Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  The next day was a Thursday and Holden took Sally to the matinée of “O Mistress Mine,” which neither of them had seen. During the first intermission, they smoked in the lobby and vehemently agreed with each other that the Lunts were marvelous. George Harrison, of Andover, also was smoking in the lobby and he recognized Sally, as she hoped he would. They had been introduced once at a party and had never seen each other since. Now, in the lobby of the Empire, they greeted each other with the gusto of two who might frequently have taken baths together as small children. Sally asked George if he didn’t think the show was marvelous. George gave himself a little room for his reply, bearing down on the foot of the woman behind him. He said that the play itself certainly was no masterpiece, but that the Lunts, of course, were absolute angels.

  “Angels,” Holden thought. “Angels. For Chrissake. Angels.”

  After the matinée, Sally told Holden that she had a marvelous idea. “Let’s go ice skating at Radio City tonight.”

  “All right,” Holden said. “Sure.”

  “Do you mean it?” Sally said. “Don’t just say it unless you mean it. I mean I don’t give a darn, one way or the other.”

  “No,” said Holden. “Let’s go. It might be fun.”

  SALLY and Holden were both terrible ice skaters. Sally’s ankles had a painful, unbecoming way of collapsing toward each other and Holden’s weren’t much better. That night there were at least a hundred people who had nothing better to do than watch the skaters.

  “Let’s get a table and have a drink,” Holden suggested suddenly.

  “That’s the most marvelous idea I’ve heard all day,” Sally said.

  They removed their skates and sat down at a table in the warm inside lounge. Sally took off her red woolen mittens. Holden began to light matches. He let them burn down till he couldn’t hold them, then he dropped what was left into an ashtray.

  “Look,” Sally said, “I have to know—are you or aren’t you going to help me trim the tree Christmas Eve?”

  “Sure,” said Holden, without enthusiasm.

  “I mean I have to know,” Sally said.

  Holden suddenly stopped lighting matches. He leaned forward over the table. “Sally, did you ever get fed up? I mean did you ever get scared that everything was gonna go lousy unless you did something?”

  “Sure,” Sally said.

  “Do you like school?” Holden inquired.

  “It’s a terrific bore.”

  “Do you hate it, I mean?”

  “Well, I don’t hate it.”

  “Well, I hate it,” said Holden. “Boy, do I hate it! But it isn’t just that. It’s everything. I hate living in New York. I hate Fifth Avenue buses and Madison Avenue buses and getting out at the center doors. I hate the Seventy-second Street movie, with those fake clouds on the ceiling, and being introduced to guys like George Harrison, and going down in elevators when you wanna go out, and guys fitting your pants all the time at Brooks.” His voice got more excited. “Stuff like that. Know what I mean? You know something? You’re the only reason I came home this vacation.”

  “You’re sweet,” said Sally, wishing he’d change the subject.

  “Boy, I hate school! You oughta go to a boys’ school sometime. All you do is study, and make believe you give a damn if the football team wins, and talk about girls and clothes and liquor, and—”

  “Now, listen,” Sally interrupted. “Lots of boys get more out of school than that.”

  “I agree,” said Holden. “But that’s all I get out of it. See? That’s what I mean. I don’t get anything out of anything. I’m in bad shape. I’m in lousy shape. Look, Sally. How would you like to just beat it? Here’s my idea. I’ll borrow Fred Halsey’s car and tomorrow morning we’ll drive up to Massachusetts and Vermont and around there, see? It’s beautiful. I mean it’s wonderful up there, honest to God. We’ll stay in these cabin camps and stuff like that till my money runs out. I have a hundred and twelve dollars with me. Then, when the money runs out, I’ll get a job and we’ll live somewhere with a brook and stuff. Know what I mean? Honest to God, Sally, we’ll have a swell time. Then, later on, we’ll get married or something. Wuddaya say? C’mon! Wuddaya say? C’mon! Let’s do it, huh?”

  “You can’t just do something like that,” Sally said.

  “Why not?” Holden asked shrilly. “Why the hell not?”

  “Because you can’t,” Sally said. “You just can’t, that’s all. Supposing your money ran out and you didn’t get a job—then what?”

  “I’d get a job. Don’t worry about that. You don’t have to worry about that part of it. What’s the matter? Don’t you wanna go with me?”

