Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  “I’m flying in to visit you this weekend,” announced Zoë.

  “I was hoping you would,” said Evan. “Charlie and I are having a party for Halloween. It’ll be fun.”

  “I have a costume already. It’s a bonehead. It’s this thing that looks like a giant bone going through your head.”

  “Great,” said Evan.

  “It is, it’s great.”

  “All I have is my moon mask from last year and the year before. I’ll probably end up getting married in it.”

  “Are you and Charlie getting married?” Zoë felt slightly alarmed.

  “Hmmmmmmnnno, not immediately.”

  “Don’t get married.”

  “Why?”

  “Just not yet. You’re too young.”

  “You’re only saying that because you’re five years older than I am and you’re not married.”

  “I’m not married? Oh, my God,” said Zoë, “I forgot to get married.”

  Zoë had been out with three men since she’d come to Hilldale-Versailles. One of them was a man in the municipal bureaucracy who had fixed a parking ticket she’d brought in to protest and then asked her out for coffee. At first, she thought he was amazing—at last, someone who did not want Heidi! But soon she came to realize that all men, deep down, wanted Heidi. Heidi with cleavage. Heidi with outfits. The parking-ticket bureaucrat soon became tired and intermittent. One cool fall day, in his snazzy, impractical convertible, when she asked him what was wrong he said, “You would not be ill-served by new clothes, you know.” She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars. She flicked an ant from her sleeve.

  “Did you have to brush that off in the car?” he said, driving. He glanced down at his own pectorals, giving first the left, then the right, a quick survey. He was wearing a tight shirt.

  “Excuse me?”

  He slowed down at an amber light and frowned. “Couldn’t you have picked it up and thrown it outside?”

  “The ant? It might have bitten me. I mean, what difference does it make?”

  “It might have bitten you! Ha! How ridiculous! Now it’s going to lay eggs in my car!”

  The second guy was sweeter, lunkier, though not insensitive to certain paintings and songs, but too often, too, things he’d do or say would startle her. Once, in a restaurant, he stole the garnishes off her dinner plate and waited for her to notice. When she didn’t, he finally thrust his fist across the table and said, “Look,” and when he opened it, there was her parsley sprig and her orange slice crumpled to a wad. Another time, he described to her his recent trip to the Louvre. “And there I was in front of Delacroix’s ‘The Barque of Dante,’ and everyone else had wandered off, so I had my own private audience with it, all those agonized shades splayed in every direction, and there’s this motion in that painting that starts at the bottom, swirling and building up into the red fabric of Dante’s hood, swirling out into the distance, where you see these orange flames—” He was breathless in the telling. She found this touching, and smiled in encouragement. “A painting like that,” he said, shaking his head. “It just makes you shit.”

  “I have to ask you something,” said Evan. “I know every woman complains about not meeting men, but really, on my shoots I meet a lot of men. And they’re not all gay, either.” She paused. “Not anymore.”

  “What are you asking?”

  The third guy was a political-science professor named Murray Peterson, who liked to go out on double dates with colleagues whose wives he was attracted to. Usually, the wives would consent to flirt with him. Under the table sometimes there was footsie, and once there was even kneesie. Zoë and the husband would be left to their food, staring into their water glasses, chewing like goats. “Oh, Murray,” said one wife, who had never finished her master’s in physical therapy and wore great clothes. “You know, I know everything about you: your birthday, your license-plate number. I have everything memorized. But then that’s the kind of mind I have. Once, at a dinner party, I amazed the host by getting up and saying goodbye to every single person there, first and last names.”

  “I knew a dog who could do that,” said Zoë with her mouth full. Murray and the wife looked at her with vexed and rebuking expressions, but the husband seemed suddenly twinkling and amused. Zoë swallowed. “It was a Talking Lab, and after about ten minutes of listening to the dinner conversation this dog knew everyone’s name. You could say, ‘Take this knife to Murray Peterson,’ and it would.”

  “Really,” said the wife, frowning, and Murray Peterson never called again.

  “Are you seeing anyone?” said Evan. “I’m asking for a particular reason. I’m not just being like Mom.”

