The Long-Winded Lady
Page 20
The self-service elevator at my hotel shivered piteously when I stepped into it, and hesitated before starting its painful ascent to the high floor where I live. That is as usual. The tiny, boxy elevator is as alien to this elegantly made hotel as the blue neon sign that winks on and off in front. A marble staircase winds all the way up through the heart of the building, and decorated windows over every stairwell still filter and color the light as they have done for more than sixty years. The fireplaces have all been blocked up long ago, but the rooms are very big and the ceilings are high and the walls shut out all sound. I looked again through the windows that give me my view of Broadway. Just below me, on Forty-eighth Street, on both sides of the street, a few small houses huddle together in the shadows, and from their low level other, newer walls rise higher and higher to the south and east, but tonight the big buildings, the giants that carry Manhattan’s monumental broken skyline, were lost in fog. I could see only the little roofs below me and their neighbors immediately beyond, all of them under smooth snow that shaped them in the dark into separate triangles and squares and rectangles and slopes. The snow on Forty-eighth Street was rumpled, but there was no one in the street and the open parking lot was empty. To the right, Broadway was still lighted up as high as the sky, but the lights shone weakly, smothered in fog, except for the dazzling band of color that runs around the Latin Quarter, a few houses away from me. I pushed open the window. The cold air rushed in, but no noise. What sound there was was drugged, as though I was a hundred floors above the street instead of only eleven floors. The wind had died down, and the snow fell thickly, falling in large, calm flakes.
JANUARY 21, 1967
A Visitor from California
WE had a visitor from California on the Fifth Avenue bus going downtown tonight — a very young man who was seeing New York for the first time. He joined a group of us who were waiting for the bus outside the glass bank at Forty-third Street and Fifth Avenue, and he arrived very suddenly, in haste, embracing a flowing plastic bag that had clothes on wire hangers inside it. He was also carrying a slim black case — a distinguished-looking case made of some rough leather — and a bunch of flowers in a green paper cone. He wasn’t out of breath or flurried, and he didn’t seem ill at ease, but he looked quickly at each of us, as though he were wondering whether he had gotten away with it. It was exactly as though he had been planning to hurry up like that and stand with us, pretending he was one of us, or hoping he was one of us. It was as though he had been hiding around a corner, or in a parked car, or even under the street, in a manhole, waiting for the one and only moment that would be right for his arrival among us. There was nothing furtive about him, but he walked up in an unusual way, very lightly and quickly, and then stood for a few seconds looking around at us all. There were about ten of us there waiting for the bus, but for those few seconds we might all have been standing in the middle of a desert, having been brought together for a reason that was a secret to us. When nothing happened, and nothing was said, the young man began organizing himself—settling in. He stepped to the nearest tree and hung his clothes on its lowest branch, about five and a half feet from the ground. It was gray and windy there on the corner of Forty-third and Fifth. It was about seven o’clock — the tired end of a long day — and nothing was happening at that busy intersection except that people were hurrying home. Sticking out of the top of the young man’s plastic bag as it hung on the tree were two wire hangers. One had a short white raincoat on it and the other a suit of light-colored clothes, and the flimsy transparent envelope that enclosed them was much too long, and fluttered piteously as it was blown against the tree by the wind. With his clothes out of the way, the young man was able to get his hands sorted out. He was carrying the slim black case, which was just an inch or so longer than an attaché case, in his left hand, and at this point he transferred the flowers to his left hand as well and stood very straight, waiting, as though the first part of his plan had been carried out and the next part might now begin. The flowers were deep in their cone of green paper. I could not even see what kind of flowers they were. The young man was tall and slender, with brown hair and very pale, clear skin. He might have been nineteen, maybe twenty-one. He looked English, but I felt perfectly sure that when he spoke he would speak in German — perhaps in Russian, but more likely in German. He did not look as though English were his language. He wore a navy blue suit with a snowy white shirt and had a button-down collar, and his tie, which was navy blue, was very long and hung straight down, without a pin or anything to hold it. His general appearance was astonishingly conventional, and his hair was so well cut and brushed that it looked old-fashioned on such a young man. He didn’t look old-fashioned. He was a twentieth-century young man of no special vogue or group, and his bearing suggested that there had been a few exactly like him in every generation since the world began. He was a literary and historical figure of a young man, an eternal or ideal type, an apprentice hero, eligible in society, promising at the office, and doomed in wartime. His particular wars would have been the First World War and the Crusades. Among authors, Jane Austen knew him well, although he belongs more to Galsworthy than to her, and James Montgomery Flagg drew his likeness over and over and over again, most often in summertime settings: tennis, croquet, punting on the river, picnics on the lawn, bicycles with two sizes of wheels — one for show, one for balance. In the distant past he was much closer to Saint George than to Galahad, and he was definitely related to Rupert