Childish Loves (45 page)

‘And what did you send Lukas out for?'

Lukas was not laughing, but he was still smiling, when Pietro said, ‘I did not send him out. I gave him the money so that he would stay.' He added, ‘I would have given him my own, but I haven't any.'

The truth of all this (and a great deal more than was said) came home to me, as I glanced from one to the other: the boy with his bright eye looking directly into mine, and Pietro, who bears me no malice and a great deal of love, ashamed of something or someone and staring at his shoes. I said nothing for a long while, and then I asked Pietro to leave me alone with the boy.

When he was gone, I said to Lukas, ‘Come, sit next to me. I am not angry any more.'

‘Of course not, why should you be angry?' he replied, without coming nearer.

I said gently, ‘For two nights, when you could not sleep, I sat by your bed.'

‘I never asked you.'

Then, losing my temper: ‘If my service is unpleasant to you, you may go.'

My blood was up, and I was tired of all this foolishness; but he continued to provoke me. ‘But you do not want me to go,' he said.

I stood up and walked towards him; saying, ‘Oh, if it's a question of what
I
want,' – and attempted to seize him, but he, being younger, was quicker and stronger, too, and easily escaped. I might have followed, but for this damned foot. He stood in the doorway, panting and grinning, and I said to him, ‘Look at me! Look at me!' with the tears suddenly streaming down my face. After he was gone, I went to the window, to see if he went out. To be surrounded on all sides by nothing! Nothing but watery swamp, and swampy water; but he so little felt the importunities of my presence, he must have stayed below, for I did not see him go out. After a minute of this watching, I grew thoroughly sick of myself, and then another kind of feeling rising up in me, I sat down at the table and for the first time in almost a month began to write.

It seems fairly clear that this is the poem Peter had in mind, which Byron at the end of ‘A Soldier's Grave' ‘began to write':

It was the last he ever completed. He died a few weeks later of some illness connected to the fit he had suffered earlier; his doctors more or less bled him to death. Afterwards his body was shipped to England. The Dean of Westminster refused to bury it at the Abbey, on moral grounds, though it lay on view for a week at a house on Great George Street. Hobhouse made the arrangements, seeing his old friend in the flesh for the first time in several years. ‘It did not seem to be Byron,' he wrote. ‘The mouth was distorted & half open showing those teeth in which poor fellow he once so prided himself quite discoloured … I was not moved so much scarcely as at the sight of his hand writing.' The streets of London were lined with spectators for the funeral procession, which carried the coffin through Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, past St Pancras Church and out of London. After a journey of several days, it reached the family vaults at Hucknall Torkard, a few miles from Newstead Abbey.

Hobhouse was also behind the other more famous arrangement made by Byron's friends for his posterity. He presided, along with the poet's old editor John Murray, over the burning of his memoirs. Hobhouse and Murray thought they would ruin his reputation; neither had read them. The papers were destroyed less than a month after Byron's death at Murray's office on Albemarle Street, which Byron himself used to visit in his London heyday.

What happened to Lukas is less clear. Byron left him and his family some money, to be paid out of the debts owed him by the city of Missolonghi. It appears that the money was never paid, and Lukas himself, like Edleston and Lord Grey before him, died young.

***

About Peter and me, there isn't much left to tell. Paul Gerschon agreed to match the Ransom Center's offer for his papers and eventually I settled with Ms Niemetz on a price – five thousand dollars. Gerschon then offered to buy the books himself for his private collection. Another two thousand dollars. So I went down to Charlestown one morning to give Mary Sullivan the news. I wasn't sure how she'd take it. Seven thousand dollars, on the one hand, seems like a lot of money for a few boxes of books and papers. On the other, it doesn't look like nearly enough. She invited me into her kitchen and gave me tea.

‘I suppose you'll be wanting your ten per cent,' she said.

But I shook my head and after that she cheered up. ‘You've been a good friend to him. God knows, he didn't have many.'

As I was leaving, she said to me, standing in her own doorway while I stood in the street, ‘Do you know what I mind most about all this? I saw that review in the
New York Times
a few years ago. Of the second book. A neighbor pointed it out to me; we get all kinds of neighbors now. Some of them even take the
New York Times
. I've got nothing to say against that review but I thought at the time, if only Peter had been alive to see it. It would have been something, to take a seat on the subway, minding your own business, and read
that
in the newspaper on your way to work.'

A few weeks after my visit to Walden, Kelly came to my office again. She was in tears when I opened the door and she sat down in tears. ‘As soon as I started to knock I started to cry,' she said. ‘Just the thought of what I was going to tell you set me off.' Her soft pink cheerful face looked red and childish. I went to the bathroom to get her toilet paper for blowing her nose. The judge had ruled against her. He had decided there was no compelling reason for her to relocate to Austin. It wasn't in the interests of the children, and her husband had a right to enforce the terms of their custodial agreement. Now she was stuck here, with no prospects of a job and her family one thousand nine hundred and fifty-two miles away. (She had looked it up on Google Maps.) Then she stopped crying and said, ‘And you're leaving too this summer.' When I didn't answer, into a slowly changing silence, she added, ‘This is hard for me. I have feelings for you. I don't know if you have feelings for me.'

She was sitting in the armchair with her hands on her lap, like a good girl, sitting up straight and composed, in spite of her red eyes and streaked face, and staring back at me.

