The Odd Woman and the City Read online

  He often reminded me of the street-urchin protagonists in postwar Italian movies: those handsome, ragged children of Rossellini’s who imprint on Rome by knowing the city inside out. Leonard always looked like that to me when we took one of our long hikes through the boroughs: hungry, as only a working-class kid can be, for information; the kind of information that makes the ground beneath your feet yours. With him as my guide, the neighborhoods spread out for miles in all directions, often looking to my uninformed eye like wasteland until I began to see them as Leonard did: an incomparable sea of ghettos forever bleeding new life into a rectangle of glamour and prosperity.

  On these treks of ours, the character of time-and-space often changed as we walked. The concept of “hours” evaporated. The streets became one long ribbon of open road stretched out before us, with nothing to impede our progress. Time expanded to resemble time in one’s childhood, when it seemed never to end, as opposed to time now: always scarce, always pressing, always a fleeting marker of one’s emotional well-being.

  * * *

  At a New Year’s party, Jim comes rushing toward me. Sarah nods and turns away. A year ago I was tight with one, two years ago with the other. Tonight I realize I haven’t seen him in three months, her in six. A woman who lives three blocks from me appears, her eyes shimmering. “I miss you!” she breathes wistfully, as though we’re lovers in wartime separated by forces beyond our control. Yes, I nod, and move on. We’ll embrace happily, me and all these people: not a glance of grievance, not a syllable of reproach among us. And, indeed, there is no call for grievance. Like pieces in a kaleidoscope that’s been shaken, we’ve all simply shifted position in the pattern of intimate exchange. Many of us who not so long ago were seeing one another regularly will meet now more often by accident than by design: in a restaurant, on the bus, at a loft wedding. Ah, but here’s someone I haven’t seen in years. Suddenly, a flare of intensity and we’re meeting once a week for the next six months.

  I am often reminded of the tenement friendships in my childhood, circumstantial one and all. Round, dark-eyed women, filled with muted understanding for the needs of the moment. What difference did it make if the next-door neighbor was called Ida or Goldie when you needed someone to lend you ten bucks or recommend an abortionist or nod her head during an outburst of marital rage? It mattered only that there was a next-door neighbor. These attachments, as Sartre might have put it, were contingent rather than essential.

  As for us: Never before in history has so much educated intelligence been expended on the idea of the irreplaceable—the essential—self; and never before has aversion to the slightest amount of psychological discomfort allowed so many to be treated as the contingent other.

  * * *

  The third-century Roman writer Caius understood that his many difficulties with friendship began with an inability to make peace with himself. “No man has a right to expect friendship from others,” he wrote, “who is not a friend to himself. This is the first great duty of mankind, to be friends to themselves. There are thousands who are not only hostile to themselves, but who thwart the best intentions of others to serve them, and yet they are the persons from whom may be heard the loudest complaints that ‘there is no such thing as a friend in the world!’”

  * * *

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge worshipped a definition of friendship that embodied an ideal that could be traced back to Aristotle. Living at a time when persons of sensibility yearned for communion of the spirit, Coleridge suffered from its frequent failure to materialize in friendship; but the pain did not threaten his faith, not even when he lost the friendship that defined all others.

  Coleridge and William Wordsworth met in 1795 when they were, respectively, twenty-three and twenty-five years old. Wordsworth—grave, thin-skinned, self-protective—was, even then, steadied by an inner conviction of his own coming greatness as a poet; Coleridge, on the other hand—brilliant, explosive, self-doubting to the point of instability—was already into opium. Anyone except them could see that they were bound to come a cropper. In 1795, however, a new world, a new poetry, a new way of being, was forming itself, and at that moment, both Wordsworth and Coleridge, each feeling the newness at work in himself, saw proof of its existence reflected in the person of the other.

