Leaving Brooklyn Read online

  No effort is greater than the effort of forcing the flesh to move in untried ways, clearing paths in the tangle of nerves to make way for an alien sensation. Even today, with all my travels, when finally I can say the word “I” without a feeling of uncertainty, I harbor a deep longing for immobility—the Brooklyn in me—an instinct at war with change and growth, those holy processes of liberal psychology. Maybe only those who have been compelled, or have compelled themselves, to travel have glimpsed the broad, unexplored terrain of human laziness—too lazy to live, some of us, yearning to lie still and sink back into primeval ooze, reversing evolution. My kind of eye, despite or perhaps because of its wandering, belongs to the genre called lazy eyes, an incarnation of the body’s dearest tropism, the leaning towards more somnolent forms of life, towards death.

  I was near death once—I, not the girl—and as far as I was conscious, felt that laziness pulling slowly and methodically, like the tortoise in the race, against the agile will to live and fight. How much more natural it seemed, how much easier to give in, as if giving in were what we desire all along and living is the unnatural, neurasthenic struggle. What a voluptuous numbness, how alluringly right it felt. I don’t know what strength called me back – maybe just the ministrations of technology. The first eye I opened when the struggle was won, or lost, was the bad eye, and it shed a tear of utter estrangement, of long-suffering patience. The tear trickled to the corner of my lips and I tasted deep-sea brine. That eye was so powerful in the girl, in me when I was the girl, that I fear to think what would have happened had she been the one in a near-fatal accident. It might well have won. She might never have become me—I—and I would not be telling her story, my lazy eye’s story.

  Getting the lens in and out was as repellent as I expected, but I soon became adept at it, as I had become adept at many things that got under my skin. School, for one. The first time I inserted the lens on my own, fighting nausea, standing over the bathroom sink (no danger of its going down the drain, large as it was), I felt that slow somersault of the brain just as in first grade. So this is what it will be like.

  I would remove the lens between classes, at the girls’ room mirror, while the crowd around me puffed hastily on their cigarettes. With both eyes the same size, identical, I was a stranger to myself. My bad eye was kept in its place, its wanderings frustrated by the lens; and with its confinement, a freedom seemed to have been taken from me—no matter that the freedom to wander was accounted a blemish. With a fingertip I felt the hardness of the restraining lens beneath the veil of my upper lid. It triggered a sick lurch in my stomach that grew to a galloping, roiling fury, and this lurch and fury I never got used to.

  The next Monday after school I took the subway to the doctor’s office to have the lens and eye checked; no more need for my mother beside me, we agreed. I had resolved not to feel as out of place on Park Avenue as I had before, in my girlish yellow cotton dress with cap sleeves. I wore a narrow, bottle-green jersey dress usually saved for special occasions (my mother had once pronounced it “stunning” on me), and new sandals, and I put on make-up in the girls’ room—my father would not let me out of the house with make-up until I reached sixteen. I had washed my hair that morning and it shone. Grownups—my parents’ friends, the card players—had often teased me about my “knowing” look. Lou Zelevansky went further and joked that I had “bedroom eyes” and an “hourglass figure,” phrases that made me want to squeeze my eyes shut and hide my body in a sack. I wasn’t sure what a knowing look was, but I tried to assume it nonetheless, a kind of resigned, sleepy slackness of the features. In this guise I felt more of a match for Park Avenue.

  It was hard to attend to what the doctor said with him leaning over me, breathing his liquory breath, his right leg at moments casually brushing against mine. But I was too wrapped in Brooklyn platitudes even to register how uneasy I felt, or why. I knew only that I found an infinity of things wrong with my life, from the commonplace—adolescence and high school and my mother’s refusal to let me take two acting classes a week and the color of my eyes (that they weren’t lustrous blue or green to suit my dramatic nature, but dull bedroom brown, bothered me far more than their oddity, and back then the color couldn’t be changed by a lens)—to the cosmic—the uncertainty of the future and the human condition: anything except the simple fact that the doctor leaned over me too close for comfort and I didn’t want to be wearing the lens or visiting his office to begin with.

