Slow Man
by J.M. Coetzee
That Troublesome Costello Woman...
Ah, finished! The book's ending caught me unawares. Though I'd checked several times I'd somehow misremembered the page count. I thought it was 487 pages long; it was 467. I reread the last paragraph again with my new awareness that it was the last paragragh. Then I shut the book once and for all with a satisfying thunk.
I looked up to stare off meditatively into space as I often do after finishing a book and found myself staring into the bland face of an otherwise nondescript elderly woman. When had she taken a seat at my table? I hadn't noticed her arrival. I didn't think I'd been that absorbed in my reading. Whoever she was, she was smiling at me pleasantly. She nodded towards my book.
"I couldn't help but notice you've finished your book."
"Yes," I said, in a measured tone. In Brooklyn, strangers who sit down at your table uninvited are to be treated carefully. Like potential bombs with tricky wiring.
"That means you'll be looking for something new to read. Can I make a suggestion?"
I had the second half of a chocolate chip bagel before me and a cup of coffee. I wanted nothing more than to get back to it, and to my own private thoughts.
"Sure, why not?"
"J.M. Coetzee. Have you read him?"
"No, can't say I have."
I was familiar with the name, of course. I had the vague notion that he was a South African writer, that he wrote a lot about apartheid, a subject that, though I could understand why people would want to read and write about it, didn't interest me very much. Apartheid was a bad thing, totally reprehensible. I was glad it was over. But reading novels about it...meh.
"Then you must do so immediately. Wonderful writer. Won a Nobel Prize, though that's not why I suggest him. He'd be a wonderful writer regardless."
"He's pretty political, isn't he?" I said, just to be saying something.
"Oh in some novels yes. But not always. You aren't political? Very well. Try Slow Man. That is not a political novel at all. Or, rather, only in the most oblique ways."
"J.M. Coetzee. Slow Man. Okay. Thanks. Maybe I'll check him out."
"Oh you should. You really should. You must. You'll love him."
I had no intention of checking out J.M. Coetzee or his novel No Man, or whatever the title was. I just wanted to finish my bagel. And my coffee, which was getting colder.
Sip.
Correction: already cold.
***
Two days later I was sitting on a park bench looking out at the tankers moving imperceptibly over the river towards Manhattan. On my left was the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. On the path before me joggers, brisk walkers, and the occasional cyclist zipping past, hunched over antlered handlebars. It was one of those early spring days that people want so badly to believe is warmer than it really is. I had in my lap The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, which I'd just borrowed the day before from the Kings Highway Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. I'd just finished a short essay by Annie Dillard about weasels.
"Why hello again," came a voice startlingly close to my right ear that I nearly jumped out of my boots. "Sorry if I startled you."
It was the elderly woman from the bagel shop. I forced myself to take a better look at her this time in case I had to describe her to the police. In the end, though, if it came to that, I would have been at a loss to do better than my first impression. If anything, she was somewhat older than I first estimated. Maybe as old as seventy. On the plump side. Clothes rather out-of-date, as you might expect. Bit of a scattered air. She might have been a retired academic or just a dotty old woman with a valise full of fantasies and dreams.
"I see you have another book."
"Do I know you?"
"We met at the bagel shop."
"Yes, I remember. That's not what I meant."
"No, you don't know me. But I feel that I know you." I didn't ask how. I was convinced now that she was a nut. Probably a harmless nut, but I'd stay on my guard, watchful for the emergence of the knitting needle intended to take out my eye. "My name is Elizabeth Costello."
"I see. Well, it's nice to meet you again, Ms. Costello."
"Elizabeth."
"Yes, Elizabeth."
"I see you've got another book." I looked down guiltily into my lap. "Not the Coetzee, though."
"No," I shrugged. "Not the Coetzee, not yet."
"You really should read the Coetzee I recommended. If you haven't read him before, you're in for a real treat. Slow Man."
I felt a passing irritation that momentarily overshadowed my cautious fear of the strange old woman. "He's lucky to have such a loyal fan pitching his books, this Coetzee."
"Oh I'm more than a fan."
"What then. His editor? His publisher?"
"I'm a fellow writer who appears in his books from time to time. In fact, he's written a whole book about me."
The moment was over, the irritation had completely passed, and the fear reemerged from behind the shadow.
"You might say I'm kind of symbolic of his muse, or his writing self. Hard to say, exactly. It's all rather metafictional, postmodern, for want of a better term. But judging from what I know of your past reading, I don't think you will object to the device."
I wanted to ask what she knew about my past reading and how. Was she a librarian at one of the many Brooklyn Public library branches I visited? I let it pass.
