In 1973 I was offered a job as caretaker of a farmhouse in the south of France. My on-again off-again romance with a young woman named L. seemed to be on again, so we decided to join forces and take the job together. We had both run out of money by then, and without this offer we would have been compelled to return to America–which neither of us wanted to do just yet.
The place was beautiful: a large, eighteenth-century stone house bordered by vineyards on one side and a national forest on the other. The nearest village was two kilometres away, but it was inhabited by no more than forty people, none of whom was under sixty or seventy years old. It was an ideal spot for two young writers to spend a year, and L. and I both worked hard there, accomplishing more in that house than either one of us would have thought possible.
But we lived permanently on the brink of catastrophe. Our employers, an American couple who lived in Paris, sent us a small monthly salary (fifty dollars), a gas allowance for the car and money to feed the two Labrador retrievers who were part of the household. All in all, it was a generous arrangement. There was no rent to pay, and even if our salary fell short of what we needed to live on, it gave us a head start on each month’s expenses. Our plan was to earn the rest by doing translations. Before leaving Paris and settling in the country, we had set up a number of jobs to see us through the year. What we had neglected to take into account was that publishers are often slow to pay their bills. We had also forgotten to consider that cheques sent from one country to another can take weeks to clear, and that once they do, bank charges and exchange fees cut into the amounts. Since L. and I had left no margin for error, we often found ourselves in quite desperate straits.
I remember savage nicotine fits, my body numb with need as I scrounged among sofa cushions and crawled behind cupboards in search of loose coins. For eighteen centimes (about three and a half cents), you could buy a brand of cigarettes called Parisiennes, which were sold in packs of four. I remember feeding the dogs and thinking that they ate better than I did. I remember conversations with L. when we seriously considered opening a can of dog food and eating it for dinner.
Our only other source of income came from a man named James Sugar (I don’t mean to insist on metaphorical names, but facts are facts, and there’s nothing I can do about it.) Sugar worked as a staff photographer for National Geographic and was collaborating with one of our employers on an article about the region. He took pictures for several months, criss-crossing Provence in a rented car provided by his magazine, and whenever he was nearby he would spend the night with us. Since the magazine also provided him with an expense account, he would very graciously slip us the money that had been allotted for his hotel costs. If I remember correctly, the sum came to fifty francs a night. In effect, L. and I became his private innkeepers, and as Sugar was an amiable man, we were always glad to see him. The only problem was that we never knew when he was going to turn up. He never called in advance, and weeks could go by between his visits. We therefore learned not to count on Mr Sugar. He would arrive out of nowhere, pulling up in front of the house in his shiny blue car, stay for a night or two, and then disappear again. Each time he left, we assumed that was the last time we would ever see him.
The worst moments came for us in the late winter and early spring. Cheques failed to arrive, one of the dogs was stolen and little by little we ate our way through the stockpile of food in the kitchen. In the end, we had nothing left but a bag of onions, a bottle of cooking oil and a packaged pie-crust that someone had bought before we moved into the house–a remnant from the previous summer. L. and I held out all morning and into the afternoon, but by two-thirty hunger had got the better of us, and so we went into the kitchen to prepare our last meal. Given the paucity of ingredients, an onion pie was the only dish that made sense.
After our concoction had been in the oven for what seemed a sufficient length of time, we took it out, set it on the table and dug in. Against all our expectations, we both found it delicious. I think we even went so far as to say that it was the best food we had ever tasted, but no doubt that was a feeble attempt to keep our spirits up. Once we had chewed a little more, however, disappointment set in. Reluctantly–ever so reluctantly–we were forced to admit that the pie had not yet cooked through, that the centre was still too cold to eat. There was nothing to be done but put it back in the oven for another ten or fifteen minutes. Considering our hunger, and considering that our salivary glands had just been activated, relinquishing the pie was not easy.
