The Long-Winded Lady Read online

  1969

  On the A Train

  THERE were no seats to be had on the A train last night, but I had a good grip on the pole at the end of one of the seats and I was reading the beauty column of the Journal-American, which the man next to me was holding up in front of him. All of a sudden I felt a tap on my arm, and I looked down and there was a man beginning to stand up from the seat where he was sitting. “Would you like to sit down?” he said. Well, I said the first thing that came into my head, I was so surprised and pleased to be offered a seat in the subway. “Oh, thank you very much,” I said, “but I am getting out at the next station.” He sat back and that was that, but I felt all set up and I thought what a nice man he must be and I wondered what his wife was like and I thought how lucky she was to have such a polite husband, and then all of a sudden I realized that I wasn’t getting out at the next station at all but the one after that, and I felt perfectly terrible. I decided to get out at the next station anyway, but then I thought, If I get out at the next station and wait around for the next train I’ll miss my bus and they only go every hour and that will be silly. So I decided to brazen it out as best I could, and when the train was slowing up at the next station I stared at the man until I caught his eye and then I said, “I just remembered this isn’t my station after all.” Then I thought he would think I was asking him to stand up and give me his seat, so I said, “But I still don’t want to sit down, because I’m getting off at the next station.” I showed him by my expression that I thought it was all rather funny, and he smiled, more or less, and nodded, and lifted his hat and put it back on his head again and looked away. He was one of those small, rather glum or sad men who always look off into the distance after they have finished what they are saying, when they speak. I felt quite proud of my strong-mindedness at not getting off the train and missing my bus simply because of the fear of a little embarrassment, but just as the train was shutting its doors I peered out and there it was, 168th Street. “Oh dear!” I said. “That was my station and now I have missed the bus!” I was fit to be tied, and I had spoken quite loudly, and I felt extremely foolish, and I looked down, and the man who had offered me his seat was partly looking at me, and I said, “Now, isn’t that silly? That was my station. A Hundred and Sixty-eighth Street is where I’m supposed to get off.” I couldn’t help laughing, it was all so awful, and he looked away, and the train fidgeted along to the next station, and I got off as quickly as I possibly could and tore over to the downtown platform and got a local to 168th, but of course I had missed my bus by a minute, or maybe two minutes. I felt very much at a loose end wandering around 168th Street, and I finally went into a rudely appointed but friendly bar and had a martini, warm but very soothing, which cost me only fifty cents. While I was sipping it, trying to make it last to exactly the moment that would get me a good place in the bus queue without having to stand too long in the cold, I wondered what I should have done about that man in the subway. After all, if I had taken his seat I probably would have got out at 168th Street, which would have meant that I would hardly have been sitting down before I would have been getting up again, and that would have seemed odd. And rather grasping of me. And he wouldn’t have got his seat back, because some other grasping person would have slipped into it ahead of him when I got up. He seemed a retiring sort of man, not pushy at all. I hesitate to think of how he must have regretted offering me his seat. Sometimes it is very hard to know the right thing to do.

