The Ghost of Greenwich Village

by Lorna Graham

  “I suppose, in his maladroit way, yes.”

  “But why did everything have to be so opaque? I don’t want to upset you,” said Eve, remembering the way their opera evening ended. “But I can’t help but wonder. Why didn’t he write from the heart more, reveal something of himself the way the great artists do?”

  “He did, in his early work.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  Klieg was silent for a few moments before he spoke. “He changed gears.”

  “Why? When?”

  “It must have been about 1964 or so. He decided that words were inadequate to convey emotion.” When Eve looked perplexed, he continued. “This is typical of a young artist—to throw out everything because he’s discovered a new, more fruitful path.” Klieg stepped back from the sculpture and took in the whole.

  What had happened to Donald in 1964? Eve wanted to ask, but feared Klieg would shut down again. She opted for safer ground. “Tell me more about you and Louisa.”

  “We married. When I could afford to, I moved us back to Paris. And eventually, we came here.”

  “Why?” asked Eve.

  “Louisa wanted to. She found being back in Paris … difficult. And of course, there is a certain kind of person who just won’t be happy unless she lives in New York at least once in her life.”

  “Yes.” Eve smiled.

  “I suppose I was like that as well. It was irresistible to see if I could ‘make it’ here. I did find success, of course, and worked a great deal. That was part of it. And we did so enjoy ourselves. The opera became a habit of ours. It was her seat you took some weeks ago, our season tickets. We took walks in Central Park, ate dinner at Café Carlyle every Sunday, went for drives in the Hudson Valley. We kept up most of our routines until just before she died.…”

  Eve’s ears pricked up when he said “Café Carlyle.” But before she could ask him about it or the million other questions that sprang to mind, Klieg surprised her by resting a hand lightly on her shoulder.

  “Many in the press have asked me about my personal life, but I have always declined to talk about it. I don’t know why, but you …” Eve nodded. She had heard this many times from her interview subjects. “Maxine worries about me, thinking I am too closed off. She was most pleased about your invitation today.”

  “I’m glad you were able to come,” said Eve. “Shall we have a drink?” he asked. “Someplace nearby, perhaps.”

  They collected their coats and umbrellas. Before they headed out into the storm, Klieg looked at the rain pelting the windows and the trees turned inside out by the wind. “Let me tell you, Miss Eve, the past is a guest who visits whenever he pleases. For a long time, I managed to keep the door locked. But no more, it seems.”

  • • •

  Eve awoke to find the apartment stone cold. It felt like the heat was on the fritz. She decided to try the fireplace, though Mrs. Swan had once told her that most of them didn’t work. This had disappointed Eve, who’d cultivated a romantic image of herself tucked up in her Village apartment on a winter’s night, fire blazing, shadows swaying on the wall.

  Amazingly, the deli carried logs—these institutions had turned out to be marvelous places—and Eve loaded them along with balls of newspaper onto the grate and lit a match. The orange flame crisped the paper and set its teeth into the wood. A moment later, enormous clouds of black smoke came billowing into the room.

  “Oh my God!” Coughing, her throat burning, Eve picked up Highball, shoved her into the hall, and slammed the door. Then she opened every window and ran to the kitchen, where she grabbed her biggest pot from the shelf over the stove. She began to fill it with water. “Come on, come on,” she urged the lazy spigot.

  “What’s the hassle, baby?” asked Donald, appearing for the first time in days.

  “The fireplace. It’s”—she broke off, throwing some water into her mouth—“not working. I’ve got to call 911—”

  “Now, now. Hold on. When did you light it?”

  “I don’t know. About three minutes ago?” She broke out into another coughing fit.

  “Give it a couple more. It’s cranky. It needs to burn off the gunk inside the chimney, then it works just fine.”

  Eve, nearly gagging, ventured back into the living room. Another puff of smoke burst from the fireplace and then, suddenly, the blackness began to abate. She used pillows to shoo the remaining smoke out the windows, and the room slowly began to clear. When the air was breathable again, she let in the confused Highball, who sniffed the air warily.