To stifle our impatience, we went outside for a brief stroll, thinking the time would pass more quickly if we removed ourselves from the good smells in the kitchen. As I remember it, we circled the house once, perhaps twice. Perhaps we drifted into a deep conversation about something (I can’t remember), but however it happened, and however long we were gone, by the time we entered the house again the kitchen was filled with smoke. We rushed to the oven and pulled out the pie, but it was too late. Our meal was dead. It had been incinerated, burned to a charred and blackened mass, and not one morsel could be salvaged.
It sounds like a funny story now, but at the time it was anything but funny. We had fallen into a dark hole, and neither one of us could think of a way to get out. In all my years of struggling to be a man, I doubt there has ever been a moment when I felt less inclined to laugh or crack jokes. This was really the end, and it was a terrible and frightening place to be.
That was at four o’clock in the afternoon. Less than an hour later, the errant Mr Sugar suddenly appeared, driving up to the house in a cloud of dust, gravel and dirt crunching all around him. If I think about it hard enough, I can still see his naive and goofy smile as he bounced out of the car and said hello. It was a miracle. It was a genuine miracle, and I was there to witness it with my own eyes. Until that moment, I had thought those things happened only in books.
Sugar treated us to dinner that night in a two-star restaurant. We ate copiously and well, we emptied several bottles of wine, we laughed our heads off. And yet, delicious as that food must have been, I can’t remember a thing about it. But I have never forgotten the taste of the onion pie.
2
Not long after I returned to New York (July, 1974), a friend told me the following story. It is set in Yugoslavia, during what must have been the last months of the Second World War.
S.’s uncle was a member of a Serbian partisan group that fought against the Nazi occupation. One morning, he and his comrades woke up to find themselves surrounded by German troops. They were holed up in a farmhouse somewhere in the country, a foot of snow lay on the ground and there was no escape. Not knowing what else to do, the men decided to draw lots. Their plan was to burst out of the farmhouse one by one, dash through the snow and see if they couldn’t make it to safety. S.’s uncle was supposed to go third.
He watched through the window as the first man ran out into the snow-covered field. There was a barrage of machine-gun fire from the woods, and the man was cut down. A moment later, the second man ran out, and the same thing happened. The machine-guns blasted, and he fell down dead in the snow.
Then it was my friend’s uncle’s turn. I don’t know if he hesitated at the doorway; I don’t know what thoughts were pounding through his head at that moment. The only thing I was told was that he started to run, charging through the snow for all he was worth. It seemed as if he ran forever. Then, suddenly, he felt pain in his leg. A second after that, an overpowering warmth spread through his body, and a second after that he lost consciousness.
When he woke up, he found himself lying on his back in a peasant’s cart. He had no idea how much time had elapsed or how he had been rescued. He had simply opened his eyes–and there he was, lying in a cart that some horse or mule was pulling down a country road, staring up at the back of a peasant’s head. He studied the back of that head for several seconds, and then loud explosions erupted from the woods. Too weak to move, he kept looking at the back of the head, and suddenly it was gone. It just flew off the peasant’s body, and where a moment before there had been a whole man, there was now a man without a head.
More noise, more confusion. Whether the horse went on pulling the cart or not I can’t say, but within minutes, perhaps even seconds, a large contingent of Russian troops came rolling down the road. Jeeps, tanks, scores of soldiers. When the commanding officer took a look at S.’s uncle’s leg, he quickly dispatched him to an infirmary that had been set up in the neighbourhood. It was no more than a rickety wooden shack–a hen-house, maybe, or an outbuilding on some farm. There the Russian army doctor pronounced the leg past saving. It was too severely damaged, he said, and he was going to have to cut it off.
My friend’s uncle began to scream. ‘Don’t cut off my leg,’ he cried. ‘Please, I beg of you, don’t cut off my leg!’ But no one listened to him. The medics strapped him to the operating table, and the doctor picked up his saw. Just as he was about to pierce the skin of the leg, there was another explosion. The roof of the infirmary collapsed, the walls fell down, the entire place was obliterated. And once again, S.’s uncle lost consciousness.
