Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  Enid came limping up behind him. “Chip,” she cried, “what have you done to your ears?”

  “Dad, Mom,” Chip murmured through his teeth, hoping the azure-haired girl was out of earshot. “Good to see you.”

  He had time for one subversive thought about his parents’ Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bags—either Nordic Pleasurelines sent bags like these to every booker of its cruises as a cynical means of getting inexpensive walk-about publicity or as a practical means of tagging the cruise participants for greater ease of handling at embarkation points or as a benign means of building esprit de corps; or else Enid and Alfred had deliberately saved the bags from some previous Nordic Pleasurelines cruise and, out of a misguided sense of loyalty, had chosen to carry them on their upcoming cruise as well; and in either case Chip was appalled by his parents’ willingness to make themselves vectors of corporate advertising—before he shouldered the bags himself and assumed the burden of seeing LaGuardia Airport and New York City and his life and clothes and body through the disappointed eyes of his parents.

  He noticed, as if for the first time, the dirty linoleum, the assassinlike chauffeurs holding up signs with other people’s names on them, the snarl of wires dangling from a hole in the ceiling. He distinctly heard the word “motherfucker.” Outside the big windows on the baggage level, two Bangladeshi men were pushing a disabled cab through rain and angry honking.

  “We have to be at the pier by four,” Enid said to Chip. “And I think Dad was hoping to see your desk at the Wall Street Journal.” She raised her voice. “Al? Al?”

  Though stooped in the neck now, Alfred was still an imposing figure. His hair was white and thick and sleek, like a polar bear’s, and the powerful long muscles of his shoulders, which Chip remembered laboring in the spanking of a child, usually Chip himself, still filled the gray tweed shoulders of his sports coat.

  “Al, didn’t you say you wanted to see where Chip worked?” Enid shouted.

  Alfred shook his head. “There’s no time.”

  The baggage carousel circulated nothing.

  “Did you take your pill?” Enid said.

  “Yes,” Alfred said. He closed his eyes and repeated slowly, “I took my pill. I took my pill. I took my pill.”

  “Dr. Hedgpeth has him on a new medication,” Enid explained to Chip, who was quite certain that his father had not, in fact, expressed interest in seeing his office. And since Chip had no association with the Wall Street Journal—the publication to which he made unpaid contributions was the Warren Street Journal: A Monthly of the Transgressive Arts; he’d also very recently completed a screenplay, and he’d been working part-time as a legal proofreader at Bragg Knuter & Speigh for the nearly two years since he’d lost his assistant professorship in Renaissance Studies and Critical Theory at C—— College, in Connecticut, as a result of an offense involving a female undergraduate which had fallen just short of the legally actionable, and which, though his parents never learned of it, had interrupted the parade of accomplishments that his mother could brag about back home in St. Jude; he’d told his parents that he’d quit teaching in order to pursue a career in writing, and when, more recently, his mother had pressed him for details, he’d mentioned the Warren Street Journal the name of which his mother had misheard and instantly begun to trumpet to her friends Esther Root and Bea Meisner and Mary Beth Schumpert, and though Chip in his monthly phone calls home had had many opportunities to disabuse her he’d instead actively fostered the misunderstanding; and here things became rather complex, not only because the Wall Street Journal was available in St. Jude and his mother had never mentioned looking for his work and failing to find it (meaning that some part of her knew perfectly well that he didn’t write for the paper) but also because the author of articles like “Consensual Incest” and “Self/Abuse” was conspiring to preserve, in his mother, precisely the kind of illusion that the Warren Street Journal was dedicated to exploding, and he was thirty-nine years old, and he blamed his parents for the person he had become—he was happy when his mother let the subject drop.

  “His tremor’s much better,” Enid added in a voice inaudible to Alfred. “The only side effect is that he may hallucinate.”

  “That’s quite a side effect,” Chip said.

  “Dr. Hedgpeth says that what he has is very mild and almost completely controllable with medication.”

  Alfred was surveying the baggage-claim cavern while pale travelers angled for position at the carousel. There was a confusion of tread patterns on the linoleum, gray with the pollutants that the rain had brought down. The light was the color of car sickness. “New York City!” Alfred said.

  Enid frowned at Chip’s pants. “Those aren’t leather, are they?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you wash them?”

  “They’re leather. They’re like a second skin.”

  “We have to be at the pier no later than four o’clock,” Enid said.

  The carousel coughed up some suitcases.

  “Chip, help me,” his father said.

  Soon Chip was staggering out into the wind-blown rain with all four of his parents’ bags. Alfred shuffled after him with the jerking momentum of a man who knew there would be trouble if he had to stop and start again. Enid lagged behind, intent on the pain in her hip. She’d put on weight and maybe lost a little height since Chip had last seen her. She’d always been a pretty woman, but to Chip she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.

  “What’s that—wrought iron?” Alfred asked him as the taxi line crept forward.

  “Yes,” Chip said, touching his ear.

  “Looks like an old quarter-inch rivet.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you do—crimp that? Hammer it?”

  “It’s hammered,” Chip said.

