A Weekend in New York

by Benjamin Markovits

  Liesel got off at West 4th Street and stepped out of the subway onto Sixth Avenue. It’s true, the city was very bewildering. Her knee hurt her, the subway steps were difficult. Instead of checking her map, she asked a woman pushing a stroller how to get to Washington Square. Policemen and women with children, she thought; that was the advice she used to give her kids, when they were lost. Ask a policeman or a woman with a child. The woman pointed – the leather bag on her shoulder slipped down to her elbow, but she held her arm out straight anyway, and the fact is, Liesel should have been able to guess. There was a little concentration of green at the end of the block. She walked towards it, and then, when she reached the square, found a bench under one of the trees and sat down. She was a little early, Bill had to catch a train, which is why she left the house when she did, to keep him company. And she liked Washington Square. It was like an American version of a European square, bigger and greener, but the idea was the same. So that people should come and run into each other, so that there should be some common life. It was only half past nine but already a group of kids with backpacks were kicking something small, like a little beanbag, in the air. When it fell on the ground, they shouted good-naturedly and complained to each other. Old men played chess, three women in spandex stretched themselves against a lamppost, talking, someone read a book. A man in a suit sat with a McDonald’s paper bag between his legs and drank coffee. Liesel liked looking around. Again and again the sense of how far she had come in the world, without having to change too much, comforted her. Some people didn’t have to change much to get along; she used to think Paul was like that.

  But maybe she also underestimated what she had gone through. The prospect of her interview made her begin to go over old stories, to narrate them. That first year in America she cried herself to sleep every night. In those days, you had to take a boat to get back home; four thousand miles meant something. And everything in America seemed unreal to her. The air, for example, which was piped in winter from heating vents and made her skin dry; she got into a lot of arguments about opening windows. The bread tasted like cotton. Even the money looked fake – she couldn’t believe it when she saw, written above that image of the White House on a dollar bill, the words, In God We Trust. But she liked American Jews, right from the beginning. Who knows why – some cultural attraction. Mutti once said to her, I wish I could say Jew the way you do. Without a kind of special consciousness, she meant. Liesel didn’t know what to tell her. Now here she was, almost fifty years later. Her husband was Jewish, her kids were vaguely Jewish, and she was sitting in Washington Square on her way to breakfast with a reporter from the Village Voice. To talk about her German childhood. In a long life, everything gets used.

  She found the café easily enough – one of these places with small round tables and ornate metal chairs, all crowded in together; black and white tiles on the floor, brick walls with plants hanging off them, old-fashioned mirrors. There was a bar running along the side, and it looked like they were just opening up. A woman with a nose-ring emptied a dishwasher. She looked tired or hung over and dried the glasses with a dirty kitchen towel. She had some acne on her nose, which made the ring, a small diamond stud, appear painful, but she was otherwise pretty enough. There was only one other person in the café, a studenty type, eating eggs; his backpack was on the floor, he was playing around on his phone. Maybe he worked there, too. Liesel asked for an Americano and sat down near the window. The woman was late, and Liesel began to worry that she had the wrong place or the wrong time. For some reason she was feeling nervous or unsettled; it was hard to pin down. Maybe she was just anxious about the interview. You have a coffee with someone, you talk about yourself, you seem to get along fine, and then they write what they want, and it seems to bear no resemblance – to what you think of yourself or even to the tone of your conversation. But she was also worried about her kids. About Jean, who seemed to be dealing with something privately, about Paul, who was fighting with Dana, about Dana, who didn’t know what to do with herself, about Nathan … Her worries about Nathan were complicated and somehow not entirely disinterested. She had too much at stake, you get over-involved with your first child. Or under-involved. It’s like a kind of wrestling match that neither one of you ever completely grows out of.

  But even this didn’t bother her very much, sitting in the café – the coffee had come, surprisingly watery, dirty-colored, but perfectly drinkable. There was a little wrapped biscuit in the saucer, which she ate. Bill hated stopping for coffee; he hated spending money on what you could make more cheaply at home.

