Nobody's Looking at You

by Janet Malcolm

  * * *

  As patches of blue and orange appeared in the sky of the Sky Lounge, Yuja’s internal bad weather seemed to lift as well. She recalled her time in Europe with Gergiev: “He is amazing. This is the first time I am playing Mozart with him, and I was curious how he would do it. I did Russian stuff with him before—the energy for the Russian stuff was unbelievable. And he had the same energy for Mozart, which is scary, because it’s overwhelming for Mozart. But it put us into a good place. He has that. Claudio”—the conductor Claudio Abbado—“had that. Claudio is like intense listening. It makes you feel so scrutinizingly uncomfortable. And that place of uncomfortableness is exactly where you want to be every time you are onstage. Because that makes you play better, and that is when you are growing. Feeling comfortable is always like okay, I’ll do the thing again. Been there done that.”

  Yuja reveres Abbado, who died in 2014. When, in the interview for Limelight, she was asked what it was like to play under Abbado, she spoke of how “obscure and mysterious” the experience was. During rehearsals, “he didn’t say a word—to me at least. And then in the concert, everything just came out. You don’t really know what happens with the gestures or the energy field.… He made everyone play his or her best … without any words.”

  She spoke of her new repertoire: “It makes me happy playing Hammerklavier rather than playing Rach Three another twenty times. I used to only play pieces I was comfortable with and good at, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky. Now I propose music I won’t be comfortable with. This is the only way to get out of my skin, out of myself, and to learn.” She added, laughing, “But once in a while I crave those Russians. My heart is crying, Where are they?”

  * * *

  A week or so after Yuja’s Hammerklavier concert, the photograph that accompanies this piece1 was taken at the new Steinway piano showroom, on Sixth Avenue at Forty-Third Street. When I arrived at the showroom, around noon, Yuja, wearing one of her bandage dresses, was sitting on a table, facing a mirror, as a hair-and-makeup man from Paris applied mascara to her eyelashes. She was patient and compliant and practiced. She had done this before. There are many beautiful portraits of Yuja floating around the print and Internet worlds. After greeting me, she began lighting into Tommasini for his comment about her encores. “If instead of feeling exhausted I feel exhilarated, and want to make people happy by giving them a gift, why not do it?” she said. “It feels like home to play those familiar pieces. People play encores after much more sublime pieces. Why can’t you do it after climbing Mt. Everest? Stupid conservative doctrine.”

  We were on a below-street-level floor, filled with pianos. The photographer, Pari Dukovic, and his three assistants were placing lights and screens around one of them. They had been there since eight-thirty in the morning (catering and hair and makeup had followed at eleven-thirty). Several of Yuja’s concert dresses were strewn around an alcove serving as a dressing room, among them the blue-green dominatrix gown she had worn to play the Hammerklavier. This was the dress finally chosen for the portrait. The hair-and-makeup man, with whom Yuja had established laughing rapport, revised something in her hairdo at her request. “My cheeks are too fat,” she said as she looked in the mirror. She ate a few forkfuls from a plate of salad that her friend Carlos Avila, a pianist who teaches at Juilliard, brought her from the catering table. Then she slipped into the blue-green dress and stepped into stiletto heels, and the photo shoot began. Yuja went to the designated piano, and Dukovic—a handsome young man, with a warm and charming manner—began circling around it, snapping pictures with a handheld camera, as she played bits and pieces of repertoire. At first, she played tentatively and quietly, starting a piece and trailing off—and then she worked her way into a horrible and wonderful pastiche of Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart, Gershwin, Horowitz, Tchaikovsky, all mushed together, playing louder and louder and faster and faster, banging with mischievous demonic force, as Dukovic continued his circling and snapping, like the photographer in the famous orgasmic scene in Blowup. Yuja ended with a parodic crescendo as Dukovic shouted, “I love you!” and she burst into laughter.

