Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  People were making themselves comfortable—they didn’t think that this was going to be their last day on earth. One woman had a special neck pillow, another had a lap robe. Others had beverages—coffee, tea, and juice. Although the South Fork Bus was known for giving out free Perrier, these passengers could not wait. They had magazines and books, and about half of them had headphones. The other half were going to take naps. Naps were planned for the Long Island Expressway! I saw people adjusting their seats backward into other people’s knee space. Certain passengers were polite and consulted the people behind them, others did whatever they pleased. Supposedly in warmer weather, when I was in Nova Scotia or Maine, fights broke out about this and other things.

  The first step I had to take to get ready was to tie myself into my seat with the belt from my reversible alpaca coat. I will have to remember to take this alpaca seat belt off the armrests when I arrive in Manhattan, I thought, because it would be impossible to get another. The one thing of value that I had learned from seeing a Viennese psychiatrist in his newly restored Art Deco building on Central Park West was information on how to obtain this coat. As I went up in the splendid elevator I couldn’t help staring at the coat on a woman who looked exactly my age—at the time, thirty-nine. She was kind enough to volunteer the name of a store in England, and several overseas phone calls enabled me to have the same coat. Having read that the wrong kind of seat belt can be more dangerous than none at all, I knew that this was the wrong kind, the kind that causes ruptured spleens and herniated other organs. Still I kept to my plan and tied one end of the belt to the outer armrest and the other end to the center armrest.

  Next I would get some Mozart into my earphones—I would add Mozart to my brain, along with the Xanax. This winning combination had helped me through oral surgery, where they have a new device—a pellet gun to shoot bullets of Novocain into the roof of the mouth. It had helped me not to faint as I heard those bullets shoot in, and felt them, too.

  I had decided that this trip would not require a Mozart opera. A piano sonata would be enough—a trio, a string quartet, or a divertimento might work. Before I could get my earphones on, the extremely weird hostess appeared. She said her name was Cindy, and began giving the rules of the South Fork Bus. She must have graduated from the est program or some kind of mind-training course, because she was so overly agreeable and pleasant that there had to be a reason for it. “She’s an est graduate,” I remembered my haircutter, Francine, saying of a certain hair-streaker when I asked “Why is she so cheerful?” “You mean it’s that fake cheer?” I asked. “More or less,” she said. “At first we couldn’t stand it, but then we got used to it.” Unlike Francine, I couldn’t get used to things.

  How had Cindy come to the point in life where she could stand to ride back and forth on the Long Island Expressway, I wondered, and I thought it was something she might wonder, too. Maybe, before her trips, she smoked several ounces of marijuana to keep from wondering. Because even the est in her background wouldn’t have been enough to allow her to act this way.

  Then there was the driver—a red-haired, middle-aged woman who looked as if she had just spent the day in front of a TV, smoking packs of Camels in preparation for her long drive on the South Fork Bus, where smoking was not allowed, “and that includes the restroom.” I was thankful for that rule, and I thought I had so many things to be thankful for that if I survived the trip I might run to St. Patrick’s, too.

  Just into the andante grazioso—I was tied in tightly—I saw that Cindy had made her way up the aisle and was being argued with by a spoiled-looking sixty-year-old man in a heavy, gray, hand-knitted sweater. The passenger wanted to be allowed to use his eastbound ticket to ride westbound. This was strictly forbidden, but the passenger had a reason why it shouldn’t be forbidden in his case. Cindy had twisted herself into a physical position of sympathy and understanding, bending over the passenger with her head tilted and her body turned so that the next passenger was only an inch or two from her hip joint. “It’s really something that we’re not allowed to do in any case, but I do understand why you think your case is different, and you know what, I am going to do it, but if this were ever known I would lose my job—not that this should be anything for you to concern yourself with.” Perhaps the marijuana dose had kicked in to the point where she’d lost all concept of time and didn’t know how long this conversation was going on.