  She had finished her first cup when a woman came up, carrying too many bags, looking breathless and putting on a smile of apology or anticipation. ‘Liesel, can I call you Liesel?’ the woman said. ‘I’m late, I know. It’s very unprofessional, and I’d like to say it’s totally out of character, but …’

  Even sitting down seemed to require intricate maneuvers. She had a handbag and a computer satchel and a water bottle and a coat, which she didn’t need. Her name was Karen and then something Polish-sounding, maybe Bartkowski, and she wore a button-up white shirt (wide open at the neck) and a dark skirt and tights and high boots. Her hair was blonde but streaked and not quite curly or straight. She gave off a kind of heat, of exertion or entropy, you could almost feel it, which explained the undone buttons and the untucked shirt and the breathless manner. Her face, in repose, might have been pretty, but she smiled too much, apologetically, and her teeth weren’t particularly good. She looked about forty-five years old and Liesel basically liked her.

  Karen ordered an espresso then took a long pull from her water bottle. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’m here, you’re here. Okay. Breathe,’ and laughed.

  She put her phone on the table and asked if Liesel minded being recorded. She did, a little, but said, no, of course. The espresso came, it was the guy with the backpack who brought it; and then the woman with the nose-ring refilled Liesel’s cup from a thermos jug. Karen began by saying ‘how much she loved’ the book, which annoyed Liesel. She had a theory that it was one of those things Americans have to say, like have a nice day. Sometimes they even believe it.

  But it didn’t get better from there. Karen asked a lot of questions but didn’t always wait for the answers. It amazed Liesel (this wasn’t the first time she’d been interviewed) how often people interrupted her. They had their own ideas about the book, and the interview was really just a chance to run them by you. Again, Liesel minded a little but not much. Most of what she had to say she had said before – some of it she had even written in the book. There was something depressing about repeating yourself in this way. At least if they talked, you didn’t have to. But she also had the sense that they were wrangling about events that had actually happened to her and which this woman had clearly misunderstood. Karen wanted to argue that the book showed how children of the Third Reich were deceived and implicated along with everybody else – that the book was Liesel’s attempt to wake up to that deception and acknowledge it. But this wasn’t Liesel’s point at all. She had had a happy childhood and a wise, loving mother. There was no deception, at least, nothing that would have mattered to her as a child. Even in the middle of terrible political events, pockets of ordinary, innocent and happy family life remain possible.

  After half an hour, the phone started to ring, and Karen looked at the name and said, ‘Oh, shit,’ and picked it up. ‘Give me ten minutes,’ she said to whoever was on the line and clicked off again.

  A friend of hers was coming to stay from San Diego and Karen had totally forgotten about it. She had had a kind of feeling all morning that there was some reason she shouldn’t go out but couldn’t remember why.

  ‘It’s only ten minutes away,’ she said. ‘Do you want to wait or you can come too and we can do this in my apartment.’

  ‘I’m afraid, with my knee, I can’t walk very fast.’

  ‘I meant ten minutes in a cab.’

  So that’s what they did and somehow
Liesel ended up paying for the taxi. Karen ran out of hard cash settling the coffee bill. It didn’t matter, Liesel said, and really it didn’t matter, but you resent it anyway. You want things done right. Not just out of respect, though that was part of it. Out of respect for the whole business, Liesel thought. It wasn’t personal, but you want to be involved with serious people, who do things the right way, so that you can tell yourself, this is the world I belong to. Whereas in fact she ended up asking for a receipt from the cab driver, a black man with a friendly, very quick foreign accent, who scribbled something illegible onto one of his cards. Liesel put the card in her purse, even though Karen tried to take it from her.

  ‘I can probably get it back from the magazine,’ Karen said.

  But by this point, Liesel was annoyed and insistent. ‘My husband would say, it’s a tax deduction.’ Later, on her way uptown, she threw the receipt into a trashcan next to the subway entrance.

