Odd Woman in the City

Vivian Gornick

Word Count 3468

I have always lived in New York, but a good part of my life I longed for the city the way someone in a small town would, yearning to arrive at the capital. Growing up in the Bronx was like growing up in a village. From earliest adolescence I knew there was a center-of-the-world, and that I was far from it. At the same time, I also knew it was only a subway ride away, downtown in Manhattan. Manhattan was Araby.

At fourteen I began taking that subway ride, walking the length and breadth of the island late in winter, deep in summer. The only difference between me and someone like me from Kansas was that in Kansas one makes the immigrant’s lonely leap once and forever, whereas I made many small trips into the city, going home repeatedly for comfort and reassurance, dullness and delay, before attempting the main chance. Down Broadway, up Lexington, across Fifty-Seventh Street, from river to river, through Greenwich Village, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, plunging down to Wall Street, climbing up to Columbia. I walked these streets for years, excited and expectant, going home each night to the Bronx, where I waited for life to begin.

The way I saw it, the West Side was one long rectangle of apartment houses filled with artists and intellectuals; this richness, mirrored on the East Side by money and social standing, made the city glamorous, and painfully exciting. I could taste in my mouth world, sheer world. All I had to do was get old enough and New York would be mine.

As children, my friends and I would roam the streets of the neighborhood, advancing out as we got older, section by section, until we were little girls trekking across the Bronx as though on a mission to the interior. We used the streets the way children growing up in the country use fields and rivers, mountains and caves: to place ourselves on the map of our world. We walked by the hour. By the time we were twelve we knew instantly when the speech or appearance of anyone coming toward us was the slightest bit off. If a man approached and said, “How ya doin’, girls? You girls live around here?” we knew. If a woman wasn’t walking purposefully toward the shopping street, we knew. We knew also that it excited us to know. When something odd happened—and it didn’t take much for us to consider something odd, our sense of the norm was strict—we analyzed it for hours afterward.

A high school friend introduced me to the streets of upper Manhattan. Here, so many languages and such striking peculiarities in appearance—men in beards, women in black and silver. These were people I could see weren’t working-class, but what class were they? And then there was the hawking in the street! In the Bronx a lone fruit and vegetable man might call out, “Missus! Fresh tomatoes today!” But here, people on the sidewalk were selling watches, radios, books, jewelry—in loud, insistent voices. Not only that, but the men and women passing by got into it with them: “How long’ll that watch work? Till I get to the end of the block?” “I know the guy who wrote that book, it isn’t worth a dollar.” “Where’d ya get that radio? The cops’ll be at my door in the morning, right?” So much stir and animation! People who were strangers talking at one another, making one another laugh, cry out, crinkle up with pleasure, flash with anger. It was the boldness of gesture and expression everywhere that so captivated us: the stylish flirtation, the savvy exchange, people sparking witty, exuberant responses in one another, in themselves.

In college, another friend walked me down West End Avenue. I’d never seen a street as wide and stately as this one, with doormen standing in front of apartment houses of imposing height that lined the avenue for a mile and a half. My friend told me that in these great stone buildings lived musicians and writers, scientists and émigrés, dancers and philosophers. Very soon no trip downtown was complete without a walk on West End from 107th Street to Seventy-Second. For me, the avenue became emblematic. To live here would mean I had arrived. I was a bit confused about whether I’d be the resident artist/intellectual or be married to him—I couldn’t actually see myself signing the lease—but no matter; one way or another, I’d be in the apartment.

In summer we went to the concerts at Lewisohn Stadium, the great amphitheater on the City College campus. It was here that I heard Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms for the first time. These concerts came to an end in the mid-sixties, but in the late fifties, sitting on those stone bleacher seats July after July, August after August, I knew, I just knew, that the men and women all around me lived on West End Avenue. As the orchestra tuned up and the lights dimmed in the soft, starry night, I could feel the whole intelligent audience moving forward as one, yearning toward the music, toward themselves in the music: as though the concert were an open-air extension of the context of their lives. And I, just as intelligently I hoped, leaned forward, too, but I knew that I was only mimicking the movement. I’d not yet earned the right to love the music as they did. Within a few years I began to see it was entirely possible that I never would.

