Winter Journal (18 page)

The day after the car crash in 2002, you went to the junkyard where the car had been towed to retrieve your daughter’s belongings. It was a Sunday morning in August, warm as always, with a misty blur of rain dappling the streets as one of your friends drove you out to some godforsaken neighborhood in Brooklyn, a no-man’s-land of crumbling warehouses, vacant lots, and boarded-up wooden buildings. The junkyard was run by a black man in his mid-sixties, a smallish fellow with long dreadlocks and clear, steady eyes, a gentle Rasta man who watched over his domain of wrecked automobiles
like a shepherd tending a flock of dozing sheep. You told him why you were there, and when he led you over to the shiny new Toyota you had been driving the day before, you were stunned by how thoroughly destroyed it was, could not fathom how you and your family had managed to survive such a catastrophe. Immediately after the crash, you had noticed how badly damaged the car was, but you had been rattled by the collision, were not fully able to absorb what had happened to you, but now, a day later, you could see that the metal body of the car was so smashed in, it looked like a piece of crumpled paper. “Look at that,” you said to the Rasta man. “We should all be dead now.” He studied the car for a few seconds, looked you in the eye, and then turned his head upward as the fine rain fell onto his face and abundant hair. “An angel was watching over you,” he said in a quiet voice. “You were supposed to die yesterday, but then an angel stretched out his hand and pulled you back into the world.” He delivered those words with such serenity and conviction, you almost believed him.

When you sleep, you sleep soundly, seldom stirring until it is time to wake up in the morning. The problem you occasionally run into, however, is a reluctance to go to bed in the first place, a late-night surge of energy that prevents you from wanting to call it quits until you have polished off another chapter of the book you are reading, or watched a film on television, or, if it is baseball season and the Mets or the Yankees are playing on the West Coast, tuned in the broadcast
from San Francisco, Oakland, or Los Angeles. Afterward, you crawl into bed beside your wife, and within ten minutes you are dead to the world until morning. Nevertheless, every now and then, something will interfere with your normally profound slumbers. If you accidentally wind up on your back, for example, you might begin to snore, in all likelihood you will begin to snore, and if the noise you produce is loud enough to wake your wife, she will softly urge you to roll over, and if that benign tactic should fail, she will give you a shove, or shake your shoulder, or pinch your ear. Nine times out of ten, you will unconsciously do what she commands, and she will quickly fall back to sleep. The other ten percent of the time, her shove will wake you up, and because you don’t want to trouble her sleep any further, you will go down the hall to the library and stretch out on the sofa, which is long enough to accommodate your fully extended body. More often than not, you manage to fall back asleep on the sofa—but sometimes you don’t. Over the years, your sleep has also been broken by flies and mosquitoes buzzing in the room (the perils of summer), inadvertent punches in the face from your wife, who tends to fling out her arms when she rolls over in bed, and once, just once, you were rousted from your dreams when your wife started singing in the middle of one of her own dreams—belting out the lyrics of a song from a movie she had seen as a child, your brilliant, erudite, supremely sophisticated wife returning to her midwestern childhood with a splendid, full-voiced rendition of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” as sung by Julie Andrews in
Mary Poppins
. One of
the rare instances when the eight-year difference in your ages has ever been apparent to you, since you were too old for that film when it came out and therefore (mercifully) have never seen it.

But what to do when it is the middle of the night, when you have woken up sometime between two and four in the morning, have stretched out on the sofa in the library, and are unable to go back to sleep? It is too late to read, too late to turn on the television, too late to watch a film, and so you lie in the dark and ruminate, letting your thoughts go wherever they choose to go. Sometimes you get lucky and are able to latch onto a word, or a character, or a scene from the book you are working on, but more often you will discover yourself thinking about the past, and in your experience, whenever your thoughts turn to the past at three o’clock in the morning, those thoughts tend to be dark. One memory haunts you above all others, and on nights when you are unable to sleep, you find it difficult not to go back to it, to rehash the events of that day and relive the shame you felt afterward, have continued to feel ever since. It was thirty-two years ago, the morning of your father’s funeral, and at some point you found yourself standing next to one of your uncles (the father of the cousin who called you on the morning of your panic attack), the two of you shaking hands with a line of mourners who shuffled past you as they offered their condolences, the ritual handshakes and empty words that punctuate every funeral service. Family members mostly, friends
of your father’s, men and women, faces you recognized and didn’t recognize, and then you were shaking hands with Tom, one of the faces you didn’t recognize, who told you he had been your father’s chief electrician for many years and that your father had always treated him well, he was a good man, he said, this small Irishman with his Jersey City accent was telling you that your father was a good man, and you thanked him for that, you shook his hand again for that, and then he moved on to shake your uncle’s hand, and when your uncle saw him, he immediately told Tom to leave, this was a private family funeral, he said, no outsiders were allowed, and when Tom mumbled that he only wanted to pay his respects, your uncle said sorry, he would have to leave, and so Tom turned around and left. Their conversation lasted no more than fifteen or twenty seconds, and you barely registered what was happening before Tom was on his way out. When you finally realized what your uncle had done, you were filled with disgust, appalled that he could have treated a person like that, any person, but especially this person, who was there only because he felt it was his duty to be there, and what still galls you today, what still floods you with shame, is that you said nothing to your uncle. Never mind that he was a man with a notorious temper, a hothead given to explosive rages and monumental shouting fits, and that if you had confronted him then, there was every chance he would have turned on you in the middle of your father’s funeral. But so what? You should have confronted him, you should have had the courage to shout back at him if he had started shouting at you,
and if not that, then why at least didn’t you run after Tom and tell him he could stay? You have no idea why you didn’t take a stand at that moment, and the shock of your father’s sudden death is no excuse. You should have acted, and you didn’t. All your life, you had been sticking up for people who had been pushed around, it was the one principle you believed in above all others, but on that particular day you held your tongue and did nothing. When you look back on it now, you understand that this failure to act is the reason why you have stopped thinking of yourself as heroic: because there was no excuse.

