Only in New York

by Lily Brett

  A Destination

  A Discovery

  Calm

  Caffe Dante

  Walking

  A Bike in the City

  Lilitchka

  Chickpea Curry

  So Jewish

  Yakub

  Psychic

  Dogs

  Flat White

  Being a Guest

  Crocodile Legs

  My Father

  Trees

  Dictionaries

  Falling in Love in Cologne

  Shoulders

  Jewish Feng Shui

  Pens

  Spandex House

  Loneliness

  Mellow

  Horses

  My Mother’s Glasses

  Sleeping Arrangements

  Weather

  A Lawyer

  Space Scrubbers

  Talking

  Searching

  Papers

  Hiroko’s Place

  The Lottery

  Grudges

  Directionally Impaired

  Sunnyside

  A Pregnancy

  Animals

  The Beach

  About the Author

  Lily Brett was born in Germany and came to Melbourne with her parents in 1948. She is one of Australia’s most prolific and successful authors. She has published six works of fiction, nine books of poetry, and three essay collections to much critical acclaim in Australia and around the world. Lily Brett is married to the Australian painter David Rankin. They have three children and live in New York.

  lilybrett.com

  Also by Lily Brett

  FICTION

  Things Could Be Worse

  What God Wants

  Just Like That

  Too Many Men

  You Gotta Have Balls

  Lola Bensky

  ESSAYS

  In Full View

  New York

  Between Mexico and Poland

  POETRY

  The Auschwitz Poems

  Poland and Other Poems

  After the War

  Unintended Consequences

  In Her Strapless Dresses

  Mud in My Tears

  Blistered Days

  Liebesgedichte (Love Poems)

  Wenn wir bleiben könnten (If We Could Stay)

  For David, who loves me, Bob Dylan and New York

  When I go for a walk in New York I like to have a destination. Actually, I like to have a destination wherever I am when I go for a walk. I am not one of those aimless walkers, people who can stroll around from place to place without a plan.

  I always have to have a plan. I feel anxious without a plan. I plan everything. I plan out my days. I plan diets. I make plans for phone calls. I write notes of what I want to discuss with various friends. I write notes to remind me of what I want to ask or mention to my doctor, my dentist, my podiatrist. And to my husband, my children and my father.

  Ask Dad if he needs any more Wedel’s chocolate would be a typical note to myself about my father. Wedel’s is the Polish chocolate of my father’s childhood. Last week I made a note to ask him if he felt like some fresh pastrami from Katz’s deli. He said yes to both questions, so I had to go to the Polish delicatessen on First Avenue and then to Katz’s on East Houston. This is more or less a fifty-minute walk, which takes me through the East Village and down to the Lower East Side.

  I understand that there are many things that can subvert any and all plans. But I plough ahead with my planning. Especially for my walks. I don’t like setting out on a voyage of discovery. I like discovering things when I am on my way to a specific destination.

  My newest destination is Grand Central Station – or, as it is more formally called, Grand Central Terminal. It takes me about fifty minutes to walk there from my home in SoHo.

  Sometimes, if the weather is bad, I cut the walk short and catch the subway the rest of the way. I love being on the subway. When you are on the subway, you are unmistakably in New York. The New York subway system is so New York. It is efficient, fast and populated with the most ethnically varied range of people.

  Almost forty percent of New Yorkers are foreign born. About thirty-two percent of the city’s immigrants come from Latin America, twenty-six percent from Asia, twenty percent from non-Hispanic Caribbean nations, seventeen percent from Europe and four percent from Africa. This diversity makes New York City one of the most uplifting cities on the planet.

  One of my plans is to some day ride from one end to the other end of every subway line in New York.

  Being on the subway grounds me. I feel part of everyone else. Part of a large humanity. On the subway, we are not separated by age, race, gender or religion. We are there together. Often squashed quite close to each other.

  I have squeezed myself into a seat in between two strangers whose lives, in most other circumstances, would not intersect with mine. And it is such a good feeling. I don’t ever feel alone on the subway. Or lonely. I feel a sense of belonging, which, for me, is quite rare.

