The Long-Winded Lady Page 7

  The van sat there, undefended but not quite deserted; the thin, smudged face of a cat peered out from underneath it, looking to see if it was safe to cross the street. It was safe — no cars coming — and she hurried across and into the parking lot on her way to make one of her daily inspections of the garbage cans that stand at the foot of the building I was in and behind the little buildings that had their backs to me. The little cat settles down in front of what used to be Zucca’s door every morning at daybreak and begins to wait there for somebody to give her breakfast. Next to Zucca’s old place is Puerto Sagua, and next to that is Tony’s Pizzeria. Now the swinging doors of the pizzeria flew open and a very large and lordly man came out. He had light red hair, his shirtsleeves were turned back, he had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and he was carrying some business papers, which he folded as he walked. He went around the van, opened the door, stepped up and in, and sat down and started the engine and sped away, still with the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He was so sure of himself that he didn’t even bother to put his hand on the door beside him to see if it was closed tight. It was his door, and it knew its job, just as he knew his job. The doors of the pizzeria were still shivering after his triumphant exit, and I wondered what operatic scene of rage or sorrow or mirth might be taking place in there now by the cash register. As for the lost man, I think he may have been on his way to apply for a job. If he was, I hope he got it, if it was a job he wanted.

  AUGUST 7, 1965

  Little Birds in Torture

  I WANTED one of those plain glass orange squeezers that generally cost about twenty-nine cents, and the nearest place I could think of where I could be sure of finding one was an enormous five-and-ten-cent store in midtown, so I went there, and down into the basement, where the kitchen things are. The basement is arranged in the usual, practical five-and-ten-cent-store fashion, with long counters separated by aisles, and when you walk about there you notice that there are no windows, and that the ceiling seems low and the lights glare, and you can imagine that you are in a very busy all-night bazaar, where everyone is hurrying to get what he wants and get away out of that heavy subterranean air. It is a feverish, nervous place. I found the orange squeezer without much trouble, and while I was waiting for change I glanced across at the bird department, one counter away from me, against the wall. I generally manage to forget those birds, but the orange squeezer had brought me too close to them, and I went over and looked into the cages. Three cages held birds. There was quite a large cage with a few parakeets, a small cage with three tiny birds in chalky browns and grays, and an equally small cage crowded with tiny bright-colored birds, orange and black and yellow and red. I counted them, and there were fourteen, in a cage meant for one or two, and when I had finished counting I saw that they had no water. There was some question about who was in charge of the birds, but finally she came, and I saw their minute water container filled, and then I left. The sign near them said IMPORTED FINCHES, and I wondered what country they had been brought from. I keep trying to think about the ordinary city birds, the pigeons and sparrows and so on, that fly around freely and seem able to find a living, but I cannot get those tortured finches out of my mind. The next time I want an orange squeezer, I will do my best to remember where the nearest hardware store is. A short walk out of my way seems a small price to pay for the privilege of avoiding reality.

