Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  I did not sleep that night. One always hates to be caught by an enemy in the act of abusing him behind his back, but what made things worse in my case was that I liked Mr. Feinstein as a person and would have given anything to be forgiven by him. “Horrible!” I thought. “Instead of understanding the delicacy of our motives, he will understand only the indelicacy of our remarks.” So, after hours of nightmare, I decided that the only thing to do was face the situation squarely and go to him. But, alas, before I did so bad fortune willed it that I meet him right in front of my door. He wasn’t coming to see me, that I knew, but I said, “Mr. Feinstein, I would like to talk to you. Won’t you come in?” He hesitated, entered, and sat down without saying a word. Despite my confusion, I immediately noticed that in person he occupied a much smaller portion of the air than did his spirit. I had been unjust. And he looked much kinder than his spirit, too.

  “I don’t know why you want to see me,” he began. “Are you looking for inspiration for more vulgar stunts to teach your children? As a matter of fact,” he continued, moving his chair back noisily and preparing to leave, “I don’t know what made me accept your offer to come in in the first place.”

  I was almost speechless, but instinctively said what I now always said to my guests: “Please be careful, we have—” And my finger was pointed toward the floor. He understood, for his face reddened and he said with rage, “Never mind! I’m up here now, not downstairs!” I blushed and sank back on my chair, then stuttered, “Now, Mr. Feinstein, you, who are a philosopher—”

  He interrupted me. “I don’t see what that has to do with the fact that you teach your children to insult a man who has done you no harm. If that’s the way Italian children are brought up, I can almost believe that Italy needs a Mussolini!”

  “Please!” I said. “There is no reason why you should insult me! Listen to me, now. I myself never used bad words against you.”

  “But you laughed when your children used them. You even encouraged them. I heard what you said in the park. So you can hear me ‘snore like a pig,’ can you?”

  “I? We? No, indeed, I never said so.”

  “You did say so. I heard you!”

  “I was only joking.”

  “Only joking! Respect for your neighbor is a joke to you. I knew it all the time, but for a while I thought that you were merely a little casual, like most Italians. But now I know. Respect for others means nothing to you, and you even take pleasure in persecuting others with your jokes. You are a Fascist!”

  “Sir!” I cried. “That you should insult me in my own home! I can prove to you that I have fought Fascism, that I have written dozens of articles denouncing all forms of persecution.”

  “You may have done so, but my experience with you is just the opposite. You have constantly disregarded my very modest demands, and on top of this you make me out a clown to amuse your children. That, sir, is more than I—”

  “Please, please!” I said. “All my friends can be witnesses to the fact that your demands for quiet are the only thing I’ve taken seriously for the last two years. It is, in fact, I who may reproach you for making me a nervous wreck. Unintentionally, I admit, but still—”

  “I?” said he, growing terribly pale. “I? I have made you a nervous wreck? All my friends are my witnesses, sir, that all I ever asked of you was a few hours of silence a week. Is that what makes you a wreck? You and your children have made me a wreck! How on earth can you have the nerve to claim that my asking you for those few hours of silence that I never got has made you a wreck! That is indeed Fascist!”

  “Sir,” I said, “please listen! I admit you never got your rest, and I’m sorry, but you don’t know how many sleepless nights I’ve spent trying to prepare the rest you never got. And let me tell you also that this all came about because I tried to be kind to you. First, I tried to offer you two hours and a quarter of quiet, then three hours, and soon quiet for you became the ruling principle of our existence. Your sleep, Mr. Feinstein, ruled my life! And how could I persuade the children to obey these rules without pretending that I was taking their part against you? If you are to enjoy the sleep of the just, you must allow me to insult you unjustly. If the children know that you are a good man, they will want you to be so good as to cope with their noise, while if they think that you are a monster, they will respect you to avoid trouble.”

  “But that is Fascism! That is horrible! Couldn’t you have told them that I was very sick?”

  “I did once, when you were, but it didn’t help. Besides, though I’m not superstitious, I hate to talk lightly about sickness. To mention it may tempt the Fates.”

