Love Me (11 page)

I tried writing a piece about 44th Street when it rains and the taxis glisten as they race through the puddles and the hotel doormen hold their big umbrellas over the elderly couple looking anxiously up the street, late for their flight home to Cleveland, and decided that E. B. White did that sort of thing to perfection and why should I do a poor imitation?

I began a profile of Arthur Godfrey (“The man in the tan raincoat and the gray homburg who entered the Columbus Circle subway station was undistinguishable from any other straphanger until he asked the woman in the ticket booth if the uptown B train was still skipping its 81st Street stop on account of the construction project that has been going on there for most of the fall and she recognized one of the most familiar voices in the history of radio and said, ‘You’ll want to take the C train to 72nd and walk, Mr. Godfrey. It’s quicker, and it’s a nice day for a stroll.”’) only to realize that he’d been dead since 1983.

I thought about writing a profile of Robert E. Lee. Then I thought about Peggy Lee, and Lee Radziwill, Will Rogers, Rodgers and Hart, Huntington Hartford, Ford Madox Ford, Betty Ford, Earl Battey, Katherine Lee Bates, Kate Smith, Howard K. Smith, Maggie Smith, Sal Maglie, Sol Hoopii and His Royal Hawaiians, Jane Wyman, the YMCA. Jack Dempsey. Dumpsters. Teamsters. Hamsters. Hamilton Jordan. Jergens Lotion. The Locomotion. Perry Como. Barium. Syngman Rhee. Ralph Stanley. Stan Musial. The musical
Oklahoma.
Hummus. And so on.

I looked in the box that Salinger left, and it was not so different from any other New Yorker memoir. Tales of gloomy mild-mannered eccentrics and their tiny feuds and Ross loping down the hall and yelling, “God bless you, damn it! ” and Thurber’s noontime assignations at the Hotel Seymour and White’s agonies of revision and the tragedy of Liebling, who needed a big windfall success and never got one and worked himself to death. I couldn’t let Salinger ruin his reputation with this crap. I lifted the box up to the open window and let the pages waft out and flutter toward 44th Street. One line caught my eye as the page flew away—“Mr. Shawn threw Hemingway to the floor and got him in a leg scissors before calmer heads—” and then it was gone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Scorched, No sin to be aliterate. There’s a whole world out there that writers write about that you can discover for yourself. Cooking, travel, clinical depression, exile, self-destructive behavior, the accumulation of vast wealth, inappropriate romance, just to name seven. I’m on the other side of the canyon from you, a writer who is staring at a blank page and trying to figure out how to make a brick out of it. Someday, somebody should bring nonwriters together with nonreaders to see what they have to say to each other. I was okay. My candle still had two good ends left and I flapped around town like a fruit bat, hanging out with socialites and starlets and literati, feasting off publishers’ parties, hobnobbing, charming the pants off people, and was never in bed before 3 A.M.

Like any famous, or semifamous, author, I had loads of offers.

I was invited to guest on
Jeopardy,
to do the voice of Skeezix in a film adaptation of
Gasoline Alley,
to write 5,000 words about families for
Good Housekeeping,
to write 2,000 words about “My Most Unforgettable Parent” for
Reader’s Digest,
to write about Madagascar for
National Geographic,
to serve as honorary chairman of the White House Council on Storytelling, to narrate a documentary about Robert Scott’s race to the South Pole, to appear on the cover of
Newsweek
with children of different races, to tour Europe for the U.S. Information Agency and present lectures on the American Literary Heartland, to host a PBS show about “trends in culture” or “really, anything you want to do,” to write the text for a book of photographs of
Childhood Homes of American Writers,
to do commentary at the Winter Olympics, to appear on various TV shows, to host a salute to Phil and Don Everly at Carnegie Hall, to chair the Right to Read Music committee of the American Choral Association, to appear at benefits and to serve here and lecture there and write and host and spread the substance of my being like a grease stain across the breadth of America.

All I wanted to do was write something good for
The New Yorker
magazine.

One day, I wrote on a piece of paper: WHY DO I WRITE?

Mr. Shawn sent me a note:

Every day I awoke early and stood under the shower listening to WQXR and saying, “This is the day I run up two flights of stairs to Mr. Shawn’s office, with a piece of writing in my hand, and he reads it, jumps up, and gives me a big hug.” And I dressed in my black suit and white shirt and drank my coffee out on the terrace with a glance at the
Times
—no Iris to lecture me about the Palestinians—and headed out the door and hiked briskly south to 86th Street and caught the C train and stood at. the front of the front car, watching the track ahead as we careened between the rows of pilings and at 59th I switched to the B and hopped out at 42nd and strode briskly past the hot-dog vendors and the steel-drum guy playing “New York, New York” and went to 25 West 43rd and into the marble lobby and stood at the bank of elevators, thinking, I am from St. Paul, Minnesota, and I am going to work at my office at
The New Yorker.
Me. The little guy they used to call Weasel. My golfer parents in Palm Beach consider me a big fat loser, but I’m not. No, I’m not! Today is my big day! Today I am going to get a big hug.

