways, in ways that compromised his own goodness. This is the nub of the catastrophe, I think. He accepted everyone else’s frailties, but when it came to himself he demanded perfection, an almost superhuman rigor in even the smallest acts. The result was disappointment, a dumbfounding awareness of his own flawed humanity, which drove him to place ever more stringent demands on his conduct, which in turn led to ever more suffocating disappointments. If he had learned how to love himself a little more, he wouldn’t have had the power to cause so much unhappiness around him. But Sachs was driven to do penance, to take on his guilt as the guilt of the world and to bear its marks in his own flesh. I don’t blame him for what he did. I don’t blame him for telling Fanny to leave him or for wanting to change his life. I just feel sorry for him, inexpressibly sorry for the terrible things he brought down on himself.

It took some time before his strategy had any effect. But what is a woman supposed to think when her husband tells her to fall in love with someone else, to get rid of him, to run away from him and never come back? In Fanny’s case, she dismissed this talk as nonsense, as further evidence of Ben’s growing instability. She had
no intention of doing any of these things, and unless he told her straight out that he was finished, that he no longer wanted to be married to her, she was determined to stay put. The standoff lasted for four or five months. This feels like an unendurable length of time to me, but Fanny refused to back down. He was putting her to a test, she felt, trying to push her out of his life in order to see how tenaciously she would hold on, and if she let go now, his worst fears about himself would come true. Such was the circular logic of her struggle to save their marriage. Every time Ben spoke to her, she interpreted it to mean the opposite of what he said. Leave meant don’t leave; love someone else meant love me; give up meant don’t give up. In the light of what happened later, I’m not so sure that she was wrong. Sachs thought he knew what he wanted, but once he got it, it no longer had any value to him. But by then it was too late. What he had lost, he had lost forever.

According to what Fanny told me, there was never any decisive break between them. Sachs wore her down instead, exhausting her with his persistence, slowly debilitating her until she no longer had the strength to fight back. There had been a few hysterical scenes in the beginning, she said, a few outbursts of tears and shouting, but all that eventually stopped. Little by little, she had run out of counterarguments, and when Sachs finally spoke the magic words, telling her one day in early March that a trial separation might be a good idea, she just nodded her head and went along with him. At the time, I knew nothing about any of this. Neither one of them had opened up to me about their troubles, and since my own life was particularly frantic just then, I wasn’t able to see them as often as I would have wished. Iris was pregnant; we were searching for a new place to live; I was commuting to a teaching job in Princeton twice a week and working hard on my next book. Still, it seems that I played an unwitting part in their marital negotiations. What I did
was to provide Sachs with an excuse, a way to walk out on her without appearing to have slammed the door shut. It all goes back to that day in February when I followed him around the streets. I had just spent two and a half hours with my editor, Ann Howard, and during the course of our conversation Sachs’s name had been mentioned more than once. Ann knew how close we were. She had been at the Fourth of July party herself, and since she knew about the accident and the tough times he had been going through since then, it was normal that she should ask me how he was. I told her that I was still worried—not so much by his mood anymore, but by the fact that he hadn’t done a stitch of work. “It’s been seven months now,” I said, “and that’s too long a holiday, especially for someone like Ben.” So we talked about work for a few minutes, wondering what it would take for him to get going again, and just as we started in on dessert, Ann came up with what struck me as a terrific idea. “He should put his old pieces together and publish them as a book,” she said. “It wouldn’t be very difficult. All he’d have to do is pick out the best ones, maybe touch up a couple of sentences here and there. But once he sits down with his old work, who knows what might happen? It could make him want to start writing again.”

“Are you saying you’d be interested in publishing this book?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said, “is that what I’m saying?” Ann paused for a moment and laughed. “I suppose I just said it, didn’t I?” Then she paused again, as if to catch herself before she went too far. “But still, why the hell not? It’s not as though I don’t know Ben’s stuff. I’ve been reading it since high school, for Christ’s sake. Maybe it’s about time someone twisted his arm and got him to do it.”

Half an hour later, when I caught sight of Sachs on Eighth Avenue, I was still thinking about this conversation with Ann. The idea of the book had settled comfortably inside me by then, and for
once I was feeling encouraged, more hopeful than I had been in a long time. Perhaps that explains why I became so depressed afterward. I found a man living in what looked like a state of utter abjection, and I couldn’t bring myself to accept what I had seen: my once brilliant friend, wandering around for hours in a quasi-trance, scarcely distinguishable from the ruined men and women who begged coins from him in the street. I got home that evening feeling sick at heart. The situation was out of control, I told myself, and unless I acted fast, there wouldn’t be a prayer of saving him.

I invited him out to lunch the following week. The moment he sat down in his chair, I plunged in and started talking about the book. This notion had been bandied about a few times in the past, but Sachs had always been reluctant to commit himself. He felt his magazine pieces were things of the moment, written for specific reasons at specific times, and a book would be too permanent a place for them. They should be allowed to die a natural death, he’d once told me. Let people read them once and forget them—there was no need to erect a tomb. I was already familiar with this defense, so I didn’t present the idea in literary terms. I talked about it strictly as a money proposition, a cold-cash deal. He had been sponging off of Fanny for the past seven months, I said, and maybe it was time for him to start pulling his own weight. If he wasn’t willing to go out and find a job, the least he could do was publish this book. Forget about yourself for once, I told him. Do it for her.