As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human—the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques—was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under. That refusal became company. I was never less alone than alone in the crowded street. Here, I found, I could imagine myself. Here, I thought, I am buying time. What a notion: buying time. 

I grew up and moved downtown but sure enough, nothing turned out as expected. I went to school but the degree did not get me an office in midtown. I married an artist but we lived on the Lower East Side. I began to write but nobody read me above Fourteenth Street. For me, the doors to the golden company did not open. The glittering enterprise remained at a distance.

***

In 1938, when he was just months from dying, Thomas Wolfe wrote to Maxwell Perkins, “I had this ‘hunch,’ and wanted to write you and tell you … I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that Fourth of July three years ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out to the cafe on the river and had a drink and after went on top of the tall building, and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below.”

The city, of course, was New York—the city of Whitman and Crane—that fabled context for the creation myth of the young man of genius arriving in the world capital, as in a secular tableau of annunciation, with the city waiting for him and him alone to cross the bridge, stride the boulevard, climb to the top of the tallest building, where he will at last be recognized for the heroic figure he knows himself to be.

Not my city at all. Mine is the city of the melancholy Brits—Dickens, Gissing, Johnson, especially Johnson—the one in which we are none of us going anywhere, we’re there already, we, the eternal groundlings who wander these mean and marvelous streets in search of a self reflected back in the eye of the stranger.

In the 1740s, Samuel Johnson walked the streets of London to cure himself of chronic depression. The London that Johnson walked was a city of pestilence: open sewers, disease, poverty; destitution; lit by smoking torches; men cutting each other’s throats in deserted alleys at midnight. It was of this city that Johnson said, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”

For Johnson the city was always the means of coming up from down under, the place that received his profound discomfort, his monumental unease. The street pulled him out of morose isolation, reunited him with humanity, revived in him his native generosity, gave him back the warmth of his own intellect. On the street Johnson made his enduring observations; here he found his wisdom. Late at night, when he went prowling for tavern conversation, he experienced the relief of seeing his own need mirrored in the company he found: those who drank and talked of Man and God till the light broke because none of them wanted to go home either.

Johnson hated and feared village life. The closed, silent streets threw him into despair. In the village his reflected presence was missing. Loneliness became unbearable. The meaning of the city was that it made the loneliness bearable.

***

Every night when I turn the lights out in my sixteenth-floor living room before I go to bed, I experience a shock of pleasure as I see the banks of lighted windows rising to the sky, crowding round me, and feel myself embraced by the anonymous ingathering of city dwellers. This swarm of human hives, also hanging anchored in space, is the New York design offering generic connection. The pleasure it gives soothes beyond all explanation.

***

A few weeks ago a woman who lives on my floor invited me to a Sunday brunch. This woman has taught grade school for years, but she looks upon teaching as a day job. In real life, she says, she is an actor. None of the people at the brunch—all in their forties and fifties—knew one another well, and some didn’t know the others at all, but it soon became clear that everyone at the table also thought of the work they did as day jobs; every one of them saw him- or herself as having a vocation in the arts, albeit one without material achievement. The chatter on that Sunday morning was animated by one account after another of this or that failed audition or publication or gallery showing, each one ending with “I didn’t prepare hard enough,” or “I knew I should have rewritten the beginning,” or “I don’t send out enough slides.” What was striking was the sympathy that each self-reproach called to life in the others. “Oh, you’re too hard on yourself!” was heard more than once. Then, abruptly, looking directly at the last person to say “You’re too hard on yourself,” a woman who’d been silent started to speak.

