Great House (3 page)

I'd like to have it, she said. Of course, I answered, and, without pausing to give myself a moment to change my mind, asked her when she wanted to come for it. I'm only in New York for another week, she said. How about Saturday? That, I calculated, would leave me five more days with the desk. Fine, I said, though there couldn't have been a greater discrepancy between the casual tone of my voice and the distraught feeling taking hold of me as I spoke. I have a few other pieces of furniture that belonged to your father, too. You can have them all.

Before she hung up, I asked her name. Leah, she said. Leah Varsky? No, she said, Weisz. And then, matter-of-factly she explained that her mother, who was Israeli, had lived in Santiago in the early seventies. She'd had a brief affair with Daniel around the time of the military coup, and soon afterwards had left the country. When her mother had found out that she was pregnant, she'd written to Daniel. She'd never heard back from him; he had already been arrested.

When, in the silence that followed, it became clear that we had run out of all the small manageable bits of the conversation, leaving only the pieces too unwieldy for such a phone call, I said, that, yes, I'd been holding on to the desk for a long time. I always thought someone would come for it one day, I told her, though of course I'd have tried to return it sooner had I known.

After she hung up I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. When I came back into the room—a living room I used as a study, because I had no need for a living room—I walked over and sat down at the desk as if nothing had changed. But of course something had, and when I looked at the computer screen to the sentence I'd abandoned when the telephone rang I knew it would be impossible to go any further that night.

I got up and moved to my reading chair. I picked up the book from the side table, but found, somewhat uncharacteristically, that my mind was wandering. I stared across the room at the desk, as I had stared at it on countless nights when I'd reached an impasse but wasn't ready to capitulate. No, I don't harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it's work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is. As such, I've never bought into the idea that the writer requires any special ritual in order to write. If need be, I could write almost anywhere, as easily in an ashram as in a crowded café, or so I've always insisted when asked whether I write with a pen or a computer, at morning or night, alone or surrounded, in a saddle like Goethe, standing like Hemingway, lying down like Twain, and so on,
as if there were a secret to it all that might spring the lock of the safe housing the novel, fully formed and ready for publication, apparently suspended in each of us. No, what I was distraught to be losing was the familiar conditions of my work; it was sentimentality speaking and nothing else.

It was a setback. Something melancholy clung to the whole business, a melancholy that had begun with the story of Daniel Varsky, but now belonged to me. But it was not an irreparable problem. Tomorrow morning, I decided, I would go out to buy a new desk.

It was past midnight by the time I fell asleep, and, as always when I go to bed entangled in some difficulty, my sleep was uneven and my dreams vivid. But by morning, despite the receding sense that I had been dragged through something epic, I only remembered a fragment—a man standing outside my building, freezing to death in the glacial wind that blows down the Hudson corridor from Canada, from the Arctic Circle itself, who, as I passed, asked me to pull a red thread that was hanging from his mouth. I obliged, bullied by the pressure of charity, but as I pulled the thread continued to pile up at my feet. When my arms tired the man barked at me to keep pulling, until over a passage of time, compressed as it only can be in dreams, he and I became joined in the conviction that something crucial lay at the end of that string; or maybe it was only I who had the luxury to believe or not, while for him it was a matter of life and death.

The next day I did not go out to look for a new desk, or the day after that. When I sat down to work, not only was I unable to muster the necessary concentration, but when I looked over the pages I'd already written I found them to be superfluous words lacking life and authenticity, with no compelling reason behind them. What I hoped had been the sophisticated artifice that the best fiction employs, I now saw was only a garden-variety artifice, artifice used to draw attention away from what is ultimately shallow rather than reveal the shattering depths below the surface of everything. What I thought was a simpler, purer prose, more searing for being stripped of all distracting
ornament, was actually a dull and lumbering mass, void of tension or energy, standing in opposition to nothing, toppling nothing, shouting nothing. Though I had been struggling with the mechanism behind the book for some time, unable to work out how the pieces fit together, I'd believed all along that there was something there, a design that if I could only dislodge and separate it from the rest would prove to have all the delicacy and irreducibility of an idea that demands a novel, written in only one way, to express it. But now I saw that I had been wrong.

