Sleepless Nights (7 page)

She puts a black shawl over her seraglio costume and rushes out. At the door she offers her little, hesitant smile of bad luck. How pretty she is with her kinky head, her large, camera teeth and the diamond brooch of her Ph.D. Men have mistreated her, a mild mistreatment, as one would speak of a mild case of, say, bronchitis. She provokes it with her charming harem discontent, with her veils of bad luck through which her eyes glitter with a curious ironic hopefulness. Goodnight, Judith. Take a drink before the telephone call.

A woman’s city, New York. The bag ladies sit in their rags, hugging their load of rubbish so closely it forms a part of their own bodies. Head, wrapped in an old piece of flannel, peers out from the rubbish of a spotted melon. Pitiful, swollen sores drip red next to the bag of tomatoes. One lady holds an empty perfume bottle with a knuckle on top of it indistinguishable from her finger. They and their rubbish a parasitic growth heavy with suffering; the broken glass screams, the broken veins weep; the toes ache along with the ache of the slashed boot.

Have mercy on them, someone. And mercy on Miss Cramer, my old neighbor who has now descended to a smaller place around the corner, down near the abandoned police station, among the damnation of emptying red-brick buildings waiting for the executioner.

Monday in winter. What has happened to you, Miss Cramer? It is December and Christmas is near. There is a reindeer in the window of the steaming Chinese laundry; there is a wreath of peppermint paper in the ferocious prostitute’s window and a lighted tree has been in the hardware store since Thanksgiving.

What has happened to the impertinent music teacher, the failed mezzo, who used to receive her pupils with sonorous black looks, sizing them up as if they were a bundle of remaindered goods asking to be patched together for use?

Miss Cramer in winter in a dress of printed silk, soiled here and there with a new pattern of damage. She is wearing torn canvas shoes and no stockings to cover her bruised, discolored legs, nothing to help the poor naked ankles caked with barnacles of dirt. And recently she has been struck by a loss beyond bearing: her two black poodles. Rich, resplendent animals, of perfect breeding like herself, accustomed to a dozen kisses on their cold, black muzzles each morning.

When we first moved to 67th Street, I applauded her amazing automobile and imagined she was assisted in her driving by her appropriate English accent. In the early days of summer the car came out of storage for the drive to the season in the Catskills. Come and see Miss Cramer in her car, I would say to my husband.

And there she was in a mannish felt hat, the top of the twenty-five-year-old miracle down, she, impressive as the car’s shining black hood with its foxlike nose of silver; she sitting on the tan, burnished leather. She went down toward Broadway, deftly twirling her hands and pointing her arms right and left in the now-arcane signals, receiving the admiration of the passers-by for her marvelous effort of conservation. She is leaving the grand old two-story apartment for the summer, abandoning without sentiment the crackling, insecure voices trying out “Dové sono,” “Un bel di,” and “The Last Rose of Summer.”

She then had her aged mother with her, a tyrant of primitive snobbery who, as she grew older and older, went back to the grievances of ancient robberies, thieving charwomen, malicious in-laws. The mother was like the old woman Herzen mentions in his memoirs, the one who could not forgive Napoleon for the premature death of her favorite cow in 1812.

On Christmas Eve Miss Cramer is wearing the same print dress and a short knit sweater. She is almost barefoot in the canvas shreds. Poverty for the autocrat came like a bulldozer, gouging out her pretensions, her musical education, her trips to Bayreuth. The mother died, summers vanished, the voices were silent. Out of the apartment went the piano and the trash of two and a half decades, brilliant American, English, and European trash. Miss Cramer moved down the street, and the move was a descent on the roller coaster, hair flying, trinkets ripped off the ears and the fingers, heart pounding and her head filled with a strange gust of air, which was never again released and seemed to be still blowing about behind the brow, rippling the dark eyelashes.

How are you, Miss Cramer?

Very well, thank you, she replies without smiling and yet in possession of the full, throaty voice.

