I’m walking up Fifth Avenue at noon straight into the cold hard sunlight of a morning in November. Mobs of people are coming at me. Once the dominating color of this crowd was white, now it is black and brown. Once it wore blue and white collars, now it is in mufti. Once it was law-abiding, now it is not. The idiom has changed, but the character remains stable. Every now and then I see a face and a figure mixed in among the regulation jeans and parkas — something narrow faced and creamy skinned in glossy furs (Paris, 1938); something swarthy and dangerous in island Spanish (Cuba, 1952); something sloe-eyed and timeless (Egypt, 4000 B.C.) — and I am reminded of the enduring nature of the crowd. New York belongs to me as much as it does to them: but no more so. We are all here on Fifth Avenue for the same reason and by virtue of the same right. We have all been walking the streets of world capitals forever: actors, clerks, criminals; dissidents, runaways, illegals; Nebraska gays, Polish intellectuals, women on the edge of time. Half of these people will be lost to glitter and crime — disappearing into Wall Street, hiding out in Queens — but half of them will become me: a walker in the city; here to feed the never-ending stream of the never-ending crowd that is certainly imprinting on someone’s creativity.
* * *
Leonard and I are passing a bookstore. In its window we see a display of a book on cosmetic surgery written by a woman I know.
“She’s only forty-two,” I say. “Why is she writing about cosmetic surgery?”
“Maybe she’s seventy,” Leonard says. “What do you know?”
* * *
A writer of my acquaintance (I’ll call her Alice) was felled at eighty-five by infirmity. Arthritis had attacked her from head to toe and left her so crippled that she had herself admitted to an assisted living facility in upper Manhattan. Composed of about a hundred studio apartments, a complete set of common rooms, a bright and airy dining room, the facility was both comfortable and attractive. Equipped (as it was) with excellent care, the place at first seemed a dream come true: a worthy woman laid low was being admirably attended to in her hour of need. But this facility was run by a development company heavily supported by federal moneys: which meant that differences in class, wealth, and education were reduced to accommodate a culture of the lowest common denominator. Therein lay the tale of a dream gone bad.
Alice, who was some twenty years older than me, had been a writer of reputation thirty years before the time I knew her. When I was in college my friends and I read her novels with interest and admiration. She was also glamorous. A slender woman with marvelous hair and great taste in clothes, she had a handsome husband, a house in the Hamptons, and an apartment in the Dakota. I didn’t get to know her until she was nearly eighty, by which time her fortunes had reversed themselves. Her books were no longer being published, her husband had left her, and she was living in a residence for women.
Ours was one of those peculiar friendships based not on shared sensibility, but on the complications of emotional need. Shortly after Alice and I met I found that I actually didn’t like her. Her mind was alert, her mental energy intact, and her desire for conversation as alive as it had ever been. It was her manner (haughty), her politics (conservative), her literary taste (middlebrow) that put me off. We were both hot-tempered, so our conversations often dissolved in a wrangle of irritated disagreement, and more often than not I went home feeling both guilty and ashamed. Nonetheless, we continued to call ourselves friends. She badly needed an interlocutor who knew who she was, I badly needed to go on paying tribute to a writer who’d once meant a great deal to me.
I went to visit Alice two weeks after she entered the assisted living facility. The lobby, painted a soft yellow and furnished with brightly colored sofas and love seats, did have a few slack-faced women and men sitting listlessly about — Not a good omen, passed through my head — but the studio apartment that Alice had been given was lovely. Flooded with light and furnished in excellent taste, it seemed perfect: everything close to hand and good to look at. Alice herself seemed as well as a woman in constant pain could be. I asked how she was, and in ten minutes she told me. Then she said, “Enough of that,” and she meant it. In no time we were talking as we always had about books, people we knew, that day’s headlines. At five thirty she said, “Time for dinner.” I helped her out of her chair and handed her her cane; as we left the apartment, I remember thinking that she — tall, dignified, well dressed — was looking particularly alert.
The door to the dining room opened, and I nearly went into shock. The room was a forest of wheelchairs, walkers, and canes, most of the people attached to them looking as slack-jawed as those I’d seen in the lobby. As cheerfully painted and furnished as the room itself was, a look of dereliction — even destitution — suffused the place. It was the destitution of people who had been flung together simply because they were old and physically incapacitated.
Without a word, Alice guided me to two empty chairs at a table for six. The other four chairs were occupied by two men and two women, all of whom were silent. When we sat down their faces brightened and one of the men said, “Ah, here’s Alice. She’ll tell us what the right and the wrong of the matter is.”
The matter turned out to concern an appetizer that had been wrongly delivered to Monica, the ninety-year-old redhead dressed in purple print polyester, when it should have gone to Minna, whose mouth trembled and whose blue eyes were awash in anxiety. It seemed that when Minna had asked the waitress to bring another appetizer for her, she was told that Monica was eating the last one. Here Minna had gone into free fall and had been insisting repeatedly that the dish should have come to her, not to Monica, it wasn’t fair, it just wasn’t fair. Alice instantly soothed Minna by telling her that it definitely was not fair, but that life itself was not fair, so experiencing this lack of fairness once again was proof that she was still alive; that alone should make her grateful. Minna’s face broke into an enchanting smile, and the crisis was over.
A few weeks later I was again in the dining room with Alice, and again I witnessed people turning to her to adjudicate a dispute similar to the one that had involved Minna and Monica. This time it was an argument over a movie that had sent the whole table into a spin. “It’s so interesting, don’t you think?” Alice said to me as we left the room. I nodded silently. “The extraordinary things one learns about human behavior in a place like this,” she said.
Possessed now of a stoic character I had never before seen in action, Alice was becoming a beloved figure in the facility. She had decided to take an interest in her surroundings, and her novelist’s delight in the oddities of humanity at large had come to her aid. As a result, her old above-the-fray manner now came across as Solomonic. For the volatile residents of this place, the gravity of Alice’s manner endowed her with a wisdom they instinctively felt they could trust. What’s more, she was a genuine lady, wasn’t she, the kind who honored the essential humanity of every person who crossed her field of vision. When Alice entered the dining room, people she didn’t know smiled and nodded at her as she passed.