Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker Read online

  Maybe I had had a little too much champagne; it certainly was delicious, with large, real raspberries stuck in the bottom of every glass. “Isn’t it strange,” I said, “to be trying to land an agent and a record contract when this is what you used to do for other people?”

  “No.”

  Her best friend, in a feathered tutu, was seated across from us, and when the tutu girl got up to go buy cigarettes I asked Samantha what her friend did. “She goes out with Fritz,” Samantha said. Fritz was a sculptor, famous for his work in lemons and mirrors. “She’s only eighteen and a real witch.” So much for best friends, I thought.

  In the rest room we applied various kinds of makeup from Samantha’s handbag. “That guy next to you,” she said as she powdered her nose, “you’re with him, right?”

  “We live together,” I said. “That’s Stash.”

  “That’s what I was going to ask you,” she said. “He’s Stash Stosz, right? Who just got a terrible review?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She took a joint out of her bag. “Is he rich?” she said, lighting the joint and handing it to me.

  “No,” I said.

  “Are you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, why would you go out with him?” she said.

  “I—” I said. I was stunned.

  “Come out with us after the dinner,” she said. “My husband has a brother who’d love to meet you. We’ll all go to the club.”

  I smoked some of the joint with her. Maybe she had had too much to drink, too.

  Back at the table Stash was having an active argument with a racehorse painter, a man with a goatee and rabbit teeth. “What you’re doing, that’s not art,” the horse painter was saying. He was wearing a cowboy hat of soft and furry felt.

  “I’ve seen your work,” I said to him. “My mother bought some paper plates one time, for a cookout, and your paintings were on them.”

  Everyone had changed places. A photographer was walking around taking candid pictures. One artist, with his long white arms curled around the back of the chair next to him, and his round, bloblike head, resembled an octopus. Another made strange movements with his mouth like a kissing gourami. One artist was so famous he refused to sit with the rest of us: he had his own private table on the balcony, where he was seated with a famous French movie actress. The one sitting across from me was quite drunk; he had a red face and a superior attitude. While he was talking to someone he picked up a full ashtray in front of him and emptied it under the table.

  When the dinner was over, one of the artists took a plate of cake (a special kind of Venetian cake known as a pick-me-up) and dumped it on the head of a less famous artist. The less famous artist didn’t even blink; he just called for the photographer to come over.

  Stash got stuck talking to someone at the coatroom, and I went outside. Samantha rolled down the window of a limousine and leaned out. “Eleanor, come here,” she said. “I want you to meet my brother-in-law, Mitch.”

  I squinted in the window. Some guy with red hair and a beard was sitting next to Samantha. He had the wild eyes of a trotter at a fifth-rate racetrack, hopped up on who knew what. “Nice to meet you, Mitch,” I said. He handed me a glass of champagne.

  “Where are you going now, Eleanor?” Samantha said.

  “Downtown.”

  “Come on, get in with us,” she said. “We’ll take you.”

  I thought for a second. I should wait for Stash, go home with him, walk the dog, and watch TV. I’d try to tell him about why all these people drove me crazy. How I was tired of their all being so wrapped up in themselves. But I knew he would just say that I’d had too much to drink. Or I could open the car door, jump in, and whiz off someplace. If I did, Stash would probably forgive me, eventually.

  “Stash is still inside,” I said. “I’m waiting for him. I don’t want to keep you. I’ll call you next week. Bye, Mitch.”

  Samantha shrugged and the window rolled back up. I was left standing on the curb with a glass of champagne in my hand.

  BY THE time we got home I was pretty depressed. While I brushed my teeth and cleaned my contact lenses, I thought about Samantha, in her rubber dress. Let’s face it, she wasn’t prettier than I, or more intelligent, and what did she do? Just one out of the millions who want to be rock stars. So how come she kept getting her picture taken, and how come all the men were making a fuss over her and asking if they could snap her latexwear? Because (a) she had an important husband, who ran a big gallery, and (b) she probably hung out with these people every night, taking drugs—cocaine or whatever—whereas it was a rare thing for me just to smoke marijuana. On the other hand, maybe she really had a better personality than I, and really was more attractive physically and psychically, and I was just deluding myself.

  I realized that I really did want to be where I was—with Stash, in this hovel. I ran through all the parts of my life, trying to figure out which thing in particular wasn’t working for me. I supposed I could get a nose job and take one of those courses that teach chutzpah. (I had read the leaflet on it in the supermarket.) But would this make me a more spiritual person? I doubted it. It was hard for me to keep up with all the various aspects of reality. Finally I figured it out: I wanted a baby. Obviously, based on this evening and others like it, I wasn’t meant for any glamorous night life or last lane, but I would be a good mother.

