Childish Loves Read online

  ‘In this business,’ he said, ‘there aren’t many success stories.’

  ‘Is that what I am?’ I asked.

  I was staying with my sister in New Haven and got the commuter service into Grand Central, then transferred to the 7 train and rode it all the way out to Flushing. For some reason I found this journey especially dispiriting. To come into Manhattan and go out of it again – to feel yourself diminishing on the way to the suburbs, into a different kind of anonymity. Mike’s enthusiasm for my success had touched a nerve. Since taking up Peter’s cause, I had published little of my own work. Nothing but Playing Days, a quiet memoir of my first long year after college, which I spent playing minor-league basketball in Germany. It came out in England first; my American publishers were still undecided about it. The book had received a more muted critical reception than Peter’s novels, and I found myself struggling, on the long train ride to Queens, against the inevitable comparisons. A dull overcast late summer day, as pale as December, and in the course of my journey the street lamps came on without discernible effect on the general whiteness.

  After five years in the fiction business I should have learned my lesson. Writers get rewarded according to their exaggerations. This explains why, compared with the real thing, most novels seem so vivid and unnatural – the qualities by which critics and readers tend to recognize ‘good writing.’ What I aimed at in Playing Days wasn’t vividness, it was the mildly unusual, overcomplicated quality of the story you tell on coming home from work. Our lives are governed mostly by technicalities; literature ignores them because they are boring. We stopped at 33rd Street, 40th Street, 51st Street stations. I’m inventing the numbers but the impression they made somehow reinforced my case. The streets below us, viewed sidelong from the elevated tracks and partly obscured by window-shine, seemed more or less indistinguishable. Sometimes I even saw the same shopping chains reproduced in slightly different order. The variations in people are hardly more significant. After an hour of self-justification, I had the stuffed-up, hungry feeling you get from eating too much of the same thing. So I rested my head against the glass and closed my eyes.

  Flushing was the last stop. There was no danger of overshooting, and I was plenty early in any case to be at Lowenthal’s house by seven thirty. Drifting off, I played over again a sort of internal dialogue, which originated God knows where, but had become familiar to me over the past few weeks. It’s what I thought about sometimes instead of sleeping; maybe it was the same thing as sleep. Someone said, Do you find this passage of time acceptable? A voice not exactly my own – maybe my father’s or brother’s. Yes, I always answered. After a moment it spoke again. Is there anything you have to do? No, I said. There is nothing I have to do. Then why not accept it? said the voice. Then other people intruded themselves. I could hear them like you hear your parents’ guests arrive while you lie upstairs in bed. Is this where you get off for Shea Stadium? That’s why they call it Shea Station, lady. I beg your pardon, that’s not what they call it, and so on. By the time I woke up, the artificial light of the subway car was sharp enough to hurt my eyes. It was dark outside, and I felt oddly intimidated by the hurry of the commuters going home.

  *

  Mike Lowenthal lived in a gray clapboard row-house about ten minutes’ walk from the station. His wife and seventeen-year-old son had died in a car accident five years before. This is one of the first things he told me as he showed me inside. There was a woman he called his Super Maid hustling around the kitchen, a middle-aged Polish woman named Marte, bulky, sweating, with the wide shoulders and hips of a Matisse or a Henry Moore. ‘Don’t introduce me,’ she said. ‘I don’t have time to talk. My hands are dirty. Don’t shake my hands.’

  ‘My wife was the only one who could get her to do anything,’ Mike said. ‘Now she bosses me around.’

  ‘Look at me, bossing,’ she called out.

  ‘Listen, you’re a little early. Before the rest of this crowd arrive, why don’t I show you something.’

  I followed his back up the staircase running through the center of the house. He had the ordinary, loose-skinned face of a middle-aged working man, but from behind he looked like some strange vegetable, with all its weight gathered in the middle and tapering away to the top and bottom. When he reached the landing, he turned towards the rear of the house into a boy’s bedroom. Pinned to the door, a large official-looking sign: Beware of the Teenager. There was an unmade single bed in the room, under a window that overlooked the backs of the row-houses: porch lights glared as regular as street lamps. Mike sat down at his son’s desk, wheezing a little from the stairs. There was nowhere for me to sit but the bed. Something about it, however, made me hesitate, and the awful thought crossed my mind that the sheets hadn’t been changed in five years.