  As I watched the other passengers calmly paying their fares, it occurred to me that most of the men on the left side of the bus looked like antique dealers. The proportion seemed greater than the proportion viewed in other activities around the town. The junk-bond traders from Southampton had not yet boarded. When they did board, they would be angry that the good seats had been taken by this kind of passenger. But at least then it would be time to get that Perrier. The hostess had promised this.

  PASSENGERS at Southampton turned out to have more materialistic and less intellectual paraphernalia than passengers from East Hampton. One woman with platinum-blond hair had five big shopping bags from the Saks Fifth Avenue Southampton branch, and she was in an angry mood. She’d been drinking. I could smell the alcohol particles in the air. She was one of those fifty-five-year-old women who always wear black or red, or both together. A red cashmere turtleneck sweater—everything else, including the coat she took off when she sat down, was black—and all those pieces of jewelry I couldn’t identify except for the Rolex watch and the Cartier watch. She had one of each, plus several other kinds of gold bracelets. She was sitting right across the aisle, so I could study her jewelry the whole trip if I needed to.

  At last, it was time for the refreshments. But not only wasn’t it Perrier, it was some cheap club soda in a plastic bottle and served in plastic cups. All along I had thought that it was going to be individual green glass bottles for everyone. The hostess was asking people if they wanted little bags of peanuts and even asked some, “Would you like two?” Several were saying yes. One antique dealer had to ask if he could have two. Just the kind of thing I was afraid of but could not imagine—soon the entire bus had the odor of chewed peanuts. How long would the peanut odor last with the poor ventilation system was something I couldn’t get off my mind. Why hadn’t these people heard that peanuts are contaminated by the carcinogenic mold aflatoxin?

  I noticed that other men had just as poor peanut-eating styles as my husband. Maybe my husband was not so bad. Maybe men are like this, as my exercise teacher, the dancer Katherine Glass, used to say. One man emptied the bag of peanuts into his hand, then threw them all at once into his mouth. Another one held the opened packet to his mouth with his head back and tapped the packet to get the peanuts out.

  The time had come to complain about the temperature. It was about one hundred degrees in the bus. People were tearing off their cashmere scarves and sweaters. “We’re trying to control the heat,” Cindy said. “I know it’s awful.” Soon there was no heat. The platinum-blond, jewelry-laden passenger was getting angrier as she put her black coat back on. I saw that she was eating peanuts, even though she needed to lose ten pounds—her wrists were fattened up under her gold watches. One of the antique dealers didn’t mind the wildly fluctuating temperature conditions, but he was complaining that his overhead light didn’t aim right on his newspaper.

  Somewhere around Manorville, Cindy made an announcement. “As you may have noticed we are having a lot of trouble temperature-wise,” she said. “We can’t control the heat, but we want you all to know that we’re trying.” Unfortunately, I had taken my earphones off to hear this announcement. Now I had the word “temperature-wise” stamped into my brain, and I also realized that the coughing man was still coughing at timed intervals. It was not a real cough, I suddenly knew, but a sign of Tourette’s syndrome, where the afflicted person involuntarily shouts obscenities and has no recollection of having done so. This man had mastered the cough as a disguise, or he had not yet reached the obscenity stage. Perhaps it began with a cough—I couldn�
�t recall, although this was my husband’s favorite disease to read about.

  Still, this was a better way to ride than driving myself, I thought, even though it was one hundred degrees for half the trip and thirty for the other half. I decided I would become a regular rider of the South Fork Bus throughout the winter. No one even noticed when I untied myself from my seat.

  THEN there was the trip back. Nobody had told me what it was like to board the South Fork Bus at Fortieth Street and Third Avenue. I had only my husband’s version of the facts, which was “It’s right near my office—a perfect short walk.” But, then, the opinion of a man who works in midtown, an architect who would choose to spend his life in the ugliest part of midtown—what is the opinion of this man worth? There are so many ugly office buildings in midtown now, and his is the ugliest. When you see this building you can think only one thing. “WHY?” is the thing. “Why? Why? Why?” But when you read architects’ explanations of why this or that is in their plans, they have answers. Not that anyone would ask an architect why, just as no one would put an architect in jail for crimes of architecture; there is already such a prison-space shortage.