  “I’m seeing my house. I’m tending to it when it wets, when it cries, when it throws up.” Zoë had bought a mint-green ranch house near campus, though now she was thinking that maybe she shouldn’t have. It was hard to live in a house. She kept wandering in and out of the rooms, wondering where she had put things. She went downstairs into the basement for no reason at all except that it amused her to own a basement. It also amused her to own a tree.

  Her parents, in Maryland, had been very pleased that one of their children had at last been able to afford real estate, and when she closed on the house they sent her flowers with a congratulations card. Her mother had even U.P.S.’d a box of old decorating magazines saved over the years—photographs of beautiful rooms her mother used to moon over, since there never had been any money to redecorate. It was like getting her mother’s pornography, that box, inheriting her drooled-upon fantasies, the endless wish and tease that had been her life. But to her mother it was a rite of passage that pleased her. “Maybe you will get some ideas from these,” she had written. And when Zoë looked at the photographs, at the bold and beautiful living rooms, she was filled with longing. Ideas and ideas of longing.

  Right now Zoë’s house was rather empty. The previous owner had wallpapered around the furniture, leaving strange gaps and silhouettes on the walls, and Zoë hadn’t done much about that yet. She had bought furniture, then taken it back, furnishing and unfurnishing, preparing and shedding, like a womb. She had bought several plain pine chests to use as love seats or boot boxes, but they came to look to her more and more like children’s coffins, so she returned them. And she had recently bought an Oriental rug for the living room, with Chinese symbols on it she didn’t understand. The salesgirl had kept saying she was sure they meant “Peace” and “Eternal Life,” but when Zoë got the rug home she worried. What if they didn’t mean “Peace” and “Eternal Life”? What if they meant, say, “Bruce Springsteen”? And the more she thought about it, the more she became convinced she had a rug that said “Bruce Springsteen,” and so she returned that, too.

  She had also bought a little baroque mirror for the front entryway, which, she had been told by Murray Peterson, would keep away evil spirits. The mirror, however, tended to frighten her, startling her with an image of a woman she never recognized. Sometimes she looked puffier and plainer than she remembered. Sometimes shifty and dark. Most times she just looked vague. “You look like someone I know,” she had been told twice in the last year by strangers in restaurants in Terre Haute. In fact, sometimes she seemed not to have a look of her own, or any look whatsoever, and it began to amaze her that her students and colleagues were able to recognize her at all. How did they know? When she walked into a room, how did she look so that they knew it was she? Like this? Did she look like this? And so she returned the mirror.

  “The reason I’m asking is that I know a man I think you should meet,” said Evan. “He’s fun. He’s straight. He’s single. That’s all I’m going to say.”

  “I think I’m too old for fun,” said Zoë. She had a dark bristly hair in her chin, and she could feel it now with her finger. Perhaps when you had been without the opposite sex for too long, you began to resemble them. In an act of desperate invention, you began to grow your own. “I just
want to come, wear my bonehead, visit with Charlie’s tropical fish, ask you about your food shoots.”

  She thought about all the papers on “Our Constitution: How It Affects Us” she was going to have to correct. She thought about how she was going in for ultrasound tests on Friday, because, according to her doctor and her doctor’s assistant, she had a large, mysterious growth in her abdomen. Gallbladder, they kept saying. Or ovaries or colon. “You guys practice medicine?” asked Zoë, aloud, after they had left the room. Once, as a girl, she brought her dog to a vet, who had told her, “Well, either your dog has worms or cancer or else it was hit by a car.”

  She was looking forward to New York.

  “Well, whatever. We’ll just play it cool. I can’t wait to see you, hon. Don’t forget your bonehead,” said Evan.

  “A bonehead you don’t forget,” said Zoë.

  “I suppose,” said Evan.

  The ultrasound Zoë was keeping a secret, even from Evan. “I feel like I’m dying,” Zoë had hinted just once on the phone.

  “You’re not dying,” said Evan, “you’re just annoyed.”

