Crossroads (10 page)

Sally was visiting when Sean picked me up. I was in the bathroom, so she got the door. She called to me, “There's some
gorgeous guy here to see you.” It was Sally's humor but she made Sean uncomfortable immediately. When I looked at him, standing in the doorway, I saw, however, that Sally had perhaps made an accurate observation. Over dinner, he seemed restless. “Your friend, is she always so blunt?” I apologized for Sally, saying she was a journalist and generally said what was on her mind.

After dinner Sean wanted to walk to Times Square and maybe catch a show. He had no idea what show, what kind of show, he wanted to see. We bought a paper that felt wet to the touch and wilted in our hands. “You want to walk to Times Square in this heat?” But he insisted. Most of the films I'd seen he hadn't, and vice versa. “Here we are,” he complained, “in the middle of Fun City and we can't find anything to do.” We decided to stroll. He rolled up his shirt sleeves before we'd gone two blocks, and I put up my hair. “Why don't we decide what we want to do and take a cab?” I suggested.

“Why don't we just walk and find something?”

“I think we should go somewhere air-conditioned.”

It was the kind of night when every smell is stronger than anything you've ever smelled before, the kind of weather people have in mind when they warn travelers, “Don't visit New York in July.” So I was with a madman who wanted to walk throught the grimiest parts of the city in a July heat wave. Mark would have known where we were going and we'd have taken a cab. It would have been planned before we walked out the door. We were both great planners. Most people who visited our apartment noticed that all our books were in alphabetical order.

“Look”—Sean took me by the elbow—“when was the last time you walked to Times Square?”

“They have a subway that takes you right there. It's very efficient. Isn't that easier?”

But Sean won. He didn't want to be indoors. It was the war that had made him hate being inside. As we walked, he told me
about his “bit part” in Vietnam. He had dropped out of Yale at the height of the war and the army made him a deal. He didn't have to take off to Canada and he didn't have to bribe some poor doctor. He just had to run the radio station for servicemen in Saigon. He'd never seen real action. But he spent nine months inside a radio station, reading off lists of dead and MIAs and POWs in between the Stones and Roberta Flack, and the greatest effect it had on him was that he'd lost the ability to be indoors for long.

He loved to window shop. “I'm a consumer,” he said as we passed a head shop. “Everything I see, I want to buy.”

“I always buy things I don't really want.”

He shook his head as we paused in front of an antique store. There was a walnut chest in the window he said he liked. He knew it was walnut because of the grain and the color. “I like walnut and oak best,” he said. “What do you like?”

“Formica.” I was a little annoyed.

He laughed and said that sometimes he found me very funny.

“You know, if you've never just walked to Times Square for the hell of it, it'll do you good,” he said, as he started walking. At Lincoln Center we bought some ice cream cones at an outdoor Italian cafe on Broadway. “Why will it do me good?” I didn't see anything good about spending the evening walking around Manhattan when the humidity was 94 percent and the temperature about the same. “It's very hot. Why don't we just sit in front of Lincoln Center and watch everyone go to the opera?”

“You're an urban planner. And you don't experience the city. It doesn't make sense.”

“I don't need to experience anything. I look at maps. They tell me what I need to know. I look at charts; they tell me how many people live somewhere, walk somewhere, how many cars go by in an hour, and so on. Then I write elaborate grant
proposals for millions of dollars based on those facts.” I was being glib and stubborn. In truth, a large part of my time was spent examining neighborhoods and writing rather emotional reports about urban conditions.

“In other words, you wouldn't go to Times Square unless you had tickets for a show?”

“That's about right.”

“Well, a change will be good for you.” I wasn't sure I liked being told what would be good for me, but lately I wasn't necessarily the best judge anyway. Sean wanted to see the night life up close. He wanted to feel the pulse of the city, get its filth all over his shirt, his neck, his hands. “I always know when I've been to Manhattan,” he said. “My shirt gets dirty in half an hour.”

