The Long-Winded Lady Page 14

  SEPTEMBER 16, 1967

  The View Chez Paul

  TODAY, Saturday, was warm, windy, and gray, and for the first time this year the city showed its summer emptiness. The endless avenues were quiet and looked wider, and people were scarce on the side streets. In the middle of town, New York took on its desultory tourist look, except in the block of Forty-fourth Street between Fifth and Sixth, where there was pandemonium of the locked, almost silent kind we who live in the city have come to associate with the arrival of the moviemakers. During the past few months, I have watched preparations for moviemaking in several parts of town, and in every case there was the same enormously organized cessation of activity; it is as though invaders from another country had arrived with all their trucks and their armies and their heavy artillery, and with their battle plans drawn up, only to find they had forgotten their ammunition, or their general. They wait. First they maneuver themselves and their heavy equipment into position, and then they begin waiting. They drink coffee out of cardboard containers. They speak together, but not very much. They have no need of language. They annex what they want — this doorway, that second-floor window, a corner of the park, a certain stretch of street — and they ignore the rest, including us New Yorkers, who stand about smiling and goggling like friendly natives. The moviemakers hate to be asked questions. They hardly seem to see us. They are aloof, touched by the remoteness of the Star that will begin shining now at any minute. They wait. And, on the outside, we wait — adults, children, and dogs, all of us crowding as close as we can get to where the Presence will stand, the Star. The Star on West Forty-fourth Street today was Julie Andrews. She was making a movie in the Algonquin Hotel, and early this afternoon the narrow street outside the hotel was packed tight with her caravan. A caravan, according to my dictionary, is a company traveling together for safety in the East. Miss Andrews’s caravan was extensive — theatrical moving van (Schumer’s), silver-colored long-distance buses (Campus Coach Lines), suppliers’ trucks (Thos. A. Deming: platforms, tents, bleacher seats, chairs, tables), limousines, and big green Hertz vans. Only a narrow and uncertain lane was left in the middle of the street for motorists traveling from Sixth Avenue to Fifth, and cars trying to get in and out of the big parking garage directly across from the Algonquin were having an even worse time than they usually do. The entrance to the Algonquin was hedged in with ropes and coils and boxes and tripods and lights, and at the curb a red revolving light on a stand about three feet high went round and round in a triumphant way that made me feel oppressed and obedient. I was standing in a window of the hairdresser’s on the second floor of the Royalton Hotel, across the street from the Algonquin. I was having my hair done, and every once in a while I struggled out from under the dryer and went to the windows to have a look. I was not the only curious one. M. Paul, who owns the establishment, and his assistant, Pauline, who has blue-black hair and comes from Normandy, also kept going to the windows to look out. I asked if she had ever seen Julie Andrews. “Not in person,” she said regretfully. The Royalton Hotel and the Algonquin Hotel are about the same age, both of them going on seventy — handsome, strong old places that are not at all alike except for the heavy Edwardian air they have, which is beginning to seem recalcitrant on this narrow street. The obliterating touch of the cement mixer is gradually smoothing this block into the bland expression that is the new New York. The street seems very close and at the same time quite distant from the Royalton windows, which are curtained only in a pale diaphanous material, a veil. Elizabeth Bowen once described a room that was crowded although there were no people in it as looking as if somebody were holding a party for furniture. The scene on Forty-fourth Street today looked as if somebody were holding a protest meeting for cars. There were very few people about, and nobody was standing