Face to Face Read online

  He did say something I was able to take to heart, though. He said with a shrug, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that I had the right to drive at whatever speed and in whatever manner I found comfortable. The car was a means of getting me somewhere, and that was that. It was plain from the way he spoke that as a driver himself, he had no contempt for other drivers; he had no interest at all in other drivers. Here was a new way of looking at the game of life as played on the road. The road was a community in which we all pursued our goals in our own way and at our own pace; naturally we obeyed the same set of rules—the social contract—and accorded each other communal rights and courtesies, and it was tacitly understood that we must cooperate for our common good and safety. But essentially we were following our individual paths.

  This, I know, is a most banal piece of news, so banal that I was amazed it had never struck me before. It described ordinary life—idealized, for sure, yet recognizably life as I lived it on foot. It had never occurred to me that the social contract might prevail on the road as it does, or should do, on foot. To my father, and to me when I was his passenger, the road was the state of nature. And the allure of that state is overpowering. To move with such arrogance, such abandonment, such self-interest, such predatory skill! But I cannot bring myself to yield to its allure. No doubt it is better so. Yet I know what it feels like to sit, small and excited, beside that yielding. Ah, to go for a ride with my father again!

  You might think that after this great yet banal revelation, my dread would vanish and I would drive with ease. At least I thought so. Almost as alluring as the myth of the state of nature is the myth of instant transformation: the scales falling from the eyes, the paralytic striding away from Lourdes, the frog, having done penance, turning back into the prince he really was all along. And it does happen—not every great change must be attended by long patience and a tedious accumulation of incremental efforts. Was there not Saul becoming Paul on the road to Damascus, or the unexpected collapse of the Berlin Wall? Yes, I had served my time in darkness and reached the light of truth. Now I would come into my inheritance.

  But this, alas, didn’t happen. Sometimes on long trips everyone agrees to share the driving. Pride makes it impossible for me to refuse. I pray that when my turn comes it will be an easy stretch. But at heart I know it doesn’t matter what kind of stretch it is; every stretch—crowded or empty, fast or slow, pitted, slick, or under construction—offers its own ordeals, and they do not appreciably alter my dread. At the appointed moment I take my turn gallantly at the wheel, stomach clenched, will taut. I build up speed—I may be scared, but I’m not slow. I relish the power, the breeze, the swiftness. I try to anticipate what’s ahead and plan for it, but on the road this is impossible. I mutter curses when some nearby driver does something clumsy or inept. Aside from that harmless indulgence, I observe the social contract, but I long to be in a state of nature. That tension is grimly exciting. I am terrified and elated. Anything might happen. Joy, power, and dread swirl and contend in my every cell. The road of life.

  Being There

  AT ABOUT ELEVEN IN the morning on March 2, 1983, the Greek men working on the roof of Diana Angel Stamoulis’s apartment building banged on her door to tell her, speaking in Greek, that they saw smoke. “Stop making fun,” she said, and closed her door. They banged again. This time she went out into the hall and opened the window. She saw smoke coming up from the fourth floor below. She climbed the stairs to the sixth floor, where she saw smoke coming from under the door of one of the apartments.

  Mrs. Angel phoned her daughter, Adrienne, an actress who lived in the building next door. Adrienne came right over, and together the two women left the building, walking down the five flights of stairs. Once outside, where fire engines were already gathering on the Manhattan street, Mrs. Angel decided to go back to save some of her possessions. She had thousands of dollars’ worth of stamp collections, knickknacks, jewelry, a trunk full of fabrics—she had been a dressmaker like her mother before her—as well as valuable papers and correspondence with New York’s Mayor John Lindsay, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and President Lyndon Johnson. Apparently no one saw her reenter to climb the four flights.

  Back in her seven-room apartment, Mrs. Angel felt intense heat coming from next door. She heard the crashing of windows exploding from the heat, and when she looked out her kitchen window she saw flames. She sat down on her living room sofa and spoke to God in Greek. “You’re not going to let this building burn,” she said. “But if it’s time for me to go, I’ll go with the building.” At that moment, the large mirror behind her, above the sofa, crashed and splintered, the glass flying right over her without hurting her. Mrs. Angel knew then that God felt it wasn’t time for her to go.

