At the Strangers' Gate Read online

  Two arcs are traced here: First is the one by which a couple of lovers from Canada become a New York couple, New York citizens, within New York circles, learning to replace the poetry of aspiration with the prose of experience. The other, small by most standards but big to me, since sentences are all that writers have to live by: my own transit from someone who wrote in the manner of a graduate student—contentious “but” after the next pugnacious “yet”—to someone who told stories, or at least tried to, and, perhaps crucially, could make his living by the attempt. That journey cost me more in sweat and perplexity than I now like to recall, but—no, and—it was worth it, at least inasmuch as anyone’s life is worth recalling in shape. My life was a struggle to move from “but”s to “and”s; from the contestatory cliché of academic struggle to the inclusive habits of storytelling. So I ask the reader to grant this writer a few implicit “and”s. The form is not “memoirs” but mémoires, fables from a time about a few people inside it. It takes us from a twoness that for three years was nearly complete, to a set of connections: that’s how we build a life. The world can never be as convincing as a couple is. But a couple is too insulated to remain a world. Somehow we found our way through the first marriage that people make, two people bound together by desire and laughter and ambition—the first marriage, before children come, and desire becomes duty, laughter loyalty, and ambition a grimmer kind of responsibility.

  A bus and then a train. We are on a bus heading south, we are on a train on our way to City Hall. We took the bus from Hyannis to New York City, and now the subway to City Hall, keys clutched in our hands, an absurd but (narrowly!) potent idea of poetic existence in our hearts. “The world of dew”? The world was dew, I thought, though, as I looked around the 5 train, it really didn’t seem that dewy. The truth was that dew was one thing you couldn’t find in Manhattan if you looked high and low. But you could find the world. I looked at the pretty girl in white wool across from me. I knew that I loved her. I thought she loved me. Life was beginning. The dew could wait. The dew would have to wait.

  2

  The First Fall

  I lost my pants on my first morning in New York, and have been looking for them ever since. To lose one’s pants is, I suppose, the simplest and purest of burlesque acts, just what always happens to clowns and baggy-pants comedians—although, in point of physical fact, my trousers never really got to the floor-clinging stage, having got lost before I could ever put them on in public. And it didn’t happen truly on the first morning, though it feels that way. More like the first month. Still, I have been walking with my pants at my spiritual, or anyway narrative, ankles ever since. I feel them there, or, rather, not there.

  They were, you see, the lower, and lesser, half of a suit in which Martha and I intended to armor ourselves against the chances and difficulties of our first New York winter. In August 1980, as I have said, we searched for and then rented the world’s smallest apartment on First Avenue and Eighty-seventh Street—it was a single nine-by-eleven room, and I am not exaggerating. We chose it from an admittedly grim set of possibilities, because of its “view.” It was in the basement of a modern building, but if you craned your neck up from the window, you could see, across the way, the stained-glass windows of the morning chapel-house of the Church of the Holy Trinity. That gave tone to our basement.

  These days, couples newly arriving in New York are sent out into the outer boroughs, where they slowly ooze out work and love, like a spreading stain. In those days, young couples were placed in drawers inside the big buildings in “good” neighborhoods of Manhattan. Then they shut the drawers. In these tiny drawers we were forgotten, like embarrassing costume jewelry. It was as if a whole generation were living in the hidden remnant spaces of the great remaining buildings.

  I often asked myself why, in movies of the early sixties, Young Couples Like Ourselves arriving in New York always ended up in top-floor apartments. The running joke—of films like Barefoot in the Park and Sunday in New York, and wasn’t there Barefoot on Sunday and Love in the Park; the titles were as transitive as the tales—was always about the huffing and puffing of in-laws or the telephone installer as they climbed to the top of the stairs. Our generation, by contrast, were lodged in “garden” apartments up and down First and Second Avenues—basement flats that look out on the airshaft—or else in studios like ours.

  Back then, the reason seemed to me one of essentially spiritual difference—the early sixties was a time of aspiration, upward, where hope lay somewhere on the roof. (“Up on the Roof” was an anthem of that aspiration.) Our generation plunged downward, either ambitiously toward the punk clubs on the Bowery, or just into the basement of the building.

