The Odd Woman and the City (10 page)

The thing was, we weren't friends. Without friendship, we were each alone in the wilderness.

I began to realize what everyone in the world knows and routinely forgets: that to be loved sexually is to be loved not for one's actual self but for one's ability to arouse desire in the other. It was a given that the powers assigned the me that Manny desired would be short-lived. Only the thoughts in one's mind or intuitions of the spirit can attract permanently, and those in mine Manny did not love. He did not hate them, but neither did he love them. They were not necessary to him. Ultimately, this connection of the senses meant that I would be thrown back on myself to an intolerable degree, made to feel so vulnerable that I was soon drowning in self-doubt.

I once asked Manny if he was surprised at how his life had turned out. He said to me, “I've always felt pulled around by forces beyond my control. I'd do what people expected of me, and then I'd get anxious. For years I knew no condition but anxiety. One day I realized the anxiety had formed me. After that there were no surprises.”

At the end of one incendiary exchange, I flung myself on Manny's neck. For one long moment I hung there, like dead weight. Then his arms closed around me. He smoothed my hair back with a gesture of such exquisite tenderness, I can feel it to this day. He knew that we were cashing out. Very soon now, there would be no currency left with which to buy time.

*   *   *

Leonard and I, having bought the makings of a dinner we are preparing together, are standing in line in the supermarket when an old woman, thin and trembling, already at the checker's register, realizes she's forgotten something. Her eyes begin to roll in her head—oh God, she'll lose her place in the line! The high school student standing right behind her puts his hand on the old woman's arm and asks what it is she's forgotten. Milk, comes the answer. Leonard emits a sound of unmistakable exasperation. The student runs quick and gets the milk. The old woman says, “Oh, you are so kind, so kind, so extraordinarily kind!” The student says, “No, only moderately kind.” I beam at him—a soul mate!—but Leonard says to him, “Now, that's an interesting distinction. Considering the circumstance, your action might seem extraordinary rather than ordinary. In New York, to go out of your way to help someone is to interrupt conventional inconvenience; delay, deflect, detain; stop the action; pursue reflection.” The student stares at him. “In short,” Leonard explains, “risk assault.”

What I never feel in the city he feels every day of his life.

*   *   *

They met in Florence in 1880. He was thirty-seven, she forty. She was Constance Fenimore Woolson, a popular American writer of essays and stories—and he? He was Henry James. To his great surprise, he saw quickly that she was a woman of taste and judgment whose self-divisions mirrored his own. She enjoyed reputation but burrowed into obscurity; she feared loneliness yet courted solitude; she wished to be openhearted yet came off as evasive. Once, when James was considering taking a flat in Venice, Constance said to him, “I don't imagine you on the Grand Canal,” and he replied: “No. Somewhere hidden. It does not matter quite where, as long as it is difficult to find, with many blind alleys on the way.” He was speaking for her as well as himself. From earliest youth, she'd begun building her armor of defensive reserve; by the time she came of age it was in place; by the time she died it was suffocating her.

They walked and they talked; they took tea and they talked; they went to museums and they talked. They talked books, they talked writing, they talked the moral imagination. The exchange was, of course, not personal in any usual sense, but the intellectual honesty that animated their talk resulted in a conversation that made each of them feel less alone in the world.

Without question she gave him more than he gave her. She became his best reader, his most intelligent interlocutor, the one more than any other who understood all in life that went unspoken and unsaid. The same could not be said for James, who took flagrant advantage of all between them that went unspoken and unsaid. He seems, almost willfully, never to have grasped the depth of her anguish; or, if he did, he chose, with a hand shading his eyes, not to look directly into it. Perhaps it was that he knew if he did let that information penetrate him, he'd be forced to become more accountable to the friendship. Above all else, Henry James feared and hated being held accountable.

