The Odd Woman and the City

by Vivian Gornick

I stared at him. I don’t know what he saw in my face, but his own softened perceptibly. Very quietly he said, “It doesn’t mean what it meant when you were young.”

  * * *

  Once, in the late seventies, when I was on my high horse for radical feminism, I was invited to give the commencement address at a small women’s college. I called my mother to let her know that this honor had been bestowed on me.

  “You were asked to deliver a commencement address?” she exclaimed incredulously.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You mean someone writes the speech and you give it?”

  “No,” I said, “I write the speech and I give it.”

  “Tell me,” she said the next day, “how come they asked you. I mean how is it exactly that they ask someone like you.”

  “Ma!” I said.

  And the day after that: “Do you have to show the speech to them before you give it?” she asked. “I mean, a dean or someone, he’ll see what you’re going to say?”

  “No…” I sighed. “I don’t have to show it to anyone.”

  Her eyes rested silently on my face.

  “Nu,” she said at last, “if they don’t like what you say all they’ll do is tell you to go home.”

  Meaning: After all, it is America, they can’t kill you.

  * * *

  I learned early that life was either Chekhovian or Shakespearean. In our house there was no contest. My mother lay on a couch, in a half-darkened room, one arm flung across her forehead, the other pressed against her breast. “I’m lonely!” she cried, and from every quarter of the tenement, women, and men also, flapped about, trying to assuage an anguish of the soul they took to be superior. But she turned away, her eyes closed in frantic dissatisfaction. She wanted a solace of the spirit none of them could provide. They were not the right people. No one around her was the right person. There had been only one right person, and now he was dead.

  She had elevated love to the status of the holy grail. To find love was not simply to have sexual happiness, it was to achieve a place in the universe. When she married my father, she told me, a cloud of obscurity lifted from her soul. That’s how she put it: a cloud of obscurity. Papa was magic: his look, his touch, his understanding. She leaned forward when she got to the end of this sentence. Understanding was the talismanic word. Without understanding, she said, she didn’t know she was alive; with understanding, she felt centered and in the world. In my father’s presence she responded with a depth she hadn’t known she possessed to poetry, politics, music, sex: everything. She closed her eyes dramatically. Everything. When he died, she said, “everything” went with him. The cloud over her soul returned, blacker than ever: now it blotted out the earth.

  The depression was profound and, apparently, nonnegotiable, persisting undiminished and undiluted for years on end. She could not forget the absolute rightness of what had once been hers. Whatever was now being offered, it would not do. Nothing was ever again exactly the right thing, no one exactly the right one. Refusal of the approximate took on a life of its own.

  I became my mother’s daughter. Very young, I was not able to find myself interesting without intelligent response. I required the company of minds attuned to my own, but no one around gave me back the words I needed to hear. I was forever telling the children on the block a story that had grown out of something that had just happened at school, in the grocery store, in the tenement building where I lived. I’d give them the narration, then I’d sum up, giving them the sentence that delivered the meaning of the story. After that I wanted someone to speak a sentence that would let me know my own had been received. Instead, eager looks evaporated, expressions turned puzzled or hostile, and, inevitably, someone said, “Whaddaya mean by that?”

  I grew agitated, restless, and insulting, permanently aggrieved. “How can you say that!” I cried long before I could vote. I was beside myself with my mother’s sense of deprivation. It was as though I’d been cheated at birth of the Ideal Friend, and now all I could do was register the insufficiency of the one at hand.

  I was never going to know what Keats knew before he was twenty-five, that “any set of people is as good as any other.” Now there was a Shakespearean life. Keats occupied his own experience to such a remarkable degree, he needed only the barest of human exchanges to connect with an inner clarity he himself had achieved. For that, almost anyone would do. He lived inside the heaven of a mind nourished by its own conversation. I would wander for the rest of my life in the purgatory of self-exile, always looking for the right person to talk to.

