New York Echoes

by Warren Adler

  He did mull over her offer. With retirement came the loss of his work routine, which enhanced the loneliness of his widowhood. His two children were grown and lived on the West Coast and although he was still fit and not without sexual urges, he could no longer compensate with the ingrained habits and long hours of a fervent legal career. Nor was he in love with Betsy. Attracted, yes, but not, as he defined it, in love.

  After retirement, they continued to see each other. She became available to sort his papers and continue to serve him in a business way. Without the conduct restrictions mandated by the firm, and the legal barriers imposed, they now socialized in dating mode, and with the boundaries broadened, they developed a relationship, meaning they became sexually involved. To him, it was a revelation. She was remarkably giving, uninhibited, adventurous, and exciting as a sex partner and it served its purpose as a profound bonding mechanism. Besides, they were already bonded in the practical ways of domestic cooperation.

  At one point in their new relationship, Betsy suggested in her practical way, that he live with her for a trial period and see if it worked out. It did and they married. She smoothly transferred her secretarial skills to their domestic life and organized and comforted him and, as vanilla ice cream goes with apple pie, she completely revived his interest in sex. These days that pursuit was achieved with some pharmaceutical assistance. She interpreted her own healthy sexual appetite as making up for lost time. He was delighted and the process went a long way to further bond with her and by the miracle of chemistry and attraction, he fell in love with her.

  Their life in Manhattan was filled with theater going, concerts, opera, lectures, and dinner in restaurants or with friends. He served on a number of not-for-profit boards, and she had her opera club and circle of female friends.

  “It’s not that bad,” she told him, referring to the glass-walled condominiums. “Better than that heap of old brick.”

  “That heap of old brick was built in the early thirties,” he said. “Like me. I hated to see it go.”

  “The new condo is an improvement to the neighborhood,” she said in her gently persuasive way.

  He started to concentrate on the Times again, then looked up at the emerging building.

  “What is the dividing line?” he asked.

  “The dividing line?”

  “Between the old and the new. Relevance and irrelevance.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “That’s because you’re transitional.”

  Her forehead creased and her eyes narrowed, which was the way she often expressed skepticism.

  “You’re fifty-five, a baby boomer. I preceded you by twenty years. You have a dividing line as well, but you’re not conscious of it.”

  He knew he sounded like he was playing the wise man, a bit pompous and all-knowing, but he felt the need to illustrate what had started in his mind as a vague concept and was fast coming into full bloom as an important and essential truth. In an odd way he felt that the two of them were transported into a New Yorker cartoon waiting for someone to write a caption.

  “I was sitting in my doctor’s office last week. Picked up People magazine and I didn’t know a single one of the featured people, nor did I care. I can’t even name them.”

  “Some of them are foreign to me as well. I do know some, the older ones.”

  “At some point the editors will phase them out. Like for example Eddie Cantor.”

  “Who is that?”

  “Who is Eddie Cantor? You’re kidding.”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “He was the biggest movie star and comedian in the early thirties. He had a wife named Ida and five daughters. . . . I think it was five daughters. He was also on radio every Sunday night along with Jack Benny, Charlie McCarthy, and Fibber Magee and Molly.”

  “Sorry. I don’t remember. I wasn’t born until 1949. Who was Fibber Magee?”

  He sighed and shook his head, showing an amused smile.

  “My point about the dividing line. When do memories become irrelevant?”

  “You mean when do they fade out from the collective memory?”

  She seemed serious, but he had the impression she was humoring him.

  “There has to be a dividing line, a point where living memory becomes merely history, where things have become obliterated and lost except to those whose memory is still alive. A point where what used to exist, buildings, neighborhoods, once famous actors and politicians, fade from memory and become merely history. Like my reference to Eddie Cantor and that old pile of bricks that has disappeared.” He pointed with his chin to the new condominium rising outside. “People fade away and die out and with them goes their memory.”

  “I will always remember that pile of bricks that has disappeared,” he muttered. “Not for its aesthetic value, but for its being there.”

  He knew he was groping for some clear way to express what he was suggesting and searched his mind for other examples. “Take theaters. The Loews Paramount, the Capital, the Roxy. All gone. And 52nd Street, Swing Street in my time. Leon and Eddie’s, the Downbeat Club. And 42nd Street. Grant’s, where you could get the best hot dogs, and all those movie theaters where you could go for a quarter and get a double feature.” He felt himself on a roll. “And Lindy’s, the real Lindy’s, and Shrafft’s, and the Third Avenue El, and the Fifth Avenue double-decker buses and trolley cars. The subway was a nickel. Take politics.” He mulled the thought for a moment.

  “Who was Harry Truman’s vice president? And Fiorello LaGuardia. He was once a person, yet most people will remember his name merely as a New York airport.”

  “Lots of airports, high schools, streets, towns, and colleges are named after people that no one remembers. I don’t know where you’re going with this.”