When he woke up this time, he found himself lying in a bed. The sheets were clean and soft, there were pleasant smells in the room and his leg was still attached to his body. A moment later, he was looking into the face of a beautiful young woman. She was smiling at him and feeding him broth with a spoon. It seemed possible to him that he had woken up in heaven. With no knowledge of how it had happened, he had been rescued again and carried to another farmhouse.
He stayed on in the house and fell in love with the beautiful young woman, but nothing ever came of the romance. I wish I could say why, but S. never filled me in on the details. I know only that his uncle kept his leg, and that once the war was over, he moved to America to begin a new life. Somehow or other (the circumstances are obscure to me), he wound up as an insurance salesman in Chicago.
3
L. and I were married in 1974. Our son Daniel was born in 1977, but by the following year our marriage had ended. None of that is relevant now–except to set the scene for an incident that took place in the spring of 1980.
We were both living in Brooklyn then, about three or four blocks from each other, and our son divided his time between the two apartments. One morning, I had to stop by L.’s place to pick up Daniel and walk him to nursery school. Just as we were about to walk off together, L. opened the window of her third-floor apartment to throw me some money. Perhaps she wanted me to replenish a parking meter for her or do an errand, I don’t know. All that remains is the open window and the image of a dime flying through the air. I see it with such clarity; it’s almost as if I have studied photographs of that instant, as if it’s part of a recurring dream I’ve had ever since.
But the dime hit the branch of a tree, and its downward arc into my hand was disrupted. It bounced off the tree, landed soundlessly somewhere nearby and then it was gone. I remember bending down and searching the pavement, digging among the leaves and twigs at the base of the tree, but the dime was nowhere to be found.
I can place that event in early spring because later the same day I attended a baseball game at Shea Stadium–the opening game of the season. A friend of mine had been offered tickets, and he had generously invited me to go along with him. I had never been to an opening game before, and I remember the occasion well.
We arrived early (something about collecting the tickets at a certain window), and as my friend went off to complete the transaction, I waited for him outside one of the entrances to the stadium. Not a single soul was around. I ducked into a little alcove to light a cigarette (a strong wind was blowing that day), and there, sitting on the ground not two inches from my feet, was a dime. I bent down, picked it up and put it in my pocket. Ridiculous as it might sound, I felt certain that it was the same dime I had lost in Brooklyn that morning.
4
In my son’s nursery school, there was a little girl whose parents were going through a divorce. I particularly liked her father, a struggling painter who earned his living by doing architectural renderings. His paintings were quite beautiful, I thought, but he never had much luck in convincing dealers to support his work. The one time he did have a show, the gallery promptly went out of business.
B. was not an intimate friend, but we enjoyed each other’s company, and whenever I saw him I would return home with renewed admiration for his steadfastness and inner calm. He was not a man who grumbled or felt sorry for himself. However gloomy things had become for him in recent years (endless money problems, lack of artistic success, threats of eviction from his landlord, difficulties with his ex-wife), none of it seemed to throw him off course. He continued to paint with the same passion as ever, and unlike so many others, he never expressed any bitterness or envy towards less talented artists who were doing better than he was.
When he wasn’t working on his own canvasses, he would sometimes go to the Metropolitan Museum and make copies of the old masters. I remember a Caravaggio he once did that struck me as utterly remarkable. It wasn’t a copy so much as a replica, an exact duplication of the original. On one of those visits to the museum, a Texas millionaire spotted B. at work and was so impressed that he commissioned him to do a copy of a Renoir painting–which he then presented to his fiancée as a gift.
B. was exceedingly tall (six-five or six-six), good-looking and gentle in his manner–qualities that made him especially attractive to women. Once his divorce was behind him and he began to circulate again, he had no trouble finding female companions. I saw him only about two or three times a year, and each time there was another woman in his life. All of them were obviously mad for him, but for one reason or another, none of these affairs lasted very long.
