Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  “How?” asked Trexler.

  “Look at the chair you’ve been sitting in! See how it has moved back away from my desk? You kept inching away from me while I asked you questions. That means you’re scared.”

  “Does it?” said Trexler, faking a grin. “Yeah, I suppose it does.”

  They finished shaking hands. Trexler turned and walked out uncertainly along the passage, then into the waiting room and out past the next patient, a ruddy pin-striped man who was seated on the sofa twirling his hat nervously and staring straight ahead at the files. Poor, frightened guy, thought Trexler, he’s probably read in the Times that one American male out of every two is going to die of heart disease by twelve o’clock next Thursday. It says that in the paper almost every morning. And he’s also probably thinking about that day on the Madison Avenue bus.

  A WEEK later, Trexler was back in the patient’s chair. And for several weeks thereafter he continued to visit the doctor, always toward the end of the afternoon, when the vapors hung thick above the pool of the mind and darkened the whole region of the East Seventies. He felt no better as time went on, and he found it impossible to work. He discovered that the visits were becoming routine and that although the routine was one to which he certainly did not look forward, at least he could accept it with cool resignation, as once, years ago, he had accepted a long spell with a dentist who had settled down to a steady fooling with a couple of dead teeth. The visits, moreover, were now assuming a pattern recognizable to the patient.

  Each session would begin with a résumé of symptoms—the dizziness in the streets, the constricting pain in the back of the neck, the apprehensions, the tightness of the scalp, the inability to concentrate, the despondency and the melancholy times, the feeling of pressure and tension, the anger at not being able to work, the anxiety over work not done, the gas on the stomach. Dullest set of neurotic symptoms in the world, Trexler would think, as he obediently trudged back over them for the doctor’s benefit. And then, having listened attentively to the recital, the doctor would spring his question: “Have you ever found anything that gives you relief?” And Trexler would answer, “Yes. A drink.” And the doctor would nod his head knowingly.

  As he became familiar with the pattern Trexler found that he increasingly tended to identify himself with the doctor, transferring himself into the doctor’s seat—probably (he thought) some rather slick form of escapism. At any rate, it was nothing new for Trexler to identify himself with other people. Whenever he got into a cab, he instantly became the driver, saw everything from the hackman’s angle (and the reaching over with the right hand, the nudging of the flag, the pushing it down, all the way down along the side of the meter), saw everything—traffic, fare, everything—through the eyes of Anthony Rocco, or Isidore Freedman, or Matthew Scott. In a barbershop, Trexler was the barber, his fingers curled around the comb, his hand on the tonic. Perfectly natural, then, that Trexler should soon be occupying the doctor’s chair, asking the questions, waiting for the answers. He got quite interested in the doctor, in this way. He liked him, and he found him a not too difficult patient.

  It was on the fifth visit, about halfway through, that the doctor turned to Trexler and said, suddenly, “What do you want?” He gave the word “want” special emphasis.

  “I d’know,” replied Trexler uneasily. “I guess nobody knows the answer to that one.”

  “Sure they do,” replied the doctor.

  “Do you know what you want?” asked Trexler narrowly.

  “Certainly,” said the doctor. Trexler noticed that at this point the doctor’s chair slid slightly backward, away from him. Trexler stifled a small, internal smile. Scared as a rabbit, he said to himself. Look at him scoot!

  “What do you want?” continued Trexler, pressing his advantage, pressing it hard.

  The doctor glided back another inch away from his inquisitor. “I want a wing on the small house I own in Westport. I want more money, and more leisure to do the things I want to do.”

  Trexler was just about to say, “And what are those things you want to do, Doctor?” when he caught himself. Better not go too far, he mused. Better not lose possession of the ball. And besides, he thought, what the hell goes on here, anyway—me paying fifteen bucks a throw for these séances and then doing the work myself, asking the questions, weighing the answers. So he wants a new wing! There’s a fine piece of theatrical gauze for you! A new wing.

