The Long-Winded Lady Page 6

  AUGUST 13, 1966

  Lovers in Washington Square

  WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK was being very satisfactory the other morning at six o’clock. It was a dripping green morning after a night of rain. The air was mild and fresh, and shone with a faint unsteadiness that was exactly like the unsteadiness of color inside a seashell. It was a weekday, an ordinary morning, business hours drawing near, but the evanescent appearance of the square said that anything might be about to happen — an operetta, a harlequinade, a pantomime, a fantasy about city creatures trapped by one another or about country creatures drawn to the city by dreams that turned out to be only traps they set for themselves. But, whatever the play, it would have no ending, unless to vanish is ending enough. Around the square the other morning at six o’clock there was an air of arrival and also of return. That overfed-university atmosphere was altogether absent, and the anxiously academic façades surrounding the park might have been made of paper, for all the reality they had. The trees, refreshed by the night and by the damp air, fluttered with a gaiety that seemed full of echoes — echoes of brightness, echoes of jokes, echoes of quick footsteps, echoes of friendliness. A lady who used to walk through the park forty and thirty and twenty and ten years ago could have walked there the other morning and found that, after all, nothing had really changed very much. There was a pair of young lovers quarreling helplessly — very young lovers, a girl and a boy of about nineteen years each. For their arena — they kept moving from bench to bench — they had the northwest corner of the park, where there is a large circular clearing in the grass. Far away from them, and hidden from them by the trees, a solitary musician of their age sat exactly in the middle of a bench that was exactly in the middle of the long east row of benches, so, like them, he had his back to the street, and, like them, he looked toward grass, trees, and the fountain. He had a bulging cloth bag, a sort of knapsack, at his side, and he was strumming a guitar and singing to it in a voice so low that his words were lost, though their meaning was not. He was sad, or being sad. And behind him, on the other side of University Place, a thin, tidy middle-aged man had set a very small canvas on an easel and, with his back to the sharp angle of the corner building, was intent on making his own record of the perfect morning. By the time I saw the painter, it was a few minutes past six. I had walked into the square from Washington Place, on the west side, and as I entered the park I saw the girl sitting alone on a bench in her corner. Her young man had not yet arrived. She was holding her handbag in her lap, and she wore short black gloves. She was dressed as though she were going to her office — in a narrow green linen dress and high-heeled shoes. She had an enormous mop of black hair, and her head was slightly bent, as though she were shy and were waiting alone in a crowded place. Then he appeared, strolling nonchalantly, from Sullivan Street. He wore a brightly checked cotton jacket, and for a man who appeared to be taking his time, he crossed the square in very short order. As I passed by the girl, I saw him far off, just walking into the park, and when I turned my head he was sitting beside her — sitting very close. But then, after a minute, she got up and walked off across the circle and sat down on a bench that faced him — far enough away to show him what she thought of him but near enough for him to speak to her if he chose to raise his voice. They sat like that, staring at each other across the distance, the desert, for a while, and then he stood up and walked over to her and again sat down beside her, but this time she got up at once and went back to her original bench and sat down, and they started staring at each other all over again. But not for long. He got up suddenly and walked out of the square, and she turned her head and watched him go. He never looked back, but when he reached the sidewalk he bent down to pat the topknot of a tiny white poodle that was being led into the park by its master. The poodle was so small that ordinarily a person might stop to admire it or to smile at it, or even to pick it up, but to bend down all the way to pat it was very like bending down to pat a sparrow. The young man bent. By the time his hand reached the poodle’s head, he was folded in half, and from that difficult position he twisted his neck around so that he was looking up into the face of the master — making complimentary remarks about the little dog, I suppose. I imagined the girl’s anguish, to see her young man able to talk so calmly and naturally to a stranger only a minute after leaving her sitting there alone with a broken heart. Also, I felt her irritation with him; he didn’t seem like the kind of young man who would normally be effusive. But it was all over in a minute. The poodle paraded joyfully into the park, and the young man — Animal Lover, Persecutor of Women at six o’clock in the morning — sauntered across the street and went off down Waverly Place, heading for Sixth Avenue. He didn’t hesitate or look back, and when he was out of sight the girl stopped watching and began waiting again. I went over to the east side of the park, where I saw the guitarist and the painter, and when I was starting down University Place, leaving the Square, I looked back to where the girl had been sitting, but there was no one there. I hope that that girl had found sense enough to follow that young man and catch up with him. I don’t think he intended to come back.

