The Best American Essays 2014 Read online

  “Maybe somewhere in there is a clue to why Lorenzo drinks.”

  “It’s disgusting,” Leonard says softly, “to be this old and have so little information. Now, there’s something Krista K. could write about that would interest me. The only problem is she thinks information is what the KGB was after.”

  In the drugstore I run into ninety-year-old Vera, a Trotskyist from way back who lives in a fourth-floor walk-up in my neighborhood, and whose voice is always pitched at the level of soapbox urgency. She is waiting for a prescription to be filled, and as I haven’t seen her in a long while, on impulse I offer to wait with her. We sit down in two of the three chairs lined up near the prescription counter, me in the middle, Vera on my left, and on my right a pleasant-looking man reading a book.

  “Still living in the same place?” I ask.

  “Where’m I gonna go?” she says, loudly enough for a man on the pick-up line to turn in our direction. “But y’know, dolling? The stairs keep me strong.”

  “And your husband? How’s he taking the stairs?”

  “Oh, him,” she says. “He died.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I murmur.

  Her hand pushes away the air.

  “It wasn’t a good marriage,” she announces. Three people on the line turn around. “But, y’know? In the end it doesn’t really matter.”

  I nod my head. I understand. The apartment is empty.

  “One thing I gotta say,” she goes on, “he was a no-good husband, but he was a great lover.”

  I can feel a slight jolt in the body of the man sitting beside me.

  “Well, that’s certainly important,” I say.

  “Boy, was it ever! I met him in Detroit during the Second World War. We were organizing. In those days everybody slept with everybody, so I did too. But you wouldn’t believe it”—and here she lowered her voice dramatically, as though she had a secret of some importance to relate—“most of the guys I slept with? They were no good in bed. I mean, they were bad, really bad.”

  Now I feel the man on my right stifling a laugh.

  “So when you found a good one,” Vera shrugs, “you held on to him.”

  “I know just what you mean,” I say.

  “Do you, dolling?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “You mean they’re still bad?”

  “Listen to us,” I say. “Two old women talking about lousy lovers.”

  This time the man beside me laughs out loud. I turn and look at him.

  “We’re sleeping with the same guys, right?” I say.

  Yes, he nods. “And with the same ratio of satisfaction.”

  For a split second the three of us look at one another, and then, all at once, we begin to howl. When the howling stops, we are all beaming. Together we have performed, and separately we have been received.

  No one is more surprised than I that I turned out to be who I am. Take love, for instance. I had always assumed that, in this regard, I was like every other girl of my generation. While motherhood and marriage had never held my interest, and daydreaming myself on some revolutionary barricade was peculiar among my classmates, I always knew that one day Prince Passion would come along, and when he did, life would assume its ultimate shape—ultimate being the operative word. As it happened, a number of PP look-alikes did appear, but there was no ultimate anything. Before I was thirty-five I had been as much bedded as any of my friends, and I had also been twice married, twice divorced. Each marriage lasted two and a half years, and each was undertaken by a woman I didn’t know (me) to a man I also didn’t know (the figure on the wedding cake).

  It was only after these marriages were over that I matured sexually; that is, I became conscious of myself as a person preoccupied with desiring rather than being desired; and that development gave me an education. I learned that I was sensual but not a sensualist; that I blissed out on orgasm but the earth didn’t move; that I could be strung out on erotic obsession for six months or so but was always waiting for the nervous excitement to die down. In a word: lovemaking was sublime but it wasn’t where I lived. And then I learned something more.

  In my late thirties I had an affair with a man I cared for and who cared for me. This man and I were both drawn to the energy of mind and spirit that each of us felt in the other. But for this man too—intelligent, educated, politically passionate as he was—the exercise of his sexual will was central to any connection he made with a woman. There was not a moment when we were together that he wasn’t touching me. He never walked into my house that his hand wasn’t immediately on my breast; never embraced me that he wasn’t reaching for my genitals; never lay beside me that he wasn’t trying to make me come. When, after we’d been together some months, I began to object to what had started to feel like an on-automatic practice, he would invariably put his arms around me, nuzzle my neck, and whisper in my ear, “C’mon, you know you like it.” As I did genuinely love him and he me—we had memorable times together—I would stare at him at such moments, shake my head in exasperation, but then let it go.

  One day he suggested that I let him sodomize me, something we’d not done before. I demurred. Next day he made the same suggestion. Again I demurred. “How do you know you won’t like it,” he persisted, “if you’ve never done it?” He wore me down: I agreed to try it once. No, no, he said, I must agree to do it three times and then if I said no it would be no. So we did it three times, and truth to tell, I didn’t hate the physical sensation as much as I had thought I would—almost against my will my body responded—but I definitely did not like it. “Okay,” I said, “I’ve done it three times, and I don’t want to do it anymore.” We were lying in bed. He nuzzled my neck and whispered in my ear, “C’mon. Just one more time. You know you like it.”

  I drew away then and looked directly into his face. “No,” I said, and was startled by the finality in my own voice.

  “What an unnatural woman you are!” he exploded at me. “You know you want to do it. I know you want to do it. Yet you fight it. Or is it me you’re fighting?”

