Authors: Paul Auster
On the first Monday, he rented a mailbox at the Berkeley post office to give himself an address, returned the Plymouth to the local branch of the car agency, and bought a nine-year-old Buick Skylark for less than a thousand dollars. On Tuesday and Wednesday, he opened eleven different savings accounts at various banks around town. He was wary of depositing all the money in one place, and starting multiple accounts seemed more prudent than walking in somewhere with a bundle of over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash. Besides, he would call less attention to himself when he made his daily withdrawals for Lillian. His business would be kept in permanent rotation, and that would prevent any of the tellers or bank managers from getting to know him too well. At first, he figured
he would visit each bank every eleven days, but when he discovered that withdrawals of one thousand dollars required a special signature from the manager, he started going to two different banks every morning and using the automatic cash machines, which disbursed a maximum of five hundred dollars per transaction. That amounted to weekly withdrawals of just five hundred dollars from each bank, a piddling sum by any standard. It was an efficient arrangement, and in the end he much preferred slipping his plastic card into the slot and pushing buttons than having to talk to a living person.
The first few days were hard on him, however. He suspected that the money he had found in Dimaggio’s car was stolen—which could have meant that the serial numbers on the bills had been circulated by computer to banks around the country. But faced with a choice between running that risk or keeping the money in the house, he had decided to run the risk. It was too early to know if Lillian could be trusted, and leaving the money under her nose would hardly be an intelligent way to find out. At each bank he went to, he kept expecting the manager to glance down at the money, excuse himself from the conversation, and return to the office with a policeman in tow. But nothing like that ever happened. The men and women who opened his accounts were exceedingly courteous. They counted his money with swift, robotlike skill; they smiled, shook his hand, and told him how happy they were to have him as a customer. As a bonus for coming in with initial deposits of over ten thousand dollars, he received five toaster ovens, four clock radios, a portable television set, and an American flag.
By the beginning of the second week, his days had fallen into a regular pattern. After taking Maria to school, he would walk back to the house, clean up the breakfast dishes, and then drive off to the two banks on his list. Once he had completed his withdrawals (with an occasional visit to a third bank to take out money for himself),
he would go to one of the espresso bars along Telegraph Avenue, settle into a quiet corner, and spend an hour drinking cappuccinos as he read through the
San Francisco Chronicle
and
The New York Times
. As it turned out, surprisingly little was reported about the case in either paper. The
Times
had stopped talking about Dimaggio’s death even before Sachs’s departure from New York, and except for a short follow-up interview with a captain from the Vermont State Police, nothing further was published. As for the
Chronicle
, they seemed to be tiring of the business as well. After a flurry of articles about the ecology movement and the Children of the Planet (all of them written by Tom Mueller), Dimaggio’s name was no longer mentioned. Sachs was comforted by this, but in spite of the diminishing pressure, he never went so far as to suppose it couldn’t tighten again. All during his stay in California, he continued to study the papers every morning. It became his private religion, his form of daily prayer. Scan the newspapers and hold your breath. Make sure they weren’t after you. Make sure you could go on living another twenty-four hours.
The rest of the morning and early afternoon were devoted to practical tasks. Like any other American housewife, he shopped for food, he cleaned, he took dirty clothes to the Laundromat, he worried about buying the right brand of peanut butter for school lunches. On days when he had some time to spare, he would stop in at the local toy store before picking up Maria. He showed up at school with dolls and hair ribbons, with storybooks and crayons, with yoyos, bubble gum, and stick-on earrings. He didn’t do this to bribe her. It was a simple outpouring of affection, and the better he got to know her, the more seriously he took the job of making her happy. Sachs had never spent much time with children, and it startled him to discover how much effort was involved in taking care of them. It required an enormous inner adjustment, but once he settled into the rhythm of Maria’s demands, he began to welcome them, to relish
the effort for its own sake. Even when she was gone, she kept him occupied. It was a remedy against loneliness, he found, a way to relieve the burden of always having to think about himself.