  For one instant, in an assault of truth that can sneak up on the most swaddled souls—like the boys at school slipping ice down the collars of our winter coats—it struck me that the doctor might be pressing his leg against mine more than necessary to examine my eye. But I dismissed this—hopped around, shook out the ice—as utter nonsense, even sacrilege, he being a grown man, a big man, on Park Avenue, and I a gauche child from Brooklyn. It was untenable; it could have opened a road to other untenable thoughts, to a universe where human nature was not as Brooklyn conspired to portray it, progressing towards ever more expansive plateaus of decency and tolerance, but rather where people were driven chaotically by impulses, everyone wanting something from everyone else and staggering about to get it. That might be the way it was in books, locked between covers, due dates stamped in the back so that they didn’t even stay in your bedroom too long, but not in real life.

  Going home in rush hour was a long nasty ride, crushed against sweaty strangers. I resented the trip, and the trips and checkups to follow—twice a month till I was completely “used to” the lens; “adjustments” might be needed. I had the wretched thing, I was looking normal to please my parents. Wasn’t that enough? I didn’t complain, though: once a process was set in motion in Brooklyn, it took more initiative to stop it than to keep it going. That was how we were; we did what we had done the day or the week before.

  THE NOTION THAT people could be driven by want rather than propriety was not entirely new to me. It was more or less what my father had said about McCarthy two years ago, that glimpse of greed and lust I had shoved behind my bad eye. Now my father’s predictions were coming true—they were getting the bastard. He had had a bad summer, everyone was gloating—gone too far with his machinations, gotten himself into trouble with the Army. The sweetness of revenge by proxy was mellowed by television. He had been challenged publicly, and to my father’s glee would have to submit to censure, to sticks pounding on the bucket. His days were numbered, said my father. Elections were coming up. Power would shift. Soon we would be released from his grip, like a village that has sacrificed a maiden every month to feed its resident dragon, finally released by an avenging prince.

  But there was no prince. He was destroying himself—a suicidal dragon. Brooklyn had done nothing but wait. Brooklyn could maintain, unperturbed, its trust in waiting.

  If only Brooklyn had been shaken to the point of revolt! How wondrous to see crowds carrying banners through the streets, singing songs, or even tearing up the paving stones, as I had read in accounts of the Paris Commune. I was guiltily disappointed, too, that the pig had not touched anyone in Brooklyn, as far as I could tell. His victims were famous names: movie people, government people, writers. I wanted to see in the flesh, on my street, someone who had lost his job, whose furniture had been hurled down the stairs after him by a terrorized landlord, and who sat on the curb with his head in his hands, desolate, embittered, ruined. I knew this was not a nice craving, that it would horrify my mother, but I indulged it. My bad eye, growing up, was hungry for reality, famished for a scene worthy of its kind of vision.

  My acting class in Manhattan also trafficked in motivations less than pure. Each Thursday afternoon eight of us, six girls and two boys, did improvisations in a bare room under the eye of a scrawny, spindly teacher with a nasal voice, who had been a great surprise the first day—I thought actors had to be handsome and sexy. He was to surprise me further, years later, by winning an Academy Award. Had I known I was in a room with someone destined for an Academy Award I
might have been too intimidated even to speak; as it was I had trouble with the simple improvisations. He said we had to have a motive in each scene, something we wanted urgently. Every word we spoke, every movement, must be part of the effort to get what we wanted. Of course we needed to be quite clear in our minds about what we wanted—and that was the gist of his criticism.

  “Something’s not clear, Audrey. What exactly are you after?”

  I was playing a scene with a girl who was supposed to be my mother. I was twenty-five years old, unmarried, and I ostensibly wanted to leave home and get my own place, but I didn’t know how to say such an outlandish thing; maybe I wasn’t certain I wanted it, either.

  “Mother.” I turned to her, a tiny long-haired girl named Lizzie, from Greenwich Village. “I may as well tell you outright. I want to get an apartment of my own.”

  “Well, dear,” she said, “that’s nice. Are you sure you can afford it?”

  My heart sank. Obviously this girl had never been near Brooklyn.