  “You were right,” said Eve, holding her hands up to the dancing fire. “It’s okay now.”

  “That brings back such memories. This funny little apartment with all its idiosyncrasies. How I miss it. Does the closet in the hallway still smell like teriyaki?”

  “Yes,” said Eve, laughing.

  After she changed, she made herself some tea and found their current yellow pad. “As a thank-you, how about we get back to ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’?”

  “It’s gratifying to see you so eager,” Donald said as Eve sat down on her bed. “But I worry you’re not in the right frame of mind. After all the unpleasantness at work, are you sure you wouldn’t rather just relax?”

  “You’re sweet,” she said. “But I could use the diversion.”

  “Ah. Well then, onward. But if you’ll permit me to say just one thing about it. I want you to know I support what you did.”

  “Lighting the fire?”

  “No. At work. Taking the big story for yourself.”

  Eve had almost forgotten she’d been thinking of Donald when she did it. Even now, his support still gave her a small measure of comfort. “Thanks.”

  “My generation had a rather different relationship to the Establishment than yours, you know. We saw how the individual could be crushed by the machine. In my circle, we did not hesitate to resort to drastic measures when the situation called for it. We felt our power and we used it.”

  “Writers really mattered back then, didn’t they?”

  “They were covered in the papers like Hollywood stars.”

  “It seems like they weren’t afraid of anything.” Eve thought of the beaten-down Smell the Coffee writers.

  “Probably because we had real community back then. Manhattan was smaller. So was the Village. We stuck together, took care of each other. And restaurants and bars took care of us, too. They gave us food and drink when we were hard up. They took pride in having a stake in the career of up-and-coming young talent.”

  “Nobody remembers those times anymore,” said Eve, thinking of the plaques. Every time she’d mentioned them to someone, they’d shrugged. Alex had never noticed them. Nor had Vadis. Or even the Smell writers. “It’s fifty years ago now. Soon it’ll be lost for good. Unless …”

  “Yes?”

  Now was the time. She hadn’t planned for it, but there might never be another moment that would feel this natural. She cleared her throat and employed the lightest possible tone. “Have you ever thought about writing a memoir?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m an artist. My fiction is my statement.”

  “Well, plenty of artists have written memoirs. And think about it, you’ve lived such an interesting life. Everyone you knew in New York. Plus Paris! Your days with Lars and René and—”

  “How do you know about them?”

  “The library,” she lied, hoping to steamroller right over this revelation to prevent him from questioning this further. “You could tell stories about all of it. The Beats. The Postwar Four. How the movements were related. Funny anecdotes about everyone.”

  “I don’t—”

  “And how about this? We put your stories in the body of the memoir. You discuss your artistic process and then illustrate the fruits of it, all in one book. Let the reader go behind the scenes with the artist.”

  “Listen here—”

 
“This could be a whole new way to go, something more for the times as they are now. You’ve been gone a long time; things have changed. Drop the veil. Let the reader in.”

  There was a pause. Eve rubbed the sides of her upper arms. She rarely gave directives, rarely spoke in such short, punchy sentences. It felt good.

  “I’m not interested in a memoir. I want to continue with my stories. Now, will you or will you not help me?”

  Highball, who’d been watching her intently from the foot of the bed, high-stepped her way over the gathered ridges of the coverlet. She yawned, stretched, and sat, her pointed snout an inch from Eve’s own nose. The dog’s breath was warm against her cheek, her wagging tail like a feather duster, tickling the sides of her thighs.

  “Of course I’ll help you.” Eve sighed, trying to take his decision with good grace, already planning to bring the subject up again soon. She picked up her pen and they returned to the story, at the key moment when Paper and Scissors finally meet.

  “Everyone is waiting for the fight, for the collision,” began Donald. “Paper and Scissors size each other up and … smile broadly. They get along like a house on fire. The dinner guests are disappointed; there is nothing to see! Paper recognizes in Scissors a kindred soul, a metaphysical twin. By all rights they should be mortal enemies and this is what makes it even more delicious.”