‘I'm sorry,' I told her, standing up. ‘I don't feel much about anything at the moment.'

‘That must be a real bitch for you,' she said.

I don't know how I got her out of my office, but I remember thinking that something had happened which I needed to tell Caroline about. Something that wasn't just my imagination. That evening, after our daughter was in bed, I began to try. ‘Do you remember Kelly? The woman with the two kids I've mentioned to you. She's had some bad news and she came to my office today to cry about it.' And so on. ‘I feel like I need you to forgive me,' I said, ‘but I didn't do anything wrong.'

Caroline was silent at first, but when she started talking, this is the form her anger took. ‘It's her I feel sorry for,' she said. ‘I know the way you come on. As if you're tremendously interested and caring, when really you don't give a fuck about anyone else.'

We went to bed together that night, as we always do, reading for ten minutes in silence and then turning off the light. But after the lights were off the silence continued. In the morning our daughter woke us, by climbing over me into the middle of the bed, and we talked and played with her and breakfasted more or less as usual, and went to work. And after work we gave her dinner and put her to bed and ordered in and sat up a little later than normal watching TV. I thought the whole thing would blow over, but a few days later I came back from the office to find Caroline at home, sitting at the desk in the entrance hall where we kept our papers, reading. It's my habit, at the end of every week, to print out whatever I've written and put it in a drawer, where I mostly forget it, unless there's some reason for resorting to a hard copy. Caroline had been reading my book, and this time the argument lasted much deeper into the night and covered more ground, and when we went to bed at the end of it we clung together as we hadn't in years – as we used to in New York before we were married, when Caroline was woken by the traffic on 2nd Avenue and saw with horror our whole strange lives stretching in front of us.

One of the things we agreed on before falling asleep is that I would make no attempt to publish this book. At least, the sections of the book I had written; what Peter had written she didn't care about either way. So I stopped working on it. (I had just come to the end of my visit to Walden.) The first thing I felt was relief. I sat in my office every day and followed the news on the Internet. I took long lunches. I went to the gym. The image I had was of a runner, who, having worked through other resources, begins to draw on his own tissues for energy. This is what I had been doing, and when I stopped writing, I felt my energy for other things coming back to me. I slept better; my sexual anxieties declined. The weather was improving daily, and all but the last of the snow had disappeared from the public parks. My daughter and I spent hours wandering through the Mount Auburn cemetery, climbing on gravestones, which she particularly loved, getting lost among the endless indistinguishable lanes that curve between the hills and fields of the dead.

But after a few weeks the thought of those manuscript pages began to worry me. Peter's phrase kept running through my head – they were ‘emitting their rays.' This was a subject, of course, in which he was expert: what it's like to have all those public thoughts stay private. I would see him sometimes in the faces of strangers: a man with an uncut beard, wearing out his best suit and waiting for the public library to open; or maybe sitting on a street bench over the lunch hour, reading. And Caroline relented. We were getting on much better by this point, and the marriage described in this memoir seemed to her almost as fictional as anything else that's out of date. ‘Just don't do it again,' she said. She didn't want me or her or any of our children to appear in anything else that I wrote, because by that point she knew she was pregnant; and as for me I was relieved to get the book off my hands, and out of the desk drawer, and more than willing to exchange the pleasures of this kind of writing, such as they are, for the happiness that writes white.

 

Benjamin Markovits grew up in Texas, London and Berlin. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics. Since then he has taught high-school English, edited a left-wing cultural magazine, and written essays, stories and reviews for, among other publications, the
New York Times
, the
Guardian
, the
London Review of Books
and the
Paris Review
. His novels include
The Syme Papers, Either Side of Winter, Imposture
and
A Quiet Adjustment
. Markovits has lived in London since 2000 and is married with a daughter and a son. He teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

“Beautifully drawn …, portrayed with moral clarity as well as complexity.”

—Jay Parini,
New York Times

“A worthy addition to the literature of the Byron legend, and an excellent novel in its own right … an absorbing portrait of the celebrity couple and an unworkable marriage to an exhilarating but unmanageable man.”

—Toby Lichtig,
New Statesman

“Most extraordinary about Markovits's achievement … is the sustained voice, a careful imitation of 19th-century prose that barely sounds a wrong note.”

—Stephanie Merritt,
The Observer

“What Markovits has achieved here … is a startling, psychologically terrifying portrait of an individual with the capacity to destroy lives.”

—Lesley McDowell,
Independent on Sunday

“Markovits tells his tale with incredible style.”

—Melissa Katsoulis,
The Times

“[The novel's narration] is brilliantly achieved. It asks the reader to relish its artifice … and the artifice repays the attention it demands.”

—John Mullan,
The Guardian

“A Quiet Adjustment
is a lovely novel, as finely textured, nuanced, and vivid as Balzac.… Benjamin Markovits writes with an uncanny sensibility that is at once classic yet contemporary.”

—Katharine Weber

“A psychological masterpiece.”

—Amy Mathieson,
The Scotsman

“Delicate and sinewy and richly felt,
Imposture
is the rare novel of ideas that pulses with real blood.… The prose is marvelous—not a misshapen sentence, not a misplaced emphasis—but the author's real triumph is to transform a figure from literature's margins into something suspiciously universal. Something that looks an awful lot like us.”