Part 3 (1/2)

”Ah.”

He was moving back to New York, he told me, to work on a short biography of the writer Isaac Babel. He would need someone to look over some Russian text for him. ”It's either that or learn Russian. And I'm not Edmund Wilson.” I smiled-I caught the allusion to Wilson's voracious reading in many languages in his composition of To the Finland Station To the Finland Station; it was the last allusion I would catch from Morris-and said I'd be happy to help.

”Then you can help me with something else, too,” said Morris, ”since you're my biggest fan. I'm moving this weekend, and your agency probably takes-how much do they pay you an hour for this?”

”Eight dollars.”

”Right, and they charge me twenty. Ideally I need someone for an entire weekend-forty-eight hours, more or less. So how about let's split the difference-I'll pay you five hundred dollars and your train fare back, you make all the arrangements, pick up a U-Haul on Friday, we move my stuff into it, drive it up to New York, unload it into my apartment, you return it, go to Penn Station, end of game. What do you think?”

”What about the agency?”

”Screw the agency.”

”Wow,” I said. ”You're my hero.”

Morris laughed and we shook on it.

That night I invested some of my future earnings into a keg party at my house. Ali Dehestani got drunk and we wrestled in the backyard; he had four inches and forty pounds on me, but I was stronger. It was an even match. Jen Cohen got so drunk she pa.s.sed out on Ali's couch. Amy Gould for her part got so drunk, and so angry, when she saw me (briefly) kissing her friend Amanda that she kissed Ravi Winikoff, which was a surprise to everyone involved. And from my father's lovely ivy-bestrewn porch I made a speech about Isaac Babel: ”They didn't let him finis.h.!.+” I cried. ”Don't let them not let you finis.h.!.+ Finis.h.!.+ Finish while you can!”

My speech made no sense. Everyone cheered.

Two days later I picked up a smallish U-Haul, pulled it up to Morris's place, and very quickly with Morris lugged his boxes of books, and then his heavy wooden futon and his cherrywood writing desk into the truck, and then drove us to New York in three and a half hours.

On the way Morris talked to me about literature, politics, the movies. Henry Adams, when he met Swinburne, thought it would take him a hundred years to catch up to the poet's erudition, his learning, his reading. I felt a little like that with Morris, but I thought-I was young-that I could make up the difference in ten years. He was twelve years older than I was. I had two years to spare.

Also, Morris talked about publis.h.i.+ng. What a bunch of miserable careerists his contemporaries were.

”John Globus is a joke. It's a mystery he still gets published. This is what is known as publis.h.i.+ng inertia. They publish your next book because they don't want people to think that publis.h.i.+ng your previous book was a mistake.

”Joanne Simkin is actually Alfred Simkin's granddaughter, did you know that? One thing you learn in New York is that if it sounds like a relative, it's a d.a.m.n relative.

”Harold Phillips,” Morris concluded. ”How many times can you confess in print that you're a middle-aged mediocrity who is envious of his friends? Jesus. Don't read him.”

I never had read him. In fact, I'd never heard of him, or any of the others-mediocrities, as it turned out, and careerists, careerists, careerists, every one. It was news to me. I dealt then exclusively with the great dead-and with Morris, who carried them all like a bright banner into the present.

But I sat there-or, rather, I sat at the wheel-and nodded. I was sure there was a good reason to beat up on these jokers, and after all here I was so serendipitously with Morris Binkel, and I did not want to seem like a fool.

”Judith Hestermann is a miserable excuse for a television critic. Her idea of greatness is the NBC Thursday-night lineup.”

Morris shook his head and looked out at the woods of suburban New Jersey as we drove through them, alternating between the enormous shopping malls and the New Jersey state police. ”Jesus, it's the chain mall archipelago,” said Morris. ”It's all malls and state troopers. These people on their death marches. You step outside J.Crew and they shoot you.” He shook his head but also smiled-it was a good line.

Morris's apartment was a small, handsome one-and-a-half-bedroom on Riverside Drive. It looked out over the Hudson and on into New Jersey. Aside from the office, which we now repeopled with Morris's books, it looked surprisingly lived-in for an apartment he'd been gone from for a year. We moved him in and I took the U-Haul down to 23rd Street.

Walking over to the subway-Morris told me to take a cab but I wanted to ride the subway-I pa.s.sed through Chelsea. I had never seen so many beautiful people. I was sweating, tired, gruesome, and these people had left their houses looking like movie stars- perhaps they were movie stars? One fell behind on such things in college, or anyway I did-and, oh G.o.d, what would it take to live in such a place? What reserves of strength? What reserves of cash? And yet I thought that I could do it. These people looked soft, for all their movie-star hard bodies. They looked like they were unsure of what they wanted in life but that they suspected they'd gotten it. They hoped anyway that this was it.

By the time I got back Morris had set up shop and he'd even photocopied some Babel stories for me. I showered-his shower was clean, his towels were reasonably new.