After two or three years, B.’s landlord finally made good on his threats and evicted him from his loft. B. moved out of the city, and I lost touch with him.
Several more years went by, and then one night B. came back to town to attend a dinner party. My wife and I were also there, and since we knew that B. was about to get married, we asked him to tell us the story of how he had met his future wife.
About six months earlier, he said, he had been talking to a friend on the phone. This friend was worried about him, and after a while he began to scold B. for not having married again. You’ve been divorced for seven years now, he said, and in that time you could have settled down with any one of a dozen attractive and remarkable women. But no one is ever good enough for you, and you’ve turned them all away. What’s wrong with you, B.? What in the world do you want?
There’s nothing wrong with me, B. said. I just haven’t found the right person, that’s all.
At the rate you’re going, you never will, the friend answered. I mean, have you ever met one woman who comes close to what you’re looking for? Name one. I dare you to name just one.
Startled by his friend’s vehemence, B. paused to consider the question carefully. Yes, he finally said, there was one. A woman by the name of E., whom he had known as a student at Harvard more than twenty years ago. But she had been involved with another man at the time, and he had been involved with another woman (his future ex-wife), and nothing had developed between them. He had no idea where E. was now, he said, but if he could meet someone like her, he knew he wouldn’t hesitate to get married again.
That was the end of the conversation. Until mentioning her to his friend, B. hadn’t thought about this woman in over ten years, but now that she had resurfaced in his mind, he had trouble thinking about anything else. For the next three or four days, he thought about her constantly, unable to shake the feeling that his one chance for happiness had been lost many years ago. Then, almost as if the intensity of these thoughts had sent a signal out into the world, the phone rang one night, and there was E. on the other end of the line.
B. kept her on the phone for more than three hours. He scarcely knew what he said to her, but he went on talking until past midnight, understanding that something momentous had happened and that he mustn’t let her escape again.
After graduating from college, E. had joined a dance company, and for the past twenty years she had devoted herself exclusively to her career. She had never married, and now that she was about to retire as a performer, she was calling old friends from her past, trying to make contact with the world again. She had no family (her parents had been killed in a car crash when she was a small girl) and had been raised by two aunts, both of whom were now dead.
B. arranged to see her the next night. Once they were together, it didn’t take long for him to discover that his feelings for her were just as strong as he had imagined. He fell in love with her all over again, and several weeks later they were engaged to be married.
To make the story even more perfect, it turned out that E. was independently wealthy. Her aunts had been rich, and after they died she had inherited all their money–which meant that not only had B. found true love, but the crushing money problems that had plagued him for so many years had suddenly vanished. All in one fell swoop.
A year or two after the wedding, they had a child. At last report, mother, father and baby were doing just fine.
5
Twelve years ago, my wife’s sister went off to live in Taiwan. Her intention was to study Chinese (which she now speaks with breathtaking fluency) and to support herself by giving English lessons to native Chinese speakers in Taipei. That was approximately one year before I met my wife, who was then a graduate student at Columbia University.
One day, my future sister-in-law was talking to an American friend, a young woman who had also gone to Taipei to study Chinese. The conversation came around to the subject of their families back home, which in turn led to the following exchange:
‘I have a sister who lives in New York,’ my future sister-in-law said.
‘So do I,’ her friend answered.
‘My sister lives on the Upper West Side.’
‘So does mine.’
‘My sister lives on West 109th Street.’
‘Believe it or not, so does mine.’
‘My sister lives at 309 West 109th Street.’
‘So does mine!’
‘My sister lives on the second floor of 309 West 109th Street.’
The friend took a deep breath and said, ‘I know this sounds crazy, but so does mine.’