  On a particularly deformed strip of the low Sixties around Second Avenue there is a building that’s constructed of a material which cannot be identified. It’s a color between that of a dead salmon and a dead rat. How can this be possible when these colors are so far apart? It’s possible because they’ve been mixed together the way dog food was mixed together before there were any health regulations about its contents. Ground-up parts of old dead anything still go into dog food, apparently, things Ralph Nader says are in hot dogs—lips, ears, hooves. There are even worse ones, which Ralph Nader doesn’t always list.

  Why can’t buildings be built according to the specifications of Prince Charles, I thought when first I saw the sight of East Fortieth Street. Why can’t Prince Charles be in charge? East Fortieth Street was filled with gigantic, new gray-and-black buildings—if the sky was blue on any day, there would be no way to see it.

  A commandant from the bus company was lining up the prisoners in some kind of cavernous space on East Fortieth Street—it wasn’t clear what the space was, but some architect must have described it as something. It was a kind of mall space without any stores, thus combining the worst parts of city life and suburb life. The commandant was drinking coffee out of a plastic-foam cup. He had a look that identified his origins as Montauk and Poland. Yet he was in charge here, with an evil smile that could have meant the buses were not headed for any Hampton. His smile hinted that he knew about all kinds of things that were going to go wrong on the trip.

  As I looked around I saw that I was trapped, waiting on East Fortieth Street in a cavernous nowhere surrounded by midtown. I was gripped by horror at the thought of what it would be like to stroll aimlessly through this part of Manhattan. Always have a purpose and walk rapidly between appointments, to work, and on errands. In this way you cannot be overwhelmed, overtaken, enveloped by the mammoth emptiness of square gray spaces and buildings. Your tiny remnant of a soul, crushed into a minute fragment of itself by traveling the streets of New York—your soul can’t be obliterated if you keep walking. Walk briskly, ride, escape if it’s over fifty degrees, wear dark glasses if the sun is out, stay near Central Park on the Upper East Side, never go to a business district on weekends, never even be in New York on a weekend. Even a Friday is not safe—don’t let yourself try to imagine what it would feel like to be on Park Avenue and Forty-sixth Street on a Sunday in the summer. You would be the only one there—maybe a lost tourist or a derelict in some state of delirium tremens would be someone to share the empty corner with. Your view would include the Scaffold Building, a building designed to incorporate the look of metal scaffolding into its façade.

  By talking to the commandant as if I had normal, casual thoughts on my mind—I was getting to like him—I found out that the bus was on the way down from the Seventy-third Street stop: the better, Upper East Side, first stop. I knew that the passengers who had boarded there would have that smug first-stop look on their privileged Upper East Side faces. But when the bus pulled up I saw that some of them had chosen those dangerous first-row seats. How stupid people could be, even if they lived on the Upper East Side. It was then I decided that in the future I’d go uptown to Seventy-third Street, all the way from SoHo, in order to board the bus with this smug group.

  On the trips from Long Island, I discovered that any kind of person could get on the bus at any stop. One ride from East Hampton started out so well that I wasn’t prepared for what I soon saw. It was still cold out, and something like a real winter day from the past. It was almost dusk and I could see out the window that the sky looked as if it might snow, but I knew that in the new greenhouse weather this was not a realistic hope. As I waited for the bus to start, I was thinking about what the pharmacist in “The Stranger” says to Orson Welles, the Nazi Franz Kindler: “Looks like it’s coming up for snow.” My view of the sky and my happy memory of that film were both suddenly obstructed by a six-feet-six creature who looked exactly like Frankenstein, except for his face, which was kinder and sweeter than the monster’s face. He did have that protruding frontal bone in his forehead, but his forehead was small and low. He had to fold up his long arms and legs in order to get into the tiny space provided by the bus company for its passengers, the way you have to fold a marionette to get it into its little box. I felt sorry for the man as I noticed his long wristbones sticking out of his jacket sleeves, which were several inches too short. His pants legs were much too short, also. He sat down in the seat across from mine. He wore a reddish-brown box-plaid suit and a lopsided Frankenstein-style toupee, the exact same color brown as his suit. The toupee was tilted too far forward, and, underneath, his own normal-colored hair was visible—darker brown with gray. I’d seen this kind of toupee mistake on other men, including something I thought I saw on Dennis Hopper. The box-plaid colors of his suit were turquoise blue and orange. He wore an orange shirt to match one color and white socks with turquoise blue stripes around the tops to match the other. Before long he took out a bag with his lunch or dinner. The meal appeared to be a liverwurst sandwich, and after eating this sandwich he ate two bananas. Then he took out a bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies. When I checked to see which kind of Pepperidge Farm cookie such a man would choose, I was surprised to see that it was Chessmen. In my whole life of acquaintance with this brand of cookie I’d never seen anyone buy or eat Chessmen. The Frankenstein man ate about half a bag of Chessmen and then began to read the Times Book Review. He was a big man, he had to eat a lot, I tried to tell myself. Still, there could never be a reason to eat liverwurst, or animals in any form.

