Other People's Lives (23 page)

“It's a lullaby,” she says, and, looking at him directly, knows perfectly well that was not the way she sang it.

The cadre begins tapping rapidly on a bamboo length he has sharpened. In his staccato Northern voice, he says, “You should not stay in the jungle any longer.”

“A red and a blue scarf

and two wigs”

There is no street in Cholon, no house, no door, no stand, no stall that Sut On could not find in her sleep. It is in fact this feeling of sleep that stays with her now as she walks through the market in a short wig and a Western dress, seeing no one and smiling dimly, politely, at hawkers who, noticing a stranger, shout out elevated prices in broken Vietnamese. She could tear off her wig, pull out her voice, and scream and haggle with them in Chinese, but luckily the sleepiness stops her. In some ways, nothing even seems familiar, so she walks on, with her sunglasses, to a certain teashop where she picks up instructions. In front of it there is a row of old women who are selling radios and cameras in cartons marked PX. One of them suddenly looks up at her and in a hoarse, tired voice calls out in Chinese—it is
not
her mother. Inside, the message is more or less what she has been expecting: “The mountains around you do not have higher peaks than the one on which you already stand. There is no going back.”

In the bare Cholon apartment rented to Miss Phung Ngoc Anh, Sut On lights a joss stick, and in its old, missed smell folds and unfolds the scarves, staring at the red and blue squares in the dark room. Over and over again she turns them inside out and around and smooths down the edges; it's as if they were someone else's, she has never been so neat.

“Should I wear the red or blue?” she says, and feels like giggling, so much does she want to pretend that this is her dilemma.

Asleep on the straw mat which belongs to the apartment, she dreams that her grandfather is walking through the long, narrow halls of her uncle's go-down. He is coming to greet her, but does not call out her name or even beckon to her. He just keeps on walking slowly with a slice of pineapple held out in his hands.

“There is no going back.” To what would Phung Ngoc Anh go back? There is a girl with a flowing red scarf who speeds through the streets on the back of a motorcycle. If her heart is remote, she'd be the last one to know it. Fleet as a fawn, she shoots with both hands.

T
HIS IS ONE OF
the places where the Marshaks lived: a small stone cottage, probably whitewashed walls, outside some virgin sand and water the color of tinted sunglasses, maybe a clump or two of bougainvillaea, and, as far as you might want to see, several endless fields of blinding red anemones.

Theodore H. Marshak, America's enigmatic wanderer-poet-playwright, interviewed for the BBC's prestigious Third Programme, was asked if there was anything about the U.S. which he missed. Confounding both interviewer and audience, Marshak replied, “Yes. Egg-rolls and spareribs.” Abroad at the time was celebrated N.Y. restaurateur Sy Krinsky, and hearing of Marshak's response, the sympathetic Krinsky immediately arranged for special Care packages from his Jade and Lotus Garden to be flown to Marshak at his isolated Mediterranean retreat

And:

Topics and Treasures
alight on … exciting young Ted (Knives) Marshak and his radiant-as-her-name wife, Sunny. No believers in private Illyrias they, but as Ted told us, thoughtfully choosing his words with the quiet, dramatic intensity for which he is
treasured,
“This is a good place. It lets you know that life is where
you
are.”

Where
I
was at the time was in high school, and one of the things that preoccupied me in those days was the way people looked. Going to school in the morning, walking up the difficult blocks which were all hills, I used to imagine that just up above us was an overworked pilot in a low-flying plane. Any time he needed a jolt out of his boredom, he just glanced down from the cockpit and took a good look at us: long hair, dangling earrings, Mexican serapes, and chunky leather sandals that kept winding up our legs as if
they
were the hills. Those were the girls.

The boys, already sensitive to charges of “fruitiness,” were careful to look as if they might have been going anywhere, and could only be spotted by the instrument cases or sketchbooks they carried between their looseleafs. Here and there, in advertisement of something particular, some had longer hair and wore capes.

