The Odd Woman and the City (16 page)

*   *   *

It's an evening in June and I am taking a turn through Washington Square. As I stroll, I see in the air before me, like an image behind a scrim, the square as it looked when I was young, standing right behind the square that I'm actually looking at. That was a good fifty years ago, when my friends and I used to come down from the Bronx and in from Brooklyn on summer evenings and we'd walk around looking at a piece of world so different from that of our own neighborhoods we might as well have been in Europe. The square was pristine then—paths swept clean, benches freshly painted, fountain sparkling—and the verdancy a marvel: thousands of leaves glistening on the century-old trees, every bush and flower bed neatly trimmed, the grass green velvet. And the people in the square! It was middle-class bohemia then, the women sensual, the men poetic, and of course everyone white. To our hungry young eyes the scene promised culture and class privilege … not a thought in our heads then about race or sex … we couldn't wait to get there. Romantic longing washed through all of us for years, and we were haunted by the beauty of the square on those sweet summer evenings.

Now, here it is another summer evening and I am again walking in the square. With the street at my back and everything I know etched on my face, I look through the scrim directly into those old memories and I see that they no longer have authority over me. I see the square as it is—black, brown, young; swarming with drifters and junkies and lousy guitar players—and I feel myself as I am, the city as it is. I have lived out my conflicts not my fantasies, and so has New York. We are at one.

*   *   *

On the other side of the square I run into Leonard, serendipitously out for his own stroll this evening. I start to tell him what I've been remembering, but he is nodding before I'm through a dozen sentences. He understands almost by osmosis what I am saying because he was there himself, all those years ago, on those same summer evenings. “We were probably both trying to pick up the same guys,” he laughs. Then he says, “But I, too, was lusting after the couples. Trying desperately to talk myself into ‘normal.' What were we? Sixteen? Seventeen? Somehow, even then, I knew I'd never make it. Never.”

We walk on together, side by side; silent; mirror-image witnesses, each of us, to the other's formative experience. The exchange will always deepen, even if the friendship does not.

*   *   *

It is now October. On a Saturday evening in midmonth, Daniel takes me down to the Winter Garden in Battery Park City to hear a group of Renaissance singers in concert. I have many times walked through this lovely open hall with its marble floors and great central staircase, the glittering shops and restaurants, and the tall arched window filled with New York Harbor. Who could have imagined that this elaborate piece of architectural commerce and kitsch would become such a New York treat? But it has, filling up at all hours with people streaming through to shop, eat, wander, listen to the free music and theater pieces presented most days at noon or in the evening at seven or eight.

We come early to secure seats close to the movable stage set up before the arched window, then wander off, buy sandwiches and coffee, sit beside the water. The evening is soft, with the harbor and promenade gleaming under the strung lights of boats and restaurant terraces, the atmosphere festive, sparkling, somehow (lovely word!) expectant. When we return to our seats darkness has fallen, and the great hall is buzzing with humanity. I look about me, and to my amazement the entire staircase, receding stadium-like, up the back of the hall, rising four or five stories high, is packed. Turning back in my seat, I feel a thrill shoot through my body, the kind that occurs when a nerve is touched. A thousand people are gathered here, grouped all over the hall, waiting to feel themselves in the music.

For the first time in decades, I feel the spirit of Lewisohn Stadium alive at my back, and I think, I'm always being told you people have left the city in droves, but look, you're still here. Oh, you've shifted positions, to be sure, you don't dominate the scene anymore, the city is no longer made in your image, but here you are; and here am I; and there are the singers. It takes all of us together to fill the hall with joy and, urban death or no urban death, the city is still up for it.

*   *   *

A friend reads what I've been writing and says to me over coffee, “You're romanticizing the street. Don't you know that New York has lost seventy-five percent of its manufacturing base?” In my mind's eye, I stare into the faces of all the women and men with whom I interact daily. Hey, you people, I address them silently, did you hear what my friend just said? The city is doomed, the middle class has deserted New York, the corporations are in Texas, Jersey, Taiwan. You're gone, you're outta here, it's all over. How come you're still on the street?

New York isn't jobs, they reply, it's temperament. Most people are in New York because they need evidence—in large quantities—of human expressiveness; and they need it not now and then, but every day. That is what they
need
. Those who go off to the manageable cities can do without; those who come to New York cannot.