Today she pauses at the end of the block where trucks and cabs and cars are flowing and raging with their horns. She approaches an appalling wreck of great individuality, a black woman who wanders in and out of the neighborhood, covers the streets with purposeful speed. No one has ever seen the black woman’s mouth, since the whole lower part of her face is always bound tight with a sort of turban of woolen cloth. Fear of germs, disfigurement, or symbol of silence? She has three large bags of rubbish, larger than herself, which she carries without effort. Her dark purdah glance is strong and still as rock. She gets on the city bus without fare and sometimes so black is her glance the driver shrugs in panic and lets her pass.

She and Miss Cramer meet suddenly at the corner and both stop for a moment. The wind is so strong a beer bottle rolls in the gutter. They are both fearless and they gaze bitterly at each other with their terrible virginal inviolability, their sore purity. These are not cases, they do not fill out forms or wait for the mails. They are gladiators, creatures of the trenches, accustomed to the streets at night, to the toughness of weather, the pain of stones, and the itch of dirt. Mad strength, hideous endurance, hostility, nightmares, met for a few seconds at the corner but it seemed to me that there was no sign of recognition. The two women do not know what they look like, do not see their lives, and so they wander about in their dreadful freedom like old oxen left behind, totally unprovided for.

D
EAREST M
.: I saw Alex A. on the street recently. He is still handsome. I suppose that is, with him, the first thing one thinks—that and the waving shadow, the shadow of his own self-reproach. Not quite liking himself, he whom everyone adores. I must say he was wearing a very good-looking raincoat and so the “presentation” isn’t much altered. That’s something, isn’t it? But what is his intention? I mean the intention of his life.

That was a year ago. And now it is this year. It is time for cocktails. The moment for which all of New York works, lies, exercises, hurries, dresses.

New York—this is no city for poor people. Their presence ruins everything, everything. Dread—that is the noxious air around them. The rich in their pyramids have a nice time. All of the objects of eternity are at hand, lest they down the years need something remembered or forgotten. A broken heart. The pharaohs need not even go outdoors to pace about in their pain, looking in shop windows, buying things. No, they may sit at home in a depression, a square of fur warming their knees, mending all the while. Everyone dreams of a servant when the ego is bruised, the vanity affronted.

To Alex I said on the telephone: You cannot imagine how well I am set up, how comfortable I appear to be, although a pauper.

It is almost seven. Should Alex walk in the door as a type, a genre? Perhaps that effort is a mistake. What is wanted is history, the man in the raincoat, wearing the loops of his ideas, the buttons of his period. Some men define themselves by women although they appear to believe it is quite the opposite; to believe that it is
she
, rather than themselves, who is being filed away, tagged, named at last like a quivering cell under a microscope.

Back there, when I first came to New York, I observed that a number of intellectual men, radicals, had a way of finding rich women who loved them in the brave and risky way of Desdemona. A writer or painter or
philosophe
sailed into port and a well-to-do woman would call out,
Evviva Otello!
The women were not necessarily sparkling and lighthearted. More often an impressive, thick, downright strength of purpose went along with them, like an overcoat.

Perhaps a sort of perverse complacency led the lucky women to rescue a smart, sulky man, one whose ambitions and gifts were far from settled, whose intelligence was certain but whose destiny was a curling, warning question mark. Gifts, sad and defining, books read, ideas stored—all intact and battered by an inconstant will.

Envy is not the vice of the frozen intellectual. How can it seize the mind when boredom arrives before it, always ahead of time, ready? Boredom with the results of those who are always working and producing, failing or piling up money and reputation, boredom with the ordinary thoughts laid out in carefully chosen type, bound for the ages, with indexes, chapter headings, ordinary thoughts dressed in the same coats and hats as the complete works of Spinoza.

Time—that is something else. With the hesitant intellectual years fly by like a day; life is shortened by the yellowing incompletes. The “book”—a plaguing growth that does not itself grow, but attaches, hangs on, a tumorous companion made up of the deranged cells of learning, experience, thinking.

Sometimes the moneyed women with their artists and thinkers were like wives with their vigilant passion for the Soviet Union, the huge land mass that had long ago aroused in them the blood loyalty and tenderness felt for a first child. And what are a child’s “few mistakes”?

