Winter Journal by Paul Auster Page B

on an Esso oil tanker that shuttled among various refineries in the Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic coast—a job with decent pay, which you were hoping would finance a temporary move to Paris. Your girlfriend found someone to share the expense of the apartment with her during the months you were gone: a quick-tongued, sharp-witted young white woman who earned her living pretending to be a black D.J. for an all-black radio station—with great success, apparently, which you found deeply amusing, but how not to see it as one more symptom of the times, another example of the nuthouse logic that had taken over American reality? As for you and your girlfriend, the experiment in conjugal living had been something of a disappointment, and after you returned from your stint in the merchant marine and started preparing for the trip to Paris, you both decided that the romance had played itself out and that you would make the trip alone. One night about two weeks before your scheduled departure, your stomach rebelled against you, and the pains that shot into your gut were so severe, so agonizing in their assault, so unrelenting as you lay doubled up on the bed, you felt as if you had eaten a pot of barbed wire for dinner. The only plausible explanation was a ruptured appendix, which you figured would have to be operated on immediately. It was two o’clock in the morning. You staggered off to the emergency room at St. Luke’sHospital, waited in utmost misery for an hour or two, and then, when a doctor finally examined you, he confidently asserted that there was nothing wrong with your appendix. You were suffering from a bad attack of gastritis. Take these pills, he said, avoid hot and spicy foods, and little by little you’ll begin to feel better. Both his diagnosis and his prediction were correct, and it was only later, many years later, that you understood what had happened to you. You were afraid—but afraid without knowing you were afraid. The prospect of uprooting yourself had thrown you into a state of extreme but utterly suppressed anxiety; the thought of breaking up with your girlfriend was no doubt far more upsetting than you had imagined it would be. You wanted to go to Paris alone, but a part of you was terrified by such a drastic change, and so your stomach went haywire and began to rip you in two. This has been the story of your life. Whenever you come to a fork in the road, your body breaks down, for your body has always known what your mind doesn’t know, and however it chooses to break down, whether with mononucleosis or gastritis or panic attacks, your body has always borne the brunt of your fears and inner battles, taking the blows your mind cannot or will not stand up to.
    10. 3, rue Jacques Mawas; 15th Arrondissement, Paris. Still another two-room apartment with a sit-down kitchen, on the third floor of a six-story building. Age 24. Not long after you arrived in Paris (February 24, 1971), you began having second thoughts about the breakup with your girlfriend. Youwrote her a letter, asking if she had the courage to try to make another go of it, and when she said yes, your good-and-bad, off-and-on, up-and-down relations with her continued. She would be joining you in Paris in early April, and in the meantime you went out to look for a furnished apartment (the ship had paid well, but not well enough to allow you to buy furniture), and you soon found the place on the rue Jacques Mawas, which was clean, filled with light, not too expensive, and equipped with a piano. Since your girlfriend was an excellent and devoted pianist (Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven), you took the apartment on the spot, knowing how pleased she would be by this lucky turn. Not just Paris, but Paris with a piano. You moved in, and once you had taken care of the household fundamentals (bedding, pots and pans, dishes, towels, silverware), you arranged for someone to come and tune the out-of-tune piano, which had not been played in years.