  This dead end led quickly to high-minded moralizing. I became the only fourteen-year-old girl on the block who pronounced regularly on the meaning and nature of Love with a capital L. Real love, true love, right love. You knew instantly, I declared categorically, when you were in the presence of love. If you didn’t know, it wasn’t love. If it was, whatever the obstacles, you were to give yourself to it without question, because love was the supreme intensity, the significant exaltation. It was the certainty with which I rehearsed this litany, again and again, that marked me.

  At the same time that I was pontificating about Love with a capital L, I was a girl who continually daydreamed herself up on the stage of some great auditorium, or on a platform in a public square, addressing a crowd of thousands, urging it to revolution. The conviction that one day I would have the eloquence and the vision to move people to such action was my secret thrill. Sometimes I’d feel puzzled about how I would manage life both as an agent of revolution and as a devotee of Love. Inevitably, then, a picture formed itself of me on the stage, my face glowing with purpose, and an adoring man in the audience waiting for me to come down into his arms. That seemed to cover all the bases.

  As I passed into my late teens, this image in my head of myself leading the revolution began, mysteriously, to complicate itself. I knew, of course, that a significant life included real work—work done out in the world—but now I seemed to imagine that an Ideal Partner was necessary in order to do the work. With the right man at my side, I posited, I could do it all. Without the right man … but no, that was unthinkable. There would be no without the right man. The emphasis began to shift away from doing the work to finding the right man in order to do the work. Slowly but surely, finding the right man seemed to become the work.

  In college, the girls who were my friends were literary. Every one of us identified either with George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, who mistakes a pedant for a man of intellect, or with Henry James’s Isabel Archer, who sees the evil-hearted Osmond as a man of cultivation. Those who identified with Dorothea were impressed by her prideful devotion to “standards”; those who didn’t thought her a provincial prig. Those who identified with Isabel admired her for the largeness of her emotional ambition; those who didn’t thought her dangerously naïve. Either way, my friends and I saw ourselves as potential variations of one or the other. The seriousness of our concerns lay in our preoccupation with these two fictional women.

  The problem, in both Middlemarch and Portrait of a Lady, was that of the protagonist—beautiful, intelligent, sensitive—mistaking the wrong man for the right man. As a problem, the situation seemed entirely reasonable to all of us. We saw it happening every day of the week. Among us were young women of grace, talent, and good looks attached, or becoming attached, to men dull in mind or spirit who were bound to drag them down. The prospect of such a fate haunted all of us. We each shuddered to think that we might become such women.

  Not me, I determined. If I couldn’t find the right man, I swore boldly, I’d do without.

  For nearly ten years after college I knocked about in pursuit of the holy grail: Love with a capital L, Work with a capital W. I read, I wrote, I fell into bed. I was married for ten minutes, I smoked marijuana for five. Lively and animated, I roamed the streets of New York and Europe. Somehow, nothing quite suited. I couldn’t figure out how to get down to work, and needless to say, I couldn’t stumble on the right man. In time
, a great lassitude overcame me. It was as though I’d fallen asleep on my feet and needed to be awakened.

  On the very last day of my twenties I married a scientist, a man of brooding temperament who had taken eighteen years to complete his dissertation. His difficulty made him poetic in my eyes. He, of course, was remarkably sensitive to my own divided will. During our courtship we walked together by the hour while I discoursed ardently on why I could not get to Moscow. His eyes flashed with emotion as I spoke. “My dear girl!” he would exclaim. “My beautiful, marvelous girl. You are life itself!”

  I became the interesting, conflicted personage and he the intelligent, responsive wife. The arrangement made us both happy. It felt like comradeship. At last, I thought, I had an Ideal Friend. Life seemed sweet then. Alone, I had been cramped up inside; now I felt myself breathing freely. It gave me pleasure to open my eyes in the morning and see my husband lying beside me. I experienced a comfort of the soul that I had not known before.

