Speaking with Strangers Read online

  I might have missed that world more had we stayed in our old house. But our new house brought new vistas, new corners to turn. The first time we saw it (I was responding to an ad), my older daughter peeked around a closed shower curtain to see the tub. “So nosy!” I said, attempting to blush, but my embarrassment was faked. Had the present tenant not been there to show us around, I too would have peeked around the shower curtain. For I, like my eleven-year-old, was excited about unfamiliar faucets, foreign tiles. As time has proved, it is, above all else, what we have in common.

  To remember life in our new house is to think of small blocks of color in a long gray ribbon. The blocks were the days and weeks when I woke up in countries in which, without a language to share with those along whose streets I walked, I was condemned to silence. I was condemned to envy, too, because those were their front doors they were opening and their groceries under their arms and their tables at which they would have their evening meal. Even so, I wallowed in the silence because it sharpened my senses. My ears were a fox’s, my eyes an eagle’s, and often I forgot I had any identity but that of traveler.

  But I could not have survived without the long gray ribbon, the ordinary, to be deprived of which is my definition of hell. Still, on nights when I have run out of books, and all television palls, I sometimes bring out the colored blocks and play with them, freezing time, watching the woman I used to be in performance.

  Soon after we moved in, I heard the leader of a Sunday-morning walking tour tell his charges that the house (Number 85, as it was known to the neighbors, who identified themselves by their addresses) was “Anglo-Italianate.” But the neighbors, most of whom were standing about in what looked suspiciously like a receiving line the evening I emerged with the landlord after signing the lease, said it was a made-over stable. Whatever it was, it was built in 1856 and had an enormous mahogany bar in the cellar. “If worse comes to worst,” said a friend who knew I was worried about the rent, “you can always open an afterhours club.” Over the bar was inscribed: “On this site overlooking the majestic Hudson stood the William Bayard Mansion, where Alexander Hamilton, the first treasurer of the United States, died July 12, 1804, after his famous duel with Aaron Burr.”

  The rooms were tall and airy and painted my usual white, but it is the cellar I remember best: the bar and the tattered posters from rock concerts thumbtacked to dirty plaster walls and the cartons of 45s and rotting paperbacks left by the previous tenants. The landlord and his wife hoarded food. They came back from New Jersey supermarkets (no taxes) in what seemed a clown car, so crammed was it with staples and what they called “paper goods,” then stored them in closets in the front. Once, curious, I opened one and saw what must have been fifty boxes of Social Tea Biscuits.

  My old dishwasher was in that cellar, and an old wingchair, along with, in the back, the washer and dryer, around which crawled an army of shiny waterbugs. I was in that cellar constantly, hauling laundry and, bookish as always, quoting something appropriate from Yeats. Surely this, this unspeakable slum above which were rooms arranged as starkly and as beautifully (I thought) as a museum, was the foul rag-and-bone shop of my heart.

  Because of a curious conjunction of streets, the block seemed cut off, isolated. Entering it, I always felt as if I were entering a stockade, a stockade that smelled strongly of the vanilla wafted through the open windows of the wholesale bakery at the corner. I liked that scent. I liked even better that, no matter how late I came home from work, some of the bakers would be sitting on the fire escape, taking a break from the ovens. Sometimes I’d wave at them, and sometimes they’d wave back. We were too distant and the sky too dark for us to recognize one another if we ever met by daylight. Still, on a street where little houses, their windows shrouded in curtains and blinds, turned blank faces to the world and the sidewalks emptied after eight, I thought them my compatriots, my landsmen.

