The Odd Woman and the City (15 page)

The brilliance of
Gypsy
—the story of a celebrated stripper and her outrageous mother—lies in its point of view. It is a point of view that makes you hear Jule Styne's music “twice,” delighting the first time around in the childish cynicism of “Let Me Entertain You,” cringing the second time at its shocking contempt.

Rose moves forward blindly, alienating everyone with the speed and power of her need, at the same time dragging them along behind her. No one—including herself—is real to her, yet each goodbye is an intolerable loss. Toward the end, when even the devoted Herbie is finally leaving her, Rose is so confused she cries out, “You're jealous, like every other man I've ever known. Because my girls come first!” This at the moment when she is about to push her daughter Louise onto a burlesque stage, hissing at her, “You'll promise them everything, and give them nothing.” Within seconds Louise will become the Gypsy Rose Lee who comes out onstage announcing, “My mother got me into this business. She said, ‘Promise them everything and give them nothing.'” Then she looks mockingly at the deranged men salivating in front of her, and tells them, “But I'll give you everything. Only you have to beg.” Before our eyes an even greater monster is born.

The moment is stark. We see what the play has been driving toward all along: the human fallout of Rose's deracinated hunger.

Now, decades later, I look around me when
Gypsy
reaches “Rose's Turn.” There are so many young faces (black as well as white, boys as well as girls) looking as my own had once looked: eyes shining, mouths open, screaming, “Yes, yes, yes!” I feel my own face congealing as theirs grow ever more mobile, and I find myself thinking, There's no way around this one, there is only the going through it.

It's the gene for anarchy, alive in everyone born into the wrong class, the wrong color, the wrong sex—only in some it stays quiescent, while in some it makes a holocaust—no one knows this better than me.

In the 1970s, at a time when social unhappiness seemed to be erupting all over the United States, and thousands in America were adopting the speech and tactics of antisocial rebellion, I joined in the raging intemperateness of exploding radical feminism: “Marriage is an institution of oppression!” “Love is rape!” “Sleeping with the enemy!” When I think back on it, I realize that we, the feminists of the seventies and eighties, had become primitive anarchists. We didn't want reform, we didn't even want reparations; what we wanted was to bring down the system, destroy the social arrangement, no matter the consequence. When asked (as we were, repeatedly) “What about the children? What about the family?” we snarled (or roared), “Fuck the children! Fuck the family! This is the moment to declare our grievance, and make others feel it as we do. What comes later is not our concern.”

Here we were, women of the law-abiding middle class sounding, at this crucial moment of unmediated revolt, like professional insurrectionists, when in reality we were just Rose, demanding our turn.

Watching
Gypsy
, the word
just
leaves me with the taste of ashes in my mouth.

*   *   *

The other day I thought I saw Johnny Dylan sitting on a bench in Madison Square Park. Impossible, of course, as he's dead, but the moment was so vivid that it put me instantly in mind of what in my life he had come to signify.

Ten or fifteen years ago, we were forever running into each other somewhere in the neighborhood—either on Greenwich Avenue, or in Sheridan Square, or at the corner of Fifth and Fourteenth—and when we did we'd both come to an instant halt. I'd say hello, he'd bob his head, and for a moment we'd stand there beaming at each other. After that I'd say, “How are ya?” and wait calmly while Johnny's voice struggled to find a register in which, one by one, the syllables could free themselves to become words no longer strangling in his throat.

It was John Dylan who taught me how to wait. He was in his sixties then, smaller and much thinner than he'd once been, but his blue eyes were lit with a beautiful kind of gravity and his narrow face imprinted with the wisdom of inflicted patience. Sometimes the quiet trapped in that patience seemed immense, and it would flash through me how much more alone he was than even the rest of us.

He had had a stroke that had left him aphasic and had effectively ended one of the most impressive acting careers in the New York theater. In the eighties and nineties, the Public Theater had been his territory and Beckett monologues his signature work. Doleful and magisterial, it had been the work of a man in superb control of the material. After the stroke, John pulled himself back from the dead through an act of disciplined will that spoke directly to how art—both in spirit and in body—really gets made; but no one thought ever again to hear the great Irish playwright's words emerging from that twisted mouth.

