The Long-Winded Lady Page 13

  The little hedge out there had gathered quite a lot of snow when the young man who was to spend so much time in the glass phone booth came into view, exactly as the star of that movie might have made his entrance, head and shoulders first across the hedge, and then full length but blurred through the glass panels of the revolving door, and then he was inside — still standing up, which was lucky, because he was one of those who fumble and paw at revolving doors instead of pressing themselves firmly against them. He wore a big, crumpled raincoat, which hung open so that the tartan lining showed. He was tubby and not very tall, and he had straight, fine, sandy hair that was plentiful except on top of his head, where it was very thin — nearly all gone, in fact. He was about twenty-five, or perhaps twenty-seven, with blue eyes and neat features — a straight, tiny nose and a serious mouth. His expression as he entered the restaurant said that he was intent on something — one thing — and indifferent to everything else. He couldn’t have walked very far; there was very little snow on him. Under his arm he clutched a bundle of London Observers, which had been opened and folded back carelessly so they looked half inflated and as though they might start to rise, like a soufflé, at any minute. He didn’t look about him, or hesitate, but spoke anxiously to the first face he saw, which belonged to the coatroom girl, who was watching him across the half door of her little cubicle, where she had a background of empty wall tonight — no customers, no coats. The girl answered him by nodding toward the glass phone booth, and he went quickly over and got into it and shut the door. He had his dime ready, and he dialed at once and started talking, holding the phone with the same air of anxiety he had shown when he spoke to the coatroom girl. He never smiled. Even later, when he had won his suit on the telephone, he did not smile. He was serious in all his ways, and methodical — not as though he were naturally methodical but as though he had made up his mind that tonight he was going to make no false move. The occasion was so important to him that he was not himself. He was buried in the importance of that phone call. He spoke on the phone for a minute, and then he opened the door and stepped out of the booth, and when he stepped back in he had the big Longchamps menu in his left hand, and he took the phone in his right hand. The restless Observers were pinned down by his right elbow. And he had coins to manage and maneuver. He used up three more before the conversation ended. The young man was taking no chances, and he wasn’t going to tempt the Fates by letting go of any of his encumbrances — he would hold on to all of them, like a man standing up in the subway at rush hour. He read from all sections of the menu. I had a menu of my own, so I could tell just about where he was — in Seafood, and in Desserts, and in Curries and Specialties, and in Salads, and so on. He read straight down the Sizzling Platters column, and something there may have decided her, and shut her up, because it all ended very suddenly. He hung up the phone and got himself out and went to the bar, which is on the north side of the room and looks about a mile long — more than a mile tonight, in its deserted state.

  The young man put his Observers on one of the stools near the window end, and then he turned and politely laid his menu on the nearest unoccupied table, and took off his raincoat and made it into a bundle to anchor the newspapers. And at last he stood still and looked around him, tightening the knot of his tie, which was much too tight and small already. Once he had taken the raincoat off, you could see that he was not tubby but sloppy. His navy blue suit was loose and almost as crumpled as his raincoat, and he wore a white shirt with a button-down collar, which went up quite far on his neck. The tie let itself go under the tiny knot and flowed in bright stripes of red and orange down to below the waistband of his trousers. His expression as he surveyed the restaurant was calm, and when he sat down he turned the stool sidewise to the bar and went on gazing benignly at the room. Most people sitting alone at that bar turn sidewise, because there is nothing facing them across the bar but a blank wall with, at its center, a towering cupboard of evangelical extraction that looks as though it might be musical. The young man put his hands on his thighs and sat there resting. He was not relaxing. What he was doing was much more old-fashioned — he was simply resting. The bartender brought him a bottle of beer and a tall glass, and after the young man had tasted the beer he picked up a little bowl of peanuts that was there on the bar and emptied some of the peanuts into his right hand. Then he went on resting, taking peanuts from his right hand with his left hand and looking around the restaurant.

  It was time for me to leave, and as I collected my umbrella from the coatroom girl, somebody came through the revolving door, and I turned to look. She wore a red coat with a red hood attached, and she didn’t throw the hood back, so I didn’t see even the color of her hair. The young man had stood up and was looking at her, and his face wore the same expression it had had when he came in — he looked intent on something and indifferent to everything else. I went out. The sidewalk was positively dangerous, sliding away from me and everybody else, and the tall new apartment buildings that dwarf the Washington Arch seemed to shiver in their glittering skins. Those buildings give off a magnificent slaty light on wet nights. It is their only moment of beauty. The wind had turned bitter, perhaps because the snow had stopped falling, and it took me nearly fifteen minutes longer to walk home than it usually does.

