Unaccompanied Women Read online

  My husband, intent on peering into the darkness of the beer before him, took no notice. Lynne noticed at once. “Oh, dear,” she said. “Turn your back to me. I’ll try to get it back together.” I did and she did and it wouldn’t go back together. “Here,” she said, “put your coat on.” I did and, not soon enough for me, we left. At home my husband, in no mood to be sympathetic, said, “Well, you got what you wanted. Happy now?” As the clock struck twelve, someone set off firecrackers in the street outside. Inside, my husband snored.

  And that was the last time, 1966 verging on 1967, I ventured out to celebrate the coming of the new year. Over time the possibilities of getting kissed at midnight lessened and then disappeared altogether. Over time, armed with the foreknowledge of what I was up against, I have maintained and even increased my capacity to mount a pout of epic proportions, lasting most of the holiday season—my only defense against the relentlessness of the cruelest night of all. Is it any wonder, then, that I remain kissless when the new year brings new life and lots of fucking to those who do not wander beyond the confines of respectability.

  Of course, were I in New York, I could count on a few kisses from . . . whom? Is Sidney still alive? Graham isn’t, at least not for me. Never mind, New York is alive, always, unlike me, who has suffered an emotional stroke, leaving behind only one feeling, the great big one: self-pity. What the hell. I’m going to New York. Again.

  So what if my cottage gets sold in the meantime? My landlady and her family are moving far away. Not much I can do about that. Somebody new will buy the property, and maybe they’ll let me stay and maybe they won’t. I can’t do anything about that either. I am not good at waiting. The years I have accumulated have not brought with them patience; I am, however, a champion hand-wringer and occasional sniveler. So while I wait for other people to make or unmake my life, there’s nothing wrong with kissing an entire bottle of champagne by myself and then calling the airlines—that I can do. They’re always open, even on New Year’s Eve, and if I punch zero a lot of times and wait long enough, a real person will talk to me. Happy New Year, he’ll say. How can I help you? Get me to New York, I’ll say. And he will.

  CHAPTER 8

  at the plaza

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman alone in a bar must be in want of a date.

  —with apologies to JANE AUSTEN

  THE RIDE FORM JFK to midtown Manhattan takes about thirty minutes, except it never does, it’s always longer. Which is fine with me. Coming across the Triborough Bridge into New York, through Queens and Harlem and Central Park, is thrilling. So, usually, is the cab ride.

  It is very, very cold in New York in January, though not as cold as the holidays I just endured not at all gracefully. Outside the cab windows the dirty snow is banked along the highway, the sky is gray, overcast; at five P.M.. darkness is almost upon us. I am in high spirits. My cabdriver is not.

  “Sonofabitchin’ traffic.” The accents of New York are forever interesting to me; I can’t make out exactly where this one comes from. The Bronx, I think, with black overlay or underlay; I like it. I will keep him talking if I can.

  We pass Shea Stadium. “So,” I say, “did your team win the Series?”

  “No.” Can you bite off a no and spit it out? Yes, he just did.

  A dark green SUV eases its way onto the roadway.

  “Sonofabitch!” My driver is bellowing. “Hey!” He opens his window, puts his arm out, and gives the international sign for aggrievedness. The icy wind renders me speechless. The driver of the SUV rolls down his window, does the same back. My driver leans his head out the window and yells, “Get your truck outta my way!” The SUV continues to glide slowly, confidently, into our lane. “Fuck you!” yells my driver. The SUV glides closer to our cab, whose driver has not seen fit to slow so that those vehicles from entrances can merge with the flow of traffic. “Fuck you!” yells the SUV driver, a young white man with a mouth as big as my driver’s, and he moves the SUV into the lane ahead of us.

  My driver is as livid as any American male can be. “Fuck you!” he yells, and in a burst of creativity, “Fuck yo mama!” The SUV driver leans his head out his window and yells, “Fuck you!” Equally creative, they are, but I will not argue, I will not beg for the window to be rolled up. I will simply endure.