  NOVEMBER 24, 1962

  A Young Lady with a Lap

  SATURDAY nights begin very quietly in New York City in the summertime. Even Broadway cannot hurry the darkness those big lights need, and Broadway must have the big lights to transform her from ramshackle and dusty into what she really is: an island of unimaginable pleasures, where the forbidden fruit is within reach at last — still out of sight but within reach, somewhere here, very close now. There is something on Broadway that is not to be found at home, and everyone who walks along the great street begins to look for it. No other place is so blatant and secret, so empty and alive, so unreal and familiar, so private and noisy. To walk along Broadway is like being a ticket in a lottery — a ticket in a glass barrel, being tossed about with all the other tickets. There are eyes everywhere. I watched the crowd that roamed along there last night, moving through the lonely light that comes after sunset, during the hour when the sky is vacant and the moon is still powerless. High in the fading sky, the big lights glimmered faintly, creating an architectural mirage that was like the reflection of another city — the New York no one has ever found, perhaps. The Broadway crowd was eager but disheveled; it looked like the end of a long day’s sightseeing. All the smart people were away for the weekend or waiting on their own side of town for curtain time. As I came near the Latin Quarter, a girl appeared in the crowd, walking alone. She wore a tight white crêpe dress, much whiter than flesh, and she had a small, fluffy white mink stole around her shoulders and her bosom. She was very slim, and she walked like two snakes, while her hemline slithered about her knees. She was much too clever to wear a very short dress. She showed her knees, and left the rest to her audience, to us — to all of us. We all looked. Her dress was more than very tight. It was extremely tight. Nobody looked at her knees. Everybody looked at her lap. Her hair was gold and it glittered, and so did her slippers, which were of transparent plastic edged with gold. She carried a small handbag, also of transparent plastic edged with gold, but it contained nothing except a gold lipstick, which rolled about like dice. I thought at first she must have some money tucked away in the tops of her stockings or somewhere, but as far as I could make out she had nothing at all on under her dress. We all stared at her, in our different ways, and from our attention she drew the air of indifference that made her a star. She cast swift glances right and left to show us how she despised us all, and then she vanished, leaving us with nothing to look at except ourselves. On the east side of Seventh Avenue, the Metropole Café was going full blast, as it does almost all day and almost all night. They have curtained off the side windows of the Metropole, so you have to stand up near the glass doors if you want to get a free glimpse of the almost naked girls dancing on the shelf behind the bar, but even so there is always a fascinated crowd around there, with a policeman saying sensible things like “Move along now.” Not far from the Metropole, on the corner of Forty-ninth, a very spacious cigar store sells the cigarettes and cigars of all nations, but if you ask for a package of plain American cigarettes they show you where the machine is. Forty-ninth in that block between Seventh and Sixth Avenues is one of the several narrow little side streets that revel in the overflow from Broadway. It is a tumble-down block, lined with bars and small restaurants, and last night sailors in white suits were swarming like bees around the doors of all the bars, trying to decide which one looked the gayest, or the rowdiest, or the cheapest — or, at any rate, trying to decide which one they wanted to go into. I walked along to Le Steak de Paris, a French restaurant that has been in the same house, No. 121, for twenty-five years. Last night it was quiet there — very quiet in comparison with the excited street outside. There was a row of decorous customers at the bar, but the tables in the front room were all empty, and in the back room only one table was occupied — by a neat, dark young man, who sat alone with his back to the wall. He was a lucky man, dining peacefully in a nice French restaurant so close to Broadway that all he had to do was step outside the door but so quiet that he had all the attention in the house. He was eating scallopines de veau en crème, and there was a half bottle of wine on his table. When he wasn’t watching the people at the bar, he was reading a paperback book — something by Simenon. In the doorway leading to the back room, Francine, the waitress, and Jo, the waiter, both from Brittany, stood waiting in a serenity that had in it neither patience nor impatience. It was early yet, still almost as light as day. The regular customers would begin to drift in soon. I went on to Sixth Avenue. Schrafft’s was full of people eating their dinner at the counter. You don’t have to be a customer to know what’s going on in that Schraf
ft’s. The street walls are made mostly of glass. The crowd on Sixth was more desultory than the crowd on Broadway, as it always is — more desultory and more inward-thinking. Sixth Avenue is simply the thoroughfare that lies between Fifth and Seventh. There was room and need for a street there, so they put one there and called it Sixth. People walk on Sixth Avenue because they are leaving someplace or going someplace, but as a promenade it is no man’s land. I kept thinking about the girl in the mink stole. She must have had a pocket in the stole, where she kept some money. In that case, why not put the lipstick in the pocket and leave the handbag at home? She must have had a very well considered reason for carrying the handbag, and it would have to be a better reason than that the handbag matched the shoes. I wish I knew what her reason was. And then, of course, there may not have been a pocket in the stole.

