The Long-Winded Lady Page 8

  I went on up to the place I have in the hotel. I was thinking about another man I had seen making himself public, but that had been on a bright Friday afternoon last May, and the crowd that gathered to watch had looked sadly at him. It was a mournful gathering in the afternoon sunlight. What that man had done was to smash the large plate-glass window on the Sixth Avenue side of the Forty-ninth Street Schrafft’s, which is a long, narrow corner restaurant with no tables, only a counter. He was a very small man, about five feet one, and he was wearing a round, muffin-shaped cap with a peak, very like a seaman’s cap, and a neat black suit and striped shirt, and he was carrying a large bunch of long-stemmed red roses loosely wrapped in pink-and-white-striped paper. A big, elderly policeman, who looked unhappy, was guarding him beside the window, which was so thoroughly shattered that there was no glass to be seen except on the sidewalk, where two counterboys with brooms were cheerfully sweeping up. The cheer they showed was all the cheer there was. Inside the window was the wreckage of the glass shelves and of the food they had displayed — cakes and buns and jars of butterscotch and fudge sauce — and it was all being cleared up by young girls who looked apprehensive. The policeman looked downcast, and everybody in the crowd looked downcast, except one well-dressed young man, who kept sneaking glances right and left into the faces nearest to him and half smiling, as though he had a secret and unpleasant understanding of what had happened. The little captive looked interested and obedient, not ashamed or frightened or angry. He was mute. I don’t know why he had broken the window or what he had broken it with. At the time of the crash, I had been sitting at the end of the counter, far away from the window, and by the time I had made up my mind to go outside, the discussions were over and there was nothing going on except waiting, with the policeman in charge. I went off without delay. What was strange on that corner that afternoon was the expression of the crowd. There was not one face that looked indifferent or amused. You do not often see a street crowd thinking, or appearing to think.

  The only thing I have left to say about the two protesters, or protestants, is that one of the men was black and one was white.

  APRIL 25, 1964

  Lost Overtures

  EARLY the other evening, I was sitting in a restaurant on lower Fifth Avenue that has peach-colored walls and a softly lighted mirror running the length of the bar, when a striking red-haired lady in a black dress with pearls who was sitting by herself at a table not far from mine stood up and walked to a corner table where a nice-looking man was sitting alone reading his evening paper while he waited for someone to come and take his order. He was a careful, orderly man — he had already folded his newspaper up small, so that he could read it and at the same time eat his dinner. The lady bent over this man and said something to him, and he glanced up and then got up immediately, looking very pleased and confused, and collected his briefcase and followed her back to her table. He was still clutching his newspaper. She sat down, but at the last moment, when he was almost in his chair, he hesitated and began looking around him and behind him. “Are you sure you’re alone?” he asked. “Of course I’m alone,” she replied. “Stop asking me if I’m alone.” He sat down, and she picked up her drink and started gazing at him possessively. She looked possessive but very good-humored. They were just beginning to talk when the headwaiter, a big, dignified man, appeared from a distant corner of the restaurant and saw the change that had been made in his seating arrangements. He walked swiftly to where the lady sat with her flattered captive, who had settled back and seemed about to relax. “Sir,” said the headwaiter, “please go back to your own table.” The man (everything was happening to him) jumped up, gathering his briefcase and his newspaper to his chest, and scurried to his corner table, and picked up the menu and held it in front of his cowardly face. The lady was annoyed. “Just who do you think you are?” she said to the headwaiter. “Lady,” said the headwaiter, “do me a favor. Please go home.” “Don’t talk to me like that,” she said. “Who do you think you are? Don’t you talk to me like I was dirt.” “Lady,” said the headwaiter, “please don’t tell me that I am talking to you like you were dirt.” Unfortunately, I had already paid my check and put on my gloves, and I hadn’t the nerve to just sit there watching, so I had to leave without hearing the rest of the repartee.

