Sunset Park by Paul Auster

  After the soup comes, Renzo asks: What’s the latest on the boy?

  He’s here, Morris says. As of two or three weeks ago.

  Here in New York?

  In Brooklyn. Living in an abandoned house in Sunset Park with some other people.

  Our drummer friend told you this?

  Our drummer friend is one of the people living there. He invited Miles to come up from Florida, and the boy accepted. Don’t ask me why.

  It sounds like good news to me.

  Maybe. Time will tell. Bing says he’s planning to call me, but no messages yet.

  And what if he doesn’t call?

  Then nothing changes.

  Think about it, Morris. All you have to do is jump in a cab, drive out to Brooklyn, and knock on the door. Aren’t you tempted?

  Of course I’m tempted. But I can’t do it. He’s the one who left, and he’s the one who has to come back.

  Renzo doesn’t insist, and Morris is thankful to him for letting the matter drop there. As godfather to the boy and longtime friend of the father, Renzo has been participating in this grim saga for seven years, and by now there is little of anything left to say. Morris asks him about his recent travels, the trips to Prague, Copenhagen, and Paris, his reading at the Max Reinhardt Theater in Berlin, the prize he was given in Spain, and Renzo says it was a welcome diversion, he has been in a slump lately, and it felt good to be somewhere else for a few weeks, someplace other than inside his own head. Morris has been listening to this kind of talk from Renzo for as long as he can remember. Renzo is always in a slump, each book he finishes is always the last book he will ever write, and then, somehow, the slump mysteriously ends, and he is back in his room writing another book. Yes, Renzo says, he knows he’s talked this way in the past, but this time it feels different, he doesn’t know why, this time the paralysis is beginning to feel permanent. Night Walk was finished at the end of June, he says, more than six months ago, and since then he’s done nothing of any account. It was such a short book, just a hundred and fifty-something pages, but it seemed to take everything out of him, he wrote it in a kind of frenzy, less than three months from beginning to end, working harder and with more concentration than at any time in all the years he has been writing, pushing, pushing, like a runner sprinting at full tilt for seven miles, and exhilarating as it was to work at that pace, something in him collapsed when he crossed the finish line. For six months he has had no plans, no ideas, no project to occupy his days. When he hasn’t been traveling, he has felt listless and without motivation, with no desire to return to his desk and start writing again. He has experienced similar lulls in the past, yes, but never anything as stubborn and protracted as this one, and although he hasn’t reached a state of alarm yet, he is beginning to wonder if this isn’t the end, if the old fire hasn’t been extinguished at last. Meanwhile, he spends his days doing next to nothing—reading books, thinking, going out for walks, watching films, following the news of the world. In other words, he is resting, but for all that it is a strange kind of rest, he says, an anxious repose.

  The waiter brings them their sandwiches, and before Morris can say anything about this half-serious, half-mocking account of mental exhaustion, Renzo, in an abrupt about-face, contradicting everything he has just said, tells Morris that a small notion occurred to him while he was flying home from Europe the other day, the tiniest germ of an idea—for an essay, a piece of nonfiction, something. Morris smiles. I thought you had run out of ideas, he says. Well, Renzo answers, shrugging defensively, but with a glint of humor in his eye, one does have an occasional flicker.

