Odd Jobs (12 page)

N
EW
Y
ORK
is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. I left, in April of 1957, a floor-through apartment on West Thirteenth Street, and return, when I do, to midtown hotels and the Upper East Side apartments of obliging friends. The Village, with its bookstores and framer’s shops, its bricked-in literary memories and lingering bohemian redolence, is off the track of a professional visit—an elevator-propelled whirl in and out of high-rise offices and prix-fixe restaurants. Nevertheless, I feel confident in saying that the disadvantages of New York life which led me to leave have intensified rather than abated, and that the city which Le Corbusier described as a magnificent disaster is less and less magnificent.

Always, as one arrives, there is the old acceleration of the pulse—the mountainous gray skyline glimpsed from the Triboro Bridge, the cheerful games of basketball and handball being played on the recreational asphalt beside the FDR Drive, the startling, steamy, rain-splotched intimacy of the side streets where one’s taxi slows to a crawl, the careless flung beauty of the pedestrians clumped at the street corners. So many faces, costumes, packages, errands! So many preoccupations, hopes, passions, lives in progress! So much human stuff, clustering and streaming with a languid colorful impatience like the pheromone-coded mass maneuvers of bees!

But soon the faces and their individual expressions merge and vanish under a dulling insistent pressure, the thrum and push of congestion. As ever more office buildings are heaped upon the East Fifties—the hugest of them, the slant-topped white Citicorp building, clearly about to fall off its stilts onto your head—and an ever-greater number of impromptu merchants spread their dubiously legal wares on the sidewalks, even pedestrian traffic jams. One is tripped, hassled, detoured. Buskers and beggars cram every available niche. The sidewalks and subway platforms, generously designed in the last century, have been overwhelmed on both the minor and major entrepreneurial scales. The Manhattan grid, that
fine old machine for living, now sticks and grinds at every intersection, and the discreet brownstones of the side streets look down upon a clogged nightmare of perpetual reconstruction and insolent double parking. Even a sunny day feels like a tornado of confusion one is hurrying to get out of, into the sanctum of the hotel room, the office, the friendly apartment. New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space—only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. While popular journalism focuses on the possible collapse of Los Angeles and San Francisco into chasms opened by earthquakes, here on the East Coast, on its oblong of solid granite, the country’s greatest city is sinking into the chasm of itself.

Hardened New Yorkers will sniff, What else is new? Their metropolis has been a kind of vigorous hell since the days of the Five Points and the immigrant-packed Lower East Side. Its vitality and glamour are ironically rooted in merciless skirmish and inconvenient teeming; a leering familiarity with crowdedness and menace is the local badge of citizenship, and the city’s constant moral instruction features just this piquant proximity of rich and poor—the Park Avenue matron deftly dodging the wino on his grate, the high-skirted hooker being solicited from the black-windowed limousine. In a city that rises higher and digs deeper than any other, unchecked ascents and descents rocket side by side, exhilaratingly. In the noonday throng on Fifth Avenue near Forty-second Street, I once saw a nearly naked man, shirtless and barefoot and sooty from his place of subterranean rest, scuttle along in a pair of split overalls that exposed his buttocks, and everyone’s eyes but mine were expertly averted. Mr. Sammler reflects, in Saul Bellow’s late-Sixties novel of Manhattan, “You opened a jeweled door into degradation, from hypercivilized Byzantine luxury straight into the state of nature, the barbarous world of color erupting from beneath.”

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: there is grandeur in that, and necessity. For the Korean grocer and the Ukrainian taxi-driver, the apparent turmoil holds out opportunity and hope. The chaos is not quite complete; food is trucked in through the tunnels and purveyed in epic daily amounts, Bloomingdale’s brightly peddles kitchen wares to young couples who have somehow found an apartment they can afford, the museums continue to expand, Central Park still offers patches of grass for a sunbath and a doze in the bosom of humanity. But the price of those delights, in
the three decades of my exile, has gone from steep to exorbitant. Archibald MacLeish, toward the end of his long life, told me, “New York used to be a giving place, a place that gave more than it took. Now it takes more than it gives.” Even for those with access to the right side of the jewelled door, the city teeters on the edge of dysfunction. Something as simple and, elsewhere, as comfortable as a rainy day tips it over the edge.

