Leviathan (3 page)

The first time we met, it was snowing. More than fifteen years have gone by since that day, but I can still bring it back whenever I wish. So many other things have been lost for me, but I remember that meeting with Sachs as clearly as any event in my life.

It was a Saturday afternoon in February or March, and the two of us had been invited to give a joint reading of our work at a bar in the West Village. I had never heard of Sachs, but the person who called me was too rushed to answer my questions over the phone. “He’s a novelist,” she said. “His first book was published a couple of years ago.” Her call came on a Wednesday night, just three days before the reading was supposed to take place, and there was something close to panic in her voice. Michael Palmer, the poet who was supposed to appear on Saturday, had just canceled his trip to New York, and she wondered if I would be willing to stand in for him. It was a somewhat backhanded request, but I told her I would do it anyway. I hadn’t published much work at that point in my life—six or seven stories in little magazines, a handful of articles and book reviews—and it wasn’t as though people were clamoring for the privilege of hearing me read out loud to them. So I accepted the frazzled woman’s offer, and for the next two days I fell into a panic of my own, frantically searching through the midget world of my collected stories for something that wouldn’t embarrass me, for one scrap of writing that would be good enough to expose to a roomful of strangers. On Friday afternoon, I stopped in at several bookstores and asked for Sachs’s novel. It seemed only right that I should know something about his work before I met him, but the book was already two years old, and no one had it in stock.

As chance would have it, an immense storm blew in from the
Midwest on Friday night, and by Saturday morning a foot and a half of snow had fallen on the city. The reasonable thing would have been to get in touch with the woman who had called me, but I had stupidly forgotten to ask for her number, and when I still hadn’t heard from her by one o’clock, I figured I should get myself downtown as quickly as possible. I bundled up in my overcoat and galoshes, stuck the manuscript of my most recent story into one of the coat pockets, and then tramped out onto Riverside Drive, heading toward the subway station at 116th Street and Broadway. The sky was beginning to clear by then, but the streets and sidewalks were still clogged with snow, and there was scarcely any traffic. A few cars and trucks had been abandoned in tall drifts by the curb, and every now and then a lone vehicle would come inching down the street, skidding out of control whenever the driver tried to stop for a red light. I normally would have enjoyed this mayhem, but the weather was too fierce that day for me to lift my nose out of my scarf. The temperature had been falling steadily since sunrise, and by now the air was bitter, with wild surges of wind blowing off the Hudson, enormous gusts that literally pushed my body up the street. I was half-numb by the time I reached the subway station, but in spite of everything, it appeared that the trains were still running. This surprised me, and as I walked down the stairs and bought my token, I assumed that meant the reading was on after all.

I made it to Nashe’s Tavern at ten past two. The place was open, but once my eyes adjusted to the darkness inside, I saw that no one was there. A bartender in a white apron stood behind the bar, methodically drying shot glasses with a red towel. He was a hefty man of about forty, and he studied me carefully as I approached, almost as if he regretted this interruption of his solitude.

“Isn’t there supposed to be a reading here in about twenty
minutes?” I asked. The moment the words left my mouth, I felt like a fool for saying them.

“It was canceled,” the bartender said. “With all that slop out there today, there wouldn’t have been much point to it. Poetry’s a beautiful thing, but it’s hardly worth freezing your ass off for.”

I sat down on one of the barstools and ordered a bourbon. I was still shivering from my walk in the snow, and I wanted to warm my innards before I ventured outside again. I polished off the drink in two swallows, then ordered a refill because the first one had tasted so good. Midway through that second bourbon, another customer walked into the bar. He was a tall, exceedingly thin young man with a narrow face and a full brown beard. I watched him as he stamped his boots on the floor a couple of times, smacked his gloved hands together, and exhaled loudly from the effects of the cold. There was no question that he cut an odd figure—towering there in his moth-eaten coat with a New York Knicks baseball cap perched on his head and a navy blue scarf wrapped around the cap to protect his ears. He looked like someone with a bad toothache, I thought, or else like some half-starved Russian soldier stranded on the outskirts of Stalin-grad. These two images came to me in rapid succession, the first one comic, the second one forlorn. In spite of his ridiculous getup, there was something fierce in his eyes, an intensity that quelled any desire to laugh at him. He resembled Ichabod Crane, perhaps, but he was also John Brown, and once you got past his costume and his gangly basketball forward’s body, you began to see an entirely different sort of person: a man who missed nothing, a man with a thousand wheels turning in his head.

He stood in the doorway for a few moments scanning the empty room, then walked up to the bartender and asked more or less the
same question that I had asked ten minutes earlier. The bartender gave more or less the same answer he had given me, but in this case he also gestured with a thumb in my direction, pointing to where I was sitting at the end of the bar. “That one came for the reading, too,” he said. “You’re probably the only two guys in New York who were crazy enough to leave the house today.”

“Not quite,” said the man with the scarf wrapped around his head. “You forgot to count yourself.”

“I didn’t forget,” the bartender said. “It’s just that I don’t count. I’ve got to be here, you see, and you don’t. That’s what I’m talking about. If I don’t show up, I lose my job.”

