When human experience slides off the scale, and the end of civilization threatens, only hard truths will do; and I was finding them sealed into the minimalist prose of French and Italian novelists of the fifties and sixties. Here, an eerie inwardness trapped in the prose resonated inside a suffusing silence that promised moral disorder of a serious nature. Ah yes, the reader feels. However it once was, that’s the way it is now.
Standing there on the island in the middle of Broadway, I realized what it was that we were losing: it was nostalgia. And then I realized that it was this that was at the heart of postwar fiction. It wasn’t sentiment that was missing from these novels, it was nostalgia. That cold, pure silence at the heart of modern European prose is the absence of nostalgia: an absence made available only to those who feel themselves standing at the end of history, staring, without longing or regret, into the is-ness of what is. Now, here in New York after 9/11, if only for the moment, we too stood, lined up with the rest of a world permanently postwar, staring into that cold, silent purity.
* * *
Late for an appointment in midtown, I run down the subway stairs just as the train is pulling into the Fourteenth Street station. The doors open and a young man standing in front of me (T-shirt, jeans, crew cut) with an elaborately folded-up baby carriage on his back, leading a very small child by the hand, heads for the seats directly ahead of us. I plop down on the one opposite him, take out my book and reading glasses, and, settling myself, am vaguely aware of the man removing the carriage from his back and turning toward the seated child. Then I look up. The little boy is about seven or eight, and he is the most grotesquely deformed child I have ever seen. He has the face of a gargoyle — mouth twisted to the side, one eye higher than the other — inside a huge, misshapen head that reminds me of the Elephant Man. Bound around the child’s neck is a narrow piece of white cloth, in the center of which sits a short, fat tube that seems to be inserted into his throat. In another instant I realize that he is also deaf. This last because the man immediately begins signing. At first, the boy merely watches the man’s moving fingers, but soon he begins responding with motions of his own. Then, as the man’s fingers move more and more rapidly, the boy’s quicken, and within minutes both sets of fingers are matched in speed and complexity.
Embarrassed at first to be watching these two so steadily, I keep turning away, but they are so clearly oblivious to everyone around them that I can’t resist looking up repeatedly from my book. And then something remarkable happens: the man’s face is suffused with such delight and affection as the boy’s responses grow ever more animated — the twisted little mouth grinning, the unaligned eyes brightening — that the child himself begins to look transformed. As the stations go by, and the conversation between the man and the boy grows ever more absorbing to them, fingers flying, both nodding and laughing, I find myself thinking, These two are humanizing each other at a very high level.
By the time we get to Fifty-Ninth Street, the boy looks beautiful to me, and the man beatific.
* * *
My mother had heart surgery. She emerged from the operation in a state of calm I’d never known her to possess. Criticism and complaint disappeared from her voice, grievance from her face. Everything was a matter of interest to her: negotiating the bus, the sunlight on her cheeks, the bread in her mouth. In a diner before we are due to take a bus ride across town, she sips her coffee appreciatively (usually she complains it’s not hot enough) and eats a pastry with relish. She sits back, beaming at me. Then she leans across the table and declares vehemently, “This is the best cheese Danish I have ever eaten.”
We leave the diner and walk to the bus stop. “Let’s stand here,” she says, pointing to a spot a few feet beyond the sign. “It used to throw me into a rage,” she explains, “that the driver would always pass the sign and stop here. I never understood why. But now I realize that it is actually easier for him to lower the step here for people like me than it is at the sign.” She laughs and says, “I’ve noticed lately that when I don’t get angry I have more thoughts than when I do. It makes life interesting.”
I nearly weep. All I had ever wanted was that my mother be glad to be alive in my presence. I am still certain that if she had been, I’d have grown up whole inside.
“Imagine,” I say to Leonard. “She’s so old and she can still do this to me.”
“It’s not how old she is that’s remarkable,” he says. “It’s how old you are.”
* * *
A month ago, I passed a middle-aged couple on the promenade at Battery Park City. She was black, he white; both had gray hair and wavy jawlines. They were holding hands and talking earnestly, their eyes searching each other’s faces for the answers to questions that only lovers put to each other. I realized, as I looked at them, that the city now contains a considerable number of middle-aged interracial couples. I’d been spotting them all over town for more than a year now, black men and white women, white men and black women, almost all of them in their forties or fifties, clearly in the first stages of intimacy. It moved me to be reminded once again of how long it is taking blacks and whites to become real to one another.
* * *
At ten in the morning, as I am standing on line in my branch library, waiting to check out a book, a frail-looking woman about my own age suddenly grasps the edge of the checkout desk and remains standing there. I lean forward from my place in the line and call out to her, “Is everything all right?” She glances wanly in my direction, then screams at me, “Why the hell are you asking me if everything is all right?”
At noon, waiting on the corner for the light to change, I look down and see a pair of shoes I think beautiful but complicated. “Are those shoes comfortable?” I inquire of the young woman wearing them. She backs off, looks at me with suspicion in her eyes, and in an alarmed voice says, “Why are you asking me that?”
At three in the afternoon, I pass a man who is yelling into the air, “Help me! Help me! I’ve got four uncurable diseases! Help me!” I tap him on the shoulder and cheerfully confide, “The word is incurable.” Without missing a beat, he replies, “Who the fuck asked you.”
The randomness of life being what it is, a few days later I have another “who the fuck asked you” day.
I’m sitting in an aisle seat on a crosstown bus. A man — black, somewhere in his forties, dressed in jeans and an oversize yellow T-shirt — is standing beside me, speaking very loudly into a cell phone.
I catch his eye and make a motion with my hand that means, “Lower your voice.” He looks amazed.
“Lower my voice?” he says incredulously. “No, madam, I will not lower my voice. I paid my fare, I’ll do what I damned please.”