A Round-Heeled Woman (23 page)

By the spring of 2000 I had a lot to transcend. On May 3 we offered up ourselves and Bach's music to an audience. The next day I left for New York.

When I was not practicing my Alto II part for the B Minor Mass—and yes, I practiced a lot—I was preparing my students in prison for their final exam. I was inviting people to come for the last night of class, when the men would tell their stories. I did not, I could not, anticipate anything so dramatic as Frederick leading us in “Eensy Beensy Spider,” so I did not expect this night to equal our best final night ever, three years earlier, when Randy had told his story. On that night, from his seat in our Circle of Kings plus One, Randy transformed us all with the music of his voice and the power of his words as he told the story of his life. Like the B Minor Mass, Randy Wethers and his story were another transcendent experience.

RANDY WAS THEN forty-six years old. He had spent thirty-two of those years in prison. He was of medium height with the body of a man who has worked out: strong, muscled, compact. Randy was scheduled for release on the Saturday following our last class, though early that week the prison accused him and his cellie of trying to start a new religion and tossed the cellie into the Hole. Randy was the last to tell his story. He did not need notes; his memory served him—and us—well. “They tell you to tell the story of what you know best. So I will tell the story of my life.” Randy was a basso profundo, and his voice rolled over us like the River Jordan.

“When I was two, I saw my mother stab my father forty-two times. I went to live with my father's mother, my grandmother. All the rooms in her house except three were locked. In the room where she sometimes sent me, there were clothes piled all over the floor, and a picture of Jesus on the wall that glowed in the dark and his eyes followed you wherever you went. My grandmother told me over and over my mother was a murderess and that one day she would come and get me. When I was seven, she did. She took me away on the Trailways bus, and I don't know why people complain about sitting in the back of the bus; the seat was big and wide and the view out back was better than the view in the front.” Randy's voice was calm, soothing, the voice of a man in control of himself, his life, and his audience.

“My mother took me to New York City, where she entertained her visitors in the bed next to mine. Sometimes, she gave me a dollar. The subway was fifteen cents, and I had a whole dollar. I discovered Coney Island. I loved Coney Island. I listened and learned and looked, so when my dollar ran out I knew how to get more.

“As I grew older, no one knew what to do with me, I was so wild. So they put me in Creedmore State Hospital. By the time I was eighteen, I had been in and out of every jail, every court, every juvenile facility in New York City and beyond. I hated my mother. It took me a long time to appreciate what she done for me. She had fed me, clothed me, she never did drugs, and the visitors she entertained were always on the other side of the curtain. She taught me this: ‘Always remember, to every reality there is a shadow. Just because you see a woman standing at a bus stop don't mean she's waiting for a bus. Eyes closed don't mean sleep. Good-bye don't mean gone.' ”

He looked around the circle at each and every one of us and said, “Pray for me on Saturday.” Every one of us, believers and not, bowed our heads.

Word has it that Randy was released but that he is not gone. He returns to San Quentin regularly to visit his son, an inmate.

NEW YORK WILL HAVE to be very good to me to compete with that. But whaddya know, on my arrival, the marquee over Carnegie Hall announces the performance of Bach's Mass in B Minor by the New York Choral Society. Of course, I go. So
that's
how it's supposed to sound. It is magnificent.

Creedmoor State Hospital, where Randy spent his adolescence, is in Queens. I sometimes think I should pay my respects, but Queens and Creedmoor seem very far away and, at the same time, not far enough.

SEVENTEEN

Hard Candy

But then, perhaps you live in Tupelo and have a wasting disease.