  He was on the plane, he says, a first-class ticket paid for by the people who gave him the prize, the dread of flying dulled somewhat by soft leather seats, caviar and champagne, imbecilic luxe among the clouds, with an abundant choice of films at his disposal, not just new films from Europe and America but old ones as well, venerated classics, ancient fluff from the dream factories on both sides of the Atlantic. He wound up watching The Best Years of Our Lives, something he had seen once a long time ago and therefore had utterly forgotten, a nice movie, he felt, well played by the actors, a charming piece of propaganda designed to persuade Americans that the soldiers returning from World War II will eventually adjust to civilian life, not without a few bumps along the way, of course, but in the end everything will work out, because this is America, and in America everything always works out. Be that as it may, he enjoyed the film, it helped pass the time, but what interested him most about the film was not the film itself but a minor role played by one of the actors in it, Steve Cochran. He has only one bit of any importance, a short, smirking confrontation with the hero, whose wife has been running around with Cochran on the sly, but that finally isn’t what interested him either, Cochran’s performance is a matter of complete indifference to him, what counts is the story his mother once told him about having known Cochran during the war, yes, his mother, Anita Michaelson, née Cannobio, who died four years ago at the age of eighty. His mother was an elusive woman, not given to opening up about the past, but when Cochran died at forty-eight in 1965, just after Renzo had turned nineteen, she must have been thrown sufficiently off guard to feel a need to unburden herself, and so she told him about her brief infatuation with the theater in the early forties, a girl of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and how she crossed paths with Cochran in some New York theater group and fell for him. He was such a handsome man, she said, one of those rugged black-Irish heart-throbs, but what falling meant was never quite clear to Renzo. Did his mother lose her virginity to Steve Cochran in 1942 when she was seventeen years old? Did they have an actual fling—or was it only a thing, an adolescent crush on an up-and-coming twenty-five-year-old actor? Impossible to say, but what his mother did report was that Cochran wanted her to go to California with him, and she was prepared to go, but when her parents got wind of what was brewing, they put an immediate stop to it. No daughter of theirs, no scandals in this family, forget it, Anita. So Cochran left, his mother stayed and married his father, and that was how he came to be born—because his mother hadn’t run off with Steve Cochran. That is the idea he is toying with, Renzo says, to write an essay about the things that don’t happen, the lives not lived, the wars not fought, the shadow worlds that run parallel to the world we take to be the real world, the not-said and the not-done, the not-remembered. Chancy territory, perhaps, but it could be worth exploring.

  After he came home, Renzo says, he felt curious enough to do a little digging into Cochran’s life and career. Gangster roles for the most part, a couple of plays on Broadway with Mae West, of all people, White Heat with James Cagney, the lead in Antonioni’s Il Grido, and appearances on various televison shows in the fifties: Bonanza, The Untouchables, Route 66, The Twilight Zone. He formed his own production company, which produced little or nothing (information is scant, and although Renzo is curious, he is not curious enough to explore this point further), but Cochran seems to have acquired a reputation as one of the most active skirt chasers of his time. This probably explains why his mother fell for him, Renzo continues, sadly contemplating how easy it must have been for a practiced seducer to soften the heart of an inexperienced seventeen-year-old girl. How could she have resisted the man who later went on to have affairs with Joan Crawford, Merle Oberon, Kay Kendall, Ida Lupino, and Jayne Mansfield? There was also Mamie Van Doren, who apparently wrote at great length about her sex life with Cochran in an autobiography published twenty years ago, but Renzo has no plans to read the book. In the end, what fascinates him most is how thoroughly he suppressed the facts about Cochran’s death, which he must have heard about when he was nineteen, but even after the conversation with his mother (which theoretically should have made the story impossible to forget), he forgot everything. In 1965, hoping to rejuvenate his moribund production company, Cochran developed a project for a film to be set in Central or South America. With three young women between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five, supposedly hired as assistants, he se
t out for Costa Rica on his forty-foot yacht to begin scouting locations. Some weeks later, the boat washed ashore along the coast of Guatemala. Cochran had died on board from a severe lung infection, and the three panic-stricken young women, who knew nothing about sailing, nothing about navigating forty-foot yachts, had been drifting through the ocean for the past ten days, alone with Cochran’s putrefying corpse. Renzo says he cannot efface the image from his mind. The three frightened women lost at sea with the decomposing body of the dead movie star below deck, convinced they will never touch land again.

  So much, he says, for the best years of our lives.

