Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(38)
He gets out his livery license and holds it out the window. “Seriously?” he says. “A degenerate with his own limo?”
“A very motivated degenerate,” I say, and he laughs. “I don’t really think that, Skip, but hopefully you see my point, yes? That I am somewhat sharper than you thought at first?”
“Point made, Lillian,” he says. “Good talking with you. I hope you have a good dinner.”
“Thanks, Skip,” I say. “Thanks for stopping, and for trying. Happy New Year.”
“You too,” he says, rolling up the window, driving slowly away.
As I make my way south on William Street, the final block before I turn onto Beaver, I don’t know how triumphant to feel about my victory. I could count my conversation with Skip as proof that I haven’t lost it; that I can still be persuasive. Or it could just be that I’m stubborn, and that Skip—sizing me up in my blue hat, my mink coat, my mustard-yellow Coloralls—decided there’s just no effective way to persuade the insane.
I have blind spots, like anybody. My biggest one is myself: how people perceive me. I suppose that’s a common enough affliction—otherwise shops would stop stocking mirrors—but it’s one that particularly galls me, because I’m generally quite good at guessing what people think. My fastidiousness of dress, my ongoing attention to fashion, my occasional panic buying of discontinued cosmetics: These could all be taken as hyperawareness of my appearance, but in fact they signify its opposite.
A gust of wind blows over the Hudson, intensified by the jet effect of passing between the Towers, and it carries the night’s first hint of real cold. I march on toward my destination, recalling a fight I had once with my mother, back in the 1940s, when Johnny was a baby, and she was up from D.C. to help me take care of him.
She accused me of having a thwarted sense of superiority. Said that was the cause of all my present unhappiness. I had a high degree, she said, of linguistic mastery, as well as an intuitive understanding—nuts and bolts, nontheoretical—of psychology.
“Those qualities are like two great swords that just cut away anything in your path, Lily,” she said. “You’re different from everyone else. All the rules and emotions and obligations that guide most of us through life—they’re invisible to us. They’re natural, like breathing. But they’re visible to you. And you use that to manipulate people.”
I couldn’t argue. For years, that was how I did my work at R.H. Macy’s: If I understood better than you did yourself why you thought or did or wanted something, then I could control you. Not in any kind of dramatic way—like something out of The Manchurian Candidate—but enough to get myself and my employer into your head, to give us a slight edge, enough to turn a profit. That was my job. You would find yourself in the department store, and you would not necessarily know why you had come there, but only that you were going to buy some merchandise that was going to make you feel better.
My mother did not make this observation as a compliment. But that skill—and it is a skill; not, as she suggested, some mental defect or weakness of character—was not something that I could simply turn off, even after motherhood ended my tenure at R.H. Macy’s and left me with few productive uses for it. I still can’t. Everywhere I look, I see people being manipulated: wheedled out of their cash through their vulnerabilities and anxieties. The problem, as I started to notice after I’d had Johnny, was that I had always believed myself to be exempt from that sort of manipulation. But I wasn’t—as the empty package of Oreos in my kitchen waste bin will testify. And for a long time, that made me very angry.
It happened only rarely, but I always found it so frustrating whenever my mother was right.
13
A Flaw in the Design
It is possible to stay indoors during a storm and end up struck by lightning all the same.
Generally, I went outside on my lunch breaks at R.H. Macy’s, especially in the summer, to walk and to write. But this particular August day it was raining, an absolute torrent, so I opted to stay in and run a small errand in the store. I still wound up practically knocked down by the thunder outside.
I needed a new rug for my new Greenwich Village apartment, and I ended up acquiring the salesman, as well. That day, Friday, August 3, 1934, I met and fell in love with Max, with Massimiliano Gianluca Caputo, with the head rug buyer for R.H. Macy’s, with my future husband and the father of my child.
My new place was on the top floor, the only floor I ever wanted to live on, not having upstairs neighbors being the key to a long and happy life of city dwelling. But to have a courteous neighbor, of course, one must be a courteous neighbor, so I wanted to cover my living room floor with a carpet—beautiful enough to stare at every day, thick enough to deaden my and my guests’ footsteps over the heads of the tenants below.
The rug department was on the seventh floor, and I took the stairs from the institutional advertising department on the thirteenth, the weather slapping and rattling the windowpanes all the way down.
The electrified air reminded me of a performer I’d seen months earlier, at a down-at-the-heel circus that some down-at-the-heel newspaper had thought would be amusing to send me to. She was a whip cracker, Austrian or German, wearing a sagging sequined corset that I feared would not sustain her modesty for the duration of the act. As she went to work destroying a succession of increasingly tiny paper targets at increasingly improbable angles, my skepticism waned until I was transfixed, until the tension was such that I thought I might cry out in terror. For her finale she took up a whip in each hand and knit herself into the middle of an earsplitting maelstrom that I was certain could only end with her maimed or collapsed. And then it was over: She curtsied and made way for a clown and three dingy poodles. I had missed it. My question remained unanswered: how to stop?