  The infatuation lasted a little more than a year and a half. At the end of that time, the chaos within Coleridge doubled its dominion; the pride in Wordsworth stiffened into near immobility. The person each had been for nearly two years—the one who had basked in the unbroken delight of the other—was no more. It wasn’t exactly that they were returned to the persons they had been before; it was only that never again would either feel his own best self in the presence of the other.

  One’s own best self. For centuries, this was the key concept behind any essential definition of friendship: that one’s friend is a virtuous being who speaks to the virtue in oneself. How foreign is such a concept to the children of the therapeutic culture! Today we do not look to see, much less affirm, our best selves in one another. To the contrary, it is the openness with which we admit to our emotional incapacities—the fear, the anger, the humiliation—that excites contemporary bonds of friendship. Nothing draws us closer to one another than the degree to which we face our deepest shame openly in one another’s company. Coleridge and Wordsworth dreaded such self-exposure; we adore it. What we want is to feel known, warts and all: the more warts the better. It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are.

  * * *

  Every night when I turn the lights out in my sixteenth-floor living room before I go to bed, I experience a shock of pleasure as I see the banks of lighted windows rising to the sky, crowding round me, and feel myself embraced by the anonymous ingathering of city dwellers. This swarm of human hives, also hanging anchored in space, is the New York design offering generic connection. The pleasure it gives soothes beyond all explanation.

  * * *

  The phone rings. It’s Leonard.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  “Reading Krista K,” I reply.

  “Who’s she?” he asks.

  “Who’s she!” I say. “She’s one of the most famous writers in Eastern Europe.”

  “Oh,” he says matter-of-factly. “What’s the book like?”

  “A bit claustrophobic.” I sigh. “You don’t really know where you are most of the time, or who’s speaking. Then every twenty pages or so she says, ‘Ran into G this morning. Asked him how long he thought we could go on like this. He shrugged. Yes, I said.’”

  “Oh,” Leonard says. “One of those. Bor-ring.”

  “Tell me,” I say, “don’t you ever mind sounding like a Philistine?”

  “The Philistines were a much maligned people,” he says. “Have you seen Lorenzo lately?”

  “No, why?”

  “He’s drinking again.”

  “For God’s sake! What’s wrong now?”

  “What’s wrong now? What’s right now? What’s ever right for Lorenzo?”

  “Can’t you talk to him? You know him so well.”

  “I do talk to him. He nods along with me as I speak. I know, I know, he says, you’re right, I’ve got to pull it together, thanks so much for saying this, I’m so grateful, I don’t know why I fuck up, I just don’t know.”

  “Why does he fuck up?”

  “Why? Because if he’s not fucking up he doesn’t know who he is.”

  Leonard’s voice has become charged.

  “It’s unbelievable,” he swears on, “the muddle in his mind. I say to him, What do you want, what is it you want?”

  “Tell me,” I cut in, “what do you want?”

  “Touché.” Leonard laughs drily.

  There follows a few long seconds of vital silence.

  “In my life,” he says, “I have known only what I don’t want. I’ve always had a thorn in my side, and I’ve always thought, When this thorn is removed I’ll think about what I want. But then that p
articular thorn would be removed, and I’d be left feeling emptied out. In a short time another thorn would be inserted into my side. Then, once again, all I had to think about was being free of the thorn in my side. I’ve never had time to think about what I want.”

  “Maybe somewhere in there is a clue to why Lorenzo drinks.”

  “It’s disgusting,” Leonard says softly. “To be this old and have so little information. Now, there’s something Krista K could write about that would interest me. The only problem is she thinks information is what the KGB was after.”

  * * *

  In the drugstore I run into ninety-year-old Vera, a Trotskyist from way back who lives in a fourth-floor walk-up in my neighborhood and whose voice is always pitched at the level of soapbox urgency. She is waiting for a prescription to be filled, and as I haven’t seen her in a long while, on impulse I offer to wait with her. We sit down in two of the three chairs lined up near the prescription counter, me in the middle, Vera on my left, and on my right a pleasant-looking man reading a book.

  “Still living in the same place?” I ask.