  “It isn’t that,” Sally said. “It’s not that at all. Holden, we’ll have lots of time to do those things—all those things. After you go to college and we get married and all. There’ll be oodles of marvelous places to go to.”

  “No, there wouldn’t be,” Holden said. “It’d be entirely different.”

  Sally looked at him, he had contradicted her so quietly.

  “It wouldn’t be the same at all. We’d have to go downstairs in elevators with suitcases and stuff. We’d have to call up everyone and tell ’em goodbye and send ’em postcards. And I’d have to work at my father’s and ride in Madison Avenue buses and read newspapers. We’d have to go to the Seventy-second Street all the time and see newsreels. Newsreels! There’s always a dumb horse race and some dame breaking a bottle over a ship. You don’t see what I mean at all.”

  “Maybe I don’t. Maybe you don’t, either,” Sally said.

  Holden stood up, with his skates swung over one shoulder. “You give me a royal pain,” he announced quite dispassionately.

  A LITTLE after midnight, Holden and a fat, unattractive boy named Carl Luce sat at the Wadsworth Bar, drinking Scotch-and-sodas and eating potato chips. Carl was at Pencey Prep, too, and led his class.

  “Hey, Carl,” Holden said, “you’re one of these intellectual guys. Tell me something. Supposing you were fed up. Supposing you were going stark, staring mad. Supposing you wanted to quit school and everything and get the hell out of New York. What would you do?”

  “Drink up,” Carl said. “The hell with that.”

  “No, I’m serious,” Holden pleaded.

  “You’ve always got a bug,” Carl said, and got up and left.

  Holden went on drinking. He drank up nine dollars’ worth of Scotch-and-sodas and at 2 A.M. made his way from the bar into the little anteroom, where there was a telephone. He dialed three numbers before he got the proper one.

  “Hullo!” Holden shouted into the phone.

  “Who is this?” inquired a cold voice.

  “This is me, Holden Caulfield. Can I speak to Sally, please?”

  “Sally’s asleep. This is Mrs. Hayes. Why are you calling up at this hour, Holden?”

  “Wanna talk Sally, Mis’ Hayes. Very ’portant. Put her on.”

  “Sally’s asleep, Holden. Call tomorrow. Good night.”

  “Wake ’er up. Wake ’er up, huh? Wake ’er up, Mis’ Hayes.”

  “Holden,” Sally said, from the other end of the wire. “This is me. What’s the idea?”

  “Sally? Sally, that you?”

  “Yes. You’re drunk.”

  “Sally, I’ll come over Christmas Eve. Trim the tree for ya. Huh? Wuddaya say? Huh?”

  “Yes. Go to bed now. Where are you? Who’s with you?”

  “I’ll trim the tree for ya. Huh? Wuddaya say? Huh?”

  “Yes. Go to bed now. Where are you? Who’s with you?”

  “I’ll trim the tree for ya. Huh? O.K.?”

  “Yes! Good night!”

  “G’night. G’night, Sally baby. Sally sweetheart, darling.”

  Holden hung up and stood by the phone for nearly fifteen minutes. Then he put another nickel in the slot and dialed the same number again.

  “Hullo!” he yelled into the mouthpiece. “Speak to Sally, please.”

  There was a sharp click as the
phone was hung up, and Holden hung up, too. He stood swaying for a moment. Then he made his way into the men’s room and filled one of the washbowls with cold water. He immersed his head to the ears, after which he walked, dripping, to the radiator and sat down on it. He sat there counting the squares in the tile floor while the water dripped down his face and the back of his neck, soaking his shirt collar and necktie. Twenty minutes later the barroom piano player came in to comb his wavy hair.

  “Hiya, boy!” Holden greeted him from the radiator. “I’m on the hot seat. They pulled the switch on me. I’m getting fried.”

  The piano player smiled.

  “Boy, you can play!” Holden said. “You really can play that piano. You oughta go on the radio. You know that? You’re damn good, boy.”

  “You wanna towel, fella?” asked the piano player.

  “Not me,” said Holden.

  “Why don’t you go home, kid?”

  Holden shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “Not me.”

  The piano player shrugged and replaced the lady’s comb in his inside pocket. When he left the room, Holden stood up from the radiator and blinked several times to let the tears out of his eyes. Then he went to the checkroom. He put on his chesterfield without buttoning it and jammed his hat on the back of his soaking-wet head.

