Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  I’M FEELING fine, he’s reported to have said whenever someone asked him how he was, which was almost always the first question anyone asked. Or: I’m feeling better, how are you? But he said other things, too. I’m playing leapfrog with myself, he is reported to have said, according to Victor. And: There must be a way to get something positive out of this situation, he’s reported to have said to Kate. How American of him, said Paolo. Well, said Betsy, you know the old American adage: When you’ve got a lemon, make lemonade. The one thing I’m sure I couldn’t take, Jan said he said to her, is becoming disfigured, but Stephen hastened to point out the disease doesn’t take that form very often anymore, its profile is mutating, and, in conversation with Ellen, wheeled up words like blood-brain barrier; I never thought there was a barrier there, said Jan. But he mustn’t know about Max, Ellen said, that would really depress him, please don’t tell him, he’ll have to know, Quentin said grimly, and he’ll be furious not to have been told. But there’s time for that, when they take Max off the respirator, said Ellen; but isn’t it incredible, Frank said, Max was fine, not feeling ill at all, and then to wake up with a fever of a hundred and five, unable to breathe, but that’s the way it often starts, with absolutely no warning, Stephen said, the disease has so many forms. And when, after another week had gone by, he asked Quentin where Max was, he didn’t question Quentin’s account of a spree in the Bahamas, but then the number of people who visited regularly was thinning out, partly because the old feuds that had been put aside through the first hospitalization and the return home had resurfaced, and the flickering enmity between Lewis and Frank exploded, even though Kate did her best to mediate between them, and also because he himself had done something to loosen the bonds of love that united the friends around him, by seeming to take them all for granted, as if it were perfectly normal for so many people to carve out so much time and attention for him, visit him every few days, talk about him incessantly on the phone with each other; but, according to Paolo, it wasn’t that he was less grateful, it was just something he was getting used to, the visits. It had become, with time, a more ordinary kind of situation, a kind of ongoing party, first at the hospital and now since he was home, barely on his feet again, it being clear, said Robert, that I’m on the B list; but Kate said, that’s absurd, there’s no list; and Victor said, but there is, only it’s not he, it’s Quentin who’s drawing it up. He wants to see us, we’re helping him, we have to do it the way he wants, he fell down yesterday on the way to the bathroom, he mustn’t be told about Max (but he already knew, according to Donny), it’s getting worse.