  Alfred winced and gave a low, inhaling whistle.

  “We’re doing a Luxury Fall Color Cruise,” Enid said when the three of them were in a yellow cab, speeding through Queens. “We sail up to Quebec, and then we enjoy the changing leaves all the way back down to Newport. Dad so enjoyed the last cruise we were on. Didn’t you, Al? Didn’t you have a good time on that cruise?”

  The brick palisades of the East River waterfront were taking an angry beating from the rain. Chip could have wished for a sunny day, a clear view of landmarks and blue water, with nothing to hide. The only colors on the road this morning were the smeared reds of brake lights.

  “This is one of the great cities of the world,” Alfred said with emotion.

  “How are you feeling these days, Dad,” Chip managed to ask.

  “Any better I’d be in Heaven, any worse I’d be in Hell.”

  “We’re excited about your new job,” Enid said.

  “One of the great papers in the country,” Alfred said. “The Wall Street Journal.”

  “Does anybody smell fish, though?”

  “We’re near the ocean,” Chip said.

  “No, it’s you.” Enid leaned and buried her face in Chip’s leather jacket. “Your jacket smells strongly of fish.”

  He wrenched free of her. “Mother. Please.”

  CHIP’S problem was a loss of confidence. Gone were the days when he could afford to épater les bourgeois. Except for his Manhattan apartment and his handsome girlfriend, Julia Vrais, he now had almost nothing to persuade himself that he was a functioning male adult, no accomplishments to compare with those of his sister, Denise, who at the age of thirty-two was the executive chef and co-owner of a large new high-end restaurant in Philadelphia. Chip had hoped he might have sold his screenplay by now, but he hadn’t finished a draft until after midnight on Tuesday, and then he’d had to work three fourteen-hour shifts at Bragg Knuter & Speigh to raise cash to pay his August rent and reassure his landlord about his September and October rent, and then there was a lunch to be shopped for and an apartment to be cleaned and, finally, sometime before dawn this morning,
a long-hoarded Xanax to be swallowed. Meanwhile, nearly a week had gone by without his seeing Julia or speaking to her directly. In response to the many nervous messages he’d left on her voice mail in the last forty-eight hours, asking her to meet him and his parents and Denise at his apartment at noon on Saturday and also, please, if possible, not to mention to his parents that she was married to someone else, Julia had maintained a total phone and E-mail silence from which even a more stable man than Chip might have drawn disturbing conclusions.

  It was raining so hard in Manhattan that water was streaming down façades and frothing at the mouths of sewers. Outside his building, on East Ninth Street, Chip took money from Enid and handed it through the cab’s partition, and even as the turbaned driver thanked him he realized the tip was too small. From his own wallet he took two singles and dangled them near the driver’s shoulder.

  “That’s enough, that’s enough,” Enid squeaked, reaching for Chip’s wrist. “He already said thank you.”

  But the money was gone. Alfred was trying to open the door by pulling on the window crank. “Here, Dad, it’s this one,” Chip said and leaned across him to pop the door.

  “How big a tip was that?” Enid asked Chip on the sidewalk, under his building’s marquee, as the driver heaved luggage from the trunk.

  “About fifteen per cent,” Chip said.

  “More like twenty, I’d say,” Enid said.

  “Let’s have a fight about this, why don’t we.”

  “Twenty per cent’s too much, Chip,” Alfred pronounced in a booming voice. “It’s not reasonable.”

  “You all have a good day now,” the taxi-driver said with no apparent irony.

  “A tip is for service and comportment,” Enid said. “If the service and comportment are especially good I might give fifteen per cent. But if you automatically tip—”

  “I’ve suffered from depression all my life,” Alfred said, or seemed to say.

  “Excuse me?” Chip said.

  “Depression years changed me. They changed the meaning of a dollar.”

  “An economic depression, we’re talking about.”

  “Then when the service really is especially good or especially bad,” Enid pursued, “there’s no way to express it monetarily.”

  “A dollar is still a lot of money,” Alfred said.

  “Fifteen percent if the service is exceptional, really exceptional.”

  “I’m wondering why we’re having this particular conversation,” Chip said to his mother. “Why this conversation and not some other conversation.”

  “We’re both terribly anxious,” Enid replied, “to see where you work.”

  Chip’s doorman, Zoroaster, hurried out to help with the luggage and installed the Lamberts in the building’s balky elevator. Enid said, “I ran into your old friend Dean Driblett at the bank the other day. I never run into Dean but where he doesn’t ask about you. He was impressed with your new writing job.”

  “Dean Driblett was a classmate, not a friend,” Chip said.

  “He and his wife just had their fourth child. I told you, didn’t I, they built that enormous house out in Paradise Valley—Al, didn’t you count eight bedrooms?”

  Alfred gave her a steady, unblinking look. Chip leaned on the Door Close button.

  “Dean’s mother Honey and I are good friends, you know,” Enid said, “and Dad and I were at the housewarming in June. It was spectacular. They’d had it catered, and they had pyramids of shrimp. It was solid shrimp, in pyramids. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Pyramids of shrimp,” Chip said. The elevator door finally closed.