  FEBRUARY 15, 1958

  Balzac’s Favorite Food

  THERE is a bookshop on Forty-eighth Street, not far from Sixth Avenue, where they sell mostly paperbacks and marked-down copies — publishers’ remainders. I was in there the other day looking around. It was Saturday and the weather was cool. The shop door was open to the street. It was about lunchtime, and what business there was was casual. The afternoon was a slow one, and the city was amiable and groggy — no complaints that I could hear. Such a siesta mood is remarkable in New York City and, in the very middle of the city, strange. It was a mysterious occasion and a lighthearted one, as though all the citizens had just been given their seasonal allotment of time and had found that they had enough and to spare — plenty of time, more than they ever would have imagined. In the bookshop, all was calm. You might have been far away, in some much older city, browsing alongside the antiquarians. The pace was intent and unhurried as the customers meandered among the works of Henry James and Rex Stout and Françoise Mallet-Joris and Ivan Turgenev and Agatha Christie and the rest, more and more names turning up in front of my eyes as I stood looking. I had already collected all I intended to buy — five books under my arm — and I was looking through another book, one I cannot remember the name of, and I was reading a description of Balzac’s favorite food. What he liked best was plain bread covered with sardines that he had mashed into a paste and mixed with something. What was it Balzac mixed into his sardine paste? I was just looking back to find out, reading it all again and thinking how delicious it sounded, when my ears were insulted by hard voices screeching right outside the door — people making remarks about the books in the window. “Hey, Marilyn Monroe has been reduced!” a man’s voice shouted. “Five seventy-five to one ninety-two!” There were squawks of laughter, and then a woman’s voice said (it was a harridan speaking), “Wait till she goes down to a dollar.” “Too much! Too much! A dollar is too much!” the man shouted, and then these horrors were trooping into the shop, and I took off my glasses to get a look at them. Cruelty and Stupidity and Bad Noise — there were three of them, a man and a woman and another, but I did not see the third, who was hidden behind the tall spindle bookcase they were all looking at and making merry over. They called out names and titles, and made a lot of feeble puns, ruining the place for everybody, and I paid for the books I had under my arm, and left. I walked over to Le Steak de Paris and asked for sardines and plain bread, but when I began to mash the sardines, I couldn’t remember what it was that Balzac used to mix them with. It didn’t matter. Sardines with plain bread are very good. I said to myself that there was no use thinking about the hyenas in the bookshop. Their capacity for arousing violence will arouse somebody who is violent one of these days. (That is what I told myself.) They will trip over their own shoelaces. Time will tell on them. They will never know anything except the miserable appetite of envy. They will learn, like the boy who cried wolf, that people who mock the Last Laugh are incinerated by it when it finally sounds. I don’t care. That little bookshop stays open late, and I am going there this evening to find that book I was looking at that has the description in it of how Balzac made his sardine paste. Before the evening is finished, I will know exactly what the Master’s favorite food was, and I will also know how it tastes today.

