Childish Loves Page 4

  At reception, I asked the way to Heinz’s office. The bird-like Irish woman at the black phones, smaller than she used to be, blinder (her pale staring blue eyes were fading into the whites), remembered me. ‘Sure I know you,’ she said, ‘tall as you are. You were Mr Pattieson’s great friend.’

  ‘I knew him a little and liked what I knew.’

  ‘A very amusing man. A great one for impressions.’

  ‘I never heard his impressions.’

  ‘Well, I suppose he didn’t intend them for the upstairs.’ Most of the department offices were on the second floor. The ground floor housed administration, and that’s where she directed me now, back the way I had come. ‘To the door with the window in it,’ she said. I stopped a moment at her desk; she worked in a little cubicle just off the main entrance, with an old-fashioned switchboard over her head that hadn’t been used in years.

  ‘I hear he died a few years ago. I was very sorry to miss the funeral.’

  ‘You weren’t the only one who was sorry.’

  ‘I hear he wrote a few books.’

  She gripped me confidentially on the back of the wrist and said, ‘I wouldn’t bother with them. I had a look at one of them – one of the teachers brought it in, for show, you know. It looked sad stuff to me. He was much more amusing in life, but then, most people are.’

  When I walked in Heinz’s office, he called out, ‘Ah, the famous Markovits.’ Whenever old students came to visit him, this is what he cried: ‘Ah, the famous so-and-so.’ He had taken me under his wing for the nine months I taught at Horatio Alger. I had been warned by other teachers that he liked to play the father-figure, but I didn’t stay long enough for any strain to develop. Still, it disappointed me mildly to be greeted with the stock enthusiasm he showed to everyone else. People who play the father-figure usually find replacements for the young men who leave them behind. Also, in my case he might have meant a dig about the way I had given up an honorable profession to make a name for myself.

  He was a short, round-shouldered man in his early sixties, with a short white beard that covered his cheeks and the loose skin of his neck. I should add, it was one of his jokes that we were distantly related, through a cousin on his side and a married aunt on mine, who had roots in the small close-knit community of Pittsburgh Jews.

  ‘Look at you,’ I said to him. ‘You’ve got a fish tank.’ Fish tank, mahogany shelves, a new Persian rug. The chair he sat in rotated effortlessly between the two wings of an L-shaped desk. Which had a view, across it, of the baseball field – itself brand new and bright with fresh chalk and turf.

  ‘It’s what they give you when you reach higher office.’

  ‘To see if you can keep something alive?’ And so on. This is how we talked.

  ‘Listen,’ he said at last, ‘I got a class to teach. Why don’t you come along and we can get lunch after.’

  I followed him into the hallway, suddenly filled with students (the noise of them like the noise of ugly birds). The school board didn’t believe in bells; it was one of the illusions of the place that this traffic was voluntary. At the beginning of class, he introduced me as ‘the famous writer,’ but mostly what I felt, as I leaned my head against the back wall, was sixteen years old. For the next forty minutes I sat in a gray plastic chair beside an opened window and listened to a discussion of Bartleby the Scrivener. Heinz was a good teacher; he had the gift of reviving at will his passion for a familiar book. Teaching is like marriage, he once said to me. ‘After thirty years of Shakespeare you got to figure it takes a certain effort of the memory to get it up.’

  Outside I could see the kids with early lunch finding a spot at the edge of the baseball field to sit and eat – the regents were particular about the diamond. And I remembered another conversation I had had with Heinz about marriage. He rarely joined us for a beer at Dorney and Malone’s. At the time he was head of the English department; maybe he liked to keep a certain distance. But shortly before the end of the spring term, he asked me between classes if the young guns still liked to hit the bars on Friday afternoons because he wouldn’t mind tagging along. I said sure; in the end, nobody came and it was just the two of us, which probably suited him.

  There was something on his mind. A son from his first marriage was graduating (cum laude) from Rutgers in a few weeks’ time, and his ex-wife was making difficulties about the weekend arrangements. But he didn’t want to talk about these disagreements, which were equally petty and painful, and more boring than anything else. He never thought when he was young that he would invest so much of his energy and intelligence on administrative detail. Not only at work but at home. It should be clear by now that I spent most of the afternoon on the listening end of this conversation, though he paid for my two beers and his own modest ginger ale. The popcorn came free. I kept eating and drinking, out of embarrassment. This was the first time someone from my father’s generation had opened up to me.

  No, what he wanted to talk about was something else. His second marriage was much happier, thank God, a fact that had a great deal to do with the character of his second wife, which he had recognized almost immediately. But it was also true that he had learned a few things from his first marriage, which might prove useful to me. By this point he knew I was leaving for London at the end of the year. ‘To become a writer,’ I had told him – though, of course, what I became first was a sponge and a part-time tutor; subsequently a book reviewer and assistant editor, and finally, etc. What upset him so much about the current round of stupid negotiations with his ex-wife was the fact that all he could think about, even while fighting his own corner, was, This is what I have done to you. You are the way you are because of me.