I heard the rain beginning at my back as I sat at one of those late dinner parties (we sat down at ten) with which the Manhattan rich prove their fortitude. The rain made a lyrical sound, ticking off the fire escapes and deepening the swish of cars on the street far below and forming a soothing undercurrent to the name-dropping and scarcely veiled financial bragging and media exegesis. (I am struck by how seriously—religiously, indeed—New Yorkers watch television. In other parts of the country, television is taken as an escape from reality; in New York, all things being relative, it is considered a window
into
reality, and no doubt its phantoms do have more substance than the doormen downstairs, and the neighbors behind the apartment wall, and the mugger waiting around the corner.) Rain in New York seems to arrive from so great a distance, picking its way through so many intervening obstacles, as to be a friend bearing a private message. But the next day, having allowed plenty of time to reach my appointment, I found my host’s doorman overwhelmed with taxi requests on an avenue of cabs already taken, hurrying heedlessly past with their doused
FOR HIRE
lights. In the meantime, I and several other mature citizens who had miles to go and promises to keep tiptoed among the rivers that ran under the canopy and watched the minutes pour by. As frequently (but not inevitably) happens, a few empty cabs did at last wink into view and, as grateful as elderly Eskimos who at the last minute were
not
abandoned to starve in the snowfields, we were damply bundled off to our destinations, shedding tips like dandruff.

But at the end of my day, spent at an anachronistic ceremony held at a site, on West 155th Street, where no taxi-driver believes you want to go if you’re white, the rain had intensified, and the taxi dearth was complete; I found myself up to my ankles in a babbling gutter, waving at ships that passed in the night and thinking that my best option might be painlessly to drown. As luck would have it, in this town of hairbreadth rescues, a limousine at loose ends offered me a ride to the airport for (the driver was very clear) “thirty-five dollars—cash.” Beggars can’t be choosers,
and drowning exiles can’t be thrifty, and so off we went, weaving jubilantly, only to bog down in a solid hour of stop-and-go traffic on 125th Street and another hour of trying to nudge our way onto the Triboro Bridge. The escape routes from the city were all but impenetrably jammed, and, reaching the airport, where planes not uncommonly sit on the runway for six hours waiting for their turn to fly, I tipped my driver, who had become my comrade in misery, five dollars. In his agitation at wasting so much of his time on me, he had cracked the taillight of another auto, whose protesting driver, a young Hispanic, he silenced by offering to trade insurance-company names. He knew, he explained confidentially to me, that his victim’s car would be uninsured, illegally. Thus the have-nots get their taillights raped. The little incident, one no doubt of a thousand bits of preëmptory maneuver in that hour of urban squeeze, saddened me, but instead of standing up for justice I sat back for greater ease, in the only transportation the rain-soaked jungle seemed likely to provide.

The emergency atmosphere of this most recent visit is typical, and by no means as bad as it can get: I have not yet been mugged, knocked down by a bicycling messenger, crushed by a falling construction crane, or poisoned by a handcart hot dog. The few friends of mine still toughing it out in the city assure me that such inconveniences scarcely threaten residents, who have their cozy digs, their settled ways, their familiar routes and haunts, their terms of accommodation with the state of nature. Of course I remember how one does, over the weeks and months, pull a kind of friendly village—grocery store, newsstand, flower shop, laundry, dentist—out of New York’s ghastly plenitude, its inexhaustible and endlessly repeated urban muchness. But the friendliness lies more in our wishing it to be so than in any confirming reality; returning only a little later, one finds the shops have changed names, the chummy clerks are gone, and one’s name has been erased from the computer.

Toward the end of each of my by now countless trips to New York, I must still fight a rising panic that I won’t be able to get out. The city, like the Soviet Union, has this constant usefulness: it makes you glad you live somewhere else. As in the Soviet Union, nothing is easy: there are lines at the bank and the post office, there is nowhere to park, everything is an exhausting walk away, the restaurant has no tables, the theatre has no seats, and carbon monoxide ubiquitously offers an invitation to succumb. Time has only strengthened my impelling perception of thirty
years ago: being in New York takes so much energy as to leave none for any other kind of being.

