The Odd Woman and the City

by Vivian Gornick

  The small talk that daily filled her ears, she told me, was deadening. Worse than silence, she said. Much worse.

  A mutual friend surprised me by remarking on how sad it was that Alice’s life should be winding down this way, by which our friend meant the failure of her marriage and the end of her literary career. But Alice’s losses late in life were not at all to the point as far as I was concerned. After all, she had had a very good time for many years—money, glamour, reputation, steady sex—so what if it didn’t see her through to the end? That was simply the roller-coaster ride of life common to us all, not actually a cause for sorrow. No, what mattered here was that Alice had spent a lifetime struggling to become a conscious human being whose primary delight was the use of her own mind; and now she was locked up in an atmosphere constructed to ignore—nay, discard—that long, valiant effort, when the only thing owed a human being—yes, from first to last—was to have it honored.

  I felt the paltriness then of all my former complaints about this friendship. How mean and trivial they seemed; ignoble, really. All that mattered now was my friend’s consignment—when not reading—to an exile of the mind that amounted to solitary confinement. It was as though Alice were being found guilty of having stayed alive too long. How strongly I felt the punishment in excess of the crime!

  Alice lived on in the facility for seven more years. At her funeral I discovered that the most unlikely people had also visited her regularly. I knew most of them en passant, and none, I thought, had been any closer to her than I had been—a Village feminist, a performance artist from SoHo, a cousin up in the Bronx, a program director at the public library—yet it seemed we had all shared in a fellowship devoted to the rescue of Alice-in-solitary.

  An image crossed my mind then of a circle laid down on the surface of Manhattan, with lines radiating out from the middle to the periphery. At any given moment someone in the fellowship was walking one of those lines toward the center where Alice stood waiting. When the fellow reached her, the line lit up.

  * * *

  In summer, in the tenement neighborhoods on the West Side, men play dominoes at card tables set up on the pavement, women sit talking on the stoop, kids play ball, teenagers make love, and everywhere people drink, smoke, do drugs. I once saw a pig being roasted at midnight in the middle of the street because someone had won the lottery. Throughout the day and most of the night, men and women screech, sob, laugh, quarrel at a high pitch. Emotions are unfiltered here and race about without nuance or restraint.

  One evening in July, walking down Ninth Avenue in the Forties, the street thronged with people, I saw a man and a woman standing perfectly still in the crowd. He was looking intently at her face and had a hand pressed to her arm. She, in turn, had her face twisted away from his, her eyes pressed shut, her mouth forming a wordless no. As I came abreast of them, I happened to look up and I saw a woman on a fire escape staring down with hot eyes at the man and the woman in the street, the pain in her face unmistakable. For a moment I was jealous of life in Hell’s Kitchen.

  * * *

  The street keeps moving, and you’ve got to love the movement. You’ve got to find the composition of the rhythm, lift the story from the motion, understand and not regret that the power of narrative drive is fragile, though infinite. Civilization is breaking up? The city is deranged? The century surreal? Move faster. Find the story line more quickly.

  On the Sixth Avenue bus, I get up to give an old woman my seat. She’s small and blond, wearing gold jewelry and a ratty mink coat, her hands a pair of blotchy claws with long red fingernails attached to them. “You did a good thing, dear,” she says to me, and smiles coyly. “I’m ninety years old. I was ninety yesterday.” I smile at her. “You look fantastic,” I say, “not a day over seventy-five.” Her eyes flash. “Don’t get smart,” she says.

  At a coffee counter, two women sit talking at right angles to me. One is telling the other that a woman they both know is sleeping with a much younger man. “We all tell her, he wants your money.” The woman speaking nods her head like a rag doll and lets her face go daffy in imitation of the woman she’s speaking of. “‘Right,’ she tells us, ‘and he can have it, all of it.’ Meanwhile, she looks great.”

  At Forty-Second Street, a man in front of me—skinny, young, black—suddenly lies down spread-eagle in the middle of the street just as the cars are beginning to move. I turn wildly to the man walking beside me, who, as it happens, is also skinny, young, black, and cry out at him, “Why is he doing this?” Without breaking his stride, he shrugs at me. “I don’t know, lady. Maybe he’s depressed.”