  JULY 30, 1966

  I Wish for a Little Street Music

  THERE are times when this city seems actually to disapprove of people. In gloomy moments, I think we are allowed to stay alive here but not to live, much less to enjoy ourselves or take pleasure in what we see when we look out of our windows or walk around our streets. If we have the fortitude to get up out of bed in the morning and get going to face the day, we should also have the freedom to rejoice, and I think the freedom to rejoice is being denied us when our senses are dulled at every turn by streets that are inimical when they are not simply sad. Tonight at seven o’clock, I stood at the corner of Forty-fourth Street and Broadway waiting for the light to change. It is a crowded place there, where a huge fenced-in parking lot occupies the site of the recently executed Astor Hotel. Broadway is dying, but the big street still looks much as it has looked for some time now — a garish architectural shambles with cheap shop fronts and a few movie houses. At seven o’clock, in summertime, the celebrated lights had not yet begun to stretch and lift and distort the scene into night’s dazzling skeleton of what might have been if Broadway, the entertainment center, had been able to prove her own importance. The people crowding the sidewalks moved steadily, jostling along like sheep in a pen that has no end, except that this Broadway pen must have had an end, because some of the people were coming back. They seemed to be the same people coming back. Not that the crowd was faceless but that there was a common expression — not passive, not alert, not expectant, not disappointed: a crowd expression that conveyed nothing because it said nothing. There were few, if any, tourists in the crowd, and it was not a holiday night, not even a weekend night. The people on the sidewalks were ordinary New Yorkers after working hours. I thought to myself: All these people are sheep and I am a sheep. Somebody behind me gave a push, but I did not look around, for fear they might become angry and push me again. Instead, I watched the light and I thought: There are too many people in this world. I looked up. Over there the pale moon was rising to meet the night. At that moment I wished very much for a little street music: a man with a melodeon, or a brass band, or a piper, or a barrel organ, or a person with a big voice and a tuneful song — something surprising and friendly. The light changed and I started across Broadway along with the rest of the people who had been waiting. I was about halfway across when I heard a wild shout of “Father, Father!” and a young man ran forward so that I only saw his back. He was a very tall young man, fat and untidy in a tweed jacket that was too short for him, and gray flannel trousers, and he ran as awkwardly as though he had seven arms and seven legs to control instead of only two of each. He seemed to be keeping all his knees high in the air, and he held one arm up, like Mercury. Then I saw, on the corner, a middle-aged man standing alone with his hands clasped patiently in front of him. The middle-aged man was not very tall, and he was very thin and tri
m and distinct in a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a dark tie. His face was pale, and his expression was solemn and almost stern. When he caught sight of his son, he pursed his lips into an odd smile that was half formal and half shy, and he extended his hand very formally in greeting. But then, as the son ran up and took his hand, the father couldn’t help himself and he began grinning. The son bent and kissed his father, who kissed him back, and as they moved from the corner I saw that the son wasn’t a young man at all but a young boy, not more than fifteen years old, maybe sixteen, and that he wasn’t fat but simply growing in all directions at once. His hair was rumpled, and as he talked, gesticulating with his arms and chattering at full speed, he kept putting one big hand flat on the top of his head and holding it there, hoping not to grow another inch just yet, I suppose. He wore big spectacles, and his face was red and shiny. He had his father’s brown eyes and his father’s straight, narrow nose and perhaps his father’s serious mouth, but it was hard to tell about that, because he was smiling and talking so much. They moved along slowly, going north, when suddenly the son remembered something more he wanted to say, and he scrambled around in front of his father and started all over again, talking and waving his arms and getting in the way just as he must have often done not long ago, when he was a small boy. The father stared admiringly up at his son, hearing every word, and you could see that what he longed for was to have the chance, just once again, to pick his child up and walk a few steps with him in his arms. And it would have taken very little to cause that boy to embrace his father and whirl him around in the air. What a funny trick Time had played on those two — or was it a trick of Light that made the son so big while the father remained the size he had been? It was as though some cameraman had enlarged a picture of the child and left the father life-size. They got themselves side by side again and went on up the avenue and were lost to my view in the crowd that was gathered outside the Criterion Theatre. I think they were going to have dinner someplace. Maybe they went to the Howard Johnson’s at Forty-sixth Street. That is a nice place, especially if you get near the window, so that you can look out at the crowd passing and see that at a little distance there are no sheep on Broadway.