  I FOUND out that bad things happened at East Seventy-third Street, too. Once, a woman with a German accent was complaining, in a voice between crying and screaming, about the “air conditions,” and the journey had not yet even begun. The woman was about forty-eight but still had long, straight black hair and bangs, as if it were the nineteen-sixties and she were twenty. “What is that terrible odor?” she was asking the driver in her hysterical voice. Other passengers joined the debate.

  “It’s food,” one said. “People are eating lunch.”

  “It’s something else, in addition to that—it’s some kind of fumes!” she said.

  People quickly skipped over what it was to how they could avoid this trip on the South Fork Bus. Two elderly gentlemen in suede jackets with fringes said that you could avoid Penn Station by taking a taxi over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge to Hunter’s Point, the place the Long Island Railroad started from—some barren, deadly yard in Queens where gangland shootouts and drug transactions probably took place.

  Down in the dirty, gray Forties, the first-stop people seemed to be on the verge of awareness of the seriousness of the air problem, but before a rebellion could start, the bus stopped and the doors opened to let in the angry midtown line. Before things could settle down I heard sounds of a scuffle a few
rows behind me. I heard punching sounds—maybe two men had started to punch each other. I didn’t want to see. The reason for the fight turned out to be that one passenger didn’t want a new passenger to sit next to him and said so. The new passenger, a dark-skinned man, took this to be a racial insult. The seated man explained that he needed two seats for himself because he was tall.

  After the altercation was over I heard some swearing and heavy breathing, but I couldn’t tell which was coming from which passenger. A light-skinned, sixty-year-old African-Spanish-American woman tried to keep the insulted man calm by turning back toward his seat and reciting outdated anti-racist slogans. After a while she turned around, and she and her own seatmate began chatting about other things.

  The sun was beating into the bus on all sides—even though it was January, the temperature outside was about seventy degrees. By then we were near the exits of the hot, truck-packed Thirties, but this did not deter her from happily telling her seatmate that she had ordered up some Chinese food for lunch before the trip, and that her husband was a judge. I thought that ordering up Chinese food on a warm afternoon before a long bus ride was wrong. Then I imagined the sixty-five-year-old judge, probably a corrupt Housing Court judge, in his black robes downtown in his chambers with all the other corrupt judges. The judge’s wife and her seatmate were becoming the best of friends, even though the seatmate was a rich-looking white woman, about five feet nine, wearing black toreador pants, ballet slippers, and eight or ten bracelets. As her bracelets clinked together she confessed that she had been a cruise-ship attendant—it sounded like a confession—and she had married an airline executive and they had a little boy, who’d been born when they lived in Senegal. When asked about the maternity treatment in Senegalese hospitals, she said, “It was fine. They have you hang from a tree by your wrists.” I began to feel ill when I heard this, even though I knew that the use of gravity had to be better than the American method of lying on a table. It was the picture of the former cruise-ship attendant in labor, hanging from a tree—this picture plus the combination of the heat, the fumes, the Chinese lunch of the woman married to the judge presiding downtown in Housing Court. The Mozart in my earphones could not help me transcend this.