"Not to fear though. In the event that you find me irritating, rest assured that I play only a supporting role in Slow Man. The star of the book is a man named Paul Rayment. He's a lonely man of sixty. Though he wouldn't call himself lonely, at least not at the start of the novel. He's settled in his ways. A bachelor. A recluse. Curmudgeonly. In these regards, he's reputed to be a lot like J.M Coetzee himself. Rayment is a retired portrait photographer, but, as he himself is quick to point out, he was never an artist. He describes himself, somewhat self-disparagingly, as a technician. Married once, no children, which he regrets. As a hobby, he collects vintage photographs as a hobby. His other main passion is riding his bicycle. It's also a passion with Coetzee, this bicycling. One day, out of for a ride, Paul is struck by a car. He saves his head but his leg is destroyed. He wakes up in hospital where he is told they will have to amputate. They amputate. Now he is a man hobbled. A man facing the sunset of his life on one leg. He falls in love with the Croatian nurse who comes to care for him. But she's married, with children of her own. What to do? I know what you're thinking."
"What am I thinking?"
"You're thinking it all sounds pretty predictable. Man loses leg, loses hope, loses will to live. Learns to adapt, learns to love, regains the will to go on."
Now I'm thinking how does she know what I'm thinking? But I guess it wouldn't have been hard to guess.
"It's not what you're thinking, though. Paul does come to these realizations but not in the way you might imagine. He does fall in love, but with a woman who doesn't love him. He acquires children, but not in the usual way. He gets back on a bicycle, but it's not one he will choose to ride. He will go on, still hobbled, still hopeless, if by hope you mean a belief that his dreams will come true. Think Samuel Beckett. His famous lines 'I must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.' That's Paul Rayment at the end of Slow Man. And I'm in the book, a thorn in his side, a burr under his saddle. I spur him forward. You'll see. When you read it. Tell me you'll read it."
"I'll read it."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
***
But I didn't read it. I had no intention of reading it and her insistence that I read J.M. Coetzee only cemented my resolve to never read him. I picked up--and in some cases put back down--novels by V.S. Naipul, Patrick McGrath, Jeanette Winterson, and Elizabeth Hardwick. I was willing to read practically anyone, even, god help me, William T. Vollman, anyone but J.M. Coetzee.
That wasn't the end of the story, though. Nor the end of Elizabeth Costello. Over the next two weeks she seemed to pop up everywhere. At the Key Food, she surprised me evaluating cauliflowers in the produce section. At the laundromat she hailed me as I was folding up my intimate apparel. We ran into each other on the sidewalk outside my electrolysist's office. She was standing in line behind me at the post office. She even looked up from a magazine in my doctor's crowded waiting room. The last straw was when I came home one afternoon from a blissful Elizabeth Costello-free walk and found the woman in my apartment.
I lost my temper. My voice rose to something like a sub-shriek. "This is really unacceptable. You've gone too far this time. I'm calling the super."
"Oh it isn't his fault. Please don't be upset, but he's the one who let me in."
I didn't know whether to believe her or not. Could she have broken into my apartment? This bland, bosomy, blowsy old lady? My threat to seek out the super was mostly bluff. I didn't even know in which apartment I could find the super. I always considered it good policy to keep as low a profile as possible where building supers are concerned.
"He let you in?" I said, faking incredulity. How should I know what the man might or might not do.
"Yes, I explained the situation and convinced him it would be okay."
"You explained the situation?" I eyed her coldly. "And what situation would that be?"
She was feeling unwell. She'd been visiting the city on some academic business and that business was now completed. She was just about to return to Melbourne when she met me. Wasn't that fortunate? She knew no one else in the city. She had nowhere else to stay. She'd checked out of the hotel where she'd been and hadn't a reservation for another. Money was a "tad tight" at the moment. Could she stay with me, just until she felt well enough to travel? She promised not to get in my way. Why, I wouldn't even know that she was there. That, in a nutshell, was the "situation." By the way, had I read the Coetzee yet?
***
Funny, though it seemed the obvious solution, I didn't seriously consider reading J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man. Call me stubborn. I prefer to think of it as standing by my principles. I resist coercion with every fiber of my being. Instead of capitulating to her demands and reading Coetzee, I set my mind to work.
By the end of the month, I had devised a plan for evicting Elizabeth Costello from my apartment and my life.
***
All along I suspected her of spying on me. How else could she know so much about me? Perhaps she was an identity thief? Had she hacked into my email account? She didn't look any more like a computer
hacker than a break-in artist but who really knew for sure? What does an identity thief look like anyway? She said her name was Elizabeth Costello but that was apparently a character who appeared in a book by J.M. Coetzee. Perhaps she stole this Costello woman's identity...
