Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  I stood in the gutter. I was trembling. Either I was extremely happy or I had just received a shot of adrenaline from being hit. It was hard to tell the difference. I wasn’t dead. It was like finding twenty dollars in the gutter. What a thing I was! I went across the street and into a pizzeria, and I ordered a piece of pizza—pepperoni, mushrooms, onions, and peppers. I had to wait on line while it was heating in the oven.

  There was another girl waiting ahead of me, and when the cook finally took out her slice I tried to reach for it, but she reached first and the cook handed it to her. “Is this the type that you ordered?” I said. I rarely speak to strangers, but I had to say something. I didn’t believe the girl had gotten the same type of pizza as mine, because (a) it was an unusual choice to make, and (b) almost everyone else seemed to be ordering the plain slices.

  The girl gave me a dirty look. “Yes, it is,” she said snippily.

  The cook said to me, “Don’t get impatient, honey. Just relax.” This only made me feel more foolish. The slice that he gave me, however, was really sparse. Most of the ingredients had slid off into the oven. I was embarrassed and would have said something along the lines of “I can assure you I’m not impatient,” but nothing came out of my mouth. The cook, I was certain, had gone out of his way to make me look pushy, when obviously it was unintentional on my part.

  The pizza was like a metaphor for my entropic life. The girl whose slice I tried to steal was carrying one of these trashy novels about Hollywood. I was incensed. This was her reading material, yet she felt superior to me. At first I thought she was about to take the only table left and I would be forced to sit with her. My hot pizza was leaking through the paper plate. But finally I found another empty table. I felt so grateful I almost threw myself into my seat. At the next table was a woman with a crew cut, a kid about six years old, and a guy with pale-blue hair who looked like the woman’s brother. He kept taking food from the little kid’s plate, and the kid said, in a fury, practically heartbroken, “Leave my food alone.” He was eating spaghetti. I wondered if it tasted as good as my pizza, which, though skimpy, was absolutely delicious—chunks of chewy mushrooms, dense and meaty, cheese like stringy bubble gum, and salty, sparky bits of pepperoni.

  On the ceiling, over the steam trays, giant papier-mâché haunches of meat were hanging from ropes. I kept thinking, “I was just hit by a car.”

  ON THE bus home, I reminded myself not to tell Stash, my boyfriend, about what had happened, or he would kill me. How would it be if he picked up the Post and saw “jewelry designer, 28, killed by hit-and-run”? First of all, everyone would know that I got my hair cut in an outré joint on Lexington Avenue and not at some SoHo or East Village spot. Plus, who would come to my funeral? I had no friends. All the other jewelry designers I knew had plenty of friends. They threw big parties for themselves at various clubs, and their pictures were published in the most fashionable magazines. Maybe they were receiving outside financial assistance. I had no money to throw parties, although I had a hunger for things I knew I didn’t actually care for.

  When I got in the door, Stash was lying on the bed next to Andrew, our Dalmatian. Stash’s thick blond hair, loose from its ponytail, was practically covering his face. He had an ominous, unshaven look. He wasn’t wearing a shirt; his hairy chest had an animal ferocity. Andrew’s legs were sticking up in the air, and his neck was resting on Stash’s arm. Andrew had a snoring problem; he snored so loudly that he used to wake Stash and me several times a night, until Stash devised a solution: he attached a rope to Andrew’s bed, and during the night whenever Andrew began to snore Stash would yank the rope and the abrupt movement would wake Andrew and he would stop snoring for a while. I used to tease Stash, telling him this was cruelty to animals—after all, would he have liked it if someone tied a rope to our bed and gave it a jerk every time we drifted off to sleep? But Andrew was so good-natured—or dumb—he didn’t seem to mind.

  Stash and Andrew didn’t even look at me. I felt left out. “Hi,” I said. “I got my hair cut.” I had red corkscrew curls, almost to my waist; my hair didn’t have a real style, it was just a mess. Stash had begged me never to change it. “It doesn’t look one iota different, does it? I spent ten dollars and told them to snip the ends. What do you think? Will I look nice tonight?”