—JOHN

May is the most wonderful month New York offers. Go there. The weather is fine, the people are happy to breathe the last of winter, the cops are on horseback, ducks swim in Central Park, all is right with the world, and the world in all its rightness is New York City. It is possible to feed oneself for very little money from the sidewalk stands in New York: a hot dog for $1.50; a bag of warm nuts, $1.00. In San Francisco, a hot dog from a sidewalk vendor costs $3.75. Of course, in San Francisco one can choose from an array of Aidells gourmet sausages: apple chicken, basil tomato, cilantro spicy. The bun is big and crisp but not too, the stuff one can put on it endless: onions, ketchup, mustard, chiles, sauerkraut, tomatoes, relish, pickles, cheese. A San Francisco hot dog is a dining experience. I like New York hot dogs: a wiener slapped into a steamed bun, maybe some mustard, maybe some sauerkraut, often nothing. It feeds the stomach. And sometimes, the vendor who sells it to you feeds the soul.

In January, on my first visit to New York, on Broadway and Sixty-eighth I had my first knish. The vendor was a small, old, older than I, bent-over woman. She smiled up at me. “One hot dog, please,” I said. She paused, looking at my red nose and watering eyes. “I think you want knish,” she said.

“I never had a knish,” I said. I stamped my feet in the bitter cold.

“I thought so. I make this one for you.” She took the sort-of patty made from, she tells me, potato, deep-fried, and split it at one end. “You like onions?” she asked. I nodded. She tucked some fried onions inside. “You like mustard?” I nodded. “You like applesauce?” Yes, but with mustard? Oh, okay. “This Jewish food, good Jewish food,” she said, and handed me my first knish. It was delicious, utterly delicious. “I thought so,” she said. “You look like you could use good Jewish food.” She put out her hand for the $1.50. I handed her $5.00. “That's fine,” I said, “thank you for my first and very wonderful knish.” The woman beamed, well, of course she beamed, and I beamed back. Lots of people in New York beam at me, well, almost beam, as beaming as New Yorkers ever get, which is hardly at all. It is, I suspect, because I beam first and I tip big. Cabdrivers line up for me. Doormen race to hold doors for me. Porters vie with each other to carry my bags. I am happy in this city.

But, my god, I was just here in March! One month at home and back I come again. Three reasons: 1. Sidney has got the tickets to
Wonderful Town;
2. I have yet to meet John, the New England John whose letters and phone calls intrigued me, that is, his language on paper and over the telephone is extraordinary: formal, sort of, syntactically varied—a varied syntax sends shivers up and down my spine—interested in me, always a seductive tactic against which I am hopeless; and 3. there is Graham, whose letters have gotten even more interesting since his first in December, whose luncheon invitations in January and March I accepted with increasing pleasure. Of course, I view Graham, years younger than I, as a sort of adjunct to all this, not notably significant, just someone to amuse me, to make me jittery and dry-mouthed, that sort of amusement. I haven't had hot flashes in fifteen years; those lunches saw their return because from across the table Graham looked at me funny, like he didn't want me just to talk to; it was a sort of priapic look, if you know what I mean, and I couldn't believe it either. However, that sort of thing does pique one's interest.

This visit, finally, I have done something smart. I have accepted my niece's invitation to stay with her in her Midtown apartment. Caroline is who I would have been if I had gotten to choose era, personality, looks, intelligence. She is thirty-three. She likes me. She is self-supporting, funny, independent, well educated, well traveled, well read, and well dressed. She thinks these adventures of mine are a hoot, well, I'm not sure of that, but she finds them interesting. On my two previous visits to her city we have met for a drink or brunch; one evening, we go to Arthur's, our favorite bar in the Village, old, real, too scuzzy for most of Caroline's friends. Over a beer, Caroline says, “Men lie, you know.”

“They do? More than women?” I ask. I am enrapt and completely trusting in Caroline's insights, the insularity of my history having limited the scope of my own insights. Earlier in the evening, I told Caroline of Sidney's admiring words, his instant appreciation of me. So now I am listening especially carefully.

“Yes, I think they do. Well, they don't think they lie. When they say it, they believe it.”

I nod, seems true enough.

“But somewhere down the line they forget they said it. Or they admit they said it but have changed their minds.” She looks more intently at me. “You might be wary of Sidney's flattery.” Suddenly, I feel very young and very foolish. But then, she might be wrong; after all, in January she met Robert and pronounced him a very nice man.

