The Odd Woman and the City (11 page)

“At 51,” he wrote,

believe it or not, or believe it and pity me if you are young and swift, I still don't know truly “what I want to be.”… In that profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine I'm as open to every wild possibility as I was at 13 …

Thousands upon thousands of people who I believe are like me are those who have never found the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls. Many never will … This isn't presumption so much as a voice of scars and stars talking. I've lived it and will probably go on living it until they take away my hotdog …

But if you are a proud, searching “failure” in this society and we can take ironic comfort in the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of us, then it is smart and honorable to know what you attempted and why you are now vulnerable to the body blows of those who once saw you robed in the glow of your vision and now only see an unmade bed and a few unwashed cups on the bare wooden table of a gray day.

The pleasure of this piece lies in the rich, sure speed of an idiomatic language that mimics the national preoccupation with youth as well as failure:

That profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine

The riot in their souls

A voice of scars and stars

Those who only see an unmade bed and a few unwashed cups on the bare wooden table of a gray day

Idiomatic speech always feels young—in any language it makes the adrenaline shoot right up—but never more so than in the edgy, street-smart version of it one hears on the pavements of New York, where middle-aged writers of American prose are free to cry out in voices forever young, “I'm no longer young!”

*   *   *

Leonard went away for a holiday weekend without telling me he was leaving the city, and he left his answering machine off.

“What was that all about?” I asked upon his return.

“Oh,” he said sheepishly, “I left the machine off accidentally.” But the laugh that followed was hollow. “I guess I didn't want to know that no one was calling me.”

“But someone was calling you. Me.”

“Yes,” he said, his voice ominously vague. “You
were
, weren't you
.
”

*   *   *

For eight years I taught one semester a year in Arizona. Often, upon my return to the city, encounters like the following would take place:

I'd run into Eli, a writer I know. His face in repose is apprehensive, but when I ask how he is, it brightens and he tells me that he's just signed a book contract. I congratulate him, ask about the family, and then about Paul, another writer we both know. Eli sighs. His face reverts to apprehensive. “He always has to top me,” he says. “If I've been invited to L.A. he's been invited to Hawaii. If I have a book coming out he's got two. If I win a CAPS he's won a Rockefeller.”

Hours later I run into Gloria, an old acquaintance of mine who obsesses over financial ruin and her miserably indifferent family.

“How's it going?” I ask.

“My father?” she replies. “He says, ‘Get a reverse mortgage.' My nieces and nephews? I never see them. My sister-in-law? She'd be happy to see me out on the street. And my brother? He's a pussy!”

Myra, who's often told me she thinks of me as one of her best friends, invariably looks quizzically at me, as though she can't quite place me, and asks, “Where've you been? Out in Oklahoma, someplace?”

And then there's Sylvia, a devotee of the therapeutic culture. Two years in a row she grins at me and says, “I've gotten so mature I no longer demand of my friends that they give me what they cannot give. I now accept friendship on the terms that it is offered.” The third year the grin dies on her face. “I hate it!” she hisses. “It makes life feel small. Small and partial.”

My friends, too, must shake the kaleidoscope of daily experience to arrive at a composition that will help mediate the pain of intimacy, the vibrancy of public space, and the exquisite intervention of strangers.

I turn the corner onto Seventh Avenue and a very large cross-dresser is standing squarely in front of me, eyes squeezed shut, hands joined as though in prayer, calling into the air, “I have so many enemies!” When his eyes open they meet mine. “Why?” I mouth silently. He gives me a brilliant smile and announces joyously, “I don't
know
.”

*   *   *

Some ten or fifteen years ago, a woman of my acquaintance (I'll call her Jane Brown) had an affair with a man who was heir to a famous American fortune (I'll call him Roger Newman). At the time of their meeting, they were both storefront lawyers serving a slum neighborhood in Brooklyn. For Jane, the work was the natural culmination of a Quaker childhood, a good education, and a devout sense of political idealism. For Roger, the work was done in defiance of unearned privilege, a proper rather than an erotic marriage, and a future in the family business that precluded the promise of purposeful employment.

