But the essential humanity of Alice herself was not being served. Each time I came to visit, she looked exponentially more weary than the time before. She was of course now well over eighty-five and living on painkillers; the weariness, however, was, in the main, of the spirit not the body. After some months in the facility, I’d find her slumped in her chair, looking so exhausted that it would scare me. Nevertheless, I’d sit down on a chair facing hers and, without even asking how she was, start talking. Within minutes of hearing my voice, her face, her body, the movement of her hands, began coming back to life. Soon we were conversing about books and headlines and people we knew as animatedly as we ever did, minus the wrangling. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of that miraculous conversion. To see the engagement of a talented mind bring a half-dead person back to living liveliness was to witness a transformation that never felt less than magical.
“Is there no one here with whom you can have a conversation?” I once asked.
“No, dear,” Alice replied. “Chatter, yes. I get plenty of that. But conversation? No. Certainly not conversation like the one we are having.”
The small talk that daily filled her ears, she told me, was deadening. Worse than silence, she said. Much worse.
A mutual friend surprised me by remarking on how sad it was that Alice’s life should be winding down this way, by which our friend meant the failure of her marriage and the end of her literary career. But Alice’s losses late in life were not at all to the point as far as I was concerned. After all, she had had a very good time for many years — money, glamour, reputation, steady sex — so what if it didn’t see her through to the end? That was simply the roller-coaster ride of life common to us all, not actually a cause for sorrow. No, what mattered here was that Alice had spent a lifetime struggling to become a conscious human being whose primary delight was the use of her own mind; and now she was locked up in an atmosphere constructed to ignore — nay, discard — that long, valiant effort, when the only thing owed a human being — yes, from first to last — was to have it honored.
I felt the paltriness then of all my former complaints about this friendship. How mean and trivial they seemed; ignoble, really. All that mattered now was my friend’s consignment — when not reading — to an exile of the mind that amounted to solitary confinement. It was as though Alice were being found guilty of having stayed alive too long. How strongly I felt the punishment in excess of the crime!
Alice lived on in the facility for seven more years. At her funeral I discovered that the most unlikely people had also visited her regularly. I knew most of them en passant, and none, I thought, had been any closer to her than I had been — a Village feminist, a performance artist from SoHo, a cousin up in the Bronx, a program director at the public library — yet it seemed we had all shared in a fellowship devoted to the rescue of Alice-in-solitary.
An image crossed my mind then of a circle laid down on the surface of Manhattan, with lines radiating out from the middle to the periphery. At any given moment someone in the fellowship was walking one of those lines toward the center where Alice stood waiting. When the fellow reached her, the line lit up.
* * *
In summer, in the tenement neighborhoods on the West Side, men play dominoes at card tables set up on the pavement, women sit talking on the stoop, kids play ball, teenagers make love, and everywhere people drink, smoke, do drugs. I once saw a pig being roasted at midnight in the middle of the street because someone had won the lottery. Throughout the day and most of the night, men and women screech, sob, laugh, quarrel at a high pitch. Emotions are unfiltered here and race about without nuance or restraint.
One evening in July, walking down Ninth Avenue in the Forties, the street thronged with people, I saw a man and a woman standing perfectly still in the crowd. He was looking intently at her face and had a hand pressed to her arm. She, in turn, had her face twisted away from his, her eyes pressed shut, her mouth forming a wordless no. As I came abreast of them, I happened to look up and I saw a woman on a fire escape staring down with hot eyes at the man and the woman in the street, the pain in her face unmistakable. For a moment I was jealous of life in Hell’s Kitchen.
* * *
The street keeps moving, and you’ve got to love the movement. You’ve got to find the composition of the rhythm, lift the story from the motion, understand and not regret that the power of narrative drive is fragile, though infinite. Civilization is breaking up? The city is deranged? The century surreal? Move faster. Find the story line more quickly.
On the Sixth Avenue bus, I get up to give an old woman my seat. She’s small and blond, wearing gold jewelry and a ratty mink coat, her hands a pair of blotchy claws with long red fingernails attached to them. “You did a good thing, dear,” she says to me, and smiles coyly. “I’m ninety years old. I was ninety yesterday.” I smile at her. “You look fantastic,” I say, “not a day over seventy-five.” Her eyes flash. “Don’t get smart,” she says.
At a coffee counter, two women sit talking at right angles to me. One is telling the other that a woman they both know is sleeping with a much younger man. “We all tell her, he wants your money.” The woman speaking nods her head like a rag doll and lets her face go daffy in imitation of the woman she’s speaking of. “‘Right,’ she tells us, ‘and he can have it, all of it.’ Meanwhile, she looks great.”
At Forty-Second Street, a man in front of me — skinny, young, black — suddenly lies down spread-eagle in the middle of the street just as the cars are beginning to move. I turn wildly to the man walking beside me, who, as it happens, is also skinny, young, black, and cry out at him, “Why is he doing this?” Without breaking his stride, he shrugs at me. “I don’t know, lady. Maybe he’s depressed.”
Each day when I leave the house, I tell myself I’m going to walk up the East Side of town because the East Side is calmer, cleaner, more spacious. Yet I seem always to find myself on the crowded, filthy, volatile West Side. On the West Side life feels positively thematic. All that intelligence trapped inside all those smarts. It reminds me of why I walk. Why everyone walks.
* * *
When I was eight years old my mother cut a piece out of a dress I had been longing to wear to a friend’s birthday party. She grabbed a pair of sewing scissors and sliced the part of the dress that would have covered my heart if, as she said, I had had one. “You’re killing me,” she always howled, eyes squeezed shut, fists clenched, when I disobeyed her or demanded an explanation she couldn’t supply or nagged for something she wasn’t going to give me. “Any minute now I’ll be dead on the floor,” she screamed that day, “you’re so heartless.” Needless to say, I did not go to the party. Instead I cried for a week and grieved over the incident for fifty years.
“How could you do that to a child?” I asked in later years, once when I was eighteen, again when I was thirty, yet again when I was forty-eight.
The odd thing was that each time I raised the incident my mother would say, “That never happened.” I’d look at her then, more scornfully each time, and let her know in no uncertain terms that I was going to go on reminding her of this crime against childhood until one of us was dead.