The Odd Woman and the City

by Vivian Gornick

  The truth of the matter is that neither Woolson nor James was equal to the task of friendship. While both cherished the connection, more compelling by far was the neurotic unhappiness within which each was imprisoned. Neither could do for the other what they could not do for themselves.

  * * *

  The night after I’d read about Woolson and James, I became a literary groupie. I dreamed that Leonard and I had both given up our own apartments in order to live together, and now, in the dream, he had called to say he’d found a place for us on the Upper East Side, where, in waking reality, neither of us would ever live. Quick, he says on the phone, come see it. I run uptown, enter a classy-looking building, push open the apartment door, and I am standing in a room, long and narrow, that feels like a coffin. At the far end of the room is a curtained window. I rush to it, thinking, The view will make up for it. I tear the curtain aside and I am staring at a brick wall.

  * * *

  I stepped onto the Number 3 bus on Fifth Avenue at Sixty-Sixth Street just as the afternoon rush hour was beginning. The seat near the door directly opposite the driver was empty, and I dropped into it. At Fifty-Ninth Street the bus began to fill up. As people crowded on, my eyes watched hand after hand drop and retrieve the MetroCard from the fare box and then move past my fixed gaze. At Fifty-Third Street someone got on without making the automatic gesture toward the box. I looked up and saw that it was an old man settling himself heavily in the seat diagonally opposite me.

  The bus went one more stop. Then the driver turned in his seat and said, “Sir, you didn’t pay your fare.” The old man didn’t answer; he was staring at the floor, his hands resting lightly on the head of a walking stick planted between his knees.

  The driver repeated himself.

  The old man looked up. “Yes, I did,” he said.

  The driver stared at him. “No, sir,” he said patiently, “you did not pay your fare.”

  “Yes, I did,” the old man said, and went back to staring at the floor.

  At the next light the driver swung out of his seat and stood before the old man. “Sir,” he said, “I can’t go on until you pay your fare.”

  The old man looked up. “I paid the fare,” he said evenly. “I can’t help it if you didn’t see me do it. I’m not going to do it twice.”

  The old man and the driver locked eyes. Slowly, the stare became a glare. The old man began to look like a bulldog, the driver another kind of animal. The old man was white, the driver was black; for a moment I thought …

  “Mister,” the driver yelled, “this bus ain’t going nowhere until you pay your fare.”

  “Omigod,” the woman beside me breathed.

  “What the hell is going on?” a man three seats down called out.

  “I paid,” the old man said again.

  “He’s paid, all right,” a man said softly.

  The driver switched off the ignition and began speaking into the phone on his dashboard. Up and down the aisle people perked up with interest and agitation.

  A woman in black leaned toward a man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and, one finger tapping the side of her forehead, stage-whispered, “Senile.”

  “Hey,” a voice called out from the back. “Let’s get this show on the road, I gotta get downtown.”

  Two people began discussing the legal and social ramifications of the case. “Ain’t no way that driver-man can keep goin’, he don’t pay the fare,” said one. “But what if the old man ain’t got the money?” said the other. “Baby, you ain’t got no money, you don’t get on no bus,” came the swift reply. “That’s the law, man, the law.”

  The driver stood in the aisle and announced loudly, “Everybody off the bus. Sorry, folks, but this bus is not moving. I’ll give you all transfers.”

  Stunned silence. Nobody could believe this was happening. Then everyone was yelling at once: “What the hell, I gotta get, you can’t do this to us.”

  At the back of the bus, a wounded howl went up from a young man who until this moment had been dreaming out the window. Now he stood up, his slim body a glory of black leather and silver studs. He stalked to the front of the bus, planted himself before the silent old man, and spat out, “What-choo wanna make yourself so cheap for? For a lousy buck and a quarter. Man, for that you gonna put us through all this misery?”

  The driver, a tall, well-built man, stood unmoving as the passengers streamed toward the doors, but in his face I thought I saw an accumulation of the insults that daily life flung at him. In thirty seconds we were all off the bus, milling about in the street. Interestingly enough, no one walked away and no one speculated on why not one of us had thought to simply pay the old man’s fare.

  “Oh, this lousy city,” the man beside me crooned softly, “goddamn this lousy city.”

  I looked back at the bus. The old man was still sitting in his seat, his hands on his walking stick, his eyes on the floor. Suddenly, as the confusion on the street was mounting, he stood up, climbed off the bus, and, like a figure in a dream, walked away into the crowded afternoon. I plucked at the driver’s sleeve. “He’s gone,” I said.

  The driver’s glance followed mine, and without the flick of an eyelash, he announced, “Okay, everybody back on the bus.”

  In silence, everyone filed back onto the bus. Each passenger sat down in the same seat he or she had occupied before. The driver took his seat, closed the doors, and swung expertly out into Fifth Avenue traffic. I looked at my watch. One hour had elapsed from the time the driver had first said, “Sir, you didn’t pay your fare.” I looked around at my fellow travelers and saw that each had quickly rearranged his or her face behind its compulsory mask of neutrality. It was as though, for them, nothing had ever happened. But even then I knew better.