As we came closer to the tops of the hills, the sounds of instruments tuning up surrounded us. Finally, at the very top was the school itself, famous all over the city for its distinctiveness and nonconformity. An occasional flute or bassoon blew itself over the first warning bell, and certain above all of our distinctiveness, we pulled at our serapes and streamed in through the opened doors.

I say “we”: in fact I did not have long hair or Greek sandals, and took very little part in the life of the school, which I called to myself decadent, affected, and sometimes bourgeois, though this word “bourgeois” was known to be out of date, a carry-over from other times. Still, these were my favorite words, and were in my eyes constantly as I climbed up the hill or walked through the halls. Because I did not share in the look of the school and seemed over-quiet in the recklessness which was its spirit, there were people who began to wonder.

“Are your parents divorced?” the guidance counselor asked me. “Is there something you'd like to tell me?”

“No,” I said, and was easily truthful.

“Just tell them you're a mental case, it's the one thing they're always waiting for,” said a girl I knew whose father was a well-known sculptor, and who was herself to become briefly famous in her senior year when she refused to take cover in a shelter drill outside Altman's.

“I can't,” I said. It was one of the many things I considered decadent.

Partly out of concession, and partly because I liked them, I did get long pierced earrings, and sometimes wore peasant blouses. About these heavily embroidered peasant blouses, my mother said, “Every Polish peasant had a blouse like that. Wanda the goose-girl!” And for the earrings she fell back on Yiddish, calling out as I left the house, “The little gypsy with her jangles.”

In my jangles, and with my schoolbooks, I sat opposite the guidance counselor.

“Your teachers say that you don't contribute in classes. Would you say that you were always shy?”

“With
some
people,” I said, and looked out for life beyond the shades where a whole city was speeding about its morning business.

She leaned back against her filing cabinets and smiled at me as if I were a convalescent. “There's a wonderful church downtown, and they've asked us if we could find them an organist.”

“I don't play the organ,” I said, and ran out with the bell to report on this latest bit of decadence to my friend Simone.

Simone and I were not exactly friends. We belonged to rival Socialist-Zionist youth groups, and in city-wide gatherings of Zionist youth stood glaring at each other in blouses of varying shades of blue, each washed-out difference in color marking our separate commitments.

“What about the Arab workers who were paid
money
wages and never included communally?” Simone would say. She wore her hair pulled back by a thin, knotted rubber band that nobody would dare call Beat or bohemian, and would not have her ears pierced or even wear olivewood barrettes. Also, she had a policy of never taking a seat in a bus or subway, because if there was an empty seat near a Negro and you didn't sit in
that
one, it could be judged as offensive, and if you did, when there were other seats around, it could easily be thought of as patronizing.

On the train, which lurched past pillars and gum machines, I would stand on my tiptoes, trying to get hold of a subway strap.

“What if it happens that money was what they wanted in the first place?”

But Simone was much better at arguing than I; she enjoyed it for its own sake, and not even the end of a long day, a crowded train, or an upcoming midterm could stop her. What might do it, I knew, was to say, “What about the Prague Trials?” but since I did not actually know what they were, I decided not to try it. Besides, she was the only one in her family not born in France, she lived on the twelfth floor of a doorman building on Central Park West, she spelled her last name, Frydman, with a “y,” had an uncle who was a Communist representative in the French Chamber of Deputies, and her father, who was always taking business trips to Switzerland, could be found listed in the telephone book this way: Frydman Lucien…Imprt-Exprt. What he imported or exported I had no idea; altogether, it was a family of mystery. Once she told me that her father would have to stay in Milan for a few days because they had relatives there who were beginning to feel insulted.

“Milan, Italy?” I said. “How come you have relatives in Italy?”

“Oh,
you
know. Typical Yid story. They were hiding in a convent and now they're very rich.”

It was not typical of anyone I knew, so that this sense of their glamour and mystery only deepened. In a way, what I found most mysterious and glamorous of all was that Simone lived in Manhattan, on a street whose name alone, I believed, existed solely for the purpose of certain Hollywood movies when it was necessary to show, through the flash of an awning and a lobby, or a doorman with a whistle at a cab, the backdrop of lives carried on in the ridiculous luxury of obvious make-believe.

