She’d been drinking all afternoon with some friends in a bar that used to be on Greenwich Avenue near Christopher Street but that’s long gone now. They all went down to Chinatown to eat and she kept drinking, beer, and vodka from a full pint that she had in her bag. She wasn’t really a drunk, but that day she was plastered. The story was that her husband, a really lousy painter who lived off her and spent every day in McSorley’s soaking up ale, had been relentlessly unfaithful to her with anybody who’d stand still, but you hear a lot of stories. After dinner, on Elizabeth Street, she got separated from her friends, although they might have conveniently lost her, seeing that she’d become an impossible embarrassment. She must have got a cab and took it to the Cedar, the new one, new then, anyway, on what?, Eleventh Street?, and sat at the bar nodding over a whiskey sour and trying not to fall off her stool. At about 2:00 A.M., she left the bar, walked east to Broadway, then down to Eighth Street and into the subway station. The change-booth attendant had to call the police because she was standing on a bench about halfway down the platform, screaming and sobbing about Canal Street disappearing and her friends disappearing and the whole world vanishing. She calmed down right away, and the cops took her to the Sixth Precinct station house and let her sober up there, even bought her coffee, since she was well-dressed and good-looking. She moved about two months later to a loft in Long Island City, then to some suburb outside Chicago. She’d been, incidentally, an editor at Mademoiselle when she married the rotten painter. Not that it matters.
She got on the Fourth Avenue Local at Canal Street for the short trip to Twenty-third Street. It was 2:45 A.M. The doors slid shut, the train lurched and banged, the car’s lights shivering on and off. She was alone in the car, and had a violently painful red-wine headache. As far as she could tell, there was no one in the cars before and behind hers. The train screamed into Prince Street’s deserted station, nobody boarded or got off, and the train barged on through the dark. After a minute or so, it entered Eighth Street, but when she looked out the smudged and greasy windows she saw that the station signs read Canal Street. She got up, frightened; the train had not gone backward. But this was Canal Street. Bewildered, she took a step toward the doors, and just as they were closing, lurched out onto the platform, losing one of her high-heeled pumps. An old Chinese woman, her face half-turned to look down the silent tracks, stood at the end of the platform, two crammed and battered paper shopping bags at her feet. One read: Jade Mountain; the other: Six Happiness. A panic possessed her as the old woman, abandoning her bags, turned and shuffled down the platform toward her, her face taut with a fear that seemed to be just short of terror.
FACTS AND THEIR MANIFESTATIONS
He doesn’t recall this, or pretends not to, but when he first met, many years ago now, the woman who would become his wife, she was wearing a cashmere polo coat, pale beige stockings and tan pumps, and a dark-red silk scarf. There was, or he pretended that there was, nothing odd or unusual about this, since he had forgotten, or pretended that he had forgotten, an incident in the past, an incident that would have made the woman’s dress notable. Interestingly enough, at the time, the incident, now, perhaps, forgotten, seemed overwhelmingly important, as a matter of fact, unforgettable.
On this warm Florida night, his father is telling him, once again, of the dance at which he met his wife and, of course, his mother. Elements of this story change, as they will in stories, but the delight, even the passion with which his father evokes this young woman, just sixteen, and her sumptuous black hair in a chignon and wide, white-silk ribbon, and her green eyes, remain always the same. He fell in love instantaneously, painfully, with her face and figure, her womanly stillness and provocative reserve. After they had been “keeping company,” as his father put it, for six months, he gave her a silver charm, a tiny shoe, to commemorate their meeting at a dance. His father falls silent, and he knows that the old man is thinking of his wife’s death, the dreamlike suddenness with which she was struck down by a cab outside the Plaza, after a day of shopping. He was barely four at the time, and he recalls, or seems to recall, that she had bought him a maroon wool challis scarf, returned to his father, torn and stained, by the police. Surely, his father told him this, for he remembers no scarf. He makes another highball, and about a quarter of an hour later, his father’s new wife enters the kitchen, with a bag of groceries. She is not pleased to see that he is still there, and that both he and her husband are drinking. Her waxy, blue-black hair creates a somewhat grotesque frame for her sixty-year-old face, although she is disturbingly attractive to him. Irrationally, he wonders about the fate of the silver-shoe charm, but cannot ask at the moment, and, later, forgets to ask. A month later his father is dead, and the shoe is lost along with the sad and isolate detritus of gone lives.