  The arresting photograph that was chosen out of the hundreds, possibly thousands, of pictures Dukovic took of Yuja at the piano and, later, in the first-floor showroom, posed full figure in front of a piano with its lid up, represents her as no concertgoer has ever seen her. The wild disorder of the hair has never been seen in a concert hall. (Yuja’s hair tends to stay in place throughout even the most rousing of her performances.) And the foreshortened, oversized hand is an obvious deviation from the consensus we call reality. Will Yuja cringe when she looks at the photograph? Or will she see it as expressive of her impudent, defiant nature and find in it, almost hear in it, an echo of her incomparable musicality?

  The New Yorker, 2016

  THREE SISTERS

  One day in late December, I was sitting at a small table on the fifth floor of the Argosy Bookshop, on East Fifty-Ninth Street, with the three beautiful sisters—Judith Lowry, Naomi Hample, and Adina Cohen—who own and run the business, which they inherited from their father, Louis Cohen, in 1991. Now in their seventies, the sisters have been at the Argosy—which sells autographs, maps, prints, and paintings, as well as old and rare books—since their early twenties. As each one graduated from college, she came to the bookshop, and found the work so congenial and was so good at it that when Cohen died the transition was seamless.

  The sisters have distinct personalities. Judith has a firstborn’s quiet augustness; she is tall and elegant and could be taken for a college president. Naomi has the second child’s ease and confidence; she is merry and vivacious and the family raconteur. Adina, arguably the most beautiful of the beautiful sisters, radiates some of the wistfulness of the baby of the family who can never catch up, though in fact she is the equal of her sisters in every facet of the family business.

  The room we were sitting in was Judith’s domain. She is an authority on English and American first editions, and a large collection of them is housed here, the most valuable in a locked case and others on open shelves. On the floor above, Naomi tends a large collection of autographs, letters, and historical documents. But both spend at least two-thirds of the working day on the ground floor, in the bookshop proper, where the life of the enterprise is lodged.

  The daughters were very fond of their father—they refer to him as Lou—and have a repertoire of stories about his adventures in the antiquarian book trade that illustrate his cleverness and boldness. Adina told an anecdote from the days of cutthroat competition for books among dealers:

  “One day, Lou went to an apartment whose owner was selling his library. There was another book dealer already there, and Lou saw the book dealer point to him and heard him say to the owner, in Yiddish, ‘I’ll top whatever he offers you.’ My father had blue eyes and the dealer assumed he wasn’t Jewish. Lou went up to the owner and said—in Yiddish—‘And I’ll top that.’”

  Naomi recalled another instance of Cohen’s quick wit. It was during the Depression, and he had sent out penny postcards to people in the Social Register asking if they had books to dispose of. Many did. “Once, he went to a house in Tuxedo Park, and a very society type of woman came to the door and said, ‘And you are Mr.’”—she paused meaningfully—“‘Cohen?’ And he—knowing what was coming, namely that ‘I would not sell my books to the likes of you’—said, ‘Yes, I am Mr. Cullen—C-U-L-L-E-N.’ He got the books.”

  Naomi then began a long story about a book-buying expedition she had accompanied her father on when she was ten. “It’s a very vivid memory. A Dr. Hart, who lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, came into the store and said he had a houseful of books to sell—all medical.”

  Judith said, “I think you’re wrong that it was all medical books. He had every subject, from animal studies to—”

  “No, it was a medical library,” Naomi said. “There may have been other subjects. But it was a medical library.”

  “I don
’t think so,” Judith said.

  “I don’t know,” Adina said. “I was only four.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” Judith said.

  “So we drove to Bridgeport—”

  “You went with him?” Judith said.

  “I did go.”

  “When you were ten years old?”

  “Absolutely. It was one of the big moments of my childhood.”

  “I didn’t go,” Judith said, “though I certainly know the story.”

  “Well,” Naomi went on, “the house was on the main street of Bridgeport and it was full of books. The stairs were lined with books. There were aisles of bookcases in every room and piles of books everywhere. No one lived there. Dr. Hart had been pushed out of the house by the books and lived somewhere else. There was no way you could assess this library, so Lou pulled a price out of his head, a lowish price, because it was just a nightmare. And Dr. Hart was so relieved that someone was actually interested in the books that he said yes. But he said you have to take them all. Lou said all right and we made many trips there—we only had a station wagon then—and I remember Lou would go through the books and say, ‘I’ll take this one, I’ll take that one,’ and when he came to a book he didn’t want he threw it out the window.”