  “I’m searching for the dividing line,” he said, somewhat testily. “Like when was the moment when the curtain went down on the memory of Eddie Cantor and the Roxy and the Paramount and double-decker buses.”

  “And Harry Truman’s vice president. I know that one. It was Alben Barkley. I read McCullough.”

  “Not fair. That was history. He was, by the way, referred to as “The Veep.”

  “So how many people now retain this bit of information as living history.”

  “Life goes on, darling. People who knew Shakespeare and called him Willy or Will or Bill are long gone. Think of all the things that have disappeared, never mind people. My mother wore a corset and hung her clothes on the line. My father wore a fedora and chain-smoked cigarettes. What man wears hats, and only young idiots or fools smoke cigarettes. And the sun. No one told us you could get cancer from the sun.”

  He nodded, went back to reading the Times, but he couldn’t concentrate, and looked up again at the building going up. But the ideas they were discussing continued to hold his attention.

  “I guess that’s why I love black-and-white movies of the thirties and forties. My time. I love to look at the details, the backgrounds. The clothes my mother wore, the décor and furniture, the telephones, the old appliances, the old cars, the slang. Words like scram and mug and sucker. Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, the Ritz Brothers. Jean Harlow. Do you know she died when she was twenty-seven years old? Imagine.” He felt a lump grow in his throat and unaccountably a sob began deep inside of him and, for a moment, his eyes teared. I am a sentimental old fool, he told himself.

  He hadn’t realized that she was watching him.

  “Remember, darling. I watched those with you, mostly for the stories. I love those old stories.”

  “And I point out who those actors are?”

  “Yes you do.”

  “I do appreciate your trying to enter my past. I love you for that.”

  “Now I know why you called me transitional. You have twenty years of living memory on me. Some day my dividing line will come. My range of celebrities and memories will fade away from the public consciousness just like yours.”

  “It’s all changed too damned fast,”
he muttered. “You don’t even get much of a chance to savor it. And you don’t know how good it was until it’s gone.”

  “Now you’re getting maudlin,” she admonished.

  He ignored her criticism, knowing she was right.

  “I can’t keep up,” he sighed. “Once I thought I was actually computer literate. I could do e-mail, use word for my writings and briefs. I could read an Excel sheet. Now, just a handful of years later, all I know is fast becoming obsolete, old hat. I am falling behind. I feel overwhelmed by change. I find my greatest comfort in looking backwards.”

  They exchanged glances. Her gaze seemed alarmed. She sees my fear, he told himself.

  “Did it ever occur to you darling, that things are better than they were. That you’re living longer, that we’ve grown smarter in some ways, what with all the technological advances. Did you ever see a computer in those old movies?”

  “Maybe I’m just bitching about the changes that are happening so damned fast and as you grow older you become more and more irrelevant locked in some place and mindset that doesn’t exist any more.” He rustled his paper and went back to reading the Times. “Look at this. Horror upon horror. Then again, we did have our horrors and bloodbaths. Of course we didn’t have instant reporting back then and the reach of communications.”

  He sensed he was heading for something more cerebral than emotional now, forcing himself into a lawyerly mode to justify his premise.

  “You’re just looking at the surface of things, darling,” she said after a long silence. In her pragmatic way, she had been mulling over her own thoughts. “The more things change the more they remain the same.”

  “Tell it to my mirror,” he chuckled.

  “I mean human nature. The way we are. Our inner core. That never changes. No matter if that pile of bricks is demolished. External change happens, but through it all we remain the same. As humans we are constant in our emotions and our behavior. Like Shakespeare, who I just mentioned. You know why he survived for five hundred years. He knew the everlasting unchanging immutability of human nature.”

  “My my,” he said chuckling. “You are so profound and eloquent today, my love.”

  Suddenly she rose, left the room, and was back in a moment. She stood before him and opened her palm in which was a little blue pill, which he recognized, of course.

  “Take this,” she whispered, bending over and kissing him on the lips.

  “Finish your paper and contemplate your lost world over there for the next hour. Then I’ll illustrate how human nature hasn’t changed very much at all.”

  He took the pill from her and swallowed it.

  It might not be a complete answer, he thought happily, but she did have a point.

  “By the way,” he said as she started to leave the room again. “Let me tell you who Fibber Magee was.”

  She turned, looked at him, and, putting her hands on her hips, she straightened her posture in a mocking haughty and indignant manner.

  “Frankly, Scarlett,” she said. “I don’t give a damn.”

  Then she pranced out of the room.

  That Horrid Thing

  by Warren Adler

  “No politics please,” Irma said.

  “I don’t talk politics. Only common sense,” Bob replied.

  “Okay then. No common sense.”

  “I mean it. I’ll never forgive you.”

  He was helping her fold the linen napkins in a special way to make them look like birds in flight. There would be eight guests, she had told him, agonizing over the placement of each person in the dining room of their East Side apartment. They were her people, meaning people from her law office, partners mostly and their spouses. He was a salesman for a firm making ladies’ underwear, which might as well have been an occupation on another planet.