  His teeth chattering violently, Holden stood on the corner and waited for a Madison Avenue bus. It was a long wait.

  [1946]

  RENATA ADLER

  BROWNSTONE

  THE CAMEL, I HAD NOTICED, was passing, with great difficulty, through the eye of the needle. The Apollo flight, the four-minute mile, Venus in Scorpio, human records on land and at sea—these had been events of enormous importance. But the camel, practicing in near obscurity for almost two thousand years, was passing through. First the velvety nose, then the rest. Not many were aware. But if the lead camel and then perhaps the entire caravan could make it, the thread, the living thread of camels, would exist, could not be lost. No one could lose the thread. The prospects of the rich would be enhanced. “Ortega tells us that the business of philosophy,” the professor was telling his class of indifferent freshmen, “is to crack open metaphors which are dead.”

  “I SHOULDN’T have come,” the Englishman said, waving his drink and breathing so heavily at me that I could feel my bangs shift. “I have a terrible cold.”

  “He would probably have married her,” a voice across the room said, “with the exception that he died.”

  “Well, I am a personality that prefers not to be annoyed.”

  “We should all prepare ourselves for this eventuality.”

  A six-year-old was passing the hors d’oeuvres. The baby, not quite steady on his feet, was hurtling about the room.

  “He’s following me,” the six-year-old said, in despair.

  “Then lock yourself in the bathroom, dear,” Inez replied.

  “He always waits outside the door.”

  “He loves you, dear.”

  “Well, I don’t like it.”

  “How I envy you,” the minister’s wife was saying to a courteous, bearded boy, “reading ‘Magic Mountain’ for the first time.”

  THE homosexual across the hall from me always takes Valium and walks his beagle. I borrow Valium from him from time to time, and when he takes a holiday the dog is left with me. On our floor of this brownstone, we are friends. Our landlord, Roger Somerset, was murdered last July. He was a kind and absentminded man, and on the night when he was stabbed there was a sort of requiem for him in the heating system. There is a lot of music in this building anyway. The newlyweds on the third floor play Bartok on their stereo. The couple on the second floor play clarinet quintets; their kids play rock. The girl on the fourth floor, who has been pining for two months, plays Judy Collins’ “Maid of Constant Sorrow” all day long. We have a kind of orchestra in here. The ground floor is a shop. The owner of the shop speaks of our landlord’s murder still. Shaking his head, he says that he suspects “foul play.” We all agree with him. We changed our locks. But “foul play” seems a weird expression for the case.

  IT IS all weird. I am not always well. One block away (I often think of this), there was ten months ago an immense crash. Water mains broke. There were small rivers in the streets. In a great skyscraper that was being built, something had failed. The newspapers reported the next day that by some miracle only two people had been “slightly injured” by ten tons of falling steel. The steel fell from the eighteenth floor. The question that preoccupies me now is how, under the circumstances, slight injuries could occur. Perhaps the two people were grazed in passing by. Perhaps some fragments of the sidewalk ricocheted. I knew a deliverer of flowers who, at Sixty-ninth and Lexington, was hit by a flying suicide. Situations simply do not yield to the most likely structures of the mind. A “self-addressed envelope,” if you are inclined to brood, raises deep questions of identity. Such an envelope, immutably itself, is always precisely where it belongs. “Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative. But “joking with nurses” fascinates me in the press. Whenever someone has been quite struck down, lost faculties, members of his family, he is said to have “joked with his nurses” quite a lot. What a mine of humor every nurse’s life must be.

  THE St. Bernard at the pound on Ninety-second Street was named Bonnie and would have cost five dollars. The attendant held her tightly on a leash of rope. “Hello, Bonnie,” I said. Bonnie growled.

  “I wouldn’t talk to her if I was you,” the attendant said.

  I leaned forward to pat her ear. Bonnie snarled. “I wouldn’t touch her if I was you,” the attendant said. I held out my hand under Bonnie’s jowls. She strained against the leash, and choked and coughed. “Now cut that out, Bonnie,” the attendant said.

  “Could I just take her for a walk around the block,” I said, “before I decide?”

  “Are you out of your mind?” the attendant said. Aldo patted Bonnie, and we left.

