If you went in Grand Central Terminal, it was encrusted with a patina of eighty years of smoke, soot, grime; if you went in the toilets, if you tried to sit in the waiting room, you’d be hanging out with homeless people, because that’s where they lived.
A magazine editor held a big Christmas party there. She invited the hip and rich and beautiful to come to Grand Central Terminal for a dinner, followed by a performance by a young, hip choreographer and dancer at the recently renovated Brooklyn Academy of Music. Nobody in those days went to Brooklyn; you couldn’t get there, but that was the excitement of it. That day it was bad. It snowed and rained and flooded. But we managed to get there.
The waiting room had been cleared out. The waiting room was clean.
For the first time in decades it didn’t stink of urine. There were no homeless people passed out on benches surrounded by piles of bags and things stuffed in stolen shopping carts. A glittering Christmas tree rose to the ceiling. Scented candles flickered on ornate candelabras. Fine linens covered long tables heaped with spiced nuts, bonbons, and baskets of flowers “by” Robert Isabell, a famous event planner of the 1980s who commanded hundreds of thousands of dollars for such a presentation.
The drenched and soaked guests entered this room: at any entrance, heavy red velvet ropes had been erected to block the regular commuters at Grand Central Terminal from coming in.
But most commuters didn’t even use this waiting room. The people who used this waiting room—where they slept, where they lived—were the homeless. Tonight they were prevented from returning.
So, as the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus sang, the homeless, in great stinking crowds, gathered at the ropes, pressing up in filthy rags, to look in at the attendees.
The homeless could be prevented from using the waiting room that one night.
But they could not be blocked from the restrooms. You went in that women’s room in your evening gown, and—taking a bath in the sink next to yours, or passed out in a toilet stall—that’s where they were.
I don’t know if any of them even got a piece of cake.
Maybe a half million was spent there that night, maybe more.
It was a scene worthy of Dickens, but somehow nothing other than the glitz and glamour ever got written up by the press. A day or two later, it’s all forgotten: just another party in New York City. And I still haven’t figured out a novel to put that scene into.
how i met the kennedys
It was about 1961 or 1962 when John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Amherst College and people gathered to greet him as he walked through the campus. My father took me to see this man. He held me up in his arms, and as Kennedy came through he stopped and shook my hand and said hello. I remember this vividly because even at that age this man made a strong impression on me. I felt he liked me, that he had singled me out for special attention and there was even something—not sexual, but the man had a sexual charisma that even a tiny girl was aware of.
Years passed and I was made over by a beauty magazine to look like a rich person. That same evening a friend took me to the opening night of the ballet season and whisked me into the VIP or board members room. I was wearing a borrowed Oscar de la Renta suit, and Jackie Kennedy Onassis came up to me. She looked at me with a mix of amusement, curiosity, and bafflement. Then she took a tiny pair of spectacles from her handbag and put them on. She looked me up and down and shook hands with me. I did not know it or realize it at the time, but not only had I been perfectly groomed by the magazine staff to successfully resemble a rich socialite, which took ten hours, but I was also wearing the line from de la Renta that was not supposed to be ready for months and that no one was supposed to have access to yet. It was a big deal. Boaz, de la Renta’s assistant, rushed over and started shouting at me, “Where did you get that suit! How did you get it!”
The magazine had dressed me in that suit and told me to go out in it for the night and have fun; it was part of the story I was writing. I did not know I was not meant to be wearing that suit. I did not know who Boaz was. “None of your business!” I said, giggling, although I put it much more politely, and I went back to chatting with Jackie O.
Another night, at a different friend’s house, at a small dinner, I was seated next to Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. She was very nice but you could see she could never make any new friends—she had only those she had grown up with—and I understood this perfectly. Who would she ever be able to trust? I was a writer, and besides, that evening I was not dressed to resemble a wealthy socialite.
Then, after another event, there was a small reception and John F. Kennedy Jr. was there, and my friend introduced us. He was good looking but a lot younger than me, and I felt way out of my league. Besides, I was very plain.
He, too, had an animal magnetism but not as interesting; it was the sexuality of the frat boy, not my thing. Of this famous family, three of the four are dead. (It seems curious to me that I met all of them, at different times and places and stages in my life, but also pointless.) It makes me think of Forrest Gump. But in my case, I’m spliced into photographs that exist only in my head. At a certain point, you get old, you realize, Hey! I met all these original Kennedys! And then you think, but what does it mean? Why? Finally I thought of an answer: I don’t know.
socialites, art, and fashion
For a long time my life in New York was interesting to me. If, over a period of time, I would meet various socialites, I would think, Now I am meeting various socialites. And I would try to discern something about that breed.
I met Lee Radziwill once—not that she counts as one of the main or original John F. Kennedy family, but still. The most interesting thing about her was that she was so thin. She appeared to be a woman who had spent her entire life not eating, or consuming only enough calories to sustain life. I could not imagine this, a whole lifetime devoted to not eating. She had the look of doelike suffering and yet superiority, not just because of her social status, but because of her vast suffering. I am sure she suffered a great deal, but by the time you get to a certain age, you kind of realize everyone has suffered a great deal. You are not unique.
