almost mystical quality. Nineteen drawers of varying size, some below the desktop and some above, whose mundane occupations (stamps here, paper clips there) hid a far more complex design, the blueprint of the mind formed over tens of thousands of days of thinking while staring at them, as if they held the conclusion to a stubborn sentence, the culminating phrase, the radical break from everything I had ever written that would at last lead to the book I had always wanted, and always failed, to write. Those drawers represented a singular logic deeply embedded, a pattern of consciousness that could be articulated in no other way but their precise number and arrangement. Or am I making too much of it?
My chair was turned slightly away, waiting for me to return and swivel it back to attention. On such an evening I might have stayed up half the night working, writing and staring out at the blackness of the Hudson, as long as the energy and clarity lasted. There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet, no one toward whom I had to bend. Had the caller been almost anyone else, after hanging up I would have returned to the desk that over the course of two and a half decades I’d physically grown around, my posture formed by years of leaning over it and fitting myself to it.
For a moment I considered saying that I had given it away or thrown it out. Or simply telling the caller that she was mistaken: I’d never been in possession of her father’s desk. Her hope was tentative, she had offered me a way out—Do you still have it? She would have been disappointed, but I would have been taking nothing away from her, at least nothing that she had ever had. And I could have continued writing at the desk for another twenty-five or thirty years, or however long my mind stayed agile and the pressing need didn’t subside.
But instead, without pausing to consider the repercussions, I told her that, yes, I had it. I’ve looked back and wondered why I so quickly uttered those words that almost immediately derailed my life. And though the obvious answer is that it was the kind and even the right thing to do, Your Honor, I knew that wasn’t the reason I’d said it. I’ve wronged people I’ve loved far more gravely in the name of my work, and the person asking something of me now was a complete stranger. No, I agreed to it for the same reason I would have written it in a story: because saying yes felt inevitable.
I’d like to have it, she said. Of course, I answered, and, without pausing to give myself a moment to change my mind, asked her when she wanted to come for it. I’m only in New York for another week, she said. How about Saturday? That, I calculated, would leave me five more days with the desk. Fine, I said, though there couldn’t have been a greater discrepancy between the casual tone of my voice and the distraught feeling taking hold of me as I spoke. I have a few other pieces of furniture that belonged to your father, too. You can have them all.
Before she hung up, I asked her name. Leah, she said. Leah Varsky? No, she said, Weisz. And then, matter-of-factly she explained that her mother, who was Israeli, had lived in Santiago in the early seventies. She’d had a brief affair with Daniel around the time of the military coup, and soon afterwards had left the country. When her mother had found out that she was pregnant, she’d written to Daniel. She’d never heard back from him; he had already been arrested.
When, in the silence that followed, it became clear that we had run out of all the small manageable bits of the conversation, leaving only the pieces too unwieldy for such a phone call, I said, that, yes, I’d been holding on to the desk for a long time. I always thought someone would come for it one day, I told her, though of course I’d have tried to return it sooner had I known.
After she hung up I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. When I came back into the room—a living room I used as a study, because I had no need for a living room—I walked over and