Why lie? In the days when I was an item on the society pages, I craved the light of those eyes upon me.
But I also wasn’t sure whether I was happy with how they saw me. A hopeful symbol of wealth and success during the Depression years? A vain one? Hairbrush in hand, transfixed by my own reflection in the mirror?
Now, walking south from Grimaldi toward Delmonico’s on a stomach full of Oreos and a head full of Chianti, I see my faint reflection in the glass of the dark windows I pass, and I want neither to stare nor to look away. I am just Lillian Boxfish, eighty-four or eighty-five. No one still alive can correct me.
If I wanted to take a shortcut from Madison Avenue to Broadway, which I can follow almost all the way to my destination, I’d diagonal my way through Madison Square Park. But that place is in greater disrepair than I am. While I frequent it by day, at night it fills like a horrible candy box with pimps and hookers, with drug dealers and their clients. I do not know the means by which such suppliers handle their institutional advertising, but they clearly know what they’re doing, for they never appear to have any shortage of business. No doubt having a motivated customer base helps.
By day, while on my walks, I still stop in Madison Square Park to take my lunch breaks, even though my breaks are entirely self-assigned. When I worked at R.H. Macy’s the park was magnificent, a spot to sit and compose my verses on city life. Now, even by day, it comprises nasty little bites of the unsavory covered with litter, its lawn mostly bare. Teeming with the pigeons I can’t help but love, prolific and filthy, cooing stupidly, reproducing, pooping—hopping fearlessly, oblivious among the hypodermics.
Whenever I eat my lunch there these days, I always think of and hope to see Wendy. About half the time I do. She and I met last summer, mid-July, hot and hazy, the air like a gauze bandage, tight and stifling.
Until that humid afternoon when Wendy spotted me, no one had told me I was beautiful for a long, long while. I noticed her first, actually, though I hadn’t planned to say anything to her; rather, I meant simply to sit on my bench and watch her.
Even in a city populated by outsiders with bizarre magnetism, she felt extra compelling, stalking the edges of the park in a feline fashion that made me think of Phoebe, of the way a house cat hunts, so that one can’t tell whether it’s serious or only playing, or if it’s sure itself.
Wendy was obviously a woman, but had a lean androgynous look, flat-chested in a white tank top and torn-up jeans. Her thick black hair, choppy and cropped at the nape, looked less styled than chewed on. She wore a huge Nikon camera on a strap around her neck, and she held it to her right eye with veiny hands, their fingernails painted a chipped black, taking picture after picture. But she was no tourist.
She saw me seeing her, and I, never one to feign shame in my interest in others, waved to her with my own hand: well-manicured in classic red, gold watch on my wrist. A summer linen suit encased the rest of me—because no one wants to see these arms and legs uncovered, least of all me. I wore sunglasses, Dior, from the 1960s, because by then I had come to prefer my face half-obscured.
Wendy strode over and introduced herself, shaking my hand, very direct. When she spoke, her demeanor—forthright, Midwestern—contrasted with her feral appearance, and made me laugh.
“You’re beautiful, Lillian,” she said. “Especially when you smile like that. May I take your photograph?”
“Maybe,” I said. “First, have a seat. Tell me, why would you want to do a thing like that?”
“Well,” she said, perching on the edge of the bench, almost as a prelude to a pounce, “I’m a photographer. Professionally. I work in a studio, as an assistant, just south of here. But I’m also an artist. Trying to be, you know? I’m working on my portfolio. And to do that, I’m operating under the motto, ‘I’m seeing beauty in less-obvious places, and that makes me a more interesting person.’”
“Ambitious,” I said. “But your motto also damns me with faint praise, doesn’t it?”
“Oh my goodness,” she said. “No! I just mean, like, society’s idea of beauty is really warped and limited, and you—”
“I’m joking,” I said. “I’d be honored. Where are you from, Wendy?”
“Garrettsville, Ohio,” she said, shrugging in apology. “But I live in Chelsea.”
“You’re looking at a long-term resident of Murray Hill,” I said. “I haven’t been to Chelsea in ages. And I’ve never been to Garrettsville, Ohio, but I’ve heard of it. Hart Crane was from there. Do you know him? His work? He was a poet. Killed himself in the 1930s by swan diving off an ocean liner.”
“I’ve heard of him, but I’ve never read his poems,” she said. Then her eyes got wide and she asked, “Lillian, are you a poet?”
I liked the way she asked that—not “Do you write poetry?” or even “Do you like poetry?” but “Are you a poet?” For Wendy, one’s art was one’s identity, and everything else one did simply amounted to getting by. She was still quite young, I realized, and she hadn’t been in the city very long.
“I am,” I said. “But not a poet like Crane. Though I do admire his work. You should read his first book, White Buildings—although The Bridge seems more the fashion these days. I only understand every third word of his, but it doesn’t matter. Me—my verses are less opaque.”