  He lifted a thin sheaf of papers from a drawer, cheaply bound and covered in clear plastic, and laid it out carefully on the leather of his son’s desk. It looked like a senior essay and was titled: NOT THE FIRST LOVE STORY IN THE WORLD, BY STEVEN LOWENTHAL. It cost him some effort to rise to his feet again. ‘I’m going to get out of your hair. What you don’t need is me standing over your shoulder.’ Then, in a sudden change of tone: ‘What are we doing here. Let me get you a drink.’ He put his hands quietly together, an effeminate gesture; it struck me that he was waiting for me to make room. At that moment the doorbell rang and Marte called up to him something unintelligible. ‘They’re playing my song,’ he said and moved awkwardly past me to the head of the stairs, where he stopped and turned again. We looked at each other for a moment and I felt strongly the need to add something. Then the bell rang again, the quick double-ring of social, light-hearted impatience. ‘Take as long as you want,’ he said. ‘This crowd is good for nothing till the food arrives.’

  Once he was gone, I closed his son’s door and spent a few minutes looking over the bedroom, which still smelled of sleep. It struck me that Mike probably used it as a guest room or slept in it himself when his marriage bed seemed too large for one. The desk, square and old-fashioned, crowded out a corner of the window and seemed like a recent addition. Maybe Mike used the room as an office and napped there when he got tired. On the wall over Steven’s bed was a poster of Norm Duke, a big-eared, red-faced grinning young man, stuck on with Blu-Tack. The poster said, Winner of the 2000 PBA National Championship, Toledo, Ohio; and I noticed on the top shelf of the narrow bookcase a row of bowling trophies, several honorable mentions and a 2nd place finish in the father/son category. The books were mostly the books you’d expect to see on the shelf of a high-school senior: A Tale of Two Cities, The Great Gatsby, The Norton Anthology of Poetry. There were also a few more personal touches: The Big Lebowski on VHS, and a series of fantasy novels, with women on the cover entwined around swords, etc.

  I sat down to read NOT THE FIRST LOVE STORY IN THE WORLD. The opening paragraph was a single sentence: They say that grief is transient. As I skimmed the rest of it, the doorbell continued to ring. A young man, who seems to be unnamed, falls in love with a girl from his high-school chemistry class, Laura Salzburger. He is a very nice young man, in most public ways, a good student, but he imagines doing all kinds of unspeakable things to her. Because of his terrible imagination, he breaks out in a sweat whenever he sees her and can never manage more than the most perfunctory conversation. Eventually he decides to announce his feelings for her ‘in prose.’ He writes a story about a beautiful girl named Laura Salzburger, who dies tragically and mysteriously and is mourned for the rest of his life by the awkward young man who never had the courage to ‘express his feelings for her.’

  A short story, then, or a novella – fifty-odd pages long. I wondered if he meant to suggest that the protagonist himself had been responsible for the girl’s death. This is the kind of thing teenaged writers like to hint at. Regardless, the story was more or less unpublishable and contained many of the simple flaws, easy to spot but awkward to correct, which had become familiar to me in my teaching. Sudden shifts in tense and point
of view. False oppositions; grammatical carelessness. A tendency to rely on the first phrase or thought that comes to hand, which is usually the phrase or thought left lying around on the surface of the imagination by bad movies and books: ‘Laura Salzburger had a beautiful smile that lit up not only most rooms but her own blue eyes.’ It’s common, in creative writing seminars, to talk about the difference between the reader’s truth and the writer’s truth – in other words, about the gap between what you see in your mind and what you can put on the page. But this difference matters little in practice. Most young writers put on the page exactly what it is they do see, a world of bright, textureless, unconnected parts, some of it borrowed from other books.

