Childish Loves (32 page)

Twenty minutes later, carrying my luggage with me (only a backpack filled with papers and clothes), I discovered the funny elevator at the A-train stop. The attendant wore a warden's jacket and sat down for the journey on a wooden chair, the kind of chair people leave out on the street when they move house. We rode together (it was just the two of us) above the city, and when I got out it seemed twice as cold as it had below. The wind blew through me, but I walked along Fort Washington and into the park until I could see where it was blowing from: south down the Hudson from New England. Since the cafe was closed, I had to walk back almost as far as I had come to find somewhere to eat – a grocery store and taqueria on the corner of 190th Street, with a few chairs and a table pushed together behind the shop door. After lunch I tried Peter's bell again and this time somebody answered.

I explained myself through the entry-phone – that a friend of mine once rented the apartment. He had died a few years ago, and I wanted to see for myself where he used to live.

‘Listen, I've just gotten in,' a woman said. ‘I have to pick up my daughter from school in an hour. I want to have lunch. I want to sit down for a minute.'

‘I won't be much more than a minute.'

‘This is the kind of thing they tell you not to do in New York,' she said, and buzzed me in.

The lobby, which might have been grand, was empty and dark; several of the marbled tiles needed replacing. But still the building had charm – the charm of something on which money had once been lavished. Each of the brass-fronted mailboxes had its own little window and a slot for names above it. It gave me a shock to see ‘P Sullivan' picked out in rubber lettering on one of the boxes. He'd been dead only four years; nobody had bothered to change the name. The elevator itself was narrow and badly lit. Soft quilted padding hung from three of its walls, covering the mirrors. On the way up I tried to calculate how often Peter must have stood where I was standing. Twice a day at least every day of the year; and sometimes double that, if he went out for a shop or a walk. About a thousand times a year. Unless he stayed at home on weekends, when he wasn't teaching, and in the summer – on the days he had no reason for getting out of the house.

These buildings weren't designed for visitors. They were designed to make visitors lose their way. I had come up the wrong elevator and had to go back down again to the lobby – there was another elevator for Peter's side of the building. Eventually I found his apartment at the end of a long pink-walled corridor covered in brown carpeting. Little scalloped lights, set into the walls and spaced a dozen feet apart, cast shadows against the ceiling. The numbers on the doors climbed into the thousands: Peter lived at eight hundred and seventy something. The woman who answered his door was frizzy-haired and large-breasted and short. She wore a red button-down shirt and a blue cardigan with shoulder pads. I could see behind her a chaos of toys, books, washing, and a wide sliding window with a view of the brown apartment block on the other side of the street. She had a cup of coffee in her hand and a little smear of jam on her mouth.

‘So who was this friend of yours anyway?' she said, letting me in.

‘His name's still on your mailbox slot. Peter Sullivan.'

‘P Sullivan, the great P Sullivan!' This put her in a good mood and she offered me some coffee.

The apartment was small. One wall of the living room was the kitchen; there was just about room for a sofa, a small breakfast table, and a television set. She showed me her bedroom, too, which was covered in more toys and books and had a child's colorful duvet falling off the double bed. This is where her daughter slept. The bedroom had a window, but it gave on to the air-shaft and was always closed. They kept the blinds drawn over it, because it used to scare her daughter, who didn't like the thought of something climbing through. Probably she wouldn't care now, but it didn't let in much light and they never bothered putting her to the test. Her husband and she made do with the sofa-bed; it's the only way they could go to sleep when they wanted to, and he came home late and liked to watch a little TV.

‘He needs to get in his TV time,' she said.

I asked her how long ago they moved in.

Four years, she said. Their daughter was one when they moved.

‘What did it look like when you moved in?'

‘It looked like all these places look. Empty and not very clean. They cleaned the floors and the top of the oven, but the inside was disgusting. And the windows haven't been touched in years. But there wasn't anything left if that's what you mean.'

‘Do you mind if I look round for a minute by myself?'

‘Go ahead. He must have been a pretty good friend.'

‘I didn't know him that well. That's why I want to look.'

So I went in the bathroom and opened an unexplained door, to a cupboard containing a vacuum cleaner and an ironing board. I looked at the sliding mirror over the sink. I stood at the wide living-room window and stared at the brown building opposite. Then pushed it open, with some difficulty, and leaned my head into the cold air: you could just catch a glimpse of the green of Gorman Park. In the bedroom I pulled up the blinds to the air-shaft and looked at that. For some reason the phrase came into my head again: ‘That I should live again impassioned days.' Somewhere between these walls he had written that line or transcribed it from of one of Byron's letters. And it occurred to me that, whatever else he felt, the loneliness he felt must have been passionate enough.

*

Afterwards, I caught the red line to Penn Station and then the shuttle to JFK. It always amazes me, when I make these trips on my own, how close at hand is the solitude in which I spent the first half of my twenties. As soon as I go away, it comes back; there it is, waiting. I stare at my reflection in the window of the airport bus. I mumble my destination to the woman at the check-in counter, because I haven't said a word to anyone in three hours. I buy a root beer and a
Sports Illustrated
and turn the pages in peace and quiet till my row number is called at the gate.

On the flight to Austin, I took out some of the papers Gerschon had copied for me and read them over. To prepare for my meeting at the Ransom Center. One of the reasons I thought Peter's third novel was incomplete was the gap in time between the second and final sections. There is plenty of other material he might have used, which would have borne out his general theme – including the homosexual experiments of Byron's first Continental tour, and after it, his affairs with Augusta and Caroline Lamb. (His general theme I took to be the uncomfortable relationship between innocence and sexual attraction.) But for some reason he chose to write the ending first, and he died or killed himself before he could finish the rest. Gerschon's papers showed that Peter once intended to flesh out Byron's middle years.