  Stash didn’t answer.

  “Is something wrong?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Are you sick? You have an earache?”

  “No.”

  “Did you eat today?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did I do?” I said. “I forgot to defrost the refrigerator? Is that it? You defrost the goddam refrigerator.”

  “Eleanor, I would have defrosted the refrigerator, but you’ve got too much stuff in there. You made me help you pick eight quarts of cherries last summer and you never made pies. Why don’t you throw them out?”

  “I didn’t make pies because you said we were on a diet. I come home and you’re mad at me about the refrigerator?”

  “I wasn’t even thinking about the refrigerator until you reminded me. I’m mad about that article on the table. Go look at it.”

  Sometimes I felt as if I were the sole member of the Bomb Squad: I had to defuse Stash. I picked up the magazine lying on the table. It was a nice table, like something that might be found in a campers’ dining hall. Stash had bought it for me a few months back, saying that since I complained so much about not being able to have anyone over to dinner he would get me a table. So far, though, every time I suggested we invite someone over he said the house was too messy and gave examples. No. 1, I had stuck black and white adhesive tiles in the space between the kitchen counter and the cabinets, and when they peeled off, a short time later, all the paint on the wall peeled off with them, leaving brown spots.

  In the magazine was a reproduction of one of Stash’s paintings, “The Wisdom of Solomon,” in which Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey are sawing an Eskimo baby in half. Underneath the picture was a long article. In the first paragraph the author said that while he couldn’t dismiss Stash’s work entirely, it was nevertheless the mindless scrawling of a Neanderthal. “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” I said when I put it down.

  “Doesn’t sound so bad?” Stash said. He shook his head disbelievingly. “Sometimes you amaze me.”

  “Well, things could always be worse,” I said. “This could be Russia, where they come and knock on your door and take you away and shoot you if they don’t like what you do.”

  “Russian Constructivist art is my favorite,” Stash said.

  “At least you’re getting attention!” I said. “I’d be thrilled if anyone wrote an article about me, even a negative one.”

  “I don’t know if I feel like going to the dinner tonight,” Stash said.

  A fancy dinner for thirty of the country’s most famous artists was going to be held at a swank Italian restaurant, to honor the fact that they had agreed to decorate a night club. Stash was one of them; they would all be there this evening. My girlfriend had told me that at this restaurant dinner for two, with one bottle of champagne, could cost more than two hundred dollars. Luckily, we wouldn’t be paying.

  “You do too feel like going out tonight,” I said. “All the other artists will envy your appearance in that magazine.”

  “Do you think?” Stash said. “I don’t know.”

  “First of all, everyone wants publicity,” I said. “Secondly, as long as you’re an underdog you can have respect—like Vincent van Gogh. If you get too popular it makes you seem phony and commercial.” I probably would have said anything—I really wanted to go to the dinner. It was going to be an event: never had so many diverse and famous artists been collected under one roof. They ranged from people famous for sports illustration to the latest East Village star.

  “I was in a good mood until I saw this article,” Stash said. “Then when I got home I found you still hadn’t defrosted the refrigerator. Not only will I never be able to get the
money to buy a loft now, I don’t see the point anyway. If we did have a decent place to live, it would always be a complete mess.”

  “Didn’t you ever hear of a self-defrosting refrigerator?” I said. “You were just looking for an excuse. Don’t you try and punish me, Stash.”

  “How am I punishing you?”

  “Because you promised me we’d start looking for a bigger space to live in, and now you’re going to try and weasel out.” One half of me had known all along we would never move: we were too uncomfortable here. Low rent (subsidized housing for artists) and a nice river view—we were used to it. On the other hand, a friend of Stash’s was trying to buy a building nearby, and Stash liked the way the deal sounded. He could buy a whole floor and rent out half, thus making his mortgage payments.

