The Pursuit of Happiness (2001) (69 page)

The years in Paris evaporated far too quickly. On December thirty-first, 1954, I stood on a balcony overlooking the avenue Georges V in the company of Isabel van Arnsdale, and assorted other
Herald-Tribune
reprobates. As car horns sounded - and a fireworks display illuminated the winter sky - I hoisted my glass towards Isabel and said, ‘Here’s to my last year in Paris.’

‘Stop talking crap,’ she said.

‘It’s not crap: it’s the truth. By this time next year, I want to be on my way back to the States.’

‘But you’ve got a great life here.’

‘Don’t I know it.’

‘Then why the hell throw it all away?’

‘Because I’m not a professional expatriate. Because I miss baseball, and bagels, and Barney Greengrass the Sturgeon King, and Gitlitz’s delicatessen, and showers that work, and a grocery store that delivers, and speaking my own language, and …’

‘Him?’

‘No goddamn way.’

‘You promise?’

‘When have you last heard me speak about him?’

‘Can’t remember.’

‘There you go.’

‘Then when are you going to do something stupid, like fall in love again?’

‘Hang on - you told me that the only way to get through life was by
never
falling in love.’

‘Jesus Christ, you really don’t think I’d expect anyone to follow that advice?’

But the thing was: I had followed her counsel. Not intentionally. Rather, because, after Jack, no one I met ever triggered that wonderfully strange, deranged, dangerous surge of … what do you call it? Desire? Delirium? Passion? Completeness? Stupidity? Self-delusion?

Now I knew something else: I couldn’t be with him, and I couldn’t get over him. Time may have numbed the ache - but like any anaesthetic, it didn’t heal the wound. I kept waiting for the day when I would wake up and Jack would have finally fled my thoughts. That morning had yet to arrive. An ongoing thought had started to unsettle me: say I never came to terms with this loss? Say it was always there? Say it defined me?

When I articulated this fear to Isabel, she laughed. ‘Honey, loss is an essential component of life. In many ways,
c’est notre destin.
And yes, there are certain things you never really get over. But what’s wrong with that?’

‘It’s so damn painful … that’s what’s wrong with it.’

‘But living
is
painful…
n’est-ce pas?’

‘Cut the existential crap, Isabel.’

‘I promise you this - the moment you begin to accept that you’re
not
going to get over it … you might just get over it.’

I kept that thought in mind during the next twelve months - when I drifted into a brief fling with a Danish jazz bassist, and wrote my weekly column, and spent long afternoons at the Cinematheque Francaise, and (if the weather was clement) read for an hour each morning on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, and celebrated my thirty-third birthday by giving notice at the
Herald-Tribune,
and writing Joel Eberts that the sublet of my apartment should end by December thirty-first, 1955. Because I was coming home.

And on January tenth, 1956, I found myself back at Pier 76 on West 48th Street, stepping off the SS
Corinthia.
Joel Eberts was there to meet me.

‘You haven’t aged one damn bit, counselor,’ I said after giving him a hug. ‘What’s your secret?’

‘Constant litigation. But hey, you look wonderful too.’

‘But older.’

‘I’d say, “exceedingly elegant”.’

‘That’s a synonym for “older”.’

We took a taxi uptown to my apartment. As per my instructions, he’d arranged with the janitor to have it repainted when the tenants moved out before Christmas. It still reeked of turpentine and fresh emulsion - but the whitewash of the walls was a cheering antidote to the ashen January morning.

‘Only a crazy person decides to return to New York in the thick of winter,’ Joel said.

‘I like murk.’

‘You must have been a Russian in a former life.’

‘Or maybe I’m just someone who has always responded well to gloom.’

‘What a lot of dreck you talk. You’re a survivor, kiddo. And a canny one at that. If you don’t believe me, check out the pile of bank and investment statements I’ve left in a folder on your kitchen table. You hardly touched a cent of your capital while you were in France. And the rent from the sublet built up rather nicely. Also: your stockbroker is one sharp operator. He’s managed to add about thirty per cent value to both the divorce settlement fund and Eric’s insurance payout. So if you don’t want to work for the next decade …’

‘Work is something I can’t do without,’ I said.

‘I concur. But know this - financially speaking, you’re damn comfortable.’

‘What’s in here?’ I asked, kicking a cardboard box that was by the couch.

‘It’s all of the accumulated mail I didn’t forward to you over the years. I had it sent up yesterday.’

‘But you forwarded me just about everything, except …’

‘That’s right. His letters.’

‘I told you to throw them out.’

‘I decided that there was no harm keeping them until your return … just in case you decided you did want to read them, after all.’

‘I don’t want to read them.’

‘Well, your building gets its garbage collected once a day, so you can throw them out whenever you like.’

‘Have you ever heard from Jack or his sister again?’

‘Nope. Have you?’

I’d never told Joel about my reply to Meg’s letter. I wasn’t going to now.

‘Never,’ I said.

‘He must have taken the hint. Anyway, it’s all history now. Just like Joe McCarthy. I tell you, I’m no conventional patriot - but on that day in fifty-four when the Senate censured the bastard, I thought: unlike a lot of other places, this country has the reassuring habit of finally admitting that it got something wrong.’

‘It’s just too bad they didn’t censure him three years earlier.’

‘I know. Your brother was a great man.’

‘No - he was simply a good man. Too good. Had he been less good, he’d still be alive. That’s the hardest thing about coming back to Manhattan - knowing that every time I walk by the Ansonia or the Hampshire House …’

‘I’m sure that, even after four years, it still hurts like hell.’

‘Losing your brother never gets easier.’

‘And losing Jack?’

I shrugged. ‘Ancient history.’