When you met Nancy Reagan in person you saw that she, too, had spent a lifetime not eating. The photos do add on pounds. Starved magazine editors, there are quite a number of those. I don’t know how they do it because they go out to eat all the time, breakfast and lunch and dinner, and even if they go to the gym, most of their day is pretty inactive, and when you get older and your metabolism slows, the weight doesn’t just come off easily once you have put it on.
And all of those women will probably tell you, “Oh, I eat.” But they can’t be eating. They have the big heads and the toothpick limbs that could snap at any moment. Further, it is not fun. No matter what you look like, when you spend time with one of these women you not only feel fat but expect to be responsible for one of their twigs snapping off.
New York City trends change. When I first moved back to the city after college in the 1980s, you could somehow afford an apartment. SoHo was still a working neighborhood; inside the cast-iron buildings there were factories making buttons or pins; artists were living there illegally; and on the ground-floor levels small art galleries opened up—there were all these kids making art and dealers were showing it, and just by accident I found out you could head there on a Saturday night and there were openings happening, people spilling out from the galleries onto the otherwise deserted streets.
Back then, even if you couldn’t afford a painting or an artwork, you still got to mingle and it was a party. And there were peculiar nightclubs, and the people at the art opening would say, “Are you going to—” and name a place, Danceteria, the Mudd Club, Save the Robots, Beulah Land, Area, the Pyramid Club, whatever was going on at the time, with performances and music. It was all just a big scene. I always thought it too bad that I had missed the 1960s in New York.
I didn’t realize how unique or special the times were that I was living in now, the eighties.
You could be broke but still have an amazing life. People were still able to find really cheap apartments, not that you would necessarily want to live in them. An old hotel had been converted into apartments and somehow a guy I knew was able to rent the coat checkroom. It had a great address downtown, but of course a coat checkroom is small, it doesn’t have windows, and I think there was a toilet but no shower. That was his home.
Even so, I don’t know how anybody ever made money to pay rent. A place might cost five or six hundred dollars, but a lot of people displayed no visible signs of employment. Did everyone but me have a family who sent them money?
I had a job writing for a downtown newspaper. I wrote funny little articles, reviewing art shows or clubs or events. I got paid twenty bucks an article, not enough to survive on—and then they fired me! The next week I was on the cover of New York magazine. That was an odd transformation. My book Slaves of New York wasn’t in any stores because the publisher hadn’t printed many copies. I was broke and paranoid, except now when I went someplace and people started whispering, I wasn’t being paranoid. They were actually whispering.
Then the trend—art being something cutting edge—changed. The gallery spaces cost so much for the dealers to rent, they had to sell art for a lot of money and they only wanted rich people in their galleries.
After that, for a while, fashion shows became the social event.
Going to a fashion show is fun the first few times. Then you realize: I can’t afford the clothes even if I do think they are pretty. And most of them are only pretty because they are being worn by a beautiful six-foot-tall twenty-year-old girl. If I wore a pair of baggy silk shorts and a blouse with one long sleeve and one bare shoulder with a large lumpy knot in the back just at the base of the spine in turquoise with beige spots, it would not look good. And if I wore six-inch platform shoes I would fall over.
The clothes cost thousands and thousands of dollars and the main objective is for people to say they attended the show. The people who go to the shows in New York City are all dressed quite boringly, usually in black, and would never wear the things that are being worn by the models onstage.
So the people watching isn’t all that fun, either. The front row might have some familiar faces of magazine editors or one or two celebrities or a department store buyer. There might be a “writer” who once wrote a tiny book of “funny” essays thirty years ago that no one has ever read but is so short people think they read it and remember it was funny. There are people who are “important” and other people take their pictures with cell phones or try to stop them for a mini-interview for some fashion channel. The other people are like, “So-and-so was there, and so-and-so.”
The other rows are filled with junior editors and PR people. They are sitting there talking on their cell phones, texting and tweeting, to say who is there and that they are at such and such a show—but the whole time there is a general rage that they are not seated in the important first row. Then you wait and you wait and you wait and then there is very loud music and some girls or boys come out wearing these different outfits. Then it is over.
You just sit there and you think, Ooo, pretty.
Even if I could buy it, I would get a stain on it or it would make me look dumpy or whatever. You might as well be one of a school of fish or a bunch of sparrows. I don’t really like the job of sitting there as an unpaid interested audience member. I mean, I will be an audience member, but pay me. Or give me a dress.
my mom gets a job and a real home
Eventually my mom got a job. Because she wrote poetry, A. R. Ammons selected her to come to Cornell University. She was fifty years old.
My mother lived on a small private road just off the college campus. It was a historic district. You couldn’t touch or change anything on the house unless it was done according to historic code. This made it hard to keep her house warm. Her house had windows with crisscross wood that formed diamond panes, very old and good at keeping in the cold.
