The Long-Winded Lady Read online

  The next stop I made was on Twenty-second Street, near Ninth Avenue, where I had two big rooms with a fireplace in each room and a real kitchen and the use of a garden. Outside, on Twenty-second Street, the people argued all day and then they argued all night, but more loudly at night because it was dark. When it rained, they got into the doorways to argue and then got out of the doorways to knock each other down. Over my head lived several young men who played “Come On-a My House” all evening every evening and all day long on Saturdays and Sundays. They had no rugs or anything on the floor, and when their phone rang they all made a rush for it and tackled it together. Their record player was powerful, and the sound pounded down through my ceiling until there was nothing in my head except that dreadful song. One Saturday afternoon, the owner of the building came to call. He owned it at long distance, through an agent and a manager, and his family had lived there once, and he walked into my apartment and took away the one thing that might have held me to the place — a magnificently ornate gilt mirror that filled the entire space between two windows. He said it was a family heirloom, and he and his abominable companion dragged it away, heavy and big as it was and much as I loved it, and put it in their station wagon and drove off with it. How I hated them. How I hoped it would break and give them seven years’ bad luck. From there I went to Ninth Street, near Fifth, where I had two nice rooms and a fireplace and a terrace that was surrounded in spring and summer by the tops of trees. Early one Sunday morning, my little cat climbed down from the terrace to the little bit of roof that jutted out below and sat up on a windowsill there staring in at the poodle who lived underneath me, and the poodle barked and woke his owners up and they became very objectionable, leaning out of their window and looking up at me and telling me my cat was a nuisance. I went downstairs and rescued her, and ever afterward when I passed them on the stairs I used to glare at them.

  Another summer, I was living in the Hotel Earle in the Village, where I had two nice rooms with folding doors between them and windows taking in the breeze from three directions, when there was a breeze. That was the hottest summer I ever remember, but I do not remember what I heard or felt so much as what I saw. I used to leave the hotel about seven on weekdays to go to my office, which was air-conditioned, and one morning shortly after seven I was sitting at the counter of a drugstore that was then on the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue when a young black girl walked by outside wearing a yellow cotton dress. She was about seventeen, and she seemed to me to be newer than anything else in the city. Even at that hour the heat was stunning, but she looked newer than a daffodil. Her dress was triumphantly clean and starched, and I was sure she had ironed it herself, and I felt rather ashamed, because I never iron anything anymore. She looked very resolute, walking to her work, and I often think of her. Another morning I left the hotel late — about nine-thirty or so — and as I made my way slowly through the blinding heat along Waverly Place to Sixth I saw a man approaching me who walked even more slowly than I did, and he hesitated every few steps. His hands were joined in front of him and he was carrying something that took all his attention. He never raised his eyes from what he was carrying in his hands. All the attention and care he had left to give to anything he was giving to what was in his hands, and he looked worn out and at the end of his rope. He had on only a shirt and trousers and shoes, no socks, and he was dirty and looked as though he had not washed or shaved or slept for a week, and he also looked as though he had no place to go where he could lie down and rest. He came toward me, watching what was in his hands, and I could hardly wait to see what he had that he treasured so much, and when I was passing him I looked, and there was a lump of ice melting in his hands. Then one Sunday morning I was walking across Tenth to Fifth, about noon, and, I have to say it again, the heat was past description. On the other side of Tenth, wandering along toward Sixth, I saw a man who used to hang around the neighborhood there asking for money, and I thought I would just go across and give him a quarter to relieve my conscience, because I intended to have lunch in an air-conditioned and expensive restaurant. I crossed the street, which was deserted up and down, and when I got to where he had been he had vanished. I thought he might have fainted from hunger, and I looked, and there he was leaning halfway in along the back seat of a car going through some baskets and a suitcase that were there. I crept back to my own side of the street with my quarter in my hand, feeling terribly embarrassed to have seen him stealing and thanking heaven that he had not caught me prying. It seems to me that everything I feel about that summer and about every summer was contained in the thought I had then about that man, because the world was so distorted, dead in the heat, with nothing real and nothing unreal, that it seemed no more strange for him to steal than for me to climb up into a bus and be carried from one place to another place.

