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Within a week she’d found a place to live in a satellite town a few stops up the Hudson Line from Grand Central, an au pair’s suite that was really just a room above a garage, with a bathroom carved out of one corner and a kitchenette in another. She slept on a mattress on the floor and had a dresser that she’d purchased from Goodwill for $40, a card table that her landlord had given her, and a single chair that she’d found on the street on garbage day. It was enough. Within three weeks of Jonathan’s arrest, she’d found a job bartending in Chelsea. The hours weren’t enough, so she was also a kitchen trainee at a restaurant on the Lower East Side. She preferred the kitchen, because bartending is a performance. The public streams through your workplace and watches your every move. Every time she looked up and saw a new face at the bar, there was a moment of terror when she thought it was going to be an investor.
On the stage below the projection screen, Paul was in motion, making adjustments to dials, following the projection on his laptop, playing the keyboard at intervals. Vincent sensed movement to her right, and when she looked, the woman had fallen asleep, her head on her chest. Vincent rose and slipped out into the lobby, where the lights and the solid reality of marble and benches made her want to weep with relief, and fled outside into the winter air. She walked over the Manhattan Bridge and all the way up to Grand Central Terminal, trying to steady her thoughts. The idea came to her that she could sue him, but with what proof? He’d been in Caiette every summer and every second Christmas of her childhood. There was no way of proving that he hadn’t filmed the videos himself. And any legal action would be difficult or impossible to hide from Jonathan, for whom she was supposed to be a calm harbor, no drama, no friction. On the train back to Greenwich, she caught sight of her reflection in the window and closed her eyes. She’d started paying her own rent at seventeen. How had she become so dependent on another person? Of course the answer was depressingly obvious: she had slipped into dependency because dependency was easier.
“Not as often as I’d like. I took a couple art history classes in college,” he added, as if he had to justify his presence here. They parted ways after a brief volley of small talk—“I hope you’re coming to the party tonight?”—and it might have been unmemorable except that that was the first time she found herself dwelling on the limitations of her arrangement with Jonathan. She enjoyed being with Jonathan, for the most part, she didn’t mind it, but lately she’d found herself thinking that it might be nice to fall in love, or failing that, at least to sleep with someone she was actually attracted to and to whom she owed nothing. She hailed a taxi and traveled to Saks, where she spent some time under dazzling lights and emerged an hour later with a blue velvet dress and black patent leather shoes. There were still so many hours left in the day. Don’t think of Paul, probably in a studio somewhere composing new music to accompany her plundered work. She hailed another taxi and went downtown to the financial district, to linger for a while in a café that she’d always especially liked. She stayed in the Russian Café for two hours, drinking cappuccinos and reading the International Herald Tribune.
As he walked toward the subway, he even thought about how he’d spin it: “I realized there was fraud going on,” he imagined telling an admiring future employer, “and that was the day I walked out. I never would have imagined walking off a job like that, but sometimes you just have to draw the line.” Although the line, for Oskar, had been crossed eleven years earlier, when he’d first been asked to backdate a transaction. “It’s possible to both know and not know something,” he said later, under cross-examination, and the state tore him to pieces over this but he spoke for several of us, actually, several of us who’d been thinking a great deal about that doubleness, that knowing and not knowing, being honorable and not being honorable, knowing you’re not a good person but trying to be a good person regardless around the margins of the bad. We’d all die for the truth in our secret lives, or if not die exactly, then at least maybe make a couple of confidential phone calls and try to feign surprise when the authorities arrived, but in our actual lives we were being paid an exorbitant amount of money to keep our mouths shut, and you don’t have to be an entirely terrible person, we told ourselves later, to turn a blind eye to certain things—even actively participate in certain other things—when it’s not just you, because who among us is fully alone in the world? There are always other people in the picture. Our salaries and bonuses covered roofs over heads, crackers shaped like goldfish, tuition, retirement home expenses, the mortgage on Oskar’s mother’s apartment in Warsaw, etc.
didn't expect that leonard cohen reference <3
There’s something in it, he decides later, standing in line for dinner. It’s possible to know you’re a criminal, a liar, a man of weak moral character, and yet not know it, in the sense of feeling that your punishment is somehow undeserved, that despite the cold facts you’re deserving of warmth and some kind of special treatment. You can know that you’re guilty of an enormous crime, that you stole an immense amount of money from multiple people and that this caused destitution for some of them and suicide for others, you can know all of this and yet still somehow feel you’ve been wronged when your judgment arrives.
[...] once of the reasons I wrote the novel was that I felt there are blank spaces where novels ought to be, particularly in nineteenth-century literature. For instance, I would like to read novels that give the taste and flavour of the Chartists, and their personal lives, their discussions, their conflicts, and perhaps, the small revolutionary groups that flourished in London in the nineteenth century, most of them dedicated to fomenting revolution in Europe. I think The Golden Notebook is a useful testament to its time, particularly now that communism is dead or dying everywhere, or changing its nature. Nothing seems more improbable than what people believed when this belief has gone with the wind. Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
I was so immersed in writing this book, that I didn't think about how it might be received. I was involved not merely because it was hard to write -- keeping the plan of it in my head I wrote it from start to end, consecutively, and it was difficult -- but because of what I was learning as I wrote. Perhaps giving oneself a tight structure, making limitations for oneself, squeezes out new substance where you least expect it. All sorts of ideas and experiences I didn't recognize as mine emerged when writing. The actual time of writing, then, and not only the experiences that had gone into the writing, was really traumatic: it changed me. [...]
The theme of "the artist" had to relate to another, subjectivity. When I began writing there was pressure on writers not to be "subjective." This pressure began inside communist movements, as a development of the social literary criticism developed in Russia [...] It spread fast eerywhere, finding an echo as late as the Fifties, in this country, with the theme of "commitment." It is still potent in communist countries. "Bothering about your stupid personal concerns when Rome is burning" is how it tends to get itself expressed, on the level of ordinary life -- and was hard to withstand, coming from one's nearest and dearest, and from people doing everything one respected most: like, for instance, trying to fight colour prejudice in Southern Africa. Yet all the time novels, stories, art of every sort, became more and more personal. [...]
[...] At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about "petty personal problems" was to recognise that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions -- and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas -- can't be yours alone. The way to deal with the problem of "subjectivity," that shocking business of being preoccupied with the tiny individual who is at the same time caught up in such an explosion of terrible marvellous possibilities, is to see him as a microcosm and in this way to break through the personal, the subjective, making the personal general, as indeed life always does, transforming a private experience [...] into something much larger: growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.
[...] The history of these two was as follows: They had met in 1935. Molly was deeply involved with the cause of Republican Spain. Richard was also. (But, as Molly would remark, on those occasions when he spoke of this as a regrettable lapse into political exoticism on his part: Who wasn't in those days?) [...]
lol