The Odd Woman and the City (6 page)

*   *   *

If life begins to feel like the sum of its disabilities, I take a walk up to Times Square—home to the savviest underclass in the world—where I quickly regain perspective. On Broadway at Forty-Third Street on a windy evening in winter, a black man on a makeshift platform is speaking into a microphone. Ranged around the platform are perhaps a dozen black men and women. The man at the mike sounds like a television broadcaster. People hunched over against the wind are rushing past him, but he goes on speaking in the smooth, imperturbable tones of the evening news anchor. “It has come to my attention lately,” he says, “that sales are up on suntan lotion and sunblock. Now who do you think are the customers for this item? I'll tell you who. White people, that's who. Not you or I, brother. No, it's white people.” His voice deepens. “Now what do you think of a people who keep telling us they're superior, and…” Without warning he pauses, his eyes squeeze shut, and he screams,
“They can't even make it in the fuckin' sun!”
Back to broadcast news. “You—” He points calmly at the heads of the fleeing crowd. “The white people. Don't even belong. On the planet.”

*   *   *

When I ran into Manny Rader on Third Avenue, I hadn't seen him in twenty-five years. He was the older brother of the girl in the neighborhood who'd been my best friend when we were twelve. After I turned fourteen, he'd begun staring at me. As soon as I saw him on Third Avenue, I knew I had to have him.

I have a penchant for men I've grown up with. They're like chloroform on a cloth laid against my face: I inhale them, I burrow into them, I want to bury myself in them. When I was a kid I wanted to be them—these dark, skinny, street-smart boys with hot eyes and ignorant passions who came together every day at the top of the block to laugh, curse, and kibitz themselves into existence—I never got over not being one of them. It wasn't that I envied them their shared act of imagination—the one they seemed to have inherited, it came so naturally to them—it was that it frightened me when I realized I wasn't one of them, and never would be. I felt imperiled then: without world and without self.

“Who'd have thought you'd turn out a writer,” Manny said to me on Third Avenue, a bemused expression on his face. And then he laughed. “You were such a pain in the ass as a kid, always hanging around where you weren't wanted.” His laugh brought it all back to me, made me see those feelings again as though they were standing in the air before me. He had had this rich, deep laugh I used to hear when I'd pass the boys standing on the corner. Only his friends had made him laugh like that, never the girls.

We fell into bed and astonished ourselves with a strong, sweet happiness neither of us could have dreamed was coming. One afternoon when we were making love, I went down on him. As I came up I said, “The dream of every boy in the Bronx, that the girl down the street will suck him off.” Manny lay back on the bed and laughed that unguarded, in-the-world laugh of his. It thrilled me more than anything our bodies were doing together. I stared at the wall beyond his head, thinking, I'm safe. Now he'll never leave me. But of course I didn't really think Manny was going to do the leaving; if anything, it would be me who skipped.

He had walked away from everything but the women all his life. He'd gone to college on a scholarship, then left in his third year to join the army; he'd entered business with a known embezzler, and within two years the business had gone under; he rose from technician to researcher in a biology lab, then got into a fight with his boss and quit; he worked on a large national magazine where he was quickly made reporter, then editor, and then fired because he disappeared for a week without explanation. On the block he was written off as a congenital fuckup. “He can't find himself,” his mother moaned. “That's a nice way of putting it,” his father sneered.

But his mother was right: Manny couldn't find himself. Whatever the circumstance that Manny found himself in, he couldn't find himself in it. He never repeated the same kind of work twice. Each job remained just that, a job. None of them ever became more than an apprenticeship. The events of his life refused to accumulate into experience, and he would not act as though they had. This inner refusal of his seemed to be his only gift. Certainly, it was the talent he pursued. By the time we began sleeping together, he was starting to tell himself that refusenik was his condition and his destiny. Even though he knew better, and being with me made him see even more clearly what he already knew.