  WHEN I was home, he is reported to have said, I was afraid to sleep, as I was dropping off each night it felt like just that, as if I were falling down a black hole, to sleep felt like giving in to death, I slept every night with the light on; but here, in the hospital, I’m less afraid. And to Quentin he said, one morning, the fear rips through me, it tears me open; and, to Ira, it presses me together, squeezes me toward myself. Fear gives everything its hue, its high. I feel so, I don’t know how to say it, exalted, he said to Quentin. Calamity is an amazing high, too. Sometimes I feel so well, so powerful, it’s as if I could jump out of my skin. Am I going crazy, or what? Is it all this attention and coddling I’m getting from everybody, like a child’s dream of being loved? Is it the drugs? I know it sounds crazy but sometimes I think this is a fantastic experience, he said shyly; but there was also the bad taste in the mouth, the pressure in the head and at the back of the neck, the red, bleeding gums, the painful, if pink-lobed, breathing, and his ivory pallor, color of white chocolate. Among those who wept when told over the phone that he was back in the hospital were Kate and Stephen (who’d been called by Quentin), and Ellen, Victor, Aileen, and Lewis (who were called by Kate), and Xavier and Ursula (who were called by Stephen). Among those who didn’t weep were Hilda, who said that she’d just learned that her seventy-five-year-old aunt was dying of the disease, which she’d contracted from a transfusion given during her successful double bypass of five years ago, and Frank and Donny and Betsy, but this didn’t mean, according to Tanya, that they weren’t moved and appalled, and Quentin thought they might not be coming soon to the hospital but would send presents; the room, he was in a private room this time, was filling up with flowers, and plants, and books, and tapes. The high tide of barely suppressed acrimony of the last weeks at home subsided into the routines of hospital visiting, though more than a few resented Quentin’s having charge of the visiting book (but it was Quentin who had the idea, Lewis pointed out); now, to insure a steady stream of visitors, preferably no more than two at a time (this, the rule in all hospitals, wasn’t enforced here, at least on his floor; whether out of kindness or inefficiency, no one could decide), Quentin had to be called first, to get one’s time slot, there was no more casual dropping by. And his mother could no longer be prevented from taking a plane and installing herself in a hotel near the hospital; but he seemed to mind her daily presence less than expected, Quentin said; said Ellen it’s we who mind, do you suppose she’ll stay long. It was easier to be generous with each other visiting him here in the hospital, as Donny pointed out, than at home, where one minded never being alone with him; coming here, in our twos and twos, there’s no doubt about what our role is, how we should be, collective, funny, distracting, undemanding, light, it’s important to be light, for in all this dread there is gaiety, too, as the poet said, said Kate. (His eyes, his glittering eyes, said Lewis.) His eyes looked dull, extinguished, Wesley said to Xavier, but Betsy said his face, not just his eyes, looked soulful, warm; whatever is there, said Kate, I’ve never been so aware of his eyes; and Stephen said, I’m afraid of what my eyes show, the way I watch him, with too much intensity, or a phony kind of casualness, said Victor. And, unlike at home, he was clean-shaven each morning, at whatever hour they visited him; his curly hair was always combed; but he complained that the nurses had changed since he was here the last time, and that he didn’t like the change, he wanted everyone to be the same. The room was furnished now with some of his personal effects (odd word for one’s things, said Ellen), and Tanya brought drawings and a letter from her nine-year-old dyslexic son, who was writing now, since she’d purchased a computer; and Donny brought champagne and some helium balloons, which were anchored to the foot of his bed; tell me about something that’s going on, he said, waking up from a nap to find Donny and Kate at the side of his bed, beaming at him; tell me a story, he said wistfully, said Donny, who couldn’t think of anything to say; you’re the story, Kate said. And Xavier brought an eighteenth-century Guatemalan wooden statue of St. Sebastian with upcast eyes and open mouth, and when Tanya said what’s that, a tribute to eros past, Xavier said where I come from Sebastian is venerated as a protector against pestilence. Pestilence symbolized by arrows? Symbolized by arrows. All people remember is the body of a beautiful youth bound to a tree, pierced by arrows (of which he always seems oblivious, Tanya interjected), people forget that the story continues, Xavier continued, that when the Christian women came to bury the martyr they found him still alive and nursed him back to health. And he said, according to Stephen, I didn’t know St. Sebastian didn’t die. It’s undeniable, isn’t it, said Kate on the phone to Stephen, the fascination of the dying. It makes me ashamed. We’re learning how to die, said Hilda, I’m not ready to learn, said Aileen; and Lewis, who was coming straight from the other hospital, the hospital where Max was still being kept in I.C.U., met Tanya getting out of the elevator on the tenth floor, and as they walked together down the shiny corridor past the open doors, averting their eyes from the other patients sunk in their beds, with tubes in their noses, irradiated by the bluish light from the television sets, the thing I can’t bear to think about, Tanya said to Lewis, is someone dying with the TV on.