  Karen lived quite far east, past Avenue A, on a side street, in an ugly but not very tall block of apartments, which looked recently built. At least the scale was human, there were only five floors. But the hallway was depressing, there were municipal-looking tiles on the floor, which showed footprints of dirt; the lighting was poor. And there wasn’t an elevator. Liesel, with her knee hurting, had to walk up three flights of stairs. Their steps made a loud, hollow sound underfoot, everything echoed. There were galleries or corridors running off the stairwell, with four or five doors on each floor. A woman was sitting on her suitcase outside one of them. She appeared to be roughly Karen’s age but dressed like a much younger person – she had heavy boots on, and black jeans, and a man’s plaid shirt. She was slightly overweight but also looked strong and well, even after her long flight, and had made herself comfortable on the suitcase and didn’t seem impatient or annoyed.

  ‘Somebody let me in, so I figured I might as well lug this stuff up here,’ she said, pushing herself up, with her hands on her knees.

  ‘I’m a jerk,’ Karen told her and gave her a hug. ‘This is Liesel, she’s a trouper.’

  This annoyed Liesel, too, but she got over it.

  In fact, she was curious about the apartment, she was curious to see how someone like Karen Bartkowski lived. By which she meant a journalist for the Village Voice, a freelance writer in New York – a youngish or middle-aged woman without kids, who had made a life for herself in the city, doing more or less what she wanted. There was a kitchen with a dirty linoleum floor and a gate-legged table pushed up against one wall. On the other side, the window over the sink stood half-open, with pots of herbs ranged across the sill. Their leaves pushed against the dirty screen. Everything was dirty, but homely, too. The living room was crowded with plants and furniture.

  Karen said, ‘It doesn’t normally look like this. My aunt died and I’m the only one left in New York, so I guess that makes me the big winner. I couldn’t bring myself to give this stuff away.’

  ‘Which is my couch?’ her friend said.

  ‘You can have the bedroom.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, I’m not turfing you out.’

  ‘I don’t mind, let’s talk about it later. I don’t mind sharing either.’

  Liesel had to admit, they were good friends, nice people.

  The woman’s name was Pam, she was a photographer. Karen made tea and then they carried it outside, which meant going up more stairs, and onto the roof, which was split into different sections. There were deckchairs and grills and bicycles, Astroturf carpets, a metal coffee table, rusted and peeling, and all kinds of pots and plants. It was turning into a nice day, getting warmer; you could hear the traffic carrying on in the streets below, but you could also hear birds, a plane went by overhead, and Karen pointed to the wide brick wall of an old apartment block next door and said that sometimes in the summer they projected movies onto it.

  Pam worked with video as well and had brought her camera along. Karen started the interview again. Pam filmed them. Liesel felt self-conscious at first, but she also found it pleasant, sitting on the cluttered rooftop, drinking tea and talking about herself, about her childhood. But she also felt excluded from something, she felt like a visitor. She thought maybe Pam and Karen had things to catch up on and she was in the way. But they assured her, no, they were very interested in what she had to say, Pam, too, and somehow this made Liesel feel old as well as flattered. She kept talking.

  Afterwards, on her way out, they stopped by the apartment again, so that Liesel could use the bathroom and pick up her purse. ‘So what do you do when you come to New York?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ Pam said. ‘We’ll think of something.’

  She had a gallery in New York, she had an agent, there were people she needed to see – people she liked, but these were also business relationships. She looked forward to seeing them but she looked forward to seeing people like Karen more.

  ‘What do you mean, people like me?’ Karen asked. ‘How many are there?’

  ‘Just you,’ Pam told her. Also, she wanted to visit the museums. San Diego had some great museums, too, but not like New York.

  Karen walked Liesel down to the lobby. She checked her mailbox and held the door. She said, ‘I don’t know whether to hug you or shake your hand. I’m going to hug you,’ and Liesel had to respond with an arm to her embrace. She had never much liked the confident way women claim each other, especially American women.

  She said, ‘Do you know when the piece will come out?’

