Leviathan (21 page)

I don’t think I’d ever spoken to him so emphatically. I was so wound up, so filled with passionate good sense, that Sachs started smiling before I was halfway into my harangue. I suppose there was something comical about my behavior that afternoon, but that was only because I hadn’t expected to win so easily. As it turned out, Sachs needed little convincing. He made up his mind to do the book as soon as he heard about my conversation with Ann, and everything
I said to him after that was unnecessary. He tried to get me to stop, but since I thought that meant he didn’t want to talk about it, I kept on arguing with him, which was a bit like telling someone to eat a meal that was already inside his stomach. I’m sure he found me laughable, but none of that makes any difference now. What matters is that Sachs agreed to do the book, and at the time I felt it was a major victory, a gigantic step in the right direction. I knew nothing about Fanny, of course, and therefore I had no idea that the project was simply a ploy, a strategic move to help him bring his marriage to an end. That doesn’t mean Sachs wasn’t planning to publish the book, but his motives were quite different from the ones I imagined. I saw the book as a way back into the world, whereas he saw it as an escape, as a last gesture of goodwill before he slipped off into the darkness and disappeared.

That was how he found the courage to talk to Fanny about a trial separation. He would go to Vermont to work on the book, she would stay in the city, and meanwhile they would both have a chance to think about what they wanted to do. The book made it possible for him to leave with her blessings, for both of them to ignore the true purpose of his departure. Over the next two weeks, Fanny organized Ben’s trip to Vermont as if it were still one of her wifely duties, actively dismantling their marriage as if she believed they would go on being married forever. The habit of caring for him was so automatic by then, so deeply ingrained in who she was, that it probably never occurred to her to stop and consider what she was doing. That was the paradox of the end. I had lived through something similar with Delia: that strange postscript when a couple is neither together nor not together, when the last thing holding you together is the fact that you are apart. Fanny and Ben acted no differently. She helped him move out of her life, and he accepted that help as the most natural thing in the world. She went down to
the cellar and lugged up sheafs of old articles for him; she made photocopies of yellowed, crumbling originals; she visited the library and searched through spools of microfilm for errant pieces; she put the whole mass of clippings and tear sheets and jagged pages into chronological order. On the last day, she even went out and bought cardboard file boxes to store the papers in, and the next morning, when it came time for Sachs to leave, she helped him carry these boxes downstairs and load them into the trunk of the car. So much for making a clean break. So much for giving off unambiguous signals. At that point, I don’t think either one of them would have been capable of it.

That was sometime in late March. Innocently accepting what Sachs had told me, I assumed that he was going to Vermont in order to work. He had gone there alone before, and the fact that Fanny was staying behind in New York didn’t strike me as unusual. She had her job, after all, and since no one had mentioned how long Sachs would be gone, I figured it would be a relatively short trip. A month maybe, six weeks at the most. Putting together the book would not be a difficult task, and I didn’t see how it could take him longer than that. And even if it did, there was nothing to prevent Fanny from visiting him in the meantime. So I didn’t question any of their arrangements. They all made sense to me, and when Sachs called to say good-bye on the last night, I told him how glad I was that he was going. Good luck, I said, I’ll see you soon. And that was it. Whatever he might have been planning then, he didn’t say a word to make me think he wouldn’t be back.

After Sachs left for Vermont, my thoughts turned elsewhere. I was busy with work, with Iris’s pregnancy, with David’s troubles in school, with deaths of relatives on both sides of the family, and the spring passed very quickly. Perhaps I felt relieved that he was gone, I don’t know, but there’s no doubt that country life had improved
his spirits. We talked on the phone about once a week, and I gathered from these conversations that things were going well for him. He had started work on something new, he told me, and I took this as such a momentous event, such a turnaround from his previous state, that I suddenly allowed myself to stop worrying about him. Even when he kept putting off his return to New York, prolonging his absence through April, then May, and then June, I didn’t feel any alarm. Sachs was writing again, I told myself, Sachs was healthy again, and as far as I was concerned, that meant all was right with the world.