  APRIL 22, 1967

  Painful Choice

  I WAS in a new small supermarket the other evening, waiting to have my things put in a bag, when I saw a shabby tall man with red eyes, who had obviously been drinking heavily since the cradle, trying to decide between a can of beans, a canned whole dinner, a canned soup, and a canned chicken à la king. He had thirty-seven cents or twenty-nine cents or some sum like that, and he was standing there with the four cans, glaring down at them and all around at the stalls of vegetables and fruit and bread and so on. He couldn’t make up his mind what to buy to feed himself with, and it was plain that what he really wanted wasn’t food at all. I was thinking I wouldn’t blame him a bit if he just put the cans back on their shelves, or dropped them on the floor, and dashed into the bar-and-grill next door, where he could simply ask for a beer and drink it. Later on it occurred to me that, putting it roughly, there is usually only one thing we yearn to do that’s bad for us, while if we try to make the effort to do a virtuous or good thing, the choice is so great and wide that we’re really worn out before we can settle on what to do. I mean to say that the impulse toward good involves choice, and is complicated, and the impulse toward bad is hideously simple and easy, and I feel sorry for that poor tall red-eyed man.

  SEPTEMBER 18, 1954

  The New Girls on West Forty-ninth Street

  I HEARD bad news tonight at Le Steak de Paris, where I had dinner. “The building is coming down” — and the little restaurant is to be swept away, just like that, after more than twenty-six years of hardy life. Those words “The building is coming down” occur so often in New York conversation, and they have such finality, and are so unanswerable, that once they have been said there is nothing more to say. There is no appealing the decisions of the ogre called Office Space that stalks the city and will not be appeased. Le Steak de Paris occupies the ground floor and the cellar of an old brownstone on West Forty-ninth Street, between Sixth Avenue and Seventh Avenue. Demolition has begun, but there are still several of the brownstones in a row — tall, thin nineteenth-century houses that stand as straight and plain as ever they did but seem to slant backward together because they are so out of line with the rest of the street. It is a broken-down, mismatched, patched-up street, and for many years it has existed in the extraordinary vacuum created by the city planners, who cast whole areas into limbo for long periods — for decades, sometimes — before the demolition workers actually move in. At the moment the dark shadow in New York is cast not by the past but by the future, and too many streets wear a dull air of “What’s the use?” This particular block of West Forty-ninth Street is dingy and finished-looking in the daytime, but at night it is merely shabby, and when the ligh
ts are on in the restaurants and bars and around the hotel entrances it becomes garish and secretive — more like the extension of a carnival than like a city street. Broadway, the street of dreams, has about as much connection with the ordinary life of the city as a traveling circus would have, but although the area’s image is steadily being transformed into a grimmer and more orderly one — the office-space image — the glamour of Broadway persists and spills over into the narrow side streets that lead to the big lights. All is makeshift on Forty-ninth Street, and even the old brownstones, so beautifully proportioned and presenting such a pure outline against the high, calm evening sky of summer, seem part of a stage set designed to illustrate the shaky and vanishing side of New York City. This is a tourist block, and they were nearly all tourists on the sidewalks tonight — out-of-towners in light-colored cottony dresses and suits, with jackets and sweaters over their arms. Diligent sightseers, they had been going around town all day, looking at the “points of interest,” and now they plodded on toward their share of night life. Though the groups walking along were of all kinds, they were mostly couples, or parties of men and women walking together, or small parties of middle-aged women walking very close together. They formed little crowds along the street, peering through restaurant doorways and windows, wanting to see inside without quite wanting to go in. The pavement in front of Le Steak de Paris had just been swept clean, and the miniature box hedge at the window looked very fresh and green after last night’s rain. No one was peering through the windows of Le Steak — it is too quiet there for visitors in search of excitement or novelty. There were a few people having dinner — very few — and two men, two solitaries, were drinking peacefully at the bar. I asked the owner, M. Guy L’Heureux, whether he had found a new home for his restaurant, and he sadly said, “No, not in the city. It was very difficult. We were looking all the time, everywhere. There was nothing. We have decided to move to Miller Place, Long Island. We will learn English now. There will be no one to speak French to.” Inside, Le Steak has hardly changed in all the years I have been going there. The walls were once covered with printed-paper murals of rustic eighteenth-century scenes. Later there was red-brick-patterned wallpaper. Now the paper imitates polished wooden planks — vertical planks — and there is a cigarette machine where the jukebox that played French records used to be. But nothing has really changed there. The menu is much the same as always — Crème Jeannette, Poulet Rôti, Shrimps Cocktail, Artichaut Froid, and so on. Even the atmosphere is the same, as though finality had stayed where it belongs — out of sight and far away. M. Guy and Jo, the waiter, and Francine, the waitress, were all calm and cheerful, as though they expected to be welcoming customers to Le Steak de Paris for a long time to come. There are restaurants in the other brownstones, but the tenants who used to live upstairs in the old houses have all moved away except one top-floor lady, who clings to her apartment, where she has lived for years, and