  * * *

  In the early 1950s, a New York journalist named Seymour Krim yearned to be a maker of dissident literature at the same time that he wished to enjoy national celebrity—and on both scores felt himself a failure. Out of that sense of failure, Krim found a voice and a subject that spoke to the times. His persona was that of a manic-depressive, alternately ambitious, neurotic, self-mocking, and it spilled rivers of ink delivering an ongoing account of its breakdowns, its hungers, its shocking envy of those who had achieved the success that was both despised and longed for. That voice was also urban to the core. No place on earth other than New York City could have produced a Seymour Krim.

  Making provocative use of a mad, inventive, somewhat stream-of-consciousness sentence structure, Krim developed a hipster prose style that allowed him, in spirit, to join a generation of emerging rebels for whom thought, feeling, and action were about to become one. For Krim, achieving such unity would mean bringing his own inner chaos under sufficient control that he’d be able to write the great work he knew he had it in him to write.

  Fantasy was his middle name. He was forever fantasizing a future in which all would be magically pulled together and—of this he was certain—his own big-time promise would blossom into major accomplishment. The fantasizing saturated nearly every piece he ever wrote. A nervous braggadocio beneath the surface of the prose made his narrator sound as though he imagined himself the protagonist in a Broadway musical, calling out to the audience, “Just you wait and see! I’m gonna come out of this bigger, better, more important than ALL OF YOU PUT TOGETHER.”

  But consolidation of thought and action remained beyond Krim’s grasp. All he could do was document the disability that tore him up every day that he awakened in the cold-water flat on the Lower East Side that he lived in until he died. At the height of his powers, Krim’s gift was to speak for all those like him who were also unable to convert fantasy into reality. Through the simple expedient of using this defiantly daydreaming self as an instrument of illumination, Krim sought to make a metaphor of the American inability to grow up and get down to work.

  Too often Krim’s anxiety swamped the metaphor, and when it did the writing was reduced to a disheveled rant, tiresome and pathetic. In 1973,
however, he wrote “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business,” a remarkable essay in which he at long last did pull together the subject he had spent years making his own. Here, he was able to capture brilliantly the American obsession with failure itself—the taste of it, the fear of it, the forever being haunted by it—and when he did, his message was delivered in language that made prodigious use of the New York vernacular:

  “At 51,” he wrote,

  believe it or not, or believe it and pity me if you are young and swift, I still don’t know truly “what I want to be.”… In that profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine I’m as open to every wild possibility as I was at 13 …

  Thousands upon thousands of people who I believe are like me are those who have never found the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls. Many never will … This isn’t presumption so much as a voice of scars and stars talking. I’ve lived it and will probably go on living it until they take away my hotdog …

  But if you are a proud, searching “failure” in this society and we can take ironic comfort in the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of us, then it is smart and honorable to know what you attempted and why you are now vulnerable to the body blows of those who once saw you robed in the glow of your vision and now only see an unmade bed and a few unwashed cups on the bare wooden table of a gray day.

  The pleasure of this piece lies in the rich, sure speed of an idiomatic language that mimics the national preoccupation with youth as well as failure:

  That profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine

  The riot in their souls

  A voice of scars and stars

  Those who only see an unmade bed and a few unwashed cups on the bare wooden table of a gray day

  Idiomatic speech always feels young—in any language it makes the adrenaline shoot right up—but never more so than in the edgy, street-smart version of it one hears on the pavements of New York, where middle-aged writers of American prose are free to cry out in voices forever young, “I’m no longer young!”

  * * *

  Leonard went away for a holiday weekend without telling me he was leaving the city, and he left his answering machine off.

  “What was that all about?” I asked upon his return.

  “Oh,” he said sheepishly, “I left the machine off accidentally.” But the laugh that followed was hollow. “I guess I didn’t want to know that no one was calling me.”

  “But someone was calling you. Me.”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice ominously vague. “You were, weren’t you.”

  * * *

  For eight years I taught one semester a year in Arizona. Often, upon my return to the city, encounters like the following would take place:

  I’d run into Eli, a writer I know. His face in repose is apprehensive, but when I ask how he is, it brightens and he tells me that he’s just signed a book contract. I congratulate him, ask about the family, and then about Paul, another writer we both know. Eli sighs. His face reverts to apprehensive. “He always has to top me,” he says. “If I’ve been invited to L.A. he’s been invited to Hawaii. If I have a book coming out he’s got two. If I win a CAPS he’s won a Rockefeller.”

  Hours later I run into Gloria, an old acquaintance of mine who obsesses over financial ruin and her miserably indifferent family.

  “How’s it going?” I ask.

  “My father?” she replies. “He says, ‘Get a reverse mortgage.’ My nieces and nephews? I never see them. My sister-in-law? She’d be happy to see me out on the street. And my brother? He’s a pussy!”

  Myra, who’s often told me she thinks of me as one of her best friends, invariably looks quizzically at me, as though she can’t quite place me, and asks, “Where’ve you been? Out in Oklahoma, someplace?”