  He looked at me, bit his lip, then said, “Why didn’t you just call me a fool?”

  “Who was I to do that?” I said. “And you, sir, why did you always ask with such kindness, and look so pale? That made me act the way I did.”

  He frowned, looked at me again, and then we both started laughing and my wife came in with a bottle of wine and some wineglasses. The children, too, came running in, and started jumping so hard that this time it was for the protection of the house itself that we had to stop them. “I guess,” said Mr. Feinstein now, “this all goes back to the incongruities of Progress.”

  “Also,” I said, “to the decay of Western Civilization.”

  “Perhaps, too, though only a little, to these darling children here,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, “or to me, who am silly enough to live in town. Let’s drink now and be friends.”

  So our friendship was sealed, and upon leaving Mr. Feinstein said, “Frankly, I prefer your noise to all that unfair propaganda against me. It’s bad enough that the grownups should scare each other with lies. Let’s spare these babies if we can.”

  “This time,” I said, “I am sure I can keep my promise.”

  But, alas, this time, too, it was a mistake to make a promise. For now every time I think of my good friend Mr. Feinstein, even late at night, I hope the children will play ball, jump, or do something awful, just to let him know that he has friends upstairs, real friends, and that his name is not being taken in vain. Yet he’s so nervous now, so jittery, so sad (and, needless to say, his spirit still sometimes manifests itself by the usual rappings), that I still am afraid to let the children act like children. The result is that I never quite know whether to give rest to his body or to his soul.

  [1947]

  SUSAN SONTAG

  THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

  AT FIRST HE WAS JUST LOSING weight, he felt only a little ill, Max said to Ellen, and he didn’t call for an appointment with his doctor, according to Greg, because he was managing to keep on working at more or less the same rhythm, but he did stop smoking, Tanya pointed out, which suggests he was frightened, but also that he wanted, even more than he knew, to be healthy, or healthier, or maybe just to gain back a few pounds, said Orson, for he told her, Tanya went on, that he expected to be climbing the walls (isn’t that what people say?) and found, to his surprise, that he didn’t miss cigarettes at all and reveled in the sensation of his lungs’ being ache-free for the first time in years. But did he have a good doctor, Stephen wanted to know, since it would have been crazy not to go for a checkup after the pressure was off and he was back from the conference in Helsinki, even if by then he was feeling better. And he said, to Frank, that he would go, even though he was indeed frightened, as he admitted to Jan, but who wouldn’t be frightened now, though, odd as that might seem, he hadn’t been worrying until recently, he avowed to Quentin, it was only in the last six months that he had the metallic taste of panic in his mouth, because becoming seriously ill was something that happened to other people, a normal delusion, he observed to Paolo, if one was thirty-eight and had never had a serious illness; he wasn’t, as Jan confirmed, a hypochondriac. Of course, it was hard not to worry, everyone was worried, but it wouldn’t do to panic, because, as Max pointed out to Quentin, there wasn’t anything one could do except wait and hope, wait and start being careful, be careful,
and hope. And even if one did prove to be ill, one shouldn’t give up, they had new treatments that promised an arrest of the disease’s inexorable course, research was progressing. It seemed that everyone was in touch with everyone else several times a week, checking in, I’ve never spent so many hours at a time on the phone, Stephen said to Kate, and when I’m exhausted after the two or three calls made to me, giving me the latest, instead of switching off the phone to give myself a respite I tap out the number of another friend or acquaintance, to pass on the news. I’m not sure I can afford to think so much about it, Ellen said, and I suspect my own motives, there’s something morbid I’m getting used to, getting excited by, this must be like what people felt in London during the Blitz. As far as I know, I’m not at risk, but you never know, said Aileen. This thing is totally unprecedented, said Frank. But don’t you think he ought to see a doctor, Stephen insisted. Listen, said Orson, you can’t force people to take care of themselves, and what makes you think the worst, he could be just run-down, people still do get ordinary illnesses, awful ones, why are you assuming it has to be that. But all I want to be sure, said Stephen, is that he understands the options, because most people don’t, that’s why they won’t see a doctor or have the test, they think there’s nothing one can do. But is there anything one can do, he said to Tanya (according to Greg), I mean what do I gain if I go to the doctor; if I’m really ill, he’s reported to have said, I’ll find out soon enough.

