I was hungry and I envisioned food of delectable piquancy, served in luxurious surroundings by punctilious and servile waiters. I would order veal, possibly venison, perhaps duck. But I did not yet want to become stationary, however tempting and elegant the atmosphere. I would walk now, but where? I had almost three hours to spend before meeting Giselle. I’d told her to meet me about three o’clock in an Irish bar on Sixth Avenue, not far from her point of rendezvous with the editors of the greatest picture magazine in the world. Should I now walk north to Central Park, embrace the natural world of trees, of soft spring earth and new greenery, or weave my way among the sumptuous lobbies and cafés of the hotels on Central Park South? No, I longed for something grander and with more verve than those, something even more poetic than nature.
I strode southward on the avenue and knew the instant pleasure that came from the high elegance of the windows of the great stores. In Saks’ window I saw a suit that I instantly coveted, a double-breasted gray glen plaid, one of the grandest-looking suits I’d ever seen. In the window of The Scribner Book Store I found two books that suited my mood: Life Is Worth Living by Fulton Sheen and The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, wise men both. I would buy both books when I had the money. I turned, decided to say hello to Jesus at St. Patrick’s Cathedral; and I remembered the flustered Methodist cleric who protested to his Irish taxi driver that he had asked not for St. Patrick’s, but for Christ’s Church, and the driver advised him, “If you don’t find him here he’s not in town.” There’s verve.
I crossed the avenue at 49th Street and walked west between the British Empire building and La Maison Française toward the sunken plaza in Rockefeller Center. I stopped and read the credo of the great John D. Rockefeller, Jr., carved into a slab of polished black marble: “I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man’s word should be as good as his bond; that character — not wealth or power or position — is of supreme worth.” Wonderful. And more: “I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free. . I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world. .” And so do I, John, so do I.
I continued my walk through the Center, the greatest concentration of urban buildings in the world. I remembered coming here with Peter when I was a child to see the tallest Christmas tree in the world. I followed my shoes and found myself in the lobby of the Time-Life building, home to the greatest concentration of magazines in the world, and considered going up to the office where Giselle was being seduced away from me, but descended instead into the underground world of Rockefeller Center, the most labyrinthine subterranean city since the catacombs, passing stores and restaurants and murals and sculpture, far more exciting to a refined sensibility than any underground passageway anywhere, including Mammoth Cave, or the sewers of Paris. I took a stairway up into the RCA building, home to the greatest radio and television networks in the world (and next door the Associated Press building, home to the greatest news service in the world). Nothing in urban, suburban, or rural history could compare with this achievement, and as I moved through the magnificent corridors I noted shining brass everywhere: in the floors, the hand railings, the revolving doors; and the thought of the cost of such elegance exalted me.
The very idea of selfless munificence in the service of the architectural imagination was surely a pinnacle in the history of man’s capacity to aspire. And aspire I did, assuming the poetry of all this grandeur into my eyes, my ears, my sense of smell, the poetry of man the master builder, the poetry of man who climbed to the skies with his own hands, the poetry of Babel refined into godly and humanistic opportunity and respect and mortar and stone and endeavor and joy and love and money and thickness and breadth and luxury and power and piety and wonder and French cuisine and the American novel and jazz music and (oh yes, Meriwether, oh yes) the naked titties of ten thousand women. Oh the immensity of it all!
I taxied back to the apartment where Giselle and I were staying and, from the desk where our host kept his financial records, expropriated two checkbooks, two dozen of the host’s business cards, several letters that would verify my identity if the business cards and the checkbooks did not, assorted press credentials from the U.S., West Germany, the Soviet Union, Brazil, and an Arab nation whose name I did not immediately recognize, all identifying the owner as a writer for Life magazine. I folded these items into one of the host’s several empty breast-pocket wallets, dialed the number at Life Giselle had given me, and left a message for her: “Meet me at either the Palm Court or the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel, the greatest hotel in America, when you are free,” and I then set out in further quest of poetry and verve.
The first thing I did was register and establish my credit with the Plaza’s front desk, then equip myself with ready cash. I engaged a corner suite that looked out on Fifth Avenue, Central Park, and the Grand Army Plaza, and then I descended to Fifth Avenue and on to Saks, where I bought three new shirts and ties, pocket handkerchiefs, shoes, belt, socks, and the gray glen plaid suit I’d seen in the window; but I would accept it all, I told the clerk, only if alterations were done within the hour (cost not an obstacle) and delivered to my suite at the Plaza, which they were.
I bought two pounds of Barricini chocolates for Giselle, and back at the suite ordered two dozen yellow roses from the hotel florist and four bottles of her favorite French wines from room service. I went back downstairs and explored the lobby, found the Palm Court too crowded, sought out an empty corner of the Oak Bar, and ordered my first drink in five and a half months, a Scotch on the rocks with water on the side. I sipped it with care, waiting for my system to feel the first alcoholic rush of the new year, and wondering if Dr. Tannen’s prophecy would be correct: that, should I ever again drink alcohol, the flood controls of my brain would let the madness cascade back into my life.
I affirmed my disbelief in this diagnosis with another sip of whiskey, and only then did I look about me at this walnut-dark, wood-paneled male saloon, with its murals out of the storied past of the Plaza — a horse and carriage in a snowstorm in front of the old hotel, water spilling out of the fountain’s dish while a full moon is all but covered by clouds. By the light from the room’s wall sconces and copper windows this country’s Presidents, giants of capital, movie stars, and great writers had drunk for half a century. I recognized no one. I took another sip and knew the ease that drink had always provided me, a flow of juices that wakened dormant spirits and improbable values. The first sips alone did this. Consider, then, the potential of an entire bottle.
For months I had not seen anybody through the auroral brilliance that those summoned juices could generate. My life had been repetitive rituaclass="underline" rise from narrow bed, dress in sordid clothing, eat meagerly and without relish, go out into the world to edit a book you loathe, confront what you now knew to be an unpublishable novel of your own making, come home in darkness to reinhabit your father’s bohemian gloom, and write your daily letter to Giselle.
I knew the danger of imposing too much trivia on my letters and so, one by one, I outlined the lives of my putative relatives to her, also wrote her short essays on the values assorted poets and writers imparted to the world, even if they never published a word. The task, of itself, I wrote her, was holy, the only task atheists could pursue that was buoyed by the divine afflatus. As for myself, the afflatus was flatulent.