The evening makes everything slightly sinister. People walk around with pointy ears, even though Halloween is still two weeks away. Every other man is dressed as Spider-Man. I wander around a flea market housed outside an old church. There is junk everywhere, glassware, boxes of nail polish. They are packing up. I flip through photographs of unidentified people in a box, combing through unknown smiling faces, the banality and pain of their lives lost to me. Unidentified family photographs in a junk-store bin would be on my “lists that quicken the heart,” just like Sei Shōnagon’s in The Pillow Book, which the filmmaker narrator in Sans Soleil borrows as his criterion for what he films. It is getting late. I walk toward Union Square. A man lying in the window recess of a large bank waves at me, and he does it in so charming a way that I wave back and go over to him. I give him money and mention that it’s going to be cold tonight. I linger, wanting to talk. I wonder why I don’t take off wandering more. I consider, could I just completely choose to leave my identity, my name, to become someone else? I go into a gay bar near Union Square. It is nearly empty inside, decorated with cobwebs, a few men in groups. I was here the previous year, for a birthday party for a well-known editor who had just edited an anthology I appeared in. It was at that party that I’d met a famous writer whose short stories made me want to become a writer when I read them in my early twenties. The writer looked like she did in her photographs, like a wonderful and spooky blond ostrich. I finally went up to her, at the end of the night, and told her how much her work meant to me. I knew that I was bothering her, that she would have probably rather I had left her alone. She kept on telling me how bad her new book was, how afraid she was of having it published, how it was not ready, how she shouldn’t have written it. It’s not good, she kept on repeating. It’s just not good. I did that thing with her I do to most women in my life, where I soothe them, become sycophantic. It is wonderful I’m sure, I said to her. It will be great. Everyone will love it. I remember feeling that she knew that I was full of it, and wishing I could have acted in a different way. That perhaps she was in turn watching me with the cruelty of one of her characters, observing my blathering. I sit at the bar and write up my notes from my walk in my notebook. Next to me, a man wearing high-waisted jeans, a black turtleneck, and a flashlight as a necklace is watching a film on his laptop. He resembles Steve Jobs, and only typing up my notes now do I realize that this may have been his costume. Are you a writer? he asks me. Yes, I reluctantly answer. I always dread that question and the possible conversation that follows. What genre? he asks. I tell him I never really know how to answer that. Like fictional novels? he asks. In a way, yes, I say to him. Would I write down my name so he can look it up later? For some reason I write down the name that was not my name, that I’d written inside the cover of my yellow notebook. He folds up the piece of paper in an exacting way, opening his leather attaché case. I then ask him whether he is editing something. He looks so intent with his headphones on. No, he works in crisis management. Like after 9/11, he says to me, as if that was an explanation. He tells me he is watching The Man Who Would Be King, which I look up later, a seventies Technicolor starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine, an adaptation of a Rudyard Kipling story set in a nineteenth-century colonialist India. It seems the exact sort of Orientalist fantasy my father would love. He watches it once a day, he says to me. I tell him I haven’t seen it. I write in a notebook too, he tells me. He takes out a diary, from a pocket of his briefcase seemingly designed for this purpose. It was one of those small diaries that my father keeps in his widowed solitude, to note errands each day. He hands it to me, and, not knowing what else I am supposed to do, I flip through it. It is completely blank.