  “Where’m I gonna go?” she says, loudly enough for a man on the pickup line to turn in our direction. “But y’know, dolling? The stairs keep me strong.”

  “And your husband? How’s he taking the stairs?”

  “Oh, him,” she says. “He died.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I murmur.

  Her hand pushes away the air.

  “It wasn’t a good marriage,” she announces. Three people on the line turn around. “But, y’know? In the end it doesn’t really matter.”

  I nod my head. I understand. The apartment is empty.

  “One thing I gotta say,” she goes on, “he was a no-good husband, but he was a great lover.”

  I can feel a slight jolt in the body of the man sitting beside me.

  “Well, that’s certainly important,” I say.

  “Boy, was it ever! I met him in Detroit during the Second World War. We were organizing. In those days, everybody slept with everybody, so I did, too. But you wouldn’t believe it…” And here she lowers her voice dramatically, as though she has a secret of some importance to relate. “Most of the guys I slept with? They were no good in bed. I mean, they were bad, really bad.”

  Now I feel the man on my right stifling a laugh.

  “So when you found a good one”—Vera shrugs—“you held on to him.”

  “I know just what you mean,” I say.

  “Do you, dolling?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “You mean they’re still bad?”

  “Listen to us,” I say. “Two old women talking about lousy lovers.”

  This time the man beside me laughs out loud. I turn and take a good long look at him.

  “We’re sleeping with the same guys, right?” I say.

  Yes, he nods. “And with the same ratio of satisfaction.”

  For a split second the three of us look at one another, and then, all at once, we begin to howl. When the howling stops, we are all beaming. Together we have performed, and separately we have been received.

  * * *

  No one is more surprised than me that I turned out to be who I am. Take love, for instance. I had always assumed that, in this regard, I was like every other girl of my generation. While motherhood and marriage had never held my interest, and daydreaming myself on some revolutionary barricade was peculiar among my classmates, I always knew that one day Prince Passion would come along, and when he did, life would assume its ultimate shape: ultimate being the operative word. As it happened, a number of PP look-alikes did appear, but there was no ultimate anything. Before I was thirty-five I had been as much bedded as any of my friends, and I had also been twice married, twice divorced. Each marriage lasted two and a half years, and each was undertaken by a woman I didn’t know (me) to a man I also didn’t know (the figure on the wedding cake).

  It was only after these marriages were over that I matured sexually—that is, I became conscious of myself as a person preoccupied with desiring rather than being desired; and that development gave me an education. I learned that I was sensual but not a sensualist; that I blissed out on orgasm but the earth didn’t move; that I could be strung out on erotic obsession for six months or so but was always waiting for the nervous excitement to die down. In a word: Lovemaking was sublime, but it wasn’t where I lived. And then I learned something more.

  In my late thirties I had an affair with a man I cared for and who cared for me. This man and I were both drawn to the energy of mind and spirit that each of us felt in the other. But for this man, too—intelligent, educated, politically passionate as he was—the exercise of his sexual will was central to any connection he made with a woman. There was not a moment when we were together that he wasn’t touching me. He never walked into my house that his hand wasn’t immediately on my breast; never embraced me that he wasn’t reaching for my genitals; never lay beside me that he wasn’t trying to make me come. When, after we’d been together some months, I began to object to what had started to feel like an on-automatic practice, he would invariably put his arms around me, nuzzle my neck, and whisper in my ear, “C’mon, you know you like it.” As I did genuinely love him and he me—we had memorable times together—I would stare at him at such moments, shake my head in exasperation, but then let it go.

  One day he suggested that I let him sodomize me, something we’d not done before. I demurred. Next day he made the same suggestion. Again, I demurred. “How do you know you won’t like it,” he persisted, “if you’ve never done it?” He wore me down: I agreed to try it once. No, no, he said, I must agree to do it three times and then if I said no it would be no. So we did it three times, and truth to tell, I didn’t hate the physical sensation as much as I had thought I would—almost against my will, my body responded—but I definitely did not like it.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ve done it three times, and I don’t want to do it anymore.”