  The truth was simpler, and more terrifying: the honeymooners of the sixties had never actually given up their fifth-floor walk-ups. The mythical part of the Jane Fonda–and–Robert Redford movies was that they ever get out of the first apartment. The reality was that if they didn’t move sideways, out to the suburbs, they didn’t move at all. Years later, I read Neil Simon’s dour but immensely entertaining memoir of his early years, in which he reveals that the fifth-floor one-room apartment, with the fold-out bed and improvised bathtub, in which he installed his Barefoot couple for the stage version, was modeled on the place he and his first wife still occupied when their first child was born. They were able to move out only after…the success of Barefoot in the Park. So, if you planned to have an extra room for the baby, you had better become the most successful Broadway playwright of the age.

  New York real estate already raced ahead of all but the truly rich. A game of musical chairs was played, with music and no chairs. People mostly just sheltered in place, adding a loft bed high above as the child arrived, or having ingenious shaggy carpenters build hidden storage or renovate bathrooms. When we eventually managed a paint job, the painter assured us that it would “really open the place up.” Of course, nothing, aside from an explosion, could have managed to do so, but that didn’t matter.

  This was typical of the faith of the permanently situated—we were all stowaways aboard the ship Manhattan, and glad if our little barrels or stolen sleeping places under the tarps of the lifeboats could be made one touch cozier. We had the basement apartments because the fifth-floor walk-ups were still occupied by the couples who had moved in twenty years before. No one ever moved out. They merely adjusted.

  The suit was but one more bulwark of poetry and against normalcy, for fantasy and against realism. It was a way of accepting fate without accepting it. Martha had her one beautiful dress, a lovely white Ports cashmere number; and so, for symmetry’s sake, we decided to take our fellowship money to Barneys and use some of it, even waste it, on one perfect suit. So we went and bought a Ted Lapidus inky-blue suit—that was Martha’s name for its color—to be our shield in the city. This one perfect suit would get us through life. It wasn’t the first suit we would have chosen. We bought it because it was a suit and on sale. It had a yoked back, and, as Martha admits now, she had never really believed in yoked backs, nor did she entirely believe even in inky blue.

  But it was a good suit. And there was another reason, too, that this suit suited. Ted Lapidus had designed the white suit John Lennon wears on the cover of Abbey Road. The blessing of the Beatles was upon that label. This was still a big blessing at the time. Though the Beatles had broken up and dispersed ten years before, they had never stopped being the big full moon that hung over our generation, just too young to have seen them at their height, mere ten-year-olds when they were there in 1966 and 1967. That made it possible to believe in them fully. Their music was full of melodies, melodies that seemed to have been found more than made; and melodies are the one thing the world wants most from art.

  I wanted to make melodies, too. My life plan, as I say, was to write songs for shows. I thought you could do so just by strumming the guitar long enough until the words came to you. This was not a very good plan. But we did have a more direct path, we thought: we knew someone
who’d once had dinner with the sister of a close friend of Art Garfunkel’s psychotherapist. Something like that. Anyway, I made a tape for her. That was enough. Our acquaintance would go down the line and get the tape to Art. And in between, I would write jokes for comedians. It seemed like a plan for life.

  Am I being too tender about our own lost selves? I can just hear that accusation murmured in those same margins where spectators see spouses as they really are, and I think—if we can’t be tender about our own longings, knowing that even at their best they take a disillusioned turn, then what is the sense of living? If we can’t regard our own yearnings with a longing for the time when we first felt them, then there is not much more to life than consuming things, settling scores, and growing old and bitter. Tenderness toward one’s lost self is sentimental; tenderness toward one’s lost longings is just life.

  So: poetry and one good suit. It was a kind of Scott Fitzgerald recipe for managing in New York. Once we laid claim to this tiny basement apartment as our New York home, infusing it with “poetry” was harder than it seemed. For one thing, it was already infested with cockroaches. We hadn’t seen them in the daylight, when we first looked at it; we didn’t meet them until we tried to spend our first night there. And there were many kinds and varieties of cockroaches. Really, it was kind of an entomological laboratory. There were little well-organized German cockroaches; and there were the Asian cockroaches as well, busy and enterprising. And there were those enormous American cockroaches, then called water bugs, who resembled wasps displaced from their natural habitat. They would just remain immobile and horrible in the middle of the tiny room, all elbows and haunches and condescension—just standing there, taking up space.

