Only in New York
Page 2
Galina was talking about a surgical procedure her client was considering. I was trying not to imagine I had a pain in my left lung. This city, it seems to me, has more than its share of hypochondriacs. It’s not just me. And I was wondering how I could bring up the issue of Galina not liking sex. It seemed impossibly rude to interrupt the conversation about lung cancer with a question about sex. So I didn’t.
Caffe Dante, in MacDougal Street, has been like a second home for so many people. My husband and I are as comfortable there as we are in our own home. That is, we were until the rumours began. Rumours that the cafe, which has been there for decades and is part of so many people’s daily lives, was closing.
A low-level panic slowly spread among the regulars. Like all unofficial news, the rumours started with oblique snippets and statements. Everyone had a small scrap of information, often conflicting. All the small scraps came together to make a ragged sort of whole with lots of holes. The general consensus was that there was a good chance that Caffe Dante was closing down.
This was not good news. Several of the regulars felt that their world, the world of Greenwich Village of the 1960s and 1970s, would disappear if Caffe Dante closed. Most of that world was already gone.
Joe’s Dairy in Sullivan Street had closed down. It closed suddenly and without a word of warning. A small store, Joe’s Dairy was where all the locals who have lived in the area for years bought their cheese. The fresh and smoked mozzarella was the best in New York. The cheeses at Joe’s Dairy were so good and were a fraction of the prices of the numerous gourmet food stores in the area.
You always learned something interesting from shopping at Joe’s Dairy. Joe’s Dairy was across the road from the Church of St Anthony of Padua. Whenever there was a funeral there, someone at Joe’s could tell you who had died.
I also got some very good tips at Joe’s Dairy about cooking pasta in bulk from the priest who cooked for the priests at St Anthony’s. You have to mix a small amount of your sauce into the pasta as soon as the pasta is drained. Then you add however much sauce you feel the pasta needs. This was very useful.
A few weeks after Joe’s Dairy closed, I bumped into Rose, who had worked there for years, at Raffetto’s in Houston Street, where she was now working. I was thrilled to see her at Raffetto’s. Rose and I have exchanged recipes and family news for about ten years. Raffetto’s has been on Houston Street for 108 years. They make the best fresh ravioli. My favourite is the wild mushroom ravioli.
Milady’s, a bar and restaurant on the corner of Thompson and Prince streets, also closed. Milady’s, a slightly shabby place, had been on that corner for fifty years. It had never been swanky or hip. It was a place where you could have a drink and a meal that wasn’t exorbitantly expensive, and not be surrounded by very cool people.
One of the Caffe Dante regulars reeled off a list of other places that had closed. It was depressing. He suggested that we all decide on another cafe to frequent, but most of the other regulars were too stunned to make plans.
One man, an academic who had a cappuccino and a decaf coffee and a glass of water at Caffe Dante almost every afternoon, suggested that maybe Dante was going to metamorphose into a bar with disco lighting and shiny surfaces. I think this man was stuck in the 1960s and 1970s. I don’t think anyone has disco lighting any more. But I shared his concern. Was our much-loved Caffe Dante going to turn into something else just as unrecognisable as go-go girls dancing in elevated cages under flashing strobe lights?
Finally, as the rumours were getting wilder, Mario Junior, one of the cafe owners, started telling people that it would soon be closing for renovations. Dante’s closing was now confirmed. Mario Junior said that they would be re-opening in several weeks.
They were planning to re-open in several weeks? Anyone who has ever renovated anything larger than a chair knows that renovations never take several weeks. Especially in New York. Most renovations take much longer here than they would out of the city. The streets are congested. Parking is impossible. Doorways are too small for large pieces of construction equipment or demolition debris. Staircases, especially in downtown New York, are too narrow.
An exasperated friend trying to renovate his Tribeca apartment explained to me that in the suburbs you can renovate your house relatively fast. The construction company can fill two huge trucks with whatever they need for the job and leave them there for however long they like.
In Manhattan there are so many rules about how and where you can and cannot park and how much time you can occupy a parking space – or, more accurately, how little time you can occupy a parking space, if you are lucky enough to find one.
For the last few weeks before it closed for renovations, Caffe Dante was packed. The news had spread fast. People came from all over the city to have their last coffee, to have their last cannoli, their last homemade gelato. Many of them took photographs of the cafe. Photographs of the photographs of Florence on the walls. Photographs of the two sepia-toned murals of nineteenth-century Florence. The murals and photographs are a tribute to the poet Dante, who was born in Florence.
The cafe was so packed that it was hard for the regulars to get a seat. Despite the crowds there was a slightly funereal feeling in the air, as though people had come for a private viewing before a burial. I went there every day and felt quite mournful. What would I do if Dante closed forever?
I felt so at home at Caffe Dante. I knew many of the waitresses well. When you go somewhere almost every day you end up discussing the big and small moments and events of the day. The sort of details that get overlooked when you only see people every month or two. Several of the waitresses knew more about my life than some of my friends. And I knew about the waitresses’ lives.
