I would go out to interview the famous, become so involved with talking to them that I forgot their fame and my fear, and return with good, often funny notes. But once I was back in the Graybar Building, where Vogue had its offices, and aware that Allene’s sharp tongue was about to rip my back, I was terrified. One day she outdid herself—outdid everyone, really, who has ever disliked me. “You have more talent for the quick phrase than anyone I’ve ever hired,” she barked, “but you’re not capable of a sustained piece of work.”
Using my notes—“After Loren, bones are boring” was perhaps my finest moment—Allene would write the captions, bring them out to be typed, and then, always running scared, wait for our reactions to them. Since they were good within their context and entirely predictable, I had nothing to say, having been raised never to gush or, in my family’s parlance, be “Judas-friendly.” My silence meant acceptance, but it was construed as criticism, and I was stunned the day she asked, “Do you know how many people you’ve hurt?”
When I joked of the horror of having to write my fifth caption in one day about women about whom there was little to say except that they had “skin as translucent as a Limoges cup” and “a brave list of charities,” she heard of it within seconds and raged at what she called my betrayal. Her secretary and her assistant, linked in the camaraderie of survivorship, let me flounder. Only my friend the bubbly blonde implied that Allene was difficult to work for. “The first few weeks I worked with her . . . well, my dear, I used to go home, sit in the tub, and weep. My dear, the bathwater was pure salt.” I wish I had known about the walking wounded who were my predecessors, or that one of them had spoken of wanting to kill Allene and claimed she lay in bed at night trying to figure out how to leave the Graybar undetected. It might have given me a new perspective.
By then, however, I had no perspective on anything, and certainly not Vogue. I had even begun to believe in “People Are Talking About.” This was a page, written primarily by Allene from material collected by her minions, that ran in almost every issue. Finding ”People“ items was a nightmare. If we were lucky, we could come up with sentences like ”People Are Talking About . . . the bluesy, cigarette-rasp with which the astonishing Elaine Stritch saws through ‘You Took Advantage of Me’. . . the way the brilliant young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, is capturing the nation’s imagination.” Unlucky, we were reduced, as one contributor once was, to ”. . . the music piped into the treatment rooms at Sloan-Kettering during chemotherapy.”
I wrote a “People” page all by myself once, when Allene was on holiday—“on holiday,” so snugly British, was Vogue’s preferred term for two weeks with pay—and Jessica Daves, the magazine’s faintly frumpy editor-in-chief, suddenly wanted one. With the bull terrier no longer a room away, my pencil flew. Once she was back, it traced boxes and initials and trees with fluffy tops, but no sentences. Allene threatened to fire me, but I said no, you must not, because I have never failed at anything and cannot bear to.
One autumn afternoon I walked to Saks Fifth Avenue to buy a dress I had seen in an advertisement. I had never cared much about clothes, except for the samples I bought from McCardell’s back room, and was vain only of my very narrow feet. The one mirror in our apartment was on the door of the medicine cabinet. Mornings, I would sling on something, twist my head over my shoulder to see if my slip showed, and that was it. So I did not know what I looked like until I saw myself in the dressing room’s full-length mirror: ghastly in orange, my cheeks as hollow as if I had lost my back teeth, my eyes as staring as my father’s just before he died, my arms like sticks.
Only Jell-O would go down at lunch, Jell-O and the occasional nutted cream cheese sandwich at the Chock Full O’ Nuts across Lexington from the Graybar, and the Dexamyl that Dr. Franklin had prescribed was robbing me of what little appetite was left. B. joked about my logorrhea, about how I would elbow him awake at midnight with “Did I ever tell you what my grandfather said to me when I was ten?” and “Do you remember the time we went to the basketball game and . . . ?” but he could not joke any more after he took me, for a treat, to a restaurant named Teddy’s.