and staring. The street would have been mobbed except that Miss Andrews and her caravan had come without fanfare into a very quiet weekend city. The doorman of the Algonquin kept hurrying out into the middle of the street, looking for taxis for people, but the rampart of trucks and vans hid most of what was going on. Once in a while we had a glimpse of the real movie people — the actors and actresses who made their headquarters in a very large silver omnibus that was parked in front of the Algonquin. The bus door opened, and a handsome, white-haired gentleman in evening clothes stepped down. He had handlebar mustaches and he wore a red carnation in his lapel, and he was carrying a cardboard box with coffee containers in it. A golden-haired lady in silver lamé climbed up into the bus. Her dress was trimmed with silver fringe that undulated about her knees, and she wore a silver Pocahontas band around her head. At that moment, on Forty-fourth Street in her glittering stage dress, she was enviable and beautiful, part of the illusory world we all half hope to enter when we gather to watch the Hollywood people keep their enormous vigils on our streets. The golden-haired actress sat down in the front seat of the bus, across from the driver, and almost immediately bent her head and began making the gestures people make in airplanes when the stewardess has brought them their tray of food. She opened little envelopes and looked into them, and she opened big envelopes and looked into them, and then she began eating her box lunch. In the dim interior of the bus, she was only a shadow along with all the other shadows who sat eating or stood talking or walked to the bus door to step out into the daylight that showed them as they really were — costumed figures, the men in evening clothes, the girls dressed for a wild party of forty years ago. One of the bus seats was piled almost to the top of the window with light-colored, long-haired furs — furs of the nineteen-twenties. “It must be a movie about the twenties,” M. Paul said. “Julie Andrews hasn’t come out yet,” Pauline said. When my hair was finished, I walked across to the Algonquin to buy cigarettes and have a look inside. At that early hour of the afternoon, even on a summer Saturday, there are always people sitting about the hotel, having a drink or reading the paper or waiting for friends to join them for lunch. Not today. The place looked half dismantled. The chairs and sofas were there, but there was no place for anybody to sit down, with all the movie clutter about and underfoot. The lobby, usually so comfortable and hospitable, looked like a setting for anxiety, and the Rose Room restaurant, at the end of the lobby, was drowned in a blaze of tall white lights that concentrated on the back wall and the bar. I picked my way across to the newsstand and bought cigarettes, and I was starting to leave when I saw Julie Andrews. She was alone, sitting in a high, high-backed armchair beside the entrance to the Rose Room, having her box lunch. Her tight short dress seemed to be made of crystal and light, and she was wearing a crystal headband for a crown; she looked like Titania. The chair was much too big and too high for her, and to balance herself and her lunch she had put her knees together, and her feet, balanced on the tips of her toes, were far apart. She was very hungry. All her attention was on her sandwich, which she picked up with both hands, and she was just about to take a bite out of it when she raised her eyes and saw me standing and staring at her. I immediately stopped thinking of Titania and began thinking of Lady Macbeth. At the sight of me, Julie Andrews froze in fury. Behind her sandwich, she was at bay, her hungry face glazed with anger. She is a Star, no doubt about that. She shines and radiates, and she can cast a spell, any kind of spell. Later in the afternoon, I went back to the Algonquin to get a taxi and first have another look around. This time, Julie Andrews was standing in the entrance to the hotel, having her photograph taken. Her flirtatious little dress shimmered mauve in the gray-white daylight, and she might have been the girl Scott Fitzgerald had in mind when he wrote:

  There’d be an orchestra

  Bingo! Bango!

  Playing for us

  To dance the tango,

  And people would clap

  When we arose

  At her sweet face

  And my new clothes.

  I looked over at the Royalton, and beside Chez Paul’s filmy curtains I saw a neat blue-black head. Pauline, catching a glimpse of Julie Andrews in person.


  JUNE 17, 1967

  The Sorry Joker

  ONE night recently, in the Longchamps Restaurant at Madison Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, I had the satisfaction of seeing a practical-joker type smacked down, and in such a way that he could do absolutely nothing to save his face. That night was rainy — a steady, heavy rain. I was having dinner in one of the crescent-shaped booths they have at Longchamps; it was one that faces the entrance door and the street window on the Madison Avenue side. It was about nine-thirty, and in the light from the street lamps and from the few shop windows that were still lighted the rain fell brightly, but hardly anybody passed by. It was too wet for walking that night. There were not many people in the big restaurant, and the long bar was quite deserted, but at a table by the door four people were sitting — two men and two women — and they were very noisy, laughing a lot and shouting at the waiter and changing their minds about what they wanted to eat. One of the men, the one who talked the loudest and the most, the life of the party, was sitting with his back to me, but I could see the faces of his three companions. When I had been there only a couple of minutes, the revolving door went around very slowly and a tall elderly lady wearing a transparent raincoat over her regular coat, and a transparent rain hat over her real hat, and transparent galoshes, came in, carrying a very wet umbrella. She opened her raincoat, and from inside it, where they had been keeping dry, she drew out a book and a folded newspaper that looked like the London Times. Then, without hesitation, she started to walk toward a table not far from me. But she had taken only a few paces past the table by the door when the man with his back to me turned his chair noisily and shouted “Hey, lady!” after her. The lady turned and took a step or two back toward him, and found him laughing senselessly, looking up at her, and his three companions convulsed with amusement at the sight of her startled face. She turned away from them immediately and again started walking to her table, and this time she reached it and sat down, but she forgot to take off her raincoat, which billowed out awkwardly around her, shining with raindrops. The waiter brought her a menu and then went to attend to someone else. She looked at the menu and laid it on the table and began to stare in the direction of the street, but her eyes kept wandering over to the four rude strangers by the door, who gave every sign of enjoying themselves and each other and their dinner. She took up the menu again, and then she put it back on the table and took up her book, her London Times, her handbag, her gloves, and her umbrella, and went out of the restaurant as quietly as she had come in, but in disarray. I was afraid that the man might speak to her again as she passed his table, but I do not think he saw her go. It had been a pointless little scene, but the point was that there had been a scene. Someone had been humiliated. A woman had been deprived of the quiet dinner she had promised herself, and now she was going to have to decide on another place and on how to get there in the rain, and she would probably decide to just give up and go home.

  To divert myself from the spite I was feeling, I began to watch a fat lady in a pearly satin Nefertiti turban who sat a good distance off, several empty tables away from me, in the corner booth by the window. She was square and pink, all flesh, and she sat up very straight, with her back pushed firmly against the back of the booth, and her round dark eyes, like an idol’s eyes, seemed to look directly at nothing. She hardly moved her head on its erect, portly neck, and as her eyes moved over the restaurant she seemed to see not one person, or two, but millions, maybe billions, of people, and she ate steadily. A man sat with her, but she never spoke to him. Her fork was in her right hand, and her right hand never rested; she was eating something creamy — chicken à la king, or something like that. Her left hand was laid against the base of her throat, flat against her skin, and the ring she wore sparkled brilliantly, like her earrings. When I first looked at her, she was lifting some food from her plate, and as she carefully raised the fork she glided her left hand down and placed it, palm downward, under the food, and so conducted the fork up to her face, in a gesture that looked as though she might be about to dance in Bali. When the food was safe, when she was eating it, the fork went down onto the plate again, and her left hand was laid back against her throat again until the fork could be filled once more. Her imperturbability and the smoothness and style of her gestures and the independence of her arms and the separate independence of her head made me believe that I was seeing how Siva might eat and still maintain an inhuman ascendancy, because the common work of eating detracted no more from the majesty of this woman in Longchamps than falling down a cliff detracts from the majesty of water or passing through clouds detracts from the majesty of the sun. She would remain the same, whatever she did. Nothing would affect her. Nothing could make her vulnerable or cause her shame or discomposure. No one would ever drive her out of the restaurant she had made up her mind to dine in.