  2

  He has been invited to four New Year’s Eve parties in four different parts of Manhattan, East Side and West Side, uptown and downtown, but after the funeral, after the lunch with Renzo, after the two hours spent at Marty and Nina’s place, he has no desire to see anyone. He goes home to the apartment on Downing Street, unable to stop thinking about Suki, unable to free himself of the story Renzo told about the dead actor on the drifting boat. How many corpses has he seen in his life? he wonders. Not the embalmed dead lying in their open coffins, the wax-museum figures drained of blood who no longer appear to have been human, but actual dead bodies, the vivid dead, as it were, before they could be touched by the mortician’s scalpel? His father, thirty years ago. Bobby, twelve years ago. His mother, five years ago. Three. Just three in more than sixty years.

  He goes into the kitchen and pours himself a scotch. He already knocked off two of them at Marty and Nina’s place, but he doesn’t feel the least bit wobbly or disabled, his head is clear, and after the enormous lunch he consumed at the delicatessen, which is still sitting in his stomach like a stone, he has no appetite for dinner. He tells himself that he will end the year by catching up on the manuscripts he should have read in England, but he understands that this is merely a ruse, a trick to propel him into the comfortable armchair in the living room, and once he sits down in that chair, he will not return to Samantha Jewett’s novel, which he has already decided not to publish.

  It is seven-thirty, four and a half hours before another year begins, the tired ritual of noisemakers and fireworks, the blast of drunken voices that will echo across the neighborhood at midnight, always the same eruption on this particular midnight, but he is far from that now, alone with his scotch and his thoughts, and if he can go deeply enough into those thoughts, he won’t even hear the voices and the clamor when the time comes. Five years ago this past May, the call from his mother’s cleaning woman, who had just let herself into the apartment with her duplicate key. He was at the office, he remembers, a Tuesday morning around ten o’clock, talking with Jill Hertzberg about Renzo’s latest manuscript and whether to use an illustration on the cover or go with pure graphics. Why remember a detail like that? No reason, no reason that he can think of, except that reason and memory are nearly always at odds, and then he was in a cab heading up Broadway to West Eighty-fourth Street, trying to get his mind around the fact that his mother, who had been wisecracking with him over the phone on Saturday, was now dead.

  The body. That is what he is thinking about now, the corpse of his mother lying on the bed five years ago, and the terror he felt when he looked down at her face, the blue-gray skin, the half-open-half-closed eyes, the terrifying immobility of what had once been a living person. She had been lying there for roughly forty-eight hours before she was discovered by the cleaning woman. Still dressed in her nightgown, his mother had been reading the Sunday edition of the New York Times when she died—no doubt of a sudden, cataclysmic heart attack. One bare leg was hanging over the edge of the bed, and he wondered if she had tried to get up when the attack began (to search for a pill? to call for help?), and if so, given that she had moved only a few inches, it struck him that she must have died within seconds.

  He looked at her for a brief moment, for several moments, and then he turned away and walked into the living room. It was too much for him; to see her in that state of frozen vulnerability was more than he could bear. He can’t remember if he looked at her again when the police arrived, if it was necessary for him to make a formal identification of the body or not, but he is certain that when the paramedics came to pack up the corpse in a black rubber body bag, he couldn’t look. He remained in the living room staring down at the rug, studying the clouds through the window, listening to himself breathe. It was simply too much for him, and he couldn’t bring himself to look anymore.

  The revelation of that morning, the blunt, incontestable minim of knowledge he finally grasped when the paramedics were wheeling her out of the apartment, the idea that has continued to haunt him ever since: there can be no memories of the womb, not for him or anyone else, but he accepts it as an article of faith, or else wills himself to understand it through a leap of the imagination, that his own life as a sentient being began as part of the now dead body they were pushing through the opened door, that his life began within her.