I left the apartment and went for a long walk through Riverside Park and down Broadway to clear my mood. I stopped at Zabar's to pick up some things for dinner, waving to the same man in the cheese department who'd been there since the days when I visited my grandmother, weaving past the old, heavily powdered hunchbacks pushing a jar of pickles around in a cart, standing in line behind a woman with an eternal and involuntary nod—yes, yes, yes, yes—the exuberant yes of the girl she once was, even where she meant no, no, enough already, no.

But when I got back home it was exactly the same. The next day was worse. My judgment of all I'd written over the last year or more took on a sickening solidity. In the days that followed, all I accomplished at the desk was to box up the manuscript and notes, and empty the drawers of their contents. There were old letters, scraps of paper on which I'd written things now incomprehensible, scattered odds and ends, remaindered parts of objects long ago thrown away, assorted electrical transformers, stationery printed with the address where I'd lived with my ex-husband, S—a collection of mostly useless things, and, underneath some old notebooks, Daniel's postcards. Lodged at the back of one drawer I found a yellowed paperback Daniel must have forgotten so many years ago, a collection of stories by a writer named Lotte Berg, inscribed to him from the author in 1970. I filled a large bag with things to be thrown out; everything else I put away in a box except for the postcards and paperback. Those I
placed, without reading them, into a manila envelope. I emptied all the many drawers, some very small, as I said, and some of average size, except for the one with a small brass lock. If you were sitting at the desk the lock would be located just above your right knee. The drawer had been locked for as long as I could remember, and though I'd looked many times I'd never found the key. Once, in a fit of curiosity, or maybe boredom, I tried to break the lock open with a screwdriver, but only managed to scrape my knuckles. Often I'd wished that it were a different drawer that was locked, since the one on the top right was the most practical, and whenever I went to look for something in one of the many drawers, I always instinctively reached for it first, awakening a fleeting unhappiness, a kind of orphaned feeling that I knew had nothing to do with the drawer but that had somehow come to live there. For some reason I always assumed that the drawer contained letters from the girl in the poem Daniel Varsky once read to me, or if not her then someone like her.

The following Saturday at noon Leah Weisz rang my bell. When I opened the door and saw the figure standing there I caught my breath: it was Daniel Varsky, despite the intervening twenty-seven years, exactly as I'd remembered he'd stood that winter afternoon when I rang his bell and he opened the door for me, only now everything was reversed as in a mirror, or reversed as if time had suddenly come to a halt then begun to hurtle backwards, undoing everything it had done. The same thinness, the same nose, and, despite it, the underlying delicateness. This echo of Daniel Varsky now extended her hand. It was cold when I shook it, despite the warmth outside. She wore a blue velvet blazer scuffed at the elbows and a red linen scarf around her neck, the ends slung over her shoulders in the rakish way of a college student bent under the burden of her first encounter with Kierkegaard or Sartre, battling the wind to cross a quadrangle. She looked as young as that, eighteen or nineteen, but when I did the math I realized Leah must have been twenty-four or twenty-five, almost exactly the age Daniel and I had been when we'd met
each other. And, unlike a fresh-faced student, there was something foreboding about the way her hair fell in her eyes, and the eyes themselves, which were dark, almost black.

But inside I saw that she was not her father. Among other things, she was smaller, more compact, almost puckish. Her hair was auburn, not black as Daniel's had been. Under the overhead lights of my hallway, Daniel's features fell away enough that had I passed Leah in the street I might not have noticed anything familiar about her.

She saw the desk immediately and walked slowly toward it. Stopping in front of the hulking mass, more present to her, I imagine, than her father could ever have been, she put her hand to her forehead and sat down in the chair. For a moment I thought she might cry. Instead she laid her hands on the surface, ran them back and forth, and began to fiddle with the drawers. I stifled my annoyance at this intrusion, as well as those that followed, as she wasn't content to open only one drawer and look inside, but proceeded to look in three or four before she seemed satisfied that they were all empty. For a moment I thought I might cry.