Johnny had lived for years in Westbeth, the Bell Laboratories building in the Village that had been converted in 1970 into subsidized artists' housing. The place takes up a square block, its backside facing the West Side Highway and the Hudson River—John's studio apartment had a river view—and it contains a population of painters, dancers, and writers, many of whom would have been on welfare times without number if not for the low Westbeth rent.

I've always thought those river apartments reflect the alternating surges of promise and desolation that the building itself seems to induce. On a Saturday night in spring, with the current moving swiftly in the open windows, boats outlined in lights, high-rises glowing across the water, laughter in the hallways beyond the studio door, these rooms are infused with a sense of New York everlasting; then again, on a Sunday afternoon in winter, with the river gray and frozen, not a human being in sight, and the city an abstraction, the same space fills up with an overpowering solitariness that seems to echo through what now feels like miles of vacant corridors on the other side of the door.

One day a few years before he died, I received an invitation to a seven o'clock reading by John Dylan to be held in his Westbeth studio apartment. What on earth? I thought, and went. When I arrived I found twenty or thirty people sitting on folding chairs lined up in rows, facing the river. At a space between the windows stood a round wooden table and a chair; on the table, a gooseneck lamp and a sheaf of manuscript. I found a seat in a middle row, one in from the book-lined wall to my right.

At seven o'clock Johnny came forward and sat down in the chair between the windows. He placed his hands on the manuscript and looked out at us for a moment. The room went dark except for the pool of light shining down on the table, and John began to read from Beckett's monologue
Texts for Nothing
. His voice—unlike the voice I usually heard on the street—was now remarkably steady and did not sound at all like the voice of an actor reading. It sounded, instead, like that of a man speaking directly from the heart.

“Suddenly, no, at last, long last,” John said quietly, “I couldn't any more, I couldn't go on. Someone said, You can't stay here. I couldn't stay there and I couldn't go on … How can I go on … It's simple, I can do nothing any more, that's what you think. I say to the body, Up with you now, and I can feel it struggling, struggling no more, struggling again, till it gives up. I say to the head, Leave it alone, stay quiet, it stops breathing, then pants on worse than ever … I should turn away from it all, away from the body, away from the head, let them work it out between them, let them cease, I can't, it's I would have to cease. Ah yes, we seem to be more than one, all deaf, gathered together for life.”

We all sat up straighter in our folding chairs, and the many little movements of an audience not yet engaged came to an abrupt halt. Into the expanded silence John spoke again, but, abruptly, his strong start began to lose momentum, and the instability that haunts his speech came creeping back. His voice began to go up when it should have gone down, to crack when it should have stayed firm, rush forward when it should have held back. Yet, surprisingly, on this night the unreliability did not jar, and the performance remained absorbing. Slowly, I realized that this was because John wasn't fighting the loss of control. It was as if he had known it would be coming and had figured out a survival tactic in advance. He would go with it, ride it, in fact make use of wherever it landed him.

“How long have I been he-e-e-ere?” he screeched when I was certain the script called for dullness of tone—and the screech felt right.

“What-a-question,” he rushed on. “An-hour-a-month-a-year-a-century, depending on what I meant by here, and me, and being and there”—and the speed became exciting.

Repeatedly, he moved into the skid. Wherever his voice wanted to go, he let it go; whatever it wished to do, he let it do. And Beckett accommodated him. Beckett's words danced, climbed, crawled, to make the sense that Johnny's voice needed to make of them, and the work remained compelling. Starting, stopping, jerking about, starting up again, the piece began to sound as if it had been written for this very reading.

Then a man in a seat near the wall reached out toward the bookcases and turned a switch on a tape machine. Suddenly, John's voice of twenty years earlier, reading the same monologue, flooded the room. That mannered vibrancy—the unmistakable sound of “Beckett acting” in full command of itself—washed over the company.