  Once again I stared at him: only this stare was different from those other stares. A man was pressing me to do something I did not want to do, and pressing me in a manner he would never have applied to another man: by telling me that I didn’t know what I wanted. I felt my eyes narrowing and my heart going cold. For the first—but not the last—time, I consciously felt men to be members of a species separate from myself. Separate and foreign. It was as though an invisible membrane had fallen between me and my lover, one fine enough to be penetrated by desire but opaque enough to obscure human fellowship. The person on the other side of the membrane seemed as unreal to me as I felt myself to be to him. At that moment, I didn’t care if I never again got into bed with a man.

  I did of course get into bed with them—love, quarrel, and bliss out many more times after this man and I parted—but the memory of that fine, invisible separation haunted me; and more often than I like to remember, I saw it glistening as I gazed into the face of a man who loved me but was not persuaded that I needed what he needed to feel like a human being.

  In time I came to know other women who would have analyzed the experience differently but immediately understood what I was talking about when I described the invisible curtain. It comes with the territory, most of them shrugged.

  Work, I said to myself, work. If I worked, I thought, pressing myself against my newly hardened heart, I’d have what I needed. I’d be a person in the world. What would it matter then that I was giving up “love”?

  As it turned out, it mattered more than I had ever dreamed it would. As the years went on, I saw that romantic love was injected like dye into the nervous system of my emotions, laced through the entire fabric of longing, fantasy, and sentiment. It haunted the psyche, was an ache in the bones; so deeply embedded in the makeup of the spirit it hurt the eyes to look directly into its influence. It would be a cause of pain and conflict for the rest of my life. I prize my hardened heart—I hav
e prized it all these years—but the loss of romantic love can still tear at it.

  Workmen have erected a wooden barrier on my street around two squares of pavement whose concrete has been newly poured. Beside the barrier is a single wooden plank laid out for pedestrians, and beside that, a flimsy railing. On an icy morning in midwinter I am about to grasp the railing and pull myself along the plank when, at the other end, a man appears, attempting the same negotiation. This man is tall, painfully thin, and fearfully old. Instinctively I lean in far enough to hold out my hand to him. Instinctively he grasps it. Neither of us speaks a word until he is safely across the plank, standing beside me. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you very much.” A thrill runs through me. “You’re welcome,” I say, in a tone that I hope is as plain as his. We each then go our separate ways, but I feel that “thank you” running through my veins all the rest of the day.

  It was his voice that had done it. That voice! Strong, vibrant, self-possessed: it did not know it belonged to an old man. There was in it not a hint of that beseeching tone one hears so often in the voice of an old person when small courtesies are shown—“You’re so kind, so kind, so very kind,” when all you’re doing is hailing a cab or helping to unload a shopping cart—as though the person is apologizing for the room he or she is taking up in the world. This man realized that I had not been inordinately helpful, and he need not be inordinately thankful. He was recalling for both of us the ordinary recognition that every person in trouble has a right to expect and every witness an obligation to extend. I had held out my hand, he had taken it. For thirty seconds we had stood together—he not pleading, I not patronizing—the mask of old age slipped from his face, the mask of vigor dropped from mine.

  A few weeks ago a woman who lives on my floor invited me to a Sunday brunch. This woman has taught grade school for years, but she looks upon teaching as a day job. In real life, she says, she is an actor. None of the people at the brunch—all in their forties and fifties—knew each other well, and some didn’t know the others at all, but it soon became clear that everyone at the table also thought of the work they did as day jobs; every one of them saw him- or herself as having a vocation in the arts, albeit one without material achievement. The chatter on that Sunday morning was animated by one account after another of this or that failed audition or publication or gallery showing, each one ending with “I didn’t prepare hard enough,” or “I knew I should have rewritten the beginning,” or “I don’t send out enough slides.” What was striking was the sympathy that each self-reproach called to life in the others. “Oh, you’re too hard on yourself!” was heard more than once. Then, abruptly, looking directly at the last person to say, “You’re too hard on yourself,” a woman who’d been silent started to speak.

  “When I got divorced,” she said, “I had to sell the house in Westchester. A couple in the business of importing Chinese furniture and art objects bought the house and began moving things in a week before I was to leave. One night I went down into the basement and began looking through some of their crates. I found a pair of beautiful porcelain vases. On impulse, I took one. I thought, They’ve got everything, I’ve got nothing, why shouldn’t I? When I moved, I took the vase with me. A week later the husband called and said this funny thing had happened, one of this pair of vases had disappeared, did I know anything about it. No, I said, sounding as bemused as he, I didn’t know anything about it, I’d never even seen the vases. I felt awful then. But I didn’t know what to do. I put the vase in a closet and never looked at it again. Ten years passed. Then I began thinking about the vase. Soon the thought of the vase began to obsess me. Finally this past year I couldn’t stand it anymore. I packed up the vase as carefully as I could and sent it back to them. And I wrote a separate letter, saying I didn’t know what had possessed me, why I had taken this thing that belonged to them, and I wasn’t asking for forgiveness, but here it was back. A few weeks later the wife called me. She said she’d gotten this strange letter from me, she didn’t know what I was talking about, and then this package came, and inside the package was about a thousand shards of something or other. What on earth was it that I had taken and was now sending back?”