When Manny and I hooked up, I was in a slump. That's how I put it. “I'm in a slump.” Manny looked at me. “You're in a slump?” he said. “What does that mean? That's bullshit for you don't wanna work, right? That's what it means, doesn't it? It means you're a writer who doesn't write. Even I can see that. We're together now, what? Three months? I've been watching you. You don't even sit down at the desk. You fuck away the day, day after day. Every day, you fuck it away. You did a little work, got a little recognition, and that's it, right? You're finished. You got no more fight in you. Right? I mean, what
more
do they want from you? Am I right? Have I got that right?”

He took one look at my life, and sex gave him all the focus he needed. He saw the leakage in the pipeline, understood the drain of spirit in me. He sympathized with what he saw—the sympathy provided the connection between us as well as the heat—but he wasn't into euphemisms.

At forty-six, Manny was as skinny as he'd been at seventeen. I, as always, was fighting fifteen pounds of overweight. “Sweetheart,” he murmured against my breasts, burying himself in me in that way that men do, “you're a Renoir.” I've never understood what it is about female flesh that sends them off like that, but whenever Manny said this I would smile into the dark with relief. I needed him to lose himself in me. I was still buying time. And I still didn't understand for what I was buying it.

*   *   *

One year when I was teaching in Arizona, Leonard came out to visit me and we took a trip to the Grand Canyon, making a few stops here and there as we traveled across one of the most striking landscapes on earth. A day and a half into the trip, we came up over a rise, and there, as far as the eye could see, was the great western desert without a sign of human life on it. The sheer sweep of world without definition and without end took my breath away.

“How beautiful!” came out of my mouth before I even registered a thought.

Leonard was silent.

“No?” I inquired.

He smiled one of his small, tight smiles.

“What is it you feel?” he asked with genuine curiosity; he really wanted to know.

Now I felt obliged to think.

“Elated,” I replied. “Inspirited.”

Silence.

“Don't you?” I asked.

“Never,” he replied, and shivered. “I feel awe looking at the elemental world,” he said. “Fear, actually. Conversely, looking at a civilized landscape I feel moved by the human effort to push back the alienness. With me and nature it's either terror or gratitude. Inspirited, never.”

*   *   *

On upper Broadway a beggar approaches a middle-aged woman. “I don't drink, I don't do drugs, I just need—,” he starts. To his amazement, the woman yells directly into his face, “I just had my pocket picked!” The beggar turns his face northward and calls to a colleague up the block, “Hey, Bobby, leave her alone, she just got robbed.”

*   *   *

It was through the discovery and exploration of the unconscious that Freud made his major discoveries, chief among them that from birth to death we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don't want to grow up; we hunger for sexual pleasure, we dread sexual pleasure; we hate our own aggressions—anger, cruelty, the need to humiliate—yet they derive from the grievances we are least willing to part with. Our very suffering is a source of both pain and reassurance. What Freud found most difficult to cure in his patients was the resistance to being cured.

*   *   *

I had a friend once with whom I was certain I would grow old. My friendship with Emma was not one I would have described as Montaigne does his with
É
tienne de La Bo
é
tie—as one in which the soul grows refined—but now that I am thinking about it, I see that, in important ways, it was analogous. Ours was an attachment that, if it did not refine the soul, certainly nourished the spirit so well that, for a very long time indeed, we each seemed to experience our inquiring selves fully in the presence of the other. At school we'd both been prime examples of those very intelligent girls whose insecurities equip them with voices that easily generate scorn and judgment. It would be years before those formidable defenses altered sufficiently that each of us could see herself in the other. I remember once when we were in our twenties hearing Emma correct someone's grammar—“The word is
who
, not
whom
”—and the contempt in her voice made me wince. Thank God
I
don't sound like that, I thought. But I did. We were in our thirties when I first heard myself as I heard Emma whenever one or the other of us said some awful thing. And then the corrective of self-recognition—a thrilling occurrence at that point in our lives—worked a kind of magic between us. In no time at all it became necessary for us to meet or speak at least three times a week. The open road of friendship everlasting seemed spread out before us.