“When I got divorced,” she said, “I had to sell the house in Westchester. A couple in the business of importing Chinese furniture and art objects bought the house and began moving things in a week before I was to leave. One night I went down into the basement and began looking through some of their crates. I found a pair of beautiful porcelain vases. On impulse, I took one. I thought, They’ve got everything, I’ve got nothing, why shouldn’t I? When I moved, I took the vase with me. A week later the husband called and said this funny thing had happened, one of this pair of vases had disappeared, did I know anything about it. No, I said, sounding as bemused as he, I didn’t know anything about it, I’d never even seen the vases. I felt awful then. But I didn’t know what to do. I put the vase in a closet and never looked at it again. Ten years passed. Then I began thinking about the vase. Soon the thought of the vase began to obsess me. Finally, this past year I couldn’t stand it anymore. I packed up the vase as carefully as I could, and sent it back to them. And I wrote a separate letter, saying I didn’t know what had possessed me, why I had taken this thing that belonged to them, and I wasn’t asking for forgiveness, but here it was back. A few weeks later the wife called me. She said she’d gotten this strange letter from me, she didn’t know what I was talking about, and then this package came, and inside the package was about a thousand shards of something or other. What on earth was it that I had taken and was now sending back?”

****

At three in the afternoon, a distinguished-looking couple is standing under the awning of the posh Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. The man has iron-gray hair and regular features and is wearing an expensive overcoat. The woman is alcoholic thin, has blond, marcelled hair, and is wearing mink. She looks up at him as I pass them, and her face lights up. “It’s been a wonderful afternoon,” she says. The man embraces her warmly and nods directly into her face. The scene excites my own gratitude: how delicious to see people of the moneyed classes acting with simple humanity! Later I run into Sarah, a tired socialist of my acquaintance, and I tell her about the couple on Park Avenue. She listens with her customary Marxist moroseness and says, “You think she knows from a wonderful afternoon?”

***

If life begins to feel like the sum of its disabilities, I take a walk up to Times Square—home to the savviest underclass in the world—where I quickly regain perspective. On Broadway at Forty-Third Street on a windy evening in winter, a black man on a makeshift platform is speaking into a microphone. Ranged around the platform are perhaps a dozen black men and women. The man at the mike sounds like a television broadcaster. People hunched over against the wind are rushing past him, but he goes on speaking in the smooth, imperturbable tones of the evening news anchor. “It has come to my attention lately,” he says, “that sales are up on suntan lotion and sunblock. Now who do you think are the customers for this item? I’ll tell you who. White people, that’s who. Not you or I, brother. No, it’s white people.” His voice deepens. “Now what do you think of a people who keep telling us they’re superior, and…” Without warning he pauses, his eyes squeeze shut, and he screams, “They can’t even make it in the fuckin’ sun!” Back to broadcast news. “You—” He points calmly at the heads of the fleeing crowd. “The white people. Don’t even belong. On the planet.”

***

On Fourteenth Street, at noon on a summer’s day—in the midst of honking traffic, bargain store shoppers, crosstown bus riders—I run into Victor, an unhappy dentist who has lived in my neighborhood for years. Tall and slim, with a Caesar haircut and sad brown eyes, he is a nervous man who smiles compulsively. Whenever he sees me he coos, “Dahling, sweetness, beautiful girl, how a-a-are you?” Then, like a mother in a permanent state of interested alarm, he peers intently into my face and very gently asks, “You still writing, dahling?” Some years ago Victor, in search of inner peace, began traveling regularly to Japan to consult the Zen healer who has given him the wherewithal to get out of bed in the morning in New York. He must be sixty by now.

Standing here on Fourteenth Street, a Con Ed drill blasting in our ears, Victor croons at me, “Dahling, sweetness, beautiful girl, how are you, still living in the same building?”

“Yes,” I reply.

“Still doing journalistic work?”

“No, Victor, I teach now.”

He pushes his chin out at me as though to say, “Tell me.”

I tell him. He listens intently as the words fall rapidly from my mouth, nodding steadily as I speak of the deprivation of spirit I suffer living for months at a time in one university town or another.

“It’s exile!” I cry at last. “Exile pure and simple.”

