Sleepless Nights (6 page)

In the hotel lobby, tired bandsmen, dark glasses, ashen sleeplessness, oppressive overcoats, their wives, blond and tired. Tired creatures of the saxophone, the trumpet, basses; sweating booking agents lying in wait. The “vocalist” carrying a load of long dresses on her arm.

I knew well those in the old furnished rooms up around Columbia. They had about them a left-over, dim, vanquished aspect, depressed spirits living in a conquered territory. The discontent of the people at the Hotel Schuyler was quite different. Most of them were failures, but they lived elated by unreal hopes, ill-considered plans. They drank, they fought, they fornicated. They ran up bills, they lied and fought confusion with mild debaucheries. They were not poverty-stricken, just always a little “behind.” Undomestic, restless, unreliable, changeable, disloyal. They were not spinsters, but divorcees, not bachelors but seedy
bons vivants
, deserters from family life, alimony, child support, from loans long erased from memory. They drank for three days and sobered for three. People with union cards—acrobats, ballroom teams. That act was presented terrible, they would say about the current bill at Radio City Music Hall.

Tell me, is it true that a bad artist suffers as greatly as a good one? There were many performers at the Hotel Schuyler, but they gave no hint of suffering from the failure of their art. Perhaps the art had changed its name and came to their minds as something else—employment.

The sadness of the lost years of practice, the lessons, the exercises, the muscles stretched, the horn-blowing, tap-dancing, the swirling tango, the anguish of the violin. It is too much to think of. Even for these people the horror of mastery had been theirs. They seemed to be from the small towns of large states, such as New Jersey or northern Ohio. Their faces mirrored the bleak urban surface, the jangling provinciality of the old highway suburbs. Old age was unimaginable. When, whither? Perhaps, perhaps lovers would turn into widowers in the nick of time, somebody, somewhere would settle a little property on them. Why not? It was known to happen. Old rakes and “models”—after all, they were not clerks or filling station attendants or grocers. They were only those who wanted a good time, to have fun, to grow blowzy and paunchy in a vivacious, noisy company. The night clerks, rodents with red eyes, gray faces, men who had spent all their lives on the night shift, who greeted the morning as the time to pull down the blinds—how they envied the tenants, the lucky ones we never pass by in life without asking: what do they live on?

My friend, our
mariage blanc
—things went on for another year or so and then we parted. There was something of a divorce in our leave-taking. Quarrels, anger, and boredom, each with his character and that of the other.

J. suffered in his loves from seizures of optimism, a blighting frenzy quite unknown to me. A meeting, an attraction, aroused in him a rich, agitated possessiveness. He rushed into the future with the first glance, swept along by a need for connection that extended the moment before it had begun. He was one of those who look into new eyes and say: Now I am going to be happy.

And yet a day scarcely passed before a shadow, a reluctance fell into the space, a small or large difference, an imbalance. Alerted to rejection on the very heels of enthusiasm and hope, he would then have to retreat. He would become sardonic, taunting, clever, epigrammatic. How he suffered, sustained again and again only by the ferocious power of his habits, by a consuming discipline.

Transformations and miracles of the will were not beyond J. He was quite handsome, but also soft and rounded and as determined against sports as if he had been born with a handicap. But one year he began the recreation of himself in a daily horrible contest with barbells, push-ups, excruciating exercises. And slowly the neck thickened, the chest expanded, the muscles of the arms were visible. An appalling lifelong force had entered his being, leaving his self intact but accompanied always by this screaming, exercising twin, a twin who called out in the morning and again in the evening, calling for time, breath, pain, sweat. By enormous effort, he finally succeeded in looking like others.

J. left the hotel first, and into his room moved a call girl and her pimp. The girl was named Miss Chadwick and she was from the South. I heard this news with desperation. Complicity entwined us and her smile came back to me as if I were looking in a mirror. She showed me a picture of her little son. Where is he? Mama’s raising him, she said. That was all. Goodbye.

