But Isabel! The poor dear woman. She stared at me in terror, and then she began to cry great rolling tears of grief. “My cats!” she sobbed. “My Delft platter.” She ran into the bathroom, slammed the door and locked it. I stood motionless, staring at the carrots on the floor, at the chips of china. The cats had disappeared. I shrugged, got a can of cat food from a shelf and opened it.
We were civil with one another after that one, walking on eggshells for about three days. Once, for no apparent reason, Isabel began to cry while reading her Hamlet. The air of the little apartment was thick with grief; I had no idea how to cut through it. On the fourth day I told Isabel I was going to move to the Pierre. She smiled faintly and said, “That might be best.”
It was early May when I moved out, packing up all I had lived with during the winter into one Synlon bag, paying off a few of Isabel’s major bills—her rent, the telephone bill, the winter assessment—before I left. She was at a rehearsal at the time. When I signed the checks my hand shook and I cursed at it for shaking. Another goddamned unreliable member. I looked around the place, nodded with controlled civility to the sleeping cats, bent down to pick up a two-dollar piece I had dropped on the floor probably a week before, sighed melodramatically, and left.
It was a surprisingly warm day and I had my heavy mackinaw unbuttoned as I walked up Park Avenue. There was a nice sense of life and bustle, with a lot of horses and a few methane taxis in the streets and people bicycling happily. My spirits picked up. I began to whistle.
Half the people on the street were Chinese. By midsummer New York always seems to be a Chinese city, a kind of cultural suburb of Peking. The Russians are ahead of everybody else at heavy industry; the art comes from Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro; the political life in Aberdeen and Hangchow is far more lively than New York’s; and if you want to make a really big business arrangement you go to Peking, the world’s richest city. But New York is still New York, even with its elevators not working and a total of one hundred fifty taxis permitted to operate (Peking has thousands, they are electric powered and have leather upholstery). But Peking is still a stodgy businessman’s city, with all the old China erased from its neoclassical architecture. The Chinese come to New York for the civilized life. New York is the major city of a second-rank power, of a country whose time is slipping away; but it still has a bounce you don’t find anywhere else. There are restaurants with white tablecloths, with waiters in tuxedos that look like they came from the last century, and, however they beer-feed and hand-rub their fat old steers in Japan, the Kansas City steak served in a New York restaurant, with the dim lights and the polished wooden bar and the tuxedoed waiters, is still one of the delights of the world. And New York theater is the only theater to hold anybody’s interest for long; American music is the most sophisticated in the world. The Chinese are still, behind those stuffy facades, the greatest gamblers on earth and the trickiest businessmen; they’ve accommodated their ideology and their asceticism of the last century to their present wealth with the ease of the Renaissance Popes; they are Communists the way Cesare Borgia was a Christian. And they love New York.
The Pierre is a grand place and I know its people well. I moved in there first when I was twenty-three and working on downhill mergers; the same man still tends bar in the afternoons and he calls me Ben. His name’s Dennis. I always ask about his kids. He has a son in the wood business in North Carolina; his daughter runs the office at the Jane Fonda Theatre. The manager says they’re going to name my suite the Belson Suite someday and I tell him I’m all for it, that it’ll make it easier to get my mail if there’s a plaque on the door. They always have fresh flowers for me when I move in. What the hell, something deep in me likes to live in hotels, to be ready to check out at any time. To live by the day and pay by the day.
I had an appointment that afternoon with Orbach, up on Eightieth Street. I looked over the suite, smelled the flowers, called Henri Bendel’s to order my cooking pots, and decided to walk to Orbach’s and pick up a few cookbooks on the way. Maybe there would be spring vegetables in, from the South, if the Mafia wasn’t in disarray from its quarrels. I called a couple of lawyers and gave them my phone number and left.
Walking up Third Avenue, I found myself looking in store windows, not at cookbooks but at clocks. I was doing that a lot these days, developing a fascination with timepieces, with the passing of time. I noticed birthdays as I never had, would remember trivial things that had happened on a given day a year before. This started when I turned fifty. I was becoming aware that my days are numbered, that I am going to die and rot like everybody else and that I’d better get my ass in gear if I want to live my life as Ben Belson and not as some fucked-over replica of my father. I know I’ve made a lot of money and fame for myself, have traveled everywhere, have bedded a lot of women and eaten a lot of the world’s best food, and my father did none of those things. But for twenty years something in my soul has been on HOLD, waiting, going through the motions of having a filled and good life but inside feeling morose and sullen. And there, looking at clocks in yet another Third Avenue window, I was waiting for the time to run out, waiting to join my father in the underground brigade—to terminate, with the smell of wet earth.
And, realizing that, or some of it, I was seized with anger of a kind I hadn’t felt in years. I wanted to rush into the store and smash every clock in the place. Instead, I went in and bought a Chinese wristwatch. I’m wearing it now, here on Belson. I am an eccentric in many small ways; this watch is the first I’ve ever owned. Now that I have time to reckon with.
A voice in me cries desperately, Hurry, Ben!
Looking back on it, I can see that picnic on Juno was a turning point for me. I have become even more of a hermit now than ever before; but something happened there on Juno that moved a big chunk of the gray old glacier inside. In college I never sat around and drank with my classmates; if I were with two or more people at a time something became stiff in my soul. I did not hate people; I never have. But there was a coldness in me that would, to my despair at times, cut me off from my fellows. Somehow it dropped from me at that picnic and I felt an easy comfort in the presence of the crew that I had never felt before. Mimi sang “Downtown” and “Michigan Water Blues,” and I drank red wine from a passed-around bottle and lay back on that moist grass in the grape-flavored air; I would look at the faces of the crew and silently beam. Sometimes between songs everybody would be silent, listening to the quiet, papery sounds of those extraterrestrial leaves blowing in that fruity breeze, feeling the rich, oxygen-laden air on our cheeks. I thought from time to time of Juno herself, the original Juno who slept on hay and whose massive nostrils exhaled steamed horse breath into the Ohio night air at my side, and some of the deep old fondness I felt for her was transferred to this new and generous planet and to the people, mostly young, who lay about on its spongy and inviting surface with me.