  “No,” Judith said. “He couldn’t have thrown books out the window.”

  “Judy—”

  “I have told this story myself many times and—”

  “But I was there.”

  “Memory is a strange thing. What happened was that—”

  Naomi glared at Judith. “I can’t believe that you are telling me what my experience was.”

  Any reader who has a sibling or siblings will recognize this exchange and its tone. The invisible cord that binds siblings together is wrapped in an insulation of asperity. Sisters, perhaps more than brothers, unendingly irritate one another and scrap with one another. And yet, until this moment—during all the hours over a period of several weeks that I had spent at the Argosy observing its workings—I had seen nothing but an almost preternatural amity flowing between the sisters. They seemed to be of one mind about how the business is to be run and how its functions are to be performed. The spat that had just taken place ended the way spats between cats from the same litter do—it dissolved into nothing. The dust of rivalrous feeling that memory had stirred up settled. Naomi, with a gesture of friendly irony, turned over the telling of the story of Dr. Hart’s library to Judith.

  Judith said, “After Lou had taken half the books out of the house, something terrible happened. Dr. Hart had an offer on the house and he accepted it. He said to Lou, ‘You have got to get these books out of here in a month’—which was impossible. So Lou matched the offer and bought the house. Then he could take his time removing the books. Eventually, he sold the house.”

  * * *

  In 1953, Cohen took what proved to be his most decisive step for the bookstore. He bought the building on Fifty-Ninth Street that the Argosy now occupies—a nondescript six-story commercial building with a bar on the ground floor and a lampshade business and dance studio above. At the time, the Argosy was one door down, in a town house that was part of a row of brownstones in which Cohen and other booksellers were renting space for their shops. In 1963, as if on cue, a developer bought up the brownstones and tore them down, in order to build a forty-story skyscraper. As Cohen’s fellow booksellers dispersed like ants hysterically fleeing a wantonly destroyed nest, he serenely moved his bookstore into the refuge next door, where it remains a picturesque anomaly on a street of sleek tall buildings and shops such as Williams-Sonoma, Banana Republic, and Sherry-Lehmann Wine and Spirits. The developer tried to buy Cohen’s building, but Cohen turned him down. The developer kept raising his price, and Cohen kept turning him down. Everyone has his price, the developer believed, but Cohen had no price. “Everything Lou did was for the business,” Naomi said. “When he bought the building, he was not thinking real estate. He was not thinking about turning a profit. He only wanted to protect the business.” The daughters, who have had repeated offers for the building over the years, feel the same way. “We’re safe here,” Naomi said. “I can’t even imagine the panic of the people who are renting in New York. What will next month bring?”

  Next month, as it happens, or the next few months, will bring, if not panic, serious unpleasantness to the Argosy. The bookshop is not the only anomaly on the block. Next door, on its east side, there is a squat, unusually ugly four-story brick building with a fast-food shop on the ground floor, a business that rents tuxedos and does “expert tailoring and alterations” on the second, and Dawn Electrolysis on the third. Over the years, the owner resolutely refused all offers from developers, but finally was unable to resist forty-nine million dollars. So the squat building will be demolished, and a thirty-story structure will rise in its place. The sisters—who were approached in vain by the developer, as their father had been in 1963—retain their feeling of virtuous safety, even as they brace themselves for the time of blasting and jackhammering and the loss of business when the cranes arrive and the sidewalk is made inaccessible.

  * * *

  Louis Cohen was the seventh child of a Lower East Side immigrant family, whose childhood was darkened and harshened by a catastrophic event that occurred in 1903, when he was in his mother’s womb. In an unpublished autobiography, written late in life, Cohen reconstructed the event:

  My father was the owner of a small neighborhood bakery.… He was a kindly man and would personally carry bread to destitute families in walk up tenements. On one of his errands of mercy, with his basket on his shoulder, he presented a good target. Some hoodlums threw snowballs-iceballs from across the street. He was hurt, put his basket down, and went after one of them. It seemed to be a signal for his cronies to join and attack him. He was badly beaten. Soon thereafter his vision became impaired. His optic nerve was affected. He went from doctor to doctor; they could do nothing for him. He became blind.

