Intimations

by Zadie Smith

  Screengrabs

  (After Berger, before the virus)

  A MAN WITH STRONG HANDS

  Midway between work, school, Three Lives bookstore and coffee there is a nail place. It is like all the other nail places, except in size: it’s slightly larger than most. Given the nature of rent in lower Manhattan, I assume this is a good sign, that the place does well. The clientele are mostly upscale mothers, well mannered, generally quiet. They balance their iPhones against bottles of nail varnish, or read copies of Us Weekly or Vogue that the nail technicians have placed in each client’s lap, even sometimes turning the pages for them. The nail place has no decorative pretensions. It is white, clean, well spaced out. The TV mounted on the wall is silent with subtitles, and the music that replaces it is unobtrusive.

  Because of the amount of time they take, I have never had a pedicure. I don’t think I’ve had more than five manicures in twenty years, primarily because you can’t read a book at the same time. Any beauty treatment that doesn’t accommodate reading—or takes much more than ten minutes—I find I can’t accept, and so I don’t do any of them except gray hair removal (which you can both read and write through) and eyebrow threading, which takes four minutes, and even then I sometimes try to hold a folded New Yorker above my head until the girl bats it away in irritation. My indulgence is massage. Like most people my age who spend their lives bent over a laptop, my spine hurts. But I dislike full body massage. (They take too long, they’re expensive, you can’t read—although I have experimented with balancing a Kindle in my hand under the hole in the table. It doesn’t work.) I like chair massages. They fill all the criteria. No longer than half an hour, and you can read during—if you tear the paper tissue away from the sides of the face hole—and they’re relatively cheap. Every other weekday I go to the back room of this nail place. And I make good use of my time there, if the purpose of time is to fill it always with activity, never to just be in it, nor ever to acknowledge its fundamental independence from your conceptions of it. I read some Berger. I mark some student essays. I mark up an essay I’ve written. I see how many tales by Tanizaki I can get through in how many twenty-minute bursts, over the week. I am a “regular.” Nobody in the nail place knows my name but I am greeted with fond familiarity, like the 11 a.m. drunks at the White Horse Tavern down the road. I know the masseur’s name. He is Ben. He calls me “Hey, lady.” We don’t talk much—not at all once the massage has begun. But sometimes a little just before. Almost always he says ruefully, “Hey, lady, always reading. Never relax. Always reading.” His head and face are optimistic in construction. He looks like optimism. Both his skull and his face are ideally round, he is always smiling, and he makes baldness look like an achievement, like something to be perfected. His skin is the color of old paperback pages. I have assumed he is Chinese without asking, whereas he is more forward and asked early on where my hair “comes from.” I said, “Jamaica and England—via Africa,” and he said, “Ho ho ho! Interesting mix!” At which point I should have inquired after the origins of his particular phenotypic expressions but I didn’t and from that moment on it became too late to ask. Maybe he feels the same way about my name. His hands are incredibly strong. He takes each knobble of the spine and works around it, freeing something (what?), and the effect lasts for about forty-eight hours before whatever was free begins to knit itself back together in pain and I turn up on the doorstep of the nail place once more, papers or book in hand, and a few pens, and Post-it notes: “Hey, lady, here she is. Never relax . . .”

  We have two reliable subjects: the weather and public school “days off.” The two subjects are interconnected. An excess of snow can close a public school and often does—too often for either of our likings. We also feel that too many people practice too many religions, the celebrations of which result in both of us having to scramble for childcare. We have nothing against God but we don’t know what we’re going to do about next Tuesday. We say “my boy” and “your boy” when we’re groaning over what to do about next Tuesday, even though I’m sure I long ago told Ben I also have a daughter. For reasons of convenience we have settled into this symmetrical pattern. It is not the only false symmetry. The fact that school is closed for Ben’s boy is a genuine emergency; for me it is an inconvenience only. I know Ben knows this, but out of what I interpret as his customary optimism and civility and desire to maintain symmetry, he allows me to complain with him, as if my husband or I cannot work from home, or lose a day’s work, without disaster. As if me not writing for a day matters economically, personally, existentially, practically or in any way whatsoever.

  How many beauty treatments do the fifteen white-aproned women and Ben have to perform each day of the week (10–9 Monday to Saturday; 10–7:30 Sunday) to make the rent on this three-roomed place? How high are the rents on Sixth Avenue below 14th Street? High enough that the closed Barnes & Noble has stayed shuttered now for a decade, for as long as I’ve lived here. High enough that it’s difficult to imagine how such an operation as this nail place could survive for even a week without the daily turnover. High enough that even when the nail place was two-thirds full sometimes I would walk past (always being careful to cross the road to the opposite side beforehand) and see Ben standing anxiously by a hand-dryer, looking out on the street, his optimistic face transformed from the cartoon I thought I knew into a stern portrait of calculation and concern, at once mercantile and intensely humane, backlit like a del Piombo, and evidently weighed down by far more than, solely, “his boy.” Responsible, rather, for the fifteen white-trousered livelihoods behind him—and God knows how many more. There he stood, scanning for customers, hoping for walk-ins—or wondering where I was, maybe.