  My driver, no doubt sensing my cowardice, yells once again, “Fuck you!” and then, “Fuck yo mama!” In the absence of any response the cabdriver leans out his window and yells, “I got yo mama right here.” He gestures out the window, his thumb pointing to the backseat of his cab, to me. “Right here in my cab, you sonofabitch! You wanna talk fuckin’, hey! Take a look!”

  Surely not. There’s too much traffic; he couldn’t just stop. He couldn’t even get off the highway, clogged as it is with slow-moving traffic, and even if he did, it’s still daylight, people live all around in these neighborhoods, not to worry. Am I going to be a hostage? Nah, it’s too cold.

  The SUV, without benefit of turn signal, moves easily, rather grandly, into the right-hand lane. Smoothly the driver exits the highway, giving us the finger as he goes. No noise from my driver. Time passes. We have gone a mile in silence and with the window rolled up. “Feel better?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Good to get all that out. Where you from?” Suddenly he pulls off the highway and onto streets I’ve never heard of or seen in all of my taxi rides from JFK to midtown Manhattan. “I’m taking you some shortcuts. You got yourself the best driver going. Have you there in no time.” The cab shoots up the street. I am at his mercy. He says, “People so grateful for me knowing all these shortcuts, they usually tip me big.”

  “I’m a teacher,” I say. I don’t say I’m a writer. When I do, people ask what it is I write, and then I have to go through this long song and dance about placing an ad in the personals and meeting men, and most of the time the other person turns speechless. If I lied and said that I write about economics or cooking or just plain sex, the other person would still be speechless; there’s something about coming face-to-face with a writer that renders most people mute. Because I find this cabdriver interesting, I want him to talk to me, and so, “I’m a teacher.” People are never speechless around teachers. Except you have to be careful not to say you’re an English teacher, because the response to that is “Uh-oh, gotta watch my grammar” or “English was my worst subject” or “How come you people don’t teach spelling anymore?”

  A sigh of resignation from the front seat. What he doesn’t know is that I am also a big tipper, probably bigger than people with lots of money, which they have, partly, because they aren’t big tippers. I say, “Of course, whether or not you get a tip at all depends on how you’re going to vote in the next election.”

  Another sigh, then a long silence. We are stopped at one of the many traffic lights this shortcut provides us. Finally, “I . . . I gotta go with Hillary. She’s an all-right lady.”

  “Good,” I say, “though we’ll probably have to wait another four years for Hillary. Anyway, you’ve got a tip, an average to below average tip. How about the election coming up?”

  Traffic light number twelve, another sigh, a long silence. “Whoever’s runnin’ against Bush,” he says. “I gotta vote my conscience.”

  We are now friends. He tells me outlandish and fascinating stuff, better than what you can find in the supermarket tabloids: Robert Wagner murdered Natalie Wood out there on that boat. Whitney Houston is gay. “What? She is not!” Well, she is. My driver knows the neighborhood where she grew up. “Everybody know she’s a dyke.” Natalie Cole is clean finally, had a rough time. Bobby Brown is one bad dude, and “I never say nothing bad about babies, but that baby of his is ugly! Don’t take him out in the light! The sun go down!”

  As for himself he used to be a fireman, hurt his back, became an alcoholic, joined AA, sober seven years now. “I’m gonna show you something,” he says, and reaches into his glove compartment. “Look at this.” He hands me a piece of paper. “Barb
ra Streisand,” it reads. “I drove her. This right here is her autograph.” I return the paper quickly to his hand and murmur my appreciation. “Natalie Cole, she was in this cab, too, but she didn’t give me no autograph. She’s nice, though. She’s clean, like I said.”

  We are making progress. The street sign says East 123. We are in Manhattan.

  “So you’re a teacher.”

  “Yes.”

  “Teachers don’t get paid enough. They oughtta pay you more money.” His voice rises. “Teachers do important things. Where would we be without teachers!” I expect him to roll down the window and yell “Fuck you,” and he would, I’m sure, if either of us could identify the “they.” I would help; I would yell, too, but outside this taxi people seem to be worse off than either of us inside.

