Invisible

III

One week after I read the text of Summer, I was in Oakland, California, ringing the doorbell of Walker’s house. I hadn’t written or called to tell him what I thought of the second part of his book, nor had he written or called to ask. I felt it would be better to hold back from giving any comments until I saw him in person, and with our scheduled dinner looming up on the immediate horizon, my chance would come soon enough. I couldn’t explain why it was so important to me, but I wanted him to be looking into my eyes when I told him that I was not disgusted by what he had written, that I did not find it brutal or ugly (to quote his words back to him), and that my wife, who had now read the first and second parts of the book, felt the same as I did. That was the little speech I rehearsed in my head as the taxi took me across the bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, but I never managed to say what I wanted to say. It turned out that Walker had died just twenty-four hours after he’d sent me the manuscript, and by the time I reached the front door of his house, his ashes had been in the ground for three days.

Rebecca was the one who told me these things, the same Rebecca Adam had talked about in the second letter I received from him, his thirty-five-year-old stepdaughter, a tall, broad-shouldered woman with light brown skin, penetrating eyes, and an attractive if not conventionally pretty face, who referred to her mother’s white husband not as her stepfather but as her father. I was glad to hear her use that word, glad to know that Walker had been capable of inspiring that degree of love and loyalty in a child who had not been born to him. That one word seemed to tell me everything about the sort of life he had built for himself in this small house in Oakland with Sandra Williams and her daughter, who eventually became his daughter, and who, even after her mother’s death, had stayed by him until the end.

Rebecca broke the news to me just seconds after she opened the door and let me into the house. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. In spite of the weakness and fear I had detected in his voice when we talked on the phone, in spite of my certainty that he was coming to the end, I hadn’t thought it would happen just yet, I had assumed there was still some time left-enough time for us to have our dinner, at any rate, perhaps even enough time for him to finish his book. When Rebecca spoke the words My father passed six days ago, I felt so rattled, so unwilling to accept the finality of her statement that a sudden wave of dizziness rushed through my head, and I had to ask her if I could sit down. She walked me over to a chair in the living room, then went into the kitchen to fetch a glass of water. When she returned, she apologized for her stupidity, even though no apologies were necessary, and even though she was anything but stupid.

I didn’t find out that you and my father were planning to have dinner tonight until less than an hour ago, she said. Ever since the funeral, I’ve been coming to the house and sorting through his things, and it didn’t enter my fat little head until six o’clock this evening to open his date book and see if there were any appointments I had to cancel. When I saw the thing for seven o’clock, I immediately called your house in Brooklyn. Your wife gave me the number of your hotel in San Francisco, but when I called them, they said you weren’t in your room. I figured you were already on your way here, so I called my husband, told him to feed the kids, and stuck around here waiting for you to show up. You might not be aware of it, but you rang the bell exactly on the dot of seven.

That was the deal, I said. I promised to be here at the stroke of seven. I thought your father would be amused by my punctuality.

I’m sure he would have been, she replied, with a touch of sadness in her voice.

Before I could say anything, she changed the subject and again apologized for something that needed no apology. I was planning to call you within the next few days, she said. Your name is on the list, and I’m sorry I didn’t get around to it sooner. Dad had a lot of friends, a ton of friends. So many people to contact, and then there was the funeral to arrange, and a million other things to take care of, and I suppose you could say I’ve been a bit swamped. Not that I’m complaining. It’s better to keep yourself busy at a time like this than to sit around and mope, don’t you think? But I’m really sorry I didn’t get in touch with you earlier. Dad was so happy when you wrote back to him last month. He’s been talking about you ever since I can remember, I feel as if I’ve known you all my life. His friend from college, the one who went on to make a name for himself out in the big world. It’s an honor to meet you at last. Not the best of circumstances, I know, but I’m glad you’re here.

Me too, I said, feeling somewhat calmed by the patter of her resonant, soothing voice. Your father was writing something, I continued. Did you know about that?

He mentioned it to me. A book called 1967.

Have you read it?

No.

Not a word?

Not a single letter. A couple of months ago, he told me that if he died before he finished it, he wanted me to delete the text from his computer. Just wipe it out and forget it, he said, it’s of no importance.

So you erased it?

Of course I did. It’s a sin to disobey a person’s dying wish.

Good, I thought to myself. Good that this woman won’t have to set eyes on Walker’s manuscript. Good that she won’t have to learn about her father’s secret, which surely would have hurt her deeply, confused her, devastated her. I could take it in my stride, but that was only because I didn’t belong to Walker’s family. But imagine his child having to read those fifty pages. Unthinkable.

We were sitting face to face in the living room, each one of us planted in a soft, tattered armchair. Minimal furnishings, a couple of framed posters on the wall (Braque, Miró), another wall lined with books from top to bottom, a cotton throw rug in the center of the room, and a warm California dusk hovering outside the windows, yellowish and dim: the comfortable but modest life Walker had referred to in his letter. I drank down the last of the water Rebecca had given me and put the glass on the round short-legged table that stood between us. Then I said: What about Adam’s sister? I used to know her a little bit back in the sixties, and I’ve often wondered what happened to her.

Aunt Gwyn. She lives back east, so I never got to know her very well. But I’ve always liked her. A generous, funny woman, and she and my mom hit it off, they were solid together. She came out for the funeral, of course, stayed right here in the house, and went home just this morning. My dad’s death really shook her up. We all knew he was sick, we all knew he wasn’t going to last long, but she wasn’t around at the end, she didn’t see how he was slipping away from us, and so she wasn’t expecting it to happen so soon. She cried her heart out at the funeral, I mean really broke down and sobbed, and all I could do was hold her and try not to break down myself. My little Adam, she kept saying. My poor little Adam.