On chilly, rainy days toward the end of summer, when it was too cold to go down to the lake, they’d usually walk over to her house and talk and play Monopoly on the screened porch. In the late afternoon, she’d serve iced tea, and they’d smoke and leaf through magazines and look out at the Rose of Sharon tree dripping on the lawn. The grass shone brightly green in the odd half-light.
She was a tall girl, at once slender and large, serious in her body, with profoundly black hair and noticeably clear green eyes. Her skin was smoothly tan and there was about her a reserve that was oddly provocative in its stillness. And although they had all known each other for a half-dozen summers, she remained curiously distant. Some of the girls thought that she was a snob, but it was her womanliness that confused them. She usually wore a modest, black one-piece bathing suit to the lake, and, occasionally, a pearl choker. There were certain things that people simply would not say in front of her; everyone wished her approval.
One gloomy, dank afternoon, while he was in the kitchen helping her with the iced tea and emptying ashtrays, he, in a kind of half-crazed trance, put his hand on the strip of warm golden skin between the waistband of her white linen shorts and her seersucker halter, then leaned stupidly to kiss her upper lip. It was cool velvet, slicked with delicious sweat, salty sweet. She gave him a look of absolute calm, one that came from behind the bright clarity of her eyes. Then, in a strange silence, she held out her hand, opened it, and showed him, on her palm, a Monopoly hotel, gleaming a perfect, symmetrical red. He glanced at it and then at her, bewildered and yet exultant, when she closed her hand and turned to the sink. He knew that this was a private message, he knew this. But it was opaque, cryptic, it was impossible. And it was so because of the adoration of her that had so ruthlessly overwhelmed him: because she knew that he would not understand the message, she sent it. He was stupid, there in that small summery kitchen, with love and yearning. He wanted to kiss her knees, her feet, in their fragile golden sandals. The others were calling for them to come back to the game, and he held his hands up in front of him, awkwardly, and, foolish with desire, said something foolish. He would, he knew, never be a man, it would be too much to ask of him.
The summer moved toward its end, and they never spoke of that afternoon, or her impenetrably candid message. It was as if nothing had happened. Nothing had happened.
Twenty-five years later, he saw her, walking quickly, outside the Port Authority terminal. She was wearing a cashmere polo coat, beige stockings, and tan pumps. She didn’t see him. He would have preferred it had she been standing in front of the Plaza. Too late, of course. He thought that her name was Nina, perhaps.
There used to be a downtown hotel in a mid-sized city in northeastern Pennsylvania that had been, forty years earlier, the premier establishment of its kind in the region. But with the advent of turnpikes and the demise of railroad travel, it fell out of favor, and, over two decades, became a mainly residential hotel for retirees who were comfortably affluent, but wholly unfashionable, like the hotel itself. Yet the hotel had a bar and lounge that had been designed as a perfect replica of an ocean liner’s first-class saloon: it was a jewel of black and silver and white, with art deco murals, chrome-accented b
ar stools, and lacquered black tables. The barmen were impeccable in their tuxedo-like uniforms, the drinks were large and perfectly mixed, and there was neither jukebox nor radio. It was the sort of place that, once discovered, was never spoken of.