  Then he says, “I wanna ask you a question. You sure you’re a teacher?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “What’s this word mean?”

  “Yes?”

  “‘Conservative.’ I hear people being that, being conservative. What does that mean?”

  Now’s my chance. I can proselytize, embroider, enlarge upon, propagandize, even tell the truth. “It means ‘to conserve, to save, to pull in, to be tight, narrow.’”

  He is silent, deep in thought. Then, “How about ‘liberal’?”

  “Ah, now there,” I say. “Liberal is what you are. ‘Liberal’ means a person who is free, who thinks for himself, who grows, not shrinks. Wouldn’t you say you’re a liberal?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He nods enthusiastically. The street sign out the window says ADAM CLAYTON POWELL.

  He is not finished. We turn onto Central Park West, maybe my favorite street in all the world, and he says, “Which one is right?”

  “You mean the political right?”

  A nod.

  “Conservatives are on the right.”

  He says, “Liberals are left, right?” and laughs.

  “Yes, you are a left-leaning liberal.”

  He smiles at me in the mirror. “I am a liberal leaning to the left. A lotta l’s there.”

  “Indeed.”

  He pulls to the curb in front of the hotel. He hops out and walks back to open the trunk. He removes my bags, sets them on the sidewalk. “I want to thank you. This has been the best drive I had since Barbra Streisand.”

  “For me, too,” I assure him. Once a teacher always a teacher, I must now reinforce the learning. “Hold out your right hand. Which is it—conservative or liberal?”

  “Conservative.”

  “Now your left.”

  “Liberal. L equals liberal. That’s me.”

  “Remember that in November.”

  “I surely will.” He bends his head and looks straight into my eyes. “You know something?” he says. “I got educated.” His smile is broad. “Now I can conversate with the best of ’em.”

  “Yes, you can.” Give that man a big tip. So I do.

  New York is just one big classroom where everybody learns from everybody else. No wonder I love it.

  MY HOTEL IS down the street from the Plaza. You know, the big one with horses and carriages out front, and the fountain, where F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda danced their nights away, where Kay Thompson’s Eloise lived, the one the new owners are ruining by turning most of it into condos for the very rich, who are, indeed, different from you and me. But all that is still to come. Now it is six P.M. and time for a drink, so why not at the Plaza? On an earlier visit I peeked into the famous bar, the Oak Room, and got scared off by its clubbiness; all that wood paneling did not invite a woman alone. My favorite bars are those in the lobbies of hotels, where in the midst of the hustle and bustle of people coming and going you can sit in the eye of the storm in a comfortable chair and sip wine or belt a beer or toss back a shot, and nobody notices, nobody cares. Lots of hotels have gotten prissy and prefer to hide their liquor and the people who drink it. Oh well, everybody has something to hide, why not hotels? Anyway, the bargain hotel in which I am staying does not have a bar in its lobby or anywhere else—it barely has a lobby—so I am forced out into the winter winds to make my way up to Fifth Avenue and the corner bar at the Plaza; the One is what it’s called.

  The One is not especially inviting at first glance. Well-lit and small, it sits at one side of a large expensive-looking dining room. But it must have something, because the people sitting at its bar (once it was Gore Vidal) and at the high tables along the wall are enjoying themselves, talking to each other, nobody sitting alone and sulky in a corner, maybe because there are no corners in this bar, it’s too round.

  At one of the tables a woman sits alone, though showing no signs of sulkiness, and since all the other tables are fully occupied, I ask her if she would mind sharing hers. “That’s fine,” she says, and continues her reading of the wine list. She orders a California white; so do I, and it seems ridiculous not to talk, at least a little bit. Clearly she is alone, as am I; we are approximately the same age, although, as is most of the rest of the world, she is some few years younger. She is dressed entirely in black, which means she is in mourning or trying to look as if she belongs in New York. Neither, it turns out. She is hoping to disguise the thickness of her waistline. So far we have a lot in common.

