I had always been praised, in public and in private, for my love of fun—for seeming young forever, forever young.
But.
Happiness and a love of fun are not coextensive, and their relationship may even be divergent. If one were happy, then one might stay in with a book, say, and not go out hunting for fun.
As I watched the Manhattan skyline shrink away, Max and I were not holding hands, and no one was on shore to see us off. His parents were staying in our Murray Hill place to watch Johnny while we were gone for the month.
Gian, not Johnny, I kept having to remind myself. He’d be turning thirteen in a few weeks and had tired of the nickname. Babyish, he’d deemed it.
The symbolism of setting sail on New Year’s Day was deliberately heavy-handed, handpicked by Max’s well-meaning family.
The hope was that with a new year we could have a new start.
The idea was that I would be renewed by being in a newish place. It would still be wintry, but not nearly as much so as New York City at that time of year. A sweet thought on their part, but honestly, I might as well have been commuting on the IRT as floating on an ocean liner. It was all the same to me. Everything felt flat and featureless.
Even during the weeks we toured the Italian interior under the still-robust winter sun, I was at my wits’ fucking end, if you’ll forgive the phrase, being in a place where the weather did not reflect my mood. I was raining; the sun mocked my sadness.
I have always loved the pathetic fallacy, in verse and in life.
For a long time I could remember almost nothing of this second honeymoon, which resembled the first the way an embalmed corpse resembles the lost beloved. My mind was a wreck then—my perception dulled, my perspective poisoned—and the electroshock cure, when it finally came, swept away all my thoughts from this time, along with the person I was when I thought them.
But I left myself a path back: a travel diary, diligently kept. For years it lay forgotten at the bottom of my old steamer trunk; for years after I uncovered it, it remained unread. I feared it was a trap I’d set for myself: a trick by my old adversary to gain readmittance. I resolved to destroy it, but I never did, and then one Halloween, after a call from Gian and the kids—who were about to get a late start trick-or-treating after an hour of shaping Lily’s hair into buns above her ears, the crux of a costume I utterly failed to follow—I found myself in the mood for a ghost story, and I dug it out.
The diary made it clear that I had taken the trip as an occasion to crown myself Queen of the Mayhem, at least in my mind. My attitude was that of a saboteur: seemingly mild and compliant, biding my time, waiting for the moment to throw a wrench in the works.
The entry from when we stopped in Milan read: When in the dumps, I hate the things that ordinarily I love.
In Florence it was: Down with bluebirds.
In Venice it was: Vivacious chumps declaring how great it is to be alive. And down with them, people who say the weather forecast should be “partly sunny” instead of “partly cloudy.”
The first time we’d visited Italy, I’d learned so much. The second time, it seems the main lesson was: Ennui dies hard.
Up until then, despite the vicissitudes of my position, I’d always felt invincible. But in Italy I had come to feel vinced.
This is it, I had written on an otherwise-blank, undated page, with regard, I believe, to my career, my marriage. The stuff you see above you that looks like higher peaks may just be clouds. This is it. This is it.
I guess I wanted more, and also didn’t trust what I did have.
Stupid brain, I wrote.
By the end of the trip, Max didn’t know what to do with me. Not that he’d known what to do before—he hadn’t for a long time. How could he, when I didn’t know what to do with—or about—myself?
That night, the night of what my various caretakers would later take to calling “the incident,” we were shipboard again, shipboard at last, headed back to New York. We were having drinks with some new friends we—or rather Max, really—had acquired, a couple whose names I heard, then immediately forgot, and only picked up again when Max used them in our stilted conversation, conspicuously for my sake: Vivian and Herb.
What happened that night embarrassed Max irrevocably—both as it was happening, and in its aftermath, which was eternity, or at least the rest of our lives. He never spoke of it, not even as “the incident.”
What’s odd is that I’ve never forgotten it. Even as the days that led to and from it were scrubbed away by alcohol, madness, and electric shocks, its details have remained perfectly clear in my mind, gleaming like the bright scales of a fish arced over turbid water.