  Two evenings later I was in Le Steak de Paris on West Forty-ninth Street. It was peaceful there — a warm, rainy evening. I had worked my way through Time, back to front, and I was starting in on Newsweek when someone came and stood beside me. I looked up, and it was a very tall, solemn, scholarly-looking young man who had made a good deal of fuss over his briefcase when he came into the restaurant. He had given his hat to the checkroom girl, but he had taken his briefcase to the bar with him after explaining to her that he was afraid something might happen to it. Then, when he sat at the bar — it is a very small restaurant, everything in one room — he had balanced the briefcase on his feet for a while, which meant that he had to keep reaching down to set it straight. Finally, he had gone back and given it to the checkroom girl, and watched while she put it away on a high shelf. That had all happened some time before. Now he stood by my table and looked gloomily at me and said, “I don’t mean to insult you.” Then he said, “I want to know if you will have a drink with me.” I said, “No, thank you. I am waiting for somebody.” I was sitting at a table for one. “You are waiting for somebody,” he said, and he went back to his place at the bar. Ten or fifteen minutes later, two ladies in small, serviceable hats came in and sat down at the table next to me. They spoke French. One of them was French, or spoke like a Frenchwoman, and the other was speaking some French she had learned, using only whole sentences, and they both had loud, confident voices. The scholarly man got off his stool and came over to them. “I don’t mean to insult you,” he said. They stared up at him. He began to smile, and then he beamed at them. “Parlez-vous Berlitz?” he said. M. Raymond, who had been gazing into the cash register, hurried over and took him by the elbow and began to tow him back to the bar. “Monsieur,” M. Raymond said, “you don’t know those people. Please, Monsieur, s’il vous plaît.” “I didn’t mean to insult anybody,” the man said, but he allowed himself to be placed back at the bar, where he sat guarding his drink with both elbows and looking resentful.

  The lesson to be learned from these two encounters is that if everybody in the city were sorted out and set going in the right direction, New York would soon be a very quiet place.

  JULY 4, 1964

  The Man Who Combed His Hair

  THERE IS a man around this neighborhood who is always combing his hair. Once I saw him borrow a comb from a very small shoeshine boy. Then, while he combed his hair, combing it with one hand and smoothing it with the other, he bent and looked into the child’s face as though the little face were a mirror — only a mirror, and nothing more than that. The boy stood and looked up at him, waiting to get his comb back. I was in my hotel room, looking down into the street and watching the two of them. I am eight floors up in one of those old hotels that line the shabby side streets off Broadway in midtown, and it was a hot Sunday morning about nine o’clock. The street had been deserted until the shoeshine boy and the man who combs his hair came into view, walking with four older and taller shoeshine boys, all carrying their boxes of brushes and polish. When the man borrowed the comb, he stopped and stood still, and so did the small boy whose face became a mirror, but the others went on and out of sight, walking toward Broadway. When the man had finished — when he seemed satisfied with his appearance, whatever he thought that was — he gave the comb back to the child, who took it and put it in the breast pocket of his shirt, and then the two walked on until, I suppose, they caught up with their companions. It wasn’t the first time I had seen that man. The first time I had seen him, he had been at exactly the same point on the block as when he stood looking down into the child’s face, but he had been five flights up, walking on the roof of one of the few little houses that still stand together