  SEPTEMBER 3, 1966

  The Morning After

  I WOKE up shortly before six o’clock this morning, Sunday, to the screaming of fire sirens that came very close to my hotel and then stopped, and after they stopped there were a few loud shouts, and then the crash of breaking glass, all very familiar sounds in this crowded Broadway side street of old hotels and rooming houses and bars and restaurants and dry cleaning places. There always seems to be a little fire starting up around here. I got up and went to the windows, and around the corner of the front wing of the hotel, through the high narrow space that separates it from its neighbor hotel, I could see sheets of smoke blowing along the street toward Sixth Avenue, but the smoke was white, not black, and it soon turned transparent, showing no danger, and after watching a few minutes I went back to sleep for another hour. The fire had broken out half a block away, in the basement under a haberdashery store, and later in the morning I walked along Forty-ninth Street to inspect the damage. It was about ten-thirty or so, the day was bright, and there were a good many weekend tourists about, strolling aimlessly, obviously wondering what you do in New York on a Sunday to kill time before you start back home again. As I passed the shiny clean Salvation Army headquarters, seven or eight workers, men and women, all in uniform and all looking good-humored and energetic, came out and we walked more or less together to the corner. The unlucky haberdashery is on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, on the north corner, and I stood on the south corner and looked. The store was wrecked, all the big plate-glass windows shattered, and men in green uniforms were sweeping up the broken glass. The curb was lined with heaps of debris, wet and blackened, wood and tin and cloth, and inside the store you could see rows and rows of shirts still arranged in tidy piles on their shelves and all the shirts looked spoiled. It would be a big fire sale. The sidewalk around the derelict store was railed and roped off, and people passing stopped for a minute to look at the mess and watch the men in shirtsleeves who were trying to clean it up. The men, evidently men employed in the store, were picking up — little frames with shirts still stretched across them, a pink plastic foot that had lost the sock it displayed yesterday, woebegone remnants, scorched and soaked — and dropping everything into large brown cartons that had FRAGILE printed on their sides. There were policemen about. You would be amazed to see how neatly the firemen had cut off the fire and confined it to its source. The haberdasher’s is quite a big place, but the corner it occupies represents only a tiny part of that huge building, and although the shop was all broken and blackened, the restaurant windows directly above and to the side of it were untouched and showed no effect at all, even of smoke. Behind me I heard familiar music and I turned to see that my companions from the Salvation Army had all lined up on my corner. One of them, an elderly lady, stepped forward, out of the line, and began to speak. She had a clear, high, elocutionary voice that carried a good distance. She announced that they were going to sing a hymn to life and beauty, and then she stepped back into the line and they all began to sing in brave, tuneless voices. Right beside me I heard a man saying “Where is Broadway?” and I looked quickly to find the question was addressed not to me but to three nice-looking, carefully dressed people, a man and two women, and the three began immediately to stare helpfully around in all directions, looking for Broadway, while the man who had asked the question looked interestedly into their faces and repeated his question. “Where is Broadway?” he said again. I almost spoke up, to tell him he was practically standing on Broadway, but then I took a good look at him. He was a big man, and he stooped a little, and he wore no jacket and no tie and the cuffs of his shirt were flapping up. His large pink face, which he had not shaved, wore an expression that was benign, but that might turn sardonic, and I looked quickly back to the fire. There is no telling what a man with that expression on his face might say next. Around the burnt store two cheerful young policemen were arranging those yellow wooden barricades they put up to protect areas of importance or disaster, and one of the men filling the cartons straightened up and looked at them and stretched his back and looked in discouragement at his filthy hands and went back to his miserable job. A man I recognized from my hotel came and stood near me. He said, “It was some fire.” I said I was sorry for the men who had been called in on their day off to do all that clearing up. “And that’s nothing to the inventory,” my friend said. “From now on, inventory, inventory, everything is inventory. Every shirt, every tie, every button. Everything must be accounted for.” And he crossed the street to get a better look. The Salvation Army had stopped singing, and I turned to see that one of the younger women had stepped forward and was talking, and I also saw the man who had been looking for Broadway. He was standing at the end of the line of uniforms with a hymn book in his hands, and his face as he listened to the girl was attentive and respectful but still bland with the ability he had to change faces. I noticed then that he wore white canvas shoes. Two women in flowered dresses walked past me, one of them carrying a small brown puppy that looked much too young to have left its mother. They came from Broadway, talking away, and they paid no attention to the burnt-out store or to the Salvation Army or to anything except their own conversation. They were neighborhood people, out for a stroll, going toward Fifth, and the little dog, not knowing he was safe, stared agitatedly about him as if he were blind. The Salvation Army meeting was coming to an end. The elderly lady who had spoken first stepped forward and spoke again. “If you are a visitor in town,” she cried, “do not think only about pleasure.” I started back along Forty-ninth Street. The gypsy ladies had not yet appeared in the doorway of their ornate parlor, which is five steps up from the street, but next door to them the movie theater with the scandalous posters outside seemed open and ready for business. The Salvation Army members walked back to their headquarters, all of them going at a smart pace but going separately, straggling apart, and the unshaven man, without his hymn book, followed close behind them. He limped very badly. His feet must have been in terrible shape.