Iris and I saw Fanny on several occasions that spring. I remember at least one dinner, a Sunday brunch, and a couple of outings to the movies. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t detect any signs of distress or unease in her. It’s true that she talked about Sachs very little (which should have alerted me to something), but whenever she did talk about him, she sounded pleased, even excited by what was happening in Vermont. Not only was he writing again, she told us, but he was writing a novel. This was so much better than anything she could have imagined, it made no difference that the essay book had been shunted to the side. He was working up a storm, she said, scarcely even pausing to eat or sleep, and whether these reports were exaggerated or not (either by Sachs or by her), they put an end to all further questions. Iris and I never asked her why she didn’t go up to visit Ben. We didn’t ask because the answer was already obvious. He was on a roll with his work, and after waiting so long for this to happen, she wasn’t about to interfere.

She was holding back on us, of course, but more to the point was that Sachs had been cut out of the picture as well. I only learned about this later, but all during the time he spent in Vermont, it seems that he knew as little about what Fanny was thinking as I did. She hardly could have expected it to work out that way. Theoretically,
there was still some hope for them, but once Ben packed the car with his belongings and drove off to the country, she realized that they were finished. It didn’t take more than a week or two for this to happen. She still cared about him and wished him well, but she had no desire to see him, no desire to talk to him, no desire to make any more efforts. They had talked about keeping the door open, but now it seemed as if the door had vanished. It wasn’t that it had closed, it simply wasn’t there anymore. Fanny found herself looking at a blank wall, and after that she turned away. They were no longer married, and what she did with her life from then on was her own business.

In June, she met a man named Charles Spector. I don’t feel I have a right to talk about this, but to the degree that it affected Sachs, it’s impossible to avoid mentioning it. The crucial thing here is not that Fanny wound up marrying Charles (the wedding took place four months ago) but that once she started falling in love with him that summer, she didn’t come forward and let Ben know what was happening. Again, it’s not a matter of affixing blame. There were reasons for her silence, and under the circumstances I think she acted properly, with no hint of selfishness or deceit. The affair with Charles caught her by surprise, and in those early stages she was still too confused to know what her feelings were. Rather than rush into telling Ben about something that might not last, she decided to hold off for a while, to spare him from further dramas until she was certain of what she wanted to do. Through no fault of her own, this waiting period lasted too long. Ben found out about Charles purely by accident—returning home to Brooklyn one night and seeing him in bed with Fanny—and the timing of that discovery couldn’t have been worse. Considering that Sachs was the one who had pushed for the separation in the first place, this probably shouldn’t have mattered. But it did. Other factors were involved as well, but this one counted
as much as any of those others. It kept the music playing, so to speak, and what might have ended at that point did not. The waltz of disasters went on, and after that there was no stopping it.

But that was later, and I don’t want to run ahead of myself. On the surface, things purred along as they had for the past several months. Sachs worked on his novel in Vermont, Fanny went to her job at the museum, and Iris and I waited for our baby to be born. After Sonia arrived (on June twenty-seventh), I lost touch with everyone for the next six or eight weeks. Iris and I were in Babyland, a country where sleep is forbidden and day is indistinguishable from night, a walled-off kingdom governed by the whims of a tiny, absolute monarch. We asked Fanny and Ben to be Sonia’s godparents, and they both accepted with elaborate declarations of pride and gratitude. Gifts poured in after that, Fanny delivering hers in person (clothes, blankets, rattles) and Ben’s turning up by mail (books, bears, rubber ducks). I was particularly moved by Fanny’s response, by the way she would stop in after work just to hold Sonia for fifteen or twenty minutes, cooing at her with all kinds of affectionate nonsense. She seemed to glow with the baby in her arms, and it always saddened me to think how none of this had been possible for her. “My little beauty,” she would call Sonia, “my angel girl,” “my dark passion flower,” “my heart.” In his own way, Sachs was no less enthusiastic than she was, and I took the small packages that kept appearing in the mail as a sign of real progress, decisive proof that he was well again. In early August, he began urging us to come up to Vermont to see him. He was ready to show me the first part of his book, he said, and he wanted us to introduce him to his goddaughter. “You’ve kept her from me long enough,” he said. “How can you expect me to take care of her if I don’t know what she looks like?”