there, holding their own against the gigantic new buildings that have risen up around them. The little houses are no longer dwellings where ordinary families live. There are restaurants or small shops on their street floors, and above there are other shops — a theatrical costumer’s or a dress or record shop — or there are studios or offices or a few apartments. The house where the man was walking on the roof has a steak restaurant on the street floor and, above, studios for musicians to practice in. The studios have long, uncurtained windows. One of the windows shows a blue light, and sometimes late at night the blue light betrays the source of some very blue music. The saxophonist who plays in there must be very sad and very slow to learn. Even so, I like to hear him — his mistakes and his hesitations and his false starts. It is like hearing music in the street — very comforting, or perhaps I mean comfortable. But on the morning I am thinking of there was no music and no blue light. The day had only begun. The windows of all the houses were blank and the street was empty. It was a hot morning after a scorching night. There had been no dawn — the darkness had merely faded away, showing the city to be gray, worn, and sleepless. The sky was very high and colorless. It was not fair. The sky promised nothing — no soft rain, no relief from the heat — but still it was beautiful up there. A few pigeons pecked in the deserted parking lot under my windows, and others flew hopefully about, but apart from the pigeons there was no life to be seen except on the roof, where the man who combs his hair was walking with some men who were unsteadily following another man, who was carrying a bottle that looked as if it contained wine. He was carrying it at about shoulder height and at arm’s length in front of him, as though it might show him the way, like a lantern. There were five men altogether, going single file, and they had more difficulty than you might think in their little passage around the roof. Things kept getting in their way — things on the roof. All the low roofs around there seem to have been patched and furnished with wreckage swept in from the sea; useful bits of freighters and tankers and steamers, funnels and pipes and cabins, all of them blackened and valuable shapes, together with skylights of different sizes and great, sprawling air-conditioning units, strewed the path of the five wandering men, who looked so unsubstantial that a breath of wind might blow them away. There was no wind, no air at all. The men weaved around and about, following their restless leader, and the last man combed his hair. He wore the same clothes that he has worn every time I have seen him — a green plaid Eisenhower jacket and crumpled cotton trousers of a light color — and as he combed and smoothed his hair, keeping his elbows well out, he ducked his head and shoulders to the right and to the left and seemed to find himself reflected in the unsteady back of the man in front of him. He bent forward and inclined his head and turned from side to side as though he were peering at himself in a mountain pool in strong sunshine. He stepped along easily and he seemed to be enjoying himself there on the roof in the discouraged daylight. The last time I saw him, I was walking along Seventh Avenue near the Metropole jazz place, just around the corner from where I live. He was standing outside one of the glittery gift shops there, talking to a man who was selling sunglasses. The salesman was wearing a pair of his own sunglasses. At least he was wearing sunglasses. I saw the man who combs his hair walk up to the sunglasses man and greet him. The sunglasses man returned the greeting, and as soon as they began to talk, the man who combs his hair took out his comb and started, as usual, combing his hair and smoothing it and leaning forward for a better look, peering first into his friend’s right sunglass and then into his left one. He bobbed his head from side to side and combed and smoothed and talked and watched his face sliding around in the dark glass. He was wearing the same clothes as always — the plaid Eisenhower jacket and the crumpled trousers — and I saw, seeing him close up for the first time, that he was about thirty-five and tired-looking but amiable. I have not seen him for a while now, and I would just as soon not see him again. I know we are all only reminders of one another, but I don’t want him to walk up to me and look into my face as though I were a mirror. What I would like even less would be to look into his face and see myself hiding there.

