Leviathan (11 page)

She studied the entries that first evening and found no names that were familiar to her. That was the perfect starting point, she felt. She would set out in the dark, knowing absolutely nothing, and one by one she would talk to all the people listed in the book. By finding out who they were, she would begin to learn something about the man who had lost it. It would be a portrait in absentia, an outline drawn around an empty space, and little by little a figure would emerge from the background, pieced together from everything he was not. She hoped that she would eventually track him down that way, but even if she didn’t, the effort would be its own reward. She wanted to encourage people to open up to her when she saw them, to tell her stories about enchantment and lust and falling in love, to confide their deepest secrets in her. She fully expected to work on these interviews for months, perhaps even for years. There would be thousands of photographs to take, hundreds of statements to transcribe, an entire universe to explore. Or so she thought. As it happened, the project was derailed after just one day.

With only one exception, every person in the book was listed under his or her last name. In among the
L
s, however, there was an entry for someone named Lilli. Maria assumed it was a woman’s first name. If that were so, then this unique departure from the directory style could have been significant, a sign of some special intimacy. What if Lilli was the girlfriend of the man who had lost the address
book? Or his sister, or even his mother? Rather than go through the names in alphabetical order as she had originally planned, Maria decided to jump ahead to
L
and pay a call on the mysterious Lilli first. If her hunch was correct, she might suddenly find herself in a position to learn who the man was.

She couldn’t approach Lilli directly. Too much hinged on the meeting, and she was afraid of destroying her chances by blundering into it unprepared. She had to get a sense of who this woman was before she talked to her, to see what she looked like, to follow her around for a while and discover what her habits were. On the first morning, she traveled uptown to the East Eighties to stake out Lilli’s apartment. She entered the vestibule of the small building to check the buzzers and mailboxes, and just then, as she began to study the list of names on the wall, a woman stepped out of the elevator and opened the inner door. Maria turned to look at her, but before the face had registered, she heard the woman speak her name. “Maria?” she said. The word was uttered as a question, and an instant later Maria understood that she was looking at Lillian Stern, her old friend from Massachusetts. “I can’t believe it,” Lillian said. “It’s really you, isn’t it?”

They hadn’t seen each other in more than five years. After Maria set off on her strange journey around America, they had lost contact, but until then they had been close, and their friendship went all the way back to childhood. In high school, they had been nearly inseparable, two offbeat girls struggling through adolescence together, plotting their escape from small-town life. Maria had been the serious one, the quiet intellectual, the one who had trouble making friends, whereas Lillian had been the girl with a reputation, the wild one who slept around and took drugs and played hooky from school. For all that, they were unshakable allies, and in spite of their differences there was much more that drew them together than pulled them
apart. Maria once confessed to me that Lillian had been a great example to her, and it was only by knowing her that she had ever learned how to be herself. But the influence seemed to work both ways. Maria was the one who talked Lillian into moving down to New York after high school, and for the next several months they had shared a cramped, roach-filled apartment on the Lower East Side. While Maria went to art classes, Lillian studied acting and worked as a waitress. She also took up with a rock-and-roll drummer named Tom, and by the time Maria left New York in her van, he had become a permanent fixture in the apartment. She wrote Lillian a number of postcards during her two years on the road, but without an address there was no way that Lillian could write back. When Maria returned to the city, she did everything she could to find her friend, but someone else was living in the old apartment, and there was no listing for her in the phone book. She tried calling Lillian’s parents in Holyoke, but they had apparently moved to another town, and suddenly she was out of options. By the time she ran into Lillian in the vestibule that day, she had given up hope of ever seeing her again.

It was an extraordinary encounter for both of them. Maria told me that they both screamed, then fell into each other’s arms, then broke down and wept. Once they were able to talk again, they took the elevator upstairs and spent the rest of the day in Lillian’s apartment. There was so much catching up to do, Maria said, the stories just poured out of them. They ate lunch together, and then dinner, and by the time she went home and crawled into bed, it was close to three o’clock in the morning.