  Hot water coming from the ceiling fell on her left shoulder. She thought the building’s boiler must have burst, and wondered how water from the boiler in the basement could have gotten so high up. She soon realized it was water that had been hosed into the floor above and heated by the flames. Mrs. Angel walked to her front window, facing Riverside Park and the Hudson River, thinking the falling water couldn’t reach her there. Up on the hill across from the building, a small crowd of people who had gathered to watch the fire noticed her and waved at her to come down, but she shook her head. She was not afraid. She was “in a sort of trance,” watching the colors of the flames, hearing the loud crashing of glass. She stayed there listening and gazing at the gorgeous black and gray smoke, at the reds and blues and greens. “People don’t realize how beautiful fire is,” she recalled.

  A fireman saw her standing at the front window, and very soon two firemen, along with Adrienne, came up the stairs to get her. Mrs. Angel didn’t want to go, but they led her out of the building. About a half hour later the roof of the apartment above collapsed and fell through to her apartment.

  Diana Angel was eighty at the time. She was my downstairs neighbor. Together with the people in the other twenty-two apartments, we had been making a kind of urban history, though we didn’t know it then—it was just our daily lives. Nor could we have known that this very local, very intimate history would be suddenly erased.

  A year and a half later, living in a place that didn’t feel quite like home, I went back to look at our former apartment, now partially restored. There were light squares on the grayed walls where pictures had hung, and light circles on the blackened floors where chairs had stood. The huge old windows with their elaborately molded frames, through which we had seen the world, were gone, replaced by nondescript square black metal frames. The place was alien, blank, nobody’s. Smaller without the furniture. I remembered the day I arrived there twenty years earlier, pregnant, and we set to work to make it a place we could live in. It had had a future. This place didn’t even seem to have a past. It didn’t seem possible that this was where I had sat watching, far across the river, the lights of the roller coaster of Palisades Amusement Park, itself now vanished. But if not here, where?

  It began in 1964, when my husband and I returned from a year in Rome, where Harry had had a Fulbright grant to study urban history and planning. We had no money, no jobs, no place to live, and I was pregnant. We camped at my parents’ house in Rockland County, and Harry would go into the city every day to look for an apartment. One day he came back pleased: six rooms in a nice old building on Riverside Drive, near Columbia University, where we had both been students. I went with him to have a look. I saw mostly that it was big, and that its wide front windows overlooked the green of Riverside Park and the Hudson River. Soon after, Harry got a job at the New York City Planning Commission. It wouldn’t make sense for me to get a job, we agreed, since I would be having the baby in November, and it was almost September.

  The day we officially moved in I took a good look around. The ceilings were very high, the walls all brown, and in the long hall, especially, they pressed in with a feeling of hushed desolation. I felt suddenly desolate too, and I cried at the prospect of living in such deso
lation, especially after the glories of Rome. We began painting; my family came to help. My brother and my nephews painted the hall; my brother, who is very tall, could paint all the way up to the ceiling, past the molding, without a ladder. As he moved smoothly along the hall with his roller, turning it from brown to white, I stopped crying. It would be a place to live, for a while at least. We were nomadic. Before Rome we had lived in one apartment in New York, three in Philadelphia, and two in Boston, in the space of six years, so I expected we would keep moving. Because I was quite pregnant, I painted that segment of wall which could be reached without much bending or stretching. Sometimes I would sit on the floor and creep around the perimeter of a room to do the lower moldings.

