In the case of Caroline, the interplay between accidents and self-authored events was too complicated for me to understand, but nevertheless it had occurred. This, I think, is what the man who went to Yale intuitively foresaw when he warned Caroline that she would get hard. He knew that if she had slept with him so easily, then she would sleep with others the same way and that such randomness contained the certainty that others would not be so kind as he had been. As parents we are quickly sobered by seeing just how impressionable a child is and how that soft, new impression quickly becomes the groove of habit, even the final dent of personality. Listening to Caroline describe her odyssey from Los Angeles to New York City, I could not help but experience a strange fusion of the dispassionate journalist, the lover, and the father. No doubt my musings were self-important and shot through with flawed reasoning, yet they began to coalesce around one powerful question. Lost in a trance of contemplation, I understood that long before she arrived in Los Angeles, Caroline must have suffered some primary period or episode of brutalization, some moment that jolted her away from the normal arc lived by most little girls and into the odd zigzag of violence and sexuality that she had described. The experience would have to have been survivableâfor she
had
survivedâyet unusual, even for a girl in a rural, lower-middle-class family with a depressed mother and a stepfather of questionable intent and sanity. It came to me that this event may have been as typicalâthough horribleâas incest or some similar abuse. Yet I sensed that it was something else, something that did
not correspond to sociological trends but that had a poetic unity and intensity recognizable by a little girl. Children are capable of a kind of concentrated attention that we adults more or less have lost. Their minds are not cluttered with the debris of existence. The world is new, language powerful, images as yet unseen. Who was the girl, I wondered, that became the woman? If one thing had happened, what was it?
But then, looking out the window of Caroline's apartment, I cursed myself for entertaining such foolish, half-drunken speculations. There was no sentimental education here; I was simply an asshole with a promiscuous woman in a room. In the city, there are always people in other rooms, doing other things. Now I was one of them. And with that I returned to the bed to hear more of what Caroline had to tell me. Unknown to me then was that my question about Caroline's childhood, which I had formulated with such tedious rumination, was uncannily similar to one that Simon Crowley had instinctively seized upon before his death. That I wondered about the answer and he
demanded
it was one of our great differences. And yet, oddly enough, it was Hobbs who had heard itâfrom Caroline herself. Thus were the three of us bound together in ways unknown to each of us; thus was the complexity of our relationship mysteriously centered on an event none of us had experienced.
Laterâmuch laterâall this would become clear to me, but for now I listened to Caroline describe her early days in New York. It was April and at first she stayed in a cheap hotel right off Washington Square Park, watching the leaves appear, the faces, the buildings, the motion, the shadows moving down avenues and across streetsâparticularly Midtown, where money walked the streets incarnated as humans. Women, she could tell, were taken more seriously in New York; they didn't look as good as the women in L.A., but they had more power, they were in the game. Everywhere she went she understood that the America she had heretofore known was strangely lacking in density, in straight-ahead power. Even L.A. seemed dissolute, distracted by its highways, flung outward, small beneath the sun. In New York, all
contexts were intimate. Even the wretched and impoverished seemed magnified in their suffering; monstrous men dressed in rags shouldered like giants through the crowds, pushing past, say, a hawkish woman in her forties who could recite from memory all the apartments selling for a million dollars or more in a given block on Park Avenue, who was herself talking on her portable phone with a man who each night composed the look of the country's biggest late-night talk show, choosing from eleven camera monitors the flowing sequence of long and close shotsâthe crowd pan, the tight shot of the guest smiling, the cut to the host's mocking eyebrow actionâin this, fortunes were made, and Caroline understood, sensed, that the ongoing dissolution and fragmentation of America may have been replicated in L.A. but in New York it was anticipated; in the cultural crevices and breakpoints and disjunctions here were people who knew how to rush in with their software and images and words and analysis. She could see the people haggling in restaurants, the photo shoots on the avenues, the attitude, the
fucking fuck you I'm talking to you
attitude that said it knew that the world was not giving away any of the good stuff, the good stuff would have to be bought or seduced or stolen outright. And where she would fit in in this place she did not know, but for now this did not worry her, for the first time she felt herself to be free of all she had come from, free even of herself, and whereas in L.A. she had been eager to please, to laugh and fuck with the others, now she gathered and preserved herself. It had been years since she'd lived in cool weather, and she liked it, liked being forced inside coats, inside cafés and museums and her first Manhattan apartment on West Ninety-seventh Street, where she could gaze down on the crowds moving along the wet ribbon of Broadway, the booksellers miserable in the drizzle, look down on the clots of taxis stopping and moving, stopping and moving, the heavy centeredness of it, the old buildings, the grime, and know that for the first time she could remember she might describe herself as happy.
Her first affair in the city, she told me, was with a young doctor she met one night outside a Korean grocery, and for
the few weeks that she saw him he was distracted and exhausted. He possessed a slender body that she thrilled at, but again and again he had difficulty with his erection; he was a resident in an oncology ward and spent his days gazing into the eyes of the wretched and dying, breathing the exhalations of the living dead, learning of the floridity of tumors, the liquefaction of bones, the godlike beauty of morphine. Each day he expended his spirit in the hospital, and although she had a new, pale love for him, she was not surprised when he slipped away from her, no longer called her back.
For a time, she stayed to herself, running her savings down, not working.
“Did you work?” I asked.
“Not really.”
“How did you exist?”
“I gave up my apartment,” she answered.
“Where did you live?”