  SEPTEMBER 21, 1963

  The Dark Elevator

  I HAVE no great fondness for elevators at any time, and I have developed a dislike for the two elevators in this hotel where I live. They are perfectly ordinary self-service elevators, safe and sound, but they carry on as though they were dangerous. They creak, and when they stop at a floor they bounce helplessly, and they often stop at the wrong floor. This morning I got into one of them with even less enthusiasm than I used to have. A few nights ago a minor fire in the hotel left part of the top floors and both elevators soaked with water from the firemen’s hoses. Since then the elevators have smelled of smoking mattresses and wet old plaster and cement, and the thin carpeting on their floors is not yet dry. I live on the eighth floor, and when I got into the elevator this morning I pushed the button marked ONE for the main floor and I pushed the button marked DC so that the doors would close without delay. The doors closed quickly and the elevator began to move, and as it did so all the lights went out, the overhead lights and the signal light, all. There I was in a pitch-black box. I felt around for the metal handbar you are supposed to hang onto in case the floor gives way, but I couldn’t find the bar, and the damp floor moved like grease under my feet. It was a ghastly descent. Whe
n the door opened at last, I was on the main floor and I walked across to the desk and said to the clerk, “The lights are out in the elevators.” He looked at me sadly. “I know,” he said. “They have been working on them all morning.” He then turned to the switchboard, because in addition to being the desk clerk he is also the telephone operator, and he has other duties as well. It was very hot in the lobby. The air was old and stale, and the fan behind the desk stirred anxiously. I started for the entrance and the white marble steps that lead down to the street, but there is a public telephone booth at each side of the entrance doors and I remembered a call I should have made before I left upstairs. The phone on the right had an out-of-order sign on it — one or the other of the phones is usually out of order — and the other one held a man who was smoking a cigar. He had left the door open, and his right leg was stretched outside the booth so that he could admire his shoe, which was of straw-colored leather with airholes in it. He was saying, “Where will you be at one-thirty? I’ll give you a call then. What about two o’clock, where will you be at two o’clock? Where will you be between one-thirty and two o’clock?” I sat down on a small settee to wait. The settee is covered with orange leatherette, and the wall behind it is covered with a mural-sized photograph in melancholy brown of New York City seen from the harbor. I sat sideways on the settee to avoid staring at the man in the booth, and I looked at the unreal skyline of the city I am living in, and then I stared at the end wall of the desk, which has a square hole cut in it so that the clerk can see who is entering the hotel. Decorating the hole is a potted plant about six inches high. The lobby used to be about three times bigger than it is now, but all that remains of its former grandeur is the high, ornate ceiling and the marble stairs that go off upstairs to the right. The present desk, which is very like an overturned shoebox, is cramped against the wall facing the elevators, and the end wall, between the desk and the elevators, is covered with panels of mirror that are held in place with glass buttons. One of the panels is a door that opens into a tiny office, but the door is usually closed, closing the wall. At right angles to the mirrored door, and right next to the elevators, there is a door opening into a dark and cavernous storage room, where a herd of old, worn-out television sets lie at peace and in silence. One of the television sets still has some life in it, and sometimes at night the bellman on duty leaves the door ajar and sits on the end edge of his orange leatherette bench peering in at the performance on the screen. At such times the night clerk on duty behind the desk puts his elbows on the counter and watches too. I was beginning to wonder if that phone call was worth all this waiting. I didn’t want to go out into the noisy, baking street and start looking for another phone booth and I didn’t want to go back upstairs in that dark elevator. Someone started to climb the steps from the street, and I looked over my shoulder and saw a gray-haired lady of about seventy who lives here. She has a room without a bath and she is often in the hall. She has bad temper written all over her face, bad temper and arrogance, and her eyes look about her in a curiosity that is unkind and persistent. She is always fighting with somebody and she is always complaining. Twice I have heard her scolding the young clerk in the grocery store next door, and I have even seen her engage in argument with one of the tiny gypsy children who hang around the street. She looks as though she would like to reform somebody. It was clear, as she climbed the stairs, that the hot weather was hurting her. She was tired. She looked as though she had never seen a worse day. She wore a long-sleeved knitted sweater of beige silk and a brown tweed skirt. Her hair, as usual, was caught tightly in a net, and she carried her handbag and a small brown paper grocery bag. We have cooking privileges here. She passed me by and stopped at the desk, but the clerk was busy on the telephone. While she waited to speak with him she rested one hand on the counter and stared back at the street she had escaped from. The lobby is not cool but it is not too bright and it is always quiet. I think this must be the only hotel in New York City that has no bar or shop of any kind opening off the lobby. When the clerk had finished speaking on the telephone, the gray-haired lady addressed him in her usual remarkable voice. She could give orders with that voice. She asked, “Are the lights working in the elevators yet?” “Not yet,” the clerk said. “When will they be working?” she asked. “I can’t tell you,” he said, “because I don’t know. They’ve been working on them all morning.” “You told me that before,” she said. “Is the manager in?” “I don’t know,” the clerk said. “I left three messages for him to call me,” she said. “What do you mean, you don’t know if he’s in?” “I know what I know,” the clerk said despairingly, “and I don’t know if he’s in.” He then went to the far end of the desk and hid himself in the recess there, where they keep records. The gray-haired lady had lifted her chin against his indifference, and she resumed her contemplation of the rowdy street scene outside. She is a tall woman, and her expression, as she realized how helpless she was, and how afraid of the elevator, was that of an empress confronted by the mob that has arrived to assassinate her. She was all fortitude and dignity. Then she turned and walked the few steps to the elevator, and as she did so her bad temper and her arrogance and her bitterness all went overboard and I think she took nothing into that dark and smelly box with her except the courage she was born with. The man in the telephone booth put another dime in and continued with his arguing, and I got up and went out into the blinding din of Forty-ninth Street. When I came back later, in the middle of the afternoon, the lights were on in the elevators and I made the ascent in comparative security. I wonder what the gray-haired lady felt when she reached her room. Did she feel defeat, at her circumstances, or victory, because of her behavior in the face of her circumstances? I suppose all she felt was relief at finding herself safe home again.