  Among his many endeavors, my father, by profession a tax lawyer and CPA, had a furniture store in Chinatown. Since we had no furniture, it seemed natural to him that we should go to the store and pick out what we needed. Others like us, young people brought up in provincial sections of Brooklyn, would buy furniture when they set up house: bedroom suites, living room suites, and carpeting to match. But we wanted never to “set up house.” We wanted to be the opposite of the way our families were, and to play house. Wherever we went, we made bookcases out of shelves and bricks and had big pillows in the living room instead of chairs. Our bed was a mattress on a frame. To placate my parents we did go to the store and pick out a few things—a round white kitchen table and four red chairs, a kitchen cabinet, and a couple of simple lamps. I remember my father looking with some contempt at one simple red lamp and saying, “That’s all you want?” What we lacked in furniture we made up for on the walls—lots of posters, prints, and odd hangings; over the years we added works of art done by our children and some real works of art loaned by friends who were painters. Harry also cultivated eighty-two plants, so the place was a bit like a greenhouse.

  Towards the end of the pregnancy I would sit at night in a red and white flowered wing chair we had gotten at some thrift shop and look out over the river at the bright lights of Palisades Amusement Park over on the New Jersey shore. I could see the outline of the roller coaster, all its snaking figure eights, and the cars swooping around them. I watched the moving letters on the park’s huge marquee, advertising products I no longer remember, till I had memorized all the slogans in a trance of lethargy and muted panic over having a baby. The baby was late. Thanksgiving came and I called my mother to say I hadn’t the strength to come to Rockland County for her big dinner. She had a solution. Hours later my mother and father and brother, my sister and brother-in-law and their two sons marched in carrying the Thanksgiving dinner and set it up on paper plates, the first of many parties in our apartment. When they left I sat in the dark and watched the lights of Palisades Park, wondering when I would ever have this baby.

  Rachel was born two days later. When she was a few months old my mother began coming over one day a week to stay with her so I could, in her words, “get out of the house.” Soon I hired baby-sitters so I could get out some more. I found a part-time job writing publicity material for an open housing program in Harlem, which was close enough to walk to, and my mother remarked, “I always thought a woman should stay home with a baby, but in your case I see you can’t. Go.”

  During six years of marriage, I had gone to work, and we had done the housework infrequently and together. Suddenly I found myself in a spacious, solid apartment with a baby it was universally assumed I should take care of, and wondered how on earth this had come about. I suppose my parents were relieved I had married at all, since I had always threatened to do bizarre things with my life, and relieved that I had gone so far as to have a baby and do the conventional things for it like buy a crib and a playpen, dress it and feed it and take it to the park in a carriage with a hood and a row of plastic balls strung across the front. My mother told me things I ought to do for the baby; one was to give her a lamb chop for lunch when she got old enough to hold a bone. My mother believed in lamb chops the way later on people came to believe in yogurt and tofu. And once a week she arrived at around nine-thirty in the morning (my father dropped her off on his way to work) and I would fly out of the house to my job in Harlem.

  When we first took the apartment, the real-estate agent told us another couple just back from Rome had moved in on the third floor, both artists. Coming out of the elevator one day, I saw a young man who looked like he might be an artist, and who looked as new to the place as I did. I inquired and he said yes, he was the one, Bob Birmelin. We invited him and his wife, Blair, over for coffee. I tried to heat a frozen Sara Lee banana cake in the oven and ruined it—the frosting melted and dripped and I was embarrassed serving it. Nevertheless we became very good friends, especially Blair and I. I discovered she read Proust and Henry James and liked to sit and talk about books just as I did. Amidst our marathon talks, periodically there would be a new baby. I had a girl, and a year and a half later she had a boy. I visited her in the hospital, bringing books, and when she came home with her baby we talked about childbirth and about the books. Two years later I had another girl, and a year and a half later Blair had another boy. We went to the park together, Riverside Park across the street, and in the course of an afternoon shifted our equipment from the benches near the slide to the benches near the jungle gym to the benches near the sandbox, along with other local mothers, women whose husbands were studying at Columbia or at Union Theological Seminary or Jewish Theological Seminary. I have a photo of Blair and me in heavy wool sweaters and jeans, playing hopscotch in the park. We look intent and defiant, as the children stand by and watch.