The place was basically air-conditioned in summer, only there was no air-conditioning. In winter, it was so air-conditioned I had to stop visiting her, after I took out my contact lenses and put them in their case and left them on the windowsill overnight. In the morning, when I got up, the contact lenses had frozen into two little chunks of ice.
There were a few other charming houses on my mom’s street in Ithaca. One had been a chicken coop, another had been a barn. Everyone knew each other on this little block, and because it was a private road, the neighborhood had to gang up together to pay for private snowplowing or to get the garbage collected.
There were a lot of rules about garbage. Garbage night was a big night. The garbage company came at around 4 A.M. to get the garbage. You had to prepare the garbage carefully or you got in trouble. Days before the event, my mother began talking about it. “We have to get the garbage ready. It has to be perfect.”
Initially I thought she was overreacting. The next day I went out to check. This was slapped on the bin:
If you made a mistake you got this Day-Glo warning stuck on the garbage, which was now strewn around in front—to teach you a lesson. You knew you were in a university town because the garbage collector took the time to write BAGS MUST HAVE FORTITUDE. He probably had a degree. I wouldn’t be able to be a garbage collector in that town. If I were collecting garbage at 3 or 4 A.M. and there was this terrible violation, I would write BAG BROKE.
There were even bigger enforcement threats this garbage company could level on you. If your garbage was incorrect—in any way—and they were feeling generous, you were issued just the warning, but after that, you got a ticket. A garbage ticket carried serious penalties with it. And so, Monday morning, it was always with some trepidation that you went out to check whether the garbage had been accepted and carried away. Or you would find a warning, a ticket, or the garbage flung back at the house.
My mom lived on that block for thirty years. Once, there had been a big mansion, but it had been torn down to make apartments. The houses that were left on that block had been part of the original estate. My mom, for example, was living in the “gatekeeper’s cottage.” For a lot of years, a family we called the Beautiful Family lived next door to her in the “gardener’s cottage.” They were all beautiful, those Nolan-Wheatleys. There was the handsome English husband who had grown up in Singapore and taught Chinese, the beautiful mother from New Orleans who had grown up in a vampire-style mansion, which was later used as a set in films.
In any southern Gothic horror movie set in New Orleans, to this day, you can see that house. The Beautiful Family didn’t personally own it—it belonged to the larger consortium of the Beautiful Family’s mother. Her big southern family had grown up there, all of them inheriting a fraction or portion of the spoils, and they now all reaped the benefits of having had to live in a place crawling with cockroaches and the ghosts of slaves.
And then there were their four beautiful daughters. They all took ballet, although one might have played the piano—not sure. These four daughters had long hair; you know what I’m talking about? Tresses? Dark, flowing tresses?
The Beautiful Family would have us over and serve real lemonade in a glass pitcher, sometimes in the yard, made out of fresh-squeezed lemons. The yard was small and lovely, full of fragrant flowers, that kind of thing, and when this beautiful family sat out there, the handsome father with his English accent, chatting away in Chinese to himself, and the mother with her lovely New Orleans drawl, not imbibing any alcoholic beverages, and those four daughters just twirling away, on pointe, with their hair flowing, you felt privileged to know them.
Everyone on the block used to know each other and they had parties and get-togethers. It was very sad when the Beautiful Family left, and Bernice (she lived in the “old barn”) went to a nursing home and then died, and Tony (the “chicken coop”) moved, etc. But my mom was so happy to be living in such a nice house, on this pleasant street, and to be a professor at Cornell.
After the Beautiful Family left there were a few other residents next door. Then, some time later, a new couple moved in. In the yard I met the new neighbor.
“Hi,” he said over the fence.
“Oh, hi,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“I have a daughter. She’s my biological daughter. I used to live next door to her mother and her girlfriend. They were trying to get pregnant but they couldn’t. They kept saying, ‘If this takes any longer, we’re going to go and blow up a sperm bank!’ ‘I’m here for you,’ I told them. The three of us had only one kid before they got their operations. Then they got married and her parents disowned them. My daughter doesn’t live with me but she comes here to visit. Is Willow your only child? Did you ever think of having more?”
“Oh, I’m okay,” I said.
It was, for me, maybe kind of too much information. But still the neighbors seemed nice enough.
He was busy redoing the garden of fragrant flowers where the Beautiful Family had formerly entertained by serving nonalcoholic beverages. Pretty soon he had blocked off the street with a few tons of stone and was busy paving over the backyard and putting up a large shed, right by the property line.
Eventually, he planned to use this shed as a small private museum for his wife’s collection of salt and pepper shakers. She had more than two thousand salt and pepper shakers and nowhere to display them, until he built her this storage shed on the property line, which, along with a lot of building materials, wheelbarrows, and piles of cement that they kept there, created a very sturdy barricade and arresting visual.
Scream Page 13