  Trexler settled down again and resumed the role of patient for the rest of the visit. It ended on a kindly, friendly note. The doctor reassured him that his fears were the cause of his sickness, and that his fears were unsubstantial. They shook hands, smiling.

  Trexler walked dizzily through the empty waiting room and the doctor followed along to let him out. It was late; the secretary had shut up shop and gone home. Another day over the dam. “Goodbye,” said Trexler. He stepped into the street, turned west toward Madison, and thought of the doctor all alone there, after hours, in that desolate hole—a man who worked longer hours than his secretary. Poor, scared, overworked bastard, thought Trexler. And that new wing!

  It was an evening of clearing weather, the Park showing green and desirable in the distance, the last daylight applying a high lacquer to the brick and brownstone walls and giving the street scene a luminous and intoxicating splendor. Trexler meditated, as he walked, on what he wanted. “What do you want?” he heard again. Trexler knew what he wanted, and what, in general, all men wanted; and he was glad, in a way, that it was both inexpressible and unattainable, and that it wasn’t a wing. He was satisfied to remember that it was deep, formless, enduring, and impossible of fulfillment, and that it made men sick, and that when you sauntered along Third Avenue and looked through the doorways into the dim saloons, you could sometimes pick out from the unregenerate ranks the ones who had not forgotten, gazing steadily into the bottoms of the glasses on the long chance that they could get another little peek at it. Trexler found himself renewed by the remembrance that what he wanted was at once great and microscopic, and that although it borrowed from the nature of large deeds and of youthful love and of old songs and early intimations, it was not any one of these things, and that it had not been isolated or pinned down, and that a man who attempted to define it in the privacy of a doctor’s office would fall flat on his face.

  Trexler felt invigorated. Suddenly his sickness seemed health, his dizziness stability. A small tree, rising between him and the light, stood there saturated with the evening, each gilt-edged leaf perfectly drunk with excellence and delicacy. Trexler’s spine registered an ever so slight tremor as it picked up this natural disturbance in the lovely scene. “I want the second tree from the corner, just as it stands,” he said, answering an imaginary question from an imaginary physician. And he felt a slow pride in realizing that what he wanted none could bestow, and that what he had none could take away. He felt content to be sick, unembarrassed at being afraid; and in the jungle of his fear he glimpsed (as he had so often glimpsed them before) the flashy tail feathers of the bird courage.

  Then he thought once again of the doctor, and of his being left there all alone, tired, frightened. (The poor, scared guy, thought Trexler.) Trexler began humming “Moonshine Lullaby,” his spirit reacting instantly to the hypodermic of Merman’s healthy voice. He crossed Madison, boarded a downtown bus, and rode all the way to Fifty-second Street before he had a thought that could rightly have been called bizarre.

  [1947]

  BERNARD MALAMUD

  REMBRANDT’S HAT

  RUBIN, IN CARELESS WHITE cloth hat or visorless soft round cap, however one described it, wandered with unexpressed or inexpressive thoughts up the stairs from his studio in the basement of a New York art school where he made his sculpture, to a workshop on the second floor, where he taught it. Arkin, the art historian, a hypertensive, impulsive bachelor of thirty-four—a man often swept by strong feeling, he thought—about a dozen years younger than the sculptor, observed him through his open office
door, wearing his cap among a crowd of art students and teachers he wandered amid along the hall during a change of classes. In his white hat he stands out and apart, the art historian thought. It illumines a lonely inexpressiveness arrived at after years of experience. Though it was not entirely apt, he imagined a lean white animal—hind, stag, goat?—staring steadfastly, but despondently, through trees of a dense wood. Their gazes momentarily interlocked and parted. Rubin hurried to his workshop class.

  Arkin was friendly with Rubin though they were not really friends. Not his fault, he felt; the sculptor was a very private person. When they talked he listened looking away, as though guarding his impressions. Attentive, apparently, he seemed to be thinking of something else—his sad life, no doubt, if saddened eyes, a faded green mistakable for gray, necessarily denote sad life. Once in a while he uttered an opinion—usually a flat statement about the nature of life, or art, never much about himself; and he said absolutely nothing about his work. “Are you working, Rubin?” Arkin was reduced to.