This possible movie aspect of Simone occurred to me constantly when I talked to her or listened to her arguing, and made me feel that, in some way I did not understand, she was leading a secret life. If it was true about Simone, who was at least partially my friend, what about all the other girls in school whom I hardly even knew? I began to look for clues of secret lives in the way people braided their long hair or knotted their sandals and, gaining nothing from this but more confusion, turned to other sources.

“Why do you always wear black?” says the schoolmaster in
The Seagull
to Masha, a girl whose father is not rich, but manages anyway for her to be living in the middle of a big estate where there are plays at night.

“I am in mourning for my life,” Masha says, and continues to complain in this way, without ever really offering any decent explanation.

In my French class, a girl named Lucy Sperling told everyone that she had gone through her closet and thrown out all of her clothes except the ones that were black.

“My mother may kill me,” she said, “but I'm only going to wear black from now on.”

So Lucy Sperling was in mourning for her life. Why? You could never have known it from looking at her. It was another case of secret lives.

The guidance counselor, who was still intent on finding out mine, though it was obvious I didn't have one, said, “How do you spend your time after school? Do you ever do any baby-sitting, for example?”

“Sometimes,” I said. From time to time, in my own building, I would baby-sit for people going out for Chinese food and the movies. After hysterical last-minute preparations, they would leave their bathed, whiny children,
Marjorie Morningstar
with a bookmark in it, and a blaring television. Out of boredom and disapproval, I had, for the most part, stopped doing it.

“The Marshaks always want one of our girls as their baby-sitter. Last year we gave them Erica Jaffe, but she graduated, and after that they went to Greece. Do you know who Ted Marshak is? Shall I give them your phone number?”

Did I know who Ted Marshak was? Was there any way I couldn't? Aside from Kahlil Gibran and Jean Cocteau, he was one of the few writers anyone in school considered worth bothering about. What he was most famous for was a single very long poem called
Knives.
It was about a random knife murderer who takes joy from his work, but is then caught and imprisoned. He escapes from prison by making a knife out of something in his cell, and ends up by being in a traveling circus or carnival where he is known as “The Human Knife.” The book, in paperback, was carried around as a badge, and its beginning lines were memorized and quoted by everyone:

         
Knives!

Flashing highglint into soft

         
flesh And blood-

         
Slash

I cruise/

         
sluice through yr rivernights (my gore store)

No

   end

      end

          red

            
en

               
Ded

“Ted Marshak, the poet?” I said.

“He's much more than a poet—they're extremely interesting people, the Marshaks. Erica Jaffe loved them. They live in Manhattan, though. Will the traveling bother you?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I take the subway all the time,” and being very careful to avoid Simone, I ran all the way down the hill. I was preparing for a brand-new decadence and the beginning of a secret life.

This is one of the places where the Marshaks lived: a gracious penthouse apartment splashed with all the moonlike winks rising off the New York skyline, vast, pale, painting-filled walls, rosy, expectant twilights echoing with the tinkle of laughter—muted laughter—due naturally to brilliant and witty jokes that were just being tossed off, and in the bathroom a glass-enclosed shower.

“I don't think they
will,
” said Mrs. Marshak, “but just in case the kids get hungry, there's some celery in the fridge.”

Except for the difference in coloring, Mrs. Marshak looked like a stalk of celery herself. Nothing moved in her face or her body as she talked, and even doing that, her mouth seemed to barely open. With her straight blond hair and loose, boyish boniness, she looked like a girl getting married in the Sunday
Times.
But most particularly what she looked like was a woman I had once seen in the elevator in Bonwit Teller's. This woman, just as straight-limbed and angular-featured, was, it occurred to me when I saw her, what was called “horsey.” Whether this meant someone who rode horses or someone who looked like a horse, or even a person who because of too much horse-riding in the family had developed into this strange and specific but recognized mutation, I did not know. As it happened, the woman in the store was English. She was holding the hand of a handsome little boy of about four or five whom she had dressed in short pants and a blazer, and as they entered the elevator, she said to him in a clear, brisk English voice, “Caps off in lifts.”