Brooke, Thomas Chatterton, and the innocent ones among the troubadours. I cannot remember him in Shakespeare, except perhaps as Rosalind, but Rosalind was arch and self-conscious, and this young man wore a very plain, solemn expression as he waited with the rest of us for the bus that would take us all downtown. The Fifth Avenue buses now turn off at different points on the way down the avenue, according to their different numbers, and it is all confusing where it used to be perfectly simple. Most of us were waiting for the No. 5. The No. 5 is the bus that in days past would have gone straight down the avenue and under the Washington Square Arch and into Washington Square Park and back uptown on Fifth Avenue again. You could stay on that bus all day, riding up and down Fifth Avenue. Now the downtown No. 5 bus turns east on Eighth Street and disappears, because Manhattan has been proclaimed a one-way city and we have to do as we are told and go in herds, all in the same direction. The only way to get uptown on Fifth Avenue these days is on foot. It is the same with most of the other avenues — most of them are one-way uptown or one-way downtown — and it is disconcerting, because half of the city is lost to all of us. It is as though we were allowed to see people only from the front or only from the back. It is also as though the city were standing still. The avenues are no longer great thoroughfares or boulevards to be gazed at and known but channels through which we are bundled as efficiently as possible. Well, the No. 5 finally came along and most of us climbed into it. The young man was the last to board, and he stood waiting his turn with his case and his bunch of flowers in his left hand and his clothes, in their fluttering envelope, held aloft in his right hand. He clambered up into the bus, looking all bones, as though he were climbing a stepladder that was not balanced against anything. He put his clothes on the seat next to the door and he spoke to the driver. “How much do I owe you?” he said. He spoke English naturally, and his voice, like his appearance, was unaccented except by its clarity. After paying his fare, he sat down in the second seat from the door, beside his clothes, which he propped up carefully to keep them from wrinkling. Then he set his case on the floor, behind his legs, and put the flowers down alongside the clothes. Before putting the flowers down, he turned the green paper cone up to his face and stared into it. When all his possessions were disposed of, he sat up straight and began staring across the bus and through the opposite window, and he turned his head and looked through the front window, which gave him the driver’s long view of the avenue ahead.
Our bus was going as fast as it could down the middle of the island, an
d all that the young man could see were closed buildings and hurrying forms on the sidewalks, and he was afraid he was missing something. And he was anxious. He turned to a lady next to him and said that he wanted to go to Ninth Street. He said, “I told the driver to let me off there. I hope he doesn’t forget.” Before we reached Lord & Taylor, the lady and all the rest of us who were close by knew that the young man was from California and that it was his first visit to New York. “It is very nice here,” the lady said. “It is a nice place.” She asked him no questions. She seemed not to want to talk to him, and her manner toward him was more one of patience than anything else. She was very tired. She was about sixty-five, and she wore her clothes as though she did not care what she wore or how she looked. There was a turban of dark gold bound around her gray hair, and she wore a brown suit, and black shoes and gloves. She had a huge, bulging handbag of black alligator, and she also carried a manila envelope that was too full of papers to be fastened, and two books — one a study of marriage and divorce in the United States and the other a paperback detective story by John Dickson Carr. She had no interest in the young man or in anyone else. He spoke rapidly, in a pleasant voice, telling her that he was going to 21 East Ninth Street and that New York was strange after the other cities he had seen. The bus became crowded, and although several people glanced at the seat that was occupied by his clothes, he made no gesture toward gathering the clothes and the flowers into his lap and did not seem to notice that there were almost no seats left vacant. He was unquestionably well brought up, and he must have been exceedingly valuable to the people who brought him up. He thought highly of himself, and although he was unassuming, he was not modest. Someone must have told him that all he had to do was be himself and things would go all right, and he was being himself — unassuming but not modest. He was very handsome except for his nose, which, like Marilyn Monroe’s nose, was indefinite, and blurred almost to thickness. But Marilyn Monroe’s nose made her beauty even more touching than it might have been if her face had been perfect, and the young man’s nose saved his face from prettiness. His eyes were brown and wide open, and blankly attentive, like the eyes of some children when they are alone among the grownups and listening hard at some solemn occasion — a funeral or a wedding. When we came to Twenty-third Street, he said to the tired lady, “What’s that?”
“What’s what?” she asked.
“I thought I saw a park,” he said.
“Oh, the park,” she said, but she could not remember the name of Madison Square Park, and, in her annoyance, she roused herself enough to look out and say, “That’s the Flatiron Building.”
“The what building?” he asked.
“The Flatiron Building, because it’s shaped like a flatiron.”
“Like a flat what?” he asked.
“A flat iron,” she said. Then she said “Flat i-r-o-n. Flatiron, like a flatiron.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, and he stretched his neck to look at the red glass panel in the window of the cigar store on the ground floor of the Flatiron Building, which we were just passing. “It’s very odd,” he said politely.
