The Odd Woman and the City

by Vivian Gornick

  “How long have I been he-e-e-ere?” he screeched when I was certain the script called for dullness of tone—and the screech felt right.

  “What-a-question,” he rushed on. “An-hour-a-month-a-year-a-century, depending on what I meant by here, and me, and being and there”—and the speed became exciting.

  Repeatedly, he moved into the skid. Wherever his voice wanted to go, he let it go; whatever it wished to do, he let it do. And Beckett accommodated him. Beckett’s words danced, climbed, crawled, to make the sense that Johnny’s voice needed to make of them, and the work remained compelling. Starting, stopping, jerking about, starting up again, the piece began to sound as if it had been written for this very reading.

  Then a man in a seat near the wall reached out toward the bookcases and turned a switch on a tape machine. Suddenly, John’s voice of twenty years earlier, reading the same monologue, flooded the room. That mannered vibrancy—the unmistakable sound of “Beckett acting” in full command of itself—washed over the company.

  “I’ve given myself up for dead all over the place,” the forty-year-old John intoned with magisterial dolefulness, “of hunger, of old age, murdered, drowned, and then for no reason, of tedium, nothing like breathing your last to put new life in you…” The voice on the tape paused, and we did not doubt that “pause” was written in the script. “Above is the light,” it went on, “the elements, a kind of light, sufficient to see by, the living find their ways…” It paused again and confided elegantly, “To have suffered under that miserable light, what a blunder.”

  At the table between the windows, above the pool of lamplight, John’s face glistened with sweat. The tape machine switched off, and in a strangled whisper the man at the table spat out, “And if I went back to where all went out and on from there, no, that would lead nowhere, never led anywhere, I tried throwing me off a cliff, collapsing in the street, in the midst of mortals, that led nowhere, I gave up … Dribble on here till time is done, murmuring every ten centuries, It’s not me, it’s not true, it’s not me, I’m far … Quick, quick before I weep.”

  The tape switched back on.

  “I don’t know,” the intact John observed. “I’m here, that’s all I know, and that it’s still not me, it’s of that the best has to be made … Leave all that, to want to leave all that, not knowing, what that means, all that.”

  The machine went off.

  “Where would I go,” the man at the table croaked, his face now bathed in sweat. “If I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me?” He stopped. “It’s not me…” Stopped again. “It’s not me … what a thought … There is only me, this evening, here on earth, and a voice that makes no sound because it goes towards none.” Stop. “No need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.” Stop. “I’m making progress.” Stop. “I am here.” Stop. “I stay here, sitting, if I’m sitting, often I feel sitting, sometimes standing, it’s one or the other, or lying down, there’s another possibility, often I feel lying down, it’s one of the three, or kneeling.” Stop.

  “What counts is to be in the world, the posture is immaterial, so long as one is on earth. To breathe is all that is required.” Stop. “Yes, there are moments, like this moment, when I seem almost restored to the feasible. Then it goes, all goes, and I’m far again … I wait for me afar for my story to begin.”

  And so on to the end, the dramatic, knowing voice of the forty-year-old John Dylan continually up against the cracked, exalted one of the Dylan who by now had lived Beckett’s script.

  Outside, the river ran dark and turbulent; across the water, banks of high-rise light shot into the sky; in the hall beyond the studio door, three people were having a neighborly argument. The water, the lights, the words in the hallway: all seemed to group themselves around the small, drained figure bowing in front of the wooden table without touching it. The figure itself remained gloriously solitary: beyond pain, pleasure, or threat. I knew that I had been hearing Beckett—really hearing him—for the first time.

  * * *

  It was a cold, clear morning in March. Having just finished interviewing a city official for a piece I was writing, I was sitting at the counter of a coffee shop across the street from City Hall, drinking coffee, eating a bagel, and writing down remembered snatches of the conversation I’d just had when a man sat down one stool away from me. He wore dark pants and a tweed jacket, looked to be in his fifties, and I took him to be a middle-rank civil servant. When I had finished eating, drinking, and writing, I stood up, and as I was gathering myself together, he said to me, “I hope you won’t mind, I haven’t been able to read a word you’re writing, but I’d like to tell you some things I know about you from your handwriting.” Startled, I said, “Sure, go ahead.” I took a better look at him then and saw that he wore a large Native American turquoise-and-silver ring and a string tie. He leaned toward me and said slowly but intently, “You’re generous. That is, you are inclined to be generous, but circumstances don’t allow you to be. So you’re often not. You’re assertive. And a bit aggressive. And that small script … you’re very literate, very intelligent.” I stared at him for a fraction of a second. “Thanks,” I said. “That’s a fine flattering portrait you’ve drawn.” He looked relieved that I wasn’t somehow offended. Then I said, “Is my handwriting really so small?” He nodded and said yes, it was, and small handwriting, he repeated, is the mark of the very intelligent. Of course, he added (very softly), there are people who have much smaller handwriting, and they … “Are the mad or the brilliant,” I said, finishing his sentence for him. He paused. “Yes,” he said, again softly, “they’re often very brilliant.” I stood there, looking steadily, perhaps even gravely, at him. He smiled and said, “Oh, don’t worry, my handwriting is twice as large as yours.” I did burst out laughing then, but the remark kept crawling around under my skin for the whole rest of that day.