  After five years of marriage, Irma placed a great deal of importance on these little dinner parties for building consequential relationships outside the office with spouses or significant others in attendance. This one, he knew, was particularly special, and he was being duly warned to control his behavior. Occasionally, he admitted, he had become a bit too confrontational, especially when the subject veered toward what others might misinterpret as political. He did not see it in those terms.

  “Above all, don’t show that horrid thing.”

  “Whatever you say,” he promised.

  He had been sitting in his office on the twenty-second floor of an adjacent building working on a big order for a Midwest chain on September 11, 2001, when he first saw that horrid thing. He had stopped by the video store on the way to work to pick up his video camera that had been in for repairs and was lying on a leather chair in his office when he heard the strange noise.

  His office window was directly in the line of sight of the Twin Towers, and when someone in the office screamed, he turned and saw where the first plane had sliced into the north tower. It was such a bizarre occurrence that, at first, he thought it might have been an accidental collision. Then, in swift succession, another plane smacked into the other tower.

  By no means was he a video buff. He had taken occasional pictures at outings and other events, but did not have that special visual curiosity of the dedicated photographer. Nevertheless the proximity of the video camera and the circumstances at hand were motivation enough, and he found himself standing by the window pointing the camera at what was quickly becoming a major catastrophe.

  It took him a minute or two to get the damned thing focused and working, but when it was finally buzzing he saw through the lens finder the incredible spectacle of people jumping out of the windows like little puppets whose strings had been cut. There was little time for reflection nor did the horror of it register as reality. It was as if he were watching a special-effect-laden movie.

  At some point, the truth of the incident set in and the collapse of the buildings set them all running from their offices. By then, he had filmed at least twenty minutes of the episode.

  Although his office building was unscathed, the evacuation was orderly and he, along with others in the building, marched like robots down the twenty-two floors to street level and hurried from the chaos as fast as they could.

  What he had captured on that video was, even now, something so horrendous, so weird, so horrifying, that it became over the years one of those visual atrocities that challenged the very idea of authenticity. You saw it, but it was difficult to believe it had happened before your eyes. You saw it over and over again to assure yourself that it was an exact representation of something that had occurred to real people in real time in his city and not simply a slick camera trick.

  To see human beings falling like stones from high windows, surrounded by other items floating in the air beside them, like shoes, papers, and miscellaneous debris, as they jumped to certain death and smashed and exploded like ripe melons against the cement of the street below, was not exactly family fare.

  Nevertheless, in those early days, he had shown it on demand. Other times he watched it by himself. As time went on, he mostly watched it in secret, as if he needed to validate its authenticity again and again to prove to himself that the memory must be preserved before it disappeared completely from the public consciousness.

  In the early days, showing the video was the centerpiece of any social gathering, especially in their apartment, but as time went on, it became, as Irma characterized it, sort of like pornography. After numerous showings, the effect wore off. She began to call it “that horrid thing.”

  “I will not watch it again,” Irma had protested finally. They were still considered newlyweds then and while she indulged his insistence that it be viewed by them and shown to their friends and acquaintances, she began to find it repulsive, disruptive, and irritating and, ultimately, boring.

  The media drumbeat about the falling towers and the loss of thousands of people continued for months. By then, the area had become a shrine. The gates of the nearby church and armory were enshrouded by photos and ar
tifacts. People continued to mill about in hopeless pursuit of their lost relatives. Clean-up crews worked day and night to clean up the mess. It was, of course, the most awful thing that had happened in New York in his lifetime.

  A few months ago he had bought a giant flat-screen television that took up one whole wall of the den. He told Irma he had bought it to watch sports events, but he knew the reason that he had bought it was to watch the footage he had shot of the people jumping out of windows.

  “Can’t you stop watching that horrid thing?” she would tell him often.

  “I need it to remind me.”

  “I’d rather you’d try to forget it. It’s so unnerving.”

  “It must never be forgotten,” he would counter. In his daily life he had observed that people were talking about it less and less, shutting it out of their memory.

  “We all know it’s a historical fact. Constantly dwelling on it is sick.”

  “The danger seems to be increasing,” he told her. “Look what’s happening throughout the world, suicide bombings, Muslims protesting everywhere. Look at the signs they wave, ‘Death to America,’ ‘Kill Christians and Jews,’ ‘Behead the Infidels.’ ‘Bush is a murderer, a terrorist.’ ‘Jews are Nazis.’ What does that tell us?”

  “So the world is a mess. Some Muslims hate us. What else is new?”

  “They want us dead, all of us. As we speak, it would be naïve to believe that we are safe. Our future is in doubt. The people who are not afraid to die will win.”

  “What will watching people jumping out of windows do to solve the situation?”

  “It will remind us,” he insisted.

  “You’re going to drive yourself nuts, Bob.”

  After awhile, he found himself watching the tape surreptitiously when Irma was out of the apartment or had gone to bed. It was as if he was viewing some masturbatory fancy, performing some dirty little secret act.