Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(30)
Beauty on Eighth
DRIVING A SUPERMODEL
Oliver and I went to a small chamber orchestra concert at the Irish-American Historical Society, a jewel box of a building directly across the street from the Metropolitan Museum. He knows the Irish gentleman who organizes these concerts, Kevin. They feature students from Juilliard. Very intimate. Unpretentious. Free of charge. A handful of people in folding chairs—maybe forty. Kevin had saved seats for O and me in the front row. Just as he was making his introductions, a woman rushed in by herself and plopped onto the cushy rose-colored sofa right next to our seats: Lauren Hutton, the model from the seventies: I recognized her instantly by her gap-toothed smile and slightly crossed eyes. Now in her late sixties, still beautiful, her face naturally lined. And, one couldn’t help but notice, she had a big bruiser of a black eye.
The concert began with no further ado, and we all sat back and enjoyed the program—Brahms, Haydn, Ravel—by these enchanting musicians. Even if you were deaf, it occurred to me, you could still “hear” every note, so expressive were they—moving with the music, delicately interacting with one another by glance, their faces expressing the colors and tones they were creating with their instruments—eyes widening or narrowing, smiling, pursing lips, necks craning, as if moving the music forward. I found myself thinking back on how healing music has been for me over the past six years. Beauty is a balm to grief, I once wrote.
With the final note, Lauren Hutton was the first to pop up and give the trio a standing ovation. “Do you have a fan club?” she sort of yelled above the clapping; it was a little startling, like someone yelling in a church. “I’m starting your fan club. You’re fantastic, you’re going places!”
The musicians bowed shyly and departed.
There was a small reception afterwards. Nothing fancy—two bottles of San Pellegrino and a couple bottles of wine—but no bottle opener. O and I were talking with Kevin when Lauren Hutton walked up to us holding the Pellegrino bottle: “Do one of you kind gentlemen have an opener? Even a knife would do—I could pry it open with a penknife.”
“Why don’t you use your teeth?” I said to her.
She laughed and smiled that famous gap-toothed smile. “I could. I could have once, but …” she wandered off. The bottle got opened somehow. Eventually she circled back and poured water for everyone. She overheard Oliver talking to Kevin about his new book, Hallucinations, which was coming out in a couple weeks. Lauren leaned across the table and listened intently.
“Hey doc, you ever done Belladonna?” she asked. “Now there’s a drug!”
“Well, as a matter of fact, yes, I have,” and he proceeded to tell her about his hallucinations on Belladonna. They traded stories. Eventually she began to figure out that this wasn’t his first book.
“Are you—are you Oliver Sacks? The Oliver Sacks?”
Oliver looked both pleased and stricken.
“Well, it is very good to meet you sir.” She sounded like a Southern barmaid in a 1950s Western. But it wasn’t an act. “I’ve been reading you since way back. Oliver Sacks—imagine that!”
Oliver, I should note, had absolutely no idea who she was, nor would he understand if I had pulled him aside and told him. Fashion? Vogue magazine? No idea…
The two of them hit it off. She was fast-talking, bawdy, opinionated, a broad—the opposite of Oliver except for having in common that mysterious quality: charm.
Somewhere along the way, she explained the black eye: A few days earlier, she had walked out of a business meeting at which she’d learned that she had been “robbed” of a third of everything she’d ever earned, and in a daze walked smack into a scaffolding pipe at eye level on the sidewalk. She didn’t seem too bothered by it: Shit happens.
I looked up and saw that the room was empty by now but for Kevin and us.
“Well, gentlemen, I’m going downtown. Share a cab?”
“Uh, we have a car,” I said.
“Even better. Much more civilized. I’m downtown.”
How could one refuse? “Let’s go, shall we?” I said.
Lauren Hutton offered Oliver an arm and we walked slowly to the parking garage. I pushed things out of the way in the backseat; she tossed in her handbag, and dove in. She immediately popped her head between our seats—the three of us were practically ear-to-ear. Her incredible face blocked my rearview mirror. When O took out his wallet to give me a credit card for the parking, she spotted the copy of the periodic table he carries in lieu of a driver’s license. This prompted a series of questions about the periodic table, the elements, the composition of the very air we were breathing. A dozen questions led to a dozen more, like a student soaking up knowledge. We talked about travels—Iceland, Africa—and Plato, Socrates, the pygmies, William Burroughs, poets … She was clearly intensely curious, life-loving, adventurous. In passing, she said something about having been a model—“the only reason I did it was so I could make enough dough to travel”—but otherwise didn’t say anything about that part of her life.
I am terrible with directions in New York, and she was not shy about telling me where and how to drive—“left here, right there …” Traffic was thick, so it took quite a while to get downtown. Eventually, we reached her address, or close enough.