Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(18)

These days, when I think of history, it occurs to me that maybe we have stopped moving forward, and are now just oscillating.

The last new art form I’ve seen was a group of Puerto Rican teenagers on St. Mark’s Place, jerking and spinning acrobatically and robotically atop flattened cardboard boxes. This, I gather, is called breaking. The last new art form I’ve heard is rap music. And I love it. It thrills me. The joyful mastery of language, its sounds and its rhythms. Rhymes and puns and nonsense, ranging from dumb and fun to witty and profound.

It troubles me that among my few remaining acquaintances there is no one with whom I can share my enthusiasm for these new things.

It wasn’t always this way. In my youth, before I had made any of my most consequential choices—and isn’t that what we always mean by in my youth?—in the days when my friends and I were the word-mad ones, earning our keep by saying things fastest and best, the new thing then was jazz. Without a second thought we’d ride the East Side Line to Harlem to listen to the bands and dance among the Lindy Hoppers at the Savoy on Lenox Avenue. It was new, but it wasn’t a novelty: We knew it was important. We weren’t tourists, or didn’t think we were; we wanted to be part of it.

What happened was what always happens. The best Lindy Hoppers earned minor celebrity, became a draw. The ballrooms started paying them, and rightly so. They in turn became more serious, more competitive, more and more skilled, working out heart-stopping flips and spins and somersaults that no casual dancer could ever hope to duplicate without injury. It was amazing. It was also a show, and not—to lift a term from my son’s teenaged lexicon—a scene, not the way it used to be. It put a barrier between us and the Lindy Hoppers, or it shored up barriers that were already there, of which color was only the most obvious.

So who was to blame? The dancers, for taking what they’d earned? The crowds of Midtown gawkers who brought the dollars in? Or we young bohemians who blazed the trail they’d followed? Maybe there’s a natural order in all this: New things pop up at the edges, but the middle’s where the money is. I did that dance myself over the years. I got rich doing it. And now here I am, an old white lady in a fur coat on a Murray Hill sidewalk, eavesdropping on passersby, wondering what I’m missing.

Nostalgia for what’s new: The French probably have a word for that. In any case, there’s precious little trace of the avant-garde in this neighborhood, which has been successfully staving off the advances of fashion since J.P. Morgan moved in a hundred years ago. I’ve come to prize its stodgy constancy.

I’ve lived in a total of six different apartments all over Manhattan—starting with the Christian Women’s Hotel in Midtown that a friend of my parents found for me when I first moved to the city—but Murray Hill is where I first felt at home, and Murray Hill was where I figured I’d end up returning, eventually—and I did, though not for many years.

Murray Hill is where Helen McGoldrick and I lived—sharing the rent on a one-bedroom, crowded for the sake of independence—after we moved out of the hotel, and not an instant too soon, as that place had been stifling. Thirty-Third Street, between Third and Lexington. We moved in just after she’d begun working at R.H. Macy’s, and so, thanks to her, had I.

Although it’ll make my walk to Grimaldi ever so mildly longer, I want to pass by the old place—days of auld lang syne and all—and I have enough time. Typically neither closeness nor distance matter much to me on my walks. Neither convenience nor difficulty is my objective. Usually I’ll accomplish about five miles a day, perhaps taking Saturday or Sunday off.

I am old and all I have left is time. I don’t mean time to live; I mean free time. Time to fill. Time to kill until time kills me. I walk and walk and think and think. It gets me out, and it keeps me healthy, and no one on the street seems to want to mess with me, as they say on the street. All my friends in New York—back when I still had friends, before everyone moved away or died—had mugging stories, but I’ve never had trouble.

Once, a few years ago, while I was walking down Bowery, I was invited in for a meal at the mission. I don’t fully understand how I might be mistaken for someone in need of a soup kitchen, so I suppose that’s why I went in. It seemed rude to refuse, and I met some nice people. Some of those there were unmeetable: too far gone, either within themselves or on drugs or booze. I don’t judge them, though.

Some of the other people I met were just having a bad year, and some of them were on their way to someplace worse, and I’m not sure that the volunteer who insisted I sit down and have a baloney sandwich was wrong about my belonging there. I am able to afford to feed myself, but I don’t always remember to eat, and sometimes I go days without speaking to anyone but Phoebe—who is a good listener for a cat—and my son on the phone. I stuffed some twenties into the donation box on the way out, and I still send that mission money every Christmas, anonymously.

A police officer walks by with a German shepherd. I used to be on the Murray Hill beautification committee, with a lot of other old ladies, some of them smart and some of them silly, and some of them—who were also on the board of the Morgan Library & Museum—obsessed with the area’s declining wealth. I drifted away, though. Stopped going, and I think by now they must have disbanded.

I am not a believer, but I still go to services at the church around the corner from my apartment, the Church of the Incarnation, not so far from where I’m walking now. A free show. A museum, practically, with work by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Something to do, and some people who know me.