Two transvestites and a bag lady passed us. The neighborhood was starting to change. Street people appeared, the emaciated kind who took drugs. Panhandlers. People with no place to go. And no one to go to. We passed a peepshow and Sean stopped. “Have you ever been inside one of these?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “It really doesn't interest me.”

“Have you ever been inside?”

“Let's go somewhere nice, O.K.?”

“We'll go somewhere nice but I'd just like to see what it looks like inside one of these places.”

“I think,” I said, “that this is one of those things in life I can live without.”

But he was already handing a few dollars for admission to the shriveled lady with no teeth and very little hair, and we walked into a room filled with little booths, the kind you take four pictures in for a quarter. Some of the booths had their curtains closed and I could see pairs of shiny shoes that businessmen wear. I decided I was in no immediate danger. We picked a booth, closed the curtain, and dropped a quarter into the slot. “Do you do this often?” I asked Sean.

“Every chance I get.” We both peered into the movieola as the film began. It was an eight-millimeter, home-type movie that seemed to have some kind of plot. A woman is devastatingly drawn to another man's male lover. The man seems to be her husband or fiance. While the men are willing to fondle and tantalize the woman, they end up making love to one another, though the picture fades before they actually get into anything too complicated.

As we left our booth, we saw a small group of men, very middle-class, homebody types, in jackets, heading into what was called “the theater.” The word “Theater” was written in very elegant pink letters with lots of swirls, each letter outlined in black. “Must be some kind of vaudeville act,” Sean said.

“The theater” consisted of about twenty booths, all in a circle, each with a curtain at the entrance and a black window in front, facing the stage. We entered a booth, closed the curtain, and put another quarter into another slot. The black window began to rise and we heard music coming from the other side of the window.

When the window was up, I saw two women, in G-strings and with spangles on their nipples, writhing on the stage and clawing their way toward the windows that were open. Pairs of little eyes peered from their windows and the eyes seemed to grow glassy as the dancing grew more frenzied, and for a few moments I found myself transfixed by the shimmying breasts and gyrating hips. The women seemed to have some kind of oil on their skin, and when one of the women sat back on her heels, swaying in a circular motion in front of our window, she looked like a snake in heat as she crawled in the direction of our window.

“All right,” Sean said, catching me by the elbow as I hailed a cab. “I made a mistake. It was a big mistake. I'm sorry. I didn't know it would upset you.” Regular Broadway theater was getting out and there weren't any cabs to be had.

“I'd just like to go home. Is that all right?”

He held me firmly by the elbow. “I made a mistake. I've made a lot of mistakes. I didn't mean to upset you. I'm an actor; I make movies. I didn't think going in there would cause this crisis.”

“You're apologizing again,” I told him. “There isn't anything to apologize for. I'd just like to go home.”

Sean held me tightly, but when I stared at where his fingers had wrapped themselves around my arm, he loosened his grip. “I didn't take you to a peepshow to upset you. I didn't take you there to make you feel bad or because I thought it would be good for our souls or so you could stage a protest on Seventh Avenue or walk away from me or so we could have a disagreement about my inappropriate behavior or so you can decide all men are impossible. I took you there as a goof. For the hell of it.” I was staring at a piece of gum, flattened on the sidewalk, as I told him I didn't think it was “a goof” to watch people humiliate themselves.

Sean stared at the same piece of gum I had my eyes fixed on. It was a brownish wad that had gotten walked on for a long time. For decades, maybe, and it was in the shape of an eyeball with a dent in the middle, where someone had put a cleat, and it seemed to be staring back at us. A miserable, brown eyeball, a wad of gum, permanently embedded in the sidewalk of Broadway. Chewing gum comes from Chicago, where I come from, and at that moment I wished more than anything that I were home. That I'd never left home.

He raised his voice. “Sometimes I think you like to have a bad time and take everything so seriously. I think disagreeing and being very serious makes you feel nice and safe. Do you want to know something? Everyone is scared. Everyone is just as scared and afraid as you are. Everyone. And I haven't been with a woman in a long time, so why don't we just say that we're all scared and we all make mistakes and start the evening over.”