  AND when he was in the hospital, his spirits seemed to lighten, according to Donny. He seemed more cheerful than he had been in the last months, Ursula said, and the bad news seemed to come almost as a relief, according to Ira, as a truly unexpected blow, according to Quentin, but you’d hardly expect him to have said the same thing to all his friends, because his relation to Ira was so different from his relation to Quentin (this according to Quentin, who was proud of their friendship), and perhaps he thought Quentin wouldn’t be undone by seeing him weep, but Ira insisted that couldn’t be the reason he behaved so differently with each, and that maybe he was feeling less shocked, mobilizing his strength to fight for his life, at the moment he saw Ira but overcome by feelings of hopelessness when Quentin arrived with flowers, because anyway the flowers threw him into a bad mood, as Quentin told Kate, since the hospital room was choked with flowers, you couldn’t have crammed another flower into that room, but surely you’re exaggerating, Kate said, smiling, everybody likes flowers. Well, who wouldn’t exaggerate at a time like this, Quentin said sharply. Don’t you think this is an exaggeration. Of course I do, said Kate gently, I was only teasing, I mean I didn’t mean to tease. I know that, Quentin said, with tears in his eyes, and Kate hugged him and said well, when I go this evening I guess I won’t bring flowers, what does he want, and Quentin said, according to Max, what he likes best is chocolate. Is there anything else, asked Kate, I mean like chocolate but not chocolate. Licorice, said Quentin, blowing his nose. And besides that. Aren’t you exaggerating now, Quentin said, smiling. Right, said Kate, so if I want to bring him a whole raft of stuff, besides chocolate and licorice, what else. Jelly beans, Quentin said.

  HE DIDN’T want to be alone, according to Paolo, and lots of people came in the first week, and the Jamaican nurse said there were other patients on the floor who would be glad to have the surplus flowers, and people weren’t afraid to visit, it wasn’t like the old days, as Kate pointed out to Aileen, they’re not even segregated in the hospital anymore, as Hilda observed, there’s nothing on the door of his room warning visitors of the possibility of contagion, as there was a few years ago; in fact, he’s in a double room and, as he told Orson, the old guy on the far side of the curtain (who’s clearly on the way out, said Stephen) doesn’t even have the disease, so, as Kate went on, you really should go and see him, he’d be happy to see you, he likes having people visit, you aren’t not going because you’re afraid, are you. Of course not, Aileen said, but I don’t know what to say, I think I’ll feel awkward, which he’s bound to notice, and that will make him feel worse, so I won’t be doing him any good, will I. But he won’t notice anything, Kate said, patting Aileen’s hand, it’s not like that, it’s not the way you imagine, he’s not judging people or wondering about their motives, he’s just happy to see his friends. But I never was really a friend of his, Aileen said, you’re a friend, he’s always liked you, you told me he talks about Nora with you, I know he likes me, he’s even attracted to me, but he respects you. But, according to Wesley, the reason Aileen was so stingy with her visits was that she could never have him to herself, there were always others there already and by the time they left still others had arrived, she’d been in love with him for years, and I can understand, said Donny, that Aileen should feel bitter that if there could have been a woman friend he did more than occasionally bed, a woman he really loved, and my God, Victor said, who had known him in those years, he was crazy about Nora, what a heartrending couple they were, two surly angels, then it couldn’t have been she.

