BRUCE GOOSE

Yesterday I went for a walk in the West 20s with two friends to see what the galleries might have. A lot of them were in between shows, and we didn’t see anything that made us keel over. It was nice and cool outside with a storm threatening. We all made it home just ahead of the rain and thunder, and as happens sometimes after the galleries, I found myself thinking of a man I knew forty-odd years ago in Seattle, named Bruce Fearing.

 

I met him in 1982 in a little art gallery called Ground Zero, where I accidentally had an unlikely show of watercolor fish pictures for a whole month. Bruce was a sort of caretaker there, and a poet. His father was the writer Kenneth Fearing. I’ve written about Bruce before, about how he took me down to the Elliott Bay bookstore on 1^st Avenue to show me a book of Alice Neel’s paintings, one of which pictured his father, whom she knew, and Bruce himself as a tiny little baby. At the time, he was living in the Matilda Winehill mission, not far from the bookshop. He didn’t have much money, but he was saving to buy that book. 

 

I thought Bruce was pretty old, but I don’t think he was yet fifty. He reminded me of Columbo from TV, with a New York brogue, a little unkempt in a pleasant way, always an adventure to be around. The funny thing is that while back then I thought he was old, I wouldn’t think so if I met him now, when he actually would be. He’d be about 87. He certainly didn’t think of himself as old. Now I understand. 

 

 

I’ve often wondered where he got to, and what it might be like to find him here in the ether. For all these many years I’ve kept the letters and postcards I got from Bruce in the early ‘80s, from Seattle. He typed all of them, sprinkled with little poems, and signed them “Bruce Goose,” or “b.g.” Yesterday I dug them out of the closet and read one, postmarked 20 March 1984, sent from the Alps Hotel on South King Street in Chinatown, also called the international district. I’ll put in some of what he wrote in the letter because why not? Maybe he’ll stumble upon it. 

 

 

 

I had mailed him a watercolor fish picture, and this was his reply:

 

 

Romy…pink fish in deep water…came across dry to the mission but now I’m living in the Alps…isn’t that Nice? I always wanted to live the life of a writer high in the alps…yes, I like the i.d.

 

You lived around here once, no? So thanks so much for that nice card…look at this:

 

it’s the miracle in poetry

it can be lyrical:

beat & offbeat/repeat &

flow…sometimes, sometimes

it even seems it glows.

                                                b.g.

 

A friendly professor with whom I correspond & who initially I came across on account of he was a fan of my dad’s said he didn’t like that one on account it reminded him of Rudolph the rednosed reindeer…I pointed out to him that rrr sold millions & if I could get even slightly slightly close to that I’d be pleased as punch.

 

New York…I naturally wish you’d meet up with Alice, Alice Neel…I’m on my way out this morning to buy her book so’s I can cut out her portrait of my dad (with the infant me apparently in it) & her nude self portrait & mount them in a Woolworth frame or something…family album you know though, as a matter of fact, family album is exactly the title of one of my dad’s poems…strange twisted life, my ex-mom recently (just) sent me my winnfield day nursery kindergarten graduation diploma dated June 27, 1941…She must figure I’m grown up by now…I don’t agree…

 

I like the International District just Fine…there’s still absolutely nothing “going on” around this town that doesn’t go on faster harder better & worse in N.Y. I went to the store last night around 11:30 & walked back the deserted streets cheerfully amazed I wasn’t really worried about getting mugged…that’s Seattle for you but beyond that…well…

 

I donate plasma pretty regular. I recited this to a bright young worker who was sticking me there:

 

You can’t cross bodies

Without first crossing brains

& I don’t really care

How much it rains

 

 

She said: “Who made that up?” incredulous…of course it couldn’t have been me. (sometimes I do feel tired.)

 

Thing is Alice…she deals mainly out of Graham Galleries 1040 Madison…Harriet Goss manages…

personally, I know I’d be fascinated to hear what you bump into there…I mean what the low rent art scene is…that way all I cld guarantee you is there’ll be 50,000 more of it than there is here, all be weird, hard-edged & positively positive about itself. Every artist seems to believe he’s the source of absolute truth & authority ‘cause that’s where the arts bag is.

 

Here, I’m enclosing another one that’s sort of woundup. Best, Bruce.

 

 

unseen help

 

the languages of earth

are broken discarded things

I don’t bring into my bedroom

or study…muddy waters is

a clear bag when it

rains a lot upstream…3 things

don’t fly on a straight beam

1 is a team of mismated oxen

another is lox on a mint-scented bun

&the last I’ve forgot so

thanks for what?

                                 b.g.

 

 

My eyes prickled reading Bruce’s letter, not least because of the lead he gave me: go see Alice Neel. Tell her Kenneth Fearing’s son said to find her. He was generous that way. He suggested a few other things, too: places to send articles—you might make 25 bucks! I don’t think I would have had the nerve to try and find Alice Neel then, but she died half a year after he sent the letter so I can imagine that she might not have wanted a visitor. I’m glad he finally had enough money to buy the book.

 

Kenneth Fearing (& Bruce as baby) by Alice Neel

 

 

 Copyright Romy Ashby 10 Sept 2023

I COULDN'T HAVE IMAGINED

I got in big trouble a few weeks ago at the Morgan Library Museum, which is one of my favorite places. I’d just gotten my new membership, and I went with a lady who I like very much and who also loves the Morgan. She’s someone who will stand and read every handwritten letter on display in the glass cases, and every little description of who wrote each letter, and those, she says, are often her favorite of everything currently exhibited.

A beautiful window at the Morgan

After going through the Rotunda and reading the letters, we went into one of the gallery rooms. I don’t remember the specific painting we were looking