by Lore Segal
Lucy stood at the window and watched nothing happen. In the office building across the courtyard—the building that must front 58th Street—someone sat at a computer. On the floor right above, a woman brought a plant to the window and watered it and did not know what lay in the courtyard twelve floors below, where a door had opened. A man in shirtsleeves stepped out and stood. A small wind tugged at the dead woman’s skirt that was hitched up her leg in a way, Lucy thought, she would not have wanted. Lucy identified tears that constricted her throat. The man, perhaps because, like Lucy, he couldn’t think of anything to do, stepped back inside and closed the door.
Al and Benedict got back from lunch and looked out the window. Bethy and Joe returned and Joe called the building’s administration. The Wide-Open Eye people tried to go back to work.
When Lucy returned to the window, the courtyard was crowded. The shirtsleeved man was there, and the police. People blocked the dead body from her view. In the building across the courtyard there were faces at the windows. The plant waterer had the view to herself, but in the window on her left, the people in the back row had to crane their necks to look over and between the heads of the people in the front.
“Interesting,” Lucy said to Bethy who stood beside her, “the long beat between something happening and the world taking any notice.”
“What do you mean, ‘beat’?” Bethy said.
Lucy, excited and upset, was glad when Joe invited her to come home with him. At dinner Joe and Lucy told Jenny about the suicide. The beat that Lucy had noted between event and reaction interested nobody beside herself, and when she reported her own initial denial of what she had seen because she couldn’t think what to do, Joe said, “All you had to do was call 911.”
“Oh, I know that,” said Lucy. “I did that. I just thought it was an interesting reaction, I mean, if one were writing a story. In what order would the protagonist take in what she is seeing? Is it “an old woman, unusually small, and black,” or “small, black, and old,” or “black, and old, and unusually small?” While she was talking Lucy observed Jenny listening with all her heart. Her tears were not stuck in her throat but flowed out of her eyes. She was not developing the dead old black woman into a story. Lucy loved her friend Jenny. Lucy said:
“I once wrote a suicide story: A woman watches a truck bearing down toward the place on the sidewalk where she stands waiting to cross. She thinks, ‘If that truck were to run me over I wouldn’t have to think what to get for supper.’ The truck passes. The woman crosses to the supermarket and takes out her shopping list. It was called ‘Truck.’ Maurie published it in The Magazine. In the days when Maurie answered my letters.”
Jenny
Breakfast was the stage on which Bethy Bernstine vented her dissatisfactions. Bethy was dissatisfied with her father, with his Wide-Open Eye, with the country, the world. “Do we ask ourselves what we have done to that African American woman to make her jump out of her own skin?”
“Yes,” said her father. “We ask ourselves.”
“And what do we tell ourselves?”
“I’ve been thinking …” Jenny hesitated. Was this a good or was it the worst moment to say, “There are also things we do that are nice …”
“You mean like making unnecessary wars?” suggested Bethy.
“I mean the small, funny things. I walked past the building site on the next block, and they’re making square holes in the wooden fence so people passing on the sidewalk can watch the work in progress.”
Bethy had perfected the stare of exaggerated disbelief: “ ‘Happy Days’ in the sandbox, Winnie.”
“And the doggie bag,” persisted Jenny. “That’s friendly, sensible, and I think it’s an entirely American invention.”
“Mom, Jesus! We’re the state terrorists in the people-killing business.”
“We are that too!” agreed her mother eagerly.
“How,” Jenny asked Joe, after Bethy banged out of the room, “is she making out in the office?”
“She’s not ‘making out’ with Benedict or Al, if that’s what you’re waiting for. That’s not going to happen.”
“What do you mean? I’m not waiting for anything. Don’t be silly,” said Jenny. “Benedict lives with that nice Viennese girl. Al Lesser is too young for her.”
Jenny came to the door to see her husband and daughter off. “I’ve got an appointment with Dr. Switt this morning. He’s two blocks from your office. Why don’t I take the two of you out to lunch?”
“Sounds good,” said Joe.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” said Bethy.