  And then there’s Sylvia, a devotee of the therapeutic culture. Two years in a row she grins at me and says, “I’ve gotten so mature I no longer demand of my friends that they give me what they cannot give. I now accept friendship on the terms that it is offered.” The third year the grin dies on her face. “I hate it!” she hisses. “It makes life feel small. Small and partial.”

  My friends, too, must shake the kaleidoscope of daily experience to arrive at a composition that will help mediate the pain of intimacy, the vibrancy of public space, and the exquisite intervention of strangers.

  I turn the corner onto Seventh Avenue and a very large cross-dresser is standing squarely in front of me, eyes squeezed shut, hands joined as though in prayer, calling into the air, “I have so many enemies!” When his eyes open they meet mine. “Why?” I mouth silently. He gives me a brilliant smile and announces joyously, “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  Some ten or fifteen years ago, a woman of my acquaintance (I’ll call her Jane Brown) had an affair with a man who was heir to a famous American fortune (I’ll call him Roger Newman). At the time of their meeting, they were both storefront lawyers serving a slum neighborhood in Brooklyn. For Jane, the work was the natural culmination of a Quaker childhood, a good education, and a devout sense of political idealism. For Roger, the work was done in defiance of unearned privilege, a proper rather than an erotic marriage, and a future in the family business that precluded the promise of purposeful employment.

  Working side by side, these two had fallen in love and Roger had left his wife to move in with Jane. Friends soon said they were living together in blissful harmony, and some were surprised when Roger began working even longer hours than he had before, his objection to the laws that thwarted his underprivileged clients having grown ever more ardent. Jane was proud of Roger’s deepened sense of engagement, yet even she urged him to slow down. Roger, however, told her that never before in his life had he felt as free as he now did. To plunge into hard, meaningful work, he said, was a joy; and to have at his side a woman who shared his belief in the work an added pleasure he had never hoped to experience. They were together for two years. Then one afternoon without warning or explanation, Roger announced that he was leaving both Jane and the practice and returning to his wife and the family business. Within a matter of days he was gone.

  In college my friends and I had played an Edith Wharton–Henry James game in which a story was told—invariably the setting was bourgeois New York, the moral dilemma a matter of emotional courage—and the question asked was: Who would have written this story, Wharton or James? Roger Newman’s retreat to his once repudiated life had, at the time, brought the game back into my mind, and I’d always been curious to know the outcome of his action. So two weeks ago when a lawyer I know phoned to say he’d been invited to dinner at the Newmans’, would I like to come, I of course said yes, and at seven o’clock the following Saturday evening, the lawyer and I got out of a cab in front of a Park Avenue building at the corner of Sixty-Sixth Street, where we were admitted to a marble-and-onyx lobby the size of a small cathedral and entered an oak-paneled elevator equipped with red velvet bench seats. When we stepped off the elevator on the nineteenth floor, we were in the Newman apartment. Our host was as I remembered him—middling tall, reed slim, with soft brown hair and blue eyes set in an inconspicuously handsome face—only now, I was struck by how well his clothes fit him and the grace with which he wore them.

  The living room was huge: Persian rugs, old English furniture, silken lamp shades. Seven men and women sat on the furniture. The women had blond hair and long legs, the men bore a strong resemblance to Newman himself. One of the women was Cissy, Roger’s wife. She shook my hand and said she was glad to meet me, she’d been reading me for years. I thanked her for having me, and we all sat down with a drink in our hands. An hour later the whole company rose and walked into the dining room, where dinner was being served. The plates were gold-rimmed china, the wineglasses thin crystal, the forks heavy silver. The food was delicious, but there wasn’t enough of it. The wine, however, flowed.

  As the tone, syntax, and vocabulary of this group were foreign to me, I did not at first grasp the banality of the conversa
tion. People introduced subjects in order to allude, not to discuss. There’d be three minutes on the headlines, seven on European travel, two on the current exhibit at MoMA. Real estate went a good ten or fifteen minutes, as did the cost of the children’s education, vacation plans, the current scandal on Wall Street. Strong opinion was clearly unwelcome, as was sustained exchange.

  Roger himself—an elegant host who pulled out chairs, passed dishes, refreshed drinks with unobtrusive courtesy—played an interesting role here. He initiated nothing; on the other hand, he never expressed a foolish or an insensitive thought. If serious disagreement threatened among his guests, he made the kind of judicious comment that quickly put the contestants at their ease and short-circuited potential rupture at the dinner table. His tone of voice throughout was uniformly light, conciliatory, civilized.

  Cissy Newman was a pretty woman who picked fretfully at her food and wore a thin layer of anxiety over her makeup. At one point, from out of nowhere she blurted at me, “But, after all, don’t you think a child needs his mother?” I stared blankly at her. “Don’t I think a child needs his mother?” I repeated idiotically. It was then that Roger laughed easily and surprised me by saying in a voice both soft and kind, “Cissy, Cissy, that’s not her point,” and then proceeding, with remarkable equanimity, to give a wonderfully reasoned précis of the feminist position with which he identified me. Cissy and I both sat there, nodding like a pair of grateful students who’ve been released by a skillful teacher from their own mental incompetence.

  I remember thinking then, What is he doing here? Why has he deliberately put himself back into this life? And I began to watch him.