He studied my face carefully. I wondered if he saw I was lying.

‘Well that’s something, I guess,’ he said.

I changed the subject. Quickly.

‘How about letting me buy us lunch at Gitlitz’s?’ I said. ‘I haven’t had a pastrami on rye and a celery soda in five years.’

‘That’s because the French know nothing about food.’

I hoisted the box of Jack’s letters. We left the apartment. Once we were outside, I tossed the box into the back of a garbage truck that was emptying cans on West 77th Street. Joel’s eyes showed disapproval, but he said nothing. As the jaws of the truck closed around the box, I wondered:
why did you do that?
But I covered my remorse by linking my arm through Joel’s, and saying, ‘Let’s eat.’

Gitlitz’s hadn’t changed in the years I had been away. Nor had most of the Upper West Side. I slotted back into Manhattan life with thankful ease. The bumpy readjustment I had been dreading never materialized. I looked up old friends. I went to Broadway shows and Friday matinees at the New York Philharmonic and the occasional evening at the Metropolitan Opera. I became a habitue once again of the Met and the Frick and the 42nd Street branch of the Public Library, and my two local fleapit movie houses: the Beacon and the Loew’s 84th Street. And every other week, I punched out a ‘Letter from New York’ - which was then dispatched, courtesy of Western Union, to the offices of the
Paris Herald-Tribune.
This bi-monthly column was Mort Goodman’s farewell present to me.

‘If I can’t get you to stay and write for me in Paris, then I better get you writing for me from New York.’

So now I was a foreign correspondent. Only the country I was covering was my own.

‘In the four years I was loitering with intent on the rue Cassette
(I wrote in a column, datemarked March 20th, 1956),
something curious happened to Americans: after all the years of economic depression and wartime rationing, they woke up one morning to discover that they now lived in an affluent society. And for the first time since the Roaring Twenties, they’re engaged on a massive spending spree. Only unlike the hedonistic twenties, this oh-so-sensible Eisenhower era is centered around the home - a happy, reasonably affluent God-fearing place, where there are two cars in every garage, a brand new Amana refrigerator in the kitchen, a Philco TV in the living room, a subscription to the
Reader’s Digest,
and where grace is said before every TV dinner. What? You expatriates haven’t heard of a TV dinner? Well, just when you thought American cuisine couldn’t get more bland
…’

That column (written in one of my flippant H.L. Mencken-esque moods) caused my phone to ring off the hook for a few days - as it was picked up by the Paris correspondent of the very conservative
San Francisco Chronicle,
who used large quotes from it in a piece he wrote about the sort of anti-American rubbish that was being printed in an allegedly respectable paper like the
Paris Herald-Tribune.
Before I knew it, I was back in Walter Winchell’s column:

News Flash: Sara Smythe, one-time yuckster for
Saturday Night/Sunday Morning
and recent professional American-in-Paris, is back in Gotham City … but not too happily. According to our spies, she’s churning out a column featuring a lot of cheap cracks about Our Way of Life for all those bitter expats who choose to live away from these great shores. Memo to Miss Smythe: if you don’t like it here, why not try Moscow?

Four years earlier, Winchell’s smear would have killed all potential employment prospects in New York. How times had changed - for now, I received a series of calls from editors whom I used to know around town during the late forties and early fifties, asking if I’d like to have lunch and talk things over.

‘But, according to Winchell,’ I told Imogen Woods, my former editor at
Saturday/Sunday
(now the number two at
Harper’s),
‘I’m still the Emma Goldman of West Seventy-Seventh Street.’

‘Honey,’ Imogen said, digging into her Biltmore Hotel cobb salad, and simultaneously signaling to the waiter for more drinks, ‘Walter Winchell is yesterday’s chopped liver. In fact, you should be pleased Winchell took another swing at you. Because it’s how I found out you were back in New York.’

‘I was surprised to get your call,’ I said carefully.

‘I was really glad you agreed to meet me. Because … and I’m being totally honest here … I was ashamed of myself when
Saturday/Sunday
let you go. I should have stuck up for you. I should have insisted that someone else give you the news. But I was scared. Terrified of losing my lousy little job. And I hated myself for being such a coward. But I still went along with them. And that will always weigh on my conscience.’

‘Don’t let it.’

‘It will. And when I read about your brother’s death …’

I cut her off before she could say anything more.

‘We’re here now,’ I said. ‘And we’re talking. That’s what counts.’

By the end of that lunch, I was the new
Harper’s
film critic. The phone continued to ring at home. The book editor of the
New York Times
offered me reviewing work. So too did his counterpart at the
New Republic.
And a commissioning editor at
Cosmopolitan
arranged a lunch meeting, telling me she’d love to revive the ‘Real Life’ column - ‘only tailored to today’s sophisticated fifties woman’.

I accepted the reviewing work. I turned down the
Cosmopolitan
offer, on the grounds that my erstwhile column was erstwhile. But when the editor asked if I’d like to do a lucrative six-month stint as the magazine’s agony aunt - I accepted on the spot. Because I was about the last person in the world who should be giving out sensible advice.

The
Cosmopolitan
editor - Alison Finney - took me to lunch at the Stork Club. While we were eating, Winchell came in. The Stork Club had always been his haunt, his outer office - and though everyone in New York now considered Winchell’s power to be on the wane (as Imogen Woods had told me), he still commanded the most highly visible of all corner tables, furnished with its very own telephone. Alison nudged me and said, ‘There’s your greatest fan.’ I shrugged. We finished our lunch. Alison excused herself and disappeared off to the Ladies’. Without thinking about what I was doing, I suddenly stood up and walked towards Winchell’s table. He was correcting some copy, so he didn’t see me approach.