For as long as she has lived in New York, Caroline has said, “If you ever need a place to stay . . .” Now I do. And it will work out: I will be in New England for part of the time, she will be in Asia part of the time, so I won't bother her, won't invade her space or her privacy, won't disgrace myself in her eyes. Of course I won't.

BUT I HAVE MILES to go before I sleep. I am bound to meet John. In his letters and phone calls, he has made three things clear: 1. he has no funds to travel; 2. he has a long-standing relationship with a woman with whom he does not live save on the weekends, so I am not to phone then; and 3. he would enjoy meeting me. Why am I driving a rental car from the airport to this little no-account town somewhere in New England? Why didn't I stay in New York?

His letters, for one. In November: “A visit when mutually agreeable conditions prevail is very much to be hoped for.” Don't you love the passive voice when it's used right? Then, in December: “If you were here, I would feed you well, take you sightseeing, and encourage you to have multiple orgasms.” I call the airlines. In January: “If you come all the way from California, it is incumbent on me to accept in advance, without protest or rancor, that you may or may not fancy me.” This is one elegant writer. “May,” I write back. “I will be there in May.”

Until then, John, who abjures television, automatic transmissions, and the computer, does answer his telephone. It is John I call in time of need, as when, this very month, Sidney got weird. “Is it normal,” I ask John, teary-voiced, “not to want to kiss?” I am confused, not for the first time; I don't know, maybe lots of people don't like kissing, but I don't think so. The only thing I can think of from all my book learning is that prostitutes don't allow kissing; does that mean Sidney wants me to be a prostitute? I don't know; he simply will not tell me, he won't talk to me about this, he drives me nuts! On the other hand, he seems very much to like me and to appreciate the pleasure I give him. He tells me I am smart and sexy, and then, “There are so many endearing things about you,” he says. In the conference room of his office, we have made love, I think, though with no kissing I can't be sure, and I tell him I am off to New England tomorrow to meet John. “I will miss you,” Sidney says. I tell him, “I will leave my earrings and combs all over your office so you will find pieces of me when I am gone.” He smiles and says, “I already have a piece of you.” He has, too. I smooth his trousers, scratch at a spot on his tie, rub my fingers over the shoulder of his jacket, touch his nubby vest, the silk of his shirt, and listen while he tells me about the horrors that would arise from a Bush presidency (every one of which comes to pass). In the elevator, coming down from the twenty-fifth floor, I take his face in my hands and say, “Hold still.” I kiss him on his beautiful mouth and say, “I have wanted to do that ever since I first saw you.” He is as immobile as he is delicious. He pulls me close and growls into my ear, “You are adorable.”

So what's so compelling about John? John has said, in response to my telephone blubbering over Sidney's nonkissing, “You know, Jane, you don't have to be sensual all of the time. Go to the Whitney.” It seemed to me the best advice anyone had ever given me; my head cleared and my shoulders relaxed. Next day, I went to the Whitney. There every piece of sculpture was phallic or vaginal or both. I had never seen so many sensual constructions in my life: what wasn't erect was cavernous; what didn't stick out sucked in. That night I called John. He laughed and said, “I guess the first thing I'll have to do when I meet you is kiss you.” Okay. “Watch for me by moonlight;/I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!” I didn't actually say Noyes's words out loud. What I said was, “Noon, Tuesday.”

There's something else irresistible about John. In a late-night phone conversation—he seems to have ample funds for phone conversations—he jokes about stealing books from the library. I am aghast, of course, and then curious: “What books would you steal if you actually did, which you actually wouldn't.” And John says this surprising thing: “There's a small volume by Margaret Fuller I have always longed for.”