  I started to get the things out of the refrigerator and put them into the sink. I’d defrost overnight. I felt like clobbering Stash over the head. I was practically thirty years old, unmarried, and my marketability was going downhill fast. My career hadn’t taken off the way I’d hoped. I had had to quit working on my jewelry full time in order to take on a job two days a week as copy editor for an East Village newspaper. I also had to be burdened with my lousy personality. If I had been more outgoing maybe I could have been more successful with my jewelry. That was the way things worked in Manhattan.

  Where I grew up, in South Carolina, social graces didn’t count. Max, my father, had a mail-order gardening business. We raised peonies, daffodils, daylilies, hyacinths, irises, all kinds of bulbs and perennials. For my fourteenth birthday, Max named a new variety of pink camellia after me. I wasn’t thrilled—I really wanted a subscription to Seventeen—but I kept my mouth shut. Max also taught horticulture at the local university part time. When we children came home from school, everyone had a job to do. The stove was full of baked potatoes, and that’s what we’d have—baked potatoes with yogurt and goat cheese. My mother raised angora goats and sold the wool to weavers across the country. My parents had made a choice: they would remain poor but live off the land, in a style unaffected by the progressively commercial and false world around them. It was taken for granted that we would all work hard. In other words, we didn’t have a TV set.

  Well, I had also made a choice: I would rebel against my parents and join the rat race. I wanted things, and the things I wanted weren’t inexpensive. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line I got sidetracked. For one thing, I had never, in my wackiest dreams, imagined that I would grow up to be a poor person. My mother had warned me about New York, but I was prepared to work hard, and I figured eventually I’d make it. I wasn’t the only one in my situation. Most of the people I knew were doing one thing but considered themselves to be something else: all the waitresses I knew were really actresses, all the Xeroxers in the Xerox place were really novelists, all the receptionists were artists. There were enough examples of people who had been receptionists and went on to become famous artists that the receptionists felt it was O.K. to call themselves artists. But if I was going to have to do something like copy-edit two or three days a week, I didn’t want to lie to myself and say I was a jewelry designer. I figured I should just accept reality and say I was a copy editor.

  I was embittered. It was hard to live in New York and not be full of rage. I was thinking of all this while I fixed some instant flan, using up all the rest of the milk so it wouldn’t go bad being outside the refrigerator overnight. On the side of the box the only ingredient listed was sugar. I felt I should have made Stash flan from scratch.

  At that moment he came into the kitchen. “What are you doing?” he said. “You can’t even focus on one activity! You’re trying to defrost the refrigerator and cook at the same time!”

  It was strange how most of the time we got along so well, but then there were these periods when it was a good thing the knives were in the drawer and not out on display. “You’re picking on me!” I said. “I do things as I please! Look around you—the junk that’s here is yours, not mine. I had to clear off four of my bookshelves and mail my books back to my mother so you could have someplace to put all that junk from the table—and now the table has new junk on it.”

  While I yelled, Stash hacked at some of the loose ice on the freezer. When he had filled a bowl, he carried it over to the sink. “Where should I put it?” he said. “The sink is full of food—plus the dirty spaghetti pot.”

  “In the tub.”

  “I can’t throw it in the tub,” he said. “I’m going to take a shower.”

  “Well, run some hot water on it,” I said. “The melting point of ice is zero degrees Celsius or thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit.”

  It was obvious that he had to restrain himself from throwing the ice at me. “How can I buy a loft when you put too much food in the refrigerator? Why should I go into debt when you’re going to turn a new place into the same kind of disaster as here?” he said.

  “You lash out at me because you’re angry about the article!” I said as he went into the bathroom.

  I imagined grabbing my clothing, throwing it into a suitcase, and storming out. This seemed so real to me that when Stash came out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, arms extended toward me, I was surprised.

  He clutched me like an orangutan. “Let’s be friends,” he said.

