What could anyone do but smile and feel shamefaced, crass? It was as if he was the only one in the room unconscious of the reviews, the prizes, the sales. With a little luck someone might compete for the reviews, the prizes, the sales, but who could compete for the absence of consciousness?
(The unpretentiousness of the humble turtle — it’s hard to explain how this contributed to making people feel shamefaced and crass, but it did.)
“So the thing of it is, is that Peter Dijkstra does not have it in his power to betray me, if he thinks something of mine can help with his new book he can just have it. Not only is he not letting me down, this has been a fantasy ever since I was a kid. I don’t care about the things, it just makes me happy to be part of this. So when I say a writer is a genius, what I mean is, there is nothing I won’t do for him. It’s really simple. Same thing with friends. When I use the word ‘friend’ what I mean is, ‘What’s mine is yours.’ It’s really really really really simple.”
People were laughing, smiling, drinking their beers. It was kind of upbeat to hear except that presumably, then, no one in the room was even a friend?
Rachel sat cross-legged at the other end of the squashy sofa. Silky black hair drifted over her shoulders; glass-green eyes, a bittersweet mouth endorsed uncalculating simplicity with their beauty. She wore a black t-shirt with white stick figures who said:
MAKE ME A SANDWICH
WHAT? MAKE IT YOURSELF
SUDO MAKE ME A SANDWICH
OKAY
This t-shirt too had the lovable cuteness of the First Dog.
Cissy stood at the back of the crowd in the cruel grip of consciousness.
Cissy had met Peter Dijkstra in Vienna. She had booked a room through venere.de but it had fallen through: an apologetic e-mail in exquisitely courteous German had explained that the room had gone through another booking service a few minutes earlier. She had been offered an alternative but instead had found Angel’s Place through booking.com, closer to the center and with the look, somehow, of a hi-tech monastery. The rooms were underground, with very white plaster walls, arched ceilings of bare brick, and fierce gleaming black flat-screen TVs. It was enchanting. And then there were only four rooms, so unlike the free-for-all of a hostel, it would be silent, pure, a place to read and think and write. And so she had taken the train down from Prague and checked in late and gone out in the morning for Sachertorte at Oberlaa Kurkonditorei and wandered all day.
She got back very late, close to midnight. In the breakfast room at street level a man sat at a table reading. He held a pen; a notebook was open. It was as if she had walked into a hotel and found Wittgenstein writing quietly at a table.
He looked older, wearier than in the only picture anyone had seen, though his very pale hair would not show gray. He was unassumingly dressed in the way that older Europeans are unassuming: he wore a short-sleeved blue-and-white checked shirt, well, white with pale blue double lines in a grid, and faded gray pants, and stout brown walking shoes. He did not bother to look up when she came in.
She could not bring herself to speak. She could not bring herself to go to her room. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water. She heard the scrape of his chair. When she turned she saw him standing, holding a pack of Marlboros. He went to the door and into the street.
The book, she saw, was Detlev Claussen’s biography of Adorno; he had left it open face down on the table. She would have liked to look at the writing on the page of the open notebook but she knew it would be bad. She put water into the coffee machine and slotted in a capsule of espresso.
The door opened just as the coffee began to drip into the little plain cup.
She knew she would hate herself always if she did not speak. She said, “You’re Peter Dijkstra, aren’t you? I love your work.”
He said, “Thank you.”
She said, “Do you like Vienna?”
He said, “Very much. It’s my first time, for one reason and another.” (She knew that he had been in an asylum for five years.)
He said, “They speak German like robots. It’s pleasant hearing a language mechanically spoken. I wish I had known.”
He said, “Adorno came as a young man to study with Alban Berg. Claussen is quite amusing on the subject.”
But he had picked up the book and put his pen in the fold to mark his place and closed it and he was picking up his notebook.
“Don’t let me disturb you,” she said. “I was just going to bed.”
“So am I,” he said. “That was my last cigarette for the day.”
In the morning she asked Angel if she could extend her booking for a week.
She would have liked to tell this story, she desperately wanted to tell this story and be drawn to the squashy sofa to be pumped for details, singled out for envious excited questions and exclamations and comments, enfolded in the collective embrace. But she had not been invited. Nathan had told her to come because Gil was a friendly guy, but he had not been able to introduce her while Gil was talking and now he was talking to other friends.
She stood awkwardly at the back.
Across the room she saw Ralph, who had found a publisher for her book when no one was buying. He caught her eye and smiled and she drifted across. He wore a pale aqua polo shirt with a crocodile on the breast, chinos, and sockless Topsiders, because he had never wanted to be a suit.
He had not done for her what he had done for Rachel, who floated now on a magic carpet.
“You should represent Peter Dijkstra!” she said gaily. “I met him in Vienna. I could put you in touch!” It felt like a thing to be doing. She imagined Peter Dijkstra in New York. There would be an inner circle of admirers. Some kind of dinner, maybe, conferring over what could be done for the genius. Sontag had introduced Sebald to New Directions.
Peter Dijkstra in New York, the inner circle, Sontag, Sebald, New Directions — she was not the only dreamer in the room.
Peter Dijkstra lay on a very white bed, his head on his arm. The television was on; German tripped off the metal tongue of a female chat show host.
At 2 am he went upstairs with his laptop and cigarettes.
An e-mail from his editor at Meulenhoff forwarded five e-mails from altruists across the pond, relaying the declared devotion of a young American writer of some fame.
He went outside to smoke a cigarette.
He did not want to be locked up again. He was sane enough as long as he lay on the bed watching TV, or stood in the street smoking a cigarette, but it’s true, the bills did mount up. He was sheltering under his credit cards.
Somehow, though. The fact that a fame-kissed young American would happily hand over all his worldly goods did not make it socially straightforward to write asking for a gift of 20,000 euros. If something was not socially straightforward he could feel his mind cracking. He wondered whether the boy might in fact give him a place to stay if he went to New York but it seemed terribly complicated. If the boy did move out it would be all right, but if he did not it would be impossible. He could not think of any sentences that would ascertain the position in a socially acceptable fashion.
Anyway, it was comfortable among the robots. Americans are so natural and friendly and sincere. The Viennese have the mechanical predictable charm of a music box; you don’t have to warm to it. He would have liked it if the boy had set up an account for him at a pastry shop. That would have been a nice gesture. The Wiener Phil — imagine if an admiring reader were to give him a subscription! Americans do like you to warm to them, and he thought he might very well warm to someone who gave him a subscription to the Wiener Phil, but it did not seem a very American thing to do. An American, he thought, would see it as too finely tuned.