  There was a period of several years when I couldn’t get on the subway. There was nothing wrong with the subway. It may have been a bit rougher in those days than it is today but millions of people still used it every day. What was wrong, was wrong with me.

  I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling of being underground, under the earth, under anything that was alive. Each time I tried to descend the subway steps I felt as though I was going to be buried. Buried out of range, out of reach. I was so happy when this feeling abated and then disappeared.

  I am proud that I can navigate my way from the subway exit at Grand Central to the main concourse. It is not a complex navigation, but navigation of anything other than an argument is not what I am good at. I love the atmosphere of railway stations. And I love the hustle and bustle of departures and arrivals. Particularly at Grand Central. It is a genteel hustle and bustle. There is no tension, no hysteria and, mostly, no trouble.

  It is so unlike the frenzied, harassed atmosphere of just about every major airport in the universe. There is no pushing and shoving. No one drops their luggage on you. The man in front of me in the boarding line for a flight from New York to Seattle dropped his carry-on suitcase on my leg and then told me he was sure it didn’t hurt. Two years later I still have a mark on my leg from that bruise.

  Grand Central Station has been called the largest train station in the world, the most beautiful train station in the world and the busiest train station in the world. Although it is very busy, it doesn’t feel busy. There is a relatively unhurried, civilised air about this very busy train terminal.

  Every day more than 750-thousand people pass through the station and seven hundred and fifty trains depart and arrive. Grand Central has forty-four platforms and sixty-seven tracks. I love knowing things like this. Soon the Long Island Railroad will open a new station below the existing tracks at Grand Central. Grand Central will then have seventy-five tracks and forty-eight platforms.

  The station is very large. It’s over forty-eight acres. With its soaring, vaulted ceilings and vast spaces, it is also very beautiful. It is elegant and feels simultaneously graceful and solid. There is nothing flimsy about Grand Central. Nothing feels transient or temporary. The station, built in 1913, feels as though it has been there forever. And will be there forever.

  Grand Central is not just a railway station. It is a small city within a large city. There is a branch of the New York Transit Museum, there are bakeries, cafes, newsagents, a fresh-food market and almost as many stores as there are in SoHo.

  You can buy fast food or healthy food from vendors in the Dining Concourse, which is on the level below the main concourse, or you can go to the Oyster Bar. The Oyster Bar is fabulous. It is a large seafood re
staurant and a New York institution. Like the station, it has been there since 1913. Although the restaurant is large, it is not impersonal or chaotic. It does feel as though you are dining in another era. Everyone is polite to everyone else. The waiters are formally dressed. No one shouts.

  The menu is huge. When I last counted there were thirty-two varieties of oysters alone. I love seafood. I don’t eat meat and rarely eat chicken or any other poultry. It is not because I am an animal lover. I am not. I just don’t like the thought of killing something in order to eat it. Illogically, I keep fish out of the category of being killed. And, perversely, although I don’t eat meat, I do cook with meat.

  I was almost put off eating fish when I saw a fish that my husband had caught while fishing off a beach on Long Island. The poor fish jumped around on its head for at least a minute before throwing up a smaller fish and collapsing. I didn’t know fish could vomit. It probably vomited out of shock. It took me a few months before I could eat fish again.

  The one place in Grand Central I have to go to is the fresh-food market. It has a selection of my favourite foods. Breads, cheeses, fish, nuts, chocolates and cakes. My father loves cake. He particularly loves a sponge cake. He pronounces it ‘spunch’, which rhymes with lunch. He used to be crazy about the sponge cake from Moishe’s Bake Shop on Second Avenue. Last year, he suddenly switched to lemon-flavored, Chinese sponge cake from bakeries named Lucky King and Dragon Land.

  Then I bought him a slice of Eli Zabar’s pound cake from the fresh-food market at Grand Central. He loved it, and started calling it the ‘heavy spunch cake’, as opposed to the former ‘spunch’ cake, which was newly renamed the ‘not-so-heavy spunch cake’.