  JULY 13, 1968

  Jobs

  I HAVE temporary residence in one of those small old houses on Tenth Street, just off Fifth Avenue, and this morning, when I walked out into the smothering summer weather, I saw that the showers that fell last night had made a difference after all. Last night, it seemed that the rain had come only to disappoint us, there was so little of it, but this morning I saw that enough water had fallen to leave traces in the gutter, where the pigeons and sparrows hopped around, getting their beaks wet and, in one case, at least, managing an enthusiastic bath. Yesterday, in the same place, beside a spindly city tree, I saw a sparrow. Parched and weightless, he fluttered along ahead of me like a ball of gray dust, and this morning I thought that in spite of the heat the happiness of the birds provided a definite start for the day. There in the hospitable gutter the birds knew themselves again. I left them and continued toward Sixth Avenue, finding the way familiar, although it has been years since I lived here, and the big, shabby studio building that used to stand on the north side of the block has been thrown down and carted away to make room for a particularly showy apartment house. The lower wall of the apartment house is plastered with tiny tiles, about the size of postage stamps, in various shades of green, and here and there small patches of raw cement show how the tiles drop off. They drop off in ones and twos. There is a drugstore on the corner of Tenth and Sixth, and I went in there to get a package of cigarettes. It is a nice, friendly place, a neighborhood drugstore. The soda fountain is on the right as you go in, and the drug counter, where you buy everything, is on the left. Both counters run the length of the store, and the whole middle of the floor, all the way down the store, is given over to showcases and to those revolving racks where they keep paperback books. When you sit at the soda fountain, you face a mirror that has signs on it advertising sandwiches, hot plates, and ice cream, and when you stand at the drug counter you face a wall of crowded shelves that are packed with bottles and jars and packages and boxes, but you never see the full expanse of the shelves, because the counter is lined with display cases and boxes, with a little space left free so that the clerk can see out to speak to customers and wait on them. The air was cool in the store that morning, and the bright electric lights seemed mild after the hot glare of the sunshine outside. In weather like this, when the temperature is up to nearly a hundred, and when you are in a cool place, you look at the people as they come in from the outside exactly as you would look at fellow survivors of some disaster. A boy came in from the street, and he came in so briskly and walked with such spirit that you would have looked at him no matter where you were. He was about sixteen. He wore only a shirt and trousers, but his shirt was very white and his trousers were neatly belted, and he held himself very straight. He was a tidy, happy boy. While he waited by the counter, he glanced about the store, a glance of curiosity, but he looked impersonal and triumphant, the way children sometimes look when they see something that they like but do not want. He took a flat leather wallet out of his hip pocket and began slapping it against his left hand, and when the clerk appeared he took a crisply folded paper out of the wallet and handed it across the counter. The clerk read the paper and then he handed it back to the boy. It was a half sheet of business stationery with the name of the firm, or whatever it was, in heavy black lettering across the top. “That’s no good,” the clerk said. “I can’t accept that signature. It has to be signed here.” “But it is signed,” the boy said. “It has to be signed here, in front of me,” the clerk said. The boy tried to hand the paper across the counter again, but the clerk shook his head. “I tell you it’s no good,” he said. “I thought if you saw the letterhead,” the boy said. “Look, I can’t help you,” the clerk said, and he leaned out to speak to a woman who was waiting behind the boy, but the boy interrupted him. “What if I sign it?” he asked. The clerk looked at him helplessly. “How often do I have to tell you?” he said. “I can’t help you. Look, I’ve got a customer waiting.” The boy moved away and began to study the paper as though it had turned out to be written in a language he did not understand. When he left the store, he was still holding the paper, unfolded, in his hand. Sixth Avenue, which is loud and ugly for every inch of the long path it cuts through the city, must have seemed hideous to him, if only because he found himself there at a wrong moment in his life. He kept looking down at the paper and then looking up and down the avenue. He did not know where to turn. He was only a boy, and his imagination was shaking along with his trust in himself. He was ashamed. I could see him through the glass door, and I was also able to see the heat showing itself in the heaviness of the air and in the exhausted faces of the people walking by. A woman walked by looking as though she might faint if she took her eyes off the distance, and when she had gone, the boy, who had been standing with his back to the drugstore, walked over to the curb and turned and looked above the drugstore windows to where the name is, and I saw his gaze go on up to the red brick walls beyond. Then he folded his paper and went off, walking uptown.

