Leviathan by Paul Auster

she had talked him into renting me his spare room for only fifty dollars a month—which was the absolute limit of what I could afford. It was located directly across the hall from his loft (which was occupied by other tenants), and until I moved in, it had served as a kind of enormous storage closet. All manner of junk and debris was stashed away in there: broken bicycles, abandoned paintings, an old washing machine, empty cans of turpentine, newspapers, magazines, and innumerable fragments of copper wire. I shoved these things to one side of the room, which left me half the space to live in, but after a short period of adjustment, that proved to be large enough. My only household possessions that year were a mattress, a small table, two chairs, a hotplate, a smattering of kitchen utensils, and a single carton of books. It was basic, no-nonsense survival, but the truth is that I was happy in that room. As Sachs put it the first time he came to visit me, it was a sanctuary of inwardness, a room in which the only possible activity was thought. There was a sink and a toilet, but no bath, and the wooden floor was in such poor condition that it gave me splinters whenever I walked on it with bare feet. But I started working on my novel again in that room, and little by little my luck changed. A month after I moved in, I won a grant of ten thousand dollars. The application had been sent in so long before, I had completely forgotten that I was a candidate. Then, just two weeks after that, I won a second grant of seven thousand dollars, which had been applied for in the same flurry of desperation as the first. All of a sudden, miracles had become a common occurrence in my life. I handed over half the money to Delia,and still there was enough to keep me going in a state of relative splendor. Every week, I would shuttle up to the country to spend a day or two with David, sleeping at a neighbor’s house down the road. This arrangement lasted for roughly nine months, and when Delia and I finally sold our house the following September, she moved to an apartment in South Brooklyn, and I was able to see David for longer stretches at a time. We both had lawyers by then, and our divorce was already in the works.
    Fanny and Ben took an active interest in my new career as a single man. To the degree that I talked to anyone about what I was up to, they were my confidants, the ones I kept abreast of my comings and goings. They had both been upset by the breakup with Delia, but less so Fanny than Ben, I think, although she was the one who worried more about David, zeroing in on that aspect of the problem once she understood that Delia and I had no chance of getting back together. Sachs, on the other hand, did everything he could to talk me into giving it another try. That went on for several weeks, but once I moved back to the city and settled into my new life, he stopped belaboring the point. Delia and I had never let our differences show in public, and our separation came as a shock to most of the people we knew, particularly to close friends like Sachs. Fanny, however, seemed to have had her suspicions all along. When I announced the news in their apartment on the first night I spent away from Delia, she paused for a moment at the end of my story and then said, “It’s a hard thing to swallow, Peter, but in some ways it’s probably for the best. As time goes on, I think you’re going to be much happier.”
    They gave a lot of dinner parties that year, and I was invited to nearly all of them. Fanny and Ben knew an astounding number of people, and at one time or another it seemed that half of New York wound up sitting at the large oval table in their dining room. Artists, writers, professors, critics, editors, gallery owners—they alltramped out to Brooklyn and gorged themselves on Fanny’s food, drinking and talking well into the night. Sachs was always the master of ceremonies, an effusive maniac who kept conversations humming along with