  We were lying in bed. He nuzzled my neck and whispered in my ear, “C’mon. Just one more time. You know you like it.”

  I drew away then and looked directly into his face. “No,” I said, and was startled by the finality in my own voice.

  “What an unnatural woman you are!” he exploded at me. “You know you want to do it. I know you want to do it. Yet you fight it. Or is it me you’re fighting?”

  Once again, I stared at him: only this stare was different from those other stares. A man was pressing me to do something I did not want to do, and pressing me in a manner he would never have applied to another man: by telling me that I didn’t know what I wanted. I felt my eyes narrowing and my heart going cold. For the first—but not the last—time, I consciously felt men to be members of a species separate from myself. Separate and foreign. It was as though an invisible membrane had fallen between me and my lover, one fine enough to be penetrated by desire but opaque enough to obscure human fellowship. The person on the other side of the membrane seemed as unreal to me as I felt myself to be to him. At that moment I didn’t care if I never again got into bed with a man.

  I did of course get into bed with them—love, quarrel, and bliss out many more times after this man and I parted—but the memory of that fine, invisible separation haunted me; and more often than I like to remember, I saw it glistening as I gazed into the face of a man who loved me but was not persuaded that I needed what he needed to feel like a human being.

  In time, I came to know other women who would have analyzed the experience differently but immediately understood what I was talking about when I described the invisible curtain. It comes with the territory, most of them said, shrugging. They had made their peace with an arrangement that was as it had ever been. I saw that I could not. For me, it had become the pea beneath the twenty mattresses: an irritation of the soul that I could not accommodate.

  Work, I said to myself, work. If I worked, I thought, pressing myself against my newly hardened heart, I’d be a person in the w
orld. What would it matter then that I was giving up “love”?

  As it turned out, it mattered more than I had ever dreamed it would. As the years went on, I saw that romantic love was injected like dye into the nervous system of my emotions, laced through the entire fabric of longing, fantasy, and sentiment. It haunted the psyche, was an ache in the bones; so deeply embedded in the makeup of the spirit, it hurt the eyes to look directly into its influence. It would be a cause of pain and conflict for the rest of my life. I prize my hardened heart—I have prized it all these years—but the loss of romantic love can still tear at it.

  * * *

  A wooden barrier has been erected on my street around two squares of pavement whose concrete has been newly poured. Beside the barrier is a single wooden plank laid out for pedestrians, and beside that, a flimsy railing. On an icy morning in midwinter I am about to grasp the railing and pull myself along the plank when, at the other end, a man appears, attempting the same negotiation. This man is tall, painfully thin, and fearfully old. Instinctively, I lean in far enough to hold out my hand to him. Instinctively, he grasps it. Neither of us speaks a word until he is safely across the plank, standing beside me. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you very much.” A thrill runs through me. “You’re welcome,” I say, in a tone that I hope is as plain as his. We each then go our separate ways, but I feel that “thank you” running through my veins all the rest of the day.

  It was his voice that had done it. That voice! Strong, vibrant, self-possessed: it did not know it belonged to an old man. There was in it not a hint of that beseeching tone one hears so often in the voice of an old person when small courtesies are shown—“You’re so kind, so kind, so very kind,” when all you’re doing is hailing a cab or helping to unload a shopping cart—as though the person is apologizing for the room he or she is taking up in the world. This man realized that I had not been inordinately helpful; and he need not be inordinately thankful. He was recalling for both of us the ordinary recognition that every person in trouble has a right to expect, and every witness an obligation to extend. I had held out my hand, he had taken it. For thirty seconds we had stood together—he not pleading, I not patronizing—the mask of old age slipped from his face, the mask of vigor dropped from mine. In the midst of American dysfunction, global brutality, and personal defensiveness, we had, each of us, simply come into full view, one of the other.