  ‘Hard to say. My editor there can be a little tricky to pin down. I’ll let you know. The video is great, by the way. That really helps.’

  And then Liesel was in the street, on her own again – she had forgotten to ask directions to the subway. She looked up and down and decided to walk towards the busier intersection, towards the traffic. But that doesn’t always work in New York, the subway stations can be hard to find. Part of her thought, just get in a cab, but she knew Bill wouldn’t like it, and she also wanted to prove to herself she could get around New York. Somehow the flavor of the women’s friendship, Karen’s apartment, the sense she had of the day ahead of them, with nothing to do and nowhere to be, maybe they would talk about men or go to a bar in the early afternoon, made her want to find her own way home. Something about the whole experience had unsettled her, she couldn’t tell what.

  She reached the corner and looked around – she could never distinguish north from south in Manhattan. Bill would correct her and say, uptown or down. Anyway, the cross street signs were too far for her to see. But she started walking and told herself, it’s nice to be in a city, there are things to look at, shops and people. This is the reason you want to move here. If the numbers go up, it’s up. She passed East 4th, and thought, at least I’m heading in the right direction, but she didn’t notice any subway signs. It amused her always, the way corner stores in Manhattan called themselves delicatessens, when all they had were a few big slabs of dry cheese under a glass counter, and some sliced bologna. She came to a park or square, one of these New York parks made up mostly of tall trees and stony paths, and fenced-off bits with flowers. But there were grassy areas, too, people were sunbathing. By this point it was half past twelve, she was tired and hungry, sweating lightly, which made her eyes sting, so she took off her glasses and put them on again, feeling both anxious and slightly exhilarated.

  There was nothing to stop her from getting something to eat, and, in fact, several cafés and restaurants overlooked the park. Some of them even had tables on the pavement. Bill disliked eating outside, he felt the cold, bugs bothered him, he wanted to concentrate on the food. She crossed over the road and walked past a pizza place and then a kind of brunchy place – someone had put flowers in jam jars on all of the tables, blue and yellow irises, but the flowers turned out to be plastic. It didn’t matter, she sat down. Whenever you do this kind of thing, talk about yourself, about a book, for publicity, afterwards there’s a kind of letdown. Not a letdown exactly, but you get a little wave of performance
anxiety, you want somebody to say, well done, you were great. But even if they do, you don’t believe them; and even if you do believe them, you feel a kind of distaste for your own self-presentation; a self-distaste. Just the way Karen had said, at the end, my editor can be kind of tricky – as if you were asking her for a favor. When really, she had contacted me. And suddenly the notion occurred to Liesel (she couldn’t tell how crazy it was) that Karen was working on spec, without a commission, hoping to place her interview in the Village Voice, or somewhere else. Which is why she also said, the video would ‘really help.’ Even when she said it this struck Liesel as odd.

  A waiter should have come by now. But then a girl stopped at her table with a sweating plastic jug full of ice water and poured her some, and Liesel said, ‘Can I have a menu?’ and the girl took out a dirty sheet of paper from her apron.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Liesel told her, looking in her purse for her reading glasses. ‘Don’t go anywhere.’

  She ordered an omelet and a glass of apple juice, for the sugar. The apple juice arrived very quickly. There was a fair amount of traffic in the street, it was quite loud, you could see the park only between moving cars. People going in and coming out of the gates, a few of them on rollerblades, others carrying musical instruments or their lunch in a bag. But still it was very pleasant to sit on the pavement and watch them. Especially when the food came, an acceptable omelet. Bill hated eating at this kind of place. But he was getting better. Sometimes he sat with her and didn’t order anything, and then he finished her food, when she said that she’d had enough. In fact, she was hungry now and ate everything, even the little salad on the side. It didn’t matter much about the interview. You thought you were going to have a glamorous experience and instead what you had was … But actually there was a kind of glamor. The two childless women in their forties, the roof garden, Karen’s apartment where she lived alone, only four or five blocks from this pretty park, in the middle of a lively neighbourhood, and maybe what Liesel felt was left out of it.