  This story seemed to come closer to saying something than the previous ones, as though the metaphors might actually be about something real, but it still didn’t make much sense. “I realize Paper and Scissors are supposed to represent something,” she said when Donald paused for a moment. “But can we make it clearer what that is? I think that would help.”

  “How many times have I told you? I am not here to spoonfeed the reader. If he can’t keep up, that’s his tough luck.” He continued with his dictation.

  Eve shook her head but took down his words, just as she had so many times before. This time, though, she felt something stirring within her. She’d always been curious about whether his work was worth publishing, but she hadn’t cared on an emotional level. Now she began to, just a little. Not so much that his stories would be published, but that he would be. Which made it all the more frustrating that the work was so, well, bad.

  Chapter 12

  November arrived and the chill sank its claws into the city. The sky hung low like a sheet of iron, and the last of the colored leaves that had carpeted the streets suffered the indignity of being swept into large garbage bags that now lined the sidewalks like shiny black fists. Eve bought a pretty winter coat, at Full Circle of course, a high-collared bouclé affair with jeweled buttons.

  As she paid for the coat, Gwendolyn invited her over for dinner the following Saturday night. She lived at the corner of Christopher and Greenwich in a rent-controlled apartment she’d inherited from her grandmother. It was on the ninth floor, with a beautiful view of the Jefferson Market Library and, beyond, the Empire State Building. Unlike Eve’s radiators, Gwendolyn’s hissed their productivity loudly, and her windows were thrown open wide like arms around the city. Eve leaned out and breathed in the crisp air, before tucking into a deep bowl of pasta and a hearty Shiraz. They spent the evening playing go fish, and afterward, Eve quizzed Gwendolyn for an entrepreneurship exam at the New School.

  Gwendolyn was planning to buy Full Circle and was single-minded in pursuing her goal. Gwendolyn, Alex, Vadis: It struck Eve that young New Yorkers were far more intent on going it alone than Ohioans. Would she ever want to do the same? She wouldn’t even know how to begin.

  • • •

  At the library, Mrs. Chin informed Eve that more boxes had come in from the collector.

  “I know I promised you these a while ago,” she said, reaching for the books, which she’d put aside under the counter. “But there’s a backlog of material, and with the latest round of budget cuts, we’ve fewer people handling processing. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  “That’s okay,” said Eve. “Thanks for flagging them for me.” She carried the stack over to her usual table. The third book she flipped through, Village Artists and Their Associations, 1940–1970, sparked an idea. Maybe there was a way to back Donald into a memoir without him realizing what she was doing. Maybe she could read up on his contemporaries and ask him about them quite innocently, drawing him out in casual fashion.

  The book proved extraordinarily helpful for tracing connections. For instance, she quickly determined that Donald was in something called the Free Voices Brigade, along with William Burroughs and someone named Simon Thuen, who was also in the Unchained Essayists of Eighth Street. And Simon was part of the Village Scribes along with Gregory Corso and someone named Floyd Sommers, whose style was described as “freemodern.” This sounded promising and Eve wrote it down in her notebook. By the end of the afternoon, she had seven pages of names and affiliations.

  At home that night, she took up her place at the bar and called out for Donald.

  “You rang?” he said. His flash of humor indicated a good mood.

  “I’ve been reading about my mother’s times at the library, as you know,” said Eve. “And I was wondering if I could toss out some names I found in a book today to see if any ring a bell. Just for fun.”

  Donald grunted a tacit assent. The first ten or so names she mentioned produced either no memory at all or spirited denunciations that were capped by such proclamations as “fink,” “horse’s ass,” or the dreaded “sellout.”

  “What about Mike McGuire?” asked Eve. “He was in, let’s see, Unchained Essayists and his name also pops up in several articles about minor Beats. Seems he was sort of the tail end.”

  “McGuire … yes,” said Donald.

  “What do you remember about him?” asked Eve.

  “Poet. A bit younger than I, ten years or so, not the kind of person I would ordinarily notice. But he stood out. He rode just up to the line of brashness. He spoke a lot but also listened well. He possessed boundless energy, too, as if extra blood were pumping through his veins.”

