Shoulder to Shoulder
Times I melted.
WHEN I WAS IN NEW YORK, I would walk for miles on Broadway and Columbus Avenue, find a place to sit, and write something in a notebook. In Arizona where I walked, roses grew along the paths, and there were lemons and grapefruits to pick. There was the age of New York, and then there was the age of becoming something else with Richard. Now, it’s the age of Hudson with trees surrounding our house and sky any time you like. And I understand how looking at nature, smelling it and hearing it, changes the sense of threat and failure I think I must always have been feeling at least a little bit in the past. The streets of New York are the way I write. My mother’s voice is my vocabulary.
People pretend to like crudité. If you offer them fried calamari, they will throw back their heads and eat it with their fingers, even if they are wearing silk. It’s pleasure we’re fighting for. I like the discovery of irony by children. I like women with space between their teeth. They wear soft clothes. They can't be shocked. They bet on the future. You can’t predict who will delight you, the same way you can’t predict what you’ll see in the mirror.
I’m Downtown in my forties, sitting on a staircase that leads to rooms above. The man’s name is Tony. He’s holding a plate and taking bites of chicken and stuffed mushrooms. I like the slow way he eats. He asks about me, and I say whatever I say. I’m one of the interchangeable characters in a Shakespeare comedy. What happens after the lovers meet? Shakespeare doesn’t care. No one cares.
He says to me, “Think back to when you were a kid and were afraid of something, and you did it anyway, and it turned out okay. Better than okay because you’d started out afraid.”
I see myself at camp, a skinny eleven-year-old perched on a diving board that juts over a lake. My toes are clinging to the edge of the board, my arms are straight out, as I prepare for my first back dive. I’ve practiced off the dock, but here I am, about to hurl myself from a height into dark water I can’t see. In theory, if I arch my back and raise my arms above my head, I will enter the water unharmed. When you think about a back dive, it sounds crazy, but it’s easy if you don’t panic. The thing is, it never stops being a little bit crazy as you stand on the diving board, and that’s how you go through life.
One night after a catering job, I’m riding my bike up Sixth Avenue. The night is warm. It’s late, and there aren’t many cars around. I’m wearing a jacket I want to take off, but I don’t want to stop pedaling, who knows why. The left sleeve slips off easily, but the right cuff catches on my wrist, and then I’m down on the blacktop. My left hand is cut. A trickle of blood slips down my left knee. My left hip is bruised. Most of the injury is to my left hand. I get back on the bike. When I squeeze the brakes, I groan so loud I laugh. The hand swells. When I get home, I apply ice. I think I might have broken a bone. I can’t decide whether to keep the hand still or flex it. I think I should get X-rays and don’t. Maybe because I feel implicated in the fall? Weeks pass. The injury doesn’t significantly heal, but in time the swelling goes down, the bruises fade, the stiffness eases, and strength returns. The hand doesn’t forget. There’s a place below the knuckle where if I press, it sings. It knows it’s got one of those skeletons now that archeologists find and record how the primitive hominid was injured and healed.
Flux Factory (again)
IN 2005, I ACCEPTED AN INVITATION TO WRITE A NOVEL IN A MONTH while living in a house built for me by architects. A small house in an art gallery, designed so that visitors could look in on whatever I was doing. They could look in on me during visiting hours because I was an exhibit as well as whatever else I was.
I didn’t think about how I would feel being looked at. It seemed like what I had to give the experiment. It was someone else’s idea, someone else’s art project, the way a play is someone else’s art project if you are an actor, or the way the world is someone else’s project if you are a female human. In other words, my feelings were mixed.
I was 58, and at 58, I was the oldest person in the Flux Factory, where the gallery was housed. At that time, the Flux Factory was an artist collective and commune in Long Island City, Queens. The residents—there were about twenty—lived in little rabbit rooms off several public spaces, furnished with worn velvet couches and a general steam punk vibe.
The fashion was boots and leather. The faces at once bored and expectant, a kind of cool I had always regarded with delight and apprehension. I had never even tried to achieve it. Nothing bored me, and everything scared me. You had to apply for the gig. I got the job because I was a little bit well known and I am easy to get.
There were two other writers in the show, Ranbir Sidhu and Grant Baillie, each in his own house in the art gallery, and on weekends the public was invited to hear us read installments of the novels we were writing. We attracted quite a bit of press attention, and each week the crowds that came swelled. Celebrity chefs, some of whom were also artists using food as their medium, cooked dinners for us each night. The food tasted good, and the food looked good. We weren’t supposed to leave the Flux Factory for the month we were installed. We had a place to exercise, like a prison yard.
Before I entered the project, my friend Esther said, “You’ll hate it.” She meant living with other people and hearing their sounds. She meant the way people in the common bathrooms left water on the sinks and on the floor. I was happy the entire 30 days I was there. I didn’t have to ask myself, “What are you doing with yourself, and where are you going next?” When our time was up, I didn’t want to leave.
I want to tell you about the heartbreak of dismantling my beautiful house, and then I want to tell you about the joy of looking back at such an experience. Did I think I could write a novel in a month, or even a draft of one? Did I think I could write a novel in all the time I had left to live?
Thanksgiving, twenty years ago
I WALKED TO SUTTON PLACE, ALONG THE EAST RIVER. The water was flowing gently along, and yellow leaves on the bordering trees looked lit from within. Among the caterers were two actors, who were friends of mine, also a chef and her assistant, who, when he wasn’t cooking, sailed as a merchant marine for the European Union.
The menu included turkey, gravy, stuffing, two kinds of cranberry relish, mashed potatoes, haricots verts, baked lady apples, sweet potato compote with marshmallows, and miniature buttermilk and chive biscuits, baked in the shape of hearts. There were five kinds of passed hors d’oeuvres, including shrimp dumplings with spicy, plum dipping sauce. The desserts included individual tarts tatin and pumpkin pie with whipped cream, plus chocolate-dipped strawberries, petits fours, and cookies.
The guests were neither friendly nor unfriendly, neither rude nor gracious. We were two families of strangers, gathered in a common room. This kind of arrangement was not unusual for us. It was part of the freedom from obligation we had come there to feel.
We spent the day picking up conversations with each other. One of the actors had been in Austin for several months, performing in a play he liked. The ex-girlfriend of another actor was still calling her all the time. After serving dessert, we cleaned the place so it looked like we had never been there, the way you straighten your apartment after a lover leaves and you sit at your desk to begin work.
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Every sentence has a biography. Every sentence tells you about the life of the narrator through their vocabulary, their inclusion of foreign words, their syntax, grammar, and punctuation, their comic outlook, the music in their cadences. These elements swirl into a distinctive sound with the ability to seduce the reader into continuing. How do you make written language register with the immediacy and intimacy of spoken language?
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i love this line: "...we cleaned the place so it looked like we had never been there, the way you straighten your apartment after a lover leaves and you sit at your desk to begin work." ushering out one state of pleasure to make room for another. wishing you and mister toon a cozy thanksgiving. xc