I’ve never told anyone this. I lied to Max, Gian, Helen, every doctor I’ve ever had. Myself most of all. The truth is, I do remember.
And it is up to me—not Max, not anyone else—to decide if I am embarrassed by it. If I am not embarrassed, well, then it is not embarrassing.
So here’s what happened:
We were in the lounge when I finally scrounged up the will to do what I had been contemplating.
The conversation was about travel: places we’d been, how we’d liked them, and why.
Vivian and Herb were the relentlessly positive types. They had a theory that maintaining a positive attitude was the secret to successful travel.
Vivian was insisting that no matter how bad something was, you could always find one thing to praise about it. “Even if it’s just something like ‘Lovely salt, isn’t it?’” she said, laughing.
“Or,” said Herb, squeezing her knee, “if you’re on a terrible bus ride, you can still find a way to fixate on the scenery. America the beautiful!”
“That’s exactly right,” said Max. “Why couldn’t we meet you two on the way over? I’ve been trying to explain this to my wife for a month! See, Lillian? Maybe you’ll listen to strangers if you won’t listen to your husband, eh?” He gave Herb a big, stagey wink. “Positivity! I’ll drink to that!”
“I’ll just drink,” I said, and I drained my Manhattan, leaving the cherry skewered on its toothpick, lacking the appetite for even that much food.
I could feel Max’s disapproval. It had been my second drink, and everyone else was just halfway through their first.
“Lily,” said Herb, “you are a perfect social hooligan!”
His mirthfulness and forced familiarity seemed sincere and well-intentioned, devoid of Max’s aggressive edge. Herb and Vivian were nice people. They had no business mixing with the likes of Max and me. I was about to show them that.
“Excuse me,” I said, picking up my clutch. “Off to powder my nose. I’ll be back in two shakes.”
I had had my sea legs well under me almost from the instant we’d set sail for home, but I felt unsteady walking away from our table.
During my younger years there were moments when I’d find myself alone in my room for the first time in weeks, and it was time for a good cry. It’s not as though I had never known sadness prior to that horrible year; it’s that by then I no longer knew what to do with the sadness. How to get through it and then put it efficiently behind me.
That year I had become unable to cry. Just blank, blank. I felt like a white wall.
There in the bathroom, certainly, I felt well past tears, and made a point of not meeting my own eyes in the mirror. The minute you see yourself you’re forced out of your head and into your body, forced to reckon with yourself as a thing that takes up space in the world, that others can see and react to, that has a story with a beginning, middle, and end that intersects with other people’s stories. A mirror gives you perspective.
I didn’t want perspective. It wouldn’t help me do what I had come to do. For months I had felt increasingly out of myself—everything seemed to be happening about me, as opposed to to me, as if I were the still midpoint of a swirling cloud of trouble. I didn’t want to be convinced that my circumstances were otherwise. I just wanted to be back in control, calling the tune.
Had I
been anywhere there was a chance that Johnny would find me, I don’t think I’d have tried it. As it was, I’d finally found a good use for the voyage.
At the bottom of my clutch, kept hidden for weeks, was a razor blade folded into a dollar bill. I unwrapped it, held it to my left wrist, and cut, remembering as I did so a supercilious young surgeon I’d met at a party some twenty-odd years before, who’d told me—to shock me, I’m sure, with his callousness—that the best technique was not across but rather up the arm, vertically. Him I paid little mind, but his advice I filed away, on the off chance it might come in handy someday.
He wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t expected it, but the pain was astonishing—a feeling of total wrongness and distress that didn’t even register as pain—and the mess was immediate. My hands went slippery, and I wasn’t dexterous enough any longer to use my mutilated left to do the same to my right. I sank to the floor—clammy linoleum, the kind that was patterned to look like marble.