M
OST
A
MERICANS
haven’t had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses. But not New England, and especially not Ipswich, Massachusetts, which, thanks to an early boom and a long stagnation, has more so-called seventeenth-century houses still standing than any other town in the nation. “So-called” because old wooden houses aren’t simple to date: the early Yankees, thrifty and handy, reused and transposed major worked timbers without any consideration for the antiquarians of the future. A noble chamfered summer beam, for instance, may certainly date from before 1680, but be worked in with structural members from several decades later, in a room with raised-field panelling from 1750, in a house fitted with new windows and staircases in the nineteenth century, and most recently clapboarded in 1950. The old frameworks were sometimes completely swallowed in later renovations, and the original shape of the place was detectable only in the attic and around the cellar stairs. The foundation itself may have belonged to an earlier, quite vanished house. Architectural historians use the term “first-period,” signifying a date before 1720. The house I and my wife and four children lived in was called, on a plaque beside the front door, the Polly Dole House and given a date of 1686, though one visiting expert sneeringly said that dating it prior to 1725 would compromise his integrity.

A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney, and utter porchlessness. Some of these houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look. The gables are on the sides. The windows were originally small, with fixed casements and leaded diamond panes. The basic plan called for two rooms over two, the fireplace opening into each room; a later plan added half-rooms behind, creating the traditional “saltbox” shape. Inside the front door—at least our front door—a shallow front hall gave onto an exiguous staircase squeezed into the space left by the great brick core at the
heart of the house. The fireplace, with its cast-iron spits and recessed bake ovens, had been the kitchen. The virgin forests of the New World had contributed massive timbers, adzed into shape and mortise-and-tenoned together, and floorboards as much as a foot wide.

The Polly Dole House had a living room so large that people supposed the house had originally been an inn, on the winding old road to Newburyport, which ran right by. Polly Dole was a shadowy lady who may have waited on tables; we never found out much about her, though local eyebrows still lifted at her name. The big room, with its gorgeous floorboards, was one you sailed through, and the furniture never stayed in any one place. The walk-in fireplace, when the three-foot logs in it got going, singed your eyebrows and dried out the joints of any chair drawn up too cozily close. In the middle of the summer beam, a huge nut and washer terminated a long steel rod that went up to a triangular arrangement of timbers in the attic; at one point in its history the house had been lifted by its own bootstraps. I used to tell my children that if we turned the nut the whole house would fall down. We never tried it.

The decade was the Sixties, my wife and I were youngish, and the house suited us just fine. It was Puritan; it was back-to-nature; it was less-is-more. A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. A previous owner had put a pipe and a pole in a small upstairs room to make a walk-in closet; fair weather or foul, I would hike from our bedroom to my clothes every morning. I discover I have no memory at all of where my wife kept hers. Perhaps, it being the Sixties, she only needed a miniskirt and a lumberjack shirt. Our children, four of them, slept in four little rooms in a row above the long kitchen, which for a time had been two kitchens, a partition intervening. There had been only two children when we moved in, and if there had been six little rooms, we might have felt obliged to produce six little tenants. When they were awake and downstairs, the children raced around and around the central brick mass with its four fireplaces on a counterclockwise route that went front hall, living room, kitchen, dining room, front hall.

The living room, beneath its low smoky-beamed ceiling, cheerfully accepted our butterfly chairs and Danish modern and glass-and-chrome coffee table. Such austere furniture looked in tune, on the broad old boards, under the slightly sway-backed beams. The ancient house felt oddly up-to-date in its serene lack of Victorian complications. Around 1940, an Ipswich eccentric (one of many), a bachelor antiquarian whose
quest for religious authenticity eventually took him from the Anglican priesthood into that of Russian Orthodoxy, had rescued the place from tenement status. At the Depression nadir of its fortunes, we were told, not only too many people had inhabited the rooms but a flock of chickens as well. The architect-priest had in his renovations installed generous, twelve-over-twelve sash-hung windows, and this fenestration dispelled any lingering gloom. One felt Puritan claustrophobia only in the cellar, among the fieldstone foundation walls, piled up without much benefit of mortar, and threaded with a worrisome inheritance of deteriorating pipes and wires. There was no sewer connection, only a cesspool in the backyard which, by the inexorable laws of hydraulics, would sometimes overflow into our kitchen sink. In the attic, as I recall, there were many loose boards, some pink fluff pretending to be insulation, a fine view over the rooftops toward the town wharf, a ramshackle TV aerial, and, in the end, tons of stacked
New Yorker
s.