Working side by side, these two had fallen in love and Roger had left his wife to move in with Jane. Friends soon said they were living together in blissful harmony, and some were surprised when Roger began working even longer hours than he had before, his objection to the laws that thwarted his underprivileged clients having grown ever more ardent. Jane was proud of Roger's deepened sense of engagement, yet even she urged him to slow down. Roger, however, told her that never before in his life had he felt as free as he now did. To plunge into hard, meaningful work, he said, was a joy; and to have at his side a woman who shared his belief in the work an added pleasure he had never hoped to experience. They were together for two years. Then one afternoon without warning or explanation, Roger announced that he was leaving both Jane and the practice and returning to his wife and the family business. Within a matter of days he was gone.

In college my friends and I had played an Edith Wharton–Henry James game in which a story was told—invariably the setting was bourgeois New York, the moral dilemma a matter of emotional courage—and the question asked was: Who would have written this story, Wharton or James? Roger Newman's retreat to his once repudiated life had, at the time, brought the game back into my mind, and I'd always been curious to know the outcome of his action. So two weeks ago when a lawyer I know phoned to say he'd been invited to dinner at the Newmans', would I like to come, I of course said yes, and at seven o'clock the following Saturday evening, the lawyer and I got out of a cab in front of a Park Avenue building at the corner of Sixty-Sixth Street, where we were admitted to a marble-and-onyx lobby the size of a small cathedral and entered an oak-paneled elevator equipped with red velvet bench seats. When we stepped off the elevator on the nineteenth floor, we were in the Newman apartment. Our host was as I remembered him—middling tall, reed slim, with soft brown hair and blue eyes set in an inconspicuously handsome face—only now, I was struck by how well his clothes fit him and the grace with which he wore them.

The living room was huge: Persian rugs, old English furniture, silken lamp shades. Seven men and women sat on the furniture. The women had blond hair and long legs, the men bore a strong resemblance to Newman himself. One of the women was Cissy, Roger's wife. She shook my hand and said she was glad to meet me, she'd been reading me for years. I thanked her for having me, and we all sat down with a drink in our hands. An hour later the whole company rose and walked into the dining room, where dinner was being served. The plates were gold-rimmed china, the wineglasses thin crystal, the forks heavy silver. The food was delicious, but there wasn't enough of it. The wine, however, flowed.

As the tone, syntax, and vocabulary of this group were foreign to me, I did not at first grasp the banality of the conversation. People introduced subjects in order to allude, not to discuss. There'd be three minutes on the headlines, seven on European travel, two on the current exhibit at MoMA. Real estate went a good ten or fifteen minutes, as did the cost of the children's education, vacation plans, the current scandal on Wall Street. Strong opinion was clearly unwelcome, as was sustained exchange.

Roger himself—an elegant host who pulled out chairs, passed dishes, refreshed drinks with unobtrusive courtesy—played an interesting role here. He initiated nothing; on the other hand, he never expressed a foolish or an insensitive thought. If serious disagreement threatened among his guests, he made the kind of judicious comment that quickly put the contestants at their ease and short-circuited potential rupture at the dinner table. His tone of voice throughout was uniformly light, conciliatory, civilized.

Cissy Newman was a pretty woman who picked fretfully at her food and wore a thin layer of anxiety over her makeup. At one point, from out of nowhere she blurted at me, “But, after all, don't you think a child needs his mother?” I stared blankly at her. “Don't I think a child needs his mother?” I repeated idiotically. It was then that Roger laughed easily and surprised me by saying in a voice both soft and kind, “Cissy, Cissy, that's not her point,” and then proceeding, with remarkable equanimity, to give a wonderfully reasoned pr
é
cis of the feminist position with which he identified me. Cissy and I both sat there, nodding like a pair of grateful students who've been released by a skillful teacher from their own mental incompetence.

