not The Island of the Blue Dolphins. And they smelled of Herbal Essence, not the stone halls of the Cloisters, where we drifted about in states of mystical transport on Sunday afternoons.
We longed for adventure, and the revelation of one’s true inner identity, which had nothing to do with the face in the mirror or popularity or grades, but with the crown tips of letters themselves and the perpetual twilight in the original old-growth forest maintained deep in the Botanical Gardens—leaf-mold scent drifting up, shadow doorways appearing and vanishing.
My friends and I passed around Act One by Moss Hart, a Bronx boy who ended up living at the Waldorf. His wife, Kitty Carlisle, on To Tell the Truth, always clasped an invisible martini in her hand. You’d never have known she’d been raised Cohen. My friend Stacy’s father brought us all to the Tiki Room at the Plaza for her eleventh birthday, and we ate with chopsticks and sipped virgin pineapple blender drinks, and the reek of the Bunsen burners was the most sophisticated scent I’d ever inhaled.
The other patrons glowered. We were a table of shrieky girls. I longed to be a grown-up with a long white cashmere dress like the woman across the room, for a man to notice me through the candlelight. And yet the theatricality of the marble-corridored hotel made me consider the presence of its invisible author—the person who put the waiters in tuxes and who arranged the palms in the Palm Court, where a storybook girl ate lunch. Even then it seemed clear that Manhattan was composed and calculated, like a wildly concocted plot, but that I would get to play a part in it merely by maturing, as if the city were something I would grow into like a shoe.
Every other issue of New York magazine in those days—the early seventies—carried, it seemed, a cover story about a housewife with a secret life. This one hung out with drug addicts. This one posed for girlie pix. It seemed clear that to live in New York was to have a secret life, and it was only a matter of getting older and finding out what yours would be. Who needed the unconscious? New York was the unconscious. Waiting for my friend Emily outside Hunter Junior High, I asked a man, “Do you have the time?” “If you’ve got the place,” he answered. I swiveled my head away and let my eyes follow a city bus, as though I didn’t understand.
But I knew what his words meant, and was flattered and frightened. And what if I’d said, “I don’t have the place, but do you?” What would happen then? If you could dream it, it could happen in New York—that seemed keenly true to me at thirteen. My friends and I carried our secret lives before us like emblems, and read them as we walked to school, and read them on the bus. The city itself was a library of apartment buildings, each with stories spooling down echoey corridors and with dialogue leaking through the plasterboard. Often we put a cup to the wall so we could hear it better. “Shhh!” we’d say to our families, glaring, fingers to our lips, ears shoved hard against the glass.
My friends and I read only novels. Nonfiction did not exist, despite Stacy’s pamphlets on how to live the cultivated British life. It wasn’t until late in junior high, when a friend showed me a book outlining the five ballet positions, that I considered the possibility that volumes stuffed with facts might actually be real books. But what sad books they seemed! How thin—no matter their sprawl and heft. Books of fact all seemed like math, as if a thousand wood pointers were banging against a thousand chalkboards on which were inscribed life’s rock-hard realities. How frightening! I was terrible at school. I was in fact terrible at everything except reading, which at the time seemed about as useful as whittling.
Years later—my first job out of college—I found myself working on a definitive book of facts, The Guinness Book of World Records. The country of books had sucked me up for good. I sat beside the proofreader on the twenty-sixth floor of a deco skyscraper and read copy aloud to him. The man with the longest fingernails, which twirled from his fingertips like paper party noisemakers. The man who’d drifted the longest time at sea. The Siamese twins scissoring away from each other, dapper, married to sisters. Out the office window the sunset laid siege to New Jersey. It hovered from three p.m. on in shades of hibiscus and tangerine. I didn’t want to hear it was pollution, something the production manager felt obliged to explain. I was so happy to have a job in Manhattan involving books.
The proofreader and I ate dried pineapple chunks and cashews from brown paper sleeves we’d bought at lunch. He told me that I resembled a young Leslie Caron. I was obscurely attracted to him, and went over to his apartment on West Ninety-Fourth, and watched a sea of glittering cockroaches recede miraculously into the walls, and then sat on his mattress on the floor and gazed at Fred Astaire dancing with Ginger Rogers through a TV screen thick with haze. Women’s faces peered down from the apartment walls, dozens of them ripped from magazines and taped three feet from the floor: Bette Davis, Jean Harlow, all seeming to smolder with disapproval, as if his superego were female, as if he would feel its eyes on him even in the dark.
“I’ll never make a play for you,” said the proofreader to me at a Beefsteak Charlie’s on Thirty-Fourth Street. “Don’t expect that I will.”
But I was still so averse to facts I had no idea what he meant. The next time I came over he showed me his feather collection—bluebird feathers, wild turkey feathers, and many feathers of unknown origin, tawny, with a triangular eye at the top as if an inky pen had been allowed to bleed. He kept them crammed in a brown paper lunch bag in his closet, so many that the sides of the bag were round. For how long had he been collecting them? “Draw the feather across your upper lip,” he instructed. “Doesn’t it feel nice?” “Oh, it does,” I answered. Then he walked me to the subway. An enormous sadness seemed to fill the night. I thought wildly: “I should stay with him until he’s happy!” I thought this mad thought even as he waved to me from the top of the stairs. How I would have liked to dash up to him! How I would have liked to touch the bearded texture of his cheek!
His grandfather had been an illustrious publisher: the first to publish James Joyce in the United States. This heritage weighed heavily on the proofreader, who disbelieved himself worthy of it. The proofreader himself was easier to talk to than almost any man I’d ever met. He carried a Channel 13 tote with orange print on canvas, and took me to see Casablanca at the Thalia, and he told me about New Orleans, where he’d grown up fatherless, but always this wild melancholy seemed to throb around us, and it glued me to him. I kept thinking that if I could just get closer or stay longer, the melancholy would disperse.
One day, the proofreader was fired. He’d been proofing fewer and fewer galley pages. When he averaged less than two a day, he was dismissed. Meanwhile I’d been promoted to editing children’s joke books and puzzle books. Soon I departed for Boston, which was cheaper and where I thought I might at last learn to write. A decade later, visiting my parents, I saw the proofreader on the platform at Forty-Second Street, about to board the #1 uptown. “Oh!” I gasped, but didn’t exert myself to call his name.
He looked so familiar I had the ridiculous feeling that I’d be seeing him again soon anyway, which of course I never did. But our strange romance—watching dance movies, reading aloud the jerky and now antiquated language of proofing (caps, ques, bang), and the strong scent of Mitchum aftershave contained in his bathroom—all returned to me.
How long I had remained in ignorance!—even after he told me about a very close male friend of his who liked to dress up in stockings and brassiere. Even after he told me that he’d never had a girlfriend in his adulthood. He had announced himself to me as explicitly as he could bear but I maintained my perverse innocence, and felt forever that we were on the edge of a breakthrough of intimacy that would somehow resolve our mutual melancholy. I refused to read his secret life, which he had come to New York to live.
My own got resolved through the mirrored halls of sentences. I found myself in prose. And he, I suspect, discovered himself in the meeting places of the city. He phoned me once, a few months after he was fired. “I’ve called to tell you something,” he said. “I’ve joined a weekly group for people like