The answer was to be found in the advantages of what was now Caroline's more conservative appearance and in the functional inefficiencies of wealth. Rich people may only occupy one space at a time. Yet they may own two, three, or more residences, and once she had apartment-sat for one such person, she found that people were always going off to Italy for six months or being transferred to Hong Kong. These were people who belonged net to a particular nation but to the country of wealth; they needed someone in New York who would pass on messages, or forward the mail, or water the weeping cherry trees atop the penthouse. The arrangements were always casual, and made easier by the notion that Caroline was “between apartments,” “not settled into the city yet.” Of course, the owners of the apartments knew or sensed the truthâthat Caroline's only agency was her beautyâbut they also knew that her loveliness suggested that the owner of the apartment was a person of largesse and refinement. Caroline's presence was a form of self-flattery.
So she drifted from one apartment to the next, living a hand-to-mouth life of luxury, always short of cash, yet somehow skating by. In each place she inspected the rugs and
the books and the china. She also always read what letters and diaries she found and was struck by how unhappy the rich were, or how unhappy they imagined themselves to be. She knew that she needed to be discreet about whom she brought back to the apartment, lest word leak back to the owners that she was defiling their good name and rugs with men tramping through. And the apartment buildings always had older men who found her intriguing and were unable not to offer her “advice on her investments” or small gifts of significant cash value, so long as she remembered not to say hello to the men in front of their wives.
I will interrupt my summation of Caroline's long account to note that even as I listened to her describe her early days in New York City, I was seized by the strange realization that there would come a time when the older Caroline would describe
these
days to someone. If she did not mention me, then at least she would describe the few years before she had turned thirty, when she was living just off Central Park and was engaged to Charlie. I suspected that I was not going to see her in her future self, and there was a far toll of sadness in this for me, for I find, now that I near forty, that women, all women, are beautiful to me. No, that is a lieânot all women. But many of them. Of course, little girls and teenagers and girls in their twenties. But equally compelling are the older women in their sixties, seventies, or even eighties. They seem to know so much about their worlds. They gaze upon younger people, men and women, with a gentle clarity. They have lived the cycle, or most of it, and in seeing others' strugglesâfor love, for identity, for securityâthey remember their own. And then there are the women in their fifties; they have arrived at the age of wisdom, and they are exhausted and sometimes bitter and frequently tough from the long climb. They seem more certain of their power, finally, as the men their age begin to collapse, and as their own bodies settle into whatever form of ruin will carry them the rest of the wayâfleshy heaviness, a slow, shrinking boniness, stoop and gnarl and bad toes. And then there are the women in their forties, fired by the intensity of their desires. There may be
nothing sexier than a woman in her forties. She has arrived at new freedoms, yet she knows that time is taking from her even as it presents more bounty. When I was a young man of twenty-five, I could not see the sexualityâoften hard-wonâof a woman, say, of forty-three. But I see it now. It is a kind of glory.
Looking at Caroline, I could imagine what she would look like in fifteen yearsâthe teeth and mouth still marvelous and the sunglasses and lipstick and the lines at the corners of the eyes and the ankles still slim and ever more money to keep her hair blondeâbut I did not know her well enough to guess whether the next two decades might be largely good or offer some new occasion of suffering. I wondered if in some inexplicable way she had arrived at a moment of reckoning with herself. It was not only me she was telling her story toâno. Her own future self was also listening.
It had been about a year after she arrived in New York, Caroline said, that a letter from her mother arrived, saying that her father had died out in California. The cause was unknown, except that he had been lingering in the old VW camper for several months. Caroline stared at the letter for almost an hour, trying to understand why the news hurt her so much. She had never known her father, never seen him but for that one day in Venice Beach, and yet his death was shocking to her; the universe seemed diminished. The unhappiness of their brief relation was now eternal. If she had hoped that one day they might meet again, and somehow redeem each other, then such a possibility was now foreclosed. She would die having never known her father; she would die not knowing if he had loved her or missed her or even ever thought of her.
After that came an Israeli businessman who was all curly black hair and gold. He seemed powered by hate, hate for those whom he bested in commerce, for Arabs, for chickenhearted American men, for blacks, for Russians, who were cheats, for anyone who did not live with the toughness that he did. She did not know why she even put up with himâperhaps it was because inwardly his tirades broke her heart.
He confessed to her one night after they had made love that as a boy he had heard an explosion up the street, and when he ran to the bus that the Palestinians had bombed, the first thing he saw was the top half of his mother's body, tossed like a rag doll into a leafless tree. After this, Caroline felt that she would forgive him his brutality. But one night he slapped her in his anger, and she saw that the damage would never heal, that the bomb twenty years prior exploded again day after day, and that he was doomed by his anger.
She understood by now that she was attracted to men who were in some way excessive. The bars and health clubs and office buildings were filled with fine and boring men, and their reasonableness and good humor held no attraction for her. They were interested in mutual funds and pro football and they were too witty on the first date and too polite in bed. They described themselves as political but didn't understand the streets. They seemed mass-produced, they exhibited the impotent irony of their generation, they were television. She found that men on the margin were more interesting, had more at risk, were forced to live with greater consciousness.
And then came Simon. He was on the West Coast half the time. He didn't want her along. When he was in Manhattan he disappeared with Billy. Or he blew into town with a schedule of appointments, people to see, parties, nightclub acts, plays, one-man shows. She went with him, and at times he seemed to forget that she was there in the room, so vociferously did he argue with the others. And she watched admiringly. He was one long riff. He was about conversation and nuance and observation, and all the better if it was at a restaurant with twelve other people and the tab was running into the thousands of dollars. Then at one or two or three they would stumble into a cab and shoot back to the apartment.