A small crowd had formed, ready to absorb any tragedy that came their way in New York, and watched us argue. Sean shooed them away with some determination. I looked around Broadway. All the cabs were filled. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I just don't see what the big deal was. Walk to Times Square. Watch some sad people make a display of themselves.”

He rubbed his forehead. “I really am doing it all wrong, aren't I? I just haven't been with a woman in a while.”

My hand reached up. “You know,” I began, “you can drop out of fine universities and risk your life doing stupid stunts, waiting to make it big somewhere, and make all kinds of profound statements about how other people should live their lives and what they should do and what they need, but in the end I don't see where your life is any great model for how we should live. You know what you are?” I went on. “You're a watcher. You look at people and make judgments. You sit back and watch and criticize. No one means anything to you. Nothing means anything to you. That's why you'll never be a great actor or director or whatever you want to be. How can you understand someone else if you can't even understand yourself?”

“Did it ever occur to you,” he said, “that you push people away from you?”

What was I doing in this mess? I glanced around me and looked at a sign across the street. It was one of a man, the size of a building, continuously smoking, an endless flow of vapor, day after day, year after year, pouring from his mouth. Like some steamy oracle, some deadly pronouncement, he ruled over us. I looked back down at the wad of gum and knew I was being watched on all sides, and those writhing breasts at the entrance to the peepshow seemed to be observing this as well.

The light above me was green and a sign read
WALK
, so I walked. I crossed Broadway and left Sean standing in front of the peepshow. I was aware of traffic that came to a halt, of
screeching brakes, and then of people pushing past me. I crossed to Forty-second Street and headed down the steps into the subway. Pimps and hookers in their pink satin heels were doing business on the stairs. Puerto Rican boys, radios blasting, raced down. Theatergoers used the railing, walking arm in arm.

I went with them all. There was a big procession of us, heading to the token booth. I went down with the Chinese and the Japanese, the blacks and the Chicanos, the tourists and the permanent residents. The rich and the poor. The native New Yorkers. I went down with the cops and the criminals, the runaways and misfits and members of the Racquet Club and the illegal aliens and the professors and the
Times
reporters and the single people and the divorced and widowed people and old people and frigid and impotent people and those who looked like they'd had too much sex altogether and those who looked like they hadn't had it in years. I walked among the workaholics, the alcoholics, the coffee drinkers, the pill poppers, the weight watchers and Turkish bath users, the chain smokers, the people who'd stopped being chain smokers, the people who'd been hypnotized, terrorized, mesmerized, analyzed, declawed, defanged, who'd improved themselves, exercised themselves, rid themselves of any germ of selfdestruction. They were coming home from night school; they were going out to mug somebody. Everyone was going to improve themselves somehow. Everyone was going to take the same goddamn express train I was going to take.

Sean was right about one thing. I had only been thinking about myself for a while. But who was he to try and take my mind off it? As I entered the subway, my future suddenly seemed in doubt. The token taker hollered at me as I pulled out a twenty. I fumbled for a five while people standing in line behind me sighed impatiently and someone asked me to move out of the way.

I decided to get lost, to lose myself underground. I decided to ask the pimp in the pink suit if he could use an extra hand. I walked toward him and he started to smile. All his teeth had been filed to gold points and he had a dozen gold chains around his neck. He was tall and shiny on top, like the Chrysler Building. The pimp smiled as I walked toward him through the tunnel and he seemed to be leading me deeper and deeper inside and I was lost somewhere in the bottom of the city I knew by heart on a drawing board.

Sean was standing in the same place where I'd left him, staring at the brown wad of gum stuck into the sidewalk, and he glanced up when he saw me coming, a look of sadness in his eyes. My hand was raised in a clenched fist. He was a stuntman, after all. He could take a punch for me. I don't think I would have hit him, but he caught my arm and held my wrist lightly between his fingers. “I'm really sorry,” he said.