  Then I thought, and he’s dead, and he’s been dead five years. And it’s quite possible that this story is basically ‘true.’ That Steven Lowenthal had a crush on a girl from his chemistry class, his first real sexual crush; and that he imagined doing all kinds of perfectly acceptable things with her, which he felt terrible about from the point of view of his decent, daylight, pre-sexual personality; and that he never got the chance to reconcile himself, as most of us do and should, to certain aspects of his human nature. One of the things I had learned after three years in teaching is that my training had taught me to distinguish between good and bad writing, but not between what was true and what wasn’t. I’d had kids handing in stories about their alcoholic mothers you could have sworn were lifted from the plots of daytime television until you saw them shivering in your office, holding themselves by the arms to keep from crying. What’s happening to these people, you think, that it comes out so badly written? Don’t they suffer too?

  For a minute I sat at Steven Lowenthal’s desk, calming down. Saying to myself, what are you getting worked up about. Below me I heard Mike’s voice, not the words themselves, but the muffled shape of the words, diminishing as he moved away from the stairs in the hall. More guests. And the feeling returned to me that I was lying half-asleep in my parents’ house and listening to one of their parties. Another minute, I thought, another minute. Then decided I was probably angry about being somewhere I didn’t want to be and doing something I didn’t want to do; and at that point I stood up and went downstairs.

  When I walked into the living room, there were nine or ten people sitting down, haphazardly, with food on their laps. The oldest was in his eighties, bald and straight-backed, with thick rolls of skin on his forehead and the back of his neck. I learned afterwards he had recently lost a great deal of weight. Henry Pantolini. He offered to make space for me on the piano seat.

  ‘There’s not much of me,’ he said, with a kind of pride. I sat down for a minute beside him. ‘I don’t play any more because of my hands,’ he added and held up his hands. ‘When I was your age I used to work nights sweeping floors at the Harry Eichler School in Richmond Hill. They kept a little upright Mason-Hamlin in a corner of the gym. Sometimes, when I had the place to myself, I played whatever they had on the stand, like “Bandstand Boogie”, that kind of thing. For ten, twenty minutes. Very spooky and loud. This was my second job, and the rest of my free time was taken up with an accounting degree. It’s amazing how hard you can work when you have no choice. Now I get tired rolling out of bed.’ I could think of nothing to say to any of this, and he took pity. ‘Why don’t you get some food.’

  The youngest was Sarah, in her mid-twenties; an undergraduate at Queens College. Permed hair; an accommodating blouse; and a dark skirt made of some synthetic material that clung to her thighs when she stood up. She told me within a few minutes of conversation that she was a single mother with a two-year-old child at home. ‘I come here to meet men, that’s what I tell people,’ she joked. ‘This is my fifth meeting, and you’re the first one I’ve seen. Age-suitable, I mean.’ Her father, before he died, had written her what started out as a long letter about the year and a half he spent as a teenager in Birkenau. The reason she started school so late is because he needed taking care of, and also because of her daughter. The letter by the time he was done was a hundred and fifty pages long. ‘Some letter,’ she said. She didn’t even look at it before he was dead, but by the time I met her she had read it ‘five or six times over, and always with tears in my eyes. The old bastard. If he does this to me, who had every reason to resent him, what will he do to people he didn’t annoy?’

  Marte had made two kinds of stew, one with meat and one without, which bubbled thickly in the kitchen, still in their pots. I moved vaguely towards it, through an arch in the living room. Next to the pots were bowls and slices of cheap white bread. ‘I don’t know you,’ a woman said to me, ladle in hand – middle-aged, round-bellied, with a girlish, unpretty face. She wore her red hair in a bob. ‘You’re the new kid.’

  ‘Do you normally know everybody?’

  ‘It’s a pretty good crew,’ she said. Crowd; crew. They had found odd, affectionate ways of referring to each other.

  ‘I’m sure it is.’ I stood waiting for her to finish serving herself. ‘I don’t know what the thing you say here is. To new members, I mean.’

  ‘You mean, who died? My sister. She didn’t have any specially awful story, except she wanted to be a writer and couldn’t get published. I teach high-school English in Forest Hills. What she wrote is not bad. I don’t have any illusions about it, either. She died last February, not this year’s but the one before. Forty-five years old. You know how many manuscripts she left behind? But what do you care; let me ask you. Who died for you.’

