The Odd Woman and the City (7 page)

The withdrawal of feeling in romantic love is a drama most of us are familiar with and therefore feel equipped to explain. In thrall to the intensity generated by passion, we invest love with transformative powers; imagine ourselves about to be made new, even whole, under its influence. When the expected transformation fails to materialize, the hopes interwoven with the infatuation do a desperate dissolve. The adventure of having felt known in the presence of the lover now bleeds out into the anxiety of feeling exposed.

In both friendship and love, the expectation that one's expressive (if not best) self will flower in the presence of the beloved other is key. Upon that flowering all is posited. But what if the restless, the fluid, the mercurial, within each of us is steadily undermining the very thing we think we most want? What, in fact, if the assumption of a self in
need
of expressiveness is an illusion? What if the urge toward stable intimacy is perpetually threatened by an equally great, if not greater, urge toward destabilization? What then?

*   *   *

On Fourteenth Street, at noon on a summer's day—in the midst of honking traffic, bargain store shoppers, crosstown bus riders—I run into Victor, an unhappy dentist who has lived in my neighborhood for years. Tall and slim, with a Caesar haircut and sad brown eyes, he is a nervous man who smiles compulsively. Whenever he sees me he coos, “Dahling, sweetness, beautiful girl, how a-a-are you?” Then, like a mother in a permanent state of interested alarm, he peers intently into my face and very gently asks, “You still writing, dahling?” Some years ago Victor, in search of inner peace, began traveling regularly to Japan to consult the Zen healer who has given him the wherewithal to get out of bed in the morning in New York. He must be sixty by now.

Standing here on Fourteenth Street, a Con Ed drill blasting in our ears, Victor croons at me, “Dahling, sweetness, beautiful girl, how
are
you, still living in the same building?”

“Yes,” I reply.

“Still doing journalistic work?”

“No, Victor, I teach now.”

He pushes his chin out at me as though to say, “Tell me.”

I tell him. He listens intently as the words fall rapidly from my mouth, nodding steadily as I speak of the deprivation of spirit I suffer living for months at a time in one university town or another.

“It's exile!” I cry at last. “Exile pure and simple.”

Victor nods and nods. His brown eyes are dissolving in watery pain. He knows
exactly
what I mean, oh, no one in the world will ever know better than he what I mean. His face goes dreamy. My own starts feeling compromised. Car brakes screech, sirens pierce the air, the Con Ed drill stops and starts, stops and starts. No matter. Victor and I are now quarantined on this island of noise, spellbound by matters of the soul.

“But you know, dahling?” he says ever so softly. “I have discovered there's a lot of love out there.”

“Oh yes,” I reply quickly, suddenly aware of the harm my relentless negatives may be doing.

“A lot of love,” he repeats reverentially.

“Absolutely,” I agree. “Absolutely.”

The Con Ed drill starts up again.

“I mean, people
care
.” By now Victor's face is radiant. “They really do.”

And it is me who is nodding and nodding.

Victor puts his hand on my arm, leans toward me, looks searchingly into my eyes, and delivers himself of his wisdom.

“Dahling,” he whispers in my ear, “we've got to let it go.”

Yes, yes, oh yes, I know just what you mean.

“Let it all
go
.”

*   *   *

After 9/11, an atmosphere difficult to describe enveloped the city and refused to abate. For weeks on end the town felt vacant, confused, uprooted. People walked around looking spaced-out, as though permanently puzzled by something they couldn't put a name to. The smell was eerie: like nothing anybody could describe exactly, but when your nostrils inhaled the air, you felt anxious. And all the while a kind of otherworldly quiet prevailed. In restaurants, theaters, museums; shops, traffic, the crowd itself—all seemed muted, inert, even immobilized. A man who loved New York movies found himself turning the television set off when one came on. A woman who enjoyed seeing photographs of the city in a storefront she passed daily now flinched as she approached the shop. The pictures, she said, felt like “before,” and nothing “before” gave comfort.