Nine years earlier (1970), while serving on the crew of the S.S.
Esso Florence
, you threatened to punch and even kill one of your shipmates for baiting you with anti-Semitic insults. You grabbed hold of his shirt, slammed him into a wall, and brought your right fist up against his face, telling him to stop calling you names or else. Martinez backed down immediately, apologized, and before long you became good friends. (Shades of Madame Rubinstein.) Nine years later, meaning nine years after your father’s funeral (1988), you almost punched someone again, which was the last time you came close to engaging in a fight similar to the ones you fought as a boy. It was in Paris, and you remember the date well: September first, a special day on the French calendar,
la rentrée
, the official end of the summer holiday season, and therefore a day of crowds and inordinate confusion. For six weeks prior to that, you and your wife and children had been staying at
your French publisher’s house in the south, about fifteen kilometers east of Arles. It had been a restful time for all of you, a month and a half of quiet and work, of long walks and rambling excursions through the white hills of the Alpilles, of outdoor dinners under the plane tree in the yard, probably the most enjoyable summer of your life, with the added pleasure of seeing your one-year-old daughter take her first tottering steps without holding on to her parents’ hands. You must not have been thinking clearly when you scheduled your return to Paris on September first, or perhaps you simply didn’t understand what would be waiting for you when you got there. You had already put your eleven-year-old son on a plane back to New York (a direct flight from Nice), and so there were just three of you traveling north on the train that day, you and your wife and small daughter, along with a summer’s worth of baggage and half a ton of baby supplies. You were looking forward to arriving in Paris, however, since your publisher had told you that an extensive article about your work would be appearing in that afternoon’s
Le Monde
, and you wanted to buy a copy of the paper as soon as you climbed off the train. (You no longer read articles about yourself, no longer read reviews of your books, but this was then, and you still hadn’t learned that ignoring what people say about you is beneficial to a writer’s mental health.) The trip by T.G.V. from Avignon was a bit frazzling, largely because your daughter was too impressed by the high-speed train to sit still or sleep, which meant that you spent most of the three hours walking up and down the aisles of the cars
with her, and by the time you pulled into the Gare de Lyon, you were ready for a nap. The station was mobbed with people, large masses of travelers surging forth in all directions, and you had to jostle and fight your way to the exit, your wife carrying the baby in her arms and you doing your best to push and pull the family’s three large suitcases—not the easiest task, given that you had only two hands. In addition, there was a canvas bag slung over your shoulder, which held the first seventy-five pages of your novel in progress, and when you stopped to buy a copy of
Le Monde
, you slipped it into the bag as well. You wanted to read the article, of course, but after checking to see that it had indeed been printed in that afternoon’s edition, you put it away, assuming you could take a closer look at it while you were waiting in line for a taxi. Once the three of you made it through the exit door, however, you discovered that there was no line. There were taxis in front of the station, there were people waiting for those taxis, but there was no line. The crowd was immense, and unlike the English, who are in the habit of queuing up whenever more than three of them are present and who then stand there patiently until it is their turn, or even the Americans, who go about it more sloppily but always with an innate sense of justice and fair play, the French turn into fractious children whenever there are too many of them gathered in a confined space, and rather than collectively try to impose some order on the situation, it suddenly becomes every man for himself. The pandemonium in front of the Gare de Lyon that day reminded you of certain news clips
you have seen of the New York Stock Exchange: Black Tuesday, Black Friday, the international markets are crashing, the world is in ruins, and there, on the floor of the exchange, a thousand frantic men are screaming their lungs out, each one about to drop dead of a heart attack. Such was the crowd you had joined that September first twenty-two and a half years ago: the rabble were on the loose and no one was in charge, and there you were, no more than a stone’s throw from where the Bastille had once stood, stormed two centuries earlier by a mob no less unruly than this one, but revolution wasn’t in the air just now, what the people wanted wasn’t bread or freedom but
taxis
, and since the taxi supply was less than a fiftieth of what it should have been, the people were fuming, the people were shouting, the people were ready to tear one another apart. Your wife was calm, you remember, amused by the spectacle unfolding around her, and even your little daughter was calm, taking in everything with her big, curious eyes, but you were becoming aggravated, you have always been at your worst when traveling, edgy and irritable and never quite yourself, and more than anything you hate being trapped in the chaos of crowds, and therefore, as you sized up the predicament you had fallen into, you concluded that the three of you would have to wait there for a good hour or two before finding a cab, perhaps six hours, perhaps a hundred hours, and so you said to your wife that maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look for a taxi somewhere else. You pointed to another taxi stand down the hill, a few hundred yards away. “But what about the bags?” she said. “You’ll