In the spring of 1893, Constance—now deep into one of her serious depressions—occupies a flat in a palazzo fronting the Grand Canal. Henry is delighted and promises to come to Venice in the winter. She writes immediately to say the prospect of his visit is elating. No sooner does he get this letter than his anxieties begin to rise. In midsummer he writes to say he's working on a new book, his plans for the winter are unsettled, it is more than likely that he will not come to Venice at all. She is silent. The summer drifts by, and then the autumn, with hardly a communiqu
é
passing between them. Then comes a letter from Constance casually announcing that the novel she's been working on is finished. He knows that when she is between writing projects she rapidly starts to sink, but somehow the information does not register. He lets things ride.

In January 1894, Constance Woolson jumped from a window in her Venetian flat, spattering her incredibly stripped-down life on a pavement washed by the waters of the most glamorous seaway in the world. After her death, the American diplomat John Hay said of her, “She had not as much happiness as a convict.” James, at home in England, felt horror, panic, guilt: whether or not he felt pain is not known. Somewhere within himself, he must have thought, If I'd gone to Venice, she wouldn't have jumped.

The truth of the matter is that neither Woolson nor James was equal to the task of friendship. While both cherished the connection, more compelling by far was the neurotic unhappiness within which each was imprisoned. Neither could do for the other what they could not do for themselves.

*   *   *

The night after I'd read about Woolson and James, I became a literary groupie. I dreamed that Leonard and I had both given up our own apartments in order to live together, and now, in the dream, he had called to say he'd found a place for us on the Upper East Side, where, in waking reality, neither of us would ever live. Quick, he says on the phone, come see it. I run uptown, enter a classy-looking building, push open the apartment door, and I am standing in a room, long and narrow, that feels like a coffin. At the far end of the room is a curtained window. I rush to it, thinking, The view will make up for it. I tear the curtain aside and I am staring at a brick wall.

*   *   *

I stepped onto the Number 3 bus on Fifth Avenue at Sixty-Sixth Street just as the afternoon rush hour was beginning. The seat near the door directly opposite the driver was empty, and I dropped into it. At Fifty-Ninth Street the bus began to fill up. As people crowded on, my eyes watched hand after hand drop and retrieve the MetroCard from the fare box and then move past my fixed gaze. At Fifty-Third Street someone got on without making the automatic gesture toward the box. I looked up and saw that it was an old man settling himself heavily in the seat diagonally opposite me.

The bus went one more stop. Then the driver turned in his seat and said, “Sir, you didn't pay your fare.” The old man didn't answer; he was staring at the floor, his hands resting lightly on the head of a walking stick planted between his knees.

The driver repeated himself.

The old man looked up. “Yes, I did,” he said.

The driver stared at him. “No, sir,” he said patiently, “you did not pay your fare.”

“Yes, I did,” the old man said, and went back to staring at the floor.

At the next light the driver swung out of his seat and stood before the old man. “Sir,” he said, “I can't go on until you pay your fare.”

The old man looked up. “I paid the fare,” he said evenly. “I can't help it if you didn't see me do it. I'm not going to do it twice.”

The old man and the driver locked eyes. Slowly, the stare became a glare. The old man began to look like a bulldog, the driver another kind of animal. The old man was white, the driver was black; for a moment I thought …

“Mister,” the driver yelled, “this bus ain't going nowhere until you pay your fare.”

“Omigod,” the woman beside me breathed.

“What the hell is going on?” a man three seats down called out.

“I paid,” the old man said again.

“He's paid, all right,” a man said softly.

The driver switched off the ignition and began speaking into the phone on his dashboard. Up and down the aisle people perked up with interest and agitation.

A woman in black leaned toward a man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and, one finger tapping the side of her forehead, stage-whispered, “Senile.”

“Hey,” a voice called out from the back. “Let's get this show on the road, I gotta get downtown.”

Two people began discussing the legal and social ramifications of the case. “Ain't no way that driver-man can keep goin', he don't pay the fare,” said one. “But what if the old man ain't got the money?” said the other. “Baby, you ain't got no money, you don't get on no bus,” came the swift reply. “That's the law, man, the law.”

The driver stood in the aisle and announced loudly, “Everybody off the bus. Sorry, folks, but this bus is not moving. I'll give you all transfers.”

