Leviathan by Paul Auster Page A

around with her camera for the entire length of his visit. She had absolutelyno interest in him, and the last thing she was looking for was an amorous adventure. Her intention was to keep herself hidden, to resist all contact with him, to explore his outward behavior and make no effort to interpret what she saw. The next morning, she caught a flight from LaGuardia to New Orleans, checked into a hotel, and bought herself a black wig. For three days she made inquiries at dozens of hotels, trying to track down the man’s whereabouts. She discovered him at last, and for the rest of the week she walked behind him like a shadow, taking hundreds of photographs, documenting every place he went to. She kept a written diary as well, and when the time came for him to go back to New York, she returned on an earlier flight—in order to be waiting at the airport for a last sequence of pictures as he stepped off the plane. It was a complex and disturbing experience for her, and it left her feeling that she had abandoned her life for a kind of nothingness, as though she had been taking pictures of things that weren’t there. The camera was no longer an instrument that recorded presences, it was a way of making the world disappear, a technique for encountering the invisible. Desperate to undo the process she had set in motion, Maria launched into a new project just days after returning to New York. Walking through Times Square with her camera one afternoon, she got into a conversation with the doorman of a topless go-go bar. The weather was warm, and Maria was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, an unusually skimpy outfit for her. But she had gone out that day in order to be noticed. She wanted to affirm the reality of her body, to make heads turn, to prove to herself that she still existed in the eyes of others. Maria was well put together, with long legs and attractive breasts, and the whistles and lewd remarks she received that day helped to revive her spirits. The doorman told her that she was a pretty girl, just as pretty as the girls inside, and as their conversation continued, she suddenly found herself being offered a job. One of the dancers had called insick, he said, and if she wanted to fill in for her, he’d introduce her to the boss and see if something couldn’t be worked out. Scarcely pausing to think about it, Maria accepted. That was how her next work came into being, a piece that eventually came to be known as “The Naked Lady.” Maria asked a friend to come along that night and take pictures of her as she performed—not to show anyone, but for herself, in order to satisfy her own curiosity about what she looked like. She was consciously turning herself into an object, a nameless figure of desire, and it was crucial to her that she understand precisely what that object was. She only did it that once, working in twenty-minute shifts from eight o’clock in the evening until two in the morning, but she didn’t hold back, and the whole time she was onstage, perched behind the bar with colored strobe lights bouncing off her bare skin, she danced her heart out. Dressed in a rhinestone G-string and a pair of two-inch heels, she shook her body to loud rock and roll and watched the men stare at her. She wiggled her ass at them, she ran her tongue over her lips, she winked seductively as they slipped her dollar bills and urged her on. As with everything else she tried, Maria was good at it. Once she got herself going, there was hardly any stopping her.
    As far as I know, she went too far only once. That was in the spring of 1976, and the ultimate effects of her miscalculation proved to be catastrophic. At least two lives were lost, and even though it took years for that to happen, the connection between the past and the present is inescapable. Maria was the link between Sachs and Lillian Stern, and if not for Maria’s habit of courting trouble in whatever form she could find it, Lillian Stern never would have entered the