The Odd Woman and the City

by Vivian Gornick

  * * *

  Leonard has a friend, Tom, who is a great collector of parables. For Tom, the mere act of waking in the morning is a source of apprehension; the parables comfort and refresh him. The other day Leonard repeated two of Tom’s newest to me. In the first, “A woman falls off an ocean liner. Hours later, she is missed. The crew turns the ship around. They go back and they find her because she’s still swimming.” In the second, “A man decides to kill himself, jumps off a high bridge, changes his mind in midair, shapes his body into a dive, and survives.” Life is hell, the species is doomed, but ya gotta keep swimming.

  “Why do you think in the first story the protagonist is a woman, in the second a man?” I asked Leonard.

  “But the man is gay, dummy!” he replied. “The woman has fallen off the boat, she hasn’t jumped, and she’ll be damned if an accident is going to do her in; she starts swimming immediately. The man, on the other hand, is all suicidal indecisiveness. He’s more than halfway into his plunge before he decides it’s better to live than to die. Gay, definitely.”

  * * *

  There are two categories of friendship: those in which people enliven one another and those in which people must be enlivened to be with one another. In the first category one clears the decks to be together; in the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule.

  I used to think this distinction more a matter of one-on-one relationships than I now do. These days I look upon it more as a matter of temperament. That is, there are people who are temperamentally inclined to be enlivened, and others for whom it is work. Those who are inclined are eager to feel expressive; those for whom it’s work are more receptive to melancholia.

  New York friendships are an education in the struggle between devotion to the melancholy and attraction to the expressive. The pavements are filled with those longing to escape the prison sentence of the one into the promise of the other. There are times when the city seems to reel beneath its impact.

  * * *

  A few weeks ago a woman who lives on my floor invited me to a Sunday brunch. This woman has taught grade school for years, but she looks upon teaching as a day job. In real life, she says, she is an actor. None of the people at the brunch—all in their forties and fifties—knew one another well, and some didn’t know the others at all, but it soon became clear that everyone at the table also thought of the work they did as day jobs; every one of them saw him- or herself as having a vocation in the arts, albeit one without material achievement. The chatter on that Sunday morning was animated by one account after another of this or that failed audition or publication or gallery showing, each one ending with “I didn’t prepare hard enough,” or “I knew I should have rewritten the beginning,” or “I don’t send out enough slides.” What was striking was the sympathy that each self-reproach called to life in the others. “Oh, you’re too hard on yourself!” was heard more than once. Then, abruptly, looking directly at the last person to say “You’re too hard on yourself,” a woman who’d been silent started to speak.

  “When I got divorced,” she said, “I had to sell the house in Westchester. A couple in the business of importing Chinese furniture and art objects bought the house and began moving things in a week before I was to leave. One night I went down into the basement and began looking through some of their crates. I found a pair of beautiful porcelain vases. On impulse, I took one. I thought, They’ve got everything, I’ve got nothing, why shouldn’t I? When I moved, I took the vase with me. A week later the husband called and said this funny thing had happened, one of this pair of vases had disappeared, did I know anything about it. No, I said, sounding as bemused as he, I didn’t know anything about it, I’d never even seen the vases. I felt awful then. But I didn’t know what to do. I put the vase in a closet and never looked at it again. Ten years passed. Then I began thinking about the vase. Soon the thought of the vase began to obsess me. Finally, this past year I couldn’t stand it anymore. I packed up the vase as carefully as I could, and sent it back to them. And I wrote a separate letter, saying I didn’t know what had possessed me, why I had taken this thing that belonged to them, and I wasn’t asking for forgiveness, but here it was back. A few weeks later the wife called me. She said she’d gotten this strange letter from me, she didn’t know what I was talking about, and then this package came, and inside the package was about a thousand shards of something or other. What on earth was it that I had taken and was now sending back?”

  * * *

  Leonard and I are sitting in his living room, me in the tall gray velvet chair, he on the brown canvas couch.

  “The other day,” I tell him, “I was accused of being judgmental. What a laugh, I thought. You should have known me ten years ago. But you know? I’m tired of apologizing for being judgmental. Why shouldn’t I be judgmental? I like being judgmental. Judgmental is reassuring. Absolutes. Certainties. How I have loved them! I want them back again. Can’t I have them back again?”

  Leonard laughs and drums his fingers restlessly along the wooden armrest of his beautiful couch.

  “Everyone used to seem so grown up,” I say. “Nobody does anymore. Look at us. Forty, fifty years ago we would have been our parents. Who are we now?”

  Leonard gets up and crosses the room to a closed cabinet, opens it, and takes out a torn package of cigarettes. My eyes follow him in surprise. “What are you doing,” I say, “you’ve stopped smoking.” He shrugs and extracts a cigarette from the package.

  “They passed,” Leonard says, “that’s all. Fifty years ago you entered a closet marked ‘marriage.’ In the closet was a double set of clothes, so stiff they could stand up by themselves. A woman stepped into a dress called ‘wife’ and the man stepped into a suit called ‘husband.’ And that was it. They disappeared inside the clothes. Today, we don’t pass. We’re standing here naked. That’s all.”

