What Remains (6 page)

There were three men in my house when I was growing up, besides my father. And I was in love at various times with all of them—Bucky Dent, Hawkeye Pierce, and Robert Redford. My mother hung a poster of Redford in our stairwell, his sultry gaze held fast with thumbtacks, and for years he watched us come and go.

So it seemed perfectly natural that one day I would follow him out of his office and chase him down Forty-Sixth Street into a cab.

It was Linda’s idea. We were sixteen and bored on a Thanksgiving holiday. Linda and our friend Maria and I took a train into the city. I was wearing Maria’s rabbit fur, glamorous, pretending I was famous while Linda and Maria followed me into buildings and took pictures. “Oh my God, is it her?” they gasped, laughing.

My mother said Redford had an office in the Warner Brothers building at Rockefeller Center. We went into the city without much more of a plan than running into him at work. We made it as far as his lobby before backing out under the stares from security.

“Let’s go in the bank,” I said. We were loitering, looking for something to mark our adventure. “Maybe he’s in there, making a deposit.” We giggled at the thought of Robert Redford just hanging around, doing the ordinary things other people in New York do.

“What are we
doing
?” Maria was laughing. I peered into the front window of the bank, trying to see past the tinted glass, and then I saw his reflection as he walked by right behind us.

“Oh. My God.” Linda’s body froze and her eyes popped open, wide with a giddy mix of fear and joy. Fortune dropped Redford in our laps. He was bigger than the president.
The Electric Horseman
had just come out, which would have been a forgettable movie if we hadn’t been so love-drunk for The Sundance Kid, Hubbell Gardner, and Jay Gatsby. There was nothing he couldn’t be forgiven for.

“Oh, my God,” Maria screamed, unembarrassed.

“Oh, my God,” the three of us shrieked in unison. And before we could think, we were following him. He was walking east on Fifty-First Street toward Fifth Avenue, and people butterflied to the sides, fanning out and double-glancing. The sidewalk parted for him like a holy sea, and the three of us chased him right up the middle.

“Hurry, he’s hailing a cab!” Linda yelled. We got to the cab as he was getting in and shutting the door. He was looking straight ahead, saying something to the driver, and Maria opened the front door and threw in a ten-dollar bill. “Here. Don’t charge him. Take this for his ride.”

The cab screeched away, and we walked back to the train station. We sang “The Way We Were” off-key and imagined Redford with his blue, sparkly eyes and angled jaw, flashing teeth and dropping anecdotes on the
Tonight
show
. Well, Johnny, there was a funny time with these girls once, in New York….
It didn’t occur to us that he had thousands of these stories, that this one would be instantly forgotten.

Years later I tried to remember that moment when a man came to life from a poster in my stairwell and what it aroused in me. I attached to him all the utopian illusions of my sixteen-year-old self about boys, fame, love. I tried to remember what that afternoon was about. The rush of power we felt that day when we willed a thing to happen and it did.

I remembered how once I felt a giddy sense of invincibility that has gone almost unmatched in the years since that afternoon with my two girlfriends, skipping carelessly through the city. I tried to remember Redford and that it wasn’t personal. We weren’t chasing the man, after all, but the poster, a caricature. A caramelized, glittery concoction of Jeremiah Johnson and Bob Woodward and Gatsby and Sundance. Of horses and beaches and Katharine Ross and white teeth. Of windless days of sun shining on an ageless face. We knew him intimately without ever speaking a word to him.

This was my first glimpse of mania—of crazy, blind desire for a stranger with a well-known face. A stranger who unwittingly represents something for the adorer, entirely personal and unpredictable. A stranger who is so completely formed in the minds of others that one wrong move, a sentence spoken or not spoken, an expression or gesture, can excite extreme emotion.

It was my first glimpse of losing yourself and hanging every heightened emotion on another human being’s shoulders. A human being in the sense that he walks standing up. In every other regard not human, but godlike, able to clear a New York sidewalk simply by stepping on it.

I’d like to think I had a nagging sense of embarrassment that day, that somewhere before the train back to Suffern I realized how silly it was to chase after a stranger like that, a man with his own life, trying to get home after work. I’d like to think I felt bad about it. It seemed so harmless, three teenagers acting silly. But then years later I was on the other side, going to the opening of the ballet. I went out with John sometimes before he and Carolyn were married, so she wouldn’t have to. There were rows of photographers facing us, walking backward and shouting out, “John, this way. John, over here.”

Photo assassins, I called them. They tried to be familiar, yelling out things they thought they knew about him. “Hey, John. Who’s the girl? Hey, Sunshine, over here! Look over here. What’s your name?” All against a loud backdrop of rapid-fire camera clicks.

I suppose it’s not acceptable to protest the travails of fame, even when it’s unsought. I witnessed it from the sidelines. You have to remove yourself to stand in the middle of it, smiling.

When I was dating Anthony but before many people knew, I had dinner with Linda and Maria. We were catching up—we were all in different lives, and by then a year or two might go by between dinners. Linda brought up Redford, and we laughed. “Maria and I went to Hyannis last summer, to see if we could find John Kennedy,” Linda said. They giggled a little, exchanged sheepish looks, because we were older now. They didn’t know about Anthony, that I was dating John’s cousin, and I didn’t tell them that night. “I thought maybe we’d get lucky again,” Linda said with a laugh. I laughed, too, nervously.

It hadn’t occurred to me what it might be like from Redford’s view, to be
inside
the cab.