Stunned silence. Nobody could believe this was happening. Then everyone was yelling at once: “What the hell, I gotta get, you can't do this to us.”

At the back of the bus, a wounded howl went up from a young man who until this moment had been dreaming out the window. Now he stood up, his slim body a glory of black leather and silver studs. He stalked to the front of the bus, planted himself before the silent old man, and spat out, “What-choo wanna make yourself so
cheap
for? For a lousy buck and a quarter. Man, for that you gonna put us through all this misery?”

The driver, a tall, well-built man, stood unmoving as the passengers streamed toward the doors, but in his face I thought I saw an accumulation of the insults that daily life flung at him. In thirty seconds we were all off the bus, milling about in the street. Interestingly enough, no one walked away and no one speculated on why not one of us had thought to simply pay the old man's fare.

“Oh, this lousy city,” the man beside me crooned softly, “goddamn this lousy city.”

I looked back at the bus. The old man was still sitting in his seat, his hands on his walking stick, his eyes on the floor. Suddenly, as the confusion on the street was mounting, he stood up, climbed off the bus, and, like a figure in a dream, walked away into the crowded afternoon. I plucked at the driver's sleeve. “He's gone,” I said.

The driver's glance followed mine, and without the flick of an eyelash, he announced, “Okay, everybody back on the bus.”

In silence, everyone filed back onto the bus. Each passenger sat down in the same seat he or she had occupied before. The driver took his seat, closed the doors, and swung expertly out into Fifth Avenue traffic. I looked at my watch. One hour had elapsed from the time the driver had first said, “Sir, you didn't pay your fare.” I looked around at my fellow travelers and saw that each had quickly rearranged his or her face behind its compulsory mask of neutrality. It was as though, for them, nothing had ever happened. But even then I knew better.

*   *   *

In the early 1950s, a New York journalist named Seymour Krim yearned to be a maker of dissident literature at the same time that he wished to enjoy national celebrity—and on both scores felt himself a failure. Out of that sense of failure, Krim found a voice and a subject that spoke to the times. His persona was that of a manic-depressive, alternately ambitious, neurotic, self-mocking, and it spilled rivers of ink delivering an ongoing account of its breakdowns, its hungers, its shocking envy of those who had achieved the success that was both despised and longed for. That voice was also urban to the core. No place on earth other than New York City could have produced a Seymour Krim.

Making provocative use of a mad, inventive, somewhat stream-of-consciousness sentence structure, Krim developed a hipster prose style that allowed him, in spirit, to join a generation of emerging rebels for whom thought, feeling, and action were about to become one. For Krim, achieving such unity would mean bringing his own inner chaos under sufficient control that he'd be able to write the great work he
knew
he had it in him to write.

Fantasy was his middle name. He was forever fantasizing a future in which all would be magically pulled together and—of this he was certain—his own big-time promise would blossom into major accomplishment. The fantasizing saturated nearly every piece he ever wrote. A nervous braggadocio beneath the surface of the prose made his narrator sound as though he imagined himself the protagonist in a Broadway musical, calling out to the audience, “Just you wait and see! I'm gonna come out of this bigger, better, more important than ALL OF YOU PUT TOGETHER.”

But consolidation of thought and action remained beyond Krim's grasp. All he could do was document the disability that tore him up every day that he awakened in the cold-water flat on the Lower East Side that he lived in until he died. At the height of his powers, Krim's gift was to speak for all those like him who were also unable to convert fantasy into reality. Through the simple expedient of using this defiantly daydreaming self as an instrument of illumination, Krim sought to make a metaphor of the American inability to grow up and get down to work.

Too often Krim's anxiety swamped the metaphor, and when it did the writing was reduced to a disheveled rant, tiresome and pathetic. In 1973, however, he wrote “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business,” a remarkable essay in which he at long last
did
pull together the subject he had spent years making his own. Here, he was able to capture brilliantly the American obsession with failure itself—the taste of it, the fear of it, the forever being haunted by it—and when he did, his message was delivered in language that made prodigious use of the New York vernacular: