“How beautiful!” came out of my mouth before I even registered a thought.
Leonard was silent.
“No?” I inquired.
He smiled one of his small, tight smiles.
“What is it you feel?” he asked with genuine curiosity; he really wanted to know.
Now I felt obliged to think.
“Elated,” I replied. “Inspirited.”
Silence.
“Don’t you?” I asked.
“Never,” he replied, and shivered. “I feel awe looking at the elemental world,” he said. “Fear, actually. Conversely, looking at a civilized landscape I feel moved by the human effort to push back the alienness. With me and nature it’s either terror or gratitude. Inspirited, never.”
* * *
On upper Broadway a beggar approaches a middle-aged woman. “I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I just need—,” he starts. To his amazement, the woman yells directly into his face, “I just had my pocket picked!” The beggar turns his face northward and calls to a colleague up the block, “Hey, Bobby, leave her alone, she just got robbed.”
* * *
It was through the discovery and exploration of the unconscious that Freud made his major discoveries, chief among them that from birth to death we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don’t want to grow up; we hunger for sexual pleasure, we dread sexual pleasure; we hate our own aggressions—anger, cruelty, the need to humiliate—yet they derive from the grievances we are least willing to part with. Our very suffering is a source of both pain and reassurance. What Freud found most difficult to cure in his patients was the resistance to being cured.
* * *
I had a friend once with whom I was certain I would grow old. My friendship with Emma was not one I would have described as Montaigne does his with Étienne de La Boétie—as one in which the soul grows refined—but now that I am thinking about it, I see that, in important ways, it was analogous. Ours was an attachment that, if it did not refine the soul, certainly nourished the spirit so well that, for a very long time indeed, we each seemed to experience our inquiring selves fully in the presence of the other. At school we’d both been prime examples of those very intelligent girls whose insecurities equip them with voices that easily generate scorn and judgment. It would be years before those formidable defenses altered sufficiently that each of us could see herself in the other. I remember once when we were in our twenties hearing Emma correct someone’s grammar—“The word is who, not whom”—and the contempt in her voice made me wince. Thank God I don’t sound like that, I thought. But I did. We were in our thirties when I first heard myself as I heard Emma whenever one or the other of us said some awful thing. And then the corrective of self-recognition—a thrilling occurrence at that point in our lives—worked a kind of magic between us. In no time at all it became necessary for us to meet or speak at least three times a week. The open road of friendship everlasting seemed spread out before us.
To the uninitiated eye, this vitality of connection between Emma and me might have appeared puzzling. She was a bourgeois through and through, I a radical feminist who owned nothing. She had married, become a mother, and pursued graduate work; I was twice divorced, had remained childless, and lived the marginal existence of a working freelance. Beneath these separating realities, however, lay a single compelling influence that drew us irresistibly toward each other.
Together, we seemed always to be puzzling out those parts of the general condition to which our own circumstances applied. Emma had embraced the family, I had rejected the family; she endorsed the middle class, I loathed the middle class; she dreaded loneliness, I endured it. Yet the longer we went on meeting and talking, the more clearly we saw that to know how we had come to be as we were was for both of us the central enterprise. When we spoke together of the exhaustion of love and the anguish of work, the smell of children and the taste of solitude, we were really speaking of the search for the self and the confusion that came with the mere construction of the phrase: What was the self? Where was it? How did one pursue it, abandon or betray it? These questions were the ones that concentrated our deepest concerns. Consciousness as a first value, we each discovered, was what we together were exploring.
The absorption grew in us day by month by year, fed by the excitement of abstract thought joined to the concreteness of daily life. In conversation with each other, we both felt the strength of context imposed on the quotidian. The more we explored the immediate in service to the theoretical—a chance encounter on the bus, a book just begun or just finished, a dinner party gone bad—the larger the world seemed to grow. The everyday became raw material for a developing perspective that was acquiring narrative drive: sitting in a living room, eating in a restaurant, walking in the street—it was as though we had grasped things whole without ever having had to leave home.
We went on like this for nearly ten years. And then one day the bond between us began to unravel. I had a bad exchange with Emma’s husband, and she saw it as divisive. She read a book by a liberationist writer I prized, and I was stung by her scorn. We each made a new friend whose virtues the other failed to respond to. That winter I could barely pay the rent, and Emma’s preoccupation with redecorating her place got under my skin. Suddenly, the adventure we had made of our differing circumstances seemed to be going sour: my cozy apartment felt sterile, her amiable husband a fool. Who are we? I remember thinking. What are we doing? And why are we doing it together?
Slowly but inexorably, the enterprise of mind and spirit to which our friendship had been devoted began to lose strength before the growing encroachment of the sympathies out of which our lives were actually fashioned. Like an uncontrollable growth that overtakes a clearing in the forest, the differences moved in on us. In no time at all, the friendship that had for so long generated excitement and exerted power was now experienced as a need that had run its course. Overnight, it seemed, it took one long stride and moved from the urgent center to the exhausted margin. Just like sexual infatuation, I remember thinking idly one morning as I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. And then, somewhat dazedly, I realized, That’s right. That’s exactly what this is like. Sexual infatuation.
In the end, my friendship with Emma did prove to bear a striking resemblance to romantic love. The passion that had flared between us now seemed an equivalent of the kind of erotic feeling that dies of its own intensity at the moment one begins to realize that much in oneself is not being addressed by this attraction of the senses. The irony here was that sexual love usually fails because of an insufficiency of shared sensibility, whereas sensibility was what Emma and I had had in abundance.
When my friendship with Emma was disintegrating, I recalled Winston Churchill’s having once said there are no permanent friends, only permanent interests, and although I understood that Churchill meant worldly ambition trumps personal loyalties, I remember thinking even then, He’s wrong, there are no permanent interests, either. It was the infidelity of our own mutating “interests” that had brought me and Emma low.
Our inner lives, William James announced, are fluid, restless, mercurial, always in transition. The transitions, he speculated, are the reality, and concluded that our experience “lives in the transitions.” This is a piece of information difficult to absorb, much less accept, yet it is transparently persuasive. How else account for the mysterious shift in emotional sympathies that, at any hour of the ordinary day, brings a marriage, a friendship, a professional connection that has repeatedly threatened dissolution, to a “sudden” actual end?
The withdrawal of feeling in romantic love is a drama most of us are familiar with and therefore feel equipped to explain. In thrall to the intensity generated by passion, we invest love with transformative powers; imagine ourselves about to be made new, even whole, under its influence. When the expected transformation fails to materialize, the hopes interwoven with the infatuation do a desperate dissolve. The adventure of having fe
lt known in the presence of the lover now bleeds out into the anxiety of feeling exposed.
In both friendship and love, the expectation that one’s expressive (if not best) self will flower in the presence of the beloved other is key. Upon that flowering all is posited. But what if the restless, the fluid, the mercurial, within each of us is steadily undermining the very thing we think we most want? What, in fact, if the assumption of a self in need of expressiveness is an illusion? What if the urge toward stable intimacy is perpetually threatened by an equally great, if not greater, urge toward destabilization? What then?
* * *
On Fourteenth Street, at noon on a summer’s day—in the midst of honking traffic, bargain store shoppers, crosstown bus riders—I run into Victor, an unhappy dentist who has lived in my neighborhood for years. Tall and slim, with a Caesar haircut and sad brown eyes, he is a nervous man who smiles compulsively. Whenever he sees me he coos, “Dahling, sweetness, beautiful girl, how a-a-are you?” Then, like a mother in a permanent state of interested alarm, he peers intently into my face and very gently asks, “You still writing, dahling?” Some years ago Victor, in search of inner peace, began traveling regularly to Japan to consult the Zen healer who has given him the wherewithal to get out of bed in the morning in New York. He must be sixty by now.
Standing here on Fourteenth Street, a Con Ed drill blasting in our ears, Victor croons at me, “Dahling, sweetness, beautiful girl, how are you, still living in the same building?”
“Yes,” I reply.
“Still doing journalistic work?”
“No, Victor, I teach now.”
He pushes his chin out at me as though to say, “Tell me.”
I tell him. He listens intently as the words fall rapidly from my mouth, nodding steadily as I speak of the deprivation of spirit I suffer living for months at a time in one university town or another.
“It’s exile!” I cry at last. “Exile pure and simple.”
Victor nods and nods. His brown eyes are dissolving in watery pain. He knows exactly what I mean, oh, no one in the world will ever know better than he what I mean. His face goes dreamy. My own starts feeling compromised. Car brakes screech, sirens pierce the air, the Con Ed drill stops and starts, stops and starts. No matter. Victor and I are now quarantined on this island of noise, spellbound by matters of the soul.
“But you know, dahling?” he says ever so softly. “I have discovered there’s a lot of love out there.”
“Oh yes,” I reply quickly, suddenly aware of the harm my relentless negatives may be doing.
“A lot of love,” he repeats reverentially.
“Absolutely,” I agree. “Absolutely.”
The Con Ed drill starts up again.
“I mean, people care.” By now Victor’s face is radiant. “They really do.”
And it is me who is nodding and nodding.
Victor puts his hand on my arm, leans toward me, looks searchingly into my eyes, and delivers himself of his wisdom.
“Dahling,” he whispers in my ear, “we’ve got to let it go.”
Yes, yes, oh yes, I know just what you mean.
“Let it all go.”
* * *
After 9/11, an atmosphere difficult to describe enveloped the city and refused to abate. For weeks on end the town felt vacant, confused, uprooted. People walked around looking spaced-out, as though permanently puzzled by something they couldn’t put a name to. The smell was eerie: like nothing anybody could describe exactly, but when your nostrils inhaled the air, you felt anxious. And all the while a kind of otherworldly quiet prevailed. In restaurants, theaters, museums; shops, traffic, the crowd itself—all seemed muted, inert, even immobilized. A man who loved New York movies found himself turning the television set off when one came on. A woman who enjoyed seeing photographs of the city in a storefront she passed daily now flinched as she approached the shop. The pictures, she said, felt like “before,” and nothing “before” gave comfort.
One soft, clear evening about six weeks after the fateful day, I was crossing Broadway, somewhere in the Seventies. Halfway across, the light changed. I stopped on the island that divides the boulevard and did what everyone does: looked down the street for a break in the traffic so that I could safely run the light. But there was no traffic: not a car in sight. I stood there, hypnotized by the grand and awful emptiness. I couldn’t recall the time—except for a blizzard, perhaps—when Broadway had ever, even for a moment, been free of oncoming traffic. It looked like a scene from another time. Just like a Berenice Ab—, I started thinking, and instantly the thought cut itself short. In fact, I wrenched myself from it. I saw that it was frightening me to even consider “a scene from another time.” As though some fatal break had occurred between me and the right to yearn over that long-ago New York alive in a Berenice Abbot photograph. That night I understood what it was that had been draining out of the city throughout this sad, stunned season.
When human experience slides off the scale, and the end of civilization threatens, only hard truths will do; and I was finding them sealed into the minimalist prose of French and Italian novelists of the fifties and sixties. Here, an eerie inwardness trapped in the prose resonated inside a suffusing silence that promised moral disorder of a serious nature. Ah yes, the reader feels. However it once was, that’s the way it is now.
Standing there on the island in the middle of Broadway, I realized what it was that we were losing: it was nostalgia. And then I realized that it was this that was at the heart of postwar fiction. It wasn’t sentiment that was missing from these novels, it was nostalgia. That cold, pure silence at the heart of modern European prose is the absence of nostalgia: an absence made available only to those who feel themselves standing at the end of history, staring, without longing or regret, into the is-ness of what is. Now, here in New York after 9/11, if only for the moment, we too stood, lined up with the rest of a world permanently postwar, staring into that cold, silent purity.
* * *
Late for an appointment in midtown, I run down the subway stairs just as the train is pulling into the Fourteenth Street station. The doors open and a young man standing in front of me (T-shirt, jeans, crew cut) with an elaborately folded-up baby carriage on his back, leading a very small child by the hand, heads for the seats directly ahead of us. I plop down on the one opposite him, take out my book and reading glasses, and, settling myself, am vaguely aware of the man removing the carriage from his back and turning toward the seated child. Then I look up. The little boy is about seven or eight, and he is the most grotesquely deformed child I have ever seen. He has the face of a gargoyle—mouth twisted to the side, one eye higher than the other—inside a huge, misshapen head that reminds me of the Elephant Man. Bound around the child’s neck is a narrow piece of white cloth, in the center of which sits a short, fat tube that seems to be inserted into his throat. In another instant I realize that he is also deaf. This last because the man immediately begins signing. At first, the boy merely watches the man’s moving fingers, but soon he begins responding with motions of his own. Then, as the man’s fingers move more and more rapidly, the boy’s quicken, and within minutes both sets of fingers are matched in speed and complexity.
Embarrassed at first to be watching these two so steadily, I keep turning away, but they are so clearly oblivious to everyone around them that I can’t resist looking up repeatedly from my book. And then something remarkable happens: the man’s face is suffused with such delight and affection as the boy’s responses grow ever more animated—the twisted little mouth grinning, the unaligned eyes brightening—that the child himself begins to look transformed. As the stations go by, and the conversation between the man and the boy grows ever more absorbing to them, fingers flying, both nodding and laughing, I find myself thinking, These two are humanizing each other at a very high level.
By the time we get to Fifty-Ninth Street, the boy looks beautiful to me, and the man beatific.
* * *
My mother ha
d heart surgery. She emerged from the operation in a state of calm I’d never known her to possess. Criticism and complaint disappeared from her voice, grievance from her face. Everything was a matter of interest to her: negotiating the bus, the sunlight on her cheeks, the bread in her mouth. In a diner before we are due to take a bus ride across town, she sips her coffee appreciatively (usually she complains it’s not hot enough) and eats a pastry with relish. She sits back, beaming at me. Then she leans across the table and declares vehemently, “This is the best cheese Danish I have ever eaten.”
We leave the diner and walk to the bus stop. “Let’s stand here,” she says, pointing to a spot a few feet beyond the sign. “It used to throw me into a rage,” she explains, “that the driver would always pass the sign and stop here. I never understood why. But now I realize that it is actually easier for him to lower the step here for people like me than it is at the sign.” She laughs and says, “I’ve noticed lately that when I don’t get angry I have more thoughts than when I do. It makes life interesting.”
I nearly weep. All I had ever wanted was that my mother be glad to be alive in my presence. I am still certain that if she had been, I’d have grown up whole inside.
“Imagine,” I say to Leonard. “She’s so old and she can still do this to me.”
“It’s not how old she is that’s remarkable,” he says. “It’s how old you are.”
* * *
A month ago, I passed a middle-aged couple on the promenade at Battery Park City. She was black, he white; both had gray hair and wavy jawlines. They were holding hands and talking earnestly, their eyes searching each other’s faces for the answers to questions that only lovers put to each other. I realized, as I looked at them, that the city now contains a considerable number of middle-aged interracial couples. I’d been spotting them all over town for more than a year now, black men and white women, white men and black women, almost all of them in their forties or fifties, clearly in the first stages of intimacy. It moved me to be reminded once again of how long it is taking blacks and whites to become real to one another.
The Odd Woman and the City Page 5