  ‘Look, I’m not trying to beat myself up here with self-hatred. For some situations I got plenty of hatred to go around. And in this case, when I feel these things, partly what I feel is also, listen lady, when did you get to be so unreasonable, selfish, vain and deliberately hurtful? Because when I met this woman she was none of the above. This was a sophisticated, curious, warm-hearted, pleasure-seeking human being. Most of the first five years of our relationship she had to drag me along, intellectually, socially, emotionally, you name it. Sure, we fought a lot of that time, nobody likes being dragged, we fought like hell. But then we entered a patch of clear water, which lasted long enough that we both came to believe it was the new rules of the game. So we got married. And it was only after five or six years of marriage, after the kids were born and we had started to sleep again and return to some kind of acceptable human existence, that I realized why we had stopped fighting in the first place. It became clear to me that I had created an atmosphere, I don’t know what else to call it, in which all of the qualities I originally admired about this woman had become blighted. The sexual creature I had fallen in love with had more or less withered and died in front of my eyes. Partly because of childbirth; I take a healthy enough dose of self-loathing without blaming myself additionally for biological facts. Partly because of what’s required to keep two kids fed and clothed, to get them to sleep at night and out of bed in the morning, even to hand them over every day to the people you pay huge sums of money to in order to take such problems off your hands. But I’m convinced that what was essentially lovable about this woman – and let me be clear here, this is no longer a lovable woman – would have survived these traumas if I had not created an atmosphere around her that was basically poisonous to her best nature. Not deliberately, I won’t go as far as that, but out of some instinct for survival that has everything to do with who I am. I beat this woman down for ten years, with conversation, with argument, by insisting on certain pleasures and opinions and denying her others, and at the end of those ten years I looked at her and thought, Why don’t you get up, God damn it, why don’t you get up any more?’

  What should I have said to him? I was twenty-three years old. With two weeks left in the school year, the only thing on my mind was how to get through them. But I asked him dutifully why his second
marriage had turned out better.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Before you get married you have to judge in cold blood two people you’re unaccustomed to treating with any detachment. It requires a cold-blooded decision. Maybe you think, one thing I know about myself is that I’m a bit of a social climber; and this girl here is something of a snob. Not attractive qualities, in either one of us, but they could play to our advantage. I mean, in forging the kind of life we need to forge for us to be comfortable together. I’m old enough to know a few unpleasant things about myself. I like to have my say. To have a wife who is curious and receptive, a natural student, who admires me and lets me talk – this, for me, is no disaster. Of course, if she were nothing besides these things, God help us. But in addition, she is patient and stubborn and maybe even a little passive-aggressive. I’m a blowhard; mostly she gets her way.’

  He seemed ashamed of talking too much and excused himself to take a leak. And coming back, with wet hands, he lifted his jacket from the round shoulders of his chair. ‘I should let you go,’ he said. ‘I should go myself.’ But even on our way out, he couldn’t help himself. ‘I’ll tell you the real trouble with Barbara’ (his first wife). ‘She knew me when I was young and stupid and couldn’t believe I had grown up to be anything else.’

  ‘My mother likes to say that the secret to happiness is love and work. And children. I’m not sure you’re right, though, about the importance of cold blood.’

  ‘Prodigious youth!’ he said.

  ‘I suspect she would think, you’re better off being too much in love. Then you’ve got time afterwards to work out why.’

  ‘I had much love for Barbara. Like Othello for Desdemona. But listen to your mother.’

  A few months after this conversation, when school was out, I got a letter from Heinz in London. I was living for free in the basement of a house in Hampstead, which belonged to friends of my parents – the use of this flat was one of my inducements for going abroad. He wanted to see how I was getting along, Heinz wrote, though the real point of his letter was the apology he offered at the end of it for his ‘outburst in that tacky bar. Real bar talk, too, full of wifely complaints. I should be ashamed of myself. I am.’ The fact is, he said, he was more upset than he knew by his negotiations with Barbara about their son’s graduation weekend – which went off almost harmlessly, he added. ‘I mean, I knew I was upset, but I wasn’t completely clear on what I was upset about. I thought I was angry with Barbara, but I was even more angry about other things that weren’t her fault, and which, you might say, she suffered from equally. The way life turns out. But let me stop here before I embarrass myself again with further confessions.’ This was the last letter I ever got from him; he didn’t answer the note I sent in return.

  *

  Of course, I had other things on my mind besides these memories. His lecture; the late summer weather, making its way by air and light into the classroom. There was a girl sitting three rows ahead of me in the sunshine of the next window along. She wore a knitted cap, even indoors, even in September; her short brown hair pushed out around the edges of it. Afterwards, I asked Heinz about her, and he said, ‘You mean the second Kostadinovic girl. The first was a delight, a real wit; at Brandeis now. But this one I don’t know what to do with. Won’t say a word.’ When she looked out the window, as she did from time to time, her face had the full dark coloring of a breathless boy’s – she might have been running all day in the sun. Something about the atmosphere of Heinz’s classroom had reminded me of the qualities my own used to bring out in me. The sexual self-consciousness; the boastfulness. The pretense of detachment. Peter once said to me, passing Heinz in the hall on the way to one of our walks, ‘The uncle with a special gift at Christmas.’ A charge just vague enough I could excuse myself for failing to stand up for a friend.