Poor little Gwyn.

Poor little everyone, Rebecca said, as her own eyes suddenly began to glisten. A few seconds later, a single tear fell from her left eye and slid down her cheek, but she didn’t bother to wipe it away.

Is she married?

To an architect named Philip Tedesco.

I’ve heard of him.

Yes, he’s very well known. They’ve been married for a long time and have two grown-up daughters. One of them is exactly my age.

The last time I saw Gwyn, she was a graduate student in English literature. Did she ever get her PhD?

I’m not sure. What I do know is that she works in publishing. She’s director of a university press in the Boston area. A big one, a prominent one, but for the life of me I can’t remember the name of it just now. Dammit. Maybe it will come to me later.

Don’t worry about it. It’s not important.

Without thinking, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a tin of Schimmelpennincks, the tiny Dutch cigars I have smoked since my early twenties. I was about to open the lid, saw Rebecca looking at me, and hesitated. Before I could ask her if it was all right to smoke in the house, she sprang out of her chair and said: I’ll get you an ashtray. Matter-of-fact, sympathetic, one of the last Americans who had not joined the ranks of the Tobacco Police. Then she added: I think there’s one in my father’s study-at which point she smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead and muttered angrily: Good God, I don’t know what’s wrong with me today.

Is there a problem? I asked, bewildered by how upset she had become.

I have something for you, she said. It’s sitting on my father’s desk, and I forgot all about it until this minute. I was going to mail it to you, but then, when I looked in the date book and saw you were coming here tonight, I told myself I could give it to you in person. But I swear, if I hadn’t mentioned my father’s study, I would have let you walk out of this house empty-handed. I think I must be going senile.

So I accompanied her into the study, a midsize room on the ground floor with a wooden desk, another wall packed with books, filing cabinets, a laptop computer, and a telephone-not so much a lawyer’s miniature home office as a place to think, a vestige of Walker’s early life as a poet. A nine-by-twelve manila envelope had been placed on top of the shut computer. Rebecca picked it up and handed it to me. My name was written out across the front in block letters, and just below my name, in much smaller cursive, I read: Notes for Fall.

Dad gave this to me two days before he died, Rebecca said. It must have been around six o’clock, because I remember coming here straight from my job at the hospital to check in on him. He said he’d talked to you on the phone about two hours earlier, and that if and when, in the event of, I don’t want to say the word anymore, in the event of his you-know-what, I was to get this to you as quickly as possible. He looked so drained… so worn out when he said that to me, I could see he’d taken a bad turn, that his strength was beginning to leave him. Those were his last two requests. To delete the 1967 file from his computer and give you the envelope. Here it is. I have no idea what Notes for Fall means. Do you?

No, I lied. Not the foggiest notion.

Back in my hotel room later that night, I opened the envelope and pulled out a short, handwritten letter from Walker and thirty-one single-spaced pages of notes that he had typed up on his computer and then printed out for me. The letter read as follows:

Five minutes after our telephone conversation. Deepest thanks for the encouragement. First thing tomorrow morning, I will have my housekeeper send you the second chapter by express mail. If you find it repugnant, which I fear you will, please accept my apologies. As for the pages in this envelope, you will see that they are the outline for the third part. Written in great haste-telegraphic style-but working quickly helped bring back memories, a deluge of memories, and now that the outline is finished, I don’t know if I have it in me to work it up into a proper piece of prose. I feel exhausted, frightened, perhaps a little deranged. I will put the printed-out ms. into an envelope and give it to my daughter, who will send it to you in case I don’t hold on long enough to have our famous, much talked about dinner. So weak, so little left, time running out. I will be robbed of my old age. I try not to feel bitter about it, but sometimes I can’t help myself. Life is shit, I know, but the only thing I want is more life, more years on this godforsaken earth. As for the enclosed pages, do with them what you will. You are a pal, the best of men, and I trust your judgment in all things. Wish me luck on my journey. With love, Adam.

Reading that letter filled me with an immense, uncontainable sadness. Just hours before, Rebecca had jolted me with the news that Walker was dead, and now he was talking to me again, a dead man was talking to me, and I felt that as long as I held the letter in my hand, as long as the words of that letter were still before my eyes, it would be as if he had been resurrected, as if he had been momentarily brought back to life in the words he had written to me. A strange response, perhaps, no doubt an embarrassingly doltish response, but I was too distraught to censor the emotions that were running through me, and so I read the letter six or seven more times, ten times, twelve times, enough times to have learned every word of it by heart before I found the courage to put it away.

I went to the minibar, poured two little bottles of scotch into a tall glass, and then returned to the bed, where I sat down with the résumé of the third and final part of Walker’s book.

Telegraphic. No complete sentences. From beginning to end, written like this. Goes to the store. Falls asleep. Lights a cigarette. In the third person this time. Third person, present tense, and therefore I decided to follow his lead and render his account in exactly that way-third person, present tense. As for the enclosed pages, do with them what you will. He had given me his permission, and I don’t feel that turning his encrypted, Morse-code jottings into full sentences constitutes a betrayal of any kind. Despite my editorial involvement with the text, in the deepest, truest sense of what it means to tell a story, every word of Fall was written by Walker himself.