  Cockroaches have largely fled New York now, having been replaced by their sinister near relation, the bedbug. But do bedbugs come in so many kinds? They seem to have the spirit of this later time, instead: they are there to aggravate and annoy but not really to terrify. They deprive the young of a feeling of adequacy, inflicting some welts, but without pointing them toward the abyss: we have got to get out of here, is what you feel about an invasion of roaches, agents of psychological warfare. (I’m told that cockroaches, after having been devastated by the weaponizing of boric acid, are coming back, or that they come in waves only to recede again, like boy bands or realist painting.) But then our room was a melting pot of insects, really, like something out of an old thirties cartoon, the insects dancing all night to a bass guitar made of an overturned bucket and mop. And so we put a piece of plywood against the baseboard, just alongside the foldout bed, in an attempt to keep the cockroaches from coming into the apartment, because we were Canadians, and thought that this would keep them out. We were politely asking them not to enter. A piece of plywood this big would surely be a sufficient shield against the entire population of New York City bugs.

  How did the neighbors cope? I’m not sure. We were interested only in each other. Watching Martha dress and undress casually every morning and night held me dry-mouthed and rapt. A suitably colorful klatch of eccentrics was what the old movies would have supplied. But such types must have all been up on the higher floors. Right behind us on the basement level was the superintendent, Mr. Fernandez, who lived with his wife and their boy, Herman, whom they yelled at routinely—Martha, who had never heard anyone raise a voice, much less yell at a child, was horrified—and then an airline stewardess and (sometimes) her boyfriend, who would come home drunk every few weeks, bellowing, “Mary! Mary! Open up.” Once, locked out, after buzzing furiously on their intercom, he climbed up the cast-iron railing that divided us from them, reaching the window of the first-floor neighbor’s apartment, which he entered, allowing him to come downstairs and pound on Mary’s door for more direct petition. She opened to him, finally. It was a building filled with love, in all its strange kinds.

  So we had a piece of plywood to keep us safe and a poetic outlook to elevate us and one great suit to be our talisman. In those days, young couples starting out went to furniture stores where you could buy piney things in need of painting. Before the suit, then, would come raw pine and something from “Dixie Foam”—a store by that name on the Lower East Side cut hunks of foam rubber into shapes to serve as furniture. (They’ve since moved to Brooklyn, of course.) We had them make us a foldout bed in a sort of gray-beige velvet—Martha called it “graige”—which we kept shut up by day, unfolded by night. When we dressed it, night after night, we followed an order that I will doubtless still be recalling on my own last bed: fitted contour sheet bought on Orchard Street, a candy-striped “comforter” that had come from God knows where, a soft wool Hudson’s Bay blanket, and finally, topping it all, an old red sleeping bag of dubious provenance, which we’d slipped into a white duvet cover. Martha, who said that the sleeping bag had belonged to “an old boyfriend,” was disturbingly vague about when it had come into her possession, why it was full-sized, and what had happened to make it hers. In the morning, as I made coffee on the little stove, Martha, neat in all things, would roll up each layer of warmth, and the room would go back to looking like a doll’s house with a modern sofa in it.

  We spent a month decorating that place, no larger than a refrigerator, albeit a refrigerator with a window. In the years since, we would have a loft in SoHo, apartments in Paris, a co-op on a better New York block, but we have never spent so much time decorating a place as we did that nine-by-eleven room. We had no money to spend on anything, and no space to put anything in if we had had money to spend. But we spent hours in Conran’s, days on the sixth floor of Bloomingdale’s, frowning and worrying our way through the possibilities. There was a man—an out-of-work actor, I suppose—who gave demonstrations of SilverStone pots and pans, a kind of nonstick cookware new at the time. He was terrific, flipping crêpes up and over in the perfectly smooth gray pans and crying out, “Hi-ho, SilverStone!” We would go back day after day to watch him and imagine owning one of the pans. He began to give us the same quizzical look that Ellis Larkins, the great and elegant jazz pianist had when we’d sat at a little table at the Carnegie Tavern to hear him and nursed a Perrier each all night while we did: we were enthusiastic fans of performers, but not big spenders on entertainment.