There is another dimension of my life at Caffe Dante that is not instantly visible. That is its location. Caffe Dante is directly across the road from the former house of a man with whom my husband has a very intense relationship. Yes, I share the man I love with another man. It is not easy living this way. The man I love loves someone else. With a passion.
I am surprisingly tolerant about this other man. Because, really, I am the jealous type. And the man I love is my husband. Sometimes my tolerance is stretched. When my husband tells me how intelligent and sensitive this other man is, I try to stay calm. When he tells me what an astonishing mind the other man has and what a brilliant writer he is, my tolerance wanes. I begin to feel a bit edgy and inadequate.
The other man is not even that good-looking. But it’s a bit hard to compete in the looks department when your rival is not the same gender that you are. The man at the centre of this domestic turbulence is hard to compete with. The man in question is famous and successful. In fact, he is Bob Dylan. My husband is crazy about him.
Our favourite table at Caffe Dante faces Bob Dylan’s former house. It is the only double-fronted house in the street. I like to think of Bob Dylan and his children living there.
Last week we bumped into Mario Junior outside Caffe Dante. For weeks the cafe had been shuttered and had looked lifeless. There had been no sign of any activity. My husband and I had just been to La Lanterna Caffe, which is also on MacDougal Street. Several of the Caffe Dante regulars had switched to La Lanterna since Caffe Dante had closed. I like La Lanterna. It has an old Greenwich Village aura. A reviewer said it was the best place to kiss in all of New York. It would have been nice to have been going there to kiss each other but we went there to see Ada, a former Caffe Dante waitress who was now working at La Lanterna. We did kiss Ada.
Mario Junior was just leaving when we bumped into him. He opened the door of the cafe and let us in. They had definitely been renovating. The two sections of the cafe looked much bigger. The walls were freshly painted. New banquettes lined three of the walls. A noisy, clunky old fridge was gone. A few other pieces of equipment had been moved around. But even amidst the construction tools and the dust, it seemed as though when the renovations were done Caffe Dante would still be Caffe Dante.
It took me a long time to write my last novel, Lola Bensky. I don’t mean it took me a long time to actually sit down and write the book. I mean it took me a long time to face writing the book.
I made a lot of notes, as I always do. I put these notes in manila folders. Ten manila folders. And I put an elastic band around each folder. Then I took the ten folders and put a giant elastic band around all ten of them. I found an old, brown travel bag and put the bound folders into the travel bag and carefully zipped up the bag. I placed the zipped-up bag in the drawer of a metal filing cabinet and shut the drawer very firmly. I checked to make sure the drawer was firmly shut.
Then I went on with my life. I walked, I cooked. I made notes for another novel. Every now and then I walked past the firmly shut filing-cabinet drawer, looked at it and kept walking. I couldn’t open the drawer. One year went by, two years, three years. Once, with my heart palpitating, I opened the drawer to make sure that all ten folders were still firmly zipped up in the travel bag. They were. I shut the drawer again.
Finally, after three-and-a-half years, I decided that I had to either face writing the book or just dump it. I took the brown bag out of the filing-cabinet drawer and gave myself three months to start writing or to decide that I wasn’t going to write this book.
I unpacked all my notes. I put out my writing equipment. On my left, I had my pens, pencils, erasers, pencil sharpeners, Post-it notes and paperclips. On my right, five or six notebooks in assorted sizes. As soon as I had arranged all of these, I began to feel calm.
I started writing. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I worked all day, seven days a week for eleven months. I barely went outside. I was certain that the lack of sunlight must be causing me to have a vitamin D deficiency.
I am still not sure why it took me so long to face writing this book. Sometimes what you fear never becomes clear. Even when, like me, you have spent a lot of your time and money on psychoanalysis.
I had forgotten how much I missed the feeling of being immersed in writing a novel. Being so steeped in creating another world that the imagined world becomes your reality. Your daily life with its unavoidable irritations and chores hardly seems to exist. For the entire time I was writing Lola Bensky, I was in 1967. The fact that it was 2011 barely registered.
I had forgotten the surprise of how, if you remain still for long enough, memories and feelings that have been buried for decades can surface with great clarity. I’d also forgotten how very happy writing makes me. My children, when they saw me, commented on how much happier I looked.
Every now and then I left the house, usually to go and visit my father. People I knew told me how well I looked. Sitting in one place for hours is clearly beneficial for your health, I decided. And so is eating a lot of cabbage. While writing Lola Bensky I had a cabbage craze, which is something not many people experience. All I wanted for dinner every night was cabbage. This hadn’t happened to me since 1998 when I was writing Too Many Men. And it was more understandable then. After all, much of Too Many Men was set in Poland and cabbage features quite prominently in Polish cuisine.
My father, who was then ninety-six, was also very relieved that I was writing again. For the three-and-a-half years the notes were in the filing-cabinet drawer, he had asked me, more frequently than was necessary, if I thought I had ‘lost the knack’. The question bothered me for many reasons. First, the ability to write a book can’t be summed up as ‘a knack’, and second, I was worried that I might indeed have lost the knack.