Every day, he put another thousand dollars in the freezer. The bills were stored in a plastic bag to protect them from moisture, and each time Sachs added a new allotment, he would check to see if any of the money had been removed. As it happened, not a single bill was ever touched. Two weeks passed, and the sum kept growing by increments of a thousand dollars a day. Sachs had no idea what to make of this detachment, this strange disregard for what he had given her. Did it mean that she wanted no part of it, that she was refusing to accept his terms? Or was she telling him that the money was unimportant, that it had nothing to do with her decision to allow him to live in her house? Both interpretations made sense, and therefore they canceled each other out, leaving him with no way to understand what was happening in Lillian’s mind, no way to decipher the facts that confronted him.
Not even his growing closeness to Maria seemed to affect her. It provoked no fits of jealousy, no smiles of encouragement, no response that he could measure. She would walk into the house while he and the little girl were curled up on the sofa reading a book, or crouched on the floor drawing pictures, or arranging a tea party for a roomful of dolls, and all Lillian would do was say hello, give her daughter a perfunctory kiss on the cheek, and then go off to her bedroom, where she would change her clothes and get ready to leave again. She was nothing more than a specter, a beautiful apparition who floated in and out of the house at irregular intervals and left no traces behind her. Sachs felt that she must have known what she was doing, that there must have been a reason for this enigmatic behavior, but none of the reasons he could think of ever satisfied him. At most,
he concluded that she was putting him to a test, titillating him with this game of peekaboo to see how long he could stand it. She wanted to know if he would crack, she wanted to know if his will was as strong as hers.
Then, with no apparent cause, everything suddenly changed. Late one afternoon in the middle of the third week, Lillian walked into the house carrying a bag of groceries and announced that she was taking charge of dinner that night. She was in high spirits, full of jokes and fast, amusing patter, and the difference in her was so great, so bewildering, that the only explanation Sachs could think of was that she was on drugs. Until then, the three of them had never sat down to a meal together, but Lillian seemed not to notice what an extraordinary breakthrough this dinner represented. She pushed Sachs out of the kitchen and worked steadily for the next two hours, preparing what turned out to be a delicious concoction of vegetables and lamb. Sachs was impressed, but given everything that had preceded this performance, he wasn’t quite prepared to accept it at face value. It could have been a trap, he felt, a ruse to trick him into letting down his guard, and while he wanted nothing more than to go along with her, to join in with the flow of Lillian’s gaiety, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was stiff and awkward, at a loss for words, and the blithe manner he had worked so hard to affect with her suddenly abandoned him. Lillian and Maria did most of the talking, and after a while he was scarcely more than an observer, a dour presence lurking around the edges of the party. He hated himself for acting like that, and when he refused a second glass of wine that Lillian was about to pour for him, he began to think of himself with disgust, as an out-and-out dunce. “Don’t worry,” she said as she poured the wine into his glass anyway. “I’m not going to bite you.” “I know that,” Sachs answered. “It’s just that I thought—” Before
he could complete the sentence, Lillian interrupted him. “Don’t think so much,” she said. “Just take the wine and enjoy it. It’s good for you.”
The next day, however, it was as though none of this had happened. Lillian left the house early, did not return until the following morning, and for the rest of that week continued to make herself as scarce as possible. Sachs grew numb with confusion. Even his doubts were now subject to doubt, and little by little he could feel himself buckling under the weight of the whole terrible adventure. Perhaps he should have listened to Maria Turner, he thought. Perhaps he had no business being there and should pack his bags and get out. For several hours one night, he even toyed with the idea of turning himself in to the police. At least the agony would be over then. Instead of throwing away the money on a person who didn’t want it, perhaps he should use it to hire a lawyer, perhaps he should start thinking about how to keep himself out of jail.