  Three weeks ago, on a Saturday morning, about nine-thirty, I saw someone else trying to get his bearings from a piece of paper. This was a man on West Forty-eighth Street between Sixth and Seventh, but nearer to Seventh. There is a nest of small houses flourishing there in the shadow of the big Broadway lights. The man was standing on the south side of the street, beside a handsome green delivery van that had ICE, DRY ICE, ICE CUBES in very large letters on its side. It was the only car on the block, which is usually choked with vans and trucks trying to make deliveries and with traffic moving eastward across the island. No New York street is busier or noisier or, in this block, more garish, than Forty-eighth Street. But this was a Saturday morning in summer and things were quiet. The restaurants that take up the ground floors of most of those little houses would o
pen for lunch, but it was nowhere near lunchtime yet. When I first saw the man, he had his back to the delivery van and he was studying first a piece of paper in his hand and then the numbers on the house doors nearest to him and over the restaurants. He looked from the building where Zucca’s Restaurant used to be, the one with the blue door and the small balcony above it, to a restaurant called Puerto Sagua, and so on along, but he did not move from the van. Then he turned and began to study the fronts of the houses across the street from him. He was young and black, twenty-four or twenty-five years old, and he wore no hat, and he had on a navy blue suit that was a little bit too big for him. He looked anxiously at the houses across the street from him, and he even looked at a parking lot next to the houses, as if he wondered whether the number he was looking for belonged to a house that had vanished from there. They must have torn down two or three houses to make that gap in the street where the parking lot is. It was because of the gap that I was able to see him. I was living on the eleventh floor at the back of a sixty-year-old house that faces Forty-ninth Street. At the back — that is where the view is. I could look straight down onto the flat, worn roofs of the low buildings the man was searching with his eyes, and by looking to the right, across a parking lot, I could see Forty-eighth Street — both sides of the street. There was only one car in the parking lot that morning, and it was huddled away in a corner, as though somebody had forgotten it. The man kept consulting his piece of paper. It was clear that he had no idea where he was. He was lost, I told myself, and with him the van, which was so expensive-looking that it might have contained chinchilla furs or imported chocolates or dresses from Paris instead of merely ice, dry ice, and ice cubes. He stared toward Seventh Avenue, where the lights of the Latin Quarter and Playland were dead in the daylight, and he took a few steps in that direction, and then he returned to the van and stood beside it again. Then he looked toward Sixth, which was almost the whole length of the block away from him, and he glanced down at his paper, and he looked at Sixth again, and thought a minute, and walked away in the direction of Sixth and out of my sight.