Goodbye? I have left out my abortion, left out running from the pale, frightened doctors and their sallow, furious wives in the grimy, curtained offices on West End Avenue. What are you screaming for? I have not even touched you, the doctor said: His wife led me to the door, her hands as firmly and punitively on my arm as if she had been a detective making an arrest. Do not come back ever.

I ended up with a cheerful, never-lost-a-case black practitioner, who smoked a cigar throughout. When it was over he handed me his card. It was an advertisement for the funeral home he also operated. Can you believe it, darling? he said.

The Hotel Schuyler is gone now. Uncertain elevators, dusty “penthouse” suites, the greasy, smoking ovens of “housekeeping units,” the lumpy armchairs—a distracted life, near the Harvard Club,
The New York Times
, the old Hotel Astor, the Algonquin, Brentano’s. In the halls you would sometimes hear a baby crying—child of a transient—and it was a sound from another world. The irregular tenants were most pitiful when they received visits from relatives, from their ex-wives, their grown children. They walked about sheepishly then, as if they had met with an accident. Soon the disappointed sons and daughters left, wives went back home, and at the Schuyler, free once again, our people returned to their debaucheries, their bills, and that stain of life-giving paranoia—limited, intact—each one wore like a tattoo.

T
HIS IS
what I saw yesterday morning through the tall, old artist-windows of my apartment. The bright morning sky that day had a rare blue and white fluffiness, as if a vacuum cleaner had raced across the heavens as a weekly, clarifying duty. It is hard to set nature apart in the city, and everything, inside and out, takes on the frame of a relentless housekeeping. Someone has let the coffee boil over; on this floor it must be. No sun from the north, only the pacifying light. There on 68th Street I see a modern church and the back view of warm red brick is a
bella vista
of sorts.

On the upper floor of the church a nursery school is held during the mornings for children up to the age of five. Pasted on the windows are cutouts of pink and green trees, red apples, and a blue boat, listing. The children had gone from one room to the other. In the vacated room I suddenly saw a little boy approach the opened window. On his face there were the signs of a deep concentration and hurry—the fixed, determined frown of someone older.

First he threw out a small yellow ball, a ball of the purest yellow like the color of the early forsythia then coming into bloom in Central Park. He turned back in a rush and once more his little hand pushed through the window, this time dropping a painted box. He is gone for a second and again the hand comes through the open space; this time a small book falls from his fingers. The yellow ball, the box, and the book landed on a large, flat ledge below. He is seen no more at the window, his destruction ended. The rain came down on the ledge in the afternoon, diluting the orange paint of the box. The little book blew about in the rustle of rain and wind, gathering moisture. Only the yellow ball remained the same, gleaming without change in its plastic brilliance.

This is what I heard in the evening. At the party everyone was intelligent and agreeable, but not particularly good-looking. No person of talent had brought along a new, beautiful, young girl, who being new and not knowing all the names would seem rude and superior, thus sending arrows of pain into the flesh of the older people who were known for something. Eyeglasses glimmered. Academics, like old barons of the Empire, coughed out their titles and universities and yet quickly the badges dimmed and their faces returned to the resignation brought on from too many lectures, and the docile, not-quite-interested smiles of students.

The host and hostess were of high intelligence and thus were, in turns, anxious, bored, and pleased. Their apartment in the West 80’s was typical of the city—the home of a bright young couple, where the man is paying alimony. Young children visited on the weekends, sleeping in the workroom of either the wife or husband, whichever labored at home. Books and records and pictures, a few pieces of old furniture well cared for, a number of handsome rugs and pillows, large plants in the southern window. Copper pans, some old silver, glazed casseroles in the neat square of kitchen.

A woman said: You can’t ask permission to leave someone. That’s where he made his mistake.

And if the permission came he’d be furious.

Exhausting.

Divorces and separation—that is the way to get attention. Everyone examines his own state and some say: Strange, they were much happier than we are. There are streets in the East 90’s where youngish couples on the wave of success buy town houses and do them over at great expense, uncovering old wood, taking off the stoop so that drunks cannot loiter, making a whole floor for the children to be quiet on. The strain and the cost and the house, a mausoleum with both names on it waiting for the dates to be filled in, drives the couple to separation. The streets are called Death Row.