For example, Peter had written out longhand a few paragraphs from what might have turned into a chapter of its own, relating to Byron's exile in Italy. This is what he wrote, in Byron's voice:

There were details in this I wanted to check against the history, but I had no books with me, apart from Marchand's edition of the
Selected Letters
– which was in my backpack in the overhead locker. The man sitting next to me in the aisle had fallen asleep with his elbow on my armrest. After a half-hour I began to feel trapped and pretended to need the bathroom. He made a noise like an animal and shifted in his seat. So I went to the bathroom. I wanted a minute to myself anyway and crouched in the narrow cubicle and washed my face, wondering if Peter had seen Lee Feldman again before he died. You need to find Lee Feldman, I thought. Instead of wasting your time on whatever it is you're wasting your time on.

*

What I remember most vividly from this short trip is the feeling building up inside me on the four-hour flight that I had something important to talk about with my parents, maybe even something to confess to, and my total inability to talk about it when I arrived. My father met me at the airport in the old Volvo and said, Nice to see you, how're you doing. But what we talked about on the drive home was the economy. He's an economist as well as a law professor and was still caught up in post-election news. He had strong fiscal feelings. My plane was a little delayed and we didn't get home till after ten o'clock. There was food on the table waiting for me, but my mother and father and I took our plates into the TV room and ate in front of the Jim Lehrer
NewsHour
. Afterwards my father turned on a basketball game and fell asleep on the couch, and my mother ‘showed me to my room' (she wanted to know if I needed a duvet; the weather in Austin, even at night, was somewhere in the 60s). She sat at the foot of my bed, as she used to; and instead of wishing me goodnight, she said to me, as she always used to say,
Bessere dich
. For nostalgic reasons. It means, better yourself.

My father had two hours of lectures in the morning, but I saw him for lunch at Ruby's, the barbecue joint behind our house. The smoker was near enough to our backyard we could smell it from the basketball court on windy afternoons. The restaurant itself isn't much to look at. A typical Texas shack, the kind that looks like it was built in two days to last a few months and which lasts thirty years. Dirty pine walls with old posters nailed into them. A courtyard fenced in by corrugated metal. The waitress called out our names, and we picked up our trays – there were squares of greaseproof paper on them, covered in meat and onion shavings, with bowls of beans, sauce and potato salad on the side. We carried them to the courtyard. My father, a New Yorker by birth, wore the loose-laced leather shoes he always teaches in, chinos and a dress-jacket. I noticed for the first time the small nub of plastic in his ear, a hearing aid, which upset me more than it should have. Not that it bothered him much, except that he couldn't figure out if it was turned on.

Mid-February overcast mild Austin weather, the temperature of left-out milk. As we sat down to eat I told him about the meeting I had that afternoon with a woman from the Ransom Center. She wanted to buy Peter Sullivan's papers, I said.

What do you get for that kind of thing, he wanted to know.

‘I have no idea. A few thousand dollars. More than he deserves.'

‘What have you done with your own papers?' he said.

‘Which ones do you mean?'

‘For example, what you used to keep in that chest I gave you.'

‘They're still there. Still in my room.'

‘Maybe you should bring along a sample.'

‘Dad, I don't think she's interested in my high-school poems. I didn't come here to talk about me. That's not why they flew me in.'

He looked up from his food. ‘It can't hurt to ask. What did they fly you in for.'

‘To talk about Peter.'

On the walk home, through straight narrow back streets, the houses smaller than the houses on our block, with narrower plots, many of them overgrown, the bamboo grasses growing through the chain-link fencing that separates one garden from the next, he said, ‘One of these is for sale, I can't remember which. I thought, maybe I'll buy it, for you kids. There's always more kids coming along.' And then, when I didn't answer: ‘What's happening with that book about me.' This is often how he referred to
Playing Days
, my memoir about the year I spent in Germany after college. Fulfilling his old childhood dream of playing pro basketball. He flew out to visit me in Landshut, the small town outside Munich where I lived, and this visit takes up several chapters.
Playing Days
had come out in England a few summers ago, but my American publishers were still on the fence about it.

‘They want to see what happens with this thing I'm working on first.'

‘What thing is that?'

‘The book about Peter.'

‘Listen,' he said, ‘I've got to get back to the office, but not yet. Let's take another turn around the block.'

A few hundred yards from our house, there's a small park with a creek running through it. Houses overlook it, some grand and new, some old and poky. A turn around the block usually means a walk from one end of the park to the other.

‘You remember my old friend Tom Vance,' my father said. An active seventy-something southerner, he had once joined us for the all-you-can-eat at my father's favorite Thai place. One of the friends my parents had picked up after the kids left home. ‘He used to be a lawyer in Houston then came in from the cold as he says. Now he teaches a semester a year at the law school – mostly corporate law. He bought a big house out by Mount Bonnell. One of those concrete boxes with a view. But this is not my point. He's part of the poetry reading group, along with John Robertson, Philip Bobbitt, Steven Wiseman and the rest of the university bigwigs. They take it in turns to host. Bill Bradley sometimes comes along. He's given a few lectures at the law school. When I mentioned the trouble you were having to Tom Vance, he offered to show the book to Bill.'