Teddy’s was a treat because it was expensive and because we had convinced ourselves the other customers were Mafia. It was a treat, too, because it was somewhere around the west end of Canal Street, and the kind of New Yorkers we were turning into love nothing more than eating in a nowhere part of town. The walls above the banquettes were lined with photographs of Teddy’s movie-star diners, and we sat directly under one of Elizabeth Taylor, who was at that moment supposed to be dying. It should have been a wonderful evening, what with the rain falling sadly on Canal Street and the beautiful young actress so tragically breathing her last and B., who looked so much like Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun, sitting beside me. But when the steamed lobster I’d ordered arrived, out of its shell and lying naked on a bed of lettuce, I thought it looked like a boiled baby. Perhaps it was the Dexamyl; perhaps it was Allene. All I know is that when I saw that lobster nestled in its iceberg lettuce cradle, I saw a murdered child.
I lasted for about nine months, or maybe it was seven, until the winter morning when I wrote a deep caption about an actress. It was a monument to adjectives, strong verbs, and the rule of three, and Allene liked it. She even smiled. Still, there was something wrong—she didn’t say what—with the last sentence. I slid the paper off her desk, stood up, and did what I should have done a long time before. I said, “I quit.”
“You can’t do that,” Allene barked, then, terrier to the last, added, “I don’t care if you spend the rest of the week in the infirmary, but no one just walks out of here.”
“I do,” I replied, and left her office.
Pausing only to pick up the stone from Prince Edward Island that I was using as a paperweight and the cellophane bag of dried apricots with which I was trying to beef up my blood, I ran for the elevator and home. There I did what I always did when I had lost my temper. I cried.
B. took me to the Berkshires the following weekend, to an inn that served up roast ham and raisin sauce and four-poster beds and cranberry-glass tumblers. We had longed to go to an inn like that, and to auctions, where we could at last buy the hutch and dry sink that would make us feel calm and cozy and truly married. But by now I was seeing the world through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything and everyone was very far away, too far away to touch or be touched by. One afternoon, so late that shadows were already bluing the snow, I took a long solitary walk beside the river. Walking, the mere act of moving my legs, had always brought me back into connection with the physical. But this time I returned shaking, because I believed that someone, shielded by the tall snowbanks that margined the water, was tracking my every step.
A few months later, a woman, a stranger, called me at home. My replacement at Vogue, she had found my name in the files and was wondering if I could tell her something about her boss, because no one else would talk. I didn’t talk either. I thought the phone was bugged.
Years later, I ran into Allene at a cocktail party. She congratulated me on what I was doing and I congratulated her on what she was doing, half expecting the playful slap and the sputtered “You’re so thin!” Then we both disappeared into the smoke and the chatter and the palazzo pajamas and the dry vermouth on the rocks, and I never saw her again. I never forgave her, either, not for being demanding but for being unable to resist piercing an all-too-visible jugular vein.
…
A man and a woman are sitting at night in a living room in Greenwich Village. It is nicely furnished and so are they. Both are reading. The woman is lonely, she is always lonely, and she would like to ask her husband if she could sit in his lap. He would like that. But if she does, she will feel his penis rise and push against her buttocks, and that will shock and sicken her. When he stands up she would like to go to him. But if she does, he will press his groin against hers and his penis will swell and she will loosen her arms and push him away. She would like t
o look at him. But if she does, he will mistake the glance and cross the room to her. Therefore she does not dare to ask to sit in his lap or hug him or even look at him. So she is silent and motionless and he is silent and motionless, and the one keeps her head bent over Ngaio Marsh and the other keeps his head bent over Philip Rahv.
It is a few days before Christmas. The woman has put up a tree and the man has helped decorate it and both are especially pleased with a jeweled butterfly she bought on Madison Avenue. Christmas cards march across the quasi-mahogany sideboard and wrapping paper spills from the couch. She has made cookies and he has made elaborate efforts to hide his presents to her in their apartment’s one closet. She was excited about Christmas coming and December’s briskness and her forays along Fifth Avenue, because he is beginning to make enough money for them to spend a bit. But now she has stopped talking and cannot hear when he speaks, because today she saw a man holding a little girl’s hand while together they looked in a window of FAO Schwarz and suddenly she wanted to be dead.