  “Yes, I’m quite sure. You know I earn—” I cast around for a plausible sum but I didn’t know what working women, usually teachers in my experience, earned. “I earn… enough.”

  “Stop, stop,” implored the acting teacher. “You!” He addressed my mother. “What do you want?”

  Lizzie shrugged. “I just want her to be happy, I guess.”

  “That’s not enough. You have to want something of your own.

  “She has to want me to stay,” I said. “So I have something to fight against.”

  “Why should I want you to stay? Maybe I want some privacy, after all this time.”

  The scent of Lizzie’s world breezed past the horizon of my mind, a world clearly orbs away from my own.

  “This isn’t working,” said the acting teacher. “There’s no conflict. There has to be conflict. You have to want incompatible things, urgently.”

  “I want to leave home urgently.”

  “Okay. Lizzie, help her out. You want her to stay.”

  “I think it might be better if you stayed home for a while, dear,” said Lizzie.

  “But why, Mother?”

  “Well…” She groped vaguely at the air. “I haven’t been feeling well. I need your help in the house.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Let me be the mother. I can do it.”

  So we switched roles. I sat down at an imaginary kitchen table.

  “By the way, Mother,” said Lizzie with unnerving calm, “I’ve been thinking it’s time I got a place of my own.”

  “A place of your own!” I sprang up, aghast. “What are you talking about? Since when does a young girl move out all by herself ! Don’t you have a perfectly good home here?”

  “Of course I do. You and Dad have been great to me,” she said genially. “But after all, I am twenty-five and I have a good job. We could all use some privacy at this point. I could have my friends over without disturbing you—”

  “Privacy?” I shrieked. “For what, may I ask? Don’t you have a lovely room? And friends? Who ever closed the door to your friends? Haven’t I made them welcome, more than welcome? Twenty-five years providing a decent home for you and this is what we get!” I darted fitfully around.

  “Just a minute, Audrey,” the acting teacher broke in. “That has energy, that’s on the right track. Except it may be a bit too much, at this point in the scene, anyway. To get to that pitch of emotion so fast there must be a strong hidden motive. Do you know what it is?”

  Once I caught on, I played the scenes as life-and-death games. I was ruthlessly, obscenely tenacious.

  “You’re forceful, Audrey. But there’s a time for understatement,” said the acting teacher. “The head-on approach isn’t always the most effective. Try being a little more calculating. Think of your words as part of a process, with a goal.”

  The next Monday I dressed in grownup clothes again, brushed my hair, and put on make-up to go to Park Avenue, where the eye doctor leaned over me, his right leg lightly touching mine. He examined my bad eye in a new way, more inquisitively. Maybe he was trying to discover the exact nature and limits of its vision, and whether it had vision enough to see what he was after.

  He must have found something—not the vision he was seeking, I didn’t have that—but possibly my rampant longing to peer beneath the surfaces of things. He put his hand on my leg. I didn’t move. I only looked at his hand, the fingers spread as if someone were preparing to trace them on my dress, then up at his face, which showed the strain of mental exertion, a curious diagnosis. He moved his hand up and down my leg as if feeling for something beneath the skin. He was testing, I saw that much, edging towards some crossroads where I might leap up in fear or anger, should I choose that path, or I might let the unknown happen.

  As though in a dream, as though it were not a conscious act, I reached out and touched him. I touched him where I knew he would want to be touched. I know that I—she—was not the kind of girl who could do that. In my old nighttime fantasies I had never touched a man that way. I was the one who was touched, gentle, romantic touches awakening me part by part. Even as I recall it, record it, I suspect I really didn’t do such an outrageous thing and memory is falsifying, inventing what I wish I could have done or imagining it from what I have since become capable of doing.