Curious things had happened to Lillian in those years, things that Maria never would have thought possible. My knowledge of them is only secondhand, but after talking to Sachs last summer, I believe that the story Maria told me was essentially accurate. She could have been wrong about some of the minor details (as Sachs
could have been), but in the long run that’s unimportant. Even if Lillian is not always to be trusted, even if her penchant for exaggeration is as pronounced as I’m told it is, the basic facts are not in question. At the time of her accidental meeting with Maria in 1976, Lillian had spent the past three years supporting herself as a prostitute. She entertained her clients in her apartment on East Eighty-seventh Street, and she worked entirely on her own—a part-time hustler with a thriving, independent business. All that is certain. What remains in doubt is exactly how it began. Her boyfriend Tom seems to have been involved in some way, but the full extent of his responsibility is unclear. In both versions of the story, Lillian described him as having a serious drug habit, an addiction to heroin that eventually got him thrown out of his band. According to the story Maria heard, Lillian remained desperately in love with him. She was the one who cooked up the idea herself, volunteering to sleep with other men in order to provide Tom with money. It was fast and painless, she discovered, and as long as she kept his connection happy, she knew that Tom would never leave her. At that point in her life, she said, she was willing to do anything to hold on to him, even if it meant going down the tubes herself. Eleven years later, she told Sachs something altogether different. Tom was the one who talked her into it, she said, and because she was scared of him, because he had threatened to kill her if she didn’t go along with it, she’d had no choice but to give in. In this second version, Tom was the one who arranged the appointments for her, literally pimping for his own girlfriend as a way to cover the costs of his addiction. In the end, I don’t suppose it matters which version was true. They were equally sordid, and they both led to the same result. After six or seven months, Tom vanished. In Maria’s story, he ran off with someone else; in Sachs’s story, he died of an overdose. One way or another, Lillian was alone again. One way or another, she continued sleeping with
men to pay her bills. What astonished Maria was how matter-of-factly Lillian talked to her about it—with no shame or embarrassment. It was just a job like any other, she said, and when push came to shove, it was a damn sight better than serving drinks or waiting on tables. Men were going to drool wherever you went, and there was nothing you could do to stop them. It made a lot more sense to get paid for it than to fight them off—and besides, a little extra fucking never harmed anyone. If anything, Lillian was proud of how well she had done for herself. She met with clients only three days a week, she had money in the bank, she lived in a comfortable apartment in a good neighborhood. Two years earlier, she had enrolled in acting school again. She felt that she was making progress now, and in the past few weeks she had begun to audition for some parts, mostly in small downtown theaters. It wouldn’t be long before something came her way, she said. Once she managed to build up another ten or fifteen thousand dollars, she was planning to close down her business and pursue acting full-time. She was just twenty-four years old, after all, and everything was still in front of her.

Maria had brought along her camera that day, and she took a number of photographs of Lillian during the time they spent together. When she told me the story three years later, she spread out these pictures in front of me as we talked. There must have been thirty or forty of them, full-size black-and-white photographs that caught Lillian from a variety of angles and distances—some of them posed, some of them not. These portraits were my one and only encounter with Lillian Stern. More than ten years have gone by since that day, but I have never forgotten the experience of looking at those pictures. The impression they made on me was that strong, that lasting.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Maria said.

“Yes, extremely beautiful,” I said.

“She was on her way out to buy groceries when we bumped into
each other. You see what she’s wearing. A sweatshirt, blue jeans, old sneakers. She was dressed for one of those five-minute dashes to the corner store and then back again. No makeup, no jewelry, no props. And still she’s beautiful. Enough to take your breath away.”

“It’s her darkness,” I said, searching for an explanation. “Women with dark features don’t need a lot of makeup. You see how round her eyes are. The long lashes set them off. And her bones are good, too, we mustn’t forget that. Bones make all the difference.”

“It’s more than that, Peter. There’s a certain inner quality that’s always coming to the surface with Lillian. I don’t know what to call it. Happiness, grace, animal spirits. It makes her seem more alive than other people. Once she catches your attention, it’s hard to stop looking at her.”

“You get the feeling that she’s comfortable in front of the camera.”

“Lillian’s always comfortable. She’s completely relaxed in her own skin.”