  In our early years the park had a sprinkler for hot days, but one year it disappeared. Too much vandalism, the park man said. And the kids took water into the sandbox. I never understood what was wrong with taking water into the sandbox, but the park man, a jovial, short, dark man who liked to flirt with the mothers, was adamantly against it. He would sit and talk to any woman alone, as if part of his job for the Parks Department was to keep young mothers company, and it was in fact pleasant to be flirted with at a time when babies and sandboxes constituted so much of the once variegated world. When he hurt his leg and disappeared soon after the sprinkler, I missed him.

  After the park, Blair and I would take the children back to one of our apartments and have drinks while they played and fought. We would be talking about books, drinking and smoking, feeling like grown women, when one of the children would rush in insulted or injured, and we would have to mediate. I tried to settle disputes by reason and fairness, but in her house, I remember, she gave the children apples. Blair seemed to have an unlimited supply of McIntosh apples, which soothed all injuries better than sweet reason. The children, especially as they got older, made so much noise that it was a wonder we could manage to keep talking about books, but manage we did, and like my mother she helped rescue me; perhaps I did the same for her.

  At night the four of us grown-ups would get together to eat and drink and play games like pick-up-sticks; it seemed all right to leave the children alone on the sixth floor or on the third, and dash out from time to time to check on them. We were all very competitive, and so the games of pick-up-sticks were tense. Especially we women were competitive, for the men were out working at their chosen professions while we had little outlet for our competitiveness. Probably we would have been competitive in any case. On and off we played with a Ouija board, which predicted the date of the birth of Blair and Bob’s first baby, the results of the 1968 presidential election, and later on spelled out the name of Rachel’s nursery school teacher.

  After a few years of babies and, for me, graduate school, we began to write fiction, Blair downstairs and I upstairs. She started first, after her second child was born. She had always been the painter and I the writer, at least in my mind. But there she was, writing. If a painter could write, I thought, surely I, a writer, could write too. When I had no private place to work she let me use a room in her apartment, so that sometimes we were both writing there, in different ro
oms. Years later, what we were both writing was in books and in bookstores, which seems miraculous.

  Meanwhile, once a week my mother kept coming over to take care of the children while I got out. When I returned home I would find she had done some laundry and ironing too. She bathed the first baby, but with the second she said she couldn’t anymore—she was older and this baby was heavier; her arm ached. But she took both out to the park, for she believed in fresh air as in lamb chops, and sometimes on her return she would rest for a few moments in the lobby on one of the old high-backed, velvet-cushioned chairs that flanked a large oak breakfront. One day these pieces of furniture vanished. Stolen, our building superintendent, Mrs. Flanagan, said in amazement. The mystery of how and when these massive items could have been stolen was never solved. After that there was no furniture in the lobby.

  My father would come by after work to pick my mother up, and we would sit and talk for a while, my mother enumerating what wondrous things the baby, and then babies, had done and said that day. During one of these talks the lights suddenly went out. First we thought it was our building alone, but out the window, up and down our side of the river as far as we could see, was blackness. Across the river New Jersey’s lights were bright. We sat in the dark bemused. I unearthed a few candles. Our neighbor from across the hall rang the bell to offer us a huge Christmas candle, and she sat with us for a while. She said she kept a lot of candles around for emergencies. She had the reputation of being eccentric, and indeed she had a touch of the Ancient Mariner about her, stopping us in the hall occasionally when some far-fetched topic seemed to weigh on her mind. She didn’t have a glittering eye, but she did have a pale, waxy-looking face, as if she never went outdoors, and her hair was done in two long braids wound about her head like an Edwardian heroine’s. She wore strange dun-colored shabby clothes that also seemed never to have seen the light of day—there was an overall mustiness to her—and those who had been in the building longer than we had told fantastic tales about primeval chaos in her apartment; and she had some strange habits as well, like reading late at night on the hall steps, to save electricity, she explained when we jumped back, startled, at the elevator door. She was often seen carrying shopping bags in and out, and she drove a repainted mail truck, which took up more than its share of precious street parking space. But with all that she could be pleasant to talk to, and she was intelligent. She was a public school teacher. And so we sat there bemused by the blackout—none of us could remember this happening in New York City before.