Wandering down these intellectual halls-of-mirrors would get me nowhere. The fact was I was certain that when I left the apartment the old woman was snooping through my papers, reading my notebooks and diaries, checking out the files on my computer. It would be pointless to accuse her; next to pointless to try to deter her.
So I did the next logical thing. I started writing a story in which a character named Elizabeth Costello appears and left it hidden badly where she would certainly "discover" it.
***
She met me at the door, shaking the pages in her fist. She moved with considerable speed and threat for a woman of her age, and thickness, her presumed infirmities. "No, no, no, no, no! This is no good. This is completely unacceptable!"
I had set the trap and she had taken taken the bait. I stared at her blankly, innocent-eyed, a newly borrowed volume of short stories by Haruki Murakami under my arm of which she could hardly fail to take notice. I almost feared that with this last touch I had gone too far. She was shaking, apoplectic, verging on the apocalyptic. But I had her on the run and I couldn't let up now.
"Why, whatever are you talking about Ms. Costello?"
"You know very well what I'm talking about. This!" She raised the papers above her head. "This awful gibberish!"
Of course I knew all along what she was talking about. The short story I was writing, or pretending to write, in which she appeared as an antagonist.
"You can't use me like this," she said. You have no right."
"Why not? J.M. Coetzee does."
"That's different."
"Is it really? How so? You're a figment of his imagination and now you're a figment of mine. In fact, you've taken up residence in my apartment. I have a right to make you part of my story. You're part of my life. If you belong to J.M. Coetzee go live with him. Eat up all his Cheez-Doodles."
"No. It doesn't work like that. I'm subject to copyright laws. I'm not in the public domain."
"Ah, but Ms. Costello, I beg to differ. You are indeed in the public domain. You're in the library, the supermarket, the bagel shop, the dentist's office. You're wherever fine books are sold."
"Don't try and confuse the issue with all these post-modern metafictional word games. I'm a tired old woman with a tetchy heart and bad feet. I haven't the time. Are you going to read J.M. Coetzee or not?"
She was still defiant, still adamant. But I could see that she was faltering fast. I felt sorry for her because, yes, on one level, she was, just as she'd said, a tired old woman with a tetchy heart and bad feet. Then again, she would be here long after the rest of us were dead and dust. She was a kind of psychic vampire, living in the imaginations of others. I had to exorcise her from my life once and for all. I had to drive the stake home while I had the chance.
"Speaking of J.M. Coetzee...does he even know you're here? For that matter how do I know that it isn't you who have made off with Elizabeth Costello's identity? That you aren't pulling some kind of scam by pretending to be her? Or, please forgive me for suggesting it, that you may be a little bit off your rocker? And, finally, no, I'm sorry. I'm not going to read J.M. Coetzee. This whole affair has given me all the taste of him that I can stomach. Thank you very much."
I could see that I had won if winning was to banish Elizabeth Costello from my life. She dropped the fist with the bunched up papers to her side. Her fleshy shoulders sagged inside her threadbare housecoat. "I'll leave in the morning," she said. "But I warn you. If this sees publication and, frankly, I hardly see how it can, there will be repercussions. Mr. Coetzee, recluse though he is, does not take kindly to plagiarism, regardless of his metafictional stance toward reality."
And, true to her word, she packed that night and, first thing in the morning, a cab pulled up to the curb to take her to the airport and back to Melbourne, or wherever it was she came from.
***
The days passed. Then the weeks. At first I could not get myself to believe that she was really gone--and gone for good. In the park, in the library, standing in line for my morning bagel and coffee I found myself half-expecting to see her lumbering, all-too-familiar shape emerge from the anonymous crowd faking surprise as if we'd come upon each other by chance alone. I found myself inwardly flinching at every louder than average voice, waiting for her intrusive greeting, the question ever-present on her tongue, "Have you read the Coetzee yet?"
But the Costello woman was gone. Truly and forever. I'd succeeded in driving her off. It took me some time to accept the fact. And, strange to say, it didn't leave me without some regret.
It wasn't until nearly eight months later that I received the package in the post. A book, obviously, from its size and shape. Nothing unusual in that. I buy a lot of books, used, on Amazon, when I'm not borrowing them from the library. This one, though, judging from the stamps and postmark, had come from Australia. There was no return address.
Yes, it's not hard to guess what was inside.
I leafed the pages but no note fell out. There was no card or letter. I turned to the title page. Nothing written there either. It wasn't signed or dedicated.
I considered it for a moment or two. I hated to admit it, and feared to admit it, too, but I almost missed Elizabeth Costello, still do. I considered the book for a moment, maybe two. Then I slid it, unread, on my bookshelf and started Renata Adler's Speedboat instead.
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