  I pictured myself with a giant Buddha baby with a fat belly, a shock of blond hair, and a surprised expression. I would give it baths in a basin and wheel it around the block in a little go-cart, speaking to the other mothers. Stash could take it to openings strapped on his back. I had often seen men doing this in art galleries or at night clubs. Finally, when it grew up, it could tell me how wonderful I was. Stash and I would at last be bonded and we could have a joint checking account and I wouldn’t have to be so worried about finances. These weren’t such great reasons, but what counted was the unconscious level—the feeling that something was missing from my life and I had finally guessed what it was.

  I went out into the bedroom—anyway, the end of our apartment where the bed was. “Listen, Stash,” I said. “I’ve been thinking. You’re middle-aged, and I’m not so young, either. It would be a good time to have a baby. We’ve been kidding about it for a while, but let’s be serious.” Looking at him, I knew that our baby would be cute, though if it inherited Stash’s chest hair and my head hair it would practically be a gorilla. There wouldn’t be one hairless inch.

  “What are you—drunk?” Stash said. He was lying on the bed, watching a Frankenstein movie on TV, Andrew alongside him. “You can’t bring a baby into this world. At least not in the city. Didn’t you hear the news before?”

  “I was brushing my teeth.”

  “This forty-nine-year-old widow was walking down the street and all of a sudden a thirty-five-ton crane toppled over and hit her. She was pinned under it for nearly six hours, partially crushed, just like that. That’s why you can’t have children in New York.” Stash looked as if he was ready to kill me. It was hard for him to believe that a person could be so stupid. I knew I irritated Stash in the same way that my younger brother used to irritate me when I was a kid. Roland’s foot-tapping used to send me into a rage; I would start to scream at him when he wasn’t even aware of what he was doing. Now I knew what it was like to be the source of irritation without being irritated in return. I looked at Stash with the same puzzled, hurt expression that my brother had when I lashed out at him for no good reason.

  “I’m taking the dog out,” I said. “Come on, Andrew.”

  Andrew shot up and plunged up and down at my feet. Every time he went out he acted as if he had been locked up in a kennel for a year. His whip tail slashed my legs. Unfortunately, this was the only time he ever paid any attention to me, even though I had been with him since he was a year and a half old. He was Stash’s dog. I had worked hard to make him love me. He was wearing a collar I had designed for him—plastic dinosaurs, turtles,
and square, varicolored rhinestones, which I had attached to the leather with little grommets. I had done all kinds of things for Andrew. I decorated him, sometimes with baseball caps, sometimes with slogan sweatshirts I cut down from Woolworth’s boys’ department, and once I had painted additional spots on him with food coloring. Well, Andrew wasn’t the brightest of dogs, but he did have a sense of humor and a certain dappled elegance.

  It was late at night, and I didn’t bother to put him on the leash. He sniffed the stunted trees and the metal signposts with the utmost delicacy, as if he were rooting for truffles. A fishy wind blew off the Hudson. Stash was probably feeling guilty and would be nice to me. Probably I had made the right choice. If I had gone off with Samantha and taken drugs I would have shifted into higher gear, but how long could I keep that up?

  “Get over here, Andrew,” I said. I wanted to go upstairs. “Hurry up.” Of course he wouldn’t move. He was deaf when he wanted to be. I gritted my teeth, annoyed. He went on calmly rooting as if I weren’t even there. The rotten animal obeyed Stash, but not me.

  Finally, he followed. The elevator was broken and we had to walk up seven flights. I’m not in such great shape. Believe me, I’d like to be one of those women with all the muscles, but, frankly, I don’t like the idea of doing all that work. Once I took an aerobics class—I thought it would give me more energy—but every day I had to come home after class and sleep for a couple of hours.

  When we made it back to the apartment Stash was standing near the window with a funny look on his face. “You wouldn’t believe what just happened,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  “A transvestite and a john came over to the bushes under the window. Well, I don’t want transvestites and tricks in our courtyard. So I went to the sink and took the spaghetti pot and dumped the water in it onto them. A direct hit!”

  I started to laugh, involuntarily, but I stopped. “Stash,” I said.

  “Well, I didn’t know that there were things in the pot,” Stash said. “I really was mad, and I just dumped the whole soapy contents out, and I didn’t realize there were some spoons and a bowl in it.”

  “My Russel Wright dish!” I said. “Stash, how could you do such a thing?”

  “What do you mean?” he said. “You were out there with Andrew. Something could have happened to you. I wanted them to get the idea they can’t come around here.”

  “What happened when the water hit them?” I said.

  “They just walked away, shaking their heads.”

  “You could have killed someone,” I said. I felt very bad about the transvestite: she was just trying to get along in the world and had ended up covered with soapy, greasy water—spaghetti water—and would probably be freezing cold for the rest of the night.

  “The bowl hit the trees, it didn’t hit her,” Stash said.

  “It’s not your job to throw water on people,” I said. “You should either have yelled something to chase them away or called the guard.”