  He strikes a match and holds it to his cigarette.

  “I’m not the right person for this life,” I say.

  “Who is?” he says, exhaling in my direction.

  * * *

  At ten in the morning, two old women are walking ahead of me on West Twenty-Third Street, one wearing a pink nylon sweater, the other a blue. “Did you hear?” the woman in pink says. “The pope appealed to capitalism to be kind to the poor of the world.” The woman in blue responds, “What did capitalism say?” As we’re crossing Seventh Avenue, the woman in pink shrugs. “So far it’s quiet.”

  At noon, a man at a grocery counter stands peering at the change in his hand. “You gave me $8.06,” he says to the young woman behind the cash register. “I don’t think that’s right.” She looks at the coins and says, “You’re right. It shoulda been $8.60,” and gives the man the correct change. He continues to stare at his open palm. “You put the six and the zero in the wrong place,” he says. “It shoulda been the other way around.” Now it’s the woman who stares. When at last the man turns away, I shake my head sympathetically. “What I put up with all day long,” she says with a sigh as I pile my purchases on the counter. “Would you believe this? A guy comes up to the counter with an item. It’s marked wrong. I can see right away, it’s the wrong amount. I tell him, ‘Listen, that’s the wrong price. Believe me, I know the prices, I been working in the store two years.’ He says to me, ‘That’s nothing to be proud of,’ and he marches out.”

  At three in the afternoon, a distinguished-looking couple is standing under the awning of the posh Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. The man has iron-gray hair and regular features and is wearing an expensive overcoat. The woman is alcoholic thin, has blond, marcelled hair, and is wearing mink. She looks up at him as I pass them, and her face lights up. “It’s been a wonderful afternoon,” she says. The man embraces her warmly and nods directly into her face. The scene excites my own gratitude: how delicious to see people of the moneyed classes acting with simple humanity! Later I run into Sarah, a tired socialist of my acquaintance, and I tell her about the couple on Park Avenue. She listens with her c
ustomary Marxist moroseness and says, “You think she knows from a wonderful afternoon?”

  * * *

  In the 1940s, Charles Reznikoff, a New York poet, walked the streets of his native city. Reznikoff was not a solitary—he was married, worked at a government agency, had literary friends—but the lucidity in his work comes from an inner silence so keen, so luminous, the reader cannot help feeling that he wandered because he needed some reminder of his own humanity that only the street could provide:

  I was walking along Forty-Second Street as night was falling.

  On the other side of the street was Bryant Park.

  Walking behind me were two men

  and I could hear some of their conversation:

  “What you must do,” one of them was saying to his companion,

  “is to decide on what you want to do

  “and then stick to it. Stick to it!

  “And you are sure to succeed finally.”

  I turned to look at the speaker giving such good advice

  and was not surprised to see that he was old.

  But his companion

  to whom the advice was given so earnestly,

  was just as old;

  and just then the great clock on top of a building across the park

  began to shine.

  Time and again the drama of human beings sighting each other across the isolation unfolds for Reznikoff in the street:

  During the Second World War, I was going home one night

  along a street I seldom used. All the stores were closed

  except one—a small fruit store.

  An old Italian was inside to wait on customers.

  As I was paying him I saw that he was sad.

  “You are sad,” I said to him. “What is troubling you?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I am sad.” Then he added

  in the same monotone, not looking at me:

  “My son left for the front today and I’ll never see him again.”

  “Don’t say that!” I said. “Of course you will!”

  “No,” he answered. “I’ll never see him again.”

  Afterwards, when the war was over,

  I found myself once more in that street

  and again it was late at night, dark and lonely;

  and again I saw the old man alone in the store.

  I bought some apples and looked closely at him:

  his thin wrinkled face was grim

  but not particularly sad. “How about your son?” I said.

  “Did he come back from the war?” “Yes,” he answered.

  “He was not wounded?” “No. He is all right.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Fine!”

  He took the bag of apples from my hands and groping inside

  took out one that had begun to rot

  and put in a good one instead.

  “He came back at Christmas,” he added.

  “How wonderful! That was wonderful!”

  “Yes,” he said gently, “it was wonderful.”

  He took the bag of apples from my hands again

  and took out one of the smaller apples and put in a large one.

  I often wonder what Reznikoff’s poems would sound like were he walking the streets today.

  * * *

  “Every man alone is sincere,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. “At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins … A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature.”

  * * *

  I had an affair with a downtown playwright. Two things about this man: He was an ex-alcoholic, and he was phobic about leaving the city. I was too old to think him poetic, but I did. He promised to remain sober, and he kept that promise. He promised to be faithful, but he didn’t keep that one. After he left me I suffered, in equal part, heartbreak and outrage. “You’re leaving me?” I wailed. “I’m supposed to leave you!”

  An alcoholic, Leonard shrugged.

  An ex-alcoholic, I explained.

