Our friend Winokur, who is ill at ease in New York, arrived from Iowa for a visit recently and immediately noticed two cucumbers on the sidewalk in front of our house. Apparently he had never seen cucumbers on a sidewalk before.
“Should I bring in these cucumbers?” he asked. We all smiled at his rustic simplicity and advised him to let sidewalk cucumbers lie. “Why are there cucumbers in front of your house?” he asked.
Nobody tried to answer that. We are New Yorkers. In New York different things turn up lying in front of your house. Sometimes they are cucumbers. Who knows why? Who cares? “This is New York, Winokur,” I said. “Enjoy it, and don’t get bogged down in cucumbers.”
We gave him a potion to calm his anxiety and bedded him down on the first floor. Having stayed with us in the past, he refuses to sleep upstairs for fear of being crushed by objects falling off the Emperor, the forty-six-story apartment building across the street. The last time he visited, the Emperor shed an entire window of thick plate glass and crushed a car in front of our house. We assured him that the Emperor was always doing that sort of thing, that nobody had been killed yet and that when somebody was, the police would do something about it, since this was the high-rent district and in New York the upper-income folks got action from the law.
Winokur was not reassured. In Iowa, I gather, they don’t have buildings that litter. He insisted on the downstairs sofa, but we had scarcely snuggled down for the night when he was upstairs rapping at the bedroom door.
“It sounds like somebody’s stealing hubcaps out front,” he said. Why did he think law-abiding New Yorkers went to bed at night, if not to allow hubcap thieves the right to work in privacy? Winokur was unhappy with this explanation. “Why don’t you go to the window and look?” he suggested.
He was clearly uneasy about going to the window himself, and sensibly so, since you can never tell when the Emperor will send some plate glass sailing out from the thirty-fifth floor, across the street and right into the window where you are investigating a hubcap theft.
So I went to the window. Sure enough, a man was removing the rear hubcaps from a red sedan parked under the Emperor. He was a short, elegantly dressed man with a mustache, and his work was being admired by a large, heavy, well-dressed woman, obviously his wife or companion. I described all this to Winokur.
“Why is a well-dressed man removing hubcaps at midnight?” he asked. “Why is a well-dressed woman watching?”
“Why are there two cucumbers lying on the sidewalk in front of my house?” I explained.
Dissatisfied, Winokur came to the window. “The elegantly dressed man is now putting both hubcaps on the wall at the base of the Emperor,” he whispered. “And now, he and the well-dressed stout woman are walking away.”
“This is New York,” I said.
“Somebody is going to come along and see those hubcaps and take them,” said Winokur.
“Not necessarily,” I said. “One night when I parked my car out there somebody came along, lifted the hood, stole the radiator hose and didn’t even touch the hubcaps.”
“Something very funny is going on here,” said Winokur. “Fancy-dress couple take off hubcaps. Leave hubcaps where they’re sure to be stolen. Obviously, they don’t need the hubcaps, they don’t want the hubcaps, they just want the hubcaps to be stolen.”
Predictably enough, the loose hubcaps were spotted by two very civilized-looking men who seemed to be out for a stroll. They stopped, discussed the hubcaps and, picking them up, walked away with them, one hubcap per stroller. They didn’t look like men who really needed hubcaps.
Winokur’s Midwestern sense of decency was so offended that he threw up the window and shouted, “Put those hubcaps down.” They didn’t, of course. Winokur was baffled by this example of white-collar street crime, which was not at all mysterious to a New Yorker.
The man who removed the hubcaps, I explained, hated the owner of the red sedan for having a free parking place at the curb while he had none. In fact, he regarded that curb space as his very own and had taken vengeance, possibly at his wife’s urging, by promoting the theft of his enemy’s hubcaps.
“Ridiculous,” said Winokur.
“This is New York,” I said.
I sent him out for the papers next morning. “Somebody has stolen the cucumbers,” he said, returning, “and now there’s a slice of pizza lying where the cucumbers were yesterday.” Life must be very strange in Iowa.