  “ULTRASOUND,” Zoë now said jokingly to the technician who put the cold jelly on her bare stomach. “Does that sound like a really great stereo system or what?”

  She had not had anyone make this much fuss over her bare stomach since her boyfriend in graduate school, who had hovered over her whenever she felt ill, waved his arms, pressed his hands upon her navel, and drawled evangelically, “Heal! Heal for thy Baby Jesus’ sake!” Zoë would laugh and they would make love, both secretly hoping she would get pregnant. Later they would worry together, and he would sink a cheek to her belly and ask whether she was late, was she late, was she sure, she might be late, and when after two years she had not gotten pregnant they took to quarreling and drifted apart.

  “O.K.,” said the technician absently.

  The monitor was in place, and Zoë’s insides came on the screen in all their gray and ribbony hollowness. They were marbled in the finest gradations of black and white, like stone in an old church or a picture of the moon. “Do you suppose,” she babbled at the technician, “that the rise in infertility among so many couples in this country is due to completely different species trying to reproduce?” The technician moved the scanner around and took more pictures. On one view in particular, on Zoë’s right side, the technician became suddenly alert, the machine he was operating clicking away.

  Zoë stared at the screen. “That must be the growth you found there,” suggested Zoë.

  “I can’t tell you anything,” said the technician rigidly. “Your doctor will get the radiologist’s report this afternoon and will phone you then.”

  “I’ll be out of town,” said Zoë.

  “I’m sorry,” said the technician.

  Driving home, Zoë looked in the rearview mirror and decided she looked—well, how would one describe it? A little wan. She thought of the joke about the guy who visits his doctor and the doctor says, “Well, I’m sorry to say, you’ve got six weeks to live.”

  “I want a second opinion,” says the guy. You act like your opinion is worth more than everyone else’s in the class.

  “You want a second opinion? O.K.,” says the doctor. “You’re ugly, too.” She liked that joke. She thought it was terribly, terribly funny.

  She took a cab to the airport. Jerry the cabbie was happy to see her.

  “Have fun in New York,” he said, getting her bag out of the trunk. He liked her, or at least he always acted as if he did. She called him Jare.

  “Thanks, Jare.”

  “You know, I’ll tell you a secret: I’ve never been to New York. I’ll tell you two secrets: I’ve never been on a plane.” And he waved at her sadly as she pushed her way in through the terminal door. “Or an escalator!” he shouted.

  The trick to flying safely, Zoë always said, was to never buy a discount ticket and to tell yourself you had nothing to live for anyway, so that when the plane crashed it was no big deal. Then, when it didn’t crash, when you had succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living.

  “YOU’RE here!” shrieked Evan over the doorbell, before she even opened the door. Then she opened it wide. Zoë set her bags on the hall floor and hugged Evan hard. When she was little, Evan had always been affectionate and devoted. Zoë had always taken care of her—advising, reassuring—until recently, when it seemed Evan had started advising and reassuring her. It startled Zoë. She suspected it had something to do with her being alone. It made people uncomfortable.

  “How are you?”

  “I threw up on the plane. Besides that, I’m O.K.”

  “Can I get you something? Here, let me take your suitcase. Sick on the plane. Eeeyew.”

  “It was into one of those sickness bags,” said Zoë, just in case Evan thought she’d lost it in the aisle. “I was very quiet.”

  The apartment was spacious and bright, with a view all the way downtown along the East Side. There was a balcony, and sliding glass doors. “I keep forgetting how nice this apartment is. Twenty-first floor, doorman . . .” Zoë could work her whole life and never have an apartment like this. So could Evan. It was Charlie’s apartment. He and Evan lived in it like two kids in a dorm, beer cans and clothes strewn around. Evan put Zoë’s bag away from the mess, over by the fish tanks. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “Now what can I get you?”

  Evan made them lunch—soup from a can and saltines.

  “I don’t know about Charlie,” she said after they had finished. “I feel like we’ve gone all sexless and middle-aged already.”