I remember thinking then, What is he doing here? Why has he deliberately put himself back into this life? And I began to watch him.

After dinner, I sat at one end of a brocade-covered couch, while Roger sat beside me in a velvet-covered armchair. A stream of chitchat formed itself all around us and, separately, we each joined in from time to time; but repeatedly I saw Roger's eyes rise above the faces of the company and come to rest on the larger surround. When he did, not only was his pleasure unmistakable, his satisfaction seemed profound. Clearly, the ease with which he wore his clothes extended to the ease with which he inhabited this room. As he looked about him, he absentmindedly stroked the velvet arm of his chair with an absorptiveness that made the caress of his hand seem that of a lover on the arm of the beloved. At the same time, he periodically eased his body forward in the chair to pick from the coffee table a marble egg that rested on a worked-gold stand, rolling the egg about smoothly and again lovingly in the palm of his hand, then returning it carefully to its place on the stand. When he spoke, he held his wineglass in such a way that he seemed more aware of the feel of the crystal stem between his fingers than of the words coming out of his mouth. It was as though the people in the room were figures in the foreground of a history painting, our host clearly heir to the painting.

I found myself thinking, Who or what is this reminding me of? Another minute and I had it. I was watching Ashley Wilkes, a man of developed sensibility and liberal inclination made inert by a will bound to a way of life rather than a spirit in consultation with itself.

For a moment, Roger Newman—working in the ghetto, in love with Jane Brown—had had an overpowering need to experience passion firsthand. His considerable intelligence had told him that it was a plus, as well, to know what was being said and done on those streets down below; but it had always been a given that any foray into them would be in the nature of a temporary investigation.

As the lawyer and I were walking down Park Avenue at midnight, I said to myself, Henry James would have written this story, not Edith Wharton. Wharton thought no one could
have
freedom, but James knew no one
wanted
freedom.

*   *   *

When the influence of European modernism crossed the Atlantic at the turn of the twentieth century, it made its first full stop in Greenwich Village. There, a generation of artists, intellectuals, journalists, and social theorists came together to make a revolution in consciousness. Among them were women and men whose names are now inscribed in the history books: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Alfred Stieglitz, Margaret Sanger, Eugene O'Neill, Emma Goldman, Walter Lippmann—an unlikely collection of cultural bedfellows drawn together by the spirit behind the movement.
Experience
was now king, and everyone wanted it: unimpeded sexual adventure, alarmingly bold conversation, extreme eccentricity of dress; declaring oneself free to not marry or make a living, have children or vote. These became the extravagant conventions of downtown radicalism—and none adhered more strictly to them than Evelyn Scott, a writer of the 1920s whose name was once known to every Village modernist. Thirty years later, Scott was living with her husband, an alcoholic English writer, in a boardinghouse on Manhattan's Upper West Side; both of them now old, ill, half-mad, and almost wholly destitute.

In 1963, Evelyn died and the English husband, through the intervention of old friends, was repatriated back to London, where he died a few years later, in an alcoholic stupor, in pretty much the same boardinghouse as the one Evelyn had died in in New York. His remains were a collection of shopping bags, small suitcases, a trunk or two. These were hauled off to a book and antiques shop in the Camden district of London, where they gathered dust for a decade and more. Then they were shipped off to a junk shop in Yorkshire. There, one day in the late seventies, an amateur book dealer, a man of literary taste, opened one of the trunks and came across a collection of Evelyn Scott's letters, diaries, and novels (both published and in manuscript). He began reading. At first mystified, he was soon absorbed. Who was this woman? How had she come to write these books? Why had he never heard of her?

The book dealer (his name was D. A. Callard) spent the next five years, on both sides of the Atlantic, trying to answer these questions. The fruit of his labor was a biography, published in 1985 and called
Pretty Good for a Woman
(a crack made by William Faulkner about Scott's work). When the book was published in the United States, a friend came over, tossed it on my coffee table, and said, “This is your cup of tea.” And so it was.