  Indeed this is the point at which memory may be at its least trustworthy. Things might well have stopped there and taken a different course or diffused into no course at all, into the endlessness of being sequestered in Brooklyn. It would seem much more likely that he didn’t put his hand on her leg, that she only wished and feared he would. Or if he did, if I grant that he did, it seems more likely that she didn’t reach out and touch him but instead stood up slowly, sliding her leg out from under his hand, which didn’t move but allowed her to separate from it, then picked up her school bag and walked to the door with the tentative gliding motion of someone who fears she may be prevented or assaulted. But he wouldn’t have assaulted her; probably he wouldn’t even have tried to stop her, just watched her go. At home she would have told her parents fretfully that she didn’t want the lens after all. It hurt. It violated her values—you can imagine by now the sorts of high-minded arguments she would have used. In the end she would have prevailed, yet felt abashed and disgusted with herself, knowing that the arguments were irrelevant, that it was only fear that kept her away.

  In case that was the way it was, if she was thwarted by her fear, I must let her have it now, do it for her, since it is right that it should have happened. It suits the person I became. So I can only repeat that I did do it, unlikely as it seems. I was taken over by my bad eye, wandering.

  There was little of my childhood fantasy in this reality, especially not the doctor, neither dark-skinned nor notably graceful. I could not have said whether he was good-looking or attracted me—he was a man like my father and my father’s card-playing friends, the sort of man I didn’t bother to look at in those terms, although my mother had pronounced him handsome despite his glasses, and admired his taste in ties.

  I touched him and felt what that was like. What I touched changed under my hand, moved of its own accord, and, like the dough my mother rolled out on the kitchen table with her big wooden rolling pin, grew and solidified, which was a little frightening and at the same time made me want to giggle, there was something so absurd about it, as if he had a small doughy animal, a mouse, stretching in his trousers.

  And then he did an unexpected thing—though anything he did would have been unexpected. He very gently spread my lids apart and removed the contact lens. He placed it in a saucer and took my hand like someone helping a lady from a carriage. “I think you should stand up,” he said.

  After he snapped the lock of the door he began caressing me, very slowly, first with his hands under my clothes and then he took off my clothes. He must have thought I knew all about it, from my touching him and from my knowing look. I did know a number of things, the facts inscribed on my blank mind by
teachers, the foolish things in the wine-colored book, as well as some things hidden behind the edges of doors. But this, what he was doing to me, was not one of them. My mother claimed there was a right and wrong way to do everything. I would stay very still and accept his caresses, not daring any wrong move that could show my ignorance.

  From scenes in books and movies, I thought passion always made its entrance in haste and urgency, grasping at clothing and clutching at bare flesh, panting and gasping. But this scene was languid and took time, and my body accepted and absorbed each sensation it offered with a wondrous impassivity. I was seeing such a multitude of things that there was no attention left to feel. I was all eye, the bad eye.

  I had never seen a man’s body except in pictures, yet that was no great surprise; it seemed something I had known all along, just as I had known how to touch him. What I hadn’t had any inkling of was the immeasurable tactile reality of bodies. Suddenly the world was matter, not words. People were their bodies, not minds incidentally occupying flesh. The only other time I had been so aware of humanity as pliable flesh was the First-Aid course in junior high, those luscious manic weeks we bandaged each other, rollicking through the spring with graying rags and gauze, giddy with the feel of flesh.

  But that was long ago and fleeting. I still thought knowledge could be licked off a page; daily life was a chore to be endured while the spirit waited, at one remove, to return to vivid, nourishing reality—in bed with a book on my lap. What I was doing now, though, what was being done to me, was as vivid and insistent as any book and gave the same relief of arrival at a resting place, a bedrock reality. It was even like a book, with new passages rolling through me rhythmically, each bearing its multitude of sensations, while I followed along—captive and heroine, feast and feaster—through infinitely opening spaces and elongated time. Every instant held more than seemed possible, unveiled more of the life hidden behind edges, the most startling revelation being that whole dramas could be performed in which the mind had barely any part. And as if I were turning pages with the rapt expectation of something glorious and astonishing waiting at the end, this too tantalized; I was consumed with curiosity yet wanted it to last and not reveal its ending too soon, just as in bed I needed all my powers of will not to peek ahead and spoil the last page by hastening it. Though I did not know pleasure in the common sense, that first time. That was beside the point, it could wait till later, when I was not so dazzled. I knew only the solitary pleasure of seeing beneath the surface.