On the day before Halloween I take the train into the city to walk through Midtown. More people in costumes at Herald Square. The blank uniformity of the twin mannequins with orange hair in the window at Macy’s. Everything again takes on an odd cast. I want to visit the Webster Apartments, the all-women residence where I stayed one year during a magazine internship in college. On the train, I look at their website on my phone. In answering a question about famous former residents, they respond that unlike the Barbizon uptown, where Sylvia Plath wrote The Bell Jar, they are not aware of any famous people who lived there, but if they knew the names of their former residents, they are sure their success stories would fill volumes, a formulation that amuses me. Walking up toward Penn Station, I find myself entering the Kmart I remember from twenty years ago. I seem to be in a fugue state, riding up the escalators to every floor. I realize then that I regularly have dreams of wandering around this same Kmart. In my dream there is a photo booth on the bottom floor, near the exit to Penn Station, although when I get to the bottom floor the photo booth is not there. I must have wandered around for at least an hour. I remember my mother buying our clothes at such stores when I was a child, which might explain the fascination and horror I feel for them now. When I was a twenty-year-old intern, I maxed out a credit card trying to buy clothes that would make me blend in here, all the shops on Canal, blazer and skirt outfits. And then when I moved here, drawn to all the beautiful conformity, that desire to look New York enough, to wear the right thing. Elizabeth Hardwick writes in Sleepless Nights: “From shame I have paid attention to clothes, shoes, rings, watches, accents, teeth, points of deportment, turns of speech.” I remember a line from a negative review of my last book: how suspicious the reviewer was of glamour, how she felt glamour was an empty suit. But what about Walser’s dandyism, I now want to respond. His shabby three-piece suits of reds, yellows, and blues, his rolled-up trousers. That photograph of Kafka as a young law student, his English bowler hat, frock coat, and stiff collar, like Flaubert’s Frédéric in Sentimental Education, Kafka’s favorite novel. His father’s fancy goods store sold gloves, along with haberdashery, parasols, umbrellas, walking sticks, silk handkerchiefs, silk ribbons, scarves, lace, buttons, slippers, fans, jewelry, and elegant decorative objects and knickknacks made of cast iron, bronze, zinc, silver, leather, wood, ivory, glass, lead. My desire now is not to look like everyone else, but like a dandy, like Baudelaire. Somehow conspicuous and also invisible. The rows of Christmas teddy bears stare at me as I descend the escalator at the Kmart. The dreamlike scenes in the Tokyo department store in Sans Soleil. The filmmaker reflects on an intense love for anonymous inhabitants of a city. “I begin to wonder if those dreams are really mine, or if they’re part of a totality, a giant collective dream.” That scene too in Wanda, Barbara Loden walking around the department store as if in a trance, staring at a mannequin, the two women, at least one unreal. I wander around the picked-over costumes section. I take a photograph of a $9.99 mask, with a shredded veil over it. Skulls and cobwebs. Cat skeletons. Another photo of a ghost costume, a cheap white plastic hooded robe. I suddenly remember my brother as a child, maybe five years old, crying on the front steps on Halloween day, as we posed for pictures before school. In my memory I do not know why he is crying. Perhaps he did not want to go as a clown again. We were always clowns. My mother made those costumes on her sewing machine, and so every year we were the same trio of clowns. The three of us children only one year apart, the smallest in our classes, too smart for our own good, especially my brother, the one considered the genius, yet all of us tiny, oversensitive, and intense. Never store-bought costumes. Too expensive. I don’t remember why my brother was crying, only that he was. It is always around Halloween that I feel most haunted by my mother, that I viscerally revisit learning that she was dying. I eventually leave the Kmart and wander into the Webster. It’s exactly the same, like it’s still trapped in the 1950s. The intense familiarity of the salmon-colored walls, the pay phones in little chambers. When I ask if I can go upstairs, the security guard tells me only residents are allowed in the rooms. While looking through these notes my mind keeps floating not to the scene of the Webster but to Chantal Akerman’s Hotel Monterey, the silent long takes inside the SRO, saturated with the sadness and solitude of a Hopper painting .
