Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  The dog grew. It took to training quickly and walked at heel, and she was glad that they had saved it. She took it to the veterinarian to ask why it was so thin. She was told that the dog was growing fast, and that eventually it would start filling out. She did not tell Jack that she had taken the dog to the veterinarian, because he thought she doted on it too much. She wondered if he might not be a little jealous of the dog.

  Slowly, things began to happen with his music. A band on the West Coast that played a song that he and Gus had written was getting a big name, and they had not dropped the song from their repertoire. In February he got a call from the band’s agent, who said that they wanted more songs. He and Gus shut themselves in the basement apartment, and she went walking with Sam, the dog. She went to the park, until she ran into the crippled man too many times. He was a young man, rather handsome, who walked with two metal crutches and had a radio that hung from a strap around his neck and rested on his chest, playing loudly. The man always seemed to be walking in the direction she walked in, and she had to walk awkwardly to keep in line with him so they could talk. She really had nothing to talk to the man about, and he helped very little, and the dog was confused by the crutches and made little leaps toward the man, as though they were all three playing a game. She stayed away from the park for a while, and when she went back he was not there. One day in March, the park was more crowded than usual because it was an unusually warm, springlike afternoon, and, walking with Sam, half dreaming, she passed a heavily madeup woman on a bench, who was wearing a polka-dot turban, with a hand-lettered sign propped against her legs announcing that she was Miss Sydney, a fortune-teller. There was a young boy sitting next to Miss Sydney, and he called out to her, “Come on!” She smiled slightly and shook her head no. The boy was Italian, she thought, but the woman was hard to place. “Miss Sydney’s going to tell you about fire and famine and early death,” the boy said. He laughed, and she hurried on, thinking it was odd that the boy would know the word “famine.”

  She was still alone with Jack most of every weekend, but much of his talk now was about technical problems he was having with scoring, and she had trouble following him. Once, he became enraged and said that she had no interest in his career. He said that because he wanted to move to Los Angeles and she said she was staying in New York. She had said it assuming at once that he would go anyhow. When he made it clear that he would not leave without her, she started to cry, because she was so grateful that he was staying. He thought she was crying because he had yelled at her and said that she had no interest in his career. He took back what he had said; he told her that she was very tolerant, and that she often gave good advice. She had a good ear, even if she didn’t express her opinions in complex technical terms. She cried again, and this time even she did not realize at first why. Later, she knew that it was because he had never said so many kind things to her at once. Actually, very few people in her life had ever gone out of their way to say something kind, and it had just been too much. She began to wonder if her nerves were getting bad. Once, she woke up in the night disoriented and sweating, having dreamed that she was out in the sun, with all her energy gone. It was stifling hot and she couldn’t move. “The sun’s a good thing,” he said to her when she told him the dream. “Think about the bright beautiful sun in Los Angeles. Think about stretching out on a warm day with a warm breeze.” Trembling, she left him and went into the kitchen for water. He did not know that if he had really set out for California she would have followed.

  In June, when the air pollution got very bad and the air carried the smell that sidewalks get when they are baked through every day, he began to complain that it was her fault that they were in New York and not in California. “But I just don’t like that way of life,” she said. “If I went there I wouldn’t he happy.”

  “What’s so appealing about this uptight New York scene?” he said. “You wake up in the night in a sweat. You won’t even walk through Washington Square Park anymore.”

  “It’s because of that man with the crutches,” she said. “People like that. I told you it was only because of him.”

  “So let’s get away from all that. Let’s go somewhere.”

  “You think there aren’t people like that in California?” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter what I think about California, if I’m not going.” He clamped earphones on his head.

  THAT same month, while she and Jack and Gus were sharing a pot of cheese fondue, she found out that Jack had a wife. They were at Gus’s apartment, when Gus casually said something about Myra. “Who’s Myra?” she asked, and he said, “You know—Jack’s wife, Myra.” It seemed unreal to her—even more so because Gus’s apartment was such an odd place; that night, Gus had plugged a defective lamp into an outlet and blown out a fuse. Then he had plugged in his only other lamp, which was a sunlamp. It glowed so brightly that he had to turn it, in its wire enclosure, to face the wall. As they sat on the floor eating, their three shadows were thrown up against the opposite wall. She had been looking at that—detached, the way you would stand back to appreciate a picture—when she tuned in on the conversation and heard them talking about someone named Myra.

  “You didn’t know?” Gus said to her. “O.K., I want you both out. I don’t want any heavy scene in my place. I couldn’t take it. Come on—I really mean it. I want you out. Please don’t talk about it here.”

  On the street, walking beside Jack, it occurred to her that Gus’s outburst was very strange, almost as strange as Jack not telling her about his wife.

  “I didn’t see what would be gained by telling you,” Jack said.

  They crossed the street. They passed the Riviera Café. She had once counted the number of panes of glass across the Riviera’s front.