  I think of that month, of September 1980, and I smell the distinctive sweet and slightly burnt smell of crêpe batter striking a nonstick surface, with Bloomingdale’s all around us. Shopping at department stores seemed an eternal sort of thing, but it was changing—it had changed and was about to change again. The material basis of middle-class aspirations was in flux. Nowadays, Bloomingdale’s is just another department store, busy and pleasing, but in those years it had a meaning and a feeling all its own—one that seemed to sum up a different kind of consumerism just then coming into being. It was a department store culture very much unlike the one we knew in Montreal, which was still ruled by the old middle-class hierarchies of expensiveness. In Montreal, well-off people wore furs and shopped at Holt Renfrew’s and liked looking comfortable—“affluent” was an Anglo-Montrealer word as much as “hygienic” was a Toronto one. The basic idea that dungarees were in the basement, cloth coats on two, and the fur salon on the top floor still ruled.

  Something different was happening in New York, another kind of mix-up. It was already exemplified by the then new idea of “designer jeans.” This was, as I would learn more fully later, a classic capitalist switcheroo of the kind that the economist Thorstein Veblen had analyzed a century before: by making the thing with low status into the thing with the most status, you could create a state of perpetual unease in your customers, and the turmoil over what to buy would keep mass consumerism alive. The department store didn’t exist to fill its customers’ needs. It existed to make the customer unsure of what he, or she, needed. It was the principle of the squirting cider, the sucker’s bet, combined with my dad’s dictum that insecurities are the one modern universal. He had meant insecurities about academic relationships, I think, but it extended to insecurities about social posit
ion. Manhattan was a kind of black hole of insecurity, where so many insecurities had collapsed one onto another to form a mass so dense no serenity of any kind could ever escape its gravity.

  E. B. White writes somewhere about having more or less lived in Grand Central Terminal during his early years in New York in the 1920s. We lived at Bloomingdale’s in the same way. In those days, Bloomingdale’s (“like no other store in the world”) even had its own foreign policy: every year it would “feature” some new country—China, Israel, and the Philippines are ones I recall—and present its goods as the latest thing. Years later, doing a documentary about department stores in New York, I met Marvin Traub, the CEO of Bloomingdale’s in that heyday—before he lost the store, to, of all ignominious fates, a Canadian tycoon, who, arriving from the north, like us, ruined it. Before that, I discovered, each of the new territories Traub had colonized, even if each was presented as though a serendipitous accident, was calculated and planned to the profitable penny. The surprisingly affordable frozen yogurt had been sought and found abroad, and was produced at a loss in order to draw in the customers. What looked like an overcharge of abundance was actually a big accounting ledger, with dollars in and dollars out neatly balanced: frozen yogurt and designer jeans and Indonesian wicker driving more sales of socks and stockings and face lotions, where the real profits were. What looked like Oz was a neatly laid-out trap for spending, as cynically designed as a Las Vegas casino, which I suppose looks like Oz, too, if that’s your idea of emerald.

  The simple act of shopping itself was undergoing an alteration that, though it was taking place before our eyes—or exactly because it was taking place before our eyes—was harder to see. In a world where real estate was already impossibly expensive, with everyone stuck in smaller and smaller places, the lures and dangles held out by materialism became other things. This was the process that would produce, by the end of the decade, giant muffins and oversized suits as substitutes for an American abundance that no one under forty could any longer afford—an abundance that had to be worn or eaten, since it could not be owned and lived in. In place of real apartments, you got objects and entertainments that were a hyper-puffed imitation of old-fashioned abundance. (“A dim parody of middle-class life,” Martha, with her keen eye, would scorn some apartment we might look at, or visit, with its tiny cubbies for bedrooms and one pointless wall of exposed brick.)