After the summer of ’99, the summer they all died, I took a Walk-man with me everywhere. I read the Philosophers in 90 Minutes series, and I discovered Mary Cantwell. She wrote
Manhattan, When I Was Young,
and I don’t think there’s a better love story or tragedy about the city anywhere. I found it when I was living in other people’s houses when I was afraid to go home to an empty apartment. I marked it up and took it with me, trading Cantwell’s thoughts for mine, tracing her journey from Bristol, the small town on the coast of Rhode Island where she grew up, to her magazine career in New York in the fifties.

I took her on my long walks. I went to her places. Her 21 Perry Street, her 232 Hope Street. These are my 969 Park, my Madison Hill Road. Like me, she seems always misplaced, running away, then looking behind her. We’d be a terrible pair, the two of us, both looking for a thread to follow, both grabbing the loose ends. She, too, is escaping.

I walked along Perry Street one morning looking for the
most secret of all the Village’s secret gardens,
which Cantwell said was between West Eleventh Street and Perry. When she lived here in 1962, you could get a key to the garden only if you were renting one of the houses from St. John’s Church. I was thinking of her apartment, with the concrete urn and Paul McCobb couches, looking for the garden, when I came abruptly upon Sant Ambroeus restaurant on the corner of West Fourth.

I hadn’t been to Sant Ambroeus since the night before Anthony died. We ordered takeout, and I left him alone to pick it up, pasta pomodoro and a tricolor salad with parmesan.

It was the same place, but our Sant Ambroeus wasn’t here; it was on Madison Avenue, and it was old and well-mannered, with white-satin walls and fake geraniums.
The coffin,
we used to call it, because of the puffy satin walls, the waiters solemn in jackets. It was our place. Now I stumbled across it in its new downtown location, cheery with large windows, the waiters in pink button-down shirts. The geraniums were still here, but not fake. It was a strange feeling, the past reshuffled, memories rearranged.

When I think of Cantwell’s Bristol, I think of Suffern. I think of a butterfly flapping its wings in a jungle in Brazil and creating an earthquake on the other side of the world. I think of what might not have happened if I’d stayed there. When I think of Suffern, I think of longing for something else. I think of Chris Nucci sitting on the hurdy-gurdy in Kingston, after I have just started an internship at ABC, asking, “Who do you think you are, Barbara Walters?” The question was rhetorical and wrapped in a sneer that suggested a girl from Suffern had no business being there. I was embarrassed but I thought he was probably right.
Who do you think you are?

Suffern was a fenced-in, cheerful town, where not much happened, and a lot of people were happy with that. I never was. By the time I was in high school, I felt a sort of low-grade panic about my future and a gnawing embarrassment about my past. I was at an age at which I thought I should have a picture of an adult life in my mind. I longed to see the world on the other side of the fence, my nose pressed up against the town limits sign.

The city held, I thought, every adventure I hadn’t imagined. I thought it might be a place to reincarnate, to pull a whole new existence from the chatter of crowded streets. I fell in love with it when I was small and my mother used to take us on weekends to Tante’s apartment. It captivated me—the noise, the grit, the busy, crazy flow of it all.

I loved the same things then that I do now about the city—walking along Madison Avenue to Central Park, watching the lights in other buildings, soaking up energy from the people in Union Square. Listening to the buses out the front living room window of Tante’s apartment.

She lived in the same fifth-floor railroad flat for fifty years. Her apartment had a smell of old things—piles of yellowed newspapers, pictures and letters wrapped with rubber bands. Layers of paint so thick none of the doors closed shut. The musty odor of a life lived and then boxed up. It was a safe smell, comforting. It said,
I have managed it all this long.

I could sit sometimes as a little girl on the stoop of her building and watch the people walk by with their stories. In bed at night, I listened to the steady, soothing sounds of the street. Everything was moving; something was going on behind all those doors stacked on top of one another.

I loved the procedure of those weekends—watching the tall brick apartment buildings that lined the drive from the George Washington Bridge to the East Side along the FDR snapping by through the car window, pressing my face up against it, searching for the Seventy-First Street exit. My father let us out in front of the building and disappeared to find parking. The rest of us raced one another up the stairwell to the fifth floor, elbowing for the lead. Tante was always waiting for us in the hallway, peering over the rail as we ran up.

When Anthony and I moved into an apartment on Park after we were married, we got into a fight the first night. A silly fight that was really about things that were bigger than we wanted to talk about—marriage, a new mortgage on Park Avenue, cancer. I left angry at midnight to walk around the city, and I ended up on Seventy-First Street. I walked out because I wanted to feel the city on my skin. I still do that, walk around aimlessly at odd times of the night. The feel of the city comforts me.

You’re lucky if you have a place like Tante’s apartment, a place where you can remember the time when you were safe. I found myself in Tante’s foyer—the small room inside the front door before you get buzzed through the second—because I knew it would look the same as it did to me when I was five. Like two people watching the moon from opposite ends of the world. My five-year-old self and my thirty-one-year-old self staring at the same cracked pink-and-black tile, smelling the same mildew mixed with smells of old cooking.

There had been times in the city at Tante’s, or dancing in Linda’s basement, or fishing off the dock in Kingston, that I was excited with what life had given me. Times I felt perfectly complete. Then I left all of that. I went too far to go back, but I didn’t know that until I was grasping for something familiar and safe and there wasn’t anything for me to hold on to.