One soft, clear evening about six weeks after the fateful day, I was crossing Broadway, somewhere in the Seventies. Halfway across, the light changed. I stopped on the island that divides the boulevard and did what everyone does: looked down the street for a break in the traffic so that I could safely run the light. But there was no traffic: not a car in sight. I stood there, hypnotized by the grand and awful emptiness. I couldn't recall the time—except for a blizzard, perhaps—when Broadway had ever, even for a moment, been free of oncoming traffic. It looked like a scene from another time. Just like a Berenice Ab—, I started thinking, and instantly the thought cut itself short. In fact, I wrenched myself from it. I saw that it was frightening me to even consider “a scene from another time.” As though some fatal break had occurred between me and the right to yearn over that long-ago New York alive in a Berenice Abbot photograph. That night I understood what it was that had been draining out of the city throughout this sad, stunned season.

When human experience slides off the scale, and the end of civilization threatens, only hard truths will do; and I was finding them sealed into the minimalist prose of French and Italian novelists of the fifties and sixties. Here, an eerie inwardness trapped in the prose resonated inside a suffusing silence that promised moral disorder of a serious nature. Ah yes, the reader feels. However it once was, that's the way it is now.

Standing there on the island in the middle of Broadway, I realized what it was that we were losing: it was nostalgia. And then I realized that it was
this
that was at the heart of postwar fiction. It wasn't sentiment that was missing from these novels, it was nostalgia. That cold, pure silence at the heart of modern European prose is the absence of nostalgia: an absence made available only to those who feel themselves standing at the end of history, staring, without longing or regret, into the is-ness of what is. Now, here in New York after 9/11, if only for the moment, we too stood, lined up with the rest of a world permanently postwar, staring into that cold, silent purity.

*   *   *

Late for an appointment in midtown, I run down the subway stairs just as the train is pulling into the Fourteenth Street station. The doors open and a young man standing in front of me (T-shirt, jeans, crew cut) with an elaborately folded-up baby carriage on his back, leading a very small child by the hand, heads for the seats directly ahead of us. I plop down on the one opposite him, take out my book and reading glasses, and, settling myself, am vaguely aware of the man removing the carriage from his back and turning toward the seated child. Then I look up. The little boy is about seven or eight, and he is the most grotesquely deformed child I have ever seen. He has the face of a gargoyle—mouth twisted to the side, one eye higher than the other—inside a huge, misshapen head that reminds me of the Elephant Man. Bound around the child's neck is a narrow piece of white cloth, in the center of which sits a short, fat tube that seems to be inserted into his throat. In another instant I realize that he is also deaf. This last because the man immediately begins signing. At first, the boy merely watches the man's moving fingers, but soon he begins responding with motions of his own. Then, as the man's fingers move more and more rapidly, the boy's quicken, and within minutes both sets of fingers are matched in speed and complexity.

Embarrassed at first to be watching these two so steadily, I keep turning away, but they are so clearly oblivious to everyone around them that I can't resist looking up repeatedly from my book. And then something remarkable happens: the man's face is suffused with such delight and affection as the boy's responses grow ever more animated—the twisted little mouth grinning, the unaligned eyes brightening—that the child himself begins to look transformed. As the stations go by, and the conversation between the man and the boy grows ever more absorbing to them, fingers flying, both nodding and laughing, I find myself thinking, These two are humanizing each other at a very high level.

By the time we get to Fifty-Ninth Street, the boy looks beautiful to me, and the man beatific.

*   *   *

My mother had heart surgery. She emerged from the operation in a state of calm I'd never known her to possess. Criticism and complaint disappeared from her voice, grievance from her face. Everything was a matter of interest to her: negotiating the bus, the sunlight on her cheeks, the bread in her mouth. In a diner before we are due to take a bus ride across town, she sips her coffee appreciatively (usually she complains it's not hot enough) and eats a pastry with relish. She sits back, beaming at me. Then she leans across the table and declares vehemently, “This is the best cheese Danish I have ever eaten.”

