by Zadie Smith
Went to the Vanguard last night, checked in on my other life. She was sat on a stool, scatting, but it was like no scatting I ever heard: she turned the sounds inside and out and backward. Instead of la la do la be la it was almost al al od al eb al—like an ululation. In fact, at times it sounded like she was just singing that word, ululation, over and over. Maybe she was. She sang in Spanish, she sang in English, she made us laugh, she made us cry, it was ridiculous! Everyone but me was over fifty and sort of Anglo-Saxon-looking but she didn’t let that stop her. She reminded me why I’m not a singer. Same reason atheists whisper in church. Fred Hersch was on the piano—he walked up to it on crutches and he left that way, too. I moved my chair so he could get by. I wish music meant that much to me. Blessed are those to whom music means that much.
* * *
• • •
Uptown, on 123rd Street, near Marcus Garvey Park, a Miss Wendy English lowered herself into the same chair Stokely sat in. It’s not an imitation, it’s not like that chair, it’s the exact same fucking chair, whether various museums realize it or not. This is her sister’s house. Her sister was once a Panther, which a lot of the time meant it fell to her to organize stuff for men who were big on rhetoric but low on practical detail. Certainly, none of them came by forty years later when Candice was alone, broke and dying. But the moral of this story is unclear because though Wendy was supposedly the good girl, never arming herself and only protesting civically, and though she married and moved to Boston and had three children who all attended four-year colleges, she is, this particular evening, as alone as Candice English ever was. No adult male made the distance. They’re not dead, you understand—they’re just otherwise occupied. New children, new countries and so forth. Divorce, divorce, sudden disappearance, property dispute, in that order. This latest one, the property dispute, will surely be the last. He was too keen to get married, and whenever Wendy locked eyes with this seventy-two-year-old lothario, as he got down on one gabardined knee (he was always doing it) she saw her dead sister’s brownstone right there in the center of his shining black pupils. Miss Wendy herself is seventy-seven, nobody’s fool. She recently broke off that last romance, retired from the library on a good pension, and moved back to New York City, to take possession of a house she hasn’t visited since 1990. She sits in Candice’s accidental gold mine and rips up the little postcards as they arrive, a few each week, the ones that explain how much the house is worth and how easy it would be to sell. She doesn’t doubt it.
Many things have surprised Wendy about Candice’s house. It isn’t a madwoman’s house, for one. Everything is very well organized. All the pictures of Wendy’s children, which Wendy kept sending over the years, even after rational communication with her sister became impossible, these she found all neatly bound—along with their accompanying, unanswered letters—with sturdy elastic bands and stacked neatly in a series of box files. “Don’t send me any more of your shit—it goes straight in the trash and then I have to empty the trash.” But it wasn’t true. She had kept it all, and lovingly. A lot of things turned out not quite to be as they had been presented. Madness might be a good way to stop people coming by. It had proved less shameful, possibly, to be mad, here in New York City, than to be lonely, or under-employed. For there was a time when Candice was at the center of a hurricane. Yes, for at least a decade she was the eye of a terrific storm, and it must have been awful when all of a sudden that storm moved on, gave up the cause, ran out of funds, got thirty to life, and Candice found herself alone, looking out of this beautiful picture window, over at the park, where not even a breeze moves the ginkgoes. Whereas Wendy, having had, comparatively speaking, much less drama in her life, is far more familiar with stillness, and silence—the textures of silence. Often, she sits in her sister’s Stokely chair for precisely four minutes and thirty-three seconds and gets her John Cage on. She hears birds, she hears garbage trucks, she hears, Hey, bitch, you better have my money! The whole city symphony. She gets a lot out of that.