Jenny went down the elevator with Mrs. Pontefiore. The weather lasted them the eight floors to the lobby, but conversation all the way to the corner was going to be a chore. At the front door Jenny Bernstine and Mrs. Pontefiore parted with a mutual fiction of going in opposite directions. However, Jenny accelerated her step so as to fall in with a newer neighbor. She didn’t know the name of the young woman whose short black hair bobbed along beside her. They had got the weather out of the way by agreeing they loved the midsummer city, when Jenny’s companion let out a laugh.
“What?”
The young neighbor laughed again but shook her head. Jenny wouldn’t let it pass.
“Nothing. That baby in the stroller smiling at its mother and the mother smiling. I mean, nothing.”
Jenny said, “Yesterday, I was annoyed with my cabbie for not getting a move on. He was smiling at the cab that was stopped in front of us with its door open. My cabbie said, ‘The kid’s left his bear on the back seat.’ I tell my daughter—New York is a turn-on!”
“Oh, oh, it is!” the young neighbor agreed.
“My husband believes the terrorists are going to blow us up.”
“Probably are,” said the young neighbor and, opening her handbag, found a quarter which she dropped without breaking stride into the parking meter so that the meter maid aborted the ticket she had begun to write. And Jenny Bernstine had her subject for conversation: “You don’t find it tiresome to own a car in Manhattan?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Whose car did you just save from getting a ticket?”
“Oh …” The young woman turned to look briefly in both directions, said, “I don’t really know,” and raising her hand in a good-bye, started down the subway steps.
Jenny had come to confess to Dr. Switt: She was not taking her anti-depression pills. “It’s that I don’t feel depressed.” Jenny told the doctor about the baby and the mother smiling at each other; about the cabbie and the teddy bear, and about the neighbor who saved a fellow citizen she didn’t know from being ticketed.
The doctor on the other side of the desk had the awkward air of a man not getting a joke. He said, “It takes time to combine the right medications in the right dosage.”
Joe was not going out. Jenny’s arrival coincided with a delivery of books and Joe thought he would stay in and get sorted.
“Bethy and I will have lunch. What’s a good place around here?”
Bethy said, “Mom. I told you this morning, No! N. O.”
Lucy said, “I’m taking Jenny to lunch in my new favorite restaurant—just two blocks.”
Lucy and Jenny
The two friends passed an interesting older couple seated by the window. “They got my table!” Lucy complained to the unsmiling proprietress of the Café Provence. “But here will be fine if you bring us some of your good bread.”
Lucy and Jenny sat and ate the good bread. Lucy kept looking with a widow’s eye at the man and woman at the window table. “They look as if they’re in the habit of conversation,” she said.
“So are you and I,” Jenny said. “My neighbor and I ride down the elevator that feels like such a neat little cabinet made for intimacy, but Mrs. Pontefiore and I talk about the weather. Mrs. Pontefiore and I don’t know, and don’t care to know, anything about each other’s lives. Why don’t we? You and I have been talking for more than half a century and we’re s
till talking.”
What did these two old friends talk about? Their conversation had two trajectories. One was circular, always looping backward over familiar matters; while the loops looped incrementally in the other, bringing them from their graduation holiday in Venice with Joe and Bertie, the two men whom they might or might not have been going to marry, to this lunch at the Café Provence on 57th Street.
Lucy told Jenny about Maurie neither accepting nor rejecting her story called “Rumpelstiltskin in Emergency,” which she had sent to The Magazine in October, she said. “This is July! How long can it take someone to read a three-page short-short?” Lucy always wondered but never asked Jenny if Jenny read her stories.
And they talked about the children. Jenny said, “My poor Bethy! Is she too unhappy, too cross, or maybe just too mean to just let me take her out to lunch?”
Lucy said, “I remember watching my little Benedict on his way to the bathroom. I’d say, ‘You need a haircut.’ I’d watch him coming out of the bathroom and I’d say, ‘Tuck in your shirt!’ You look at them with your chest in a riot of love wanting them to be happy, to tuck in their shirt. Today, in the office, I knew that picking up a grown son’s sweats from underneath his chair impinges on his liberty, so I did it quick, quick, like gulping forbidden food before the calories have time to register.”