  SEPTEMBER 5, 1964

  The Good Adano

  DURING the recent heat wave, all air ceased to flow through the streets of New York City. There was no air moving between the buildings, and what air had been trapped here stood still and began to thicken. There was nothing to breathe except heavy displeasure. Every time I walked into an air-conditioned restaurant, I felt very humble and thankful and anxious to sit down and start being good. I wasn’t the only one. On the afternoon of the dreadful third of July (it was a Sunday), I was in the Adano Restaurant, on West Forty-eighth Street. I was happy. It seemed a miracle that the one restaurant in New York where I really wanted to be should not only be open on a Sunday, when so many places are closed, but be open on the Sunday of the longest summer weekend, and on a weekend so uneasy with the heat that even Manhattan’s towering skyline appeared to waver under the fixed abyss that shimmered up there where Heaven used to be. At the Adano, the air-conditioning machine was producing ocean breezes. In this chaotic Broadway neighborhood, the Adano has always been an oasis of order and good manners and beautiful food, but that Sunday it seemed to have drifted here from another, more silent region. The restaurant is a wide oblong, with a low ceiling, lighted by star-shaped lamps of dull-yellow glass. The walls are decorated with large, placid still lifes and views of Italian scenery, except for the rear wall, which has mirrors that carry the room into the far distance. The tables are plain and plainly set, with well-worn silver and with white linen napkins folded to stand up in smart points. Empty as it was, and with everything polished and shining, the restaurant looked like a dining room on a small, tidy ship. I was sitting at the front, in one of three half-moon-shaped booths near the street door. I faced the bar, and in the mirror behind the shelves of bottles I saw the reflection of grapes and apples in the rich still life on the wall behind me and above my head. And through the glass panels of the doorway I could see the street, where the rose-red Adano awning cast a curious shadow on the burning sidewalk. Very few people passed. Once in a while, a wilted figure in summer undress climbed the sweaty steps that lead to the ticket and information bureau of the Blue Line Sightseeing Bus Tours, which is on the first floor of a poor old brownstone across the street. The old house is one of three that still stand together there, but the two others have had their faces flattened out. The house where the Blue Line people are has aged as naturally and as recognizably as a human being might do. It is the same as it always was, except that too many years have passed and life has not improved for it. There is a bar in the basement, but it was closed that Sunday. A man walked into the Adano suddenly and then hesitated just inside the door, looking around him. He was a very nice-looking, pale, thin man of about fifty, with not much hair, and he was politely dressed in a dark blue summer suit, a snowy white shirt, and a neat dark tie with dots on it. When he spoke, he had a pleasant, squeaky voice. I am sure he was a stranger in the city. He had an out-of-town look about him. I think he had rashly left his nice air-conditioned hotel in the hope of finding a real New York place, a place with atmosphere, where he would get something of the feeling of the city, and I think he must have wandered about for a while before he happened into the Adano. He must have been getting a bit frantic, not wanting to continue in the heat and loneliness, and not wanting to go back to the boredom of a long afternoon in the nice hotel that is almost certainly exactly like all nice hotels in big cities. Wandering around alone like that in New York City on a Sunday is no good at all. He stood there looking at me and looking at the bartender and looking beyond us at the calm room, and at last he called out to the bartender, “Are you open?” “Yes, we are open,” the bartender said benignly. He was polishing a glass. The stranger walked over to the bar and sat up on a stool and put his hands on the counter. “Could I just sit here and have a beer, please?” he asked. He sounded just the way I felt — on his best behav
ior. It was a day to smile eagerly back at Good Fortune if she happened to look your way, a day to say please and thank you and to watch your p’s and q’s and to look out for ladders and to watch yourself crossing streets, and so on — the heat had roused superstitious dreams and made us careful. People began coming into the Adano. A family party, mother and father and three young children, walked in and went straight to a table at the back. The mother and father immediately began reading the menu aloud, and the children all sat forward and listened as intently as though they were at a story hour. Then two women walked in — tall, strong, opulently shaped girls of about thirty who looked as though they must be in show business. Their walk was sedate, as it well might be, because their dresses did all the work — slinky, skintight, slithering dresses that recalled the body of Circe, the gestures of Salome, and the intentions of Aphrodite. One dress was of white lamé sewn all over with tiny pearls and brilliants, and the other was of shiny baby-pink cotton striped up and down in thin lines with pink glass bugle beads. Each of the girls carried a cloudy gray mink stole and long gloves and a little fat handbag, and each of them, as she sat down, swept her right hand underneath herself to make sure her dress did not wrinkle, while her eyes went swiftly about the restaurant in a wary, commanding glance that took in everything there was to see. Then, without speaking to each other, the two girls examined the menu, and they ordered at once — food only, nothing to drink — and when the food began arriving they ate steadily. They emptied big plates of hot soup, plates piled with meat and vegetables, and plates with heaps of salad, and they ate a lot of crusty Adano bread with butter, and when all that was gone they had coffee — American coffee — and a slice each of glistening rum cake. While they were eating, they talked a bit — not much — but they never smiled, and as I watched them I began to be deeply fascinated by them, because their closed faces and their positive, concentrated gestures excluded every single thing in the world except themselves. Outside herself and what contributed to her, nothing existed for either of them. They were all flesh and color and movement, and yet they were like stone monuments whose eating time had come and who would, when they had finished eating, go back to being monuments. I watched them and I wondered at them, because I thought them untroubled by every emotion except anger, and free of all sensations except the sensations of satisfaction. They made no delay over their dinner, and when they had finished they paid their check and stood up and collected their belongings and walked out with the hypnotic sedateness with which they had come in. I turned my head to watch them go, and so did the stranger at the bar, and then he went back to admiring the restaurant he had discovered, and he seemed like the man at the ship’s bar just after sailing time who still cannot believe that he has made it — that he is on board, at sea, and it is all as he imagined it. As much as anybody in New York that Sunday, the man at the bar of the Adano found himself where he had dreamed of being.