  Dropping in to Eli Zabar’s Bread & Pastry stall too often could be dangerous for me. I am crazy about their raisin and pecan bread rolls. I try to limit myself to one roll. And I never buy the raisin and pecan loaf out of a fear of eating half of it on the way home.

  You could do all of your shopping at Grand Central Station. It has everything. It has an Apple Store, a bank. You can have your eyes tested and your shoes repaired and buy just about anything you could need. There is Frankie’s Dogs on the Go. When I first saw it I thought it must be a dog day-care facility. One where you could drop off your dog on your way to work and pick him up on the way home. But Frankie’s Dogs on the Go turned out to be a hot-dog shop.

  You can drop off your tennis or squash racquet on your way to work and pick it up freshly restrung on the way home. Grand Central Racquet has been there since 1992. Apparently Grand Central Racquet has great expertise and knowledge of all racquet sports: tennis, squash, racquetball, badminton and platform tennis. What is platform tennis? I bet it has nothing to do with railway platforms.

  Despite the presence and apparent success of Grand Central Racquet, I can’t really imagine a New York workforce with tennis or squash or badminton on their minds while commuting to work. Most New Yorkers are not that relaxed on their way to work.

  The city must be more sporty than it seems. I discovered a tennis club at Grand Central Station – the Vanderbilt Tennis Club. It is not an ordinary tennis club. The club has thirty-foot ceilings and a US Open championship-quality court. For 225 dollars, you can have three hours on the practice courts. For three hundred dollars you can have three private tennis lessons.

  If you join the Vanderbilt Tennis Club you will have access to the practice alleys, a fitness centre and New York City’s only slow-motion video swing-analysis equipment.

  I think I will resist. I have never played tennis in my life. I am not going to start now, even if more New Yorkers than I thought are having tennis racquets restrung and watching themselves on a slow-motion video swing-analysis machine.

  It seems to me that all men are particularly adept at removing a bra from a woman’s body. One deft twist of the wrist and a woman is bra-less. Putting a bra on a woman is a different matter. They can’t do it. Most men have never tried.

  At the beginning of 2013 I had shoulder surgery. I had torn my rotator cuff, my bicep and two other tendons. This injury is painful. I don’t recommend it. It also leaves you unable to do up a bra. For months. No matter how hard my husband tried, and my husband is a dexterous man, he couldn’t put my bra on me. Well, he couldn’t put it on in a way that meant I could leave the house with any dignity.

  Being forced to spend so much time thinking about bras made me realise that I needed a new bra or two. I don’t like shopping for anything that requires me to undress in a small, overly lit cubicle with a full-length mirror. There was also another problem. After five months I still could not easily do up a bra myself. I decided to try La Petite Coquette, a lingerie store on University Place in Greenwich Village that’s been there for years. I took my husband with me. I needed his help. Not choosing a bra. Just doing them up.

  My husband walked into La Petite Coquette, took one look at the flimsy, lacy underwear on the racks, in baskets, spread-eagled on the tables and hanging on the walls, and decided he would prefer to chat to the homeless woman outside the store. I understood why he fled. I swear that one square metre of fabric would have been more than enough to cover the entire stock of underpants.

  The store smelled nice. The decor was Paris, 1920. There were voluptuous murals on the walls and handpainted lampshades on the tables. I congratulated myself on finding this store. I looked up at the wall beside me and saw a framed, signed photo of Woody Allen. I don’t know about you, but I still look gorgeous, Woody Allen had written to Rebecca, the owner of the store. Also on the walls were signed, framed photos of Uma Thurman, Julianne Moore, Liza Minnelli, Britney Spears, Angelica Huston and Sarah Jessica Parker, among others. I don’t know why I thought I had discovered the store.

  I went into the dressing-room and tried on seven or eight bras. Tania, the saleswoman, helped me to do them up. I tried not to look at myself in the mirror. Maybe not even Scarlett Johansson likes to look at herself, undressed, in a full-length mirror. I wondered whether unclothed men grimaced at themselves in the mirror.