  “Of course I’m working.”

  “What are you doing, if I may ask?”

  “I have a thing going.”

  There Arkin let it lie.

  Once, in the faculty cafeteria, listening to the art historian discourse at long length on the work of Jackson Pollock, the sculptor’s anger had momentarily flared.

  “The world of art ain’t necessarily in your eyes.”

  “I have to believe that what I see is there,” Arkin had politely but stiffly responded.

  “Have you ever painted?” asked Rubin.

  “Painting is my life,” retorted Arkin.

  Rubin, with dignity, reverted to silence. That evening, leaving the building, they tipped hats to each other over small smiles.

  In recent years, after his wife left him and costume and headdress became a mode among students, Rubin had taken to wearing various odd hats from time to time, and this white one was the newest, resembling Nehru’s Congress Party cap, but rounded, a cross between a cantor’s hat and a bloated yarmulke; or it was perhaps like a French judge’s in Rouault, or a working doctor’s in a Daumier print. Rubin wore it like a crown. Maybe it kept his head warm under the cold skylight of his large studio.

  When the sculptor afterward again passed along the crowded hall on his way down to his studio that day, Arkin, who had been reading a fascinating article on Giacometti, put it down and went quickly into the hall. He was in an ebullient mood he could not explain to himself and told Rubin he very much admired his hat.

  “I’ll tell you why I like it so much. It looks like Rembrandt’s hat that he wears in one of the middle-aged self-portraits, the really profound ones, I think the one in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. May it bring you the best of luck.”

  Rubin, who had for a moment looked as though he were struggling to say something extraordinary, fixed Arkin in a strong stare and hurried downstairs. That ended the incident, though not the art historian’s pleasure in his observation.

  Arkin later remembered that when he had come to the art school via an assistant curator’s job in a museum in St. Louis seven years ago, Rubin had been working in wood; he now welded triangular pieces of scrap iron to construct his sculptures. Working at one time with a hatchet, later a modified small meat cleaver, he had reshaped driftwood pieces out of which he had created some arresting forms. Dr. Levis, the director of the school, had talked the sculptor into giving an exhibition of his altered driftwood objects in one of the downtown galleries near where Levis lived. Arkin, in his first term at the school, had gone on the subway to see the show one brisk winter’s day. This man is an original, he thought; maybe his work will be, too. Rubin had refused a gallery vernissage and on the opening day the place was nearly deserted. The sculptor, as though escaping his hacked forms, had retreated into a storage room at the rear of the gallery and stayed there, looking at pictures. Arkin, after reflecting whether he ought to, sought him out to say hello, but seeing Rubin seated on a crate with his back to him, examining a folio of somebody’s prints without once turning to see who had come into the room, he silently shut the door and departed. Although in time two notices of the show appeared, one dreadful, the other mildly favorable, the sculptor seemed unhappy about exhibiting his work and hadn’t for years. Nor had there been any sales. Recently, when Arkin had casually suggested it might be a good idea to show what he was doing with his welded-iron triangles, Rubin, after a wildly inexpressive moment, had answered, “Don’t bother playing around with that idea.”

  The day after the art historian’s remarks in the hall to Rubin about his white cap, it disappeared from sight—gone totally; for a while he wore on his head nothing but his heavy reddish hair. And a week or two later, though he could momentarily not believe it, it seemed to Arkin that the sculptor was actively avoiding him. He guessed the man was no longer using the staircase to the right of his office but was coming up from the basement on the other side of the building, where his corner workshop room was anyway, so he wouldn’t have to pass Arkin’s open door. When he was certain of this, Arkin felt at first uneasy, then experienced intermittent moments of strong anger.

  Have I offended him in some way? the art historian asked himself. If so, what did I say that’s so offensive? All I did was remark on the hat in one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and say it looked like the cap he was wearing that day. How can that be so offensive?