The pathos of high projects that cannot be set aside because of the investment, the “good parts,” the research, the files, the old outlines. Healthy enough on the tennis court, to be seen at the opera, the ballet, the mysterious invalids have their charm. They know something very well, perhaps too well.

In the evening, wine may revive the dead Ph.D. and in the warmth the weed-choked garden of ambition and love seems to burst forth with thorny, brave little blossoms like those on an ancient, untended rosebush. It is like the song in the hymnal, one of the many B-flat offerings of consolation.

And yet the perennial, hardy hope cannot last out dinner. This is New York, with its graves next to its banks.

It is a Friday night, October 1973. Smog and closeness during the long afternoon. Earlier at the New York Jewish Guild for the Blind a vicious burglar alarm was somehow tripped into violent sound. On and on it rang, as if a thousand ambulances were screaming through the city, whistling, careening, warning on their mission of remedy. The alarm sounded without mercy for an hour. One began to imagine the blind, with their pale flesh, soft and misted with blue, trembling in the corridors. A thousand little white canes tapping in panic, dogs growling in their harnesses.

My plants are brought in from their southern kitchen windows to rest in pots in the living room. The stationary schefflera in its heavy tub stands in its permanent corner, like a cat that never goes out, year after year, living its entire life in a few rooms. (“The plant can stand periods of poor light—north or east window or even interior location.”) The weeping greens of the city shine in the dark and survive in a great will to accommodate. There they are, everywhere, determined, hopeful, like the coolness of evenings in the desert.

I am alone here in New York, no longer a
we
. Years, decades even, passed. Then one is out of the commonest of plurals, out of the strange partnership that begins as a flat, empty plain and soon turns into a town of rooms and garages, little grocery stores in the pantry, dress shops in the closets, and a bank with your names printed together for the transaction of business.

I often think about bachelors. A life of pure decision, of thoughtful calculations, every inclination honored. They go about on their own, nicely accompanied in their singularity by the companion of possibility. For cannot any man, young or old, rich or poor, turn a few corners and bump into marriage?

Alex is coming for a drink; he has never married but whether he is a true bachelor or not is another matter. Henry James, unwed, and well known for dining out with a statistical fervor, made his decision early in life and was thereby free to pass sociable evenings, untroubled by the errors of the ambivalent and discontent who are always going out and yet forever asking what good it has done them. To be single and busy—nothing bad in that. Such people do much good.

The trim, conservative bachelor calls up a picture of neat clothes, shoes in wooden trees, mahogany desks with leather fittings and brass antique writing instruments; glasses and bottles and ice buckets, matching curtains and pillows chosen by decorators or women friends, striped materials on the sofa. Record collection dusted, alphabetical; a stale but tranquilizing symmetry—and certain absences, like the bathroom of a blind man, without mirrors.

Beethoven was not married, nor was Flaubert. Voltaire lived thirty years longer than his mistress, and Dr. Johnson thirty after Elizabeth. Both lived out life in a populated singleness. Good for them. More restful than the material-mad Goethe with Ulrike, Marianne, Christiane, Charlotte, Gretchen, Käthchen, Friederike, Lotte, Lili, Maximiliane, Bettina, and Minna.

Last week. A young man suddenly found that his own mother had been given to him as a present. He cried out in rage, saying: My mother has collapsed completely, collapsed. Do you hear, can you imagine what that means? Have you ever heard the sound of a body falling, falling on you? He swore, eyes furious, swore at his father for dying in upstate New York. The plot was explained. They, the parents, fought without ceasing, never got along well, not from the first. She hated nursing him, the half-nursing of someone half-sick. The mother’s face had for years worn a planning look: the face had been thinking of trips alone, when the father was gone, of insurance policies, of interesting assets to examine of an afternoon. “A rich widow weeps with one eye and laughs with the other.”

Death, however, arrived as a farce. In an instant, she announced herself as the broken partner of a splendid alliance, the frozen, demanding survivor of a warm past. The young man, with his blond hair and enraged eyes, suddenly became the disheartened, unwilling caretaker of the last half of a hallowed union upstate. He ground his teeth as he heard the hearse of love coming his way.