  By the time I finally settled on two bras I was hot and dishevelled. I stepped out of the dressing-room with my new bras and walked straight into my literary agent. My literary agent has an Upper West Side office. We do most of our business on the phone. I never envisage her downtown in a lingerie store.

  I like to look as though I am a sensitive, thoughtful writer – not a flushed and flustered, red-faced shopper who has just tried on seven or eight bras. We chatted for a while. It turns out she, too, along with Uma and Liza and Britney, has shopped at La Petite Coquette for years.

  I left the store clutching my bras. Outside, my husband was still talking to the homeless woman. It transpired that she had an encyclopedic knowledge of American movies. ‘Making a movie is such a peculiar business,’ she was saying. ‘So many people are involved, and if just one person falls short – the director, producer, editor, cinematographer – the whole movie can be ruined. Any movie that is good is good against the odds.’

  She nodded at me. ‘Interesting films are not just a matter of making bad characters interesting,’ she continued. ‘You’ve got to make good characters complex and interesting.’ I could learn something from this, I thought.

  In this fairly frantic city I find myself searching out small spots of peace and calm. One of my favourite places used to be the bench outside the Sullivan Street Bakery. You could sit there for as long as you liked inhaling the aroma of freshly baked bread. The owners of the bakery divorced and now that branch of the bakery has closed.

  But Galina, the Russian pedicurist I visit every six weeks, is still here on Seventh Avenue. I am very loyal to Galina and have followed her to several locations. It’s not just that Galina attacks my toenails with the brute strength and precision of an orthopaedic surgeon, it is that everything matters to Galina. She is very Russian. Nothing is unimportant. And there is nothing you cannot panic about. On my own, I can seem intense and, to be truthful, prone to panic. Next to Galina, I come
across as a close relative of the Dalai Lama.

  ‘Vera really likes sex,’ Galina said to me the last time I saw her. Vera is her fellow pedicurist and the owner of the business. They are both Russian and both sixtyish.

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘She always talks about it,’ Galina says.

  ‘Talks about sex?’ I said, in a voice that came out sounding far more high-pitched than I intended.

  ‘Of course,’ said Galina. ‘She talks about sex, and how much she likes it.’

  I desperately wanted to know what it was that Vera said. Very few women I know talk about sex or, more accurately, talk about how they feel about sex. I took a deep breath and opened my mouth to ask Galina exactly what Vera said when she talked about sex, when Galina said, in quite a loud voice, ‘I don’t like sex.’

  This completely derailed me. ‘Oh,’ I said. There was a small silence, during which I hoped Galina wasn’t waiting to hear what I felt about sex. Right at this moment I wasn’t sure that I wanted to analyse my thoughts about sex. I also thought that conversation would need more time than my toenails required.

  ‘I don’t like sex,’ Galina said, again. She said it in the tone of voice you’d use if you were discussing a brand of dishwashing liquid, or furniture or floor polish you didn’t like.

  ‘Oh,’ I said again. I didn’t want my ‘oh’ to sound too tinged with sympathy as though I was feeling sorry for Galina for not liking sex, but it came out sounding like a timid squeak as though I, not Galina, had a problem.

  What I really wanted to ask Galina was why she didn’t like sex, what part of sex was it that she didn’t like, was there any aspect of sex that she liked. Instead, I said nothing. I couldn’t say anything. My silence bothered me. I felt overly prim. Or worse, a prude.

  Galina had moved on and was talking about a client who had just been diagnosed with lung cancer. She was weighing up the woman’s treatment options. Galina has an opinion on and a remedy for just about any ailment or injury that could strike humankind. She has polished, cut, filed and buffed the nails of so many women. She has waxed their bikini lines and dyed their eyebrows and eyelashes and accumulated enough knowledge for a doctorate in medicine. Healthcare information has real social currency in New York. Many of Galina’s clients run their symptoms by her. She also tends to know which medical specialists are good and which ones should be avoided.