  At lunch, the Kostadinovic girl sat down just across the glass partition separating faculty and students in the cafeteria. I saw the wires of headphones emerging from her knitted hat; she wore a printed dress over jeans. With a pang, I noticed her pull the earplugs down against her cheeks – a boy had set his backpack beside her. And the feeling returned to me, familiar from my teaching days, that I was on the wrong side of some divide. That what was happening to other people mattered more than what was happening to me. But I also took in a number of other impressions. The noise of two hundred teenagers at feeding time. The really distressing atmosphere of disorder (napkins on floors, being kicked about; spilt drinks, dropped books), which requires months of habituation, and even then becomes only tolerable. Such scenes were once the staple of my daily life. ‘What is it about these kids they wear their wooly hats indoors?’ I said to Heinz, waiting in line with our trays.

  Lunch was taken up with re-introductions. A number of people I once shared a faculty lounge with had stayed put. Even their names revived old sympathies: Peasbody, Beinstock, Bostick. Politely I showed an interest in my old life. Politely they responded with curiosity about my new one. But after lunch Heinz led me on a tour of the new grounds, and we had a chance to talk.

  The board of regents had raised a great deal of money in the past ten years. The school I had taught in was more or less a Victorian jumble of buildings, complete with cracked-tile hallways and steaming pipes. It had since become a modern college campus. A science observatory, built mostly of steel and glass, offered views across Manhattan of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State. Below it, on the steep slope leading to Van Cortlandt, stood the new theater, surrounded by freshly planted woods. From inside the building you could see the architect’s intentions: tall narrow windows let in the silvery birch-light. We might have been anywhere, in the rural wintry depths of a Pushkin story. Even on a warm hazy September day the sunshine came through coldly. Heinz showed more pride in these developments than I would have expected – partly, no doubt, because they contributed to the status of his new position. But, eventually, in the resonant quiet of the theater, he himself brought up the question of the Byron books.

  ‘So how long you gonna keep this game up with Peter Sullivan? My wife says I shouldn’t ask you, so I’ll ask you.’

  He had pulled two metal folding chairs from the wings of the stage.

  ‘What game?’

  ‘Come on. Nobody’s buying this business with the manuscripts. I knew Peter. He couldn’t write an end-of-year report unless you held his hand.’

  ‘He didn’t like writing end-of-year reports. He liked writing novels.’

  ‘So you plan to keep a straight face about this whole thing?’

  Heinz had put me in a false position. What I wanted was to find out more about Peter. But people have a bias for certain confessions over others. For a minute I considered telling him about the Society for the Publication of the Dead. ‘Look, these are the people I waste my time with …’ I wanted to make clear that the past few years had been difficult for me, from a professional point of view. What I needed from him was a little information about Peter, and then I could wind up my responsibility towards his literary remains, such as they were, and begin again.

  ‘I’m telling you, my first novel cured me of any interest in historical fiction,’ I said. ‘The people who matter don’t respect you for it. Besides, you know yourself I’m a lazy bastard and have no head for facts. The kind of book I like to read, the kind of book I have been trying to write, is a straightforward but textured account of a mildly interesting experience. Like Playing Days. What do I care if Byron slept with his sister? I’ll tell you something else, if Peter had lived to push his own books he’d have got sick of such questions, too. All anybody wants to know about is how much is true.’

  ‘So what are you coming to me for?’

  ‘I want to know how much is true.’

  ‘You mean, you want me to tell you what I know about Peter.’

  ‘That’s it. You see, there isn’t much left – of his work. A few unpublished stories. And the character of these stories … raises certain questions. If you need any more convin
cing: these aren’t the kind of stories I could have written myself. In me, the shame of the human being is still stronger than the shamelessness of the writer. There are subjects I won’t touch, and Peter did not have my scruples.’

  ‘Oh, the shame of the human being.’ He lifted his hand. ‘But you want to know why Peter stopped talking? To me and everyone else. This is a dramatic declaration of character, don’t you think? And childish, too. Someone who takes himself with a sense of humor has to talk; it isn’t the kind of thing you can choose to do or not. Even when those rumors started spreading about him, he kept quiet. That he used to play minor-league ball, or gigged with the Ramones. I found all that bullshit deeply off-putting – this about a guy who never did anything more adventurous in his life than feel up some kid.’ After a moment: ‘Is that what you were expecting? I voted to hire him, let me say that. He was a good teacher. He came to us out of Beaumont Hill, outside Boston. They fired him for fiddling one of the boys, but the evidence was weak; there was a lot of family pressure. I said, if the guy’s innocent, you got to hire him. Or un-convicted. Anyway, these boys’ schools. There’s a kind of perfectly reasonable human being who can’t help himself at an all-boys school. Just look at the Catholic Church. They’re not all bad men. In different circumstances, with different temptations, some of these priests would have healthy, decent appetites and attitudes towards sex. As far as I’m concerned, that’s unquestionable. So out of principle I vote for Peter, but by the end of the first year I already regret it. It’s clear to me this is not a man with a healthy attitude towards sex.’