To the uninitiated eye, this vitality of connection between Emma and me might have appeared puzzling. She was a bourgeois through and through, I a radical feminist who owned nothing. She had married, become a mother, and pursued graduate work; I was twice divorced, had remained childless, and lived the marginal existence of a working freelance. Beneath these separating realities, however, lay a single compelling influence that drew us irresistibly toward each other.

Together, we seemed always to be puzzling out those parts of the general condition to which our own circumstances applied. Emma had embraced the family, I had rejected the family; she endorsed the middle class, I loathed the middle class; she dreaded loneliness, I endured it. Yet the longer we went on meeting and talking, the more clearly we saw that to know how we had come to be as we were was for both of us the central enterprise. When we spoke together of the exhaustion of love and the anguish of work, the smell of children and the taste of solitude, we were really speaking of the search for the self and the confusion that came with the mere construction of the phrase: What
was
the self? Where was it? How did one pursue it, abandon or betray it? These questions were the ones that concentrated our deepest concerns. Consciousness as a first value, we each discovered, was what we together were exploring.

The absorption grew in us day by month by year, fed by the excitement of abstract thought joined to the concreteness of daily life. In conversation with each other, we both felt the strength of context imposed on the quotidian. The more we explored the immediate in service to the theoretical—a chance encounter on the bus, a book just begun or just finished, a dinner party gone bad—the larger the world seemed to grow. The everyday became raw material for a developing perspective that was acquiring narrative drive: sitting in a living room, eating in a restaurant, walking in the street—it was as though we had grasped things whole without ever having had to leave home.

We went on like this for nearly ten years. And then one day the bond between us began to unravel. I had a bad exchange with Emma's husband, and she saw it as divisive. She read a book by a liberationist writer I prized, and I was stung by her scorn. We each made a new friend whose virtues the other failed to respond to. That winter I could barely pay the rent, and Emma's preoccupation with redecorating her place got under my skin. Suddenly, the adventure we had made of our differing circumstances seemed to be going sour: my cozy apartment felt sterile, her amiable husband a fool. Who
are
we? I remember thinking. What are we doing? And why are we doing it together?

Slowly but inexorably, the enterprise of mind and spirit to which our friendship had been devoted began to lose strength before the growing encroachment of the sympathies out of which our lives were actually fashioned. Like an uncontrollable growth that overtakes a clearing in the forest, the differences moved in on us. In no time at all, the friendship that had for so long generated excitement and exerted power was now experienced as a need that had run its course. Overnight, it seemed, it took one long stride and moved from the urgent center to the exhausted margin. Just like sexual infatuation, I remember thinking idly one morning as I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. And then, somewhat dazedly, I realized, That's right. That's exactly what this is like. Sexual infatuation.

In the end, my friendship with Emma did prove to bear a striking resemblance to romantic love. The passion that had flared between us now seemed an equivalent of the kind of erotic feeling that dies of its own intensity at the moment one begins to realize that much in oneself is not being addressed by this attraction of the senses. The irony here was that sexual love usually fails because of an insufficiency of shared sensibility, whereas sensibility was what Emma and I had had in abundance.

When my friendship with Emma was disintegrating, I recalled Winston Churchill's having once said there are no permanent friends, only permanent interests, and although I understood that Churchill meant worldly ambition trumps personal loyalties, I remember thinking even then, He's wrong, there are no permanent interests, either. It was the infidelity of our own mutating “interests” that had brought me and Emma low.

Our inner lives, William James announced, are fluid, restless, mercurial, always in transition. The transitions, he speculated, are the reality, and concluded that our experience “lives in the transitions.” This is a piece of information difficult to absorb, much less accept, yet it is transparently persuasive. How else account for the mysterious shift in emotional sympathies that, at any hour of the ordinary day, brings a marriage, a friendship, a professional connection that has repeatedly threatened dissolution, to a “sudden” actual end?