  “I used to have a very thin body,” she says, catching me eyeing her middle passage, then pulling at the waist of her black top the way women who don’t like their bodies do in order to hide them.

  “You look very nice,” I tell her. “Are you visiting New York?”

  She tells me all. And tells me. About the tradition she and her friend continue, even after the deaths of their husbands, of coming to New York for a week to see the shows and shop, and how her friend is at Phantom this very night and she didn’t want to see that show again, though if it were Cats she would have, so she came here because she came here the last time she was in New York, and my, hasn’t the cost of a glass of wine gone up! Goodness!

  She is driving me nuts. I do not believe people are boring; it’s just that sometimes their conversation—if that’s what this is—is tedious. Greta—for that’s her name, after Greta Garbo—seems certain and secure in the belief that everything she says, as long as it’s about herself, will be of consummate interest to the listener. I envy her; it must be nice not to stammer in your head, turning over phrases and ideas, fearful that your every utterance will be misconstrued, derided, passed over. I doubt that Greta ever wondered why so early in every party she found herself standing alone. Here, in this bar, all the seats save ours are occupied by people who look absolutely fascinated, who bend across the tables and gaze into the eyes of those who seem to be truly engaged by the speaker’s intelligence and wit, who speak, then listen, and speak again. Alas, I am not among them.

  “I keep telling my daughter-in-law about ripening a cantaloupe before, not after, you put it in the fridge, but she can’t handle it, she gets so upset right away, so I try my darndest to keep quiet, keep my mouth shut.”

  Oh, Greta, Greta, do it now.

  “So why are you in New York?” she asks, her second glass of wine in hand.

  Should I tell her I’m a teacher? And keep her talking? No. I tell her the facts. “I’m a writer and I’m here doing some publicity.” This should shut her up.

  “Oh, really, what’s it about?”

  So I tell her the title, the subject, and lo and behold, when she hears A Round-Heeled Woman, she laughs. She gets it right off. And then she goes to town. Married for thirty-four years, “I was not orgasmic, just never. Well, I was twenty-two when we got married, he was twenty-four; he didn’t know what he was doing and neither did I, and things never got better. I did other things: the garden, children—we lost one—and then my husband died.”

  Greta lived for all those thirty-four years in what is now Napa Valley, “in a house we bought in the fifties for thirty-five thousand dollars. Well, gosh, here I was all alone with the children gone, and Hal dead, so I sold it. For $1.5 million! Imagine! Just a little
three-bedroom house! I love New Mexico.”

  Bet you love California, too, Greta. Jesus H. Christ, $1.5 million. I stare in amazement and envy. This was a woman who had done it right: married a man who bought the two of them a house, which she kept clean and tidy for him and the children, who came soon thereafter. By following the rules—marriage, home, family—she has made out like a bandit. Think I’ll let her buy me a drink.

  “But gosh,” she continues, “I was lonely. I was only fifty-six, you know, when Hal died. I went to a few bars, to singles gatherings in my community.” And then one day at a hardware store she met Henry. “And I became a butterfly!” She puts her palms together and makes a V with her hands, and right before my very eyes the lines in her forehead smooth out, her mouth softens, her eyes shine; her cheeks grow rosy, she becomes a pretty woman. What a gift, this sexuality of ours.

  Greta turns out to be multiorgasmic—”About time, wouldn’t you say? I just blossomed and never quit!” She and Henry were together for ten years, and then “I got tired of paying for him, you know, when we traveled, or even when we went out for dinner. He was a painter and never sold anything, so—”

  I protest: “But, Greta, he sounds like a gift worth paying for, as you say.”

  Greta knows her own mind. “He was fourteen years older than me, and frankly, he was running out of steam.”

  “Oh.”

  Now Greta and I look like the other patrons in the bar. I am bent across the table, riveted to Greta and her story. Her prettiness is, maybe, from the wine, but I don’t think so. She is having a lovely time recalling her butterfly period, when she “just opened up.”

  “And since Henry?” I ask.

  “No one,” she says, “but I go on lots of Elderhostel trips, like the last one where we went to . . .”