The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (27 page)

But where is the author and where is his novel? Sank without a trace, in the murderous phrase. What right, you might ask, has the monstrous sea of pages to engulf the young man as if he were a third-class passenger on the arrogant
Lusitania
, watching through the porthole, as he sank, the half-empty lifeboats? Of course it is always possible the critic’s pleasure unhinged him, but who can bear to think of the diseases of happiness?

Many brilliant names on the magazine covers arousing a palsy of anticipation. The romance of names, as if one were to say, I met him at a party and that is how it started. Fall in love in the middle of a Winter Issue. Or suffer a disillusionment, make several telephone calls, as if to a doctor or a druggist, to ask: What do you make of that? My head aches from the wrong turning at the end.

It’s only words, the druggist says.

Worms?

No, words.

Spring Issue, 1958: “There remains the case of the forcibly Sovietized countries of Eastern Europe, whose plight we cannot recognize as definite.” That was good news for us of the anti-Stalinist left.

At midafternoon the sun, slipping through the mist, made a bright stripe across the face of the handsome man. His skin had the sallow tintings of so many interesting peoples. But there was nothing of shah or sheikh or pasha in his black-suited diffidence. Perhaps just a shade of flirtatiousness that comes from life as a beauty and being noticed — a sort of lifting of the head.

In another Back Issue a translation from the French:

Appearances
has several meanings. The face of the handsome foreigner is not to the point here.

Nothing much to report about him. Activities at the library table have their dramatic limits.
Nervous Diseases
has been abandoned, pushed to the side. Now he seems to be writing a letter with its thoughtful pauses for reflection followed by a steady, rhythmical sweep across the sheet of paper.

The pages of the purple or cherry-colored notebook ripple back to jottings about George Gissing. “He wanted home life and found a slattern.” That was Edith, the second Mrs. Gissing, the second fatality. Such a “selfish and coarse nature” he chose, even after his youthful marriage to the alcoholic prostitute, Nell, the best of the two. Nell died at thirty-one, and at last, at last, in a fearful scene, freezing in fever in her light dirty dress on a filthy, miserable bed. “The trade of the damned” appears as a quotation, but it is not about poor Nell; it is about Gissing at his writing desk or one of his writing characters.

In the old magazines there are early opinions, what you might call thin ones, and now twenty or so years later the opinions of some have expanded like the size of the waistband.

The advertisements on the back covers linger there like gossip. What was born that year that did not exist the year before? “I am inclined to believe that John Berryman’s
77 Dream Songs
will in the long run be seen as more important than his brilliant
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
.” — Allen Tate. Well, that was true. Across the board.

No one in the public library today brings to mind the early John B. peering over his large, glinting eyeglasses from the stage of the YMHA, the temple of poetry readings. There he was then, spare, intense, and learned; there he was in a smart tweed jacket, there before the faithful girls of New York. High-style infatuation. In the vestibule where white wine completed the evening, the poet could be seen skating as if on one toe over the oil slick of questions, diverting away from his own lines to
The Winter’s Tale
and gorgeous Perdita, left to the wind and the waves, and the parenthetical paranoias of Leontes. Another evening. That’s what we’re here for, the filing cabinet of first and last performances.

Of course you never know who is about in the library. The pretty, plump girl smiling like intelligence itself as she reads....Time to leave. Gather up the Gissing class-bloodied world, a clot of unsuccess. Leave the magazine essays and their seashell precocity.

He too rose and there he is at the stairs and then again at the cloakroom. Outside a cold, heavy rain annoys hundreds who begin to scream for taxis even though there are none to be seen with the light on. But scream away just in case there has been an electrical shortage in the engine and half the cabs are indeed free. People from the street crowd under the narrow ledge of the Forty-second Street entrance. A fury of restless vexation addressed to the weather. High heels drown in the splash at the curb and the mean West Side wind from the Hudson blows about as carelessly as crime. Nothing special — just a skirmish with time, time as scarce as old shoe buckles for the busy and the idle.