An evening a day or two later. The man and woman are walking home from dinner at a friend’s house. There was a girl there, younger than she and even shyer, and because the woman felt sorry for her she “brought her out,” as her mother would have put it, and made her comfortable. The man is proud of his wife. “You couldn’t have done that a few years ago,” he says, and the woman grins. She has just received an A+.
Any Tuesday or Thursday at 4:30 in a psychiatrist’s office in Schwab House, on the Upper West Side, which is where all psychiatrists seemed to have their offices. Given the Jewish and Austrian accents that overlay the area like icing on a cake, the woman assumes the placement brings Freud’s acolytes closer to him.
The woman is sitting, arms and legs crossed, on a Barcelona chair. The couch to her left, also from Mies, has a clean paper towel, changed for each patient, at its head. But not for her. She has never lain on the couch and she never will.
The doctor is smiling, because the woman can be rather amusing, but although she talks a lot, she says nothing. After their fifty-minute session, she walks to the Seventy-second Street stop of the IRT and descends the narrow stairs to the track. When she hears the train coming, she steps behind a pillar and closes her eyes. She is afraid that if she sees it, she will jump.
The woman loves her husband. No, incorrect. She worships her husband. But she wants to go to her father. Suicide, however, is out of the question. She is a coward, and besides, her church, whose grasp she has never quite managed to elude, will not let her. So what is she to do? Writing is out of the question: she believes what she was told, that she is “not capable of a sustained piece of work.” Another job is out of the question: she has already worked for two magazines and where else can she go? A baby is out of the question: her gynecologist says she is too underweight to risk pregnancy. There is nothing for it but to move.
21 Perry Street
1
SOMEWHERE I have read that an image John Fowles could not get out of his head, of a hooded figure alone on a dock, was what prompted him to write The French Lieutenant’s Woman. There is an image I cannot get out of my head, either, that of a man standing in the areaway of our third apartment, and although it has never prompted me to write a novel, it has always struck me as a compelling first page.
The page, in précis, would read something like this. A young man and a young woman are walking home from the late show at the Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village, where they live. It is a hot summer night, and their steps are as slow as their conversation is lazy. As they round the corner of Perry Street, they see, silhouetted against the white petunias the young woman has planted in an old concrete urn, a man standing in the areaway of their apartment. He is motionless. Perhaps he is listening to something. Or waiting.
In reality, the young man and woman keep on walking, passing their apartment as if it were not theirs at all. When they return, ten or so minutes later, from their circuit of the block, the man is gone. The hands that gripped their hearts relax. They can enter the areaway, unlock the second gate, go home.
On my first page, however, the young couple decide to dare the intruder in the areaway. Maybe it is just that he is at the wrong address. The night is dark, and all these houses, brick with tall stoops, look alike. So they open the first gate, the latched one that abuts the sidewalk, and ask the man if they can help him. He mutters something, then moves toward the gate they have just opened. Relieved, they turn to the second gate, and the young man brings out his keys. Then it happens. The stranger swivels and plunges a knife in the young man’s back. The woman, her shoulders hunched and her own back pressed against the areaway’s brownstone facing, watches her husband die. Meanwhile the stranger, the sound of his footsteps diminishing as he hurries west, runs toward the Hudson River and the docks.
I see that man standing there, against those blazing white petunias, every time I pass 21 Perry Street. Suppose we had taken the dare, suppose we had not circled the block? Maybe what happened on that first page would have happened in fact. Maybe I would have been a widow; maybe there would have been no Kate, no Mag, no memories. That I might have been the one with the knife between the shoulder blades never occurs. Like most people, most Westerners anyway, I have a sneaking suspicion I am immortal.
But why—aside from the fact that there was indeed once a man lurking in the areaway—bring so heavy an imaginative burden to so innocuous a place as the basement apartment of 21 Perry Street? Easy. That is where my life as an adult began.