To be polite, and in order to put a halt to any further inquisition of the furniture, I offered her tea. She rose from the desk and turned to look around the room. You live alone? she asked. Her tone, or the expression on her face as she glanced at the leaning stack of books next to my stained armchair and the dirty mugs collecting on the windowsill, reminded me of the pitying way friends had sometimes looked at me when they came to see me in the months before I met her father, when I lived alone in the apartment emptied of R's things. Yes, I said. How do you take your tea? You never married? she asked, and perhaps because I was taken aback by the bluntness of the question, before I could think I answered, No. I don't plan to either, she said. No? I asked. Why not? Look at you, she said. You're free to go wherever you want, to live as you please. She tucked her hair behind her ears and took in another sweeping glance across the room, as if it were the whole
apartment or maybe even the life itself that was about to be transferred to her name, not just a desk.

It would have been impossible, at least for the moment, to ask all that I wanted to about the circumstances of Daniel's arrest, where he was detained, and whether anything was known about how and where he had died. Instead, over the course of the next half hour, I learned that Leah had lived in New York for two years, studying piano at Juilliard, before she decided, one day, that she no longer wished to play the giant instrument she had been chained to since she was five, and a few weeks later she went home to Jerusalem. She had been living there for the past year, trying to figure out what it was she wanted to do now. She had only come back to New York to pick up some of the things she had left behind with friends, and she planned on shipping it all, along with the desk, back to Jerusalem.

Perhaps there were other details that I missed, because as she spoke I found myself struggling to accept the idea that I was about to hand over the single meaningful object in my life as a writer, the lone physical representation of all that was otherwise weightless and intangible, to this waif who might sit at it from time to time as if at a paternal altar. And yet, Your Honor, what could I do? Arrangements were made for her to return the following day with a moving truck that would bring the furniture directly to a shipping container in Newark. Because I couldn't bear to watch the desk being carted away, I told her that I would be out, but that I would make sure that Vlad, the gruff Romanian superintendent, was there to let her in.

Early the next morning I left the manila envelope with Daniel's postcards on the empty desk, and drove up to Norfolk, Connecticut, where S and I had rented a house for nine or ten summers, and to which I hadn't returned since we'd separated. It was only once I'd parked next to the library, stepping out of the car to stretch my legs in view of the town green, that I realized any reason I had for being there shouldn't be indulged, and, moreover, I desperately wanted to avoid running into anyone I knew. I got back into the car and for
the next four or five hours drove aimlessly along the country roads, through New Marlborough to Great Barrington, beyond to Lenox, tracing routes S and I had taken a hundred times before we looked up and noticed that our marriage had starved to death.

As I drove, I found myself thinking of how, four or five years after we'd gotten married, S and I were invited to a dinner party at the home of a German dancer then living in New York. At the time S worked at a theater, now closed, where the dancer was performing a solo piece. The apartment was small and filled with the dancer's unusual possessions, things he had found on the street, or during his tireless travels, or that he had been given, all arranged with the sense of space, proportion, timing, and grace that made him such a joy to watch onstage. In fact, it was strange and almost frustrating to see the dancer in street clothes and brown house slippers, moving so practically through the apartment, with little or no sign of the tremendous physical talent that lay dormant in him, and I found myself craving for some break in this pragmatic façade, a leap or turn, some explosion of his true energy. All the same, once I got used to this and became absorbed in looking at his many little collections, I had the elated, otherworldly feeling I sometimes get entering the sphere of another's life, when for a moment changing my banal habits and living like
that
seems entirely possible, a feeling that always dissolves by the next morning, when I wake up to the familiar, unmovable shapes of my own life. At some point I got up from the dinner table to use the bathroom, and in the hall I passed the open door of the dancer's bedroom. It was spare, with only a bed and wooden chair and a little altar with candles set up in one corner. There was a large window facing south through which lower Manhattan hung suspended in the dark. The other walls were blank except for one painting tacked up with pins, a vibrant picture from whose many bright, high-spirited strokes faces sometimes emerged, as if from a bog, now and then topped with a hat. The faces on the top half of the paper were upside down, as if the painter had turned the page around or circled it on
his or her knees while painting, in order to reach more easily. It was a strange piece of work, unlike the style of the other things the dancer had collected, and I studied it for a minute or two before continuing on to the bathroom.