Homo Irrealis

by André Aciman

  I promise myself to come back exactly a year from now and spend a few months here, venture a new life, because here lies a new, unborn me waiting to come alive. I stare at the building above the café, only to be told by the waiter that the large archway of the building next door belonged to the Tolstoy House. No, not Leo Tolstoy, but still, a member of the same family. The building has a large courtyard that I should definitely visit later—if I head straight through its courtyard, I’ll come out the other end at number 54 on the Fontanka embankment. I want to look at the windows of every apartment in this large complex and spy into all those lives and wonder which might possibly be mine someday should I be lucky enough to come back and live here for a while.

  I want to learn Russian and say pozhaluysta when asking for a cigarette and spasibo when offered one, and I want to say prekrasnyi den’, because it is indeed a beautiful day, and poka for bye, and so many other things. And I want to come back here every morning of my stay in St. Petersburg, because I’ll find something that I know might still take days to pinpoint and understand, something in me or outside me—I’m not sure which—but in the meantime the one thing I know for certain, as I sit back in my chair, wrapping myself in a white shawl the way all Russians do when the weather isn’t warm enough, is that “I am not a sick man … not a spiteful man … not an unattractive man … and that nothing is wrong with my liver.”

  What does schastye mean? I finally ask our young waiter. He looks at me and, placing my Americano on the table, says, “Happiness.”

  ELSEWHERE ON-SCREEN

  In 1960 The Apartment was playing at the Rialto Theater and was advertised with a loud red poster. I was too young to see it at the time, but I do recall overhearing my parents describing it to their friends as an unusually bold film. What was shocking about the film was its subject. A young, rather hapless, timid junior executive named C. C. Baxter (played by Jack Lemmon) has been lending the key to his apartment to a number of married senior executives who need a place to spend a few leisurely evening hours with their mistresses. The key does the rounds of the office building, earns the young executive the goodwill of the company bosses, and eventually gets him promoted. In 1960 the subject was decidedly risqué. But something about the reaction of my parents intrigued me. They enjoyed talking about the film with their friends—about the acting, about the story itself, about this place called New York City, which neither they nor their friends had ever seen before and which hovered in the distance like one of those places none of them was ever likely to set foot in. I never forgot my parents’ fascination with the kind of New York City the film evoked, but since the film was not available on video or on late-night TV until the mid- to late 1970s, I seldom gave it another thought. Yet when I finally did see it, where I saw it and who I myself was that evening left an indelible mark.

  The year was 1984—late fall of 1984. I was single at the time, living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and had been dropped by my girlfriend a couple of months earlier. I had no money, not much of a job, and my career prospects were decidedly grim. So one Saturday, with nothing to do, no friends, nothing planned, and no desire to stay home, I went out for a walk down Broadway just to experience a Saturday evening lost in the crowd.

  At Eighty-First street, I stepped into what was then the only Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in Manhattan and was idly leafing through various books, envying couples who, like me, had wandered into the store. Then I saw Maggie. I knew Maggie from a café where the two of us used to hang out almost every evening; neither of us was attached, and neither liked being homebound on a weekend by ourselves. She was single and, like me, held a job that hardly paid anything. We were not attracted to each other, though something like a muted friendship had blossomed between us in our lonely-hearts café. That evening we couldn’t have been more pleased to run into someone we knew. We spoke, as usual made fun of our lives, and, because we were both smokers, couldn’t wait to leave the bookstore to light up. We walked down Broadway on the Upper West Side with lit cigarettes, not knowing what to do, neither of us eager to spend money at a bar.

  When we reached the Regency Theatre on Broadway and Sixty-Eighth Street, I saw that The Apartment was playing. My decision was instantaneous. As for her, who knows why she consented—because I coaxed her into joining me or because she had nothing better to do that night. I’ll never know, nor did I ask. I loved the Regency, where old double-feature films were still being played, frequently to a full house, and I loved the shape of the theater itself, which wasn’t rectangular but circular. There was a sense of intimate coziness inside, in good part because one felt in the company of people who shared a love for vintage films, which is perhaps nothing more than a love for things that endure despite their age. Later that night, I walked Maggie home, and we said goodbye in her lobby.

  But what has stayed with me ever since that evening is the echo, the reflux, the hazy afterimpression of the film. It lingered all night and into the following week.

  After leaving Maggie, I did not want to go back home and, even past midnight, continued to wander around the Upper West Side in the mid-seventies and high sixties, perhaps looking for the apartment and trying to see if the world inhabited by its characters continued to exist more than two and a half decades later. Without knowing it, I was on an improvised pilgrimage, the sort that many people take when they travel to the site of a film or novel they’ve loved and whose resonance continues to hover over their lives, almost beckoning them to slip into a world that suddenly feels more real and far more compelling than their own. It’s not just that they want the movie to stay with them indefinitely. They also want to borrow the lives of its characters, because they want the story to happen to them. Or, better yet, the film feels as though it has already happened to them, and what they’re asking the site to do for them is to help them relive what they lived through on-screen.