It is scarcely possible for two cities to be farther apart than Taipei and New York. They are at opposite ends of the earth, separated by a distance of more than ten thousand miles, and when it is day in one it is night in the other. As the two young women in Taipei marvelled over the astounding connection they had just uncovered, they realized that their two sisters were probably asleep at that moment. On the same floor of the same building in northern Manhattan, each one was sleeping in her own apartment, unaware of the conversation that was taking place about them on the other side of the world
Although they were neighbours, the two sisters in New York did not know each other. When they finally met (two years later), neither one was living in that building any more.
Siri and I were married then. One evening, on our way to an appointment somewhere, we happened to stop in at a bookstore on Broadway to browse for a few minutes. We must have wandered into different aisles, and because Siri wanted to show me something, or because I wanted to show her something (I can’t remember), one of us spoke the other’s name out loud. A second later, a woman came rushing up to us. ‘You’re Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Yes,’ we said, ‘that’s exactly who we are. How did you know that?’ The woman then explained that her sister and Siri’s sister had been students together in Taiwan.
The circle had been closed at last. Since that evening in the bookstore ten years ago, this woman has been one of our best and most loyal friends.
6
C. is a French poet. We have known each other for more than twenty years now, and while we don’t see each other often (he lives in Paris and I live in New York), the bond between us remains strong. It is a fraternal bond, somehow, as if in some former life we had actually been brothers.
C. is a man of manifold contradictions. He is both open to the world and shut off from it, a charismatic figure with scores of friends everywhere (legendary for his kindness, his humour, his conversation) and yet someone who has been wounded by life, who struggles to perform the simple tasks that most other people take for granted. An exceptionally gifted poet and thinker about poetry, C. is nevertheless hampered by frequent writing blocks, streaks of morbid self-doubt and surprisingly (for someone so generous), a capacity for long-standing grudges and quarrels, usually over some trifle or abstract principle. No one is more universally admired than C; no one has more talent; no one so readily commands attention; and yet he has always done everything in his power to marginalize himself. Since his separation from his wife many years ago, he has lived alone in a number of small, one-room apartments, subsisting on almost no money and only fitful bouts of employment, publishing little and refusing to write a single word of criticism, even though he reads everything and knows more about contemporary poetry than anyone else in France. To those of us who love him (and we are many), C. is often a cause of concern. To the degree that we respect him and care about his well-being, we also worry about him.
He had a rough childhood. I can’t say to what extent that explains anything, but the facts should not be overlooked. His father apparently ran off with another woman when C. was a little boy, and after that my friend grew up an only child with no family life to speak of, alone with his mother. I have never met C.’s mother, but by all accounts she is a bizarre character. She went through a series of love affairs during C.’s childhood and adolescence, each with a man younger than the man before him. By the time C. left home to enter the army at the age of twenty-one, his mother’s boyfriend was scarcely older than he was. In more recent years, the central purpose of her life has been a campaign to promote the canonization of a certain Italian priest (whose name eludes me now). She has besieged the Catholic authorities with countless letters extolling the holiness of this man, and at one point she even commissioned an artist to create a life-size statue of him–which now stands in her front yard as an enduring testament to her cause.
Although not a father himself, C. became a kind of pseudo-father seven or eight years ago. After a falling out with his girlfriend (during which they temporarily broke up), she had a brief affair with another man and became pregnant. The affair ended almost at once, but she decided to have the baby on her own. A little girl was born, and even though C. is not her real father, he has devoted himself to her since the day of her birth and adores her as if she were his own flesh and blood.
One day about four years ago, C. happened to be visiting a friend. In the apartment there was a Minitel, a small computer given out for free by the French telephone company. Among other things, the Minitel contains the address and phone number of every person in France. As C. sat there playing with his friend’s new machine, it suddenly occurred to him to look up his father’s address. He found it in Lyon. When he returned home later that day, he stuffed one of his books into an envelope and sent it off to the address in Lyon–initiating the first contact with his father in over forty years. Until he found himself doing these things, it had never even crossed his mind that he wanted to do them.
