Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(31)
When Gian and the grandkids were visiting last week, I had Wendy over to meet them, over coffee and hot cocoa. After she’d gone, Gian had remarked how happy he was that I had her in my life, and how she must seem almost like a daughter to me. That’s a pretty sentiment, so I did not correct him. But the truth is, that is not what she feels like, and of that I am glad. She is my friend, not my child, and thus our rapport has been unfraught and egalitarian, unburdened by guilt or disappointment.
Gian, on the other hand, is my child, not my friend. I love him more than any other human who still breathes upon this planet, but one child—one constant emergency, one ritual madness, one wrecker and remaker of myself—was and remains enough.
Crossing the street to continue south on Broadway, I don’t even have to wait for the light, there’s so little traffic. I jaywalk with impunity.
If something happened to me, who would see it?
If the Subway Vigilante were out and about on these same sidewalks, who would know it was him?
Wendy and I ended up going to lunch together the day we met. I invited her, and she hesitated, and I thought that maybe, as I had suspected, she didn’t want to spend her years as a young artiste in the company of the aged. When I said as much—blunt, I know—she said no, it was because she didn’t have any money. My treat, I told her, and still she shilly-shallied.
“What’s the harm in a free egg salad sandwich?” I asked. “I’m going to take us to a deli, not the Ritz.”
“I don’t want to take advantage,” Wendy said. “My husband—he’s a painter—is always saying that we need to find patrons. Benefactors. People with money to collect and cultivate our art, you know? And that seems so sleazy to me.”
“Accepting one free meal from a lonely old has-been won’t put your integrity in peril,” I said. “And your husband is right. One must hustle to make money, don’t you think?”
“Lillian, you’re hysterical,” she said. “But what’ll you get out of it?”
“Attention,” I said, and off we went.
Wendy, whose Ohio parents raised her to be too humble, in my estimation, but just the right degree of courteous, worried that we should go somewhere nearby so I would not have to walk too far. I assured her that while I am not much of what I used to be, I am still a walker—that since everything else in my life is mostly gone, I just am in the city. I just like to be here.
As I pass the string of photography studios that line this block of Broadway—located here because it’s decrepit and therefore cheap—I find myself imagining her New Year’s Eve party in Chelsea. Loud strange music. Skinny youths in Dumpster-plucked clothes. Various substances stashed upon my arrival. Suspicious neighbors, in one or both senses of suspicious. And her husband, charming and venal. Or brilliant and petulant. Or moony and narcissistic. Wendy’s husband.
I think her invitation was sincere.
But whom is she kidding? An octogenarian staying up until midnight to hoot ecstatically at the onset of another year?
Then again, what else have I got to do? It’s not as though I have to wake up early tomorrow.
On Broadway the damp wind is cooler and more assertive, and I laugh a little because I realize that this is exactly how I’ve been imagining Wendy’s husband: cooler and more assertive.
She doesn’t wear a wedding band, I’ve noticed. Then again, I do, and I haven’t been married for almost three decades. Symbols, or their absence, do not always mean what they seem to symbolize.
Nevertheless, I suppose they always symbolize something.
I like presenting myself to Wendy—presenting myself as I want to be presented, and being received as such. Maybe I will stop by her party. We’ll see.
11
Fleurs de Rocaille
In my day I was great at parties. And let me say, there were great parties.
Even after the crash, a number of us in Manhattan just kept smashing along. We all had jobs, and thus a need to unwind and the money to burn in the unwinding. The skyscrapers to which we would all eventually become accustomed were either new then or still going up, getting high, getting higher, with some of us getting high along with them.
But me, I lived in a low neighborhood—in the low sixties on the Upper East Side. The neighborhood, long ago the site of the old Treadwell Farm, built up quickly after the Civil War, filling in with corny Italianate and French Second Empire confections, including mine, a four-story townhouse. I had the top floor. The place had no river view and no doorman, but it was a small oasis all the same, the street quiet and tree-lined. I’d been there since 1930, and although it was gorgeous, I was almost ready for a change. I’d move to Greenwich Village the following year, and that move would alter my life in ways I had vowed up and down never to let my life be altered.
One night in late August 1933 I threw an unforgettable party, maybe the best I had when I resided in that particular apartment. It was the party that caused Olive Dodd, my archrival and colleague at R.H. Macy’s, not to speak to me outside of professional contexts for almost a solid year.
I invited Hattie, the downstairs neighbor, of course, to avoid complaint, and because the more the merrier. She worked at the main branch of the New York Public Library, and luckily for our harmonious neighborliness, she got all the peace and quiet she needed while laboring amid the stacks: A little racket on the weekend was fine by her. She certainly wasn’t shushing anybody present that night.