  HE HAS that strange, unnerving detachment now, said Ellen, that’s what upsets me, even though it makes it easier to be with him. Sometimes he was querulous. I can’t stand them coming in here taking my blood every morning
, what are they doing with all that blood, he is reported to have said; but where was his anger, Jan wondered. Mostly he was lovely to be with, always saying how are you, how are you feeling. He’s so sweet now, said Aileen. He’s so nice, said Tanya. (Nice, nice, groaned Paolo.) At first he was very ill, but he was rallying, according to Stephen’s best information, there was no fear of his not recovering this time, and the doctor spoke of his being discharged from the hospital in another ten days if all went well, and the mother was persuaded to fly back to Mississippi, and Quentin was readying the penthouse for his return. And he was still writing his diary, not showing it to anyone, though Tanya, first to arrive one late-winter morning, and finding him dozing, peeked, and was horrified, according to Greg, not by anything she read but by a progressive change in his handwriting: in the recent pages, it was becoming spidery, less legible, and some lines of script wandered and tilted about the page. I was thinking, Ursula said to Quentin, that the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He’s still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can’t show “still.” You can just show him being alive. He’s still alive, Stephen said.

  [1986]

  JULIE HECHT

  DO THE WINDOWS OPEN?

  FOR SEVERAL YEARS I WAS AFRAID to ride the South Fork Bus. Then one day I rode it. The day itself was over, since I couldn’t get my courage up for the afternoon bus to New York, but I did make it to the 7 P.M. For one year I had driven myself back and forth from East Hampton to New York. It had taken me ten years to manage this feat. Then, all of a sudden, after almost mastering it, I could never do it again.

  Even when I drove the better but longer way onto the Northern State Parkway and across the Triborough Bridge and down the crater-filled F.D.R. Drive to get to my apartment in SoHo, the trip became so horrible that I couldn’t keep doing it. Once I crossed that bridge at night in a thunderstorm with cars speeding past me on the left and right. But the part of the Grand Central Parkway near LaGuardia started to cause the no-breathing attacks after a few trips. Nothing like the more serious attacks of paralysis of the lungs that used to overcome me on the worse route—the Long Island Expressway and the deadly approach to the Midtown Tunnel, with trucks passing on the right and three lanes of headlights coming toward me on the left.

  On one of my last trips a single truck caused one of these attacks. I thought I could drive among trucks! And anyway, how many trucks could there be at night? There could be a whole highway full of trucks at night on the Long Island Expressway, and one of these trucks in front of me had an open cargo, if it could be called a cargo—a load of dust. Dust was its cargo, probably asbestos dust was what it was filled with, and this asbestos dust was not packed up in barrels and tied down but simply heaped onto the back and covered with a thin gray sheet. The sheet was not even tied down, so it flapped around and the dust was blowing into the air, and there was no way to see through these gusts of asbestos dust.

  I’ll pass the truck, I thought—because I had learned how to pass, with “Così Fan Tutte” playing, but I quickly discovered that I hadn’t learned to pass on a curve with no visibility, no matter what opera of Mozart’s was on and no matter how loud. I was trying to pass the asbestos truck on the left, I had my signal on, only a few seconds had gone by while I was waiting for a part of the road that was not curved. But whenever one came up, the dust would start to blow, and it would be a case of trying to pass into dust through dust to nowhere, just like actual death as we imagine it. As I waited these few seconds with Karl Böhm conducting Alfredo Kraus, cars began to squeeze in and pass on the right. Couldn’t they tell that I was going to pass at the proper moment?

  My last trip took place on a rainy night. Although I had listened to the weather reports all day and they had warned only of occasional light rain, heavy rain overtook the road at the safe, wide, empty part east of Manorville. Before I could get into the right lane, a gigantic white-and-blue vehicle roared past, going sixty or seventy, splashing highway water so that I was completely blinded for several seconds. This vehicle was the South Fork Bus. I thought, “It would be better to be on the South Fork Bus than to be passed on the right by it in a rainstorm.”

  I prepared myself for that first trip on the bus by seeing someone else off. The passenger I chose to see off was my husband. “It’s not so bad,” I said. Nothing is so bad if it isn’t summer. The people, the things they have with them and on them; namely, their faces, their bodies, their hair styles—none of this is so bad in cold weather. But even as I said that it wasn’t so bad I noticed that the seats were too close together, and I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to be aboard when the vehicle filled up with humans and departed from pleasant, tree-lined Main Street. When it got onto the road. Onto the road, with fifty other humans and their paraphernalia. Onto the Expressway. The thought filled me with horror.