Once I started writing, my father didn’t stop asking about the knack. He just rephrased his question from ‘Do you think you have still got the knack?’ to ‘Do you think you have still got the same knack?’ I said I would let him know when I finished the book.
I was so happy to be sitting in my study moving words around. Arranging and re-arranging them until they said exactly what I wanted them to say. I wasn’t worrying about the knack.
I didn’t walk at all while I was writing Lola Bensky. When I finished, I couldn’t wait to get outside. I walked and walked. I no longer had words and sentences floating around my head. You can walk around New York and be inspired by other people’s words. Hollywood may have its Walk of Fame, but here in New York we have the Library Walk.
The Library Walk is on 41st Street between Madison and Fifth avenues. Embedded in the sidewalk are bronze plaques engraved with quotes from some of the world’s most wonderful writers. There are quotes from forty-five writers, eleven women and thirty-four men, who come from eleven countries and span two centuries. One of my favourite plaques contains some beautiful lines from ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art’ by Dylan Thomas.
I love being in the streets of New York. New York is a city of street theatre – the theatre of daily life. The theatre of daily life is often more fascinating than staged theatre. Early one morning, I was walking in SoHo. The streets were not yet crowded. It was quiet. You could hear the light rain that was falling. On the corner of Prince and Wooster streets, a man and a woman were having a very intense conversation. They were in their early to mid-sixties and beautifully, although idiosyncratically, dressed. The man was very good-looking. He had the sort of looks that would turn even young women’s heads.
You could tell, by the way they were standing, that the couple knew each other well. But they were arguing. There was something almost courtly and formal about their argument. There were no raised voices, there was no hysteria, although it was clear something very intense was happening.
He was doing most of the talking. He looked as though he was apologising. He put his hand on her head and tried to kiss her, but she ducked out of his kiss. He looked as though he was pleading with her. And she was resisting. He had a very endearing smile. I wondered how she could keep resisting his entreaties. He must have made a serious misstep, I thought.
I was so mesmerised by what was happening that I had stopped walking. I was standing in a doorway. You hardly ever see people in their sixties having what looks like a tempestuous romantic moment. That sort of romance is usually reserved for the young, at least in public.
The man now looked as though he was begging her. She was shaking her head in a very firm no. It was raining more heavily. They were both getting wet. Suddenly, the man dropped down on to his knees. He put his hands together in a gesture of prayer and smiled up at her.
It was clear to me that he was begging for forgiveness. She shook her head one more time and walked off. He stayed on his knees, in the rain, for a minute before he got up and ran after her. I wanted to follow them. They looked as though they should be together. I wanted to ask her what it was that was so unforgivable. But I didn’t have an umbrella and I was already quite wet.
For the next few months, every time I went out for a walk I looked for this couple. Once, I thought I saw her. I was talking on the phone to a friend. I try not to talk on the phone when I walk. I am not very good at doing two things at once, anyway. ‘My vagina has atrophied,’ my friend had said. I had laughed because I thought she was being funny. That was when I was still naive enough to think that it was impossible for any part of our bodies to atrophy, especially that part. I had then rushed off the phone.
Later, I felt bad for not asking her more about her vagina. Not enough of us talk about our vaginas. I had rushed off the phone so I could keep following the woman I thought I had spotted. I caught up to her, but it wasn’t her – it was someone else. I kept walking.
I often walk to clear my head. Walking helps me to sort out my thoughts. I also walk to calm down. I am not naturally a calm person. That is an understatement.
The night my elder daughter was in hospital with what turned out to be a long labour before giving birth to her first child, I walked around and around the block, with increasing speed. For hours. I was trying to walk off a combination
of over-excitement and worry. There was nothing to worry about except for the normal worries about childbirth. But normal worry has never been my forte. I take worry and turn it into terror.
No amount of walking could calm me down that night.
In the middle of a complex dental procedure that involved three of my teeth, my dentist said that he wished he had been in the scaffolding business.
I am not usually surprised by anything my dentist says. He is an idiosyncratic man with a lot of interests. For a start, he is a meteorological expert. You can ask him any question about the weather anywhere in the world and he knows the answer. He also used to be in the navy and can talk at length about submarines. One of his daughters is a handbag designer who used to design for Marc Jacobs. As a result, my dentist knows a lot about handbags.
His dental practice faces one of the many New York University buildings in Greenwich Village. He pointed to one of the buildings across the road. Even from my almost horizontal position in the dental chair, I could see that the building was covered with scaffolding. ‘That scaffolding has been on that building for almost a year,’ he said. ‘They have been renting the scaffolding for months and months and they have only just started the construction work on the building.’
At that stage we had been living in New York for over twenty years, during which I hadn’t given the subject of scaffolding much thought. I couldn’t answer anyway, as my mouth was stuffed with cottonwool wadding. My dentist, while filling teeth and injecting Novocain, had clearly been dreaming of owning a scaffolding empire.