  “What else?” Eve flipped the page and kept scribbling.

  “I used to see him at El Faro and places like that. Have you been there? I hope it still exists. Marvelously cracked, very bohemian. Anyway, he always had a pencil behind his ear and a handkerchief in his breast pocket. He had a job writing advertising copy, took a lot of ribbing for it from the counterculture set. He also gambled a bit on the ponies. When he was flush, he’d buy the whole room a round. He was quite the glad-hander but he carried poems in his pocket and the only time he grew shy was when he tried to show them to me.”

  “Why did he want to show them to you?”

  “They were—only vaguely, mind you—an homage to my style.”

  “Were they any good?”

  There was a beat of silence. “He struggled a bit in terms of adapting my ideas to his own voice, which is what every writer must do, this dance between influence and the essential self. But I suppose I must admit there was … potential there. And I remember something else.”

  “Yes?”

  “After a reading I gave on Bedford Street, the hostess took me aside and told me that before I’d arrived, McGuire had addressed the room. He urged those gathered to not only read my stories but to try my theories on for size in their own work. He said something to the effect that for him, nothing had been as freeing as my particular restrictions.”

  “He really admired you.”

  “Kind, very kind, he was. I wish now I’d paid a bit more attention to him. I was so busy trying to curry favor with those older and more successful than I that I forgot to complete the circle, to support those coming up behind.”

  Eve sat up straighter on the bar stool. “I’d love to talk to him. I wonder where he is now.”

  “I’m not sure. He left town, as I remember, went traveling probably, as most of us did at one point or another. But perhaps he returned.”

  • • •

  The next week at work, Eve kept her head
low and said little. Whenever she had a moment, she worked on her résumé, but the rest of the time, her stories ranged from “Perfume for Your Daughter’s Dolls” to “Eating for Seven: Snacks for Moms Expecting Sextuplets” to “Fourteen Kinds of Thanksgiving Relishes.” She did not get to go on the sweeps shopping trip to Chicago with Quirine and Cassandra. And editing sessions with Mark became a daily misery; he was immune to her talent and to any small joke she might offer.

  Still, every once in a while she felt compelled to try to improve the atmosphere between them.

  “Hey, did you see?” she said, leaning against the doorway of his office. “They finally moved Orla Knock’s stuff out. After all this time. I guess you’ll be getting her office, right?” The wall-to-wall windows would be a vast improvement over Mark’s airless box.

  “No,” said Mark, turning his attention to a stack of folders. “They’ve got some marketing guy they’re giving it to.”

  “What? Marketing’s not editorial. That office is the managing editor’s office and you’re the managing editor.”

  “I know that, Eve.” Mark said, starting to tap away at his keyboard. “Apparently, they’re reorganizing the floor.”

  Eve shook her head. This seemed like yet another slap in the face to the department. She wanted Mark to march into Giles Oberoy’s office and demand the office for himself. But after the embarrassment she’d caused the department, he probably didn’t think he could demand anything.

  “Mark, I—” she began.

  “Kind of busy here,” he said.

  • • •

  Quirine and Russell were being extra nice. Quirine invited her to a play and they had dinner afterward. She made for lively company. She could tell you the best places to go camping in Vietnam as well as a foolproof way to get an annoying song out of your head. And Eve was further surprised when Russell and his wife, Susan, invited her over for dinner at their place on the Upper West Side. Susan, at about thirty, was ten or so years younger than Russell but had a focused air that made her seem if anything more mature. She was a pixielike redhead who worked for a cookbook publisher, and she treated them to a delicious tilapia in banana leaves that she was testing for a new volume. Quirine came too, bringing Victor, a graduate student of historical preservation at Pratt. He was olive-skinned with a halo of corkscrew curls and an easy manner, and when Eve insisted on washing the dishes, he took up a post next to her to dry them, turning the whole thing into a friendly competition to see who was faster. It ended with the two of them engaged in some playful splashing, and though a few soapy droplets splattered Eve’s Ossie Clark dress, she didn’t mind a bit.