Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  Every now and then the former cruise-ship attendant would laugh with inappropriate abandon. I decided that she must be drunk. In order to distract myself, I made a plan to ask Dr. Loquesto about the technique of childbirth she’d described, but on second thought I realized that it might enrage him. I’d once heard him yell at someone who asked his opinion of the birthing chair, “Great, the doctor has to sit on the floor in a raincoat!” Everything seemed worse when I remembered this.

  IT WAS another muggy January day at the midtown location that same winter when I realized I could never again ride the South Fork Bus. It was Thursday afternoon and I was aiming for the bus that left East Seventy-third Street at one o’clock. Because of some kind of demonstration, there was the thick, slow, miserable kind of traffic on the way up Park Avenue. The taxi-driver suggested we go to the midtown stop. I said O.K., although I had a fear of midtown, and then we agreed that the only thing demonstrations ever accomplished was traffic.

  I asked the midtown commandant where to get some coffee, even though I wanted tea, and he pointed me to a kind of hellhole combination stationery-and-coffee shop. In the hellhole I saw midtown individuals of every wretched sort, and stuffed animals of the poorest quality made, yet in the back, behind every other kind of thing a midtown person would want—for example, a cheap kind of foldup umbrella, a lavender rabbit, and the most dreaded candies and magazines known to man—there was a little Indian man whose job was dispensing coffee and tea. I was surprised to see a selection of herbal teas on a shelf behind him. I ordered a peppermint tea and a black coffee. I thought, I’ll try the tea; if it doesn’t help me feel any better, I’ll try the coffee; if it makes me feel worse, I’ll switch back to the tea.

  Behind my small suitcase in the line for the South Fork Bus, fifteen more people had arrived during the ten minutes I was gone. These passengers were sick to see a long line on a January afternoon. A former débutante who I knew would be getting off at Southampton was behind me. She said that once it was so crowded she had to ask to sit next to someone. “I asked if I could sit there and the person said, ‘No,’” she said.

  “What reason did the person give?” I asked.

  “No reason,” she said. “Just ‘no.’ It took me a long time to get over that incident.”

  “I’d never get over it,” I said. “I haven’t had to ask and people haven’t had to ask me yet,” I said, picturing the three-hundred-pound man I saw once. No one asked to sit next to him, and after a while you had to feel sorry for him, since his great girth was obviously the reason. But as he settled into the trip and discovered that he knew the couple in front of him and began to tell them about his new life in Water Mill, you had to hate him. Because in his new life, although he was around fifty-five, his new wife and he had a one-year-old son named Jake, Josh, or Zack, and his wife and son watched the sun rise each day before she went for her three-mile run on the beach. A very typical description, I thought, as I heard him say his house was right on the beach and then ask the couple where their house was. They said their house was right on the highway. Now, that was a surprise. He didn’t know what to say to that. This was as embarrassing to hear as hearing a couple say that their son was a pornography star or a follower of the Reverend Moon. There was nothing to say in reply. The couple didn’t seem to mind that their house was on the highway. They took it lightly; it was their same house they’d had all these years. Maybe the highway was not so busy twenty years ago. Still, that was no excuse, and the couple and the three-hundred-pound man all knew it.

  That trip, starting with the demonstration and the débutante, clinched it. I got on the bus, sipping my tea and coffee alternately, and found that neither one was helping. The seventh seat on the right was taken by what looked like a purple sweatshirt with a tough-looking woman inside. It was going to have to be the eighth, closer to the center accordion divider of the bus. This was the new, extra-large bus, which appeared to be two pieces of a bus joined together by a flimsy vinyl connector. In a crash, the back section would fly off and smash into everything—cars, trucks, trees. The front, at least, would still be steered by the driver, this time an angry-looking, red-faced thug who would probably have a seizure because of his poor physical condition, which I judged to be high blood pressure and arteriosclerosis.