 

 

Write about what you know. Somebody told me that back in college, I forget who.

So what do I know?

 

Today? Not much.

“You know more than you think you do,” said Dr. Spock.

Oh? Really? Maybe I’ll write about unaware knowledge then.

Write about danger. Sudden death in the afternoon.—A crowd lines up in front of Radio City Music Hall to purchase tickets to see Barry Manilow, and a bike messenger races the wrong way on a one-way street, and a nice man in a blue turtleneck steps backward off the curb to get a snapshot of his wife and her sister and
wham!!!!
It’s the last picture on this guy’s roll, he’s out of here, his body is shipped back to Sioux Falls, and who cares? You think about this often in Manhattan.
What if I fall down in the street with a nasty heart attack, will anyone notice, or what?

Write about beautiful women.

Women like Shahtoosh, a fact checker at
The New Yorker,
who wore ragged jeans and a T-shirt and a silk wrap shift lined with feathers from snowy owls sewn together with tinsel. It weighed fourteen ounces and cost $16,000. That’s what she said. I don’t know. Very soft to the touch. She put her head on my shoulder and told me I was the only man who understood her. She was from Buffalo, her birth name was Ethelyn Garber, she was doing coke big-time. I’d take her out to dinner, she’d lay her little mirror and sprinkle on the table and sprinkle the joy dust on it and stick the rolled-up dollar in her nose and snort. “You need to eat more than just breadsticks,” I said. But she was a fact checker and knew exactly what she needed.

Women like Fiona, with her shock of strawberry hair and green eyes and long sure stride, who I followed one Sunday morning for sixteen blocks down Fifth Avenue, mesmerized by her style and gait. Followed her into St. Thomas, a big gloomy church of rampant Gothicness and Anglitude on a Disneyean scale, the boy choir in their starched collars tootling in the stalls among the enervated clerical faces and the desiccated ladies with breadboard chests, the camphor mothball aroma, the whole raging Anglophilia of the place—the sermon that morning was “The Coat of Many Colours”—but I threaded my way through the crowd in pursuit of her, and then lost her and wandered off to the side, by a big yellow banner, JOYFULLY ENTER INTO HIS GATES, while the choir sang a
Benedictus
that struck me as highly erotic and then my elbow was touched and it was her. “Weren’t you following me?” she said. “Weren’t you wanting to start a conversation?” I nodded. “Then why did you give up? Is something wrong?”

“Do you come here often?” I said. She shook her head. “I came in here because I thought this was where you were headed.”

I’d never been stalked by a woman who was in front of me at the time, but that’s how they do it in New York.

 

 

 

Her body was all tan, no white zones. She lay face down on the bed and I dripped oil on her back and massaged her neck and shoulders and along her spine and down her legs, the soles of her little brown feet.

“I can’t believe I’m actually doing this,” I said. “I never do this sort of thing. I’m married, after all.”

“I don’t want to hurt anybody,” I added.

I study her fine backbone and shoulder blades and firm butt, with the tufted darkness below.

“Okay, let’s not hurt anybody,” she said. She sat up. “Let’s each stay home and pull the shades and read Flaubert and not hurt anybody. Let’s abstain from meat, and not wear nonunion clothing, and be sure our coffee beans come from growers who have signed the Golden Rule, and while we’re at it, let’s keep silent, and above all, let’s be celibate because, mister, you can’t have children and not hurt somebody.” She stood up and grabbed her clothes.

“No,” I said. “Don’t go. Lie down. I’ll lie beside you. If we hurt them, we hurt them.”

Such a cheerful lover. No shame or reluctance. She was enthusiastic and talked a blue streak and then as her pleasure mounted, she emitted a series of ululations, like yodeling in slow motion, and climaxed and cried, “Oh, what you do to me!” and shuddered to a stop. Afterward, we lay wrapped in white robes on the terrace and she said she was a psychiatrist. (“Is that a problem?” I saw no problem there at all. None.) She’d never been to Minnesota in her life, nor even to Chicago. She didn’t know the Lord’s Prayer, or
The Great Gatsby,
or
The Music Man.
She was the child of academics who summered every year in the Hebrides. I sang “‘ Til There Was You” and she was quite touched.

She asked what I did, and I said I was a writer, and she said, “What do you write?” and of course, she’d never heard of
Spacious Skies.
She didn’t read novels, she said. She found them too porous. She loved my terrace, though. And she thought I was a good lover. Better than expected. B-plus.

“So you had this in mind when you saw me walking down Fifth Avenue?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“Will I see you again?”

She thought about that.

“I have to tell you the truth,” she said.

I nodded.

“I would like to see you again but I’m afraid I might become attached.”

I pointed out that I was married.

She looked off in the distance for a long moment, weighing her words.

“It’s so easy for love to become habit, and before you know it you’re taking trips together and arguing about politics.”

“Politics doesn’t do much for me, erotically,” I said. “I’m a Democrat.”

“And then familiarity leads to the discovery of unsavory details. Beauty by its very nature is rare, and this beautiful afternoon would only be cheapened by repetition.”

So we parted. I wrote my phone number on her palm. She said she would think of me as she washed her hands.