  AND when some of the friends, the ones who came every day, waylaid the doctor in the corridor, Stephen was the one who asked the most informed questions, who’d been keeping up not just with the stories that appeared several times a week in the Times (which Greg confessed to have stopped reading, unable to stand it anymore) but with articles in the medical journals published here and in England and France, and who knew socially one of the principal doctors in Paris who was doing some much-publicized research on the disease, but his doctor said little more than that the pneumonia was not life-threatening, the fever was subsiding, of course he was still weak but he was responding well to the antibiotics, that he’d have to complete his stay in the hospital, which entailed a minimum of twenty-one days on the I.V., before she could start him on the new drug, for she was optimistic about the possibility of getting him into the protocol; and when Victor said that if he had so much trouble eating (he’d say to everyone, when they coaxed him to eat some of the hospital meals, that food didn’t taste right, that he had a funny metallic taste in his mouth) it couldn’t be good that friends were bringing him all that chocolate, the doctor just smiled and said that in these cases the patient’s morale was also an important factor, and if chocolate made him feel better she saw no harm in it, which worried Stephen, as Stephen said later to Donny, because they wanted to believe in the promises and taboos of today’s high-tech medicine but here this reassuringly curt and silver-haired specialist in the disease, someone quoted frequently in the papers, was talking like some oldfangled country G.P. who tells the family that tea with honey or chicken soup may do as much for the patient as penicillin, which might mean, as Max said, that they were just going through the motions of treating him, that they were not sure about what to do, or rather, as Xavier interjected, that they didn’t know what the hell they were doing, that the truth, the real truth, as Hilda said, upping the ante, was that they didn’t, the doctors, really have any hope.

  OH, NO, said Lewis, I can’t stand it, wait a minute, I can’t believe it, are you sure, I mean are they sure, have they done all the tests, it’s getting so when the phone rings I’m scared to answer because I think it will be someone telling me someone else is ill; but did Lewis really not know until yesterday, Robert said testily, I find that hard to believe, everybody is talking about it, it seems impossible that someone wouldn’t have called Lewis; and perhaps Lewis did know, was for some reason pretending not to know already, because, Jan recalled, didn’t Lewis say something months ago to Greg, and not only to Greg, about his not looking well, losing weight, and being worried about him and wishing he’d see a doctor, so it couldn’t come as a total surprise. Well, everybody is worried about everybody now, said Betsy, that seems to be the way we live, the way we live now. And, after all, they were once very close, doesn’t Lewis still have the keys to his apartment, you know the way you let someone keep the keys after you’ve broken up, only a little because you hope the person might just saunter in, drunk or high, late some evening, but mainly because it�
��s wise to have a few sets of keys strewn around town, if you live alone, at the top of a former commercial building that, pretentious as it is, will never acquire a doorman or even a resident superintendent, someone whom you can call on for the keys late one night if you find you’ve lost yours or have locked yourself out. Who else has keys, Tanya inquired, I was thinking somebody might drop by tomorrow before coming to the hospital and bring some treasures, because the other day, Ira said, he was complaining about how dreary the hospital room was, and how it was like being locked up in a motel room, which got everybody started telling funny stories about motel rooms they’d known, and at Ursula’s story, about the Luxury Budget Inn in Schenectady, there was an uproar of laughter around his bed, while he watched them in silence, eyes bright with fever, all the while, as Victor recalled, gobbling that damned chocolate. But, according to Jan, whom Lewis’s keys enabled to tour the swank of his bachelor lair with an eye to bringing over some art consolation to brighten up the hospital room, the Byzantine icon wasn’t on the wall over his bed, and that was a puzzle until Orson remembered that he’d recounted without seeming upset (this disputed by Greg) that the boy he’d recently gotten rid of had stolen it, along with four of the maki-e lacquer boxes, as if these were objects as easy to sell on the street as a TV or a stereo. But he’s always been very generous, Kate said quietly, and though he loves beautiful things isn’t really attached to them, to things, as Orson said, which is unusual in a collector, as Frank commented, and when Kate shuddered and tears sprang to her eyes and Orson inquired anxiously if he, Orson, had said something wrong, she pointed out that they’d begun talking about him in a retrospective mode, summing up what he was like, what made them fond of him, as if he were finished, completed, already a part of the past.