  In a town as old and settled as the place in which I was raised, one is known simultaneously by one’s maiden name, one’s husband’s name, and, to some old-timers, by one’s mother’s maiden name. So it is not fatal to lose that second one. In fact, it is not fatal if you never acquire it, because identity also resides in your house, your street, your church, your great-grandfather’s occupation. My grandmother had a cousin famous for her angel cakes, door prizes at many a church fair and the centerpieces of my every childhood birthday party. When she died, at a great age, there were enough people left to remember them, and therefore her, for the next twenty-five years. But in a city as provincial as New York, how are you identified except by your husband, your job, or your money? I loved my job, not so much for what I did at my desk but for what being at my desk did for me. It gave me a face, a voice, a manner. It gave me a personhood.

  Even office friends, though, friends who’d been barely conscious of my having a husband, sometimes treated me as an amputee. “The one thing you musn’t do,” said the worldliest of them, a woman who herself had never married and had a long string of sexually uncertain escorts, “is give brave little dinner parties.”

  I didn’t understand what she meant.

  “You know,” she continued. “You’ve always got to have a man at the foot of the table.”

  However, I didn’t give dinner parties, brave or otherwise, although I liked to feed people, had memorized a book on carving, and could mix most drinks if they weren’t too fancy. Raised with ritual, I held a wake instead. I did not think of myself as divorced but widowed, and when B called about the children or a check, the man I heard was a stranger. The voice was familiar—he had a beautiful voice, dark brown and as accentless as a radio announcer’s—but I didn’t know the speaker. I mourned the boy, I dreamed of him constantly, but I could not connect him with the man who had threatened custody suits and sanity hearings. Or I chose not to.

  “Did I tell you about Shirley?” asked a woman whom I will call Rachel, herself recently separated from a husband who’d jumped everyone from assorted secretaries to their au pair, and eager to salve her miseries with those of the salon des refusées who seemed to constitute her friends. “Her ex-husband used to make notes in book margins with a red ballpoint pen. Well, last week I borrowed a book from her, and guess what? She’d written in the margins with a red ballpoint pen! And did I tell you what she did the week before he divorced her in Mexico? He’s a photographer and used that week to finish an assignment. And she, right behind him, drove all over the Southwest, staying in the motels he’d just left.”

  A few weeks later, Shirley telephoned me. “Rachel says we’ve had a similar experience, and I was wondering if you’d like to join me and some other women who’ve been through the same thing for lunch so we could talk about it.”

  I hung up as quickly as was decent. “No, it is not the same thing,” I wanted to yell. “Nothing is the same thing. And, no, I don’t want to talk about ‘it.’”

  It would have been like eating my vomit or leaving a corpse too long unburied. I had to inter my husband. Then, years later, I could resurrect him and make him a part of my past, to be discussed with the same nostalgia with which I discussed my former boyfriends and my former schoolteachers. I hadn’t realized yet that a former husband, unless he’d been a cipher, will never slide into the same category.

  So I held a wake, for myself as well as for him. Oh, my God, this reads grim; it wasn’t grim. It just meant being an animal again; not even an animal, nothing quite so complex. Our new house had a garden in the back, and one summer morning when the sun was too bright on my book, I looked down toward the bluestone with which the garden was paved and saw an inchworm insinuating itself across a square. One of the children’s cats tracked it with her nose, and the worm stopped and flattened itself into a still U. The cat lifted her nose and walked away, and the inchworm started moving again, right through the tiny space under the paw of another, sleeping cat. My style.

  Cats. A dog. My younger daughter, the one I shall call Rose Red because her hair was black and her cheeks pink, lo
ved pets, so at our previous house we’d had goldfish, a series of turtles, and an enormous snail who ceaselessly suckered his way along a big glass bowl. We had accidental pets too, small brown mice who could slide through hairline cracks. I grew adept at trapping them—the first time I disposed of a mouse, I felt I had achieved man’s estate and was proud—but the children were appalled by my blood lust and could be appeased only by funerals. All the corpses got names. I remember only Mousie Brown Eyes.