  The débutante sat in the front with a friend who had gotten on uptown. Very quickly, I saw that someone was going to ask to sit next to me, because the new passengers, to their dismay, were having to sit with other passengers all over the bus. First they’d walk through the front section and through the accordion to the back, thinking that certainly there would be empty seats in the back. Then they’d come dejectedly back to the front and survey the choices. In front of me, in the seventh seat, a woman—the purple sweatshirt—with horribly bleached hair was asked by a man if the seat was occupied. I couldn’t tell what she said, but he left and went to the back. I was studying what had gone wrong with the hair-dyeing process when a man came by and asked me if the seat next to me was occupied. I had to tell the truth, because if you lied to a decent specimen, a worse one would be coming by next. I should be flattered that this man has chosen me, I thought, because this man was perfect as men go. He was (1) clean—clean as a man can be. His hair was clean, his bluejeans were clean, his boots were clean, his cotton socks were clean, his skin was clean and, as an added bonus, it was perfect skin, too. (2) He was only about forty. (3) He was wearing a wedding ring. (4) He had a book. He wasn’t going to bother me.

  Across the aisle from the purple sweatshirt, a most elegant man had sat down next to an elderly lady. The elegant man wore a perfect, lightweight gray flannel pin-striped suit, a blue striped shirt, and a blue striped tie. I wondered how the elegant man had just the right weight suit for this warm winter’s day. He was an investment banker, I was sure, because these guys have all the right clothes no matter what else is wrong with them. One thing wrong with this man was his face. His face was too small, his features were too small for a man’s face, but what could he do? He was a man. He couldn’t get out of it. He wore black shoes—a mark against him—but at least they didn’t have gold hardware. His hair was too long for his profession, and it was thin on top, but he didn’t let this bother him, and he bravely combed it back the way he’d always combed it. He had a suntan on his small-featured face, but not too much of a suntan, and his hands were tan and smooth-looking, as if he’d never done anything with them but handle financial papers and cut a twig in his garden. This man was going to get off at Southampton. I imagined him in prep school. I imagined his whole privileged life of about forty-nine years and how he might have managed to keep his hands like that. Servants hammered and sawed things for him in Southampton, and superintendents and porters helped with things at home on Park Avenue.

  Before we had even taken off I saw that the elegant man was talking in a cordial way to the purple sweatshirt. What could he have to say to her? He was not looking directly at her when I heard him say, “I keep mine out on the East End.” I realized that he was smiling warmly at her dog, her dog that was the reason no one sat with her—her dog sat in the window seat, although dogs were not allowed on the South Fork Bus. He spoke directly to the dog, and, to my astonishment, he called the dog “pooch.” “Hi, pooch,” I believe he said. I couldn’t tell what kind of dog it was. It looked a bit like the elegant man himself, with little tiny features on its little tiny face, but its face was a squashed, flat, light-brown fur thing, and his was not. The dog had big ears surrounding its tiny, bashed-in fur face, and the man’s ears were normal-sized.

  I saw that my seatmate was listening to his Walkman, a newer and more expensive model than mine, and that he was reading his book. There was no way to see what he was reading, but I saw that his hands were not only clean, they were beautiful. The more I stared at his hands, the more grateful I felt to have him sitting there. His long legs in those tight, but not too tight, clean, naturally faded bluejeans were not only good legs, they were great legs, but his
hands were perfect hands, and suddenly I had the urge to grab one and kiss it.

  Once we were out of the tunnel, I noticed that across the aisle the elegant man and the purple sweatshirt were exchanging newspapers—he had the Wall Street Journal, and the sweatshirt had the Times. They were friends now, just because of this dog. They were smiling at each other with each exchange of sections, and there were seven sections altogether. If they were in a Mozart opera, they might get up and dance a minuet. How could he like her so much just because she had this dog? It didn’t seem possible, because he was so elegant and she was such a slob. He’d smile his courtly smile and she’d smile glowingly back even though she couldn’t have been interested in him, since he was some kind of neuter man.