  Each day when I leave the house, I tell myself I’m going to walk up the East Side of town because the East Side is calmer, cleaner, more spacious. Yet I seem always to find myself on the crowded, filthy, volatile West Side. On the West Side life feels positively thematic. All that intelligence trapped inside all those smarts. It reminds me of why I walk. Why everyone walks.

  * * *

  When I was eight years old my mother cut a piece out of a dress I had been longing to wear to a friend’s birthday party. She grabbed a pair of sewing scissors and sliced the part of the dress that would have covered my heart if, as she said, I had had one. “You’re killing me,” she always howled, eyes squeezed shut, fists clenched, when I disobeyed her or demanded an explanation she couldn’t supply or nagged for something she wasn’t going to give me. “Any minute now I’ll be dead on the floor,” she screamed that day, “you’re so heartless.” Needless to say, I did not go to the party. Instead I cried for a week and grieved over the incident for fifty years.

  “How could you do that to a child?” I asked in later years, once when I was eighteen, again when I was thirty, yet again when I was forty-eight.

  The odd thing was that each time I raised the incident my mother would say, “That never happened.” I’d look at her then, more scornfully each time, and let her know in no uncertain terms that I was going to go on reminding her of this crime against childhood until one of us was dead.

  As the years passed and I regularly brought up the memory of the dress cutting, she just as regularly denied its veracity. So we went on, with me not believing her, and not believing her, and not believing her. Then one day, quite suddenly, I did. On a cold spring afternoon in my late fifties, I stepped off the Twenty-Third Street crosstown bus at Ninth Avenue, and as my foot hit the ground I realized that whatever it was that had happened that day more than half a century ago, it wasn’t at all what I remembered happening.

  Migod, I thought, palm clapped to forehead, it’s as though I were born to manufacture my own grievance. But why? And hold on to it for dear life. Again, why? When my hand came away from my forehead, I tipped an invisible hat to Leonard. Me too, I said silently to him. “So old and still with so little information.”

  * * *

  For the longest time, the strong, sweet happiness Manny Rader and I experienced that first night we lay down together continued to exert itself. Romantic feeling welled up in each of us with astonishing regularity: in elevators, at bus stops, in restaurant doorways, in the darkness of the movie house, in the glare of an all-night diner. Suddenly, from one or the other of us would burst, “I love you oh God I love you I can’t believe how much I love you.” It was hard to account for the irrational swell of joy we called love, much less for how entirely it overtook me. I remember thinking, Is this what besotted means?

  Manny had survived his long, puzzling melancholy by imagining himself perpetually poised for a future that had thus far eluded him. This meant making just enough money to survive and remaining marginal in all his habits. Still waiting for his life to begin, he did everything on the cheap. He drank coffee at a stand-up counter, walked everywhere he had to go, wore his clothes to shreds. The Staten Island ferry was our pleasure boat, student concerts at Juilliard our Carnegie Hall. Twofers at the theater, dinner at the diner, and excursion walks all over the city completed our social agenda.

  My own insecur
ity about money was ever-present, but I lived in a fine apartment, ate in restaurants many times a week, and spent a small but considerable sum on music, theater, and the movies. Yet Manny’s predilections invaded me easily. I fell in with them as though between this moment and the time we’d both been living in the Bronx nothing had intervened; as if I’d only learned to ape the manners of the middle class and were now reverting to type.

  It was then that I began to think about the lack of acquisitiveness in myself that I have earlier written of. When I saw Manny’s apartment, I at once understood its meaning for both of us. He lived in one large room in a loft building in Brooklyn. The room was bright and clean and neat. In it he had one bed, one table, two chairs, and a lamp; in the kitchen, two pots and a frying pan, two dinner plates, two cups, two sets of flatware, three or four drinking glasses. Minimal, I thought dryly, very minimal … and in that instant saw myself plain.