If I’d really wanted to be effective, I could have just jumped. Erased myself. Hart Crane’d off the ship, and that would have been it. It’s ugly, I know, to admit that part—just part—of why I did it the way that I did was because I wanted Max to see me. To witness, publically, how his affair with Julia had hurt me.
I tried to focus on my rage—my only source of warmth—as my teeth chattered and my head swam.
True, I had been no blanket-on-the-grass-in-the-sunshine picnic to be around during that last year we were together. But he didn’t have to do what he’d done. Not the way he’d done it.
He should have asked for the divorce first, before sneaking around. But for all his seeming nonchalance and joie de vivre, this was one area wherein he lacked courage: He would never risk a loss without a contingency plan, without assuring himself of a soft landing—in this case, in Julia’s much younger and less complicated lap. And now she’d be waiting to nurse him—and Johnny!—through this tragedy. Good luck, Julia! Can’t say I didn’t warn you.
Then the door opened, and Vivian found me. Crying, finally. Dress ruined. A bloody mess.
It is my understanding that because I had been gone a long time, Max had sent our new friend to fetch me. Typical Max! I could easily picture his gambit, outwardly concerned but actually cavalier, pushing off what ought to have been his responsibility with such charm that it would never have crossed poor Vivian’s mind to say no.
Something’s wrong, he would have said. She never takes more than two minutes in the bathroom. Could you go check on her?
And so Vivian unearthed the heap of me: such an embarrassment.
By the time Herb was sprinting for help and Max was manhandling me—crushing his thick thumb into my armpit, just the way the Army had taught him—I had blacked out, but I could still hear silly Vivian fussing innocently about, looking for jagged edges and smashed glass, trying to figure out what accident had befallen me. I’m murdering myself, you moron, I wanted to shout.
The shipboard medics rushed me to the infirmary, where the doctors stabilized me.
When we landed in Manhattan they checked me into St. Vincent’s.
I wasn’t glad that I hadn’t died. And I wasn’t sad that I hadn’t. I wasn’t anything.
* * *
Afterwards, when they were holding me, trying to figure out where to ship me next, making arrangements for residential treatment at Silver Hill, Helen came to visit.
She asked me—as a lot of my friends would ask, actually—why I hadn’t told someone. Why I hadn’t gone to one or another of them for help.
That was a fair question. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t seen it coming.
I had always cultivated a magpie mind: Any and every shred of life’s ephemera could come to serve as an adornment, either for verse or for advertising.
For the past year or so, though, the only baubles I had noticed were articles on alcoholism and subjects of that ilk. I clipped and saved pieces on mastering one’s impulses and preventing suicide. I hardly recall reading any of them, only collecting them: the expression of yet another unmastered impulse.
That afternoon—visiting hours, the end of January—Helen was sitting at my bedside. My left hand was under the covers because seeing it upset her too much: She had always been one to faint at the sight, or even the thought, of blood. But she clutched my right hand and looked into my eyes and waited for my answer.
Part of me wanted to ask why she, why they, hadn’t asked me if I needed help. They surely had to have noticed. But I could not blame them—did not blame them, not really. I did what I did. No one else was responsible.
In a way, it was my own independence—I could see now, after the incident—that had caused the incident. The very compulsion that had driven my achievements for so long had somehow begun to work against me.
It had never been an effort for me to keep up my aggressive vivacity—until suddenly it was, and I didn’t know how to get it back or what to do in its absence. And so I did not do anything, and I did not tell anyone.
The answer that I gave to Helen was:
“I have never cared for those who treat their friends as they would a charity ward.”
“But we’d have wanted to help,” she told me. “You know I would have. You know any of us would.”
“I know,” I said. “I know you would have. And you’re helping now. And I’m grateful. And I’m sorry, Helen. What I did was incredibly rude, and I’m sorry for that.”
She protested, but I knew I was right. My long, fine streak of charm had ended: I had jumped the groove, gracelessly scraping everything in my path. I had become boorish, embarrassing, but worst of all I had become exhausting. I was sure I heard a sigh of relief every time someone trundled me away into a cab or train, or took their leave of me through a hospital door.