Two women recently divorced came up to me with inquisitorial and serious frowns. Are you lonely? they asked.

Not always.

That’s marvelous, the first one said, smiling. The second said, gravely: Terrific.

How pleasant the rooms were, how comforting the distresses of New Yorkers, their insomnias filled with words, their patient exegesis of surprising terrors. Divorce, abandonment, the unacceptable and the unattainable, ennui filled with action, sad, tumultuous middle-age years shaken by crashings, uprootings, coups, desperate renewals. Weaknesses discovered, hidden forces unmasked, predictions, what will last and what is doomed, what will start and what will end. Work and love; the idle imagining the pleasure of the working ones. Those who work and their quizzical frowns, which ask: When will something new come to me? After all I am a sort of success.

There was talk about poverty. Poverty is very big this year, someone said. Talk about a trip to Mexico, about a sabbatical, about a very sick person, about a novel liked and very much disliked, about someone who drank a lot, about people taking up painting in middle age (mostly rejected wives), about New York and New Haven, about the swiftest creature in nature, a cockroach.

I began to talk to a handsome woman in her early forties. She is Judith: very thin, with short brown hair very thick and curly and worn in the African style that imparts, at least to white faces, a look of almost alarming cheerfulness and health.

Judith is not a happy woman. But there is a certain happy radiance in her bad choices, a certain aesthetic appropriateness and order in her dirges. She is a connoisseur, with a brilliant white smile, teeth perhaps a shade too large for sadness, beautiful eyes, perfectly in character, eyes that sparkled as if ready to cry.

She has a Ph.D., a credential very agreeable and surprising, since her life was all about love and disillusionment, as if she had been a courtesan rather than a scholar. She was wearing black silk pants and a blouse of flowered chiffon. She sighed behind her smile, with the resignation of experience, the harem resignation. All of her news was bad and so her talk was punctuated with “of course” and “naturally.”

Yes, I have someone, but he lives in California, naturally. Of course, you can’t exactly call that
have
.

She began suddenly to speak of her son. A mess. Do you really want to hear? Right now, where is he? He’s gone, signed himself out of the hospital and wouldn’t stay at home. He’s twenty-one. I got married very young, of course, of course. The father—what father?—I think he’s in Florida. No, not in the picture—naturally. No money. I raised the boy by myself. My father helped a lot. These things cost a fortune. It’s not to be believed.

Now? The boy’s just sitting around, actually living with a couple, both psychiatrists, and it’s supposed to be therapy. They hate me, naturally. When he was with me a few months ago it was a nightmare.

I call. I call him a lot but he won’t talk to me. I wanted him to go to this good place in Connecticut. He went and just walked out... Yes, depressed mostly, but then churns up and goes wild too.

She smokes, drinks a glass of wine, eats a bit of cheese. Drugs? How can you ask? Of course. More like amphetamines than anything else. He looks awful, very thin, a skeleton... Almost mute, except when he’s high and then he laughs a lot. His skin is a disaster, very pale, almost green... No, no, beautiful as a little boy. Not dumb either, naturally.

She lowers her eyes. This thing with him is never going to be over, never.

Judith was quiet, contemplating the ten plagues. Is she an Egyptian or an Israelite? Is she the carrier or receiver of plagues? What about the lovers in the room next to the crib? Does he look too much like his father? Does she want to be twenty again? How the poison passes from one person to another is not clear, but Judith has been accused more times than a numbers runner.

Already, in the early spring, she has a suntan, just the lightest brown on her skin. She would like to do something better, something sacramental perhaps, but instead there is only the solitary climb up to the roof, in a sweater, to turn her pale face to the sun.

Frenzy suddenly. What day is this? God, Thursday. I always call my son on Thursday night. The bitch shrink answers, and you would think I was a bill collector or a breather. Then the husband shrink comes on: Did you want something? Then the boy comes on and says nothing. Finally he says, sure, it’s okay here.

She looks for her purse. Thursday night. They want me to forget, naturally. All three of them. But I can’t forget. Then they will remember that I forgot.