Days passed without a shave or a shower, and my clothes became a uniform, ratty jeans and a grey pullover.
No doubt I looked a fright because when Anton accosted me one afternoon on Broadway, he studied me with the surprise I’d expect him to reserve for something completely alien. We hadn’t spoken since the day he recommended Kafka.
“What happened to you?” Anton cried out. “How many times do I have to call?”
It was only then that he took notice of the books piled under my arm and rudely grabbed one, almost letting the others tumble to the sidewalk. “What the fuck’s all this, man—?” Then he did something which, for the first time in our friendship, deeply wounded me. He studied the cover, turned a few pages absently, and abruptly hoisted the book high into the air and began to laugh.
Because of that laugh, I never spoke to him again.
II
After graduation, I moved into a studio east of Avenue A and found a job consulting for an international accounting firm. I devised statistical models projecting future efficiencies, given various scenarios. I shaved every day and dressed in a suit, yet constantly, at the back of my mind, I could sense that other me Anton had glimpsed, a dark creature haunting dusty, ill-lit rooms stacked high with unmarked boxes and searching for lost treasure. The furniture was sparse: futon on the floor, small desk, leather armchair, and a reading lamp found abandoned on the sidewalk the morning I moved in.
There were no bookshelves. I planned to watch books rise in towers around me, and finishing a book, say Goncharov’s Oblomov , I’d snap it shut and place it on the nearest pile. A daydream: one day climbing onto a chair to reach my hand up to the ceiling to slide the final volume into a surrounding wall of books.
Luck with women continued to elude me. Even that final year at college, when girls jumped into friends’ beds with the ease with which they hailed cabs on Amsterdam, I would put them off with my breathless excitement at discovering a newauthor. Sitting with my knees inching closer at a bar, I would suddenly ask, full of expectation, “Bohumil Hrabal . . .?” or “Bruno Schultz . . .?” as though the name phrased as a question explained itself. The evening universally slid downhill, tripping over the feet of my fervor and landing, unremarked, amid the crushed cigarettes staining the dark wood underfoot.
The morning Christie walked in to a meeting with a new client as one of my team members, she was dressed in a peach business suit. She took the chair next to mine, introduced herself and, yawning, dropped her purse onto the desk next to a Styrofoam coffee cup. A crisp paperback nudged through the purse’s open zipper. It was Kafka’s Metamorphosis .
That night, over drinks, she asked, “Do you write?”
She was the first person I confessed my dream to: a large, brightly lit study lined with bookshelves and overlooking a garden of acacia and spruce, maybe a stream, and long, unadorned pine tables, the kind Solzhenitsyn wrote on in his hideaway in Vermont, where I would complete a single great work, a novel to stand beside the masterpieces I adored.
Soon we were seeing each other almost every night.
One evening, sitting together on the love seat in her West Side apartment, we discussed Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment . She’d been turned off by the book at first. She couldn’t understand why Raskolnikov murdered the old pawn broker, and she understood less the frightful hell his actions caused him to descend into.
“He’s some idiot-savant,” she said. “He has no clue what he’s doing and he just keeps digging a bigger and bigger hole for himself!”
She’d warmed to the book only after Sonia Semyonovna’s appearance, confessing with a drunken sway and a furrowingof her brows, that it confirmed a deeply held belief of hers. She meant the necessity of suffering . Not suffering on the scale of Raskolnikov’s—a person shouldn’t have to
No doubt I looked a fright because when Anton accosted me one afternoon on Broadway, he studied me with the surprise I’d expect him to reserve for something completely alien. We hadn’t spoken since the day he recommended Kafka.
“What happened to you?” Anton cried out. “How many times do I have to call?”
It was only then that he took notice of the books piled under my arm and rudely grabbed one, almost letting the others tumble to the sidewalk. “What the fuck’s all this, man—?” Then he did something which, for the first time in our friendship, deeply wounded me. He studied the cover, turned a few pages absently, and abruptly hoisted the book high into the air and began to laugh.
Because of that laugh, I never spoke to him again.
II
After graduation, I moved into a studio east of Avenue A and found a job consulting for an international accounting firm. I devised statistical models projecting future efficiencies, given various scenarios. I shaved every day and dressed in a suit, yet constantly, at the back of my mind, I could sense that other me Anton had glimpsed, a dark creature haunting dusty, ill-lit rooms stacked high with unmarked boxes and searching for lost treasure. The furniture was sparse: futon on the floor, small desk, leather armchair, and a reading lamp found abandoned on the sidewalk the morning I moved in.
There were no bookshelves. I planned to watch books rise in towers around me, and finishing a book, say Goncharov’s Oblomov , I’d snap it shut and place it on the nearest pile. A daydream: one day climbing onto a chair to reach my hand up to the ceiling to slide the final volume into a surrounding wall of books.
Luck with women continued to elude me. Even that final year at college, when girls jumped into friends’ beds with the ease with which they hailed cabs on Amsterdam, I would put them off with my breathless excitement at discovering a newauthor. Sitting with my knees inching closer at a bar, I would suddenly ask, full of expectation, “Bohumil Hrabal . . .?” or “Bruno Schultz . . .?” as though the name phrased as a question explained itself. The evening universally slid downhill, tripping over the feet of my fervor and landing, unremarked, amid the crushed cigarettes staining the dark wood underfoot.
The morning Christie walked in to a meeting with a new client as one of my team members, she was dressed in a peach business suit. She took the chair next to mine, introduced herself and, yawning, dropped her purse onto the desk next to a Styrofoam coffee cup. A crisp paperback nudged through the purse’s open zipper. It was Kafka’s Metamorphosis .
That night, over drinks, she asked, “Do you write?”
She was the first person I confessed my dream to: a large, brightly lit study lined with bookshelves and overlooking a garden of acacia and spruce, maybe a stream, and long, unadorned pine tables, the kind Solzhenitsyn wrote on in his hideaway in Vermont, where I would complete a single great work, a novel to stand beside the masterpieces I adored.
Soon we were seeing each other almost every night.
One evening, sitting together on the love seat in her West Side apartment, we discussed Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment . She’d been turned off by the book at first. She couldn’t understand why Raskolnikov murdered the old pawn broker, and she understood less the frightful hell his actions caused him to descend into.
“He’s some idiot-savant,” she said. “He has no clue what he’s doing and he just keeps digging a bigger and bigger hole for himself!”
She’d warmed to the book only after Sonia Semyonovna’s appearance, confessing with a drunken sway and a furrowingof her brows, that it confirmed a deeply held belief of hers. She meant the necessity of suffering . Not suffering on the scale of Raskolnikov’s—a person shouldn’t have to
Similar Books