Jenny was thinking about Bethy. “She says I don’t talk about the real—the front-page matters, and, Lucy, I was thinking, the day you came to my place and we had lunch—do you remember if we even mentioned the tsunami? Did we used to talk about the Berlin Crisis? The Rosenbergs? McCarthy, Sputnik, the Cuban missiles, the Six-Day War? Watergate? Yes. The Kennedy assassination—everybody talked. Selma? Vietnam …”
“Our dinner parties!” remembered Lucy.
“MoMA was our midtown club. The theater was mostly beyond our means. The Opera was never our thing.”
“Bertie knew where to find the good jazz. And then you and Joe were in Connecticut, running Concordance. Bertie is dead. And you’re back, and we are two old women, and we’re talking.”
An ambulance passed outside. Lucy said, “I get this familiar taste of gall—but, curiously, in my gut.” She located the proprietress, who was talking with the couple by the window, caught her eye and signed a check in the air.
“Come with me,” Jenny said. “Now I’m downtown, I want to go window shopping.”
“Can’t!” said Lucy. “I have to get back to the office and read Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.”
Jack and Hope
The couple who had gotten Lucy’s favorite table were Jack and Hope. Jack had phoned Hope, suggested lunch, and said, “I have an agenda.” No need to specify the Café Provence or the time, fifteen minutes before noon, when they were sure of getting their table by the window. The proprietress brought the menu and told them the specials. Hope said, “I always mean to order something different,” but ordered the onion soup. Jack ordered the cassoulet saying, “I should have fish.”
“And a bottle of your Merlot,” he told the proprietress, “which we will have right away.”
“We’ll share a salad,” said Hope. She saw Jack watch the proprietress walk away in the direction of the bar in a remarkably short skirt for a woman in her fifties. Hope watched the long, brown, athletic legs with Jack’s eyes. She looked at Jack, a large man with a large dark bearded face. He turned to Hope.
“So?”
“Okay, I guess. You?”
Jack said, “My agenda: If it were New Year’s and we were making resolutions, what would yours be?”
Hope’s interest pricked right up. “I’m thinking. You go first.”
Jack said, “Jeremy tells me I’ve got to watch what I eat.” Jeremy was Jack’s son. “Idea for a New Yorker cartoon: Fat man eating a whole capon in front of a mirror. Legend ‘Henry the Eighth watches what he eats.’ ”
Hope said, “To watch what I watch and then turn the TV off. It feels debauched waking in the morning with the thing flickering.”
Jack said, “No more buying books from Amazon till I’ve read the ones on my shelves.”
Hope said, “Hanging my clothes in the closet even if nobody is coming over. Nora is very severe with me.” Nora was Hope’s daughter.
The wine arrived. Jack did his label checking, cork sniffing, tasting. He nodded. The salad came. Hope served their two plates. “In Provence it came after the main course.”
Jack indicated Hope’s hair, which she had done in an upsweep.
“Very fetching,” he commented.
“Thank you. And my old resolution: What was her name—my French teacher after we got back from Paris. I once counted nine years of school French—and you had to do all the talking.”
Jack said, “To learn how to pray.”
Hope looked across the table to see if he was being funny. Jack concentrated on folding a whole lettuce leaf into his mouth.
Hope said, “I will never understand the principle of not cutting it into bite sizes.”
The onion soup came; the cassoulet came. Jack asked Hope if she would like to go back.
“Back! Go back to Provence?”
“To Aix, to Paris.”
Jack and Hope had lived together, before marrying two other people. Jack subsequently divorced his wife who had subsequently died. Hope was widowed.
“There’s something I’ve been thinking of asking you,” Hope said. “Were you and I ever together in a very old garden? Do you remember walking under century-old trees? Where was it we lay in the grass and looked into the crown of a tree? France? Was it in England? Or is this a garden in a book?”
“What’s to stop us going back?” Jack said.