That same night, he ran into another friend in a café–a woman psychoanalyst–and told her about these strange, unpremeditated acts. It was as if he had felt his father calling out to him, he said, as if some uncanny force had unleashed itself inside him. Considering that he had absolutely no memories of the man, he couldn’t even begin to guess when they had last seen each other.
The woman thought for a moment and said, ‘How old is L.?’, referring to C.’s girlfriend’s daughter.
‘Three and a half,’ C. answered.
‘I can’t be sure,’ the woman said, ‘but I’d be willing to bet that you were three and a half the last time you saw your father. I say that because you love L. so much. Your identification with her is very strong and you’re reliving your life through her.’
Several days after that, there was a reply from Lyon–a warm and perfectly gracious letter from C.’s father. After thanking C. for the book, he went on to tell him how proud he was to learn that his son had grown up to become a writer. By pure coincidence, he added, the package had been mailed on his birthday, and he was very moved by the symbolism of the gesture.
None of this tallied with the stories C. had heard throughout his childhood. According to his mother, his father was a monster of selfishness who had walked out on her for a ‘slut’ and had never wanted anything to do with his son. C. had believed these stories and had shied away from any contact with his father. Now, on the strength of this letter, he no longer knew what to believe.
He decided to write back. The tone of his response was guarded, but nevertheless it was a response. Within days he received another reply, and this second letter was just as warm and gracious as the first had been. C. and his father began a correspondence. It went on for a month or two, and eventually C. began to consider travelling down to Lyon to meet his father face to face.
Before he could make any definite plans, he received a letter from his father’s wife informing him that his father was dead. He had been in ill health for the past several years, she wrote, but the recent exchange of letters with C. had given him great happiness, and his last days had been filled with optimism and joy.
It was at this moment that I first heard about the incredible reversals that had taken place in C.’s life. Sitting on the train from Paris to Lyon (on his way to visit his ‘stepmother’ for the first time), he wrote me a letter that sketched out the story of the past month. His handwriting registered each jolt of the tracks, as if the speed of the train were an exact image of the thoughts racing through his head. As he put it somewhere in that letter: ‘I feel as if I’ve become a character in one of your novels.’
His father’s wife could not have been friendlier to him during the visit. Among other things, C. learned that his father had suffered a heart attack on the morning of his last birthday (the day that C. had looked up his address on the Minitel) and that, yes, C. had been precisely three and a half years old at the time of his parents’ divorce. His stepmother then went on to tell him the story of his life from his father’s point of view–which contradicted everything his mother had ever told him. In this version, it was his mother who had walked out on his father; it was his mother who had forbidden his father from seeing him; it was his mother who had broken his father’s heart. She told C. how his father would come around to the schoolyard when C. was a little boy to look at him through the fence. C. remembered that man, but, not knowing who he was, had been afraid.
C.’s life had now become two lives. There was Version A and Version B, and both were his story. He had lived them both in equal measure, two truths that cancelled each other out, and all along, without even knowing it, he had been stranded in the middle.
His father had owned a small stationery store (the usual stock of paper and writing materials, along with a rental library of popular books). The business had earned him a living, but not much more, and the estate he left behind was quite modest. The numbers are unimportant, however. What counts is that C.’s stepmother (by then an old woman) insisted on splitting the money with him half and half. There was nothing in the will that required her to do that, and morally speaking she needn’t have parted with a single penny of her husband’s savings. She did it because she wanted to, because it made her happier to share the money than to keep it for herself.