“I’d love to read your poems sometime,” said Wendy.
“That won’t be so easy, I’m afraid, as all my books are out of print.”
“Books?” Wendy put her hand—pale and sturdy—on my linen sleeve. “Lillian, you write books?”
“I did,” I said. “In my prime I was even a bit of a celebrity. Everyone read me. But in the latter-day world of poetry it seems that nobody wants to read somebody everybody reads, as Yogi Berra might put it. So I’m quite forgotten now.”
I was pleased with that bon mot, but Wendy sped past without sparing it a second look. “Well, you must have copies,” she said. “You could loan them to me, couldn’t you?”
“I could, yes. If I ever see you again. But what would a young go-getter like you want with an old lady like me?”
As it turned out, she’d want plenty—and I can’t say I’m displeased. Wendy is now one of my best, if most improbable, friends.
I round the corner of Madison Avenue to East Twenty-Third Street, skirting the south edge of the park, taking the long way to connect to Broadway. As I do, I can’t help looking over my shoulder to see if Wendy might be in the park. She’s not, of course; she has enough sense not to go there after dark.
And tonight, I remember—I know because she invited me—she and her husband are hosting a New Year’s Eve bash for all their artist friends at their apartment in Chelsea.
Wendy is like that, now that she knows me. She treats me as if I’m not actually sixty years older than she. Her insistence on including me—her idea that an odd old woman might have any business ringing in 1985 amid her chic bohemian demimonde—is sweet and silly and fantastic. I’m quite touched.
When Gian and the grandkids were visiting last week, I had Wendy over to meet them, over coffee and hot cocoa. After she’d gone, Gian had remarked how happy he was that I had her in my life, and how she must seem almost like a daughter to me. That’s a pretty sentiment, so I did not correct him. But the truth is, that is not what she feels like, and of that I am glad. She is my friend, not my child, and thus our rapport has been unfraught and egalitarian, unburdened by guilt or disappointment.
Gian, on the other hand, is my child, not my friend. I love him more than any other human who still breathes upon this planet, but one child—one constant emergency, one ritual madness, one wrecker and remaker of myself—was and remains enough.
Crossing the street to continue south on Broadway, I don’t even have to wait for the light, there’s so little traffic. I jaywalk with impunity.
If something happened to me, who would see it?
If the Subway Vigilante were out and about on these same sidewalks, who would know it was him?
Wendy and I ended up going to lunch together the day we met. I invited her, and she hesitated, and I thought that maybe, as I had suspected, she didn’t want to spend her years as a young artiste in the company of the aged. When I said as much—blunt, I know—she said no, it was because she didn’t have any money. My treat, I told her, and still she shilly-shallied.
“What’s the harm in a free egg salad sandwich?” I asked. “I’m going to take us to a deli, not the Ritz.”
“I don’t want to take advantage,” Wendy said. “My husband—he’s a painter—is always saying that we need to find patrons. Benefactors. People with money to collect and cultivate our art, you know? And that seems so sleazy to me.”
“Accepting one free meal from a lonely old has-been won’t put your integrity in peril,” I said. “And your husband is right. One must hustle to make money, don’t you think?”
“Lillian, you’re hysterical,” she said. “But what’ll you get out of it?”
“Attention,” I said, and off we went.
Wendy, whose Ohio parents raised her to be too humble, in my estimation, but just the right degree of courteous, worried that we should go somewhere nearby so I would not have to walk too far. I assured her that while I am not much of what I used to be, I am still a walker—that since everything else in my life is mostly gone, I just am in the city. I just like to be here.
As I pass the string of photography studios that line this block of Broadway—located here because it’s decrepit and therefore cheap—I find myself imagining her New Year’s Eve party in Chelsea. Loud strange music. Skinny youths in Dumpster-plucked clothes. Various substances stashed upon my arrival. Suspicious neighbors, in one or both senses of suspicious. And her husband, charming and venal. Or brilliant and petulant. Or moony and narcissistic. Wendy’s husband.
I think her invitation was sincere.
But whom is she kidding? An octogenarian staying up until midnight to hoot ecstatically at the onset of another year?
Then again, what else have I got to do? It’s not as though I have to wake up early tomorrow.
On Broadway the damp wind is cooler and more assertive, and I laugh a little because I realize that this is exactly how I’ve been imagining Wendy’s husband: cooler and more assertive.
She doesn’t wear a wedding band, I’ve noticed. Then again, I do, and I haven’t been married for almost three decades. Symbols, or their absence, do not always mean what they seem to symbolize.
Nevertheless, I suppose they always symbolize something.
I like presenting myself to Wendy—presenting myself as I want to be presented, and being received as such. Maybe I will stop by her party. We’ll see.