Free Leviathan by Paul Auster

were dead-set against becoming parents. Years later, I discovered that just the opposite was true. They had desperately wanted to have children, but Fanny was unable to conceive. After numerous attempts to get her pregnant, they had consulted doctors, had tried fertility drugs, had gone through any number of herbal remedies, but nothing had helped. Just days before that dinner in 1975, they had been given definitive word that nothing they did would ever help. It was a crushing blow to Fanny. As she later confessed to me, it was her worst sorrow, a loss she would go on mourning for the rest of her life. Rather than make her talk about it in front of me that evening, Sachs had boiled up a concoction of spontaneous lies, a kettle of steam and hot air to obscure the issue on the table. I heard only a fragment of what he actually said, but that was because I thought he was addressing his remarks to me. As I later understood, he had been talking to Fanny all along. He was telling her that she didn’t have to give him a child to make him go on loving her.
    I saw Ben more often than I saw Fanny, and the times when I did see her Ben was always there, but little by little we managed to form a friendship on our own. In some ways, my old infatuation made this closeness seem inevitable, but it also stood as a barrier between us, and several months went by before I was able to look at her without feeling embarrassed. Fanny was an ancient daydream, a phantom of secret desire buried in my past, and now that she had unexpectedly materialized in a new role—as flesh-and-blood woman, as wife of my friend—I admit that I was thrown off balance. It led me to say some stupid things when I first met her, and these blunders only compounded my sense of guilt and confusion. During one of the early evenings I spent at their apartment, I even told her that I hadn’t listened to a single word in the class we had taken together. “Every week, I would spend the whole hour staring at you,” I said. “Practice is more important than theory, after all, and I figured why waste my time listening to lectures on aesthetics when the beautiful was sitting there right in front of me.”
    It was an attempt to apologize for my past behavior, I think, but it came out sounding awful. Such things should never be said under any circumstances, least of all in a flippant tone of voice. They put a terrible burden on the person they’re addressed to, and no good can possibly come of them. The moment I spoke those words, I could see that Fanny was startled by my bluntness. “Yes,” she said, forcing a little smile, “I remember that class. It was pretty dry stuff.”
    “Men are monsters,” I said, unable to stop myself. “They have ants in their pants, and their heads are crammed with filth. Especially when they’re young.”
    “Not filth,” Fanny said. “Just hormones.”
    “Those too. But sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.”
    “You always wore an earnest look on your face,” she said. “I remember thinking that you must have been a very serious person.One of those young men who was either going to kill himself or change the world.”
    “So far, I haven’t done either. I guess that means I’ve given up my old ambitions.”
    “And a good thing, too. You don’t want to get stuck in the past. Life is too interesting for that.”
    In her own cryptic way, Fanny was letting me off the hook—and also giving me a warning. As long as I behaved myself, she wouldn’t hold my past sins against me. It made me feel as though I were on trial, but the fact was that she had every reason to be wary of her husband’s new friend, and I don’t blame her for keeping me at a distance. As we got to know each other better, the awkwardness began to fade. Among other things, we discovered that we had the same birthday, and though neither one of us had any use for astrology, the coincidence helped to form a link between us. That Fanny was a year older than I was