INSTALLMENT 52: 16 NOVEMBER 82

 

By the time you read this I’ll be back from a lecture gig at Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana. As I prepare to fly out tomorrow afternoon, going into a state that failed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment for the first time in, oh, maybe six years—save for those occasions when, under the aegis of NOW, I made forays into unratified territory to promote the ERA—I sit here commencing my fifty-second conversation with you, deep in a brown funk at the demise of the Amendment; and knowing you’ll be reading this on Thanksgiving Day or shortly thereafter, I wonder just what there is to give thanksgiving for.

And because it’s that kind of a night, and because the mail has been a bit too full of the sort of people who like to pick nits, I choose to flee the present. I choose to tumble back into the past to remember moments that shine, therein to find cause for a smile. To find reasons for thanksgiving. The memory mist parts and if you like, I’ll take you with me…

Eight or ten years ago, as winter slunk in across the Eastern seaboard, I was reluctantly called to New York on some business now forgotten. I do not return to the Apple with much enthusiasm these days, and it has been so for almost fifteen years. A very small part of the malaise that settles over me when it becomes inescapable that I must return to Manhattan, is that bi-coastal rivalry…more regional chauvinism than pragmatic assessment of relative merits. No, I suffer trepidation about my feet touching the pavements of NYC more out of a Proustian sense of loss than fear of lurking dangers. The City seems so sad these days. There are lines in the faces of the people and the buildings. A weariness. A stolid clinging to survival against a soulfire-leaching winter perpetually slinking in.

And so it was, eight or ten years ago, that I checked into my hotel, called some friends as midnight descended, and asked if they wanted to come out for a late evening snack. Several old buddies thought that would be pleasant, and they named a small restaurant on Lexington in the lower Fifties. I said I’d meet them in half an hour, wrapped myself in muffler and topcoat, and went out into the street. I decided to walk. Cold, nasty wind wielding its scythe up Lexington, snow beginning to float down to melt instantly on my shoulders. At half past midnight the Avenue was almost deserted. The halated dimness of shop lights left burning as futile deterrent to smash&grabbers seemed like wan beacons of some lost and sunken undersea civilization. Winter in New York produces in me all the worst attributes of bad poetry.

I began walking up Lexington, hunched over against the wind that drove snowflakes past the muffler and down my neck.

Between 44th and 45th Streets, huddled on the steps of the huge Lexington post office substation, was a pile of debris from the center of which a pair of eyes marked my passage. No more startling a creature than one of the city’s shapeless bag ladies, swaddled in sweaters, pages of the Post laid against her skin as insulating layers. No feet, no hands, no shoulders or thighs. A mound of dark fabric from which wariness radiated.

Her eyes followed me as I passed her, perhaps my stride breaking just barely as a vagrant thought occurred to me; but I was walking, and the thought had no form. I knew that she would observe only till it was obvious I was not going to stop or accost her. The sensitive antennae of the survivor.

I walked another block. And stopped. The wind picked at my hair. The thought had firmed at the edges. It was that terrible scene from the film Zorba the Greek in which the sweet old Lila Kedrova character is dying, and the shrikelike Greek women from the town, all swathed in black, crouch around the perimeter of her room, waiting for the final exhalation of breath so they can divest the bedroom of its furnishings. It was a scene that had repelled me when I’d first viewed the film, and so profoundly had it affected me—I do not know why—that it had soured me on ever visiting the wonders of that gorgeous and terrible land. And now I stood in the middle of Lexington Avenue, seeing that tableau in my mind.

I turned and went back a block to the woman in the rag heap. She had moved slightly. I could now see the outline of a lower leg, a knee. I stood at the edge of the sidewalk, leaving safety space between us so she would understand I was no jackroller, come to take her secrets from their plastic shopping bags. She seemed not to be aware of me; but I knew that was not so.

Over the sound of the wind, I said, “May I help you?”

And reply there was none.

“It’s beginning to come down,” I said. She knew that. “They say it’ll be freezing by morning.” And she knew that, too. “Let me help you,” I said again.

There was no movement from the pile, and had it not been that her eyes were open—staring away into the mid-distance—I would have thought she was sleeping.

I moved closer, stood near her, looking down. Though ill and living in Florida, my mother was still alive in that year; there was no resemblance.

“Here,” I said, extending the twenty dollar bill I had taken from my pocket as I’d walked back that long block, “here, take this and get yourself a room at the Y. A couple of meals.”

She made no move to take the money. I felt the fool.

I felt, suddenly, a diminution of the pity that had overcome me. In its place was an equally saddening respect for her sense of self-possessiveness. Perhaps it was only that she had been too dulled by too many years on concrete to accept the gesture; but perhaps it was that she was self-contained and needed no cheap offerings intended to balm my soul. She would not take the money. Choosing to believe it was pride that kept her motionless, I laid the bill on the shape of knee and smiled and said, “It’ll be warm again soon.”

And I walked away. She had not moved once.

I met my friends at the restaurant, we drank coffee and talked about another world than the one in which the shape with eyes lived. At two-thirty I took my leave, and pulled my collar up, and went out to retrace the path to my hotel.

When I passed the post office, she was still there, in the same position. She had not moved, but her eyes watched me again. The twenty dollar bill was still there on her knee, now wet from the snow.

It would be there tomorrow morning when she chose to change her locale of residence. Or it would have been plucked from her knee by a passing stranger. Or it would fall off and lie there when she stood up, and she would walk away from it.

But I knew she would not put it in her pocket.

There is a liquid moment in our life when all that torments us solidifies in reality, like a fly imbedded in amber; and we understand that there are those without hope, without limbs, without beginnings and endings that matter. A moment when we fly out of our dominating thoughts and the shell of our body, and look down from a great height at the rest of the world.

In those moments, even if we do not believe in deities, we hear the hushed whisper, “Thank God,” and we slip like smoke back into ourselves, and move on, smaller and safer and quite ready to accept the paper cuts and stubbed toes the universe does not know we suffer.

In those moments we give thanks.

At this contemplative time of the year, a year that has not been as kind as we might have wished but that nonetheless has been a year through which we maintained, I wish you some peace, an hour or two of ease, and the hope that you have had a liquid moment looking down at the rest of your kind.