Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(72)
Behind the candles a piece of pink poster board leans against the wall. PETER’S N–Y–E PARTY, I read as I draw closer—not Peter and Wendy’s; just Peter’s—7TH FLOOR FOLLOW THE LITE! Around the text, the poster is collaged with dozens of tiny hand-tinted prints of the same black-and-white photograph: the appraising face of a handsome heavy-lidded young man. Wendy’s name may not be written on the poster, but the photo clearly announces her presence, reassures me that I’m in the right place.
The hallway extends parallel to the street in both directions, but more candles scatter to the left, leading toward what looks like a distant freight elevator. My hosts’ trail is charming and romantic to be sure, but also entirely unsafe: the propped door and low light create a perfect workspace for muggers and rapists. I hate thinking this way but also can’t justify partaking in plain foolishness; I pause to search my purse for my trusty penlight, click it on, and proceed.
The bluish oval that it casts discovers a ceiling veined by pipes, ducts, and conduits, none of which provides a good clue about what this place used to make, or store, or process. The walls show signs of having been whitewashed so long ago that the whiteness is all but gone; here and there there’s a flash of some more elaborate adornment. At one point a pair of pale painted hands takes shape from the darkness, each holding a doubloon-like circle—one black, one white—in its long bloodless fingers, as if illustrating an occult ritual.
As I study the image, I spy words painted above it, and I angle my beam upward to read.
OREO SANDWICH, it says.
The shock of recognition almost jolts the light from my hand. At once I know exactly where I am, and I can’t suppress a laugh—though I don’t much like the sound of it when the echo sends it back to me.
This is the old National Biscuit factory: an amalgam of packaging plants, storehouses, loading docks, offices, and industrial-scale ovens that has overflowed this Manhattan block since Teddy Roosevelt was police commissioner. In disuse now for more than a quarter century—ever since the whole operation trimmed its name to Nabisco and decamped, like so many of my other aging neighbors, to New Jersey—this was once the nation’s snack laboratory par excellence, where wizardly denizens invented tricks that would change food forever.
No hyperbole, that. National Biscuit not only found ways to ship their empty calories halfway round the world with crunches undiminished, but also to make sure that somebody was already craving them upon arrival. With such a wide reach achieved, their products ceased to be mere treats and took on the status of institutions, as unifyingly uniform as any flag, oath, or anthem. These brick walls witnessed the nativities of Zu Zu Ginger Snaps, the Lorna Doone, Ritz Crackers, and, of course, my hated adversary, derailer of my New Year’s Eve, that dark satanic sandwich, the Oreo cookie.
I suppose I ought to be pleased by the evening’s serendipitous circularity, but I can’t quite manage. While it’s tempting to cast my long walk as an accidental mock-heroic—arriving at last in the lair of the beast that wrecked my dinner plans, defeated though it now may be by my powers of digestion—there’s nothing but phantoms to counterattack. Aside from this painted wall, no physical trace of my enemy remains.
Anyway, this is silliness. If my enemy were on hand to be vanquished, what would it look like? A crisp morsel composited from sugar, flour, and fat? A bookish child in a TV commercial? An invisible pile of money, flashing around the globe in the form of Nabisco Brands stock?
Or would it just look like me? After all, no one made me buy those Oreos. Or did they? I imagine Leslie Monroe and Geraldine Kidd emerging from the darkness, glamorous and camera ready, reminding me with a cluck of the tongue and a pat on the shoulder that real advertising—not the primitive quilting bee I apparently mistook for my own copywriting career—is an inside job: deep inside our heads and hearts, the secret crannies where we hide ourselves from ourselves. Who’s been more the mother to Gian in the years since I fell apart, vigorous me or dying Julia? How did my son get by when I was fogged with liquor, or rebuilding at Silver Hill? All my cherished memories of his smartness, his sweetness: how many other such moments slipped by me undetected? I can brood, and I can speculate, but I can never know for sure—although I can buy a package of cookies.
Nay, if I turn mine eyes upon myself, I find myself a traitor with the rest.
The freight elevator elevates me not into the party but to yet more blazing candles, these blazing a trail down a wide corridor toward the ever-louder music. The hallway is lined with prints of Wendy’s photographs, alternating with canvases presumably done by her husband, all hanging unevenly against the bricks from thick steel wires strung between exposed pipes.
I’m no art critic, but even though Peter’s paintings look accomplished—abstracted landscapes in an attractive California palette that reminds me of Richard Diebenkorn—I like Wendy’s work better and think that she is the superior artist. Partly this is because Wendy’s work pulses with rhythms and textures that I know well; it’s of the city, while Peter’s is simply in it. Or maybe my preference is even more straightforward: Wendy’s images have people in them and Peter’s don’t. My biases always run against the systematic and the stylized in favor of the mess and adventure of human life. It’s the same with music: Gian is always chiding me about my inability to appreciate all the modern compositions—atonal, aleatoric, serialist—that he and his colleagues inflict on their students, the poor dears who a year ago were playing Leroy Anderson tunes in high school gymnasiums.