  I HAVE a job, of course. I have had several jobs. I’ve had our paper’s gossip column since last month. It is egalitarian. I look for people who are quite obscure, and report who is breaking up with whom and where they go and what they wear. The person who invented this new form for us is on antidepressants now. He lives in Illinois. He says there are people in southern Illinois who have not yet been covered by the press. I often write about families in Queens. Last week, I went to a dinner party on Park Avenue. After 1 A.M., something called the Alive or Dead Game was being played. Someone would mention an old character from Tammany or Hollywood. “Dead,” “Dead,” “Dead,” everyone would guess. “No, no. Alive. I saw him walking down the street just yesterday,” or “Yes. Dead. I read a little obituary notice about him last year.” One of the little truths people can subtly enrage or reassure each other with is who—when you have looked away a month, a year—is still around.

  Dear Tenant:

  We have reason to believe that there are impostors posing as Con Ed repairmen and inspectors circulating in this area.

  Do not permit any Con Ed man to enter your premises or the building, if possible.

  The Precinct

  MY COUSIN, who was born on February 29th, became a veterinarian. Some years ago, when he was twenty-eight (seven, by our childhood birthday count), he was drafted, and sent to Malaysia. He spent most of his military service there, assigned to the zoo. He operated on one tiger, which, in the course of abdominal surgery, began to wake up and wag its tail. The anesthetist grabbed the tail, and injected more sodium pentothal. That tiger survived. But two flamingos, sent by the city of Miami to Kuala Lumpur as a token of good will, could not bear the trip or the climate and, in spite of my cousin’s efforts, died. There was also a cobra—the largest anyone in Kuala Lumpur could remember having seen. An old man had brought it, in an immense sack, from somewhere in the countryside. The zoo director called my cousin at once, around dinnertime, to say that an unprecedented cobra had arrived. Something quite drastic, however, seemed wrong
with its neck. My cousin, whom I have always admired—for his leap-year birthday, for his pilot’s license, for his presence of mind—said that he would certainly examine the cobra in the morning but that the best thing for it after its long journey must be a good night’s rest. By morning, the cobra was dead.

  My cousin is well. The problem is this. Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in the literature. I know an Israeli general who, in 1967, retook the Mitla Pass but who, since his mandatory retirement from military service at fifty-five, has been trying to repopulate the Ark. He asked me, over breakfast at the Drake, whether I knew any owners of oryxes. Most of the vegetarian species he has collected have already multiplied enough, since he has found and cared for them, to be permitted to run wild. The carnivorous animals, though, must still be kept behind barbed wire—to keep them from stalking the rarer vegetarians. I know a group that studies Proust one Sunday afternoon a month, and an analyst, with that Exeter laugh (embittered mooing noises, and mirthless heaving of the shoulder blades), who has the most remarkable terrorist connections in the Middle East.

  THE New York Chinese cabdriver lingered at every corner and at every traffic light, to read his paper. I wondered what the news was. I looked over his shoulder. The illustrations and the type were clear enough: newspaper print, pornographic fiction. I leaned back in my seat. A taxi-driver who happened to be Oriental with a sadomasochistic cast of mind was not my business. I lit a cigarette, looked at my bracelet. I caught the driver’s eyes a moment in the rearview mirror. He picked up his paper. “I don’t think you ought to read,” I said, “while you are driving.” Traffic was slow. I saw his mirrored eyes again. He stopped his reading. When we reached my address, I did not tip him. Racism and prudishness, I thought, and reading over people’s shoulders.

  BUT there are moments in this place when everything becomes a show of force. He can read what he likes at home. Tipping is still my option. Another newspaper event, in our brownstone. It was a holiday. The superintendent normally hauls the garbage down and sends the paper up, by dumbwaiter, each morning. On holidays, the garbage stays upstairs, the paper on the sidewalk. At 8 A.M., I went downstairs. A ragged man was lying across the little space that separates the inner door, which locks, from the outer door, which doesn’t. I am not a news addict. I could have stepped over the sleeping man, picked up my Times, and gone upstairs to read it. Instead, I knocked absurdly from inside the door, and said, “Wake up. You’ll have to leave now.” He got up, lifted the flattened cardboard he had been sleeping on, and walked away, mumbling and reeking. It would have been kinder, certainly, to let the driver read, the wino sleep. One simply cannot bear down so hard on all these choices.