. . I read somewhere it’s now a Days Inn. Like a voiceover over these stills, I think of Elizabeth Hardwick’s portraits of the transients and drifters living at the Hotel Schuyler in Sleepless Nights. While writing this I find a postcard online for the Hotel Schuyler, “A Home Away from Home,” off Fifth Avenue and Radio City, rooms, suites, apartments with or without kitchenettes. Air-conditioned. I used to walk to my Time magazine internship from 34th Street to the Time Warner building across from Radio City. I would sit in my little unwatched cubicle and use the communal printer to print out pages of my bad play that I was trying to write, then wander home through Times Square at night. At the diner across the street from the Webster I sit on one of the vinyl silver glitter stools at the counter, staring at the miniature boxes of cereal lined above the milkshake machine, the open-cut cantaloupe wrapped in plastic, the massive pies, the goopy large strawberries on cheesecakes. How much my mother loved to sit at a diner counter and order a slice of pie. How those are the only types of restaurants where we ate growing up, but only on special occasions, like Christmas Eve. Joseph Cornell’s list of sweets in his 1946 diary, which I’m reading: “caramel pudding, a few donuts, cocoa, white bread, peanut butter, peach jam, a milky way, some chocolate eclairs, a half-dozen sweet buns, a peach pie, a cake with icing, and a prune twist.” I watch the waitress as she refills my coffee, her blue baseball cap and blue apron. I feel like I’m dressing as someone I’m not, in my leather jacket and chunky silver rings and long white tunic. The jacket I purchased when I first moved here, as a way to feel like I belonged—not the expected cropped jacket, but androgynous and tough, like Joan of Arc. How coats are always a way for me to become another person. How many years I worked in twenty-four-hour diners, the same type where we ate growing up; even now I feel like a prodigal daughter when I am back inside one. Elizabeth Hardwick writing that store clerks and waitresses were the heroines of her memories. Hardwick studied Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge when writing her novel, and a similar decreation occurs in her work—going away from the self, preferring to tell other stories, of the washerwomen and waitresses of her youth, of the denizens of the hotel, as opposed to telling her own. Later, I watch the waitress picking through a salad at one of the small booths. I feel I can inhabit some layer of her exhaustion. I fight an intense desire to ask her if they are hiring. The ravishing desire to quit my other life, to go back to my past. But maybe the same way Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo quits being a detective but doesn’t quit at the same time. Like Wittgenstein with philosophy. Or Walser with writing. Every time Walser moved to a new city he forgot his past. All the shabby rooming houses he lived in. His fixation with waitresses in his fiction. I think of Joseph Cornell, his obsession with Joyce Hunter, the teenage runaway from Kentucky forty years his junior who poured him coffee at the Strand Food Shop on Sixth Avenue. He gifted her little collages, which she resold. She also stole boxes from him, but he never pressed charges. She had left her husband and baby in Philadelphia to try to be an actress. He found an innocence and vulnerability in her, like his other muses of the ordinary, the working girls who ate their brown paper bag lunches at Union Square. Joyce Hunter was murdered two years after she met him, stabbed to death by a male acquaintance in an Upper West Side rooming house in 1964. The silent color film he made the following year, out of mourning, filming the Flushing Cemetery where she was buried. It was the second short film he made at the Flushing Cemetery, the first being Angel, mostly static shots of an angel statue and a pool, like a series of meditations, shot through with the blue of a sunny November day.
On Halloween night, holed up in the bedroom, hiding from the doorbell for the dog’s sake, multiple screens open on my computer. I watch the beginning of Sans Soleil in a loop, transcribing the narration into my notebook—how mesmerized I feel by that form of distanced address, how I itch to copy it. The narrator recounts a letter she had received from the traveling documentarian Sandor Krasna, his thoughts on how the nineteenth century dealt with concepts of space, and the twentieth century dealt with the “coexistence of different concepts of time.” I wonder in my notebook if, in the twenty-first century, we deal with layered notions of time and space. Can a work of literature contain the energy of the internet, its distracted nature?