  I don’t care what kind of alcoholic, Leonard said.

  Now, we’re walking up Sixth Avenue in midtown and suddenly—I don’t know why, maybe I’m remembering the playwright—I recall a wonderful line of Frank O’Hara’s that I saw threaded in letters of steel along the marina balustrade in Battery Park City. “One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes,” O’Hara had written. “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people don’t totally regret life.” I repeat the line to Leonard, whose eyes crinkle up with pleasure. “An overpraised poet,” he says, “but sometimes he was really quite marvelous.”

  “Yes,” I say, nodding. I can feel O’Hara’s sentence repeating itself in my head, and I’m starting to yearn toward it.

  “It’s a pity,” Leonard says, “that—”

  “He died so young,” I break in. Leonard stares at me.

  “His only bi-og-raphy was so shal-low…”

  “Oh!”

  “Hon-estly.” He peers at me. “Can’t have a serious conversation with you anymore.”

  “Okay, okay.” I pull myself together. “Yes, he does deserve a good biography.”

  “Not so much for himself,” Leonard says. “He was a mad bad boy all his life, who knows what the work would have come to, but his life was a sign of the times. It was one of those moments [the fifties] when aesthetics replaced politics, and you know gays are always welcome then. It was the end of the war, New York was at its loveliest, a few men were feeling bold enough, and unafraid enough, to be themselves openly. If you had a sense of privilege, as O’Hara did, you could push the thing to unheard-of limits. Which he did. And because he did, because he was so astonishingly bold and got away with it, things began to change.”

  As we’re passing Radio City Music Hall, Leonard looks up at the garish old movie palace. “You had to have beauty and class and Ivy League self-confidence,” he says, “all of which O’Hara had. It would have been unthinkable for someone like me to try it.”

  With these words he falls into a reverie whose rue is palpable.

  I nudge him. “But if O’Hara hadn’t lived it out then, you would not be walking here with me now.” I laugh. “Even I would not be walking here with me now.”

  He joins me in the laugh: grudgingly. He hates giving up his grievances. He equates them with the irony he says saved his life. That he will never give up.

  In the evening we have dinner at the home of a pair of psychoanalysts we both know only slightly. The people at the table are homophobic, worshipful of “values,” and avid to talk culture. The dinner is expensive, but the conversation is junk food. The analysts address themselves exclusively to me. I feel trapped. Repeatedly, I turn to Leonard to enjoy myself, but I am alone at the table. He has withdrawn into a remoteness I cannot penetrate. Later we walk through the dark and silent streets. The night is cold. We burrow into ourselves. After a time Leonard says to me, “I don’t interest them. And the part of me that’s interesting frightens them.”

  We do not draw closer because of what he has just said—I’ve been alone in his presence too many hours now—but life feels easier to bear for the clarity his words have imposed on an otherwise pointless evening.

  My friendship with Leonard began with me invoking the laws of love: the ones that involve expectancy. “We are one,” I decided shortly after we met. “You are me, I am you, it is our obligation to save each other.” It took years for me to realize this sentiment was off the mark. What we are, in fact, is a pair of solitary travelers slogging through the country of our lives, meeting up from time to time at the outer limit to give each other border reports.

  * * *

  The front door of my building is just a few steps from a subway entrance. Between the two a man stands, begging. He’s been standing here almost every day now for more than two years. His name is Arthur. He is black, in his thirties, handsome, neatly dressed. He holds a paper cup in his hand and in a
warm, patient voice intones over and over again, “Ladies and gentlemen, I wonder if you can help me out. I don’ have anywhere to sleep, and I’d sure like a little food in my stomach. I don’ drink, take drugs, or do any criminal activities. All I’m askin’ for is your support in these hard times. Anything you can spare will be appreciated.”

  I hardly ever give Arthur money—as a child of the Left I remain categorically opposed to begging—but I talk to anyone who talks to me. Arthur and I chat every morning. (How ya doin’? Okay, and you? Not bad, not bad. Don’t stay out too long, it’s gonna be cold today.) Sometimes if I’m in a hurry, all I do is wave hello. Invariably, he’ll then rag me. “Lookin’ good ta-day,” he’ll call out, “real good.” I’ll start to laugh and his voice will follow me, continuing to call out in that tender, baiting way he has.

  The other day a man came up out of the subway just as I was walking through my front door. Arthur held out his cup. The man jerked his body away from Arthur’s hand as though from something diseased, on his face a look of murderous disgust. Arthur went on droning as though nothing out of the way had occurred, but I felt ill. “What is this all about?” I cried. “Are you going to do this for the rest of your life?”

  His laughing eyes looked down at me. I was a mark like any other. “Ma’am,” he said, and went into his routine, “I look for a job, the Man he don’ wanna help me, he does everything he can to keep me down, he don’ care if I starve in the street.”

  Arthur is smart and he has words, but so do I. I stood there arguing with him. Then, in the middle of a sentence, he said sharply, “I’ll decide when the vacation is over.”