  He then thought: No offense where none’s intended. All I had was good will to him. He’s shy and might have been embarrassed in some way—maybe my exuberant voice in the presence of students. If that’s so, it’s no fault of mine. And if that’s not it, I don’t know what’s the matter other than his nature. Maybe he hasn’t been feeling well, or it’s some momentary mishigas—nowadays there are more ways of insult without meaning to than ever before—so why raise up a sweat over it? I’ll wait it out.

  But as weeks, then a couple of months went by and Rubin continued to shun the art historian—he saw the sculptor only at faculty meetings when Rubin attended them; and once in a while glimpsed him going up or down the left staircase; or sitting in the Fine Arts secretary’s office poring over long inventory lists of supplies for sculpture—Arkin thought, Maybe the man is having a nervous breakdown. He did not believe it. One day they met by chance in the men’s room and Rubin strode out without a word. Arkin, incensed, felt for the sculptor surges of hatred. He didn’t like people who didn’t like him. Here I make a sociable, innocent remark to the son of a bitch—at worst it might be called innocuous—and to him it’s an insult. I know the type, I’ll give him tit for tat. Two can play.

  But when he had calmed down and was reasonable, Arkin continued to wonder and worry over what might have gone wrong. I’ve always thought I was good in human relationships. He had a worrisome nature and wore a thought ragged if in it lurked a fear the fault was his own. Arkin searched the past. He had always liked the sculptor even though Rubin offered only his fingertip in friendship; yet Arkin had been friendly—courteous, interested in his work, and respectful of his dignity, almost visibly weighted with unspoken thoughts. Had it, he often wondered, something to do with his mentioning—suggesting—not long ago, the possibility of a new exhibition of his sculpture, to which Rubin had reacted as though his life were threatened?

  It was then he recalled that he had never told Rubin how he had responded to his hacked driftwood show—never once commented on it, although he had signed the guestbook and the sculptor surely knew he had been there. Arkin hadn’t liked the show, yet had wanted to seek Rubin out to name one or two interesting pieces. But when he had located him in the storage room, intently involved with a folio of prints, lost in hangdog introspection so deeply he had been unwilling, or unable, to greet whoever was standing at his back—hiding, really—Arkin had said to himself, better let it be. He had ducked out of the gallery without saying a word. Nor had he mentioned the driftwood exhibition thereafter. Was this kindness cruel? In some cases unsaid things were worse than thin
gs said. Something Rubin might think about if he hadn’t.

  Still it’s not very likely he’s avoiding me so long after the fact for that alone, Arkin reflected. If he was disappointed, or irritated, or both, by my not mentioning his driftwood show, he would then and there have stopped talking to me if he was going to stop talking. But he didn’t. He seemed as friendly as ever, according to his measure, and he isn’t a dissembler. And when I afterward suggested the possibility of a new show he obviously wasn’t eager to have—which touched him to torment on the spot—he wasn’t at all impatient with me but only started staying out of my sight after the business of his white cap, whatever that meant to him. Maybe it wasn’t my mention of the cap itself that’s annoyed him. Maybe it’s a cumulative thing—three minuses for me? Arkin felt it was probably cumulative; still, it seemed that the cap remark had mysteriously wounded Rubin most, because nothing that had happened before had threatened their relationship, such as it was, and it was then at least amicable, pleasant. Having thought it through to this point, Arkin had to admit to himself he did not know why Rubin acted as strangely as he was now acting.

  Off and on the art historian considered going down to the basement to the sculptor’s studio and there apologizing to him if he had said something inept, which he certainly hadn’t meant to do. He would ask Rubin if he’d mind telling him what it was that bothered him; if it was something else he had inadvertently said or done, he would apologize for that and clear things up. It would be mutually beneficial. One early spring day he made up his mind to visit Rubin after his seminar that afternoon, but one of his students, a bearded printmaker, had found out it was Arkin’s thirty-fifth birthday and presented him with a white ten-gallon Stetson that the student’s father, a traveling salesman, had brought back from Waco, Texas.