He found himself there one night, after driving into town just in front of a growing autumn rainstorm, and unable to find the Sheraton that had been recommended to him. When he saw the hotel’s name spelled out, in incandescent bulbs, on its marquee, he smiled and pulled into its small parking lot. He registered, and after a shower in his room, walked downstairs to the bar, and sat in pleased amazement at its ambience. He drank a martini, smoked, then ordered another. He was alone, or so he thought, but when he leaned back on his stool to light another cigarette, he saw, in the soft, silvery light that shone through the racks of bottles, a girl at the end of the bar. He looked at her, quickly, and as she lifted her head from the evening paper spread out on the bar, the light caught her short, black hair and the pearl choker that set off her simple black dress. She looked at him and nodded, civilly, without smiling. He turned to his fresh cocktail, his face burning, a thrill of awe and fear in possession of his entire body. It seemed to be the girl, it couldn’t possibly have been the girl, a lifetime had passed, it couldn’t be the girl. But it was the girl. He finished his martini and ordered a third, then looked again at the end of the bar, but she had left; only her newspaper, empty glass, and some bills were there. He thought that now he might die, since he couldn’t understand his life at all anymore. Surely he had imagined this girl, imagined how she looked. He had imagined nothing. There she had been.
The Monopoly hotel that he’d found in his drawer after Labor Day could well have been the one that she’d held out to him on her palm. But how? She’d closed her fingers over it, and then he’d made a fool of himself.
He had not been especially interested in her, and then he was painfully in love with her. He thought himself into her body, into her stillness, into her reserve and modesty. That she often wore a pearl choker to the beach rendered him sleepless.
She had, he realized later, held the hotel out to him twice, it was simply itself, so obvious, so mysterious in its candor. It was but one element, one figure in a rebus, the rest of which was missing, or never created.
He passed her on the street many years later. Her hair was graying, and all that he could recall after the shock of seeing her was that she had worn a dark-red silk scarf. He’d seen her from a distance, crossing against the light in front of the Plaza. A rainy day, gray and chilly, red and yellow leaves plastered to the wet pavement. It had always, of course, been too late.
IT’S TIME TO CALL IT A DAY
Whatever remnants of stylistic eccentricity peculiar and unique to Clifford’s fiction had long since been leached out of it by a dogged series of accommodations, emendations, compromises, and authorial, shall I say, understandings. His current editor was a reasonable man, so Clifford believed, and the suggestions that he made substantive and intelligent. And he had stuck by Clifford, despite the disappointment of his last book, patiently waiting for “his” writer to achieve that perfect blend of the conventionally literary and the cannily specious that would announce a breakthrough.
Now, reading the proofs of his fourth novel, Clifford saw, not with anything so dramatic as a shock, but saw with a kind of sudden, pleased candor, that not only had he, at last, quite thoroughly assassinated the prose that was once his, with its errors and tics and flourishes, its obsessions and syntactical aberrations; but that the staid, clean, undemanding—he thought of it as functional—prose within which his characters now suffered their warm and imperfect, their wonderfully human, oh so human! travails, was not only not his, but was, quite remarkably, nobody’s. It was an excruciatingly polished, forward-march prose, with suitable, occasional filigrees of clever simile and analogy, and splashes of the contemporary demotic; a prose that seemed happily familiar, as if it had been there all the time, waiting to be read, but just once. And, too, his characters, his flawed and fascinating people, were deployed as neat packages, their histories and quirks economically posited well before their thrust-and-parry colloquies. They looked, so Clifford thought, as if they had decided on things by themselves, sans authorial interference. “They more or less started doing what they wanted to do,” he could imagine himself saying to an interviewer.