  It was as though suddenly I had come to realize that things lend warmth and color to one’s surround, give it weight, context, dimension. A world stripped of things leaves the atmosphere stark: black, white, and unpopulated. If you didn’t want things the way Manny and I didn’t want things, it could only mean you were willing to live with the confirmation of a sense of marginality strong enough to cause the brooding self to stand stock-still, for years on end.

  There in that neat, empty room I saw this long moodiness of life in Manny, and its ineluctable consequence in me. Remarkably, I felt affection for the me I saw reflected in Manny’s stripped-down space. Standing there in its doorway, I felt my heart go out to him. I embraced him, I closed with him.

  But mutual disability is an unreliable magnet. The moment always comes when it repels rather than attracts.

  Within the year it became clear that love would bring us neither peace nor stability. Nostalgia and chemistry had brought us together and were keeping us together, but the incursions on pleasure being made by needs that originate in places other than the senses began rapidly to multiply. The most vital form of connection other than sex is conversation. It was important to both Manny and me to speak, and to be heard, but within months we seemed to disagree on almost everything—and disagreement was invariably perceived as repudiation. The simplest difference in opinion became a matter for dispute; and a conversation of any substance established a failure of connection that all too often proved near fatal. Repeatedly, we startled ourselves with the quickly flaring temper that began to characterize almost every exchange. The volatility was astonishing: it leaped ahead like brushfire, and within seconds we were going down in flames.

  For my part, I passed many an hour trying to retrace the course of these conversational disasters, wondering which was the sentence offered as a stimulation that had been received as a challenge, the response that had scattered my insights, the nuance that had flattened his. Why, I wondered as I sat alone late at night, did we come so close, yet remain apart? We were both decent, intelligent, literate. We both pulled the same lever in the voting booth, read the same book reviews in the Times. Neither of us was in real estate or city government. What was going wrong here? The answer to these questions was always the same.

  Good conversation is not a matter of mutuality of interests or class concerns or commonly held ideals, it’s a matter of temperament: the thing that makes someone respond instinctively with an appreciative “I know just what you mean,” rather than the argumentative “Whaddaya mean by that?” In the presence of shared temperament, conversation almost never loses its free, unguarded flow; in its absence, one is always walking on eggshells.

  In the heat of our quarrels, I inevitably tried to calm myself by observing, “Look, we’re just not on each other’s wavelength, that’s all, different wavelengths.” I spoke these words as though I thought them a neutral evaluation of our problem, but Manny always heard them as a put-down, even though they were as true for him as they were for me. Yet it was also true, what those words meant, when I spoke them, was that in his presence my own mind became a burden to me. I grew defensive when made to explain what I should have been allowed to explore, felt closed off and then shut down.

  The irony was that the worse the quarrels became between me and Manny, the more I dreaded losing him. Within six months of our having been together, I had become terminally thin-skinned, making one scene after another because I could not control the feeling that I no longer had all of his sexual attention. In bed I knew he adored me, yet it seemed to me that he was eyeing every pretty woman in the street, that I no longer looked as sufficiently good to him as I once had. Now, his every word, every gesture, every flick of the eyes, was continually being measured against an invisible ruler marked “He loves me more today than he did yesterday, less than he did an hour ago, not as much as two weeks ago.”

  The thing was, we weren’t friends. Without friendship, we were each alone in the wilderness.

  I began to realize what everyone in the world knows and routinely forgets: that to be loved sexually is to be loved not for one’s actual self but for one’s ability to arouse desire in the other. It was a given that the powers assigned the me that Manny desired would be short-lived. Only the thoughts in one’s mind or intuitions of the spirit can attract permanently, and those in mine Manny did not love. He did not hate them, but neither did he love them. They were not necessary to him. Ultimately, this connection of the senses meant that I would be thrown back on myself to an intolerable degree, made to feel so vulnerable that I was soon drowning in self-doubt.

  I once asked Manny if he was surprised at how his life had turned out. He said to me, “I’ve always felt pulled around by forces beyond my control. I’d do what people expected of me, and then I’d get anxious. For years I knew no condition but anxiety. One day I realized the anxiety had formed me. After that there were no surprises.”