So Iris and I rented a car and a baby seat and drove up north to spend a few days with him. I remember asking Fanny if she wanted
to join us, but it seemed that the timing was bad. She had just started her catalogue essay for the Blakelock exhibition she was curating at the museum that winter (her most important show to date), and she was anxious about meeting the deadline. She planned to visit Ben as soon as it was done, she explained, and because this seemed like a legitimate excuse, I didn’t press her to go. Again, I had been confronted with a significant piece of evidence, and again I had ignored it. Fanny and Ben hadn’t seen each other in five months, and it still hadn’t dawned on me that they were in any trouble. If I had bothered to open my eyes for a few minutes, I might have noticed something. But I was too wrapped up in my own happiness, too absorbed in my own little world to pay any attention.

Still, the trip was a success. After spending four days and three nights in his company, I concluded that Sachs was on firm ground again, and I went away feeling as close to him as I had ever felt in the past. I’m tempted to say that it was just like old times, but that wouldn’t be quite accurate. Too much had happened to him since his fall, there had been too many changes in both of us for our friendship to be exactly what it had been. But that doesn’t mean these new times were less good than the old. In many ways, they were better. In that they represented something I felt I had lost, something I had despaired of ever finding again, they were much better.

Sachs had never been a well-organized person, and it startled me to see how thoroughly he had prepared for our visit. There were flowers in the room where Iris and I slept, guest towels were neatly folded on the bureau, and he had made the bed with all the precision of a veteran innkeeper. Downstairs, the kitchen had been stocked with food, there was an ample supply of wine and beer, and, as we discovered each night, the dinner menus had been worked out in
advance. These small gestures were significant, I felt, and they helped set the tone of our stay. Daily life was easier for him than it had been in New York, and little by little he had managed to regain control of himself. As he put it to me in one of our late-night conversations, it was a bit like being in prison again. There weren’t any extraneous preoccupations to bog him down. Life had been reduced to its barebones essentials, and he no longer had to question how he spent his time. Every day was more or less a repetition of the day before. Today resembled yesterday, tomorrow would resemble today, and what happened next week would blur into what had happened this week. There was comfort for him in that. The element of surprise had been eliminated, and it made him feel sharper, better able to concentrate on his work. “It’s odd,” he continued, “but the two times I’ve sat down and written a novel, I’ve been cut off from the rest of the world. First in jail when I was a kid, and now up here in Vermont, living like a hermit in the woods. I wonder what the hell it means.”

“It means that you can’t live without other people,” I said. “When they’re there for you in the flesh, the real world is sufficient. When you’re alone, you have to invent imaginary characters. You need them for the companionship.”

All through the visit, the three of us kept ourselves busy doing nothing. We ate and drank, we swam in the pond, we talked. Sachs had installed an all-weather basketball court behind the house, and for an hour or so each morning we shot hoops and played one-on-one (he whipped me soundly every time). While Iris napped in the afternoons, he and I would take turns carrying Sonia around the yard, rocking her to sleep as we talked. The first night, I stayed up late and read the typescript of his book-in-progress. The other two nights, we stayed up late together, discussing what he had written so far and
what was still to come. The sun shone on three of the four days; the temperatures were warm for that time of year. All in all, it was just about perfect.

Sachs’s book was only a third written at that point, and the piece I read was still a long way from being finished. Sachs understood that, and when he gave me the manuscript the first night I was there, he wasn’t looking for detailed criticisms or suggestions on how to improve this or that passage. He just wanted to know if I thought he should continue. “I’ve reached a stage where I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” he said. “I can’t tell if it’s good or bad. I can’t tell if it’s the best thing I’ve ever done or a pile of garbage.”