This latest novel, created to satisfy the desires of an audience, as Clifford’s editor had characterized it, “too hip to actually read a lot,” educated, so to say, and busy, so, so busy, was, he hoped, the very thing to interest those readers among the favored “target group” who had progressed from slop-and-ramshackle best-sellers to the sort of fiction admired by professional reviewers—well-written, with fully developed characters, a nicely turned plot, and something important to say. It was, that is to say, designed for a particular kind of success, a “literary” success, and one that was, God knows, long deserved. So Clifford thought in righteous irritation. His first three novels should have been better received than they were—as he often complained to his wife. She thought of him as “neglected,” not, as he was, ignored. The books had been painstakingly constructed, modern in their “sensibility,” whatever he meant by that, accessible and possessed of accessible, contemporary motifs, dialogue, and sex scenes. They were, to be blunt, absolute failures, and each got a handful of mostly snide, semi-literate reviews, featuring the self-satisfaction of the ignorant. These were, of course, the usual, but Clifford was astonished by their blithe savagery.
How did all this bad luck befall Clifford? He’d begun his dim career as a poet, one of minor, limited gifts. At unexpected moments, there had appeared to him (although “appeared” may be dramatizing such occasions) the notion of the poem that would invite him to venture beyond his given odds and ends of “talent,” that would invite him to give up his conception of the poem as a vector of sensitive thought concerning his own highly edited but sensitive life. But since he had a small reputation, a fear of the untried, and, most importantly, a terror of writing a poem that would not look like his poems (he had, he believed, a style), these realities conspired to keep him writing a constipated verse that was, at its best, as some friend cruelly said behind his back, “like Sylvia Plath without the rag on.” What to do?
Clifford wanted, not fame, he knew better than that, but some sort of recognition and respect, some applause, a little money! He wanted to know that his books of poems would be regularly reviewed in the Times Book Review, even if such reviews were by the Winchell Tremaines, Brooke Van Dolans, Samantha Gundersons, and the other haughty corporals of the racket. On a number of occasions, Clifford tried to write the poem that was, if you please, just out of his reach, a poem that refused his carefully “crafted” images (“blue gardenias, slices of a summer sky”), but by the second stanza or the twelfth line, he’d be nervously lost; the language that he read, in a nausea of dislocation, was one that he neither recognized nor had control over. He could not, to put it perhaps too simply, tolerate the evidence of his obliterated opinions. And so he “retired” from versifying, as one might quit a boring job, and decided to try his hand at fiction.
His first novel, rigorously and repeatedly reworked, was, nevertheless, somewhat shaggy and juvenile; yet it had phrases and even scenes in which Clifford seemed to overcome his minuscule talents, if I may be permitted a mystical turn. Perhaps it’s better to say that he surprised himself in that he permitted his prose to forgo, on occasion, its rigid professionalism, permitted it to break loose, a little, from the everyday world and its everyday people that the narrative drove relentlessly onward: A died, but B lived; C had a terrible accident, but D, her friend, had a baby by E, C’s former husband; and F’s son came home, addicted to heroin and suffering from AIDS, sullen and despairing, yet seeking love from G, his father, who, although compassionate, was emotionally distant, even from his second wife, the weaver, and her autistic daughter. And I’s alcoholism was destroying his sister, J’s life, even thou
gh she would not recognize this fact. These exhausted problems did not, I hope it goes without saying, present themselves as banalities of “mere” pop fiction, for Clifford, like any littérateur you can think of, knew how to disguise the sentimental as the poignant, even the tragic. Life! his novel said. Life! It was, of course, baloney.
Clifford’s editor at the time, who would be disappointed by Clifford, worried about the eruptions of, well, writing in the manuscript, and worked with Clifford to temper if not excise them. The book needed to be friendlier, more coherent, retaining its toughness and quirky insights, but not at the expense of a driving narrative. The book was about, was it not, the way we are now? Without a clear respect and compassion for the characters and their messy lives, just what is a novel? What, indeed? Look at Dickens, look at Hardy, look at Trollope, look at Bellow and Updike, look at them! The novel was published, got nine reviews, one of which called it “… carefully written and enjoyably quirky … somewhat difficult at times .. rich with compassion … characters who, by the book’s end, we feel we’ve … suffered with.” The book disappeared so completely that it never showed up on remainder tables or in catalogues.
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