7
In thinking about friendship, particularly about how some friendships endure and others don’t, I am reminded of the fact that in all my years of driving I have had just four flat tyres, and that on each occasion the same person was in the car with me (in three different countries, spread out over a period of eight or nine years). J. was a college friend, and though there was always an edge of unease and conflict in our relations, for a time we were close. One spring, while we were still undergraduates, we borrowed my father’s ancient station-wagon and drove up into the wilderness of Quebec. The seasons change more slowly in that part of the world, and winter was not yet over. The first flat tyre did not present a problem (we were equipped with a spare), but when a second tyre blew out less than an hour later, we were stranded in the bleak and frigid countryside for most of the day. At the time, I shrugged off the incident as a piece of bad luck, but four or five years later, when J. came to France to visit the house where L. and I were working as caretakers, the same thing happened. We went to Aix-en-Provence for the day (a drive of about two hours) and coming back late that night on a dark, back-country road, we had another flat. Just a coincidence, I thought, and then pushed the event out of my mind. But then, four years after that, in the waning months of my marriage to L., J. came to visit us again–this time in New York state, where L. and I were living with the infant Daniel. At one point, J. and I climbed into the car to go to the store and shop for dinner. I pulled the car out of the garage, turned it around in the rutted dirt driveway and advanced to the edge of the road. Just then, as I waited for a car to pass by, I heard the unmistakable hiss of escaping air. Another tyre had gone flat, and this time we hadn’t even left the house. J. and I both laughed, of course, but the truth is that our friendship never really recovered from that fourth flat tyre. I’m not saying that the flat tyres were responsible for our drifting apart, but in some perverse way they were an emblem of how things had always stood between us. I don’t want to exaggerate, but even now I can’t quite bring myself to reject those flat tyres as meaningless. For the fact is that J. and I have lost contact, and we have not spoken to each other in more than ten years.
8
One afternoon many years ago, my father’s car stalled at a red light. A terrible storm was raging, and at the exact moment his engine went dead, lightning struck a large tree by the side of the road. The trunk of the tree split in two, and as my father struggled to get the car started again (unaware that the upper half of the tree was about to fall), the driver of the car behind him, seeing what was about to happen, put his foot on the accelerator and pushed my father’s car through the intersection. An instant later, the tree came crashing to the ground, landing in the very spot where my father’s car had just been. What was very nearly the end of him proved to be no more than a close call, a brief episode in the ongoing story of his life.
A year or two after that, my father was working on the roof of a building in Jersey City. Somehow or other (I wasn’t there to witness it), he slipped off the edge and started falling to the ground. Once again he was headed for certain disaster, and once again he was saved. A clothesline broke his fall, and he walked away from the accident with only a few bumps and bruises. Not even concussion. Not a single broken bone.
That same year, our neighbours across the street hired two men to paint their house. One worker fell off the roof and was killed.
The little girl who lived in that house happened to be my sister’s best friend. One winter night, the two of them went to a costume party (they were six or seven years old, and I was nine or ten). It had been arranged that my father would pick them up after the party, and I went along to keep him company. It was bitter cold, and the roads were covered with treacherous sheets of ice. My father drove carefully, and we made the journey back and forth without incident. As we pulled up in front of the little girl’s house, however, a number of unlikely events occurred all at once.
My sister’s friend was dressed as a fairy princess. To complete the outfit, she had borrowed a pair of her mother’s high heels, and every step she took was turned into an adventure. My father stopped the car and climbed out to accompany her to the front door. I was in the back with the girls and had to get out first. I remember standing on the kerb as my sister’s friend disentangled herself from the seat, and just as she stepped into the open air, I noticed that the car was rolling slowly in reverse–either because of the ice or because my father had forgotten to engage the emergency brake (I don’t know)–but before I could tell my father what was happening, my sister’s friend touched the kerb with her mother’s high heels and slipped. She went skidding under the car–which was still moving–and there she was, about to be crushed to death by the wheels of my father’s Chevy. As I remember it, she didn’t make a sound. Without pausing to think, I bent down from the kerb, grabbed hold of her right hand and in one quick gesture yanked her to the sidewalk. An instant later, my father finally noticed that the car was moving. He jumped back into the driver’s seat, stepped on the brake and brought the machine to a halt. From start to finish, the whole chain of misadventures couldn’t have taken more than eight or ten seconds.