  “Did you ever think about us getting married?” he said. “I thought about it. I thought that if you didn’t want to follow me to California, of course you wouldn’t want to marry me.”

  “You’re already married,” she said. She felt that she had just said something very sensible. “Do you think it was right to—”

  He had started to walk ahead of her. She hurried to catch up. She wanted to call after him, “I would have gone!” She was panting.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’m like Gus. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “You mean we can’t even talk about this? You don’t think that I’m entitled to hear about it?”

  “I love you and I don’t love Myra,” he said.

  “Where is she?” she said.

  “In El Paso.”

  “If you don’t love her, why aren’t you divorced?”

  “You think that everybody who doesn’t love his wife gets divorced? I’m not the only one who doesn’t do the logical thing, you know. You get nightmares from living in this sewer, and you won’t get out of it.”

  “It’s different,” she said. What was he talking about?

  “Until I met you, I didn’t think about it. She was in El Paso, she was gone—period.”

  “Are you going to get a divorce?”

  “Are you going to marry me?”

  They were crossing Seventh Avenue. They both stopped still, halfway across the street, and were almost hit by a Checker cab. They hurried across, and on the other side of the street they stopped again. She looked at him, as surprised but as suddenly sure about something as he must have been the time he and his father had found the jewelry in the heart-shaped wooden box. She said no, she was not going to marry him.

  IT DRAGGED on for another month. During that time, unknown to her, he wrote the song that was going to launch his career. Months after he had left the city, she heard it on her AM radio one morning, and she knew that it was his song, even though he had never mentioned it to her. She leashed the dog and went out and walked to the record shop on Sixth Avenue—walking almost the same route they had walked the night she found out about his wife—and she went in, with the dog. Her face was so strange that the man behind the cash register allow
ed her to break the rule about dogs in the shop, because he did not want another hassle that day. She found the group’s record album with the song on it, turned it over, and saw his name, in small type. She stared at the title, replaced the record, and went back outside, hunched as if it were winter.

  During the month before he left, though, and before she ever heard the song, the two of them sat on the roof of his building one night, arguing. They were having a Tom Collins, because a musician who had been at his place the night before had brought his own mix and then left it behind. She had never had a Tom Collins. It tasted appropriately bitter, she thought. She held out the ring and the bracelet to him. He said that if she made him take them back, he would drop them over the railing. She believed him and put them buck in her pocket. He said, and she agreed, that things had not been perfect, between them even before she found out about his wife. Myra could play the guitar, and she could not; Myra loved to travel, and she was afraid to leave New York City. As she listened to what he said, she counted the posts—black iron and shaped like arrows—of the fence that wound around the roof. It was almost entirely dark, and she looked up to see if there were any stars. She yearned to be in the country, where she could always see them. She said she wanted him to borrow a car before he left, so that they could ride out into the woods in New Jersey. Two nights later, he picked her up at her apartment in a red Volvo, with Sam panting in the back, and they wound their way through the city and to the Lincoln Tunnel. Just as they were about to go under, another song began to play on the tape deck. It was Ringo Starr, singing “Octopus’s Garden.” Jack laughed. “That’s a hell of a fine song to come on just before we enter the tunnel.” Inside the tunnel, the dog flattened himself on the back seat. “You want to keep Sam, don’t you?” he said. She was shocked, because she had never even thought of losing Sam. “Of course I do,” she said, and unconsciously edged a little away from him. He had never said whose car it was. For no reason at all, she thought that the car must belong to a woman.

  “I love that syrupy chorus of ‘aaaaah’ Lennon and McCartney sing,” he said. “They really had a fine sense of humor.”

  “Is that a funny song?” she said. She had never thought about it.

  They were on Boulevard East, in Weehawken, and she was staring out the window at the lights across the water. He saw that she was looking, and drove slower.

  “This as good as stars for you?” he said.

  “It’s amazing.”

  “All yours,” he said, taking his hand off the wheel to swoop it through the air in mock graciousness.

  After he left, she would remember that as one of the little digs he had gotten in—one of the less than nice things he had said. That night, though, impressed by the beauty of the city, she let it go by; in fact, she would have to work on herself later to reinterpret many of the things he had said as being nasty. That made it easier to deal with his absence. She would block out the memory of his pulling over and kissing her, of the two of them getting out of the car and, with Sam between them, walking.