  I glanced over at the four rude people, and I was glad I did, because just then the joker fell off his chair. He did not slide off or slip off — there was no chance for him to pretend he was acting — he fell off and hit the floor with a fearful thump, and his chair fell over, too, with a small crash. His companions behaved abominably. They did not reach down to help him up, or chortle companionably at him, or anything like that. Instead, the second man in the party turned his back and began to watch the street, and the two women took their mirrors out of their handbags and gave critical attention to their forelocks. The Joker stayed sitting on the floor for perhaps half a minute, staring at the hem of the tablecloth, and then he got up and set the chair straight and began to blame the chair and said he would sue Longchamps. He shook the chair to show how it wobbled, but it was as solid as a rock, and he sat down on it and stopped talking. He drank some coffee. None of the others spoke. They seemed to feel that the fun had gone out of the evening. The second man waved for the check and signed for it, and they all went out into the rain.

  I looked across at the Idol, because I wanted to know how she placed her hands when she was not eating, but her dinner plate must have been bottomless — she was still at it. In my turn, I left the restaurant, and started looking for a taxi home, and the only regret I had was that the lady with the London Times had not stayed long enough to see her tormentor get his comeuppance.

  JANUARY 20, 1962

  Giving Money in the Street

  IT is and always has been my inclination to give money to people who ask me for money on the street, and I always give something — usually a quarter these days, where I used to give a dime. I know people who say that to give money to someone who asks for it on the street is to submit to blackmail and that most of the people who ask on the street are frauds. I say that I would rather give the quarter and walk on free than not give it and pay out the rest of the day, or even an hour or ten minutes of the day, in doubt: should I have given it after all, the chances are surely fifty percent against the person’s being a fraud, and so on. I find that a decision to do something leaves me free, while a decision not to do something only leaves me surrounded with undone things and endless, exasperating chances of changing my mind. Not long ago, I was going to a matinée with a friend and I had the tickets and I was late. I was to meet my friend at the theater. It was raining hard. I stood outside the Algonquin Hotel waiting for a taxi for about five minutes before I realized that even if a taxi came along it would be going the wrong way — it would be going east, and my theater was on Forty-fifth Street west of Broadway. I got across Sixth Avenue and walked very fast and made the light at the corner of Forty-fifth and got across, so that I was on the right side for the theater. Then I really tore along toward Broadway; I could go so fast because it was raining so hard that there was no one to get in my way. While I was hurrying along, I opened my bag and got out a dollar bill to have ready in case a taxi stopped and somebody got out, and when I got near Broadway I suddenly wondered if I really had the tickets, and I opened my bag again and looked in, and they were there, all right. I saw that the light at Broadway was red, and I thought that by the time I g
ot to the corner it should be turning green and I would be able to race right across. Just then I saw, standing near the corner of Forty-fifth and Broadway, an unfortunate-looking woman who wore a straw hat and a little short black coat and who was holding a box top in her hands and looking toward me. I thought, That poor woman thinks I took something out of my bag to give her. Then I thought, I would have given the dollar to the taximan anyway and I’ll just give it to her and maybe I’ll get to the theater on time, and as I was going past her I put the dollar in the box top, which held two or three yellow pencils and some brown shoelaces. That took a second or so, and as I rushed on I heard her say, “Oh, it’s too much,” but I did not stop, and then I heard her coming after me crying “It’s too much, it’s too much.” She caught me at the corner just as I was stepping down into the street, and I had to turn and speak to her, and I said several times, “Oh, it’s all right,” but, of course, I couldn’t take time to talk about it, and she seemed agitated, so I took back the dollar and tore across Broadway and left her standing there in the rain. I didn’t look around when I got to the other side, and I was just in time at the theater, and while my friend was watching the curtain go up and settling down to enjoy the afternoon I was wondering what a dollar was too much for. Too much for me to give? I suppose so. Too much for her to take? Why? She hadn’t tried to get me to take any, or all, of the few pencils and shoelaces she had in the box top. I decided that a person who invites money on the street and then wants to limit or set the amount to be given is a fraud, but I feel I have not finished with the matter yet, and I have an uneasy suspicion that the decision I make is going to go against me, although I do not see why it should be so.