She grimaced. "How do you put up with that creep?"
"He's building me the greatest train set a boy novelist could ask for."
"I suppose. It wouldn't be worth it for me. Nothing would." She stared off, into the music, the small rain. "I don't mean his snide remarks. The solipsism. The sadism. I could deal with all that. A woman in the biz learns to put up with that as a given. I mean the sadness. He's the saddest man I've ever laid eyes on." She chose that moment to look up, to lay eyes on my eyes. "Excepting you, of course."
"Lentz? Sad?"
'The worst. It chills me. Have you ever been alone in his office with him?"
"Hours and hours."
"Ever been in there with him with the door closed?"
Never. And it had never struck me as strange until that moment. Diana did not elaborate. She left it to me to run the experiment for myself. I read her silence. Loneliness on that scale had to be measured firsthand.
We sat and listened to the western wind. The intimacy of perfect strangers. Years from now, her boys might by chance recall the odd man who came by one night and added to their shaping thoughts by reading to them. A night never repeated.
I recognized this woman. This family, curled up in advance of the night. I knew the place from a book I'd read once as a novice adult, my own first draft just undergoing revision.
I read the novel in that nest C. and I had made together in B. Mann's Doktor Faustus, the formative storybook of my adult years. In it, a brilliant German, by blinding himself to all pursuits but articulation, allows his world to pull itself down around him. I remembered the man, already middle-aged, writing a love letter to the last woman who might have accepted him.
But the letter sabotages itself. It engineers its own rejection. It bares a loneliness that it knows will scare off any attempted comfort. I haven't looked up the passage since first reading it. I will never read it again. The real thing might be too far from the one I've kept in memory. "Consider me," the marriage proposal says, "as a person who suddenly discovers, with an ache at the lateness of the hour, that he might like to have a real home."
Diana sat across from me, on a comfortable sofa scarred with the destructive industry of small boys. Upstairs, those boys tossed in dreams whose sole task lay in smoothing out the incomprehensibility of this day. Here was the home I would never have. Shaped by a book, I'd made sure I wouldn't. I'd forced my heart's reading matter to come true.
Here and there, a cylindrical tube — person or transforming robot made Lego base camp for the night in the plush carpet. Diana pulled the music's long melisma about her shoulders like a shawl. Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again.
'Thanks," she shushed me at the door. She squeezed my hand. 'Thanks. It's been a while since I've dined by candlelight."
I went home to chosen loneliness. To the book I would never be able to write.
Picture a train heading south. The train is full of ill and wounded. This month's invariable sanitarium patients. Consumption, influenza: fiction's archaic maladies. Some bodily deterioration for which the reader must invent fantastic, beginner's referents. Maimed veterans, being shipped from the front.
A moment of mass import, of universal upheaval from the just-recallable past. Populations on the leading edge of panic, stricken by industry. The evacuating train pulls out. It joins the flotilla of time's lifeboats, plowing the dark.
Cruel, blue, bracing, breaking loose: the only opening vignette worth bothering with. Stretched out urgently, along imagination's railheads, a book heads south. It signals from the telegraph car. Keys me a message I was supposed to have held on to at all costs. A message that never made it out of childhood's originating station. The day is sharp, the air invigorating and crystalline. It is the year nineteen-something. A year ending in a dash, or perhaps two hyphens.
The train works southward, in wartime. It snakes glacially up into the mountains, in perhaps the last clear month, the last week that the mountain passes will be traversable.
The engine climbs. It sniffs perpetually up to the outskirts of the same bombed-out village. Fields drift undulantly beneath its wheels, whose click convinces even Forever to bleed imperceptibly into a standing Now.
Soon, on the itinerary's second morning, the ground acquires a careless dusting of snow. Vegetation changes along the alpine climb, though the account, the travelogue itself, says nothing about that. Sirens bleat on in the distance, from whistle-stops all along this infant route. Air raids continue steeping this side of the border in today's random wildfire.
But the wounded in the compartments are exhilarated. They grow convinced: something is about to happen. Just past the next page.
C. and I returned to U. We managed to live there again for two years. I'm surprised we lasted even that long. How could we hope to make a life in a town where we'd already taken our retrospective tour? C. sought a thing she'd accidentally lost. That thing was not U., not then or ever. But severed from yourself in the press of a crowd, you head back instinctively to the most recent landmark, hoping the lost other will hit on the same idea.
Changed circumstance bought us a little nostalgic grace. C. parlayed her office experience into a position with University Personnel. And I: I'd been granted a wish so outrageous that characters in novels would have been punished just to think it. The political entertainment I wrote for C. appeared and did well. The forgotten attic legacy bridging imaginary Limburg and too real Chicago had readers.
Reviewers evaluated it in print, in the same newspapers I'd once read so casually. Total strangers spent two hours' wages to buy a copy. People I'd never meet wrote me letters, awarded me prizes.
The impossibility dawned on me: I might be the last person on earth allowed to spend all day long doing exactly what I wanted to do.
Each new book-blown coup produced a burst of sad excitement from C. "Beauie, you've done it. Proficiat. I always knew you would."
Truth was, she was terrified. We holed up in our one-bedroom apartment — one step upscale from the one in B.'s land-filled swamp — under siege from admirers. One night, we sat eating dinner at the pretty green enamel table we'd rescued from the secondhand shop. We listened to the radio as we ate, the cavalcade news. All at once, a voice was talking about the book, telling the story of the boys in the photo. Paraphrasing, as if that life had really happened.
I'd invented those boys to amuse C. I built them from pieces only she would recognize. I sprinkled the biographies with archival evidence, historical truths, the camera-eye witness. I intercut with essays how every historian half-makes the longer narrative, wedding the forces at large to a private address book. Now our private address book had been promoted to documentary fact.
At the account of that boy blown off his bike and rubbed out before the world conflagration cleared its starting block, C. started to cry. I thought at first she was crying out of pride. Writing a novel left me that inept with real-world facts.
"That poor boy," she mouthed.
I pieced it together. "I'm sorry. C., please. It'll all be over in a month." She brightened a little at the thought of recovering the anonymous. Of retreating to a time when our invented tunes formed no one's dinner music.
Our lives back in U. were like nothing we recognized. U. had changed in all but its particulars. Returning to the town was like clapping the back of an old friend at a reunion, one who turns to you with a look friendly but blank.
U. had forgotten us, while remaining agonizingly familiar. The town had become something out of Middle English allegory. Its lone consolation lay in other people, as bewildered by their abandonment here as we.