I'd go thousands of miles (and did) to meet someone who knew and appreciated Margaret Fuller, the feminist writer and journalist, a female intellectual respected even in the 1830s and 1840s, even in Concord, Massachusetts, and by no less than the men of Ralph Waldo Emerson's circle, a woman whose powerful mind and the need to make her own living drove her from this country to Italy during its time of war. For a long time she has been a hero to me, and here is a man named John who, out of the blue, says that he, too, is an admirer. People like this must not go unattended; they are rare and getting rarer. Not only is John conversant with Margaret Fuller the woman and the writer; he went to grade school at Margaret Fuller Elementary way far away in northern Minnesota in a time when her ideas and achievements were a model for the young. I have been hungry for people like John for so long, people who would talk to me about what I hold near and dear. On the phone, John asks me what about Margaret Fuller draws me to her. I answer, “She seems to have borne great suffering with dignity and grace.” John says, “I suspect we won't have difficulty finding things to talk about.”

Margaret Fuller was not beautiful in the way George Eliot (an admirer of Fuller's, incidentally) was not beautiful—their faces are sometimes described as “equine”—and she was very brave. As editor of
The Dial,
a sort-of house organ of the transcendentalist philosophers, she was reluctant to publish Thoreau because she thought he was a bum and his writing sappy. She thought the Brook Farm experiment in communal living was silly. She thought women ought to learn to think for themselves. As a woman she loved the eternally married Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man; as an intellectual, she was his equal, and he came to regard her as such; however, finding insufficient encouragement on the romantic front, she turned the energy of her disappointment to writing for little to no money at all. She traveled to Italy for Horace Greeley and his newspaper and sent back her observations and analyses of the Italians' fight for independence from the papacy. She fell in love with an impoverished and much younger Italian nobleman, a freedom fighter; he fell in love with her; she gave birth to his son; soon after, they married (there's some debate about this) and—here's the killer—on their way to live in America, the ship foundered on the rocks within seeing distance of the New England shore. All aboard were drowned.

Margaret Fuller did the right, the brave things—according to her lights—in a time that celebrated physical beauty in women and paid them hardly any money for their talents. I must be truthful here and tell you I find her essays unreadable: they are filled with classical allusions (the wont of transcendental writers), so full as to crowd out the sense of what she wishes to tell us and, finally, exhausting to the modern reader, though as modern readers we may blush from our ignorance of the Greeks and Romans, once second nature to the educated person. In her journals she is less learned, and it is from her journals and the facts of her life that I came to admire her completely. “With the intellect I always have—always shall overcome, but that is not the half of the work. The life, the life, O my God! shall the life never be sweet?” Her yearning is mine. And, from a letter to a man who fled her ardor, “Perhaps it is that I was not enough a child at the right time, and now am too childish, but will you not have patience with that?” She writes for me.

INSPIRING AS John's conversation about my hero was, his photograph gave one pause. “I had to look all over the place to find this,” John wrote. I guess so, I thought; if I looked like that, I would avoid the camera, too. In the photograph, John stands in his kitchen, peering furtively over one shoulder, which appears to be somewhat higher than the other. His dark hair, the few strands that remain, falls greasily back over his head, revealing a brow that does not suggest a high intelligence or invite my confidence, let alone lust. He looks like someone in the witness protection program. Or Richard III. The fact that I will travel all these miles to an unknown place to get kissed, maybe, by the guy in this photograph should convince you of my dedication to Margaret Fuller and my eagerness to find someone who knows her.

So here I go again, in my rental car, visited by familiar symptoms: dry mouth, shortness of breath, blurred vision; what am I doing behind the wheel of a car? I ought to have been used to this; after all, John was not the first, he was more like the fourth or fifth. But I have not gotten over the fear that on first sight, the man, whoever he is, will find me old, fat, just plain wrong in ways he will never explain. I have never gotten over the picture in my mind of a man lowering his gaze, fumbling for an apology—“I'm sorry you came all this way, but . . .” So far, though Robert shook it up a good bit, my luck has held. Nonetheless, the law of averages is not on my side. Neither is time, which it is just a matter of. Let me go back to New York, where it is safe.