Think of the courage of the new Hotel Hyatt down the street at Grand Central. Millions and millions of dollars of faith, each dollar a pilgrim. The intrepid gleam of its brass and glass, its Alpine waterfall splashing over three long, flat concrete steps, and the pastoral, bay-windowed restaurant, cozy as a cottage garden, hanging over Forty-second Street. Down below our third world mysteries and wonders of bus exhausts, blowing garbage, and blind newsdealers to salute the Japanese. Fortunately they are accustomed to the Asiatic.

And here is my man, unrolling a large black umbrella of genuine cloth. With his black cap of curls, his careful courtesy, he now has the look of a seminarian. As companions from the bookshelf and reading room, he holds the umbrella over my head and we begin to converse. People sometimes meet each other in the library, although that is not the romance of the noble building. It is not a suitable landscape for the enrichment of social experience, no. The single persons it claims are far too singular and the encounters struck up are likely to be as unfortunately surprising as the meeting of a homosexual and a detective in the subway toilets.

After we agree that it is raining, he asks: Where do you live, you American?

A reassuring accent, a nice, lilting, slightly askew knowledge of the language, the attractive flow of someone who has learned English abroad.

I live here in Manhattan.

Manhattan. More than a million and a half.

We are each one of more than a million.

What is the occupation of your life? he continues. A little rote learning in that perhaps. Once long ago I looked over the shoulder of a young man on a train in Europe in order to discover his
Nervous Diseases
, as it were. He was studying an English grammar, working on a sentence which read: “Can you tell me, sir, where I can purchase a pair of plus-fours?” So, a bit of plus-fours in the black beauty’s English.

My occupation? I find myself occupied as a teacher.

A pause, a brief, dry cough and then: Now, I am sad. In my other life I was a teacher. That was also my occupation in life and so we are engaged in a coincidence, you and I.

What is your occupation in life now?

And suddenly there in the freezing rain, the rain of a thousand annoyances not to be endured without multitudinous protests and curses of betrayal, the true black-suited man appeared. Whence cometh thou, new immigrant standing on the steps of the New York Public Library?

I am Greek. In my black suit and black tie I work in a Greek restaurant tonight and every night except Sunday.

The sad dark Greek in a dark Greek restaurant. Unfair, unfair, since it has been said time and time again that the quality of Greek light is one of the land’s greatest treasures.

His is a family story, a condensation of history: Many of my relations, relatives — which is it, the word? — are here. My brother is driving a taxi. My aunt, one uncle, and two cousins are in the streets all day. They are occupied with selling Sabrett hot dogs. Down at the corner you will see a woman dressed in ten layers of clothing and standing in the rain. My mother’s sister and a very strong woman. But the Sabrett is not much in life, is it, would you say?...Still, I don’t know. It is a question for philosophers. You make a little list of this and that and the head becomes dizzy.

Oh the Greeks in the Manhattan streets. One in felt boots, wrapped up like a mummy, showing her red, gap-toothed face, face like roughened hide with a bright hole in it. She moves her cart from the Fifty-ninth Street subway-station entrance, on down to Fifty-seventh, following the market. The thin, hawk-nosed seller outside the ABC building floats into my memory and mingles with the nerve-wrung Greek beside me.

And the library with the people huddling to escape the rain seemed like an old monastery surrounded by beggars waiting for alms. Only we, the man and I, a prelate and a nun, stand under our papal umbrella.

The restaurant?

Just another
ethnic
. I like that word ethnic, Greek root, although I never heard it in my country. We have a belly dancer on the weekend. That’s Turkish, not Greek, but what’s the difference?
Danse du ventre
on Friday and Saturday. Most of the dancers are American. They say they are college girls. Can you tell me true if they are college girls?

Probably not. Topless college girls. College call girls. Another question.

I look up at the handsome Greek waiter and he smiles, showing perfect white teeth to complete his square, fleshless jaw. And what did he teach in Greece? Ah, he said, don’t be amused. It was English I taught. Of course my Greek education is not sufficient for a profession here, not sufficient in the least way. And I am finished back there, out of the system, because I got it in my head to come to the States.