Then, less than an hour after thinking these thoughts, everything turned upside-down again. It was somewhere between twelve and one o’clock in the morning, and Sachs was drifting off to sleep on the living room sofa. Footsteps began to stir on the second floor. He figured that Maria was on her way to the toilet, but just as he started to drift off again, he heard the sound of someone coming down the stairs. Before he could throw off the blanket and stand up, the living room lamp was turned on, and his makeshift bed was inundated with light. He automatically covered his eyes, and when he forced them open a second later, he saw Lillian sitting in the armchair directly opposite the sofa, dressed in her terrycloth robe. “We have to talk,” she said. He studied her face in silence as she pulled out a cigarette from the pocket of her robe and lit it with a match. The bright confidence and flagrant posing of the past weeks were gone, and even her voice sounded hesitant to him now, more
vulnerable than it had ever been before. She put the matches down on the coffee table between them. Sachs followed the movement of her hand, then glanced down at the writing on the matchbook cover, momentarily distracted by the lurid green letters emblazoned against the pink background. It turned out to be an advertisement for telephone sex, and just then, in one of those unbidden flashes of insight, it occurred to him that nothing was meaningless, that everything in the world was connected to everything else.
“I’ve decided that I don’t want you to think of me as a monster anymore,” Lillian said. Those were the words that started it, and in the next two hours she told him more about herself than in all the previous weeks combined, talking to him in a way that gradually eroded the resentments he had been harboring against her. It wasn’t that she came out and apologized for anything, nor was it that he jumped to believe what she said, but little by little, in spite of his wariness and suspicion, he understood that she was no better off than he was, that he had made her just as miserable as she had made him.
It took a while, however. At first, he assumed it was all an act, yet another ploy to keep his nerves on edge. In the whirl of nonsense that stormed through him, he even managed to convince himself that she knew he was planning to run away—as if she could read his mind, as if she had entered his brain and heard him thinking those thoughts. She hadn’t come downstairs to make peace with him. She had done it to soften him up, to make sure he wouldn’t decamp before he had given her all the money. He was on the point of delirium by then, and if Lillian hadn’t mentioned the money herself, he never would have known how badly he had misjudged her. That was the moment when the conversation turned. She started talking about the money, and what she said bore so little resemblance to what he had imagined she would say, he suddenly felt ashamed of himself, ashamed enough to start listening to her in earnest.
“You’ve given me close to thirty thousand dollars,” she said. “It keeps coming in, more and more of it every day, and the more money there is, the more scared of it I feel. I don’t know how long you’re planning to keep this up, but thirty thousand dollars is enough. It’s more than enough, and I think we should stop before things get out of hand.”
“We can’t stop,” Sachs found himself saying to her. “We’ve only just started.”
“I’m not sure I can take it anymore.”
“You can take it. You’re the toughest person I’ve ever seen, Lillian. As long as you don’t worry, you can take it just fine.”
“I’m not tough. I’m not tough, and I’m not good, and once you get to know me, you’ll wish you’d never set foot in this house.”
“The money isn’t about goodness. It’s about justice, and if justice means anything, it has to be the same for everyone, whether they’re good or not.”
She began to cry then, staring straight ahead at him and letting the tears run down her cheeks—without touching them, as if she didn’t want to acknowledge that they were there. It was a proud sort of crying, Sachs felt, at once a baring of distress and a refusal to submit to it, and he respected her for holding on to herself as tightly as she did. As long as she ignored them, as long as she didn’t wipe them away, those tears would never humiliate her.
Lillian did most of the talking after that, chain-smoking her way through a long monologue of regrets and self-recriminations. Much of it was difficult for Sachs to follow, but he didn’t dare to interrupt, fearing that a wrong word or badly timed question might bring her to a halt. She rambled on for a while about a man named Frank, then talked about another man named Terry, and then, a moment later, she was going over the last years of her marriage to Dimaggio. That led to something about the police (who had apparently
questioned her after Dimaggio’s body was discovered), but before she had finished with that, she was telling him about her plan to move, to leave California and start over again somewhere else. She had pretty much decided to do it, she said, but then he turned up on her doorstep, and the whole thing fell apart. She couldn’t think straight anymore, she didn’t know if she was coming or going. He expected her to continue with that a bit longer, but then she digressed onto the topic of work, talking almost boastfully about how she had managed to fend for herself without Dimaggio. She had a license as a trained masseuse, she told him, she did some modeling for department-store catalogues, and all in all she’d kept her head above water. But then, very abruptly, she waved off the subject as if it were of no importance and started crying again.