  My husband did not mind his time on the bus. He said things like “I work, I read, I sleep. It’s great—I’m not driving.”

  I would never be able to work, read, or sleep. I was still working on a series of photographs of flowers in decline, and there wouldn’t be any flowers on the bus. My other project was to photograph the reproductive surgeon Dr. Arnold Loquesto with his dog, and they wouldn’t be on the bus, either. Reading in vehicles caused nausea, and sleeping on a bus on a highway was out of the question. “Are there seat belts?” I asked my husband.

  “No. Why? You mean you’re afraid to ride the South Fork Bus?”

  “Not afraid. Do the windows open?”

  “No. Windows on these new things don’t open anymore. Why—you need the windows to open?”

  “It would be better if they could be opened.”

  “But who wants to open the windows on the Long Island Expressway?” he said.

  AS THE departure time approached for my first trip on the bus, I thought that this must be the way people feel when waiting to board a plane. They’re always telling us that cars are more dangerous than planes. Why not be afraid of both? I’ll take half a Xanax to enable me to get aboard, I decided. A kindly periodontist had prescribed some for a root-extraction session, and I had eleven pills left. People I knew in Southampton and East Hampton were always trying to get my Xanax away from me. One of these people was an anxious flower arranger. Once, in a discussion of highway driving, he mentioned that he couldn’t drive on the Expressway at all. He told me this with a look of fear in his large, blue, flower-arranging eyes. These driving conversations had made him my favorite person to talk to in Southampton and East Hampton. “The traffic will be over by six, but then it will be dark,” he said. “Aren’t you afraid to drive in the dark?”

  “It’s not the dark. It’s the headlights,” I said.

  “Yes! The headlights make me crazy. Forget it. I can’t even do it in the daylight. My last time I broke into a sweat, the panic started, and when I got to the city I ran to St. Patrick’s to say a prayer.”

  I had confided in a religious, panic-stricken flower arranger. Which was more scary, his religious fervor or his discussion of floral arrangements for funerals? Both gave me shivers.

  I felt brave as I waited out in the cold night for the South Fork Bus. Very few people waited with me. This bus is so big, I thought—it must be safer than a car. “We’re the biggest thing on the road,” a confident middle-aged male passenger said to everyone in a spirit of camaraderie as the bus came down the street. But I was not the comrade of any of the passengers on the South Fork Bus, I thought as I watched them board on that first dark winter night.

  I determined that the safest seat would be on the right and in the middle. In a crash the front of the bus would fold up, crunching together the driver and the first few rows. The left side would go right into those three lanes of oncoming headlights that I had studied during my own driving experiences. The back would smash together if the bus was hit from behind. The middle could jackknife, but I’d heard that this kind of accident was rare.

 
The back seats were near the bathroom, and an important rule in traveling and in dining out is to avoid sitting near plumbing. Yet, even with this rule seeming to make perfect sense, certain passengers on the South Fork Bus chose the bathroom corner as their most desired place to sit. After watching a series of almost normal-looking individuals head for various sections of the middle and front, I saw that a tall man, all in black leather, was heading right for the seat across from the dreaded bathroom door. He was between fifty and sixty, and almost bald—he had some hair, but it was very short and gray. Probably he was a member of some sadomasochist-black-leather Hampton set, the first of his kind I’d ever seen. The minute he got to the back I heard a loud cough. Not a normal cough. A loud, choking, grunting, screaming kind of cough. Maybe his choosing the back seat was simply a matter of wanting to cough alone, to save his fellow-passengers the experience of hearing this cough at closer range, and to preserve whatever dignity a black-leather sado man could have. Before everyone was seated he coughed again. Other people were getting afraid, not just me. I figured I had gotten to the normal amount of fear with that half a Xanax in my brain. I saw that some had not even noticed the cough and were getting themselves ready for the trip with their newspapers and shopping bags and parcels.