I flipped through some more of the photographs and came to a sequence that showed Lillian standing in front of an open closet, in various stages of undress. In one picture, she was taking off her blue jeans; in another, she was removing her sweatshirt; in the next one, she was down to a pair of minuscule white panties and a white sleeveless undershirt; in the next, the panties were gone; in the next one after that, the undershirt was gone as well. Several nude shots followed. In the first, she was facing the camera, head thrown back, laughing, her small breasts almost flattened against her chest, taut nipples protruding over the horizon; her pelvis was thrust forward, and she was clutching the meat of her inner thighs with her two hands, her thatch of dark pubic hair framed by the whiteness of her curled fingers. In the next one she was turned the other way, ass front, jutting her hip to one side and looking over her other shoulder
at the camera, still laughing, striking the classic pinup pose. She was clearly enjoying herself, clearly delighted by the opportunity to show herself off.

“This is pretty racy stuff,” I said. “I didn’t know you took girlie pictures.”

“We were getting ready to go out for dinner, and Lillian wanted to change her clothes. I followed her into the bedroom so we could continue talking. I still had my camera with me, and when she started to undress, I took some more pictures. It just happened. I wasn’t planning to do it until I saw her peeling off her clothes.”

“And she didn’t mind?”

“It doesn’t look like she minded, does it?”

“Did it turn you on?”

“Of course it did. I’m not made of wood, you know.”

“What happened next? You didn’t sleep together, did you?”

“Oh no, I’m too much of a prude for that.”

“I’m not trying to force a confession out of you. Your friend looks pretty irresistible to me. As much to women as to men, I would think.”

“I admit that I was aroused. If Lillian had made some kind of move then, maybe something would have happened. I’ve never slept with another woman, but that day with her, I might have done it. It crossed my mind, in any case, and that’s the only time I ever felt like that. But Lillian was just fooling around for the camera, and it never got any farther than the strip-tease. It was all in fun, and both of us were laughing the whole time.”

“Did you ever get around to showing her the address book?”

“Eventually. I think it was after we came back from the restaurant. Lillian spent a long time looking through it, but she couldn’t really say who it belonged to. It had to be a client, of course. Lilli
was the name she used for her work, but beyond that she wasn’t sure.”

“It narrowed down the list of possibilities, though.”

“True, but it might not have been someone she’d met. A potential client, for example. Maybe one of Lillian’s satisfied customers had passed on her name to someone else. A friend, a business associate, who knows. That’s how Lillian got her new clients, by word of mouth. The man wrote down her name in his book, but that doesn’t mean he’d gotten around to calling her yet. Maybe the man who’d given him the name hadn’t called either. Hookers circulate like that—their names ripple out in concentric circles, weird networks of information. For some men, it’s enough to carry around a name or two in their little black book. For future reference, as it were. In case their wife leaves them, or for sudden fits of horniness or frustration.”

“Or when they happen to be passing through town.”

“Exactly.”

“Still, you had your first clues. Until Lillian turned up, the owner of the book could have been anyone. At least you had a fighting chance now.”

“I suppose. But things didn’t work out that way. Once I started talking to Lillian, the whole project changed.”

“You mean she wouldn’t give you the list of her clients?”

“No, nothing like that. She would have done it if I’d asked her.”

“What was it, then?”

“I’m not quite sure how it happened, but the more we talked, the more definite our plan became. It didn’t come from either one of us. It was just floating in the air, a thing that already seemed to exist. Running into each other had a lot to do with it, I think. It was all so wonderful and unexpected, we were sort of beside ourselves.
You have to understand how close we’d been. Bosom buddies, sisters, pals for life. We really cared about each other, and I thought I knew Lillian as well as I knew myself. And then what happens? After five years, I discover that my best friend has turned into a whore. It knocked me off balance. I felt awful about it, almost as if I’d been betrayed. But at the same time—and this is where it starts to get murky—I realized that I envied her, too. Lillian hadn’t changed. She was the same terrific kid I’d always known. Crazy, full of mischief, exciting to be with. She didn’t think of herself as a slut or fallen woman, her conscience was clear. That was what impressed me so much: her absolute inner freedom, the way she lived by her own rules and didn’t give a damn what anybody thought. I had already done some fairly excessive things myself by then. The New Orleans project, the ‘Naked Lady’ project, I was pushing myself a little farther along each time, testing the limits of what I was capable of. But next to Lillian I felt like some spinster librarian, a pathetic virgin who hadn’t done much of anything. I thought to myself: If she can do it, why can’t I?”