  So here I was, walking on the Upper West Side at night, feeling not too different from C. C. Baxter on the evenings when someone was using his apartment and he was forced to linger out in the cold. All I could find, though, was not the old Upper West Side of 1960, which I was hoping to drift into somehow, but one that was systematically being revamped and modernized. So many small, insignificant landmarks had already vanished or had their impending disappearance written all over their storefronts: groceries, bakeries, butchers, cobblers, fruit and vegetable vendors, drugstores large and small, delicatessens, and hole-in-the-wall mom-and-pop stores, to say nothing of the many neighborhood movie theaters. Now, more than thirty years after I took that walk past midnight, I want to list all these vanished theaters, because I don’t want them forgotten: the Paramount, Cinema Studio, the Embassy, the Beacon, the New Yorker, the Riviera and the Riverside, the Midtown, the Edison, the Olympia, and, of course, the Regency. The Thalia and the Symphony, now renamed Symphony Space, still exist today, but gone are the days of continuous film runs. And as for the Midtown, renamed the Metro, it was gutted a number of years ago and remains an empty shell.

  That night, as I walked on Columbus Avenue, which was being heavily gentrified but had once been quite a dicey area, I kept passing boutiques that hadn’t been there a few weeks before but whose earlier incarnation I no longer could even recall, and I felt guilty for not remembering. Maybe I’d been noticing changes in the neighborhood for longer than I knew, but only after seeing the film and the way it seemed to coddle its own tranquil, mildly shabby image of an Upper West Side that no longer existed was I made aware of how pervasive and irreversible these changes were.

  A new Manhattan was creeping into existence. The very store where I’d bought my first pair of American sneakers had disappeared, gone as well the Syrian bodega where cigarettes were cheaper than anywhere else in the city, and the numberless Botanica incense stores on Amsterdam Avenue—vanished, each one.

  At the start of the film, Jack Lemmon’s voice said that he lived at 51 West Sixty-Seventh Street, and as I was approaching that location, I felt that I was actua
lly about to enter a spellbound portal through time, until I saw something I’d never considered before: many of the brownstones between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West had had their stoops removed to allow for more renters. Worse yet, the brownstone on Sixty-Seventh Street was no longer even there. As I later found out online, it had been demolished in 1983 to allow a large apartment complex to be built on its site. I had missed the building where The Apartment had been filmed by one year. It was just like me to come looking for a building that didn’t exist any longer. Worse, as I would also discover online, I was in search of a brownstone that wasn’t even real. The brownstone that had inspired the producers to build a look-alike in Hollywood was not even on Sixty-Seventh Street but at 55 West Sixty-Ninth Street. And the Hollywood replica, as happens so often in art, was ultimately more persuasive than the brownstone allegedly located on Sixty-Seventh Street.

  I was living in a city that held no loyalty to its past and was so hastily slipping into the future that it made me feel behind the times, and, like a debtor who can’t manage his loan payments, I was perpetually in arrears. New York was disappearing before my eyes: Mrs. Lieberman, C. C. Baxter’s landlady, who spoke with a thick Brooklyn accent; Dr. Dreyfuss, who lived next door and spoke English with an audible Yiddish inflection; while Karl Matuschka, the cabbie and Fran Kubelik’s outraged brother-in-law, who punches C. C. Baxter in the jaw, thinking that Baxter had taken advantage of her, spoke with a typical outer-borough accent—all these ways of speaking already sounded dated in 1984 and have almost disappeared today. The Apartment was offering a rearview-mirror portrait of a lost New York and allowing us to think that a part of us, however small, still belonged, still missed living there.

  Once I reached Central Park West, I entered the park and there discovered the long row of benches, exactly as it was captured in the film, where a fluish and irritated C. C. Baxter sat tugging his raincoat while one of his company’s senior execs was entertaining a mistress in his apartment. Here he sat, shivering, feeling lost, unloved, and ever so solitary. I too decided to sit on one of those benches in that deserted spot in the park, trying to take stock of my life, which wasn’t going well, for I too felt abandoned, alone, and unmoored in a world where neither the present nor the future held any promise for me. There was only the past, and now that I think of the night when I scoured the streets looking for an Upper West Side that might have felt more congenial, I realize that, like the Regency itself, like the Rialto of my childhood, that welcoming area of the city, with its strange accents, old shops, and dingy bars, has been completely expunged. The Regency was gone in 1987, and the Rialto was brutally demolished in 2013. How could I belong there when I couldn’t find a personal landmark anywhere except on the silver screen of a theater that itself would never even achieve landmark status? Sometimes even the past, real or imagined, can be taken from us, and all we’re left holding on a cold night in late fall is our raincoat.