  One of the last times she saw him, she went to his apartment on a night when five other people were there—people she had never met. His father had shipped him some eight-millimeter home movies and a projector, and the people all sat on the floor, smoking grass and talking, laughing at the movies of children (Jack at his fourth birthday party; Jack in the Halloween parade at school; Jack on Easter, collecting eggs). One of the people on the floor said, “Hey, get that big dog out of the way,” and she glared at him, hating him for not liking the dog. What if his shadow had briefly darkened the screen? She felt angry enough to scream, angry enough to say that the dog had grown up in the apartment and had the right to walk around. Looking at the home movies, she tried to concentrate on Jack’s blunders: dropping an Easter egg, running down the hill after the egg, going so fast he stumbled into some blur, perhaps his mother’s arms. But what she mostly thought about was what a beautiful child he was, what a happy-looking little boy. There was no sense in her staying there and getting sentimental, so she made her excuses and left early. Outside, she saw the red Volvo, gleaming as though it had been newly painted. She was sure that it belonged to an Indian woman in a blue sari who had been there, sitting close to Jack. Sharon was glad that as she had been leaving, Sam raised his hackles and growled at one of the people there. She had scolded him, but out on the street she had patted him, secretly glad. Jack had not asked her again to come to California with him, and she told herself that she probably would not have changed her mind if he had. The tears that began to well up in her eyes were because a cab wouldn’t stop for her when the driver saw that she had a dog, she told herself. She ended up walking blocks and blocks back to her apartment that night; it made her more certain than ever that she loved the dog and that she did not love Jack.

  ABOUT the time she got the first postcard from Jack, things started to get a little bad with Sam. She was afraid that he might have distemper, so she took him to the veterinarian, waited her turn, and told the doctor that the dog was growling at some people and she had no idea why. He assured her that there was nothing physically wrong with the dog, and blamed it on the heat. When another month passed and it was less hot, she visited the veterinarian again. “It’s the breeding,” he said, and sighed. “It’s a bad mix. A weimaraner is a mean dog, and that cross isn’t a good one. He’s part German shepherd, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Well—that’s it, I’m afraid.”

  “There isn’t any medication?”

  “It’s the breeding,” he said. “Believe me. I’ve seen it before.”

  “What happens?” she said.

  “What happens to the dog?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well—watch him. See how things go. He hasn’t bitten anybody, has he?”

  “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

  “Well don’t say of course not. Be careful with him.”

  “I’m careful with him,” she said. She said it indignantly. But she wanted to hear something else. She didn’t want to leave.

  Walking home, she thought about what she could do. Maybe she could take Sam to her sister’s house in Morristown for a while. Maybe if he could run more, and keep cool, he would calm down. She put aside her knowledge that it was late September and already much cooler, and that the dog growled more, not less. He had growled at the teen-age boy she had given money to to help her carry her groceries upstairs. It was the boy’s extreme reaction to Sam that had made it worse, though. You had to act calm around Sam when he got like that, and the boy had panicked.

  She persuaded her sister to take Sam, and her brother-in-law drove into New York on Sunday and drove them out to New Jersey. Sam was put on a chain attached to a rope her brother-in-law had strung up in the back yard, between two huge trees. To her surprise, Sam did not seem to mind it. He did not bark and strain at the chain until he saw her drive away, late that afternoon; her sister was driving, and she was in the back seat with her niece, and she looked back and saw him lunging at the chain.

  The rest of it was predictable, even to her. Even as they drove away, she almost knew it all. The dog would bite the child. Of course, the child should not have annoyed the dog, but she did, and the dog bit her, and then there was a hysterical call from her sister and another call from her brother-in-law, saying that she must come get the dog immediately—that he would come for her so she could get him—and blaming her for bringing it to them in the first place. Her sister had never really liked her, and the incident with the dog was probably just what she had been waiting for to sever contact.

  When Sam came back to the city, things got no better. He turned against everyone and it was difficult even to walk him, because he had become so aggressive. Sometimes a day would pass without any of that, and she would tell herself that it was over now—an awful period but over—and then the next morning the dog would bare its teeth at some person they passed. There began to be little signs that the do
g had it in for her, too, and when that happened she turned her bedroom over to him. She hauled her mattress to the living room, and let him have his own room. She left the door cracked, so he would not think he was being punished. But she knew, and Sam knew, that it was best he stay in the room. If nothing else, he was an exceptionally smart dog.

  SHE heard from Jack for over a year—sporadically, but then sometimes two postcards in a single week. He was doing well, playing in a band as well as writing music. When she stopped hearing from him—and when it became clear that something had to be done about the dog, and something had been done—she was twenty-two. On a date with a man she liked as a friend, she suggested that they go over to Jersey and drive down Boulevard East. The man was new to New York, and when they got there he said that he was more impressed with that view of the city than with the view from the top of the RCA Building. “All ours,” she said, gesturing with her arm, and he, smiling and excited by what she said, had taken her hand when it had finished its sweep and kissed it, and continued to stare with awe at the lights across the water. That summer, she heard another song of Jack’s on the radio, which alluded, as so many of his songs did, to times in New York she remembered well. In this particular song there was a couplet about a man on the street offering kittens in a box that actually contained a dog named Sam. In the context of the song, it was an amusing episode—another “you can’t always get what you want” sort of thing—and she could imagine Jack in California, not knowing what had happened to Sam, and, always the one to appreciate little jokes in songs, smiling.

  [1977]

  IRWIN SHAW