  At the end of one incendiary exchange, I flung myself on Manny’s neck. For one long moment I hung there, like dead weight. Then his arms closed around me. He smoothed my hair back with a gesture of such exquisite tenderness, I can feel it to this day. He knew that we were cashing out. Very soon now, there would be no currency left with which to buy time.

  * * *

  Leonard and I, having bought the makings of a dinner we are preparing together, are standing in line in the supermarket when an old woman, thin and trembling, already at the checker’s register, realizes she’s forgotten something. Her eyes begin to roll in her head—oh God, she’ll lose her place in the line! The high school student standing right behind her puts his hand on the old woman’s arm and asks what it is she’s forgotten. Milk, comes the answer. Leonard emits a sound of unmistakable exasperation. The student runs quick and gets the milk. The old woman says, “Oh, you are so kind, so kind, so extraordinarily kind!” The student says, “No, only moderately kind.” I beam at him—a soul mate!—but Leonard says to him, “Now, that’s an interesting distinction. Considering the circumstance, your action might seem extraordinary rather than ordinary. In New York, to go out of your way to help someone is to interrupt conventional inconvenience; delay, deflect, detain; stop the action; pursue reflection.” The student stares at him. “In short,” Leonard explains, “risk assault.”

  What I never feel in the city he feels every day of his life.

  * * *

  They met in Florence in 1880. He was thirty-seven, she forty. She was Constance Fenimore Woolson, a popular American writer of essays and stories—and he? He was Henry James. To his great surprise, he saw quickly that she was a woman of taste and judgment whose self-divisions mirrored his own. She enjoyed reputation but burrowed into obscurity; she feared loneliness yet courted solitude; she wished to be openhearted yet came off as evasive. Once, when James was considering taking a flat in Venice, Constance said to him, “I don’t imagine you on the Grand Canal,” and he replied: “No. Somewhere hidden. It does not matter quite where, as long as it is difficult to find, with many blind alleys on the way.” He was speaking for her as well as himself. From earli
est youth, she’d begun building her armor of defensive reserve; by the time she came of age it was in place; by the time she died it was suffocating her.

  They walked and they talked; they took tea and they talked; they went to museums and they talked. They talked books, they talked writing, they talked the moral imagination. The exchange was, of course, not personal in any usual sense, but the intellectual honesty that animated their talk resulted in a conversation that made each of them feel less alone in the world.

  Without question she gave him more than he gave her. She became his best reader, his most intelligent interlocutor, the one more than any other who understood all in life that went unspoken and unsaid. The same could not be said for James, who took flagrant advantage of all between them that went unspoken and unsaid. He seems, almost willfully, never to have grasped the depth of her anguish; or, if he did, he chose, with a hand shading his eyes, not to look directly into it. Perhaps it was that he knew if he did let that information penetrate him, he’d be forced to become more accountable to the friendship. Above all else, Henry James feared and hated being held accountable.

  In the spring of 1893, Constance—now deep into one of her serious depressions—occupies a flat in a palazzo fronting the Grand Canal. Henry is delighted and promises to come to Venice in the winter. She writes immediately to say the prospect of his visit is elating. No sooner does he get this letter than his anxieties begin to rise. In midsummer he writes to say he’s working on a new book, his plans for the winter are unsettled, it is more than likely that he will not come to Venice at all. She is silent. The summer drifts by, and then the autumn, with hardly a communiqué passing between them. Then comes a letter from Constance casually announcing that the novel she’s been working on is finished. He knows that when she is between writing projects she rapidly starts to sink, but somehow the information does not register. He lets things ride.

  In January 1894, Constance Woolson jumped from a window in her Venetian flat, spattering her incredibly stripped-down life on a pavement washed by the waters of the most glamorous seaway in the world. After her death, the American diplomat John Hay said of her, “She had not as much happiness as a convict.” James, at home in England, felt horror, panic, guilt: whether or not he felt pain is not known. Somewhere within himself, he must have thought, If I’d gone to Venice, she wouldn’t have jumped.