  “Hmm,” said Zoë. She leaned back into Evan’s sofa and stared out the window at the dark tops of the buildings. It seemed a little unnatural to live up in the sky like this, like birds that out of some wrongheaded derring-do had nested too high. She nodded toward the lighted fish tanks and giggled. “I feel like a bird,” she said, “with my own personal supply of fish.”

  Evan sighed. “He comes home and just sacks out on the sofa, watching fuzzy football. He’s wearing the psychic cold cream and curlers, if you know what I mean.”

  Zoë sat up, readjusted the sofa cushions. “What’s fuzzy football?”

  “We haven’t gotten cable yet. Everything comes in fuzzy. Charlie just watches it that way.”

  “Hmm, yeah, that’s a little depressing,” Zoë said. She looked at her hands. “Especially the part about not having cable.”

  “This is how he gets into bed at night.” Evan stood up to demonstrate. “He whips all his clothes off, and when he gets to his underwear he lets it drop to one ankle. Then he kicks up his leg and flips the underwear in the air and catches it. I, of course, watch from the bed. There’s nothing else. There’s just that.”

  “Maybe you should just get it over with and get married.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I mean, you guys probably think living together like this is the best of both worlds, but—” Zoë tried to sound like an older sister; an older sister was supposed to be the parent you could never have, the hip, cool mom. “But I’ve always found that as soon as you think you’ve got the best of both worlds”—she thought now of herself, alone in her house, of the toad-faced cicadas that flew around like little men at night and landed on her screens, staring; of the size-14 shoes she placed at the doorstep, to scare off intruders; of the ridiculous, inflatable blowup doll someone had told her to keep propped up at the breakfast table—“it can suddenly twist and become the worst of both worlds.”

  “Really?” Evan was beaming. “Oh, Zoë. I have something to tell you. Charlie and I are getting married.”

  “Really.” Zoë felt confused.

  “I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  “Yeah, I guess the part about fuzzy football misled me a little.”

  “I was hoping you’d be my maid of honor,”
said Evan, waiting. “Aren’t you happy for me?”

  “Yes,” said Zoë, and she began to tell Evan a story about an award-winning violinist at Hilldale-Versailles—how the violinist had come home from a competition in Europe and taken up with a local man who made her go to all his summer softball games, made her cheer for him from the stands, with the wives, until she later killed herself. But when Zoë got halfway through, to the part about cheering at the softball games, she stopped.

  “What?” said Evan. “So what happened?”

  “Actually, nothing,” said Zoë lightly. “She just really got into softball. You should have seen her.”

  Zoë decided to go to a late-afternoon movie, leaving Evan to chores she needed to do before the party—“I have to do them alone, really,” she’d said, a little tense after the violinist story. Zoë thought about going to an art museum, but women alone in art museums had to look good. They always did. Chic and serious, moving languidly, with a great handbag. Instead, she walked down through Kips Bay, past an earring boutique called Stick It in Your Ear, past a hair salon called Dorian Gray. That was the funny thing about beauty, thought Zoë. Look it up in the yellow pages and you found a hundred entries, hostile with wit, cutesy with warning. But look up truth— Ha! There was nothing at all.

  Zoë thought about Evan getting married. Would Evan turn into Peter Pumpkin Eater’s wife? Mrs. Eater? At the wedding, would she make Zoë wear some flouncy lavender dress, identical with the other maids’? Zoë hated uniforms, had even in the first grade refused to join Elf Girls because she didn’t want to wear the same dress as everyone else. Now she might have to. But maybe she could distinguish it. Hitch it up on one side with a clothespin. Wear surgical gauze at the waist. Clip to her bodice one of those pins that say in loud letters “SHIT HAPPENS.”

  At the movie—“Death by Number”—she bought strands of red licorice to tug and chew. She took a seat off to one side in the theater. She felt strangely self-conscious sitting alone, and hoped for the place to darken fast. When it did, and the coming attractions came on, she reached inside her purse for her glasses. They were in a Baggie. Her Kleenex was also in a Baggie. So was her pen and her aspirin and her mints. Everything was in Baggies. This was what she’d become: a woman alone at the movies with everything in a Baggie.