  She was a child of the war, just as Renzo’s mother was, just as all their parents were, whether their fathers had fought in the war or not, whether their mothers had been fifteen or seventeen or twenty-two when the war began. A strangely optimistic generation, he thinks now, tough, dependable, hard working, and a little stupid as well, perhaps, but they all bought into the myth of American greatness, and they lived with fewer doubts than their children did, the boys and girls of Vietnam, the angry postwar children who saw their country turn into a sick, destructive monster. Spunky. That is the word that comes to him whenever he thinks about his mother. Spunky and outspoken, strong-willed and loving, impossible. She remarried twice after his father’s death in seventy-eight, lost both of the new husbands to cancer, one in ninety-two, the other in oh-three, and even then, in the last year of her life, at age seventy-nine, eighty, she was still hoping to catch another man. I was born married, she said to him once. She had turned into the Wife of Bath, and fitting as that role might have been for her, playing the son of the Wife of Bath had not been entirely pleasant. His sisters had shared the burden with him, of course, but Cathy lives in Millburn, New Jersey, and Ann is in Scarsdale, just out of reach, on the fringes of the combat zone, and because he was the oldest, and because his mother trusted men more than women, he was the one she came to with her troubles, which were never classified as troubles (all negative words had been expunged from her vocabulary) but as little somethings, as in, I have a little something to discuss with you. Willful blindness is what he called it, an obdurate insistence on looking for silver linings, moral victories, a darkest-before-the-dawn attitude in the face of the most wrenching facts—burying three husbands, the disappearance of her grandson, the accidental death of her stepgrandson—but that was the world she came from, an ethical universe patched together from the righteous platitudes of Hollywood films—pluck, spunk, and never say die. Admirable in its way, yes, but also maddening, and as the years moved forward he understood that much of it was a sham, that inside her supposedly indomitable spirit there was also fear and panic and crushing sadness. Who could blame her? Having lived through the various maladies of her three husbands, how could she not have turned into a world-class hypochondriac? If your experience has taught you that all bodies must and will betray the person they belong to, why wouldn’t you think that a small pain in the stomach is a prelude to stomach cancer, that a headache signifies brain tumor, that a forgotten word or name is an augury of dementia? Her last years were spent visiting doctors, dozens of specialists for this condition or that syndrome, and it’s true that she was having problems with her heart (two angioplasties), but no one thought she was in any real danger. He figured she would go on complaining about her imaginary illnesses until she was ninety, that she would outlive him, that she would outlive them all, and then, without warning, less than twenty-four hours after cracking jokes to him on the phone, she was dead. And once he had come to terms with it, the frightening thing about her death was that he felt relieved, or at least some part of him felt rel
ieved, and he hates himself for being callous enough to admit it, but he knows he is lucky to have been spared the rigors of seeing her through a long old age. She left the world at the right time. No prolonged suffering, no descent into decrepitude or senility, no broken hips or adult diapers, no blank stares into empty space. A light goes on, a light goes off. He misses her, but he can live with the fact that she is gone.

  He misses his father more. He is callous enough to admit that, too, but his father has been dead for thirty years now, and he has spent half his life walking beside that ghost. Sixty-three, just one year older than he is now, in good condition, still playing tennis four times a week, still strong enough to trounce his thirty-two-year-old son in three sets of singles, probably still strong enough to beat him at arm wrestling, a strict nonsmoker, alcohol consumption close to zero, never ill with anything, not even colds or flus, a broad-shouldered six-one, without flab or gut or stoop, a man who looked ten years younger than his age, and then a minor problem, an attack of bursitis in his left elbow, the proverbial tennis elbow, extremely painful, yes, but hardly life-threatening, and so he went to a doctor for the first time in how many years, a quack who prescribed cortisone pills instead of some mild painkiller, and his father, unaccustomed to taking pills, carried around the cortisone in his pocket as if it were a bottle of aspirin, tossing another pill down his throat every time the elbow acted up, thus tampering with the functioning of his heart, putting undue strain on his cardiovascular system without even knowing it, and one night, as he was making love to his wife (a consoling thought: to know that his parents were still active in the sex department at that point in their marriage), the night of November 26, 1978, as Alvin Heller was approaching an orgasm in the arms of his wife, Constance, better known as Connie, his heart gave out on him, rupturing inside his chest, exploding inside his chest, and that was the end.