  At ten in the morning, two old women are walking ahead of me on West Twenty-Third Street, one wearing a pink nylon sweater, the other a blue. “Did you hear?” the woman in pink says. “The pope appealed to capitalism to be kind to the poor of the world.” The woman in blue responds, “What did capitalism say?” As we’re crossing Seventh Avenue, the woman in pink shrugs. “So far it’s quiet.”

  At noon a man at a grocery counter stands peering at the change in his hand. “You gave me $8.06,” he says to the young woman behind the cash register. “I don’t think that’s right.” She looks at the coins and says, “You’re right. It shoulda been $8.60,” and gives the man the correct change. He continues to stare at his open palm. “You put the six and the zero in the wrong place,” he says. “It shoulda been the other way around.” Now it’s the woman who stares. When at last the man turns away, I shake my head sympathetically. “What I put up with all day long,” she sighs, as I pile my purchases on the counter. “Would you believe this? A guy comes up to the counter with an item. It’s marked wrong. I can see right away it’s the wrong amount. I tell him, Listen, that’s the wrong price. Believe me, I know the prices, I been working in the store two years. He says to me, ‘That’s nothing to be proud of,’ and he marches out.”

  At three in the afternoon, a distinguished-looking couple is standing under the awning of the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. The man has iron-gray hair and regular features and is wearing an expensive overcoat. The woman is alcoholic thin, has blond, marcelled hair, and is wearing mink. She looks up at him as I pass them, and her face lights up. “It’s been a wonderful afternoon,” she says. The man embraces her warmly and nods directly into her face. The scene excites my own gratitude: how delicious to see people of the upper classes acting with simple humanity! Later I run into Sarah, a tired socialist of my acquaintance, and I tell her about the couple on Park Avenue. She listens with her customary Marxist moroseness and says, “You think she knows what a wonderful afternoon is?”

  A friend reads what I’ve been writing and says to me over coffee, “You’re romanticizing the street. Don’t you know that New York has lost seventy-five percent of its manufacturing base?” In my mind’s eye I stare into the faces of all the women and men with whom I interact daily. Hey, you people, I address them silently, did you hear what my friend just said? The city is doomed, the middle class has deserted New York, the corporations are in Texas, Jersey, Taiwan. You’re gone, you’re outta here, it’s all over. How come you’re still on the street?

  New York isn’t jobs, they reply, it’s temperament. Most people are in New York because they need evidence—in large quantities—of human expressiveness; and they need it not now and then, but every day. That is what they need. Those who go off to the manageable cities can do without; those who come to New York cannot.

  Or perhaps I should say that it is I who cannot.

  It’s the voices I can’t do without. In most cities of the world, the populace is planted in centuries of cobblestoned alleys, ruined churches, architectural relics, none of which are ever dug up, only piled one on top of another. If you’ve grown up in New York your life is an archaeology not of structures but of voices, also piled one on top of another, also not really replacing one another.

  On Sixth Avenue, two small, dark-skinned men lean against a parked cab. One says to the other, “Look, it’s very simple. A is the variable costs, B is the gross income, C is the overhead. Got that?” The other man shakes his head. “Dummy!” the first man cries. “You gotta get it!”

  On Park Avenue a well-dressed matron says to her friend, “When I was young, men were the main course, now they’re a condiment.”

  On Fifty-Seventh Street a delicate-looking man says to a woman too young to know what he’s talking about, “These days my life feels like a chi
cken bone stuck in my craw. I can’t swallow it and I can’t cough it up. Right now I’m trying to just not choke on it.”

  As the cabbie on Sixth Avenue said, someone’s gotta get it; and late in the day someone does.

  I am walking along Eighth Avenue during the five o’clock crush, daydreaming, and somewhere in the forties, I don’t notice the light turning red. Halfway into the path of an oncoming truck, I am lifted off my feet by a pair of hands on my upper arms and pulled back onto the curb. The hands do not release me immediately. I am pressed to the chest of the person to whom the hands belong. I can still feel the beating heart against my back. When I turn to thank my rescuer, I am looking into the middle-aged face of an overweight man with bright blue eyes, straw-colored hair, and a beet-red face. We stare wordlessly at one another. I’ll never know what the man is thinking at this moment, but the expression on his face is unforgettable. Me, I am merely shaken, but he looks as though transfigured by what has just happened. His eyes are fixed on mine, but I see that they are really looking inward. I realize that this is his experience, not mine. It is he who has felt the urgency of life—he is still holding it in his hands.

  Two hours later I am home, having dinner at my table, overlooking the city. My mind flashes on all who crossed my path today. I hear their voices, I see their gestures, I start filling in lives for them. Soon they are company, great company. I think to myself, I’d rather be here with you tonight than with anyone else I know. Well, almost anyone else I know. I look up at the great clock on my wall, the one that gives the date as well as the hour. It’s time to call Leonard.

  LAWRENCE JACKSON

  Slickheads

  FROM n+1