I had even worn poor Helen out: Her reassurances gradually waned in the face of my stolid despair. We were sitting in silence when we heard the Morse-code tap of sensible heels down the corridor. The supervising nurse appeared at the door, and visiting hours were over.
I was left alone again to think, and to listen to the traffic outside: a throbbing note appropriate to the irreparable wreck of Cupid’s barque. An almost tidal-sounding score perfect for the choreography of the passage of time, a dull and dogged reminder that I was just like everyone else in suffering the injustice of chronology: I could only walk through it facing forward, going in that one direction.
24
A Secret
Although I have promised Gian that if I am ever confronted by muggers I will not resist, this turns out to have been an untruth.
I do not discover my falsehood immediately after emerging from the party, but rather outside of Penn Station. It takes a few minutes.
Walking north to Thirty-Third Street, leaving Peter and Wendy’s place, I pass numerous idling cabs, yellow and hungry like the golden Pac-Mans in those video games my grandchildren love. Single-minded, the drivers trawl the curbs, aiming to devour little ghosties like me. With just moments to go until midnight, every cabbie is waiting for a fare, all hoping that whoever drunkenly stumbles through their doors after ringing in the New Year will be a short trip: each seeks to pack as much earning as possible into this, the cabbie’s busiest night of the year.
As I walk, I’m weaving a little—hard to say just how much—from the effect of drinking cheap vodka two hours past my usual bedtime. It makes me a target, but I want to be a target. A spectacle. A catalyst. Things used to happen around me.
It hasn’t rained, but the sidewalks are as damp and gray as tombstones.
I arrive at Penn Station, by which I mean not Penn Station but the atrocity they erected in its place in 1968. I have walked by it hundreds of times since then, but the nastiness of the place still claps like a slap across the face. It is so ugly.
The old station, the one that stood when I arrived in 1926, was a Beaux-Arts marvel of pink granite and glass and steel that evoked not just travel by rail, but also travel through time: the splendor of
an ancient Roman past, plus the possibility of a future where beauty and civic function are not just valued but understood to be in harmony.
I will not make it all the way there before 1985, but I have decided that I would like to walk by R.H. Macy’s on my way back home. The last stop of the night.
Stay off the street, Peter told me. Stay off the street, Wendy agreed.
I am not going to stay off the street. Not when the street is the only thing that still consistently interests me, aside from maybe my son and my cat. The only place that feels vibrant and lively. Where things collide. Where the future comes from.
Where lights snick on and off in unreachable windows, like the ones above me. Even when the street is not majestic or momentous, it fascinates me. The lights that working people leave on after they go home: pies in a pie case bathed in bulb glow, the desk lamp burning in the funeral home, the hundreds of indistinguishable desks in fluorescent-washed offices, waiting for the next business day to restore their significance.
Footsteps to my left and a deep voice. “Hey, lady,” it says.
I turn to face it and see three teenagers, three young black men.
“We’re gonna need five dollars from you,” says the voice. It belongs to the tallest one—taller than me but just as skinny, wearing blue jeans and a red leather flight jacket striated with glittering zippers. It’s a handsome jacket, but too short for his arms, leaving his wrists bare to the midnight chill.
“Excuse me?” I say.
The kid to his left—shorter, but stronger looking—steps in closer. The third hangs back, his eyes darting from me to the street to the sidewalks to the nearby buildings and then to me again. He seems not to want to be here, and his nervousness makes me nervous, snaps me partly out of my drunken overconfidence.
“Give us five dollars,” the short one answers, “is what the man said.”
His eyes are closed off, as impersonal and unwelcoming as Madison Square Garden looming beside us. He’s dressed in an Adidas tracksuit; his tennis shoes have no laces. All three of them are shivering, dressed for this morning’s warmer weather. They’re a ways from home, wherever that is—across the Harlem River, probably.
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk Page 24