  AUGUST 18, 1962

  The Traveler

  THERE is nothing like a short walk through this city to remind us of the accidental nature of our lives. Here it is a lovely Sunday in summer — the weather a miracle in itself — and it is a miracle I am alive to write this. I started my walk at Forty-fourth Street and Second Avenue, and the first thing that happened was that I almost got killed by an overexcited motorist who was taking the corner much too fast. I would not have been alone in my calamity. A young man and woman and their baby, who were waiting along with me for the light to change, would also have been run over. But we were all saved. The man barely missed us, and screeched around without even looking at us. We all walked across the avenue as though nothing had happened, putting our common miracle behind us, along with the relief we did not want to acknowledge. They continued with their lively baby along Forty-fourth Street, but I had decided to do one block of Second Avenue, which remains dismal in spite of the grandeur that is rising up a block to the east along the river and around the United Nations building. I turned off on Forty-fifth Street, also dismal, and came out on Third Avenue, which is no longer an avenue but a beautiful vista as you look north. The removal of the El has revealed all of the space and color and distance that Third Avenue used to possess in secret, but I was walking step by step, and I did not especially want to tackle a vista. I admired Third Avenue for the length of a block, and then I went on over to Lexington. I have no particular fondness for Lexington Avenue. It is a useful place, lined with shops that are filled with interesting things, but it is noisy and congested and I think it nags for far more attention than it deserves. But after my escape from sudden death I was well disposed to whatever presented itself, and as I went along, looking about me, I saw three tall, handsome people, two women and a man, come out of a hotel and get into a limousine that I was certain was taking them to Idlewild. They had luggage and they were well dressed and they appeared to be collected and in good humor, and I wondered where they were going, and I envied them. I thought about Amsterdam and Marseille and Algiers, all places where I have never been, and I wished I could turn myself into a transatlantic traveler for a few days, or even a week, and masquerade with luggage and a striped steamer rug in some distant hotel lobby, and allow everybody to believe that I had a very good and important reason for being there, and that when I left I would have an urgent reason for leaving, and that my next destination was fixed and depended on plans that could not be changed. I wanted to be at the mercy of strict arrangements for a little while, with a timetable to guide me and tickets and a passport to explain me, and to have a list of faraway hotel rooms that were unknown to me now but that soon would be perfectly familiar, because I would sleep in them. And my excuse and explanation for being wherever I found myself would always stand by me — my suitcase, recognizable in any language. My suitcase would translate me to everybody’s satisfaction and especially to my own satisfaction. And I would go to a city where the people spoke a language I did not understand, so that I could listen as much as I liked and still not eavesdrop. It is so nice to be able to listen to voices without being delayed by what is being said. I would go to Amsterdam. I m
ight as well have been in Amsterdam for all the attention I was giving to the city I was walking in, and then I found myself at the Lexington Avenue entrance of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

  With my vision of arrivals and departures and international travelers, I went into the Waldorf and began to climb the stairs that lead to the main lobby. I thought I would walk straight through the hotel to Park Avenue and perhaps notice some transatlantic elegance on my way. When I reached the lobby, I saw that it was crowded to its last inch with groups of men and women delegates to some convention. I have never in my life seen so many people all so glad to see one another. They were having a wonderful time. They were all smiling and shaking hands and talking heartily. I hoped they would not begin to sing. I got through the lobby as quickly as I could and hurried out onto Park Avenue. I took a taxi to Le Steak de Paris, on Forty-ninth between Sixth and Seventh, where I intended to have lunch. There were two men, not together, at the bar in the little front room, but the tables were empty. It was all Sunday quiet. I took the small table by the window, and as I sat down a very young woman walked slowly by outside, wheeling her baby. A very old, bent woman walked beside her — the baby’s grandmother, or more likely its great-grandmother. They must live in the neighborhood, because the old woman, whose dress was long and voluminous, wore an apron and slippers. She carried two handbags, her own and the girl’s. They had just come out for a minute, to give the baby its Sunday airing. No one came into the restaurant, but from time to time people would stop and peer in through my window, shading their eyes with their hands. They wanted to find out if the restaurant was open, and on finding that it was they went on their way. Inside, nothing at all happened until five young people emerged from the big dining room at the back, coming through on their way to the street. There were four boys and a girl, and they all seemed to be about the same age — eighteen or nineteen. The girl was very pretty, with straight blond hair, and the boys were nice-looking. They were all dressed in blue jeans and sweaters, and they looked quietly about them with a curiosity that was remarkable because it was polite and reserved and at the same time perfectly alive and unashamed. Before they reached the door, the owner, Guy, called to them in French and offered them a drink. “Eau sucrée,” he said, and he laughed at them. They were at the door, but they trooped over to the bar and sat up on the high stools. They were all French, visiting here. They talked with Guy and seemed to be just as interested in him as they were in one another. I thought they looked incapable of rudeness or boredom. They were very happy, enjoying their idleness, and in their lack of self-consciousness I saw the international elegance I had looked for at the Waldorf. I did not listen closely enough to understand what they were saying. I looked out into the street, not to stare at them, and I thought their voices described them as the pigeons in flight outside my hotel-room window describe the view that lies before me there. I am at the Beaux Arts Hotel, on East Forty-fourth Street between First Avenue and Second, and my room is on the twelfth floor, with a great drop down to the flat roof of the adjoining house, so I have a clear view across low roofs and then across First Avenue to the glittering glass walls of the United Nations building and beyond to the East River and across the river to Queens. Just to the right of my window there is a monumentally ornate apartment building with four stone lions sitting upright on the corners of one of its lesser roofs. The lions wear crowns and hold iron pennants in their paws, but crowns, pennants, and paws are all subservient to the pigeons, who perch where they please and fly freely about the long, flowered terraces of the same building. Away over to the left, on the other side of Forty-fourth Street, there are low, moderately old commercial buildings, blank-faced, as well they might be, because they are surely doomed to come down soon, with all the ambitious construction work that is going on over there. On top of one of those buildings there is a big homemade terrace, hopefully painted pink. It is all the same to the pigeons. All of the buildings, high and low, are only different levels of the great arena in which they play all day, and they own everything in sight and out of sight. As I listened to the voices at the bar, I began to imagine I knew a country where people were so at ease with themselves that they were able to be at ease anywhere. I was thinking of another world, not France. Then, to my surprise, I saw the five young French people on the sidewalk outside my window, and as I watched they walked away down the street and out of my sight. They had made their adieus and left and I had heard nothing. Now they were gone and my lunch was finished, but I was not yet ready to leave. I watched the entrance to the back room until the waiter appeared, and I asked him for another café-filtre. I don’t really like café-filtre, but when I am in French restaurants I always drink it. I think those dutiful café-filtres are probably all I will ever know of Marseille.