  “Don’t pick on me every second of my existence,” I said into his ear. “It makes me feel like I’m a fly and you’re pulling off my wings.”

  “Yeah?” Stash said. “Don’t give me that wings-being-picked-off business.”

  I knew he was afraid of letting me get too sure of myself; this was as much of an apology as I was going to get. He said we could go to the party.

  Quickly I slurped down a yogurt before we went out. It tasted exactly like cold cream. I was only interested in helping the stomach not to complain, with its little lump of cold cream balanced neatly in the center. At these dinners, food wasn’t served until eleven o’clock, or even eleven-thirty.

  EVEN though the dinner was scheduled for ten, we didn’t get there until ten-thirty, and most of the other people were just arriving. At the door, we had to sign a release stating that if our pictures were taken they could be used in publicity.

  The restaurant was quite a pretty place. Every table had a mammoth floral display, as big as a tree, in the center, and there were little place cards and gifts at each place. My card said “Guest of Mr. Stosz”—I was seated next to the place card of “Stash Stosz”—and my gift was selected by someone who must have known my situation as well as my vocation: it was a large fake diamond engagement-and-wedding-ring set. Stash got a set of tattoos, water-soluble, and a toy motorcycle—Stash owned a motorcycle—which, when he wound it up, zipped across the table and fell over. Other artists received Etch A Sketch kits, voodoo dolls, exploding cigars, windup jack-in-the-boxes in the shape of clamshells which contained Botticelli’s Venus leaping out to music, and their signatures made into rubber stamps.

  The food was really delicious: slices of raw meat, thin as paper; angel-hair pasta speckled with shreds of crabmeat and roasted peppers; little fried fish, hot and curling on platters, with their astonished eyes still intact. In one corner of the room a man played the accordion—various haunting tunes—possibly as a special treat in honor of the occasion. Or maybe he was there all the time. For an appetizer I had a plate of slightly sandy mussels in a sauce of vermouth and garlic. Stash had smoked mozzarella with basil and tomatoes. We had agreed to share. But, frankly, I couldn’t enjoy it as much as I would have liked. For one thing, by eleven-thirty my appetite was gone and I was ready to go to sleep, and, for another, I only liked to eat alone with Stash. I wanted to relish my food without having to worry about why I wasn’t being included in the conversation or whether I was getting food on my chin. This was my small but sad handicap, not something that revealed a character trait: sometimes food or grease would get on my chin and I couldn’t feel it. I had had a minor operation when I was fifteen and sensation on my chin never returned.
It wasn’t the most glamorous of handicaps to have, but it was mine. The one handicap that really appealed to me as tragic and romantic was the one that Laura had, Laura of “The Glass Menagerie.” She was lame. There aren’t too many lame people around anymore. Nowadays they just limp.

  I was seated next to a girl wearing a rubber dress; it looked like a coat of latex paint. The card in front of her plate said “Samantha Binghamton,” and every two seconds one of the photographers would come and snap her picture. She had wild black hair (maybe a wig) and a long, skinny neck, which was either very elegant or goosey—I couldn’t decide. So much for my one fancy evening outfit of sequined top and black velvet skirt—it was nothing compared to what Rubbermaid had on. I could have strangled her. The people across from me pretended I didn’t exist. While twirling pasta with my fork, I quizzed Samantha on her life story. She had known her husband—he was seated on her other side—since second grade. He came from a fabulously wealthy family and now had one of the hottest galleries in New York. She used to be a top-notch agent—she was best friends with Dustin Hoffman and John Huston, and one of her clients was in the movie that swept the Academy Awards the year before. But even though she was only twenty-eight years old and close to the top of her profession, she decided she wasn’t happy. Since her husband could support her and she didn’t really need to work, she quit two weeks ago to become a rock star. This was what she really wanted to do. So far she hadn’t landed a manager, but it seemed likely that this would happen soon.