  “Anyway, it’s a beautiful house,” Enid said. “There are at least six bedrooms, and, you know, it looks like they’re going to fill them. Dean’s tremendously successful. He started that lawn-care business when he decided the mortuary business wasn’t for him, well, you know, Dale Driblett’s his stepdad, you know, the Driblett Chapel, and now his billboards are everywhere and he’s started an H.M.O. I saw in the paper where it’s the fastest-growing H.M.O. in St. Jude, it’s called DeeDeeCare, same as the lawn-care business, and there are billboards for the H.M.O. now, too. He’s quite the entrepreneur, I’d say.”

  “Slo-o-o-o-w elevator,” Alfred said.

  “This is a prewar building,” Chip explained in a tight voice. “An extremely desirable building.”

  “But you know what he told me he’s doing for his mother’s birthday? It’s still a surprise for her, but I can tell you. He’s taking her to Paris for eight days. Two first-class tickets, eight nights at the Ritz! That’s the kind of person Dean is, very family-oriented. But can you believe that kind of birthday present? Al, didn’t you say the house alone probably cost a million dollars? Al?”

  “It’s a large house but cheaply done,” Alfred said with sudden vigor. “The walls are like paper.”

  “All the new houses are like that,” Enid said.

  “You asked me if I was impressed with the house. I thought it was ostentatious. I thought the shrimp was ostentatious. It was poor.”

  “It may have been frozen,” Enid said.

  “People are easily impressed with things like that,” Alfred said. “They’ll talk for months about the pyramids of shrimp. Well, see for yourself,” he said to Chip, as to a neutral bystander. “Your mother’s still talking about it.” For a moment Chip was tempted to believe that his father had become a likable old stranger; but he knew Alfred, underneath, to be a shouter and a punisher. The last time Chip had visited his parents in St. Jude, four years earlier, he’d taken along his then-girlfriend Ruthie, a peroxided young Marxist from the North of England, who, after committing numberless offenses against Enid’s sensibilities (she lit a cigarette indoors, laughed out loud at Enid’s favorite watercolors of Buckingham Palace, came to dinner without a bra, and failed to take even one bite of the “salad” of water chestnuts and green peas and cheddar-cheese cubes in a thick mayonnaise sauce which Enid made for festive occasions), had needled and baited Alfred until he pronounced that “the blacks” would be the ruination of this country, “the blacks” were incapable of coexisting with whites, they expected the government to take care of them, they didn’t know the meaning of hard work, what they lacked above all was discipline, it was going to end with slaughter in the streets, with slaughter in the streets, and he didn’t give a damn what Ruthie thought of him, she was a visitor in his house and his country, and she had no right to criticize things she didn’t understand; whereupon Chip, who’d already warned Ruthie that his parents were the squarest people in America, had smiled at her as if to say, You see? Exactly as advertised. Coincidentally or not, Ruthie had dumped him two weeks later.

  “Al,” Enid said as the elevator lurched to a halt, “you have to admit that it was a very, very nice party, and that it was very nice of Dean to invite us.”

  Alfred seemed not to have heard her.

  Propped outside Chip’s apartment was a clear-plastic umbrella that Chip recognized, with relief, as Julia Vrais’s. He was herding the parental luggage from the elevator when his apartment door swung open and Julia herself stepped out. “Oh. Oh!” she said, as though flustered. “You’re early!”

  By Chip’s watch it was eleven-thirty-five. Julia was wearing a shapeless lavender raincoat and holding a DreamWorks tote bag. Her hair, which was long and the color of dark chocolate, was big with humidity and rain. In the tone of a person being friendly to large animals she said “Hi” to Alfred and “Hi,” separately, to Enid. Alfred and Enid bayed their names at her and extended hands to shake, driving her back into the apartment, where Enid began to pepper her with questions in which Chip, as he followed with the luggage, could hear subtexts and agendas.

  “Do you live in the city?” Enid said. (You’re not cohabiting with our son, are you?) “And you work in the city, too?” (You are gainfully employed? You’re not from an alien, snobbish, moneyed Eastern family?) “Did you grow up here?” (Or do you come from a trans-Appalachian state wher
e people are warmhearted and down-to-earth and unlikely to be Jewish?) “Oh, and do you still have family in Ohio?” (Have your parents perhaps taken the morally dubious modern step of getting divorced?) “Do you have brothers or sisters?” (Are you a spoiled only child or a Catholic with a zillion siblings?)

  Julia having passed this initial examination, Enid turned her attention to the apartment. Chip, in a late crisis of confidence, had bought a stain-removal kit and lifted the big semen stain off the red chaise lounge, dismantled the wall of wine-bottle corks with which he’d been bricking in the niche above his fireplace at a rate of half a dozen Merlots and Pinot Grigios a week, taken down from his bathroom wall the photographs of semierect penises which were the flower of his art collection, and replaced them with the three diplomas that Enid had long ago insisted on having framed for him.

  “This is about the size of Dean Driblett’s bathroom,” Enid said. “Wouldn’t you say, Al?”