  JULY 20, 1963

  Sixth Avenue Shows Its True Self

  LATELY I have been taking oblong walks, staying between Fifty-ninth Street and Forty-fifth Street and keeping to four avenues — Sixth, Fifth, Madison, and Park. I am generally by myself, and I find that the separate personalities of these four avenues within this area have impressed themselves so insistently on me that I want to make a few remarks about them.

  I have been searching for some good thing to say about Sixth Avenue, but I have failed in my search. Sixth Avenue shows its true self only during the two hours after dawn, when it is almost empty of life. During those hours, in the silence and the nice clean light, the eerie, unsubstantial disorderliness of those blocks of structures becomes apparent, and anyone walking alone through that ugliness can see without any trouble that Sixth is not a human thoroughfare at all but only a propped-up imitation of a thoroughfare, and that its purpose is not to provide safe or pleasant or beautiful passage for the people of the city but to propitiate, even if it is only for a little while, whatever the force is that feeds on the expectation of chaos. Those blocks, as far as you can see, offer nothing except the threat, or the promise, that they will come tumbling down. The buildings have about them nothing of the past and nothing of the future, no intimation of lives spent or to come, but only a reminder of things that should not have happened and a guarantee of things that should not come to pass.

  Fifth Avenue is different. Fifth Avenue is fine and wide and satisfactory in every respect, but the shops all seem very far apart. They are not, of course — they are side by side, in the usual way — but walking takes longer and is more of an effort on Fifth than on the other avenues because the width of the sidewalks encourages a zigzag progress; instead of walking in or with or against the crowd, as I do on an ordinary sidewalk, I am encouraged by all the extra space to dodge around the crowd and in and out of it. Fifth Avenue is at its best after eight o’clock at night and until eight o’clock in the morning. On shopping nights it does not put on its deserted look until after ten, and on Sunday mornings it is quiet enough even after ten.

  Park Avenue wears such an air of vast indifference to humanity that it is never interesting to walk on. Its face is closed, and the beautiful beds of flowers that are planted all along its center only hint that the view would be duller without them. Park Avenue looks friendly at Christmastime, when all those big trees are lighted up, but it is obviously an avenue to be splendidly lived on, and not to be looked at or walked on.

  My favorite avenue, good at any hour of the day or night, and at any season, is Madison. Whenever I walk along Madison Avenue, I think of fine clothes and gaiety and of the possibility of having both at once. The avenue, which seems to get narrower and more interesting every year, has a frivolous, relaxed air. It is even romantic. The shop windows are so close to the ground, or seem so close to the ground, and so near, that no matter how fast you walk you cannot help seeing what is in them, and the shop windows on the second floor are often even more fascinating than the ones below, so that you have to bend your head back to try to guess exactly what it is up there that you know you want very badly — the color of it is so nice or the shape so mystifying. Heaven forbid that there should
ever be a riot in the city, but if there is I will go straight over to Madison Avenue with my stone or brick and I will shut my eyes and just throw, because there is hardly a window along there that does not contain something I would like to have.

  All this time I have been trying to think of one good thing to say about Sixth Avenue. Now I remember the walk I took there on the morning of the last big snow. I was living on West Fifty-eighth Street at the time, and I was out of my hotel just after dawn, and I walked all the way down to Forty-fifth Street and saw hardly a soul. The snow had fallen thickly and was still falling. There was no sign that the snow would ever stop falling, and as I looked about me, making my way along, I could see no reason for it ever to stop falling. I looked at the buildings closest to me, and then I looked as far up as their tops, which were hidden in a hazy confusion of sky and snow, and I looked along Sixth Avenue as far as the falling snow would allow, and wherever I looked, the buildings had shed their tacky, temporary air, and appeared theatrically lost and desolate, as though they were in a movie and would soon flicker away and disappear forever. Therefore, I have this to say for Sixth Avenue: It is a perfect place for snow, and snow should always be falling there, tons and tons and tons of snow, making the avenue just about impassable, so that anybody managing to struggle through there could look at it with affection, because Sixth Avenue possesses a quality that some people acquire, sometimes quite suddenly, which dooms it and them to be loved only at the moment when they are being looked at for the very last time.