There were reasons, of course, that stopped them. Two of the littlest were this moment flattening their noses against the outside of the restaurant window.
Eight-year-old John stuck his thumbs in his ears and wiggled his fingers at his grandfather. Hope made as if to catch her granddaughter’s hands through the glass. Little Miranda laughed. On the sidewalk stood Hope’s daughter, Nora, with baby Julia in the stroller. She had come to fetch her mother. Jack’s son, Jeremy, had come to get his father.
“I’m just going to the bathroom,” Hope mouthed to her daughter through the glass.
“What?” Nora mouthed back, her elegant features sharpened with irritation. The baby was howling and a wailing ambulance passed at her back. “She has to know I can’t hear her,” Nora said to Jeremy.
Jeremy told Nora to stay with the kids. “I’ll go in and get him and see what she wants.”
In the doorway, Jeremy stepped back to let Jenny and Lucy come out. He walked straight to the corner where, an hour earlier, he had folded up his father’s wheelchair and wheeled it to the table.
Hope stood up. She came around to kiss Jack and be kissed good-bye.
“On the double, Dad!” said Jeremy. “I need to get back to the office.”
“I’ll phone you,” Jack said to Hope, “and we’ll have lunch.”
Hope was mouthing to Nora again.
“Julie, shut up, please!” Nora said, and the baby started screeching. “WHAT, Mom!”
Hope stabbed a finger in the direction of the ladies’ room.
Nora signaled, “You need me,” pointing at herself, “to go with you?” pointing at Hope. Hope shook her head no. One of the reasons for the Café Provence was that its bathrooms were on the street floor, not in the basement down a long stair.
Hope opened the door into the ladies’ room and saw, in the mirror above the basins, how her hair was coming out of its pins. She removed all the pins and stood gazing at the crone with the gray, girlishly loosened locks around her shoulders and saw what Diane Arbus might have seen and was appalled, and being appalled pricked her interest right up: “I’ve got an agenda: The Arbus Factor of old age,” Hope looked forward to saying to Jack the next time it would be convenient for Jeremy and Nora to arrange lunch for them at the Café Provence.
Jenny
; Summer, and Manhattan lies tranced, lush, and melancholy with the absence of friends traveling abroad, or away in their houses by summer ponds, or a hop and a skip from the ocean beaches. The afternoon belongs all to Jenny. Not a person in the world—well, Lucy—knows that she is walking on “the Fifth Avenue,” as Henry James called it, a tourist in her own city. Jenny is surprised all over again at the gigantism of the new glass structures. When did this block and the next turn seedy and brutal? Jenny follows the old glamour on its move a block to the east. Here, behind the great plate glass, is a single, delicious, appalling, little, translucent, winged, thousand-dollar cotton blouse.
Jenny walks and keeps walking, passing store after store before she gets herself to enter one through its high glass double doors. The interior was designed by Gehry.
Is it the subliminal retreat of Jenny Bernstine’s head downward between her shoulders that cues the expression peculiar to ruminating camels and unoccupied salesladies in Madison Avenue boutiques? The saleslady intuits the approach—sees hovering on the outskirts of her domain, the type of wrong—the non-customer.
Jenny smiles into the Madison Avenue boutique saleslady’s grossly inhospitable eyes. “I used to dream,” she tells her, “when I was a girl, of such a dress. A gown!” Jenny lets the tea-colored liquefaction glide across the back of her hand. “I’d love to get my daughter a tea-colored gown! It’s that grownup daughters wouldn’t be caught dead in a ditch wearing something their mom has picked out for them,” chattered Jenny. “What I could do is buy it for myself, and then my daughter can come and borrow it?”
Has the Madison Avenue saleslady missed her cue? Her facial expression undergoes an alteration. There was a game with which Joe used to amuse little Bethy. He would arrange his face into the tragic mask and wipe it away with an upward sweep of his open hand, revealing his comic grin. The saleslady’s smirk registers her readiness to be of service to the customer who might turn out to be a live one: If the young lady has brunette coloring, these golden notes would be a perfect accent.