  * * *

  It’s an evening in June and I am taking a turn through Washington Square. As I stroll, I see in the air before me, like an image behind a scrim, the square as it looked when I was young, standing right behind the square that I’m actually looking at. That was a good fifty years ago, when my friends and I used to come down from the Bronx and in from Brooklyn on summer evenings and we’d walk around looking at a piece of world so different from that of our own neighborhoods we might as well have been in Europe. The square was pristine then—paths swept clean, benches freshly painted, fountain sparkling—and the verdancy a marvel: thousands of leaves glistening on the century-old trees, every bush and flower bed neatly trimmed, the grass green velvet. And the people in the square! It was middle-class bohemia then, the women sensual, the men poetic, and of course everyone white. To our hungry young eyes the scene promised culture and class privilege … not a thought in our heads then about race or sex … we couldn’t wait to get there. Romantic longing washed through all of us for years, and we were haunted by the beauty of the square on those sweet summer evenings.

  Now, here it is another summer evening and I am again walking in the square. With the street at my back and everything I know etched on my face, I look through the scrim directly into those old memories and I see that they no longer have authority over me. I see the square as it is—black, brown, young; swarming with drifters and junkies and lousy guitar players—and I feel myself as I am, the city as it is. I have lived out my conflicts not my fantasies, and so has New York. We are at one.

  * * *

  On the other side of the square I run into Leonard, serendipitously out for his own stroll this evening. I start to tell him what I’ve been remembering, but he is nodding before I’m through a dozen sentences. He understands almost by osmosis what I am saying because he was there himself, all those years ago, on those same summer evenings. “We were probably both trying to pick up the same guys,” he laughs.
Then he says, “But I, too, was lusting after the couples. Trying desperately to talk myself into ‘normal.’ What were we? Sixteen? Seventeen? Somehow, even then, I knew I’d never make it. Never.”

  We walk on together, side by side; silent; mirror-image witnesses, each of us, to the other’s formative experience. The exchange will always deepen, even if the friendship does not.

  * * *

  It is now October. On a Saturday evening in midmonth, Daniel takes me down to the Winter Garden in Battery Park City to hear a group of Renaissance singers in concert. I have many times walked through this lovely open hall with its marble floors and great central staircase, the glittering shops and restaurants, and the tall arched window filled with New York Harbor. Who could have imagined that this elaborate piece of architectural commerce and kitsch would become such a New York treat? But it has, filling up at all hours with people streaming through to shop, eat, wander, listen to the free music and theater pieces presented most days at noon or in the evening at seven or eight.

  We come early to secure seats close to the movable stage set up before the arched window, then wander off, buy sandwiches and coffee, sit beside the water. The evening is soft, with the harbor and promenade gleaming under the strung lights of boats and restaurant terraces, the atmosphere festive, sparkling, somehow (lovely word!) expectant. When we return to our seats darkness has fallen, and the great hall is buzzing with humanity. I look about me, and to my amazement the entire staircase, receding stadium-like, up the back of the hall, rising four or five stories high, is packed. Turning back in my seat, I feel a thrill shoot through my body, the kind that occurs when a nerve is touched. A thousand people are gathered here, grouped all over the hall, waiting to feel themselves in the music.

  For the first time in decades, I feel the spirit of Lewisohn Stadium alive at my back, and I think, I’m always being told you people have left the city in droves, but look, you’re still here. Oh, you’ve shifted positions, to be sure, you don’t dominate the scene anymore, the city is no longer made in your image, but here you are; and here am I; and there are the singers. It takes all of us together to fill the hall with joy and, urban death or no urban death, the city is still up for it.