never be able to carry three heavy bags all the way over there.” “Don’t worry,” you said. “I can handle it.” Of course you couldn’t handle it, or could just barely handle it, and after lugging those monsters for just twenty or thirty yards, you understood that you had vastly overestimated your own strength, but at that point it would have been foolish to turn back, and so you kept on going, pausing every ten seconds to reorganize the load, switching the two bags and the one bag from your left arm to your right arm, from your right arm to your left arm, sometimes putting one of them on your back and carrying the other two with your hands, continually shifting the weight, which must have totaled about a hundred pounds, and naturally enough you were starting to sweat, your pores were gushing in the heat of the afternoon sun, and by the time you made it to the next taxi stand, you were thoroughly exhausted. “You see,” you said to your wife, “I told you I could do it.” She smiled at you in the way one smiles at an imbecilic ten-year-old, for the truth was, even though you had made it to the next taxi stand, there were no taxis waiting there, since every driver in the city was headed for the Gare de Lyon. Nothing to be done now except hang around and hope that one of them would eventually come your way. The minutes passed, your body started cooling down to more or less its normal temperature, and then, just as an approaching taxi came into view, you and your wife saw a woman walking in your direction, a young, extremely tall African woman dressed in colorful African clothes and walking with perfectly erect posture, a small baby sleeping in a sling that was wrapped
around her chest, a heavy bag of groceries hanging from her right hand, another heavy bag hanging from her left hand, and a third bag of groceries balanced on the top of her head. You were looking at a vision of human grace, you realized, the slow, fluid motion of her swaying hips, the slow, fluid motion of her walk, a woman bearing her burdens with what appeared to you as a kind of wisdom, the weight of each thing evenly distributed, her neck and head utterly still, her arms utterly still, the baby asleep on her chest, and after your embarrassing display of ineptitude as you hauled your own family’s bags to this spot, you felt ridiculous in her presence, awed that a fellow human being could have mastered so well the very thing you yourself could not do. She was still walking toward you when the taxi pulled up and came to a stop. Relieved and happy now, you loaded the suitcases into the trunk and then slid into the backseat beside your wife and daughter. “Where to?” the driver asked, and when you told him where you were going, he shook his head and told you to get out of the cab. At first you didn’t understand. “What are you talking about?” you said. “I’m talking about the trip,” he replied. “It’s too short, and I’m not going to waste my time on a measly fare like that.” “Don’t worry,” you said. “I’ll give you a good tip.” “I don’t care about your tip,” he said. “I just want you out of the cab—now.” “Are you blind?” you said. “We have a baby and a hundred pounds of luggage. What do you expect us to do—walk?” “That’s your problem, not mine,” he answered. “Out.” There was nothing left to say to him. If the bastard in the front seat wouldn’t take you to the address
you had given him, what choice did you have but to get out of the taxi, unload your bags from the trunk, and wait for another cab? You were seething with anger by then, as angry and frustrated as you had been in years, no, more angry, more frustrated, more outraged than at any time you could remember, and when you had removed the bags from the trunk and the taxi man had started to drive away, you took the canvas bag that was slung over your shoulder, the bag that contained the only copy of the manuscript you were working on, not to mention the article in
Le Monde
that you were so anxious to read, and hurled it in the direction of the departing taxi. It landed with a great thud on the trunk of the car—a deeply satisfying thud that carried all the force of an exclamation mark set in fifty-point type. The driver slammed on the brakes, got out of the taxi, and began walking toward you with clenched fists, shouting at you for having attacked his precious vehicle, itching for a fight. You clenched your own fists and shouted back, warning him not to take another step toward you, or else you would dismantle him piece by piece and kick his sorry ass into the gutter. When you spoke those words, you had no doubt that you were prepared to tangle with him, that nothing was going to stop you from carrying out your promise to destroy this man, and when he looked into your eyes and saw that you meant what you were saying, he turned around, climbed into his cab, and drove off. You went out into the street to fetch your bag, and just then, as you bent down to pick it up, you saw the young African woman walking down the sidewalk with her baby and her three heavy bundles, well
past you now, perhaps ten or twenty feet beyond where you were standing, and as you watched her move into the distance, you studied her slow and even gait, marveling at the stillness of her body, understanding that beyond the gentle swaying of her hips, not one part of her was moving except her legs.