  A CHARACTER IN A WHEELCHAIR IN THE VESTIBULE

  We’re packing to leave and I’ve been sent out to get a certain amount of cash from the ATM, so that we have some to hand. I’ve brought a large manila envelope. It’s early days so I have no mask yet but I pull my sleeve over my hand to press the elevator button and feel outside of my body. In the lobby, there are already many suitcases; outside four car trunks are being packed. Most of our university colleagues are, like us, from somewhere else, and perhaps this somewhere else is where they are headed. Ever since I was a child my only thought or insight into apocalypse, disaster or war has been that I myself have no “survival instinct,” nor any strong desire to survive, especially if what lies on the other side of survival is just me. A book like The Road is as incomprehensible to me as a Norse myth cycle in the original language. Suicide would hold out its quiet hand to me on the first day—the first hour. And not the courageous suicide of self-slaughter, but simply the passive death that occurs if you stay under the bed as they march up the stairs, or lie down in the cornfield as the plane fitted with machine guns heads your way. I do, however, have a homing instinct, and so in my passive way have allowed a plan to be conceived: accept our friends’ invitation to stay in their empty Kerhonkson cottage for a while, and then try to get to home, to London before flying becomes impossible. “The last designated New Yorker”—that beautiful, stouthearted conception of Fran Lebowitz’s, that I will read weeks later, while still in limbo, still living in Jay and Jackie’s backyard—will not be me.

  I turn the corner onto Broadway and find it empty—which is news, at this point, as I couldn’t see it from our perch on the eleventh floor. The bank is dark beyond the vestibule, with only ATMs open for business. But it is loud in here because one of my characters is in here, Myron, from a story called “Words and Music.” I haven’t seen him since long before I wrote that story and I’m very glad to see he is alive and in such good voice, as it is fair to assume that a man in his position—homeless, legless—faces an existential battle most days. I don’t greet Myron, because he is on the phone, because the time of fictional playfulness seems over, and because his name is not really Myron. Nor, as far as I know, was he ever a particular fan of disco—a trait I took the liberty of bestowing upon him. I have no
idea what music he likes. Although I do remember, when it was my turn to push him down Broadway one time, he heard me singing some Stevie under my breath and joined in. And I know he is fond of conspiracy theories, which I have never considered anything less than an entirely rational mode of processing contemporary American reality. At present he is yelling and laughing into his cell phone, a familiar sermon I’ve heard him give before, in other contexts: the craziness of white folks.

  Look at them scuttling like rats from a sinking ship . . . and what they running from? A COLD? These people are crazy. Just wash your damn hands! Ain’t complicated. They out here acting like it’s THE END OF THE WORLD. These people make me laugh. You see me running? I’m not scared of this shit! I’m gonna be scared of the flu? In what world? No, no, no, I’m staying right where I’m at. This is my city and I’m gonna leave for this shit? These people too hilarious. They watch the news and they believe every damn word like babies that can’t even think for themselves. No, no, I ain’t running from no cold. I survived worse. I survived WAY worse shit than this.

  A WOMAN WITH A LITTLE DOG

  The funny thing about Barbara is she has a little dog who she insists is a well-behaved dog but who, in reality, either barks or tries to bite pretty much everyone who comes near—except Barbara. New residents—grad students, adjuncts—sometimes believe Barbara and bend down to pet him, but we got with the program long ago and speak to Barbara only, giving Beck a wide berth. Barbara lives alone, she’s coming up on seventy, surely, and she smokes the way I used to: with great relish and evident satisfaction. Perhaps because of all the cigarettes, she is slender and often seems somewhat frail. In the past ten years her tall, elegant body has become a little more hunched over and sometimes she uses a walker, but not always. She has a tendency to list rightwards these days, like a willow, and her bone-straight hair, that swishes like a young woman’s—and somehow always makes me think of Barbara as an ex-dancer—likewise now lists and seems permanently swept over one shoulder. Like so many downtown women, she hasn’t gotten older in the traditional feminine way, that is, by becoming in some manner less visible or quieter, less apparently confident, less abreast of what just opened at BAM or the Joyce, or what over-hyped musical just shit-the-bed on Broadway. . . . And if you ask her in a concerned tone “what she’s doing for the holidays”—because you want to consider yourself a great neighbor and maybe deliver her a pie, or, more realistically, because you plan to sigh sympathetically when she says “nothing”—you’ll find she’s just booked a solo walking tour up in the Catskills, or she’s meeting with her radical women’s group to discuss the writings of Anaïs Nin. She has a broad New York accent the precise borough and decade of which I can’t identify, except to tell you few people in Manhattan seem to have this accent anymore.