still carefully tends potted plants on her windowsills. The plants make a fragile show of green, a living frieze against the old walls. When I left Le Steak, about nine-thirty, I walked toward Seventh Avenue, which becomes Broadway at almost exactly the point where it meets Forty-ninth Street. I moved along slowly, with the slow, hesitating crowd. With all the hesitation, and all the slowness, there was no revelry. There never is, on West Forty-ninth Street. It is a tentative, transient, noisy street, very ill at ease and, to a stranger’s eye, shifty, as though gaiety were unknown or strictly forbidden. Traffic is westbound in that block, so we all went along together, cars and people moving toward Broadway in a solid mass, almost as though we were on a pilgrimage. We passed the bouncy discothèque place next to Le Steak, and we passed Chinese restaurants and a Japanese restaurant and the record shop and the delicatessen and the hairdressing salon that stays open far into the night, and the Plymouth Hotel Coffee Shop, which never closes, and at last we reached the big parking garage. There’s a pizza-hero place next to the entrance, and next to that, in what was once the doorway to the upper floors of the garage building, a gypsy has her parlor, a tiny place. Four stone steps lead up to her private door, which stood open tonight, though the gypsy was not to be seen. She had retreated to a back room, perhaps. But a vase of artificial flowers stood invitingly on a round table, and there was a small piece of carpeting on the tile floor. Next to the gypsy’s parlor is an adults-only movie house that advertises itself with a frenzied blast of lights and signs. Tonight, the shows were The Promiscuous Sex and Strip Poker Queens Wild. The theater marquee is so dazzling that the letters of the titles always seem to jump into the air, blinding people half a block away, and it is surprising, when you finally reach the theater, to find a fairly clear space on the sidewalk in front of it, because hardly anybody lingers there. Tonight, at the edge of the clear space, to the side of the theater and at the foot of the gypsy’s steps, five big young girls were standing around — not together, not in a group, but just standing around. The crowd was so thick up to that point that I didn’t see the girls until I reached them. Nobody around me saw them, either, and although we were moving along and they were standing still, before we knew it they were upon us. It was like that, as though they had pounced, just as the lights seem to pounce, causing shame, or distress, or embarrassment, or curiosity, or derision, or excitement, or disgust, according to the nature of the person who sees them. This was one of those times of surprise when we cannot tell the difference between memory and instinct, between reminders and threats, and all was confusion, except that it was obviously important to avoid the eyes of those girls, because they were the eyes of satisfied furies, or of unsatisfied prison wardresses. The five never moved. They stood still, and the crowd broke up and detoured unsteadily around them. They were quite tall and about twenty years of age each, with straight, heavy hair dyed different shades of bronze and yellow and platinum, and they all wore tiny, frothy demi-mini shifts, which barely covered their behinds and seemed designed to show even more leg than they had. They were not slender girls. They looked well fed, and their legs were solid and strong and female, like pillars of flesh. One pair of legs was bare, a powdery-pink color. The four other pairs were encased in neon-colored fishnet stockings — two pairs in neon green, one pair in neon mauve, and one pair in neon white that shone with a pearly luster. The girls were probably not unusually tall, but their legs made them look colossal. They were a powerful group of young women, and people hurried past them, glancing at them with the furtive attention most of us give to the solemnly erotic photographs in the big glass-covered case that stands outside the movie house. In front of me there was a diminutive old lady with thickly crimped hair dyed to a rich dark red, who kept turning to stare back at the girls. She wore an imitation-leopard pillbox hat, and she was grinning, almost laughing. She spoke to a woman walking next to her. “Did you see those bums?” she said to the woman. The woman sprang away from her without answering her, and the old lady turned back and saw me. “Did you see those bums?” she said delightedly to me. “Did you see those bums?” She looked about ninety years old. It was my turn to hurry on ahead, in order to get away from her, and I almost caught up with the first woman to be addressed, who had joined two other women, as quietly dressed, in suits and hats and gloves, as she was herself. The three women reached the corner and disappeared up Seventh Avenue, going as fast as they could — home to their hotel, I think. I had a short wait on the corner for a taxi. I didn’t like to turn around for another look at Forty-ninth Street, for fear of finding the imitation-leopard pillbox bobbing about behind me. But there was no need to fear any further word from her to me. When I did turn around, she had gone back along the street to where the girls were. I had a glimpse of her pillbox, and I am sure she was asking her question of other surprised people. A taxi came along, and I got into it and started home. Three or four summers ago, at about six o’clock in the evening, I saw a girl walking alone along Forty-ninth Street. She wore a red dress, and her walk was a ladylike travesty of Marilyn Monroe’s walk, and she was sw
inging her handbag. All heads turned to stare at her as she sauntered boldly along in broad daylight, and she seemed very daring, but any one of the girls I saw tonight would make short work of her. Those girls looked as though they had been assembled, legs and all, in an automobile factory. They made Forty-ninth Street look very old-fashioned — faded, in fact, and harmless. They didn’t go with the street at all. They were ahead of themselves by a year or two. They will go better with the new buildings.