  ‘A guy I used to teach with. In Riverdale. I was also a high-school English teacher.’

  Mike interrupted me, with a hand on her shoulder. ‘This is our distinguished speaker,’ he said. And then: ‘Can I have a word?’ He led me to a sidebar in the sitting room, where the drinks were kept. The house reminded me of my grandmother’s house and suggested a touching Jewish faith in material quality. I could hear her commenting, ‘the best of everything,’ and meaning, the most expensive. Thick white carpets; club chairs; the carpet still white and the chairs recently re-upholstered. All of which struck me as evidence that either Mike Lowenthal was doing okay or Marte was more helpful than he pretended. The television lived in a mahogany wall-cupboard, which was built out of the fireplace and matched the piano stationed prominently in the bay window. So passers-by could look at it and admire. It was also a fact about my grandmother that she played beautifully, with real feeling.

  ‘I don’t know if you had a chance to look at … what I showed you,’ Mike said to me. His voice had dropped.

  ‘Do you mind talking about your son?’

  ‘Believe me, that’s one thing you do get used to. I understand your concerns, though. So far as I know he was no kind of sexual pervert. But then, he was a seventeen-year-old boy: what I don’t know about him could fill a much bigger book than he wrote. Such a vocabulary. In conversation, you were lucky to get a yes or no.’ He picked up a lemon and began to cut. ‘Gin and tonic? Isn’t that what you English types like to drink?’ He handed me a tall glass, and we shifted slightly into a corner of the room. ‘I can guess your next question,’ he went on. ‘My wife was literary, that’s where he gets it from. When I was a young man, just in practice, I joined what has since become, so people tell me, a very fashionable kind of association. I mean, a book group. Mostly I was on the lookout for girls. Whenever I made any kind of comment about wouldn’t it be nice to clear up this point with the author, you can’t believe the grief they gave me. Now everybody I show it to, these publishing guys, want to know the same thing. There was no Laura Salzburger in his high-school graduating class. But was there a Meira Schulzman, a Rachel Littman, a Deborah Leibowitz? Of course there was. More than that I couldn’t say.’

  I wasn’t sure if he was angry or enjoying himself, or both; his voice had risen again. ‘Next question,’ he said.

  ‘Can you tell me anything about how he died?’

  ‘Like I said, a car accident. This isn’t an interesting or dramatic kind of death, not like cancer, which
seems to get so much press these days. I mean from you people, the writers. (You see, I’ve been reading your books.) There wasn’t even some drunk running a red light I could devote myself to putting behind bars. My wife hit a patch of black ice coming off the White Stone Expressway five years ago last December. Nobody’s fault but dumb luck’s; she was going about forty miles an hour. They had just been to visit her mother in Florida – she had the cancer, and outlived them both to see the funeral. Somebody, I think it was Delta, used to run a very reasonable shuttle from Fort Lauderdale to La Guardia. I came back late from work to nobody home, but you know how it is with flights; there’s always delays. Even if the flight comes in, they lose the luggage. Till about midnight, I was perfectly calm and sensible. I brushed my teeth like a good boy; I went to bed. First I can’t sleep and then, after twenty minutes of fighting the sheets, my heart begins pounding and I start making calls. It turns out when I stopped being sensible I was more or less on the money, but I didn’t invite you here to talk to you about this.’

  ‘No, you wanted to talk about publication.’

  He looked up at me and waited. Eventually, I said, ‘I can anticipate several difficulties about publication. Let me add, this is a line I’ve heard myself in one way or another more than thirty times. You see, I keep count. Also, I’m not a publisher, I’m a writer, and what I know about is the trouble I might have selling my own work.’ It seemed to me that people were listening in, so I continued as quietly as I could. ‘Here is the first problem. Nobody wants long short stories. Nobody wants short short stories, either, but at least they don’t take up much space.’

  ‘What I was thinking of was somebody might write some kind of introduction and bulk it up a little. Like you did.’