  By the time we reached Manorville, I saw that the elegant man had stopped reading. He was becoming fidgety. When he saw that the bus was stopping at Manorville he got more fidgety. He mentioned to his seatmate, the elderly lady, that this was really too much, to have to stop at Manorville—the trip was taking four hours instead of two, the traffic was terrible, and now all these new stops.

  Soon after Manorville he started to bite his nails. But he didn’t manage to bite them. He would start, and then think better of it. Just a small nibble starting at the index finger and going across all the way. Then he began to run his hands through his hair. He’d run his hands through, and then he’d stop, and start to bite those nails again, but he never got into it. The hair, next the nails, and then he began with his ears. Rubbing his finger around the rim of his ear madly and almost poking it into the center of the ear. Then he’d look out the window and squirm around in his seat and start with his nails again. At one point he started to take a huge chomp out of all four fingers at once but reconsidered and stopped.

  This elegant man is going to go crazy on this bus, I realized, and I had those few Xanax with me. This is what they were for, but I couldn’t offer; he’d have to ask, and he would never ask. I became afraid of what would happen if he continued this way to Southampton. But he did continue. Look out the window, I tried to direct him by mental telepathy, which I didn’t believe in. Look out at the beautiful country view, look at the landscape. See the sky, see the fields, see the trees, calm down, you are almost at your destination. But he would not calm down. The hair-running, the brink of nail-biting, the ear-rubbing; and then he added nose-rubbing to it—a quick flick across each side of that tiny Pekinese nose was added to the routine. There was nothing left for him to do but put his face into his palms and rub his eyebrows and forehead upward in a final act of desperation—and then he did this, too.

  I’m not going to watch anymore, I decided, even though the best view was out his window. I tried looking out the window next to my seatmate and saw to my alarm that the clean, beautiful-hand man was writing inside the cover of his book. I had no trouble seeing that he was keeping a diary, a moment-by-moment diary of his trip on the South Fork Bus. “3:04. This f—— bus!” it said. I looked at another section and saw that he was also writing about some failed relationship. I hoped it was not with a man. It appeared to be about his innermost feelings, feelings that I thought men did not wish to express, but here he was expressing them in a diary. When I saw a sentence that began, “So many feelings,” I decided not to read on.

  If I closed my eyes and concentrated on my sonata, either one of these two passengers could go berserk and I wouldn’t see in time to escape. Neither one was calming down. The sweatshirt and her dog were asleep. The diarist put away the book and started taking deep breaths. I decided to speak. “We’re not even at Southampton,” I said to him, “and it’s four o’clock.”

  “It’s always late,” he said, as if he might start to cry. “I hate this bus. At least . . . the train . . . I can walk around.”

  “Do the windows open?” I asked.

  “No, but you can go to the end of the car and get some air,” he said.

  Finally, at Southampton, the elegant man suddenly turned calm and polite; he was helping the elderly lady on with her coat. People knew him. They were all getting off together, shaking their heads in disgust.

  “Where are you getting off?” I asked the diarist.

  “East Hampton,” he said. “I can walk home. I live on Further Lane.”

  I could see that he was used to having people gasp when he said the name of his street, because this clean, half-crazed man lived on the most beautiful and expensive lane in East Hampton. The elegant, more crazed man must have lived on the most beautiful lane in Southampton—Pond Lane, or one of those Neck Lane roads.

  Even though it had started to rain by the time we got to East Hampton, I knew that these two men would change their clothes and go out running. I couldn’t run, but I could walk so fast it would be just as good for the heart.

  On my walk I’d try to think of a new means of transportation. I’d heard that people hired retired policemen to drive them back and forth. It was only four times the price of the bus. I knew a young man who had gone to police school but flunked out because of his mistakes in choosing his uniform. The police hat he’d purchased was too large and kept falling over his eyes, and his shoes were too small to chase petty criminals in. Maybe his rates would be lower.