“I've given myself up for dead all over the place,” the forty-year-old John intoned with magisterial dolefulness, “of hunger, of old age, murdered, drowned, and then for no reason, of tedium, nothing like breathing your last to put new life in you…” The voice on the tape paused, and we did not doubt that “pause” was written in the script. “Above is the light,” it went on, “the elements, a kind of light, sufficient to see by, the living find their ways…” It paused again and confided elegantly, “To have suffered under that miserable light, what a blunder.”

At the table between the windows, above the pool of lamplight, John's face glistened with sweat. The tape machine switched off, and in a strangled whisper the man at the table spat out, “And if I went back to where all went out and on from there, no, that would lead nowhere, never led anywhere, I tried throwing me off a cliff, collapsing in the street, in the midst of mortals, that led nowhere, I gave up … Dribble on here till time is done, murmuring every ten centuries, It's not me, it's not true, it's not me, I'm far … Quick, quick before I weep.”

The tape switched back on.

“I don't know,” the intact John observed. “I'm here, that's all I know, and that it's still not me, it's of that the best has to be made … Leave all that, to want to leave all that, not knowing, what that means, all that.”

The machine went off.

“Where would I go,” the man at the table croaked, his face now bathed in sweat. “If I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it's me?” He stopped. “It's not me…” Stopped again. “It's not me … what a thought … There is only me, this evening, here on earth, and a voice that makes no sound because it goes towards none.” Stop. “No need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.” Stop. “I'm making progress.” Stop. “I am here.” Stop. “I stay here, sitting, if I'm sitting, often I feel sitting, sometimes standing, it's one or the other, or lying down, there's another possibility, often I feel lying down, it's one of the three, or kneeling.” Stop.

“What counts is to be in the world, the posture is immaterial, so long as one is on earth. To breathe is all that is required.” Stop. “Yes, there are moments, like this moment, when I seem almost restored to the feasible. Then it goes, all goes, and I'm far again … I wait for me afar for my story to begin.”

And so on to the end, the dramatic, knowing voice of the forty-year-old John Dylan continually up against the cracked, exalted one of the Dylan who by now had lived Beckett's script.

Outside, the river ran dark and turbulent; across the water, banks of high-rise light shot into the sky; in the hall beyond the studio door, three people were having a neighborly argument. The water, the lights, the words in the hallway: all seemed to group themselves around the small, drained figure bowing in front of the wooden table without touching it. The figure itself remained gloriously solitary: beyond pain, pleasure, or threat. I knew that I had been hearing Beckett—really hearing him—for the first time.

*   *   *

It was a cold, clear morning in March. Having just finished interviewing a city official for a piece I was writing, I was sitting at the counter of a coffee shop across the street from City Hall, drinking coffee, eating a bagel, and writing down remembered snatches of the conversation I'd just had when a man sat down one stool away from me. He wore dark pants and a tweed jacket, looked to be in his fifties, and I took him to be a middle-rank civil servant. When I had finished eating, drinking, and writing, I stood up, and as I was gathering myself together, he said to me, “I hope you won't mind, I haven't been able to read a word you're writing, but I'd like to tell you some things I know about you from your handwriting.” Startled, I said, “Sure, go ahead.” I took a better look at him then and saw that he wore a large Native American turquoise-and-silver ring and a string tie. He leaned toward me and said slowly but intently, “You're generous. That is, you are inclined to be generous, but circumstances don't allow you to be. So you're often not. You're assertive. And a bit aggressive. And that small script … you're very literate, very intelligent.” I stared at him for a fraction of a second. “Thanks,” I said. “That's a fine flattering portrait you've drawn.” He looked relieved that I wasn't somehow offended. Then I said, “Is my handwriting really so small?” He nodded and said yes, it was, and small handwriting, he repeated, is the mark of the very intelligent. Of course, he added (very softly), there are people who have much smaller handwriting, and they … “Are the mad or the brilliant,” I said, finishing his sentence for him. He paused. “Yes,” he said, again softly, “they're often very brilliant.” I stood there, looking steadily, perhaps even gravely, at him. He smiled and said, “Oh, don't worry, my handwriting is twice as large as yours.” I
did
burst out laughing then, but the remark kept crawling around under my skin for the whole rest of that day.