That entire fall I had an urge to walk. How eerily warm it was, like something prophetic. On a local election day, I did not have to go into work, yet I still traveled in the rush-hour crush of bodies, hoping to spend some time flipping through books on Joseph Cornell at the Mid-Manhattan Library, despite still not having a library card. The train was late and crushed with people—I let my gaze wander over everyone crowded in one space. The day before, exhausted on the train upstate, I found myself mostly on my phone, reading recaps of the TV show I watched the previous night. I did eventually take out a copy of Sebald’s Vertigo and let myself read the Vienna scene, which I seem to keep rereading, unable to move on. I found myself finally being able to read, and with reading, write a little, and while walking through the autumnal fire of trees up the hill to campus I let my mind wander, writing in a way. I never know, when I sit down to write, how to replicate that movement and those discoveries that come when my mind wanders. When I sit down to write, I begin to wander to another thought entirely. I think of Sebald saying in an interview that when he sat down to write, he didn’t know where he was going, he followed his thoughts and connections like a dog in a field. And yet why do I love thinking about that, but dislike George’s assertion that there’s a mystical aspect to language? Maybe it’s the loftiness I felt that some ascribe to the project of writing, as if it’s some sort of higher plane of existence. Or the preciousness of it. Or, worse, the idea that writing is a form of therapy. And isn’t this what we’re supposed to say to students who want to be writers, as a way to tell them that writing isn’t about success, or capitalism, it’s personal, self-directed, sacred? Maybe I even feel that, but I resent that I’m supposed to sell it. Sell writing. Sell a life of being a writer. Was being a writer a way of escaping from having a job, or was it, as others have framed it, extreme discipline and unceasing solitary labor? I didn’t know anymore. The lofty comparison irked me; the spirit of Sebald’s comment is right, to write with attention to the present is in some way to become like a dog.
On the train the next day, clinging to the sweaty metal pole, I watch everyone on their phones. The red-haired woman next to me keeps swiping right or left, and I watch her nails, previously painted red or purple, still stained despite a careless swipe of nail polish remover. I become aware how torn and dirty my own fingernails are, with dried, unkempt cuticles, the way Hans Castorp views with horror his Russian beloved. Sometimes I am distracted at what women are wearing, a certain type of groomed professional woman. I would hate to be one of those women with perfect manicures, Anna writes to me. I’d want to kill myself. I didn’t write back to her that I found myself wanting to imitate them when I moved here. The question of grooming continually perplexes me—how it seems so quickly to degrade. Yesterday on the train I stared at a woman’s chipped, worn-down burgundy nails. Sometimes, looking at strangers asleep on the train or staring at their chipped nails, or watching them carefully apply makeup in the mirror, that tenderness feels like the only time I’m sure I am a writer.
Since the main library is not open until 10 a.m., I find myself walking to Grand Central to get my bagel and coffee, just as I had the day before. There is a difference between strolling through such a public space, with time, and the way I usually enter the station, crazed and sprinting, trying to make my train. Since taking these walks, I find myself tracing the same circumference, like Sebald’s unnamed narrator in Vertigo, circling the same sickle-shaped area in Vienna. There are several German-looking men in Grand Central who look like Sebald with his rucksack. It’s difficult in midtown Manhattan to find a space to sit, write in a notebook, and read. I finally find a small crumby table outside of the coffee stand. The old woman next to me, drinking her small coffee, scroll
ing through her phone. There’s such a different texture to boredom now, I think. And I am more than susceptible. I check my email, I answer a few messages, I forget where I am, what I am doing. Scroll through fall coats on sale at expensive boutiques. There becomes an economics of shopping here—it’s half off of extremely expensive, like half-a-month’s-rent expensive. When you think about it, that’s almost affordable. And anyway a coat is an investment. There’s a note in the margins of my notebook from that day that I can’t decipher—some research about apple cider vinegar and constipation. I find myself stuck this way at Grand Central. I go upstairs and watch from above as the tourists in the main hall gaze up at the cerulean astronomical ceiling that Joseph Cornell loved so much. Cornell observing the crowds in the Grand Central waiting room, “absorbed in coming and going of endless flow.” The tourists staring up at selfie sticks like personal Eiffel Towers. I think to myself that some people take photographs as a way to not really see. I wonder if I’m one of those people, or if I take photographs as a way to pay attention, to have the tiniest window through which to look closely. I also write, in my notebook that day, about paying attention, how it is a radical act, thinking of May Sarton copying down Simone Weil’s line in her journal: “Attention is prayer.” Later Danielle repeats this same phrase to me, in an email.
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