The tired lady did not tell him that at Twenty-third Street we began riding through one of Fifth Avenue’s most dismal stretches — a perfectly plain and forthright commercial area, with nearly all the buildings dating from the last century, which becomes so bleak and lonely when working hours are over that it is hard to walk through there on a holiday or a Sunday. But Fourteenth Street is all shops and bright lights, and seems like the beginning of a friendlier country. The young man saw the change and started looking over his shoulder to see if he could read the street names. “I don’t want to miss my stop,” he said. And the tired lady broke down and gave him the information she had been trying to keep to herself. “I get off at your stop,” she said. When he heard that, he settled back, but he kept his head turned to watch the avenue approaching and vanishing as we rode along. He saw the Washington Square Arch ahead and remarked on it, and was not told that it does not make as fine a sight as it used to, since the high new buildings have risen up behind it south of the square. The bus pulled up at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the young man was the last to get off. He climbed down as he had climbed up, with his clothes aloft in his right hand and the flowers and the case clutched in his left hand. He stepped onto the sidewalk distrustfully, as though he feared it might be moving, and he looked down at his feet and at his flowers. “I hope I haven’t forgotten anything,” he said. The tired lady was walking away from him, but she turned back when she heard his voice. “Have you got your flowers?” she asked. She showed him the corner to wait on until the light changed and said firmly, “It will take you exactly two minutes to reach No. 21.” And without a goodbye she vanished, hurrying away on West Ninth Street into the shadows along the wall of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. The last I saw of the young man, he was crossing Fifth Avenue under full sail, walking as lightly and as quickly as when he had joined the crowd of us outside the glass bank. There was nothing out of the way about him. He was a Californian visiting New York for the first time, and what was foreign about him was that he was just what he seemed to be — not merely a stranger but the Perfect Stranger.
JULY 19, 1969
Just a Pair of Show-Offs
I AM sure you have heard about those “flirty, flirty guys with their flirty, flirty eyes.” They are in a song called “Paper Doll.” I had an encounter with two of those flirty guys on Sixth Avenue tonight, and I am going to tell you about it. It was around nine o’clock when I met them. The rain that had fallen all day today had stopped, leaving the air damp and the streets wet and shiny, tinted with city lights. I was walking home after having dinner at the Lobster, on West Forty-fifth Street. I must say that that block of Forty-fifth, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, is in terrible shape. It is something over two years since the wreckers moved in on the neighboring streets to the north, and now that the demolition is complete from Fiftieth Street all the way down to Forty-sixth, and the new skyscrapers are beginning to shoot up there, the few side streets that were spared, including Forty-fifth Street, look outcast. The familiar theaters and restaurants are still going strong, but the streets they stand on have taken on the appearance of slums. There have been a lot of changes. As the streets became ravaged, an army of new girls, of all shades and colors, arrived to walk around on them, and for over a year now Sixth Avenue has been monopolized by young — very young — black girls in huge gold and silver wigs who are so theatrical and new-looking that when you see them posing around the edge of the smelly ruins and excavations you begin to wonder if the entire city is rehearsing for some mad extravaganza that will end by launching us all into Bedlam. I have to remark that Bedlam is the word you see around this midtown area these days. You see it over and over again, inside and outside the construction sites. You see it stamped in big letters on motors and on the steel frames that will support those skyscraper tons of concrete and glass and so on — Bethlehem, Bethlehem, Bethlehem. Whatever happens, we won’t be able to say we weren’t warned by the manufacturer. When I reached the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-fifth tonight, I saw that five or six of these brightly wigged young girls had gathered in front of the greeting-card shop, which was closed but which remains well lighted after closing time. With the exception of the delicatessen, the other shops in the block were also closed, and in some cases barred. There are a record shop, a shop that sells old movie stills and photographs of movie stars (especially of dead movie stars), a cut-rate drugstore, a coin shop, and a dress shop, but they were all dark. The greeting-card shop has two show windows flanking a recessed glass entrance door. Two of the girls stood side by side in this recess, making a centerpiece for their companions, who had composed themselves into a group nice enough to be the finale of No, No, Nanette, although their dress seemed to promise a particularly subtle interpretation of Gaîté Parisienne. Legs, coats, and heads they were, their legs bare to the top, their coats tiny and black, and their heads very big and hi
gh in their gold and silver wigs. They all wore low-heeled shoes in light colors — gold and silver, mostly. I walked past them and on to the corner, where the two flirts showed up — loomed up before me as I stood at the curb waiting for the light to change. They were about nineteen years of age, stocky fellows, and they wore their raincoats buttoned up to the neck. They looked alike, with round faces and peachy complexions and crew-cut blond heads, and they were both grinning. They spoke to me, making a suggestion to which I had no reply, although they must have hoped for one, because they waited beside me until the light changed and I fled across the avenue. After I had walked a few steps, I looked back to see if anything was happening over there where the girls were. Something was happening, all right. In the short time since I left them, the two raincoats had not merely reached the greeting-card shop but usurped the girls’ place in the doorway, and now they stood side by side in the lighted recess, still grinning while they watched the girls, who had moved off and were conferring together before scattering up and down the street. I was a bit puzzled. Those girls are not meek, yet they had seemed to give in very easily. Probably they have been instructed to avoid trouble, and they could hardly expect to do much business with those two idiots grinning in the background. I suppose there is a chance that the two flirts were in charge of the girls, but somehow I think that they were just a pair of show-offs, and that they drove the girls away. The last I saw of them all, the boys were still standing in the doorway, their round blond heads turning right, left, right, left as they enjoyed the view, and the girls were in full flight, hurrying along the wet pavement to their new stations.