  And it hit me then that one of the reasons why some people cling to what has vintage status is not because they like things old or marginally dated, which allows them to feel that their personal time and vintage time are magically in sync; rather, it’s because the word vintage is just a figure of speech, a metaphor for saying that so many of us don’t really belong here—not in the present, or the past, or the future—but that all of us seek a life that exists elsewhere in time, or elsewhere on-screen, and that, not being able to find it, we have all learned to make do with what life throws our way. In C. C. Baxter’s case, this happened on New Year’s Eve, when Fran Kubelik—his love interest, played by Shirley MacLaine—knocks at his door, sits on his sofa, and, watching him shuffle playing cards, says, “Shut up and deal.” In my case, what life had to offer was far simpler: late that Sunday evening I went to see The Apartment again. The film was about me. All great art invariably lets us say the same thing: This was really about me. And this, in most cases, is not only a consolation, it’s an uplifting revelation that reminds us that we are not alone, that others are like us too. I couldn’t have asked for more. Then I went on the same pilgrimage as the night before.

  SWANN’S KISS

  I used to think that if the dominant principle in Machiavelli’s work was acquisition—how to acquire power, land, loyalty and, once acquired, how to keep them—for Proust it was possession—the desire, the compulsion to possess, to retain, to hoard, to hold, to have. I am not so sure now. Today I feel it is wanting that is so central to Proust—or, more precisely, yearning and longing. Yearning, as The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines it, is “a persistent, often wistful or melancholy desire.” Longing, on the other hand, is “an earnest, heartfelt desire, especially for something beyond reach.” But someone once suggested a far more subtle difference between the two: one longs for something in the future; one yearns for something in the past.

  Proust’s entire epic begins with a boy’s obsessive craving for his mother’s good-night kiss. She is downstairs entertaining guests over dinner, but the boy, who is sent to bed after leaving the table, wants his good-night kiss. And he wants a real good-night kiss, not a perfunctory peck on the cheek, which is what he gets in front of the guests. Still, on his way upstairs to his bedroom he tries his very best to keep alive the memory of his mother’s hasty kiss, to savor it, and then he plies all sorts of maneuvers to obtain the kiss he feels is still owed him. He’ll end up asking the maid Françoise to bring down a scribbled message to his mother, and when this fails to summon her upstairs, young Marcel waits until all the guests have left and intercepts his mother when she is on her way to her bedroom. She is not pleased to see that he’s disobeyed her instructions to go to bed, but the father, who also happens on the scene and who is usually less indulgent with his son, sees that Marcel is so agitated that he suggests the mother spend the night with him. Marcel finally got not just the kiss he desperately wanted all evening long but a whole night with his mother. In C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation:

  I ought then to have been happy; I was not. It struck me that my mother had just made a first concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a first step down from the ideal she had formed for me, and that for the first time she, with all her courage, had to confess herself beaten … Her anger would have been less difficult to endure than this new kindness which my childhood had not known; I felt that I had with an impious and secret finger traced a first wrinkle upon her soul and made the first white hair show upon her head.

  Marcel begins to weep, while his mother is herself on the verge of tears. The frantic desire to have, to hold, to take, and ultimately to keep may have prevented the young Marcel from going to bed after his mother had consented to her first kiss at the dinner table, but getting what he wants produces no pleasure either; instead, it yields a form of pleasure so unfamiliar as to be confused with displeasure and sorrow, neither of which can be assuaged or, for that matter, dispelled. If the kiss was a tangible sign of concord, intimacy, and love between the two, the kiss now signals distance, disenchantment, dispossession. Getting what one wants takes it away.

  With the exception of the love shared between mother and son (and grandmother), the form of love most commonly encountered in Proust has nothing to do with love. Instead, its form is the obsessive, self-tormented pursuit of the beloved to the point that she will have to be imprisoned in her lover’s home. You may not really love her, you may not want her love, even, or know what to do with that love, much less what that love is, but you cannot stop thinking and ruminating about how she might be double-crossing you. In fact, without totally knowing it—and here it is again: the specter of Proustian dispossession—even as your prisoner, your beloved will always find ways to give you the slip and cheat on you. Worse yet, you’ll even make it possible for her to double-cross you, either by turning a blind eye to those you’ve allowed her to befriend or by overlooking, if not unintentionally colluding with, her treachery. Odette may cause Swann a great deal of sorrow, but he has no respect fo
r her, nor is he truly taken in by her lies. When the two break up, he utters to himself one of the most famous closing sentences in world literature: “To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type.”

  Pages later, however, we discover that Swann has married the very woman he never loved and who, on their first meeting, had stirred in him “a sort of physical repulsion” (une sorte de répulsion physique). When we meet Swann again in Within a Budding Grove, he has long since stopped loving his wife, Odette, and indeed is now jealous over another woman. “And yet,” Proust writes,