We leave the diner and walk to the bus stop. “Let's stand here,” she says, pointing to a spot a few feet beyond the sign. “It used to throw me into a rage,” she explains, “that the driver would always pass the sign and stop here. I never understood why. But now I realize that it is actually easier for him to lower the step here for people like me than it is at the sign.” She laughs and says, “I've noticed lately that when I don't get angry I have more thoughts than when I do. It makes life interesting.”

I nearly weep. All I had ever wanted was that my mother be glad to be alive in my presence. I am still certain that if she had been, I'd have grown up whole inside.

“Imagine,” I say to Leonard. “She's so old and she can still do this to me.”

“It's not how old she is that's remarkable,” he says. “It's how old
you
are.”

*   *   *

A month ago, I passed a middle-aged couple on the promenade at Battery Park City. She was black, he white; both had gray hair and wavy jawlines. They were holding hands and talking earnestly, their eyes searching each other's faces for the answers to questions that only lovers put to each other. I realized, as I looked at them, that the city now contains a considerable number of middle-aged interracial couples. I'd been spotting them all over town for more than a year now, black men and white women, white men and black women, almost all of them in their forties or fifties, clearly in the first stages of intimacy. It moved me to be reminded once again of how long it is taking blacks and whites to become real to one another.

*   *   *

At ten in the morning, as I am standing on line in my branch library, waiting to check out a book, a frail-looking woman about my own age suddenly grasps the edge of the checkout desk and remains standing there. I lean forward from my place in the line and call out to her, “Is everything all right?” She glances wanly in my direction, then screams at me, “Why the
hell
are you asking me if everything is all right?”

At noon, waiting on the corner for the light to change, I look down and see a pair of shoes I think beautiful but complicated. “Are those shoes comfortable?” I inquire of the young woman wearing them. She backs off, looks at me with suspicion in her eyes, and in an alarmed voice says, “Why are you asking me that?”

At three in the afternoon, I pass a man who is yelling into the air, “Help me! Help me! I've got four uncurable diseases! Help me!” I tap him on the shoulder and cheerfully confide, “The word is
incurable
.” Without missing a beat, he replies, “Who the fuck asked you.”

The randomness of life being what it is, a few days later I have another “who the fuck asked you” day.

I'm sitting in an aisle seat on a crosstown bus. A man—black, somewhere in his forties, dressed in jeans and an oversize yellow T-shirt—is standing beside me, speaking very loudly into a cell phone.

I catch his eye and make a motion with my hand that means, “Lower your voice.” He looks amazed.

“Lower my voice?” he says incredulously. “No, madam, I will
not
lower my voice. I paid my fare, I'll do what I damned please.”

“Your fare entitles you to ride the bus,” I reply. “It does not entitle you to hold the passengers hostage.”

“Why, you bitch,” the man cries.

I leave my seat and go up to the driver. “Did you hear what that man just said to me?”

“Yes, lady,” the driver says wearily. “I heard him.”

“Are you going to do anything about it?” I demand.

“What do you want me to do? Call the police?”

“You bitch, you white bitch,” the man on the cell phone howls.

“Yes,” I say, “call the police.”

The bus grinds to a halt.

“Everybody off the bus,” the driver calls out.

A woman in the back wails, “I'm late for my therapist!”

When the cops show up, they laugh at me.

I go home, write up the incident, and e-mail it to the
Times
.

Two days later, my phone rings and a man from the paper says, “You want us to publish
this
?”

*   *   *

She was born Mary Britton Miller in New London, Connecticut, in 1883, into a wealthy Protestant family and grew up to become one of the Odd Women. Who can say why. Her childhood was marked by humdrum melodrama—by the age of three she'd been orphaned, at fourteen her twin sister drowned, by eighteen (it's been speculated) she might have borne an illegitimate baby. What, however, can actually account for a sensibility destined to be shaped by one set of experiences rather than another; or, for that matter, explain why one set of events rather than another
becomes
experience. What is certain, however, is that inevitably one ends up deeply surprised—“This is
not
what I had in mind!”—at how it has all turned out; and just as inevitably, the surprise becomes one's raw material.