  I could get a part-time job to pay the flunked-out police trainee his cut-rate price. I had no skills for the real world and didn’t know anyone gainfully employed except for the flower arranger and a macrobiotic chef. I could ask them if they needed any help. I could work arranging flowers by day and cooking brown rice at night. If only I’d shared those Xanax with the flower arranger, but drugs had become so hard to get. Dr. Loquesto had once given me a prescription for one Demerol for a medical test. The flower arranger had told me that his dog knocked over a bottle containing his last few pills and then tried to lick them up. The flower arranger had to scramble around the floor trying to salvage the licked pills for himself.

  I’d always listened attentively to his floral techniques. “First, I mossed up the table, then I strewed calla lilies in wet Oasis—you know, the green foam Oasis?—then I draped ivy . . . .” People preferred live flower arrangements to photographs of flowers in decline. I had to accept this. While we worked on arrangements, we could talk about flowers and pills and herbal remedies. The medium-strength Xanax was a pale-peach color, the same shade as the Apricot Beauty tulip we both admired. The mild strength was white, like a White Emperor tulip. An even higher strength was light purple, my hair-cutter, Francine, had told me. “They’re for extreme cases,” she explained. I pictured a lilac and a freesia. Valerian root could induce calm and sleep. Echinacea drops had antibiotic properties and came from the coneflower.

  I’d have to hear the word “moss” turned into a verb. Dr. Loquesto didn’t mind hearing the word “laser” conjugated as a verb. I minded, but in my new job I wouldn’t even have the authority to say “‘Moss’ is not a verb.” Still, if I could learn to moss up tables and strew calla lilies in wet Oasis, maybe I could earn enough to hire the flunked-out trainee with the big hat to drive me back and forth. That was my plan.

  [1992]

  EDWARD NEWHOUSE

  THE MENTOCRATS

  OF MY GRADUATING CLASS in grade school, only three of us passed the entrance tests for Townsend Harris High School, the special city prep for bright boys. Karl Denling and I passed with 89’s, Benny Frankel with a gaudy 97. As freshmen, we continued to live in the same neighborhood and traveled together on the Third Avenue trolley. Benny and Karl would compare their homework and I would copy mine from one or the other.

  In the course of our freshman year Benny achieved a lordly and careless preëminence. I had an inkling of the extent to which that carelessness was cultivated, because in spite of the boast that he never opened a book outside of class the homework was produced without fail each morning. But I wasn’t fool enough to contradict him, not while I had the benefit of his labors. Benny Frankel in turn pretended to believe me when I said I could do the quarter-mile in fifty seconds flat. For a tim
e we had a marvelous working relationship. If only because Benny was the one boy I knew who had read both the “Count of Monte Cristo” and the d’Artagnan series, he would have been a pleasant companion. It was regrettable that his tastes shifted from Dumas to Balzac so soon.

  Benny was scrawny and terribly small. He even had tortoise-shell glasses. It must have been because he looked so much like a grind that he insisted on maintaining he never did a lick of homework. He really did spend much less time at it than Karl, and strictly speaking, he told the truth when he said he never studied at home. He had to do his work at the library, because more often than not the gas was turned off in the basement room on Seventy-seventh Street where he lived with his mother, and they had to light the place with a candle. Even when they had gas the place was pretty dismal. Benny’s mother had a pushcart stand on Second Avenue and got home so late at night there seemed to be no point in making the beds. And everything from the walls to the worn oilcloth on the table was damp. If I sat too long on a chair my pants would stick to me moistly.

  Mrs. Frankel sold fruits in season. She didn’t hawk her wares, because her voice was ineffectual; she just stood in front of the cart and waited for buyers to come. In the wintertime she smashed up all the available crates and tried to keep a fire going in an ashcan. When the crates gave out she would peel off a sweater or two and wrap them around her ankles. Her wind-chapped red face made her look cold even during the warm months. All year round she was bundled into the same sweaters and shawls. Neither her clothes nor her face ever changed, and whenever we came by she asked Benny the same question: “Will you come help me clean up tonight?” And Benny would say, “You know damn well I’ll come.”