Victor nods and nods. His brown eyes are dissolving in watery pain. He knows exactly what I mean, oh, no one in the world will ever know better than he what I mean. His face goes dreamy. My own starts feeling compromised. Car brakes screech, sirens pierce the air, the Con Ed drill stops and starts, stops and starts. No matter. Victor and I are now quarantined on this island of noise, spellbound by matters of the soul.

“But you know, dahling?” he says ever so softly. “I have discovered there’s a lot of love out there.”

“Oh yes,” I reply quickly, suddenly aware of the harm my relentless negatives may be doing.

“A lot of love,” he repeats reverentially.

“Absolutely,” I agree. “Absolutely.”

The Con Ed drill starts up again.

“I mean, people care.” By now Victor’s face is radiant. “They really do.”

And it is me who is nodding and nodding.

Victor puts his hand on my arm, leans toward me, looks searchingly into my eyes, and delivers himself of his wisdom.

“Dahling,” he whispers in my ear, “we’ve got to let it go.”

Yes, yes, oh yes, I know just what you mean.

“Let it all go.”

***

In summer, in the tenement neighborhoods on the West Side, men play dominoes at card tables set up on the pavement, women sit talking on the stoop, kids play ball, teenagers make love, and everywhere people drink, smoke, do drugs. I once saw a pig being roasted at midnight in the middle of the street because someone had won the lottery. Throughout the day and most of the night, men and women screech, sob, laugh, quarrel at a high pitch. Emotions are unfiltered here and race about without nuance or restraint.

One evening in July, walking down Ninth Avenue in the Forties, the street thronged with people, I saw a man and a woman standing perfectly still in the crowd. He was looking intently at her face and had a hand pressed to her arm. She, in turn, had her face twisted away from his, her eyes pressed shut, her mouth forming a wordless no. As I came abreast of them, I happened to look up and I saw a woman on a fire escape staring down with hot eyes at the man and the woman in the street, the pain in her face unmistakable. For a moment I was jealous of life in Hell’s Kitchen.

***

The street keeps moving, and you’ve got to love the movement. You’ve got to find the composition of the rhythm, lift the story from the motion, understand and not regret that the power of narrative drive is fragile, though infinite. Civilization is breaking up? The city is deranged? The century surreal? Move faster. Find the story line more quickly.

On the Sixth Avenue bus, I get up to give an old woman my seat. She’s small and blond, wearing gold jewelry and a ratty mink coat, her hands a pair of blotchy claws with long red fingernails attached to them. “You did a good thing, dear,” she says to me, and smiles coyly. “I’m ninety years old. I was ninety yesterday.” I smile at her. “You look fantastic,” I say, “not a day over seventy-five.” Her eyes flash. “Don’t get smart,” she says.

At a coffee counter, two women sit talking at right angles to me. One is telling the other that a woman they both know is sleeping with a much younger man. “We all tell her, he wants your money.” The woman speaking nods her head like a rag doll and lets her face go daffy in imitation of the woman she’s speaking of. “‘Right,’ she tells us, ‘and he can have it, all of it.’ Meanwhile, she looks great.”

At Forty-Second Street, a man in front of me—skinny, young, black—suddenly lies down spread-eagle in the middle of the street just as the cars are beginning to move. I turn wildly to the man walking beside me, who, as it happens, is also skinny, young, black, and cry out at him, “Why is he doing this?” Without breaking his stride, he shrugs at me. “I don’t know, lady. Maybe he’s depressed.”

Each day when I leave the house, I tell myself I’m going to walk up the East Side of town because the East Side is calmer, cleaner, more spacious. Yet I seem always to find myself on the crowded, filthy, volatile West Side. On the West Side life feels positively thematic. All that intelligence trapped inside all those smarts. It reminds me of why I walk. Why everyone walks.

Vivian was born in New York City in 1936. She is the author of fifteen books and the recipient of numerous awards. Her most recent, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader was published in 2020 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The Odd Woman and the City, from which her piece is excerpted, was published in May, 2015.