people, but can’t help being drawn to the aura of fame—and more than fame, actual immortality—implied by the presence of a movie star in a trailer on the corner of MacDougal and Spring Streets. These two girls standing beside Clarissa, twenty if not younger, defiantly hefty, slouching into each other, laden with brightly colored bags from discount stores; these two girls will grow to middle and then old age, either wither or bloat; the cemeteries in which they’re buried will fall eventually into ruin, the grass grown wild, browsed at night by dogs; and when all that remains of these girls is a few silver fillings lost underground ground the woman in the trailer, be she Meryl Streep or Vanessa Redgrave or even Susan Sarandon, will still be known. She will exist in archives, in books; her recorded voice will be stored away among other precious and venerated objects. Clarissa allows herself to continue standing, foolish as any fan, for another few minutes, in hope of seeing the star emerge. Yes, just another few minutes, before the humiliation is simply too much to bear. She remains before the trailer with her flowers. She watches the door. After several minutes have passed (nearly ten, although she hates admitting it) she leaves suddenly, indignantly, as if she’s been stood up, and walks the few blocks uptown to Richard’s apartment.
This neighborhood was once the center of something new and wild; something disreputable; a part of the city where the sound of guitars drifted all night out of bars and coffeehouses; where the stores that sold books and clothing smelled the way she imagined Arab bazaars must smell: incense and rich, dung-y dust, some sort of wood (cedar? camphor?), something fruitily, fertilely rotting; and where it had seemed possible, quite possible, that if you passed through the wrong door or down the wrong alley you would meet a fate: not just the familiar threat of robbery and physical harm but something more perverse and transforming, more permanent. Here, right here, on this corner, she had stood with Richard when Richard was nineteen—when Richard was a firm-featured, hard-eyed, not-quite-beautiful dark-haired boy with an impossibly long and graceful, very pale neck—here they had stood and argued … about what? A kiss? Had Richard kissed her, or had she, Clarissa, only believed Richard was about to kiss her, and evaded it? Here on this corner (in front of what had been a head shop and is now a delicatessen) they had kissed or not kissed, they had certainly argued, and here or somewhere soon after, they had canceled their little experiment, for Clarissa wanted her freedom and Richard wanted, well, too much, didn’t he always? He wanted too much. She’d told him that what happened over the summer had been exactly that, something that happened over a summer. Why should he want her, a wry and diffident girl, no breasts to speak of (how could she be expected to trust his desire?), when he knew as well as she the bent of his deepest longings and when he had Louis, worshipful Louis, heavy-limbed, far from stupid, a boy Michelangelo would have been pleased to draw? Wasn’t it, really, just another poetic conceit, Richard’s idea of her? They had not had a large or spectacular fight, just a squabble on a corner—there had been no question, even then, of deep damage to the friendship—and yet as she looks back it seems definitive; it seems like the moment at which one possible future ended and a new one began. That day, after the argument (or possibly before it), Clarissa had bought a packet of incense and a gray alpaca jacket, secondhand, with rose-shaped buttons carved out of bone. Richard had eventually gone off to Europe with Louis. What, Clarissa wonders now, ever became of the alpaca jacket? It seems that she had it for years and years, and then suddenly didn’t have it anymore.
She turns down Bleecker, goes up Thompson. The neighborhood today is an imitation of itself, a watered-down carnival for tourists, and Clarissa, at fifty-two, knows that behind these doors and down these alleys lies nothing more or less than people living their lives. Grotesquely, some of the same bars and coffeehouses are still here, done up now to resemble themselves for the benefit of Germans and Japanese. The stores all sell essentially the same things: souvenir T-shirts, cheap silver jewelry, cheap leather jackets.
At Richard’s building she lets herself in through the vestibule door and thinks, as she always does, of the word “squalid.” It is almost funny, the way the entrance to Richard’s building so perfectly demonstrates the concept of squalor. It is so obviously, dreadfully squalid that it still surprises her slightly, even after all these years. It surprises her in almost the way a rare and remarkable object, a work of art, can continue to surprise; simply because it remains, throughout time, so purely and utterly itself. Here again, surprisingly, are the faded yellow-beige walls, more or less the color of an arrowroot biscuit; here is the fluorescent panel on the ceiling emitting its sputtering, watery glare. It is worse—much worse—that the cramped little lobby was cheaply and half-heartedly renovated a decade ago. The lobby is far more discouraging with its soiled white brick-patterned linoleum and its artificial ficus tree than it could possibly have been in its original decrepitude. Only the ancient marble wainscoting—a palomino-colored marble, veined in blue and gray with a deep yellow, smoky overlay, like a very fine old cheese, now hideously echoed by the yellowish walls—indicates that this was once a building of some consequence; that hopes were nurtured here; that upon entering the lobby people were expected to feel as if they were moving in an orderly fashion into a future that held something worth having.
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