A Plea for Eros

to see my books, my typewriter, my bed. And yet it was a time of dancing, too, of late nights and sporadic, short-lived passions I pursued on my own terms. My own aggression pleased me. But I wanted K., perhaps because he wanted me only fitfully, because he was elusive. I fell into and then got caught in the repetitive machinery of perverse desire—happiness and pain at regular, then predictable intervals, the cycles of an idiot in love—and finally, after many months of motion, the engine ground to a halt. I didn’t want it anymore.
    February 23, 1981. I am leaving the reading with J., and we pause in the lobby of the 92nd Street Y to talk about the poems we have just heard. From where I am standing I notice a beautiful man in front of the door. He has a slender face, enormous eyes, and a small, delicate mouth. His hair is nearly black, and his skin is pale brown. He is smoking a little cigar, and he hunches over in his leather jacket and blue jeans as he brings the reed of tobacco to his lips. I notice that his feet are rather large, and I like these big feet, too. In seconds, I have taken in the whole of him and feel woozy with attraction. I can’t remember if J. sees me ogling and tells me that he knows the man or if I ask him if he has any idea who that person is. “That’s Paul Auster,” he says, “the poet.” We are introduced, and then the three of us head downtown in a taxi. In the backseat, Paul tells me about George Oppen, the poet he has just visited in California. I like his voice, and I like the warmth, the tenderness, I hear in it when he speaks of “George.” I didn’t think it then, but now I wonder if I wasn’t hearing something familiar. My father had that when he was alive. He was alive then. My father’s voice changed inflection when he spoke about someone he loved. In the taxi, I am already in love, crazed, enthralled, smitten, and am trying to hide it. The man beside me is not. I can see it in his shrouded, thoughtful eyes. I don’t let hint go. At the party, I talk only to him. We eat. We talk. We walk in the streets and talk. We sit in a bar and talk. The beautiful eyes are gaining focus. He is looking at me, listening to me. I can tell that he likes me.
    It is early in the morning and we are standing on West Broadway together in the street. I am standing very close to him, looking into his face, but now, after hours and hours of talk, I have nothing to say. It is late. The evening is over, and I will go home and think about him. Then he kisses me, and it’s the best kiss in the world. A cab pulls up and we climb in together.
    Not long after that, I read his poems, his essays, and finally the first half of
The Invention of Solitude,
“Portrait of an Invisible Man.” There were many books inside me by then, and yet these jolted me with their originality. I met the man before I read what he had written, but if I had not loved his work as I did or if he had not admired my writing, it would have changed things. Our work has been an intimate part of our love affair and marriage for twenty-three years, but what I read wasn’t then and isn’t now what I
know
when I’m with him. His work comes from the place in him I can’t know.
    “When I get stuck,” Professor S. said to me, “I do automatic writing like the Surrealists. Try it.” S. was one of my professors at Columbia and a poet I admired. I was stuck. I had written many poems since I arrived in New York two years earlier but had rejected most of them as derivative or just weak. When I finally produced a poem I liked, I sent it out to
The Paris Review,
and to my astonishment, the poem was accepted and published. And yet, by the time I spoke to S., my work had begun to harden with self-consciousness, as though some inexorable pressure were bearing down on it. I hated my own words. That night I took S.’s advice and sat down at my blue typewriter in my apartment on 109th Street and wrote freely, and as I wrote I remembered what I had forgotten. I remembered the yellow paper my father gave his girls when he took us to the Historical Association, where he would work at his desk as we drew on the floor. Family stories came back to me—the bits and pieces of the life I had left. I noticed patterns, repetitions—a form emerged that I could never have invented beforehand. Something had broken in me, and I was writing like a person possessed. By the time I went to sleep, I had poured out thirty pages. For three months I edited