For years afterwards, I walked around feeling that this had been my finest moment. I had actually saved someone’s life, and in retrospect I was always astonished by how quickly I had acted, by how sure my movements had been at the critical juncture. Again and again I relived the sensation of pulling that little girl out from under the car.
About two years after that night, our family moved to another house. My sister lost touch with her friend, and I myself did not see her for another fifteen years.
It was June, and my sister and I had both come back to town for a short visit. Just by chance, her old friend dropped by to say hello. She was all grown up now, a young woman of twenty-two who had graduated from college earlier that month, and I must say that I felt some pride in seeing that she had made it to adulthood in one piece. In a casual sort of way, I mentioned the night I had pulled her out from under the car. I was curious to know how well she remembered her brush with death, but from the look on her face, it was clear that she remembered nothing. A blank stare. A slight frown. A shrug. She remembered nothing!
I realized then that she hadn’t known the car was moving. She hadn’t even known that she was in danger. The whole incident had taken place in a flash: ten seconds of her life, an interval of no account, and none of it had left the slightest mark on her. For me, those seconds had been a defining experience.
Most of all, it stuns me to acknowledge that I am talking about something that happened in 1956 or 1957–and that the little girl of that night is now over forty years old.
9
My first novel was inspired by a wrong number. I was alone in my apartment in Brooklyn one afternoon, sitting at my desk and trying to work, when the telephone rang. If I am not mistaken, it was the spring of 1980, not many days after I found the dime outside Shea Stadium.
I picked up the receiver, and the man on the other end asked if he was talking to the Pinkerton Agency. I told him no, he had dialled the wrong number, and hung up. Then I went back to work and promptly forgot about the call.
The next afternoon, the telephone rang again. It turned out to be the same person asking the same question I had been asked the day before: ‘Is this the Pinkerton Agency?’ Again I said no, and again I hung up. This time, however, I started thinking about what would have happened if I had said yes. What if I had pretended to be a detective from the Pinkerton Agency? I wondered. What if I had actually taken on the case?
To tell the truth, I felt that I had squandered a rare opportunity. If the man ever called again, I told myself, I would at least talk to him and try to find out what was going on. I waited, but the third call never came.
After that, wheels started turning in my head, and little by little an entire world of possibilities opened up to me. When I sat down to write City of Glass a year later, the wrong number had been transformed into the crucial event of the book, the mistake that sets the whole story in motion. A man named Quinn receives a phone call from someone who wants to talk to Paul Auster, the private detective. Just as I did, Quinn tells the caller he has dialled the wrong number. It happens again the next night, and again Quinn hangs up. Unlike me, however, Quinn is given another chance. When the phone rings again on the third night, he plays along with the caller and takes on the case. Yes, he says, I’m Paul Auster–and at that moment the madness begins.
All well and good. I finished the book ten years ago, and since then I have gone on to occupy myself with other projects, other ideas, other books. Less than two months ago, however, I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author.
I was alone in my apartment in Brooklyn, sitting at my desk and trying to work, when the telephone rang. This was a different apartment from the one I had in 1980–with a different telephone number. I picked up the receiver, and the man on the other end asked if he could speak to Mr Quinn. He had a Spanish accent and I did not recognize the voice. For a moment I thought it might be one of my friends trying to pull my leg. ‘Mr Quinn?’ I said. ‘Is this some kind of joke or what?’
No, it wasn’t a joke. The man was in dead earnest. He had to talk to Mr Quinn, and would I please put him on the line. Just to make sure, I asked him to spell out the name. The caller’s accent was quite thick, and I was hoping that he wanted to talk to a Mr Queen. ‘Q-U-I-N-N,’ the man answered. I suddenly grew scared, and for a moment or two I couldn’t get any words out of my mouth. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said at last, ‘there’s no Mr Quinn here. You’ve dialled the wrong number.’ The man apologized for disturbing me, and then we both hung up.
This really happened. Like everything else I have set down in this red notebook, it is a true story.