  “I did feel sort of demonically possessed when I did it,” Stash admitted. “What do you want? I’m only a mindless Neanderthal.” I could tell he would have liked to undo it as soon as the water was halfway down, but it was too late—as had been demonstrated in another age by Galileo, who threw some stuff off the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

  I suddenly wished I could go back to school and take physics again; I knew that this time I would understand it. The notion of random particles, random events, didn’t seem at all difficult to comprehend. The whole business was like understanding traffic patterns, with unplanned crackups and hit-and-run accidents. Somewhere I had read that increasing the rate of collisions between positrons and electrons will result in interesting “events” that physicists can study. Quarks, quirks, leptons, protons, valence electrons, tracers, kryptons, isotopes—who knew what powerful forces were at work? I saw how emotions caused objects to go whizzing about. If I had gotten into the limousine earlier that night I’d be in the same mess only in a different neighborhood; at least in this place I had love, a feeling that came at a person like a Dodg’em car in an amusement park, where the sign says “Proceed at Own Risk.”

  [1985]

  WOODY ALLEN

  THE WHORE OF MENSA

  ONE THING ABOUT BEING A PRIVATE investigator, you’ve got to learn to go with your hunches. That’s why when a quivering pat of butter named Word Babcock walked into my office and laid his cards on the table, I should have trusted the cold chill that shot up my spine.

  “Kaiser?” he said. “Kaiser Lupowitz?”

  “That’s what it says on my license,” I owned up.

  “You’ve got to help me. I’m being blackmailed. Please!”

  He was shaking like the lead singer in a rumba band. I pushed a glass across the desk top and a bottle of rye I keep handy for nonmedicinal purposes. “Suppose you relax and tell me all about it.”

  “You . . . you won’t tell my wife?”

  “Level with me, Word. I can’t make any promises.”

  He tried pouring a drink, but you could hear the clicking sound across the street, and most of the stuff wound up in his shoes.

  “I’m a working guy,” he said. “Mechanical maintenance. I build and service joy buzzers. You know—those little fun gimmicks that give people a shock when they shake hands?”

  “So?”

  “A lot of your executives like ’em. Particularly down on Wall Street.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “I’m on the road a lot. You know how it is—lonely. Oh, not what you’re thinking. See, Kaiser, I’m basically an intellectual. Sure, a guy can meet all the bimbos he wants. But the really brainy women—they’re not so easy to find on short notice.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Well, I heard of this young girl. Eighteen years old. A Vassar student. For a price, she’ll come over and discuss any subject—Proust, Yeats, anthropology. Exchange of ideas. You see what I’m driving at?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I mean, my wife is great, don’t get me wrong. But she won’t discuss Pound with me. Or Eliot. I didn’t know that when I married her. See, I need a woman who’s mentally stimulating, Kaiser. And I’m willing to pay for it. I don’t want an involvement—I want a quick intellectual experience, then I want the girl to leave. Christ, Kaiser, I’m a happily married man.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Six months. Whenever I have that craving, I call Flossie. She’s a madam, with a master’s in Comparative Lit. She sends me over an intellectual, see?”

  So he was one of those guys whose weakness was really bright women. I felt sorry for the poor sap. I figured there must be a lot of jokers in his position, who were starved for a little intellectual communication with the opposite sex and would pay through the nose for it.

  “Now she’s threatening to tell my wife,” he said.

  “Who is?”

  “Flossie. They bugged the motel room. They got tapes of me discussing ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘Styles of Radical Will,’ and, well, really getting into some issues. They want ten grand or they go to Carla. Kaiser, you’ve got to help me! Carla would die if she knew she didn’t turn me on up here.”

  The old call-girl racket. I had heard rumors that the boys at headquarters were on to something involving a group of educated women, but so far they were stymied.

  “Get Flossie on the phone for me.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll take your case, Word. But I get fifty dollars a day, plus expenses. You’ll have to repair a lot of joy buzzers.”

  “It won’t be ten Gs’ worth, I’m sure of that,” he said with a grin, and picked up the phone and dialed a number. I took it from him and winked. I was beginning to like him.

  Seconds later, a silky voice answered, and I told her what was on my mind. “I understand you can help me set up an hour of good chat,” I said.

  “Sure, honey. What do you have in mind?”

  “I’d like
to discuss Melville.”

  “‘Moby Dick’ or the shorter novels?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The price. That’s all. Symbolism’s extra.”

  “What’ll it run me?”

  “Fifty maybe a hundred for ‘Moby Dick.’ You want a comparative discussion—Melville and Hawthorne? That could be arranged for a hundred.”

  “The dough’s fine,” I told her and gave her the number of a room at the Plaza.

  “You want a blonde or a brunette?”

  “Surprise me,” I said, and hung up.

  I SHAVED and grabbed some black coffee while I checked over the Monarch College Outline series. Hardly an hour had passed before there was a knock on my door. I opened it, and standing there was a young redhead who was packed into her slacks like two big scoops of vanilla ice cream.

  “Hi, I’m Sherry.”

  They really knew how to appeal to your fantasies. Long straight hair, leather bag, silver earrings, no makeup.

  “I’m surprised you weren’t stopped, walking into the hotel dressed like that,” I said. “The house dick can usually spot an intellectual.”