  One morning I awoke desolate. Why, I could not tell. Nothing had changed. He was the same, I was the same. Just a few weeks before I’d awakened feeling festive. Now I stood in the shower stricken, spots of grief dancing in the air before my eyes, the old loneliness seeping back in.

  Who is he? I thought.

  He’s not the right one, I thought.

  If only I had the right one, I thought.

  A year later we were divorced.

  I was still my mother’s daughter. Now she was the negative and I the print, but there we both were: alone at last with not the right one.

  I did not understand until years after I’d left Gerald that I was born to find the wrong man, as were Dorothea and Isabel. That’s what we were in business for. If this had not been the case, we’d all have found some useful work to do and long forgotten the whole question of the right man. But we did not forget it. We never forgot it. The elusive right man became a staple in our lives, his absence a defining experience.

  It was then that I understood the fairy tale about the princess and the pea. She wasn’t after the prince, she was after the pea. That moment when she feels the pea beneath the twenty mattresses, that is her moment of definition. It is the very meaning of her journey, why she has traveled so far, what she has come to confirm: the unholy dissatisfaction that will keep life permanently at bay.

  So it was with my mother, who spent her years sighing for the absent right one. And so it was with me.

  We were in thrall to neurotic longing, all of us—Dorothea and Isabel, my mother and I, the fairy-tale princess. Longing was what attracted us, what compelled our deepest attention. The essence, indeed, of a Chekhovian life. Think of all those Natashas sighing through three long acts for what is not, and can never be. While one (wrong) man after another listens sympathetically to the recital of a dilemma for which there is no solution.

  Gerald and I were Natasha and the Doctor forever talking, talking, talking. Behind Natasha’s enchanting conversation lies a passivity of monumental proportion—for which the Doctor is the perfect foil. Inevitably, Natasha and the Doctor must part. They have only been keeping each other company, spending their equally insufficient intent together.

  * * *

  A man and a woman sitting side by side on a bus strike up a conversation. She is black, middle-aged, well dressed; he is white, also middle-aged, slightly wild-eyed. Apropos of nothing he says to her, “I’m spiritual. I’m a very spiritual person. I accept all religions. All religions are okay by me. I hold only one thing against Christianity. Why they hate the Jews for killing Christ.” The woman turns full face to him and says, “Y’know? I’ve always thought the same thing. After all, it was the Romans who killed him. Why don’t they blame the Italians?”

  * * *

  If life begins to feel like the sum of its disabilities, I take a walk up to Times Square—home to the savviest underclass in the world—where I quickly regain perspective. On Broadway at Forty-Third Street on a windy evening in winter, a black man on a makeshift platform is speaking into a microphone. Ranged around the platform are perhaps a dozen black men and women. The man at the mike sounds like a television broadcaster. People hunched over against the wind are rushing past him, but he goes on speaking in the smooth, imperturbable tones of the evening news anchor. “It has come to my attention lately,” he says, “that sales are up on suntan lotion and sunblock. Now who do you think are the customers for this item? I’ll tell you who. White people, that’s who. Not you or I, brother. No, it’s white people.” His voice deepens. “Now what do you think of a people who keep telling us they’re superior, and…” Without warning he pauses, his eyes squeeze shut, and he screams, “They can’t even make it in the fuckin’ sun!” Back to broadcast news. “You—” He points calmly at the heads of the fleeing crowd. “The white people. Don’t even belong. On the planet.”

  * * *

  When I ran into Manny Rader on Third Avenue, I hadn’t seen him in twenty-five years. He was the older brother of the girl in the neighborhood who’d been my best friend when we were twelve. After I turned fourteen, he’d begun staring at me. As soon as I saw him on Third Avenue, I knew I had to have him.