So, this man with his striking perfections has in his circle of choices become a whole. He is a completed form, awaiting the content of the future. Youth, foot over foot on the rungs of the ladder of the teaching bureaucracy, breathing the uncertain air of a respectable possibility. No getting drunk in taverns — and also a cautious purity perhaps, avoiding the trap of many children. Black plastic briefcase, the girdle of Adonis.

The rain let up and down came the umbrella. I am off to the unspeakable restaurant, he said with a bow. And for me the crosstown bus braked to a stop on the corner of Sixth Avenue. And there he was talking with a woman standing under the Sabrett yellow-and-blue umbrella. She was standing like a thoughtful animal in its winter stall.

No special surprise when he telephoned a few nights later, one teacher of English to another, the occupied and the disoccupied, bound together by one of our great public institutions. There was the question of his knowing my name and he said that it was found on a slip of paper left at the reading desk. It was his idea that the curious could discover what they wished.

In accord with that it was possible to ask: If you taught English why aren’t you reading novels instead of
Nervous Diseases
?

Novels? I can’t understand novels...no more than a sheep.

Can you understand medical books?

The one I was looking at had nothing to say about my condition in life. A disappointment.

In the background there was the noise of the restaurant and he stopped now and then to speak aside in Greek.

Explaining himself to me he said, in a matter-of-fact way apparently so clear and unalterable to him it was without regret: I don’t know anything about English culture. I just happened to be able to learn the language, like singing. Maybe it turned out to be a pity. A bad Greek fate. I am ignorant, deeply ignorant.

Of course this admission made me trust him without reserve. No need to imagine harassment from such an abyss of self-examination.

Also, I can’t talk about Seferis or Kazantzakis...or even Aeschylus.

His correct Greek pronunciation bejeweled the already glittering consonants and vowels of the names of his countrymen. After a pause he said: Do not be disturbed. I am not fantastical. I have no fantasies.

What a pity, the Mediterranean voyager.

I have looked for him from time to time near the library. It would be nice to see him standing at the door, with the sun on his “classical” nose and all the storehouse of the Age of Pericles behind him in the dark vaults.

At Easter I heard from him again and for the last time. He said he was getting married to a well-to-do Greek American who came as a customer to the restaurant.

Oh, the bitch.

It turned out that “well-to-do” was the result of a divorce settlement. I said: Watch out. She may have to give that up if she marries again.

He said, no, his understanding was that she was well-to-do from a
lump sum
. And he asked if that was the correct phrase and I said yes, a lump sum was quite acceptable.

And what will you do when you have married the lump sum?

He said: I will speak English to it.

That is all about my Greek exile, now a New Yorker, all about one of those “incomplete, sensitive men,” as the phrase has it in my Gissing notes. Such notes and phrases and quotations all day long attach themselves to real people like a handshake.

I think of him when I hear the wheels of the hot-dog cart pushing up the street early in the morning, pushing all the way it now seems to me from a Greek village to midtown Manhattan, and with no amazement at what, covered with boiled onions or mustard, we will eat for breakfast.

I will remember him in the conservative black and white so well suited to a displaced martyr, a teacher of English. Not the heart to imagine the bright closet of turtleneck jerseys and zippered jackets he may be wearing out there in Queens, known as the borough of cemeteries.

And the Back Issues pile up in front of and behind experience, wedging the sandwich of real life in between. Pages are existence and the eye never stops on its lookout for the worm, the seed, the fish beneath the water, the next meal.

It is summer now and yesterday I crashed into a tree in order to avoid a deer on a June morning so foggy the deer perhaps thought it was dusk. An unusual happening, a drama, terrible, a trauma. But in the evening my injured shoulder and the awesome closeness to death gave way. A Back Issue from England, one of a month or so ago, told me that in France the population had in a hundred years risen by 25 percent but “the number of art students from 1,000 to 191,600.” The conclusion was that “such numbers lead to devaluation.” An interesting idea, displacing for a time shoulder, deer, death, and, in our creative usage, my “totaled” car.