  1969

  The Two Protesters

  AT a quarter to one this morning, I went into the delicatessen in my hotel building to buy cigarettes. The hotel and delicatessen are on West Forty-ninth Street near Seventh Avenue, and at that hour of the morning the block is very busy; it is lined on both sides with bars and small restaurants and other night places, and there is noise of a loud musical kind from most of the doorways, and confusion on the street, with visitors to the Broadway area wandering around wondering where they will get the best value for their money. At my end of the block, the buildings go up very high, making the sudden New York darkness — no sky — but the sidewalk lies in a glare of hard, different-colored artificial lights, and it is all very rowdy and lonely. In the delicatessen, which is a high-ceilinged, cluttered cave carved out of the front of my hotel, there were a man and a woman ahead of me making up their minds about sandwiches — what kind of sandwiches they would buy, and on what kind of bread. They were staying in a big hotel across the street, and they wanted to take the sandwiches and some beer back to their room and have a private supper together. I had got out of a taxi and walked straight
into the delicatessen without noticing anything out of the way, but as I stood waiting, and watching the counterman make the sandwiches, I began to hear the voice of a man howling in the street outside. It wasn’t a desperate howling, as though he were crying for help, and it wasn’t a silly, playful howling; it was a determined, controlled sound, spaced out, as though he were saying words. At the same time, there was a good deal of laughter going on — such unrepressed, jolly laughter that I thought there must be a party of revelers out there and that one of them had found a way to amuse the rest and keep their attention. I didn’t look out, but when I left the delicatessen, with my cigarettes, the noise was still going on. It was very warm (for spring), and in front of a gypsy tea-leaf-reading parlor across the narrow street two young sailors were dancing about, playing the clown for two dark girls sitting inside, who had a small child with them. But the sailors weren’t howling, I could see that, and then, when I turned to the entrance of my hotel, I saw the man, standing alone about fifteen feet away from me. He was an astonishingly tall, thin man in a blue suit, and he had his head and shoulders thrown violently back. His face was turned up to the sky. He had only one leg, and his crutches, which were like stilts, were both braced in front of him so that they slanted back as he did. He was at a dangerous angle, as if he were falling slowly backward, but he did not fall, although it seemed that he might be thrown with each new effort he took to send his voice up. The people near him, all scattered, were smiling, but across the street a group of men and women were convulsed with laughter as they watched him. He paid no attention to anyone. All those about him seemed to be standing on solid ground while he was at the Edge, but although he was making no sense, he seemed to be making a good deal more sense than those who were laughing at him, and they, of normal height and standing on two legs, seemed more grotesque than he. I suppose some of the people were laughing because they were uneasy; certainly the crowd across the street thought it was being entertained, but there must have been a few who wished, as I did, that he would vanish. I don’t know.