St. John’s Church owned a lot of property: five or six houses on West Eleventh Street and seven or eight more on Perry Street, which ran parallel. Between the two, and hidden from passersby, was perhaps the most secret of all the Village’s secret gardens. It was very large, with two fountains, a small stone altar, private sitting areas at the rear of each basement apartment, a towering catalpa tree which in spring had a haunting, peppery scent, rose of Sharon bushes and spirea and a community of box turtles, invisible in winter and shy in summer. Once there had been peacocks, too, spreading their tails along the paved pathways.
All St. John’s tenants had keys to the garden, and on summer Saturday afternoons B. and I would unlock an inconspicuous wooden door on Eleventh Street, carry our cheese sandwiches through the cool dark tunnel that led to the minister’s small enclosure, cross it, and enter the garden, to sit for hours on the stone bench that circled the catalpa and dream about getting a basement apartment. It was hot and still in the garden—street sounds rarely penetrated—and though our butts were pocked by the bench’s granular surface and our backs ached, we seldom left before sunset.
Finally a family on Perry Street moved out and we leaped, signing the lease before we even took a good look at what we were getting. The previous tenant was a set designer, with a presto-chango approach to décor. The furniture, for instance, had been spray-painted in situ, which meant the walls it hid were blotched with various colors. He had made a dollhouse for his daughter by building shelves in an unused fireplace. Filled, it was charming. Empty, it was a fireplace clogged with splintery boards. The kitchen stank of cats.
No matter. We scrubbed and deodorized and hung wallpaper along the kitchen’s long east wall, and Jerry built bookcases in the small back room we called the study. He built bookcases in the living room, too, on either side of the fireplace, while B. hefted the shelves and handed out nails, as eager as he had been on Twenty-first Street to make himself a home.
An interior decorator could not date that apartment—B. and I were equally unwilling to enter department stores and indifferent to trends, but for our Paul McCobb couches and linen-shaded standing lamps—but I think a cultural historian could. The little foreign matchbooks came from West Fourth Street and were very Village. The Chinese export porcelain cups, each of which had at least one hairline crack and held cigarettes, were very New England, as was the white ironstone pitcher crammed, depending on the season, with chrysanthemums or laurel leaves. The Spode dinner
service spoke of a trip or two to London, the copper pots in the kitchen of a trip or two to Paris, and the reproduction eighteenth-century silver-plate of an inability to afford sterling combined with a rejection of stainless steel modernism. The two wine racks in the coat closet told of someone venturing beyond Soave and Chianti, and the copies of Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and Les Amours Jaunes argued junior year abroad. Almost everything from West Eleventh Street had come with us, and now we had a real Windsor chair.
In the house next door lived May Swenson, a stocky woman whose hair was cropped short over her bullet head and whom we used to see peering from her second-floor window into the garden. Justin O’Brien—“the Gide man,” B. explained—had a duplex a few doors down but was seldom in residence. His Chinese cook, though, was forever getting drunk and forever setting fire to the kitchen.
A family with a lot of money moved in across the way, and when the husband made what the head of the garden committee, a skinny little woman who wore high-top sneakers, perceived as encroachments on the community space, she chased him down West Fourth Street with the hatchet she’d been using to kill privet. The tall, Slavic-looking woman who had the floor-through above O’Brien and claimed to be a Russian princess had French perfumes delivered from Bigelow’s Drugstore and, seemingly unacquainted with cloth diapers, kept her young son in so many layers of disposables that one could have driven a truck between his legs.
The middle-aged woman who lived in the garden apartment to our right was a buyer of notions for a large department store and had never married, she told me, because everyone in her family was crazy and she did not want to pass on the taint. Al, an ex-tap dancer, and Bud, who hooked rugs, strung their terrace with fairy lights (“Ho, ho,” we chortled) at Christmastime and gave tasteful little dinners, more tasteful even than ours. The garden apartment next to theirs was lived in by a former nightclub singer and girl-about-town in her late thirties who got herself knocked up by a young stranger. She married him and promptly turned from continental layabout to Italian mama, a switch so startling to her amiable, fat-necked groom that he, starved for glamour, had an affair with Al.
Manhattan, When I Was Young Page 9