Paul Auster - Invisible

That was the end of it. Several swings of the bat, failure to make contact on any pitch, and the game was over. The world fell apart, the world put itself together again, and I muddled on. To my great good fortune, I have been with the same woman for close to thirty years now. I can’t imagine my life without her, and yet every time Gwyn enters my thoughts, I confess that I still feel a little pang. She was the impossible one, the unattainable one, the one who was never there-a specter from the Land of If.

An invisible America lay silent in the darkness beneath me. As I sat on the jet from San Francisco to New York, revisiting the bad old days of 1967, I realized that I would have to write her a condolence letter first thing the next morning.

It turned out that Gwyn had already been in touch. When I walked through the door of my house in Brooklyn, my wife gave me a warm, fervent hug (I had called from San Francisco, she knew Adam was dead), and then she told me that earlier in the day a message had been left for me on the answering machine by someone named Gwyn Tedesco.

Is that the Gwyn I think it is? she asked.

I called her at ten o’clock the next morning. I had wanted to write a letter, to express my feelings on paper, to give her something more than the empty platitudes we sputter forth at such times, but her message had sounded urgent, there was an important matter she needed to discuss with me, and so I called her back and never wrote the letter.

Her voice was the same, remarkably the same as the one that had mesmerized me forty years ago. A lilting gravity, crystal enunciation, the barest residue of the mid-Atlantic accent of her childhood. The voice was the same, but Gwyn herself was no longer the same, and as the conversation continued, I began projecting various pictures of her in my head, wondering how well or badly her beautiful face had fared over the course of time. She was sixty-one years old now, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had no desire to see her again. It could only lead to disappointment, and I didn’t want my hazy memories of the past to be blown apart by the hard facts of the present.

We exchanged the customary platitudes, rambling on for several minutes about Adam and his death, about how difficult it was for her to accept what had happened, about the rough blows life deals us. Then we caught up on the past for a little while, talking about our marriages, our children, and our work-a comfortable back-and-forth, very friendly on both sides, so much so that I even found the nerve to ask her if she remembered the day in Riverside Park when I tried to kiss her. Of course she remembered, she said, laughing for the first time, but how was she to know that scrawny Jim the college boy would grow up to become James Freeman? I never grew up, I said. And I’m still just Jim. Not so scrawny anymore, but still just Jim.

Yes, it was all quite amiable, and even though we had vanished from each other’s lives decades earlier, Gwyn talked as if little or no time had elapsed, as if those decades amounted to nothing more than a month or two. The familiarity of her tone lulled me into a kind of drowsy openness, and because my defenses were down, when she finally got to the business at hand, that is, when she finally explained why she had called me, I made a terrible blunder. I told her the truth when I should have lied.

Adam sent me an e-mail, she said, a long e-mail written a few days before he… just a few days before the end. It was a beautiful letter, a farewell letter I now realize, and in one of the paragraphs toward the bottom he mentioned that he was writing something, a book of some kind, and if I wanted to read it, I should contact you. But only after he was dead. He was very insistent about that. Only after he was dead. He also warned me that I might find the manuscript extremely upsetting. He apologized for that in advance, asking me to forgive him if the book hurt me in any way, and then he said no, I shouldn’t bother to read it, I should forget the whole thing. It was terribly confusing. In the very next sentence, he changed his mind again and told me to go ahead if I wanted to, that I had a right to see it, and if I did want to see it, I should contact you, since you had the only copy. I didn’t understand that part. If he wrote the book on a computer, wouldn’t he have saved it on his hard drive?

He told Rebecca to delete it, I said. It’s gone from the computer now, and the only copy is the one he printed out and sent to me.

So the book really exists.

Sort of. He meant to write it in three chapters. The first two are in fairly good shape, but he didn’t manage to finish the third. Just some notes for it, a hastily written outline.

Did he want you to help him get it published?

He never talked about publishing, not directly in any case. All he wanted was for me to read the manuscript, and then it would be up to me to decide what to do with it.

Have you decided?

No. To tell you the truth, I haven’t even thought about it. Until you mentioned publishing just now, the idea had never crossed my mind.

I think I should have a look at it, don’t you?

I’m not sure. It’s your call, Gwyn. If you want to see it, I’ll make a copy and FedEx it to you today.

Will I be upset?

Probably.

Probably?

Not by all of it, but one or two things might upset you, yes.

One or two things. Oh dear.

Don’t worry. As of this moment, I’m putting the decision in your hands. Not a word of Adam’s book will ever be published without your approval.

Send it, Jim. Send it today. I’m a big girl now, and I know how to swallow my medicine.

How simple it would have been to cover my tracks and deny the existence of the book, or tell her that I had lost it somewhere, or claim that Adam had promised to send it to me but never did. The subject had caught me by surprise, and I couldn’t think fast enough to start spinning out a fake story. Even worse, I had told Gwyn there were three chapters. Only the second one had the potential to wound her (along with a couple of remarks in the third, which I easily could have crossed out), and if I had said that Adam had written only two chapters, Spring and Fall , she would have been spared from having to go back to the apartment on West 107th Street and relive the events of that summer. But she was expecting three chapters now, and if I sent her only two, she would call right back and ask for the missing pages. So I photocopied everything I had- Spring, Summer , and the notes for Fall -and shipped them off to her address in Boston that afternoon. It was a rotten thing to do to her, but by then I no longer had a choice. She wanted to read her brother’s book, and the only copy in the world belonged to me.

She called two days later. I don’t know what I was expecting from her, but I had taken it for granted somehow that intense emotions would be involved-angry tears, threats, shame that her secret had been exposed-but Gwyn was unnaturally subdued, more numb than insulted, I think, as if the book had clobbered her into a state of puzzled disbelief.

I don’t understand, she said. Most of it is so accurate, so exactly right, and then there are all those things he made up. It doesn’t make any sense.

What things? I asked, knowing full well what she was referring to.

I loved my brother, Jim. When I was young, he was closer to me than anyone else. But I never slept with him. There was no grand experiment when we were kids. There was no incestuous affair in the summer of 1967. Yes, we lived together in that apartment for two months, but we had separate bedrooms, and there was never any sex. What Adam wrote was pure make-believe.

It’s probably not my place to ask, but why would he do such a thing? Especially if the other parts of the story are true.