Another surprising thing: Candice’s collection of vinyl. As sisters, they had not agreed on much, having such different temperaments, agreeing on freedom but not how to get it or what it might look like once you did—but they had a home in music. Fondest of all memories: grooving hand in hand, swaying, to Bootsy’s “I’d Rather Be With You,” at a family barbecue, before the second man vanished and the kids grew old enough to be fearful of Aunt Candice and her habit of phoning up and reading terrifying stories from the newspaper into the receiver. They were two lithe little ladies back then, still in their forties, both with locks, for their hair often agreed where their heads did not. Later they became tiny old birds and all that glorious hair turned to white fluff, which Wendy alone had the sense to cut short. They thought of their mother, who had the foresight to grow ever larger and more imperious with age. They regretted their Caribbean father’s genes, which tended toward wiriness, and had damned Wendy at least to a decade of please, please take my seat.
Please kiss my ass. Don’t need your seat—I got my own. And please stay away from this chair for it is an heirloom, a piece of living history, or else it is a thirty-buck copy my crazy sister picked up in a yard sale somewhere. Never mind. Death converts everything to treasure, everything gets fixed in place so you can spray it in gold. Beethoven! Never had Candice breathed a word of Beethoven to Wendy and yet here it all was, and if Wendy had known about that, well, it might have been something they could have shared. Now she put on the 7th, the Allegretto, and imagined a golden alternative: two noble-looking old dames, long freed of useless men, walking down to Lincoln Center to listen to this procession, this march through history, and hearing, in the counterpoint, their two different journeys, their highs and lows. Oh, that would have been something, really something, but it didn’t happen that way, it didn’t and it couldn’t, because America is the kind of bitch who turns anyone who truly cares about Her into a crazy person.
* * *
• • •
Myron’s kingdom stretches from one end of Bleecker to the other. He moves around it all day and late into the night, and no one knows where he sleeps, though of course nothing could be easier than asking him. His nemesis is the curb. Some curbs in this city are ludicrously high and as strong as he is in the upper body, sometimes he can’t get the chair over these curbs—especially if his plastic bags are full and hanging off the handlebars—so he waits wherever he is for someone to appear behind him and push. And as a piece of city choreography, we all have this down to a fine art by now. One person takes over where the other left off and Myron doesn’t even turn around to see who it is—he just knows us from the sound of our voices. Then, once you’ve got him over the curb, there’s the question of whether he wants company for a block or two. Usually he does. For a man without legs, he talks a lot about dancing. Back in the day he was crazy about disco. Few people care for disco these days but Myron makes it sound like it was the music of the gods. We say to him, Are you sure you’re not just sentimental about disco because you had legs back then? He thinks that shit is hilarious. He says, The thing you don’t understand about disco is it’s the only music in America that truly brought black and white folks together in the same room and then made them dance all night because those goddamn songs don’t end! They just run into each other! They’re like the life force itself! We don’t agree, but we laugh along. Then he turns serious, he says, Well, it was a better time in America, that’s for damn sure. We are not sure. Nixon? The Iran hostages? Jim Jones? The fall of Saigon? Still, maybe he’s right.
* * *
• • •
There’s a joyful cipher under Washington Square Arch, most warm nights, starting around ten. I like it because it’s inauthentic, like me. It’s possible that there’s nothing less real in this world than two black dudes, two Puerto Ricans and a white girl rapping under the stars of Greenwich Village, and yet there they are, you can poke them, they’re not holograms. In my experience
, the less claim a person has to a thing the harder they chase it, and these five are strivers all. Never saw anybody work so hard for a rhyme.