  He was soon homebound, and lost all desire to live. The family, I was told, had to keep all knives, scissors and sharp things out of his reach. They feared he was looking for an opportunity. I was born in the midst of this sad situation.… My mother, with her seven children in addition to her other duties, had to supervise the bakery. My father gave me all of his attention. He fed me, changed me, toilet-trained me. I was told I clung to him instinctively. My need for him brought him out of his depression.

  Cohen goes on to recall some of his sufferings at the hands of his older siblings and to give the impression that his mother was not especially tenderhearted. But the ill-starred child grew up to be a cheerful, lovable, and successful man. He found his vocation after graduating from high school, in a job as a clerk at an antiquarian bookstore called the Madison Bookstore, where, in Naomi’s words, “he fell in love with books.” She went on, “Every time he had a nickel or dime he would buy one or two books and take them home and tell his blind father, ‘I just bought this book of Dickens’s and it’s green and it cost ten cents.’ This happened over and over until the little tenement apartment was overflowing with books.”

  In 1925, Cohen borrowed five hundred dollars from an uncle and opened his own bookstore, on Fourth Avenue (then the heart of the city’s secondhand-book business), filling it with the books he had accumulated. In his autobiography, he explains how he chose the name Argosy. First, he wanted a name that started with the letter A, “as it might appear foremost on any list of bookstores.” That crass criterion done with, “I ran through some reference books, and selected ‘Argosy’ as my choice, as it had romance attached to it. It symbolized treasure and rarities carried by old Spanish galleons.”

  “He was a smart businessman, and everybody liked him,” Naomi said. “He was very pleasant and easy to deal with and he flourished.”

  “He was very kind,” Adina said.

  When Cohen moved his bookstore into its new home on Fifty-Ninth Street, he hired an architectural firm called Kramer & Kramer t
o renovate what had been a rather dismal bar, which someone set fire to on the eve of its closing. The architects transformed the gutted bar into a room of great charm, a vision of cultivation and gentility as filtered through a mid-twentieth-century aesthetic. Along the walls, they installed handcrafted bookcases and suspended green-shaded lamps, casting a warm light, over racks for displaying small old prints. Above the bookcases, on a background of green baize, they hung oil paintings of a harmless, vaguely nineteenth-century character—cows grazing in sylvan landscapes and portraits and still lifes. At the rear of the shop, they built a mezzanine for the display of leather-bound books by classic authors. Outside the store’s entrance, to give passersby a foretaste of the pleasures within, they built an arcade with a lighted ceiling, burnished wood paneling, glass cases for the display of antique prints, and a square mahogany table to accommodate bargain-priced books.

  This description of the shop and the arcade is based not on old photographs but on recent visits. Both are unchanged. The only conspicuous anachronisms are the computers that sit on some of the small tables scattered about the bookshop—tables that were there in the sixties and prove it by their sagging skirts of brown corduroy, which conceal boxes and shopping bags shoved beneath them. One of these tables, known as “the green table,” for its dark-green leather top, was the table at which Lou sat, and today Adina can often be found at it, behind several high piles of books, onto whose first pages she is penciling prices. Across the room, there is a sort of nook where Judith usually sits in front of a computer, looking at online listings of American and English first editions. Judith’s forty-five-year-old son, Ben Lowry, who started working at the bookshop fifteen years ago and is now a partner, sits at a desk near Adina. Neil Furman, an amiable, self-effacing associate, who is forty-seven, and who has also worked at the bookshop for fifteen years, and Emily Pettigrew, a young, recently hired assistant, sit at desks beneath the mezzanine. (Neil waves away the expertise he has acquired over the years: “I’m good at faking it.”) The room is quiet, almost hushed. Cardboard cartons filled with books—the spoils of the book-buying expeditions the sisters regularly make to the houses and apartments of (in most cases) the recently deceased—sit on the floor. When they are emptied, they are replaced by filled ones, stored on upper floors and in a warehouse in Brooklyn. They are the pivot on which the activity of the bookshop turns, and its lifeblood.