  Frustrated by the intractability of the furless (she had tried time after time to train her turtles to sit on the steps of their terraced plastic bowl), Rose Red languished for a dog and, tearless, stiff-backed, endured countless patch tests until declared only mildly allergic to animal fur. So we acquired Fred, a mongrel who looked like a Schnauzer on stilts and who, if left alone, avenged himself by toppling wastebaskets and chewing bed petticoats. Then Rose Red found “the most beautiful kitten in the world” at a block party and named her Eliza, and her sister, whom I shall call Snow White, because her hair was fair, appeared one day with Melanie, a half-grown tabby who’d been living in a vacant lot. When I objected, Snow White cried and said she wanted something of her own. So of course I said yes to this cat, who couldn’t believe her luck and whose every meal was accompanied by furtive glances over her food bowl.

  The calico up the street had kittens, one of which, its mother’s clone, Rose Red acquired when it was weaned and which, after an evening with the dictionary looking up words that began with cal, she called Calypso.

  So many pets were nuisances, especially the temperamental Fred, and Purina Cat Chow graveled the kitchen floor, but they gave life to a house in which the mother had none. I was keeping silence, playing dead, and if my daughters survived, it was because they were determined on all the little rituals—the bedtime stories, the Sunday breakfasts, the momentous trips to the supermarket—that made up the substance of their lives. But sometimes my children came home from school crying, because these were the days before every other mother was a single mother, and listening to what Mom and Dad had done over the weekend or hearing how the whole family was to gather for, say, Thanksgiving dinner was torture to them. My children did not want to be different from other children. My children were still young enough to want, desperately, to be like everybody else.

  Some nights, though, I found myself unexpectedly happy because there was no body between me and the river-scented air that drifted through the open window. “I wonder if anyone will ever love me again,” I would ask myself, but only because I thought I should. “You want to be like your mother, rocking on the porch all these years?” a cousin asked. I started to explain, then stopped, realizing suddenly that there was no longer an adult in the world to whom I owed an explanation for anything.

  Except for my daughters, who invariably say, “You did the best you could,” then laugh, there are still no adults to whom I owe an explanation. But I do indulge in description, because I like to tell stories. This, I am telling you, is what it was like to hold a wake for the living. It lasted, by my rough count, about six years, and much of it consisted—as do many wakes—of speaking with strangers.

  There is a thing I have noticed about New Yorkers, many of them, anyway. Asked a direction, they will stretch a conversation that should have lasted one minute into three. If they are on a bus, they will stretch it even further. Perhaps it is because so many of them live alone. Words pile up behind their closed mouths like clothes that have been crammed into a too-small suitcase. Words were piling up behind my closed mouth, too, but because I was reluctant to utter them, I began to listen instead. I eavesdropped, although never on anyone I knew, resuming a habit of my childhood when, unnoticed in a corner of my grandmother’s living room, I had listened to her and her friends speak of illness and death and wills, all of them growing more cheerful by the moment, so healthy was their interest in mortality and money.

  Sitting on the bus, listening to people talk about their boyfriends or their jobs or the building super, who they were sure was in their apartments when they were out, was like reading novels whose endings one would never know. Did the girl who was going to Lincoln Center ever make up with Joe? Did the man who was worried about his company’s sales ever get his raise? Was I accurate in believing that people who lived on the Upper West Side, by far the most vociferous of my fellow passengers, had the most tumultuous relationships with their landlords, supers, and block associations? I envied the people on the Upper West Side. Loneliness could not possibly be part of a life that involved so many phone calls, meetings, and rent strikes.

  I began to listen to friends and acquaintances in a way I could not do when I was married. B and I had given dinner parties, many dinner parties, which were like tennis matches, but for the balls being apercus and the net, leg of lamb or vitello tonnato. The rallies were always long unless somebody, usually B, served an ace. Often there was no way to distinguish one voice from another—hardly surprising, since the guests, writers and editors for the most part, hewed on such occasions to the same intensely literary mode. Once I had made my own contributions to these tennis matches, lobs usually, and once B had been amused by them. But eventually I could see the corners of his lips tightening when I talked, and grew afraid to open mine except to say, “More salad, anyone?” and, “Oh, yes, I saw a good review of that in the Times.”