* * *
• • •
Three benches along sits Abraham Lincoln. Same beard, same face, and he’s got an outfit that works. It’s not a costume, exactly, but the general impression is that this is basically what Lincoln would wear if he were alive today and spent his days between MacDougal, Thompson and the park. I suppose he’s crazy, but he’s terribly solemn and dignified and he doesn’t talk to himself or to anyone. He just strides around doing his Lincoln bit. In winter, he toughs it out as long as he can but come December you start to see him in a beanie and a large pea coat and L.L.Bean snow boots and I have to say the Lincoln effect is lessened somewhat. I really feel for him then. Not only because it’s cold but because the weather is stripping him of his true self and that’s a terrible thing to witness. For most of the winter he looks downhearted and ashamed, like a man forced to live in a body he doesn’t recognize. However, he doesn’t give the impression of owning any technology or even being aware of its existence, so he is at least saved the indignity of knowing that when you google his name the first thing that comes up is What did Abraham Lincoln do that was so important? Which is like hearing seven million fourth-grade foreheads smack onto their desks at once. Then winter thaws. Out pop the daffodils and the livelier rats, though spring is truly heralded by the appearance of our President, back doing his local rounds, in his stovepipe hat and his topcoat and that flash of black silk at the throat which pulls the whole look together. He doesn’t speak in spring, no more than he does in winter, but I did once hear him sing. I was sitting under the cherry blossoms and he walked past, his voice very low and hard to hear, but if you happened to tune in to it, wow, it was really something beautiful:
Michael, row the boat ashore, hallelujah.
Michael, row the boat ashore, hallelujah.
Michael’s boat is a music boat, hallelujah.
About two hours later I saw him sitting outside Wendy’s eating a Wendy’s. The spell was not broken. He who sings to himself without earbuds is especially precious to me now, like hearing the song of a bird long thought extinct.
* * *
• • •
Late in the summer, Dev played Central Park. Historically speaking, men with guitars have held their instruments in a certain way and pointed them at you like a penis and stood in the center of whatever space and drawn all energy to them like a lightning rod stuck on a church spire. He didn’t do any of that. For most of the show we had no idea where he was, really: he kept hiding behind other people, other instruments. He had his locks tied in a bun and wore some very high-waisted, salmon-colored trousers. Meanwhile, the crowd was filled with every type of true self imaginable in the tristate area. We all knew a great storm was coming. Because of technology, this storm could be predicted with extraordinary precision, so that as hot as it presently was, everybody knew for certain that it was going to rain on the stroke of ten o’clock. We felt the awesome power of knowing, we were high on it, and yet simultaneously I think we mourned the seers and witches and holy fools who used to try and divine these things from colors in the skies. In order to honor this ambivalent feeling, we stopped waiting for a show and began to understand we were at a séance. The music surrounded us. It was hot and heavy like the evening. It was a magical reversal of the technology: instead of iterations of Dev piping into all our bedrooms through our earbuds, now he had piped us into his small space, a strange sort of bedroom he had fashioned out of the park itself. We were all in it together. We had useless, transcendent thoughts like: This, too, is America! We were pretty high. But as I listened, I recalled a section of Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics by P. F. Strawson, in which he considers a purely auditory world, where there are no bodies, only sounds, and I could follow him as far as wondering whether if I were a sound, in a world of sounds, would I think of myself as a special item in the world of sounds, separate from them, and experience myself as a sound different from all the other sounds? Yet how would I think of myself as a separate item, a self that is experiencing sounds, when the sound I was making was only another item, aggregated, in this world of sounds? But then Strawson moves on, in the book, back to the ordinary world, hoping his reader will see the world afresh, and I confess I did not, I do not, I just see bodies everywhere, ascribing consciousness to themselves, because, well—because it really feels like your mind is inside your head! And it feels like your ears are connected to your soul! Yes, it does, whatever the philosophers say. Soul music! Given the state of the world, none of us deserved what we got that night in Central Park but I can tell you we were terribly thankful for it. Then the rain came down hard and washed all this Manhattan tomfoolery into the drains.
JUST RIGHT
“And your father’s in it?”
“Yes, ma’am. He helps my mother and makes the s— the—”
“The scenery? Try to breathe, Donovan, there’s really no hurry. I’m sure you’ll catch the others in the square.”
Miss Steinhardt sat on the very edge of her desk, working her nails with a bobby pin for the subway grime underneath.
“Now, Annette Burnham told me she went to see the show last weekend, with her mother and baby brother. Liked it a lot. And she said your father does the puppets, too—and you, too, isn’t that right?”