”It's nice here,” Morris called out from the living room as I got dressed.

”Yes,” I agreed, when I walked out.

”My wife just left me,” he said. ”Did I mention that? I had a lovely wife and she's gone.” I didn't say anything to that.

”My going to Hopkins for a year was the last straw. She decided I was sleeping with all the grad students.”

I could not understand, at the time, the allure of grad students.

Morris stood with his big hands in his pants pockets by the big window that looked out to New Jersey, over the Hudson, the sky now beginning to dim and the lights like little candles beginning to burn on the other side. ”Should we go to a party?” he said.

So we did.

What did I want from Morris Binkel? The man was practically a sociopath. He had been in New York so long, had ingested there so many values that he at heart despised, that he knew to be false and cruel, that, in angrily rejecting them, he felt also the extent to which he was beholden to them, and grew angrier still. He could no longer read five pages of anything without losing his temper, without clutching his chair in rage. Surely he'd be dead by forty. And yet the great ones were like this. And Morris, I think, had greatness in him, even if he squandered it. His anger at his era rose like vomit to his throat.

I was twenty years old. When you are twenty years old, and twenty-one, and twenty-two, and twenty-three, and twenty-four, what you want from people is that they tell you about you. When you are twenty, and twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, you watch the world for the way it watches you. Do people laugh when you make a joke, do they kiss you when you lean into them at a party? Yes? Aha-so that's who you are. But these people themselves, laughing and not-laughing, kissing and not-kissing, they themselves are young, and so then you begin to think, if you're twenty or twenty-one, when you are young, that these people are not to be trusted, your contemporaries, your screwed-up friends and girlfriends-that it's not because of you that they kissed you, but because of them, them, something about them, those narcissists, whereas you were asking about you, what did they think of you? Now you have no idea. This is why it's so important to meet your heroes while you are young, so they can tell you. When I met Morris Binkel I wanted merely for him to say: Yes. I see it in you. You can do with it what you will, but you've got it. You can be like me, if that's what you want. something about them, those narcissists, whereas you were asking about you, what did they think of you? Now you have no idea. This is why it's so important to meet your heroes while you are young, so they can tell you. When I met Morris Binkel I wanted merely for him to say: Yes. I see it in you. You can do with it what you will, but you've got it. You can be like me, if that's what you want.

We went to the party, which was in Brooklyn. For a long time we rode the train as Morris explained various things to me about the world of literature, by which it turned out Morris meant the world of publis.h.i.+ng. He rarely discussed actual literary works; he knew all the writers personally, so he just gave me the straight dope.

We'd drunk a bottle of wine from Morris's cabinet and when we arrived at last the party was well under way, and everyone greeted Morris with a mixture of regard and something like relief-I don't know-or fear. As we stood getting acclimated, people would come up to him and welcome him back to New York, and then comment on his latest broadside in the New American. New American. ”What you did to Phillips, my G.o.d,” said one kindly-looking man who seemed about Morris's age (most of the others were slightly younger), identified to me by Morris later as a socialist history professor. ”What you did to Phillips, my G.o.d,” said one kindly-looking man who seemed about Morris's age (most of the others were slightly younger), identified to me by Morris later as a socialist history professor.

”Oh, I didn't really-” Morris protested demurely.

”No, he had it coming,” said the man, then turned to me: ”Morris is like American foreign policy. The only thing he knows how to do is bomb people. But sometimes the people he bombs really deserve it.”

Morris laughed happily.

At some point Morris went outside for a cigarette, leaving me on my own. Naturally I went to the kitchen to fetch another beer. I had been drinking heavily now for several years, and I'd had only five beers this evening so far, not very much for me at the time, but Morris and I had forgotten, somehow, to eat, so I was reasonably drunk, and when I found a woman-a fairly stunning woman, maybe just a few years older than I was but a whole world away from me, with blue eyes in a round, pretty face, and long curly black hair spilling over her back, in jeans, in a kind of low-cut black short-sleeve s.h.i.+rt with ruffles along the hem-this was not how girls dressed at Harvard-and several bracelets, bangles they're called, on her wrists and hoop earrings in her ears-a real woman, in other words, which I was not used to-when I saw her standing before the refrigerator, I felt stymied, and I blushed. I was wearing a polo s.h.i.+rt from the Harvard Coop and jeans while everyone around wore a sport coat, and this woman was looking at me with amus.e.m.e.nt in her eyes.

”Hi,” I said, looking down at the floor.

”You're Morris's friend,” she said.

I looked back up. ”Well, sort of.”

”That's an intriguing response!” she said, laughing. Her earrings and her hair jangled when she talked. Her eyes laughed differently from how her mouth laughed.

”Thank you,” I said.

”And?”

”I moved Morris up here. I was working at the agency. Uh. Instead of tutoring SATs.”

She nodded encouragingly. I told the rest of the story a bit more coherently.

”So he owes you money,” she concluded.

I hadn't thought of it that way. This girl was way out of my league.