  I have a penchant for men I’ve grown up with. They’re like chloroform on a cloth laid against my face: I inhale them, I burrow into them, I want to bury myself in them. When I was a kid I wanted to be them—these dark, skinny, street-smart boys with hot eyes and ignorant passions who came together every day at the top of the block to laugh, curse, and kibitz themselves into existence—I never got over not being one of them. It wasn’t that I envied them their shared act of imagination—the one they seemed to have inherited, it came so naturally to them—it was that it frightened me when I realized I wasn’t one of them, and never would be. I felt imperiled then: without world and without self.

  “Who’d have thought you’d turn out a writer,” Manny said to me on Third Avenue, a bemused expression on his face. And then he laughed. “You were such a pain in the ass as a kid, always hanging around where you weren’t wanted.” His laugh brought it all back to me, made me see those feelings again as though they were standing in the air before me. He had had this rich, deep laugh I used to hear when I’d pass the boys standing on the corner. Only his friends had made him laugh like that, never the girls.

  We fell into bed and astonished ourselves with a strong, sweet happiness neither of us could have dreamed was coming. One afternoon when we were making love, I went down on him. As I came up I said, “The dream of every boy in the Bronx, that the girl down the street will suck him off.” Manny lay back on the bed and laughed that unguarded, in-the-world laugh of his. It thrilled me more than anything our bodies were doing together. I stared at the wall beyond his head, thinking, I’m safe. Now he’ll never leave me. But of course I didn’t really think Manny was going to do the leaving; if anything, it would be me who skipped.

  He had walked away from everything but the women all his life. He’d gone to college on a scholarship, then left in his third year to join the army; he’d entered business with a known embezzler, and within two years the business had gone under; he rose from technician to researcher in a biology lab, then got into a fight with his boss and quit; he worked on a large national magazine where he was quickly made reporter, then editor, and then fired because he disappeared for a week without explanation. On the block he was written off as a congenital fuckup. “He can’t find himself,” his mother moaned. “That’s a nice way of putting it,” his father sneered.

  But his mother was right: Manny couldn’t find himself. Whatever the circumstance that Manny found himself in, he couldn’t find himself in it. He never repeated the same kind of work twice. Each job remained just that, a job. None of them ever became more than an apprenticeship. The events of his life refused to accumulate into experience, and he would not act as though they had. This inner refusal of his seemed to be his only gift. Certainly, it was the talent he pursued. By the time we began sleeping together, he was starting to tell him
self that refusenik was his condition and his destiny. Even though he knew better, and being with me made him see even more clearly what he already knew.

  When Manny and I hooked up, I was in a slump. That’s how I put it. “I’m in a slump.” Manny looked at me. “You’re in a slump?” he said. “What does that mean? That’s bullshit for you don’t wanna work, right? That’s what it means, doesn’t it? It means you’re a writer who doesn’t write. Even I can see that. We’re together now, what? Three months? I’ve been watching you. You don’t even sit down at the desk. You fuck away the day, day after day. Every day, you fuck it away. You did a little work, got a little recognition, and that’s it, right? You’re finished. You got no more fight in you. Right? I mean, what more do they want from you? Am I right? Have I got that right?”

  He took one look at my life, and sex gave him all the focus he needed. He saw the leakage in the pipeline, understood the drain of spirit in me. He sympathized with what he saw—the sympathy provided the connection between us as well as the heat—but he wasn’t into euphemisms.

  At forty-six, Manny was as skinny as he’d been at seventeen. I, as always, was fighting fifteen pounds of overweight. “Sweetheart,” he murmured against my breasts, burying himself in me in that way that men do, “you’re a Renoir.” I’ve never understood what it is about female flesh that sends them off like that, but whenever Manny said this I would smile into the dark with relief. I needed him to lose himself in me. I was still buying time. And I still didn’t understand for what I was buying it.

  * * *

  One year when I was teaching in Arizona, Leonard came out to visit me and we took a trip to the Grand Canyon, making a few stops here and there as we traveled across one of the most striking landscapes on earth. A day and a half into the trip, we came up over a rise, and there, as far as the eye could see, was the great western desert without a sign of human life on it. The sheer sweep of world without definition and without end took my breath away.