“But I came here to do a job, too,” the other one said. “They told me I was going to earn fifty dollars. Now they’ve called off the reading, and I’ve lost the subway fare to boot.”

“Well, that’s different, then,” the bartender said. “If you were supposed to read, then I guess you don’t count either.”

“That leaves just one person in the whole city who went out when he didn’t have to.”

“If you’re talking about me,” I said, finally entering the conversation, “then your list is down to zero.”

The man with the scarf wrapped around his head turned to me and smiled. “Ah, then that means you’re Peter Aaron, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose it does,” I said. “But if I’m Peter Aaron, then you must be Benjamin Sachs.”

“The one and only,” Sachs answered, letting out a short, self-deprecatory laugh. He walked over to where I was sitting and extended his right hand. “I’m very happy you’re here,” he said. “I’ve been reading some of your stuff lately and was looking forward to meeting you.”

That was how our friendship began—sitting in that deserted bar fifteen years ago, each one buying drinks for the other until we
both ran out of money. It must have lasted three or four hours, for I distinctly remember that when we finally staggered out into the cold again, night had already fallen. Now that Sachs is dead, I find it unbearable to think back to what he was like then, to remember all the generosity and humor and intelligence that poured out of him that first time we met. In spite of the facts, it’s difficult for me to imagine that the person who sat with me in the bar that day was the same person who wound up destroying himself last week. The journey must have been so long for him, so horrible, so fraught with suffering, I can scarcely think about it without wanting to cry. In fifteen years, Sachs traveled from one end of himself to the other, and by the time he came to that last place, I doubt he even knew who he was anymore. So much distance had been covered by then, it wouldn’t have been possible for him to remember where he had begun.

“I generally manage to keep up with what’s going on,” he said, untying the scarf from under his chin and removing it along with the baseball cap and his long brown overcoat. He flung the whole pile onto the barstool next to him and sat down. “Until two weeks ago, I’d never even heard of you. Now, all of a sudden, you seem to be popping up everywhere. To begin with, I ran across your piece on Hugo Ball’s diaries. An excellent little article, I thought, deft and nicely argued, an admirable response to the issues at stake. I didn’t agree with all your points, but you made your case well, and I respected the seriousness of your position. This guy believes in art too much, I said to myself, but at least he knows where he stands and has the wit to recognize that other views are possible. Then, three or four days after that, a magazine arrived in the mail, and the first thing I opened to was a story with your name on it. ‘The Secret Alphabet,’ the one about the student who keeps finding messages written on the walls of buildings. I loved it. I loved it so much that I read it three times. Who is this Peter Aaron? I wondered, and
where has he been hiding himself? When Kathy what’s-her-name called to tell me that Palmer had bagged out of the reading, I suggested that she get in touch with you.”

“So you’re the one responsible for dragging me down here,” I said, too stunned by his lavish compliments to think of anything but that feeble reply.

“Well, admittedly it didn’t work out the way we thought it would.”

“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” I said. “At least I won’t have to stand up in the dark and listen to my knees knock together. There’s something to be said for that.”

“Mother Nature to the rescue.”

“Exactly. Lady Luck saves my skin.”

“I’m glad you were spared the torment. I wouldn’t want to be walking around with that on my conscience.”

“But thank you for getting me invited. It meant a lot to me, and the truth is I’m very grateful to you.”

“I didn’t do it because I wanted your gratitude. I was curious, and sooner or later I would have been in touch with you myself. But then the opportunity came along, and I figured this would be a more elegant way of going about it.”

“And here I am, sitting at the North Pole with Admiral Peary himself. The least I can do is buy you a drink.”

“I accept your offer, but only on one condition. You have to answer my question first.”

“I’ll be glad to, as long as you tell me what the question is. I don’t seem to remember that you asked me one.”

“Of course I did. I asked you where you’ve been hiding yourself. I could be mistaken, but my guess is that you haven’t been in New York very long.”

“I used to be here, but then I went away. I just got back five or six months ago.”

“And where were you?”

“France. I lived there for close to five years.”

“That explains it, then. But why on earth would you want to live in France?”

“No particular reason. I just wanted to be somewhere that wasn’t here.”

“You didn’t go to study? You weren’t working for UNESCO or some hot-shot international law firm?”

“No, nothing like that. I was pretty much living hand to mouth.”

“The old expatriate adventure, was that it? Young American writer goes off to Paris to discover culture and beautiful women, to experience the pleasures of sitting in cafes and smoking strong cigarettes.”

“I don’t think it was that either. I felt I needed some breathing room, that’s all. I picked France because I was able to speak French. If I spoke Serbo-Croatian, I probably would have gone to Yugoslavia.”

“So you went away. For no particular reason, as you put it. Was there any particular reason why you came back?”

“I woke up one morning last summer and told myself it was time to come home. Just like that. I suddenly felt I’d been there long enough. Too many years without baseball, I suppose. If you don’t get your ration of double plays and home runs, it can begin to dry up your spirit.”

“And you’re not planning to leave again?”