  * * *

  A friend reads what I’ve been writing and says to me over coffee, “You’re romanticizing the street. Don’t you know that New York has lost seventy-five percent of its manufacturing base?” In my mind’s eye, I stare into the faces of all the women and men with whom I interact daily. Hey, you people, I address them silently, did you hear what my friend just said? The city is doomed, the middle class has deserted New York, the corporations are in Texas, Jersey, Taiwan. You’re gone, you’re outta here, it’s all over. How come you’re still on the street?

  New York isn’t jobs, they reply, it’s temperament. Most people are in New York because they need evidence—in large quantities—of human expressiveness; and they need it not now and then, but every day. That is what they need. Those who go off to the manageable cities can do without; those who come to New York cannot.

  Or perhaps I should say that it is I who cannot.

  * * *

  It’s the voices I can’t do without. In most cities of the world the populace is planted in centuries of cobblestoned alleys, ruined churches, architectural relics, none of which are ever dug up, only piled one on top of another. If you’ve grown up in New York, your life is an archaeology not of structures but of voices, also piled one on top of another, also not really replacing one another:

  On Sixth Avenue, two small, dark-skinned men lean against a parked cab. One says to the other, “Look, it’s very simple. A is the variable costs, B is the gross income, C is the overhead. Got that?” The other man shakes his head no. “Dummy!” the first man cries. “You gotta get it.”

  On Park Avenue, a well-dressed matron says to her friend, “When I was young, men were the main course, now they’re a condiment.”

  On Fifty-Seventh Street, one boyish-looking man says to another, “I didn’t realize you were such good friends. What did she give you, that you miss her so?” “It wasn’t what she gave me,” the other replies, “it was what she didn’t take away.”

  As the cabbie on Sixth Avenue says, someone’s gotta get it; and late in the day, someone does.

  I am walking on Eighth Avenue during the five o’clock rush, thinking of changing a word in a sentence, and somewhere in the Forties, I don’t notice the light turning red. Halfway into the path of an oncoming truck, I am lifted off my feet by a pair of hands on my upper arms and pulled back onto the curb. The hands do not release me immediately. I am pressed to the chest of the person to whom the hands belong. I can still feel the beating heart against my back. When I turn to thank my rescuer I am looking into the middle-aged face of an overweight man with bright blue eyes, straw-colored hair, and a beet-red face. We stare wordlessly at each other. I’ll never know what the man is thinking at this moment, but the expression on his face is unforgettable. Me, I am merely shaken, but he looks as though transfigured by what has just happened. His eyes are fixed on mine, but I see that they are really looking inward. I realize that this is his experience, not mine. It is he who has felt the urgency of life—he is still holding it in his hands.

  Two hours later I am home, having dinner at my table, looking out at the city. My mind flashes on all who crossed my path today. I hear their voices, I see their gestures, I start filling in lives for them. Soon they are company, great company. I think to myself, I’d rather be here with you tonight than with anyone else I know. Well, almost anyone else I know. I look up at the great clock on my wall, the one that gives the date as well as the hour. It’s time to call Leonard.

  A Note About the Author

  Vivian Gornick is the author of the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments, a biography of Emma Goldman, and three essay collections, two of which, The Men in My Life and The End of the Novel of Love, were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Also by Vivian Gornick

  In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt

  The Romance of American Communism

  Essays in Feminism

  Women in Science: 100 Journeys into the Territory

  Fierce Attachments: A Memoir

  Approaching Eye Level

  The End of the Novel of Love

  The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

  The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  The Men in My Life

  Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Author’s Note

  The Odd Woman and the City

  A Note About the Author

  Also by Vivian Gornick

  Permission Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following previously published material:

  “I was walking along Forty-Second Street…” and “During the Second World War…” from The Poems of Charles Reznikoff: 1918–1975 by Charles Reznikoff, edited by Seamus Cooney. Reprinted by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Copyright © 2005 by Charles Reznikoff, edited by Seamus Cooney.

  An excerpt from a letter from Louise Bogan to May Sarton reprinted from What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan 1920–1970, copyright 1973 and with the permission of the Louise Bogan Charitable Trust.

  An excerpt from “George Gissing: A Neurotic for
Our Times,” in The Men in My Life, by Vivian Gornick, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008.

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2015 by Vivian Gornick

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2015

  Portions of this book originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Threepenny Review.

  Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material can be found at the back of the book.

  eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gornick, Vivian.

  The odd woman and the city: a memoir / Vivian Gornick. — 1st Edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-374-29860-9 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71168-9 (e-book)

  1. Friendship. 2. Love. 3. City and town life—New York (State)—New York. I. Title.

  BF575.F66 G676 2015

  818'.5403—dc23

  2014039376

  www.fsgbooks.com

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