“Oh. Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ma’am, Donovan, we’re not in the South. The things you kids get from television.”
“Yes, Miss St—” began Donovan, although he had neither an idea of the South, being Greenwich Village born and raised, nor much conception of television, which he was not allowed to watch. It was from his mother—whose father had been English—that he had received the strange idea that ma’am was a romantic form of British address, suitable for ladies you especially admired.
“Anyway, that’s fine,” said Miss Steinhardt and looked over at the door until the boy had stopped wrestling with her name and closed his big, wet mouth. “Well, I’d say it’s an unusual pastime for an eight-year-old. If I were you, I’d use it. Always best to use what you have.”
“Ma’am?”
“I’m sure the class would be interested to hear about it. You could bring in one of the puppets.”
“But—”
“Yes, Donovan?”
Miss Steinhardt moved one of her Mary Janes over the other and readjusted the long tartan skirt. She looked directly into the pale but not unbeautiful face: a long nose and bright green eyes; full, almost womanly lips; and a lot of dark hair, cut into a pair of slightly ludicrous curtains on either side of his narrow face. Really a boy who might have some hope of growing up into a Robert Taylor type—fine cheekbones, for a child—if it weren’t for this absolute lack of purpose that revealed itself in every pore of his being.
“I already—g-g-got the pictures from the paper. I was planning on doing—” Donovan looked pleadingly at his teacher.
“Breathe, Donovan. It’s not an interrogation. You’re always in such a panic.”
“The museum, uptown. The one they’ve been building. They just st-started.”
“The Guggenwhatsit?”
Donovan nodded.
“Oh, well, yes, that would be fine,” said Miss Steinhardt, and wondered at the child, for she knew both G and S were the letters of his particular difficulty. She returned to her nails. Donovan, finely attuned to the moment when people grew bored of him, picked up his book bag and made his way out onto Sullivan Street, into Washington Square.
Lit by a bright fall sun, the arch looked more like its Roman progenitor than ever, and the boy found that when he walked into the leaves they made a pleasing crunch, and some wild man in the fountain was talking of Christ, and another stood on a bench singing about marijuana. His mother must never hear of his class assignment. He swore this sol
emnly to himself on Fifth Avenue, before walking as slowly as could be managed back to the mews. At that charming row of cottages he stopped and clutched a replica Victorian lamppost.
“Donovan? What are you, cracked? Get in here!”
Irving Kendal stepped out of their little blue home and took up a spot in the middle of the street. He packed a wad of tobacco into a pipe and peered over at his only son.
“Get in here. Hanging off that thing.”
The boy stayed put. It had recently come to his attention that his father’s W came out like a V, that his H had too much water in it, and that everything he said came from another era.
“Who’re you meant to be? Gene Kelly?”
Worse were the clothes: a broad-check three-piece suit in yellows and browns, cut to create the illusion of height, with widely spaced buttons and trouser legs that kicked madly at the knee. In the cottage next door, Donovan could see Miss Clayton in her elegant black-and-red kimono, standing at the window with her Maltese, Pablo, in her arms. She examined the father and then the son and gave the son a warm look of sympathy. It would be a fine thing to walk straight past Irving to go drink from Miss Clayton’s soda-stream and listen to her bebop records, or sneak a look at the nude in her bathroom, or throw a beanbag around for Pablo to snap at with his harmless jaws. But such visits had to be rationed, out of loyalty. “Four bedrooms, is it?” said Polly, if Donovan happened to visit the apartment of a friend with means. “Well. I can see how you would have enjoyed that. Naturally. I know I would. Probably wouldn’t want to come home at all.” Or: “A soda-stream! Well, that’s what disposable income means, I guess—not having anybody but yourself to dispose it on. But was it deliciously fizzy?” These conversations, much dreaded, always left Donovan with a free-floating sensation of guilt, all the less manageable for the indeterminacy of its source.