“No, I don’t think so. Whatever I was trying to prove by going there doesn’t feel important to me anymore.”

“Maybe you’ve proved it already.”

“That’s possible. Or maybe the question has to be stated in different terms. Maybe I was using the wrong terms all along.”

“All right,” Sachs said, suddenly slapping his hand on the bar. “I’ll take that drink now. I’m beginning to feel satisfied, and that always makes me thirsty.”

“What will you have?”

“The same thing you’re having,” he said, not bothering to ask me what it was. “And since the bartender has to come over here anyway, tell him to pour you another. A toast is in order. It’s your homecoming, after all, and we have to welcome you back to America in style.”

I don’t think anyone has ever disarmed me as thoroughly as Sachs did that afternoon. He came on like gangbusters from the first moment, storming through my most secret dungeons and hiding places, opening one locked door after another. As I later learned, it was a typical performance for him, an almost classic example of how he steered himself through the world. No beating about the bush, no standing on ceremony—just roll up your sleeves and start talking. It was nothing for him to strike up conversations with absolute strangers, to plunge in and ask questions no one else would have dared to ask, and more often than not to get away with it. You felt that he had never learned the rules, that because he was so utterly lacking in self-consciousness, he expected everyone else to be as open-hearted as he was. And yet there was always something impersonal about his probing, as if he weren’t trying to make a human connection with you so much as to solve some intellectual problem for himself. It gave his remarks a certain abstract coloration, and this inspired trust, made you willing to tell him things that in some cases you hadn’t even told yourself. He never judged anyone he met, never treated anyone as an inferior, never made distinctions between people because of their social rank. A bartender interested him just as much
as a writer, and if I hadn’t shown up that day, he probably would have spent two hours talking to that same man I hadn’t bothered to exchange ten words with. Sachs automatically assumed great intelligence on the part of the person he was talking to, thereby investing that person with a sense of his own dignity and importance. I think it was that quality I admired most about him, that innate skill at drawing out the best in others. He often came across as an oddball, a gawky stick of a man with his head in the clouds, permanently distracted by obscure thoughts and preoccupations, and yet again and again he would surprise you with a hundred little signs of his attentiveness. Like everyone else in the world, but only more so perhaps, he managed to combine a multitude of contradictions into a single, unbroken presence. No matter where he was, he always seemed to be at home in his surroundings, and yet I’ve rarely met anyone who was so clumsy, so physically inept, so helpless at negotiating the simplest operations. All during our conversation that afternoon, he kept knocking his coat off the barstool onto the floor. It must have happened six or seven times, and once, when he bent down to pick it up, he even managed to bang his head against the bar. As I later discovered, however, Sachs was an excellent athlete. He had been the leading scorer on his high school basketball team, and in all the games of one-on-one we played against each other over the years, I don’t think I beat him more than once or twice. He was garrulous and often sloppy in the way he spoke, and yet his writing was marked by great precision and economy, a genuine gift for the apt phrase. That he wrote at all, for that matter, often struck me as something of a puzzle. He was too out there, too fascinated by other people, too happy mixing with crowds for such a lonely occupation, I thought. But solitude scarcely disturbed him, and he always worked with tremendous discipline and fervor, sometimes holing up for weeks at a stretch in order to complete a project. Given who he was, and the
singular way in which he kept these various sides of himself in motion, Sachs was not someone you would have expected to be married. He seemed too ungrounded for domestic life, too democratic in his affections to be capable of sustaining intimate relations with any one person. But Sachs married young, much younger than anyone else I knew, and he kept that marriage alive for close to twenty years. Nor was Fanny the kind of wife who seemed particularly well suited to him. In a pinch, I could have imagined him with a docile, mothering sort of woman, one of those wives who stands contentedly in her husband’s shadow, devoted to protecting her boy-man from the harsh practicalities of the everyday world. But Fanny was nothing like that. Sachs’s partner was every bit his equal, a complex and highly intelligent woman who led her own independent life, and if he managed to hold on to her for all those years, it was only because he worked hard at it, because he had an enormous talent for understanding her and keeping her in balance with herself. His sweet temper no doubt helped the marriage, but I wouldn’t want to overemphasize that aspect of his character. In spite of his gentleness, Sachs could be rigidly dogmatic in his thinking, and there were times when he let loose in savage fits of anger, truly terrifying outbursts of rage. These were not directed at the people he cared about so much as at the world at large. The stupidities of the world appalled him, and underneath his jauntiness and good humor, you sometimes felt a deep reservoir of intolerance and scorn. Nearly everything he wrote had a peevish, embattled edge to it, and over the years he developed a reputation as a troublemaker. I suppose he deserved it, but in the end that was only one small part of who he was. The difficulty comes from trying to pin him down in any conclusive way. Sachs was too unpredictable for that, too large-spirited and cunning, too full of new ideas to stand in one place for very long. I sometimes found it exhausting to be with him, but I can’t say it was ever dull. Sachs kept me on my toes
for fifteen years, constantly challenging and provoking me, and as I sit here now trying to make sense of who he was, I can hardly imagine my life without him.