  I used to think her little dog, like our little dog, was immortal—that it would be the last designated New Yorker—but then it did die and was seamlessly replaced by an identical dog with an equally bad attitude, and Barbara continued on her slow, smoking walks around the block and we continued to bump into her. Sometimes, if I’d published a piece in a magazine that day, or a book of mine had just come out, she’d start shouting at me from six feet away, repeating some small, unlikely detail of whatever it was that had struck her, but without any further commentary, complimentary or otherwise. So, I’d be dragging shopping bags back from Morton Williams and suddenly hear: “Myron likes his disco! Yeah, I saw that one. Me and my girlfriends, we read that one. You having a good day? They say it’s gonna rain later.”

  There is an ideal, rent-controlled city dweller who appears to experience no self-pity, who knows exactly how long to talk to someone in the street, who creates community without overly sentimentalizing the concept—or ever saying aloud the word “community”—and who always picks up after their dog, even if it’s physically painful to do so. Whose daily breakfast is a cigarette and a croissant from the French place on the corner, although to accommodate her new walker, Barbara now eats and smokes on the bench outside the hairdresser, properly intended for clients of the salon. But no one minds because this is Barbara and Beck we’re talking about, regular in their habits and known to all. There she sat on that last day—I was passing with my little dog; a final chance for Maud to pee before we put her in the rental car—and I could see Barbara was preparing to bark one of her ambivalent declamations at me, about the weather or a piece of prose, or some new outrage committed by the leader of a country which, in Barbara’s mind, only theoretically includes her own city. Already missing New York, I was keen to hear it. Instead she sucked hard on her cigarette and said, in a voice far quieter than I’d ever heard her use: “Thing is, we’re a community, and we got each other’s back. You’ll be there for me, and I’ll be there for you, and we’ll all be there for each other, the whole building. Nothing to be afraid of—we’ll get through this, all of us, together.”

  “Yes, we will,” I whispered, hardly audible, even to myself, and walked on, maintaining a six-foot distance, whether to conform with the new regulations or to avoid Beck biting me in some vulnerable spot I couldn’t tell.

  A HOVERING YOUNG MAN

  We look like we could be family—cousins. Transatlantic cousins. He is very American: super-enthusiastic, a little goofy, forever wishing a good day upon me. A self-described “IT Guy,” he works at the university library, and although he never gave me any IT advice (I never asked for any) he liked to let me know that the offer was wide open, any time, yep, any time at all. Once, during my first days in the city, I went for a walk in Chelsea and passed a brick-and-mortar shop that made personalized T-shirts. I retraced my steps, went inside, and fifteen minutes later emerged with a jersey top in two shades of brown, with BLACK NERD in large type across the chest. And this is the exact phrase that pops into my mind whenever Cy-the-IT-Guy accosts me (usually from behind) as I walk through the square, with his inimitable energy, slightly exophthalmic, puggish eyes, and irregularly coiled, unpredictable Afro, so like my own. The last time I saw him he was on a hoverboard. He appeared suddenly, speaking in his runaway manner, with as little preamble as he had manifested physically. If I didn’t look down he appeared to be levitating by my side, a twenty-first-century daemon, or a surveillance officer, sent from some NYU central authority to shadow me as I walked.

  I always tell my students: “A style is a means of insisting on something.” A line of Sontag’s. Every semester I repeat it, and every year the meaning of this sentence extends and deepens in my mind, blooming and multiplying like a virus, until it covers not just literary aesthetics and the films of Leni Riefenstahl but bedrooms, gardens, makeup, spectacles, camera angles, dances, gaits, gestures, sexual positions, haircuts, iPhone covers, bathroom taps, fonts, drink orders, dogs and people, and so much more—but people above all. Then semester ends and I forget all about it for a while. The world stops being so insistent. But this day of Cy on his hoverboard was right in the middle of semester and as he materialized beside me his vibe, his energy, his aura—whatever word is usually attached to the affect of a human being—appeared to me to be a means of insisting on something, a way of moving through the world, that was uniquely Cy’s, Cy’s absolutely, and which I could see with particular clarity that day precisely because I hardly knew him. Just as, when I first saw La Pedrera, in Barcelona, it struck me more as a belief system than a building, my ignorance of Gaudí being almost total. When we look at familiar things, at familiar people, style recedes, or becomes totally invisible. (Sontag makes the same point about “realism.”) But in fact everything has a style—and the same amount of it, even if we value or interpret each iteration differently.

  The style of Cy was youthful exuberance, it was a kind of giddy joy so irrepressible no doubt some doctor has marked it on a spectrum. It had something in common with those kids of my generation who took apart Atari joysticks to see how they worked, who remember no greater joy in a cinema than the moment Marty McFly rode a pink flying
skateboard over a municipal pond, and yes, structurally, the style of Cy was probably not a million miles distant from Carlton doing that dumb dance from The Fresh Prince. . . . But it was purer than all these because such secondary manifestations can only record, reflect and attempt to attract to themselves an energy that, as it turns out, is already in existence—in this case, the style of Cy that I’m trying to get across to you. I can see that it is a style that connects him with many other souls who are in possession of similar styles (and this family resemblance is hopefully what allows you to bring Cy to mind as I describe him) but still—in the form I experienced it that day in the park—Cy’s particular form of insistence was unique. The style of Cy. What a precious thing.