  Now, because I never gave and seldom went to dinner parties (potential hosts, I figure, may have feared I might talk about “it”), I was usually alone, except for the children, with whoever was speaking to me. My daughters squeezed themselves between me and the guest. They lingered in doorways or, courting invisibility, secreted themselves on the stairs. They wanted to hear chatter, bathe in the sea of normality, and I was, in a sense, asleep. But my hearing was coming back, sharp enough for me to drown in dialogue, savor style. It was never sharper than on a June afternoon a few weeks after we had moved into our Anglo-Italianate stable.

  I had been divorced (and B newly married) for four months, and was about to leave for Australia for the magazine. I was longing to go, longing to leave the Saturday night trio of Archie Bunker, Bob Newhart, and Mary Tyler Moore, and the hours behind my closed bedroom door reading and rereading Colette because I thought there were lessons to be learned there. I wanted to be someplace where there was no chance of meeting B and his new wife. Above all, I wanted to be someplace where nobody knew me and I could use my voice again.

  But why were my ears so sharp on that particular June afternoon? Because I was listening to a woman named Lillian.

  Two

  The first time I met Lillian Roxon, it was to hire her to write Mademoiselle’s (I was its managing editor) sex column. “Forgive the lounging pajamas,” she said to me in her wild Australian nasal when we entered Cheval Blanc, a French restaurant not far from the Graybar Building and, at that time, one of countless just like it. They all served chilly pâtés, sole meunière, crème caramel, and featured mean-looking middle-aged women at the cash register. “The exterminator came this morning, and the bug bombs stank up everything else.”

  “Everything else” was a collection of strange floating robes home-dyed in colors like puce and mustard and fuchsia, and patched, wherever a seam had split, with Mickey Mouse fabric transfers. The cortisone Lillian took for asthma had made her buoyant as a waterbed, and, embarrassed by her fat, she had turned herself into a billboard that was fun to read and, since one was amused on seeing her, unpitiable. There was only one public place where she would bare her body, a rundown rooftop solarium at either Coney Island or Brighton Beach, where old Jewish women went to strip and sun. Here there was no reason for self-consciousness, no reason to hide what had happened to a body that had not yet touched forty.

  Most of Lillian’s friends, many of whom were rock stars and their groupies, were younger than she, and she was to them as she was to Snow White, a Rabelaisian sort of mother. Lillian sent my daughter funny notes in envelopes she’d watercolored and stuck with gilt stars. She
gave her records—one of them of the singing squirrels and all of them “guaranteed to drive your mother up a wall”—and a lavender-painted strongbox because “every young girl should have one to lock up letters and diaries.” When she came to call she always went to Snow White’s room first, and I could hear them giggling behind the closed door. “I think I ought to tell you, Mary, just to set your mind at ease,” she told me once. “If your daughter ever runs away from home—and don’t tell her I told you this—don’t worry. I made her promise to run away to me.”

  Mother to her friends, mother to my daughter, Lillian was, ironically, my child. She liked the order of my house—her apartment was as messy as a child’s closet—and the way that meals appeared on time and rituals like Christmas and birthdays were faithfully observed. “You’re so ladylike, so discreet, my dear,” she teased. Sometimes she was too, or tried to be. She looked beautiful the night that, wearing pearls and a 1920s chiffon dress, she was hostess of an evening at the theater for an Australian playwright, and stood in the lobby greeting the guests and waving them in like a small and pretty Texas Guinan. Soon after I went into the auditorium, however, she slugged a woman who was crashing. After the play there was a party, and everyone congratulated Lillian on her right hook, but the evening had been ruined for her. She had dressed up, she had been a grand lady even, but a flick of her fist had turned her, in the eyes of the guests and of her disappointed self, into funny old Lillian again.