Or perhaps I should say that it is I who cannot.

*   *   *

It's the voices I can't do without. In most cities of the world the populace is planted in centuries of cobblestoned alleys, ruined churches, architectural relics, none of which are ever dug up, only piled one on top of another. If you've grown up in New York, your life is an archaeology not of structures but of voices, also piled one on top of another, also not really replacing one another:

On Sixth Avenue, two small, dark-skinned men lean against a parked cab. One says to the other, “Look, it's very simple. A is the variable costs, B is the gross income, C is the overhead. Got that?” The other man shakes his head no. “Dummy!” the first man cries. “You gotta
get
it.”

On Park Avenue, a well-dressed matron says to her friend, “When I was young, men were the main course, now they're a condiment.”

On Fifty-Seventh Street, one boyish-looking man says to another, “I didn't realize you were such good friends. What did she give you, that you miss her so?” “It wasn't what she gave me,” the other replies, “it was what she didn't take away.”

As the cabbie on Sixth Avenue says, someone's gotta get it; and late in the day, someone does.

I am walking on Eighth Avenue during the five o'clock rush, thinking of changing a word in a sentence, and somewhere in the Forties, I don't notice the light turning red. Halfway into the path of an oncoming truck, I am lifted off my feet by a pair of hands on my upper arms and pulled back onto the curb. The hands do not release me immediately. I am pressed to the chest of the person to whom the hands belong. I can still feel the beating heart against my back. When I turn to thank my rescuer I am looking into the middle-aged face of an overweight man with bright blue eyes, straw-colored hair, and a beet-red face. We stare wordlessly at each other. I'll never know what the man is thinking at this moment, but the expression on his face is unforgettable. Me, I am merely shaken, but he looks as though transfigured by what has just happened. His eyes are fixed on mine, but I see that they are really looking inward. I realize that this is
his
experience, not mine. It is he who has felt the urgency of life—he is still holding it in his hands.

Two hours later I am home, having dinner at my table, looking out at the city. My mind flashes on all who crossed my path today. I hear their voices, I see their gestures, I start filling in lives for them. Soon they are company, great company. I think to myself, I'd rather be here with you tonight than with anyone else I know. Well, almost anyone else I know. I look up at the great clock on my wall, the one that gives the date as well as the hour. It's time to call Leonard.

 

A Note About the Author

Vivian Gornick
is the author of the acclaimed memoir
Fierce Attachments
, a biography of Emma Goldman, and three essay collections, two of which,
The Men in My Life
and
The End of the Novel of Love
, were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. You can sign up for email updates
here
.

 

Also by
Vivian Gornick

In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt

The Romance of American Communism

Essays in Feminism

Women in Science: 100 Journeys into the Territory

Fierce Attachments: A Memoir

Approaching Eye Level

The End of the Novel of Love

The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The Men in My Life

Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Author's Note

The Odd Woman and the City

A Note About the Author

Also by Vivian Gornick

Permission Acknowledgments

Copyright

 

Permissions Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following previously published material:

“I was walking along Forty-Second Street…” and “During the Second World War…” from
The Poems of Charles Reznikoff: 1918–1975
by Charles Reznikoff, edited by Seamus Cooney. Reprinted by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Copyright © 2005 by Charles Reznikoff, edited by Seamus Cooney.

An excerpt from a letter from Louise Bogan to May Sarton reprinted from
What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan 1920–1970
, copyright 1973 and with the permission of the Louise Bogan Charitable Trust.

An excerpt from “George Gissing: A Neurotic for Our Times,” in
The Men in My Life
, by
Vivian Gornick
, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008.

 

 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2015 by Vivian Gornick

All rights reserved

First edition, 2015

Portions of this book originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in
The New Yorker
,
The Paris Review
,
Poetry
, and
The Threepenny Review
.

Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material can be found at the back of the book.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gornick, Vivian.

    The odd woman and the city: a memoir / Vivian Gornick. — 1st Edition.

        pages   cm

    ISBN 978-0-374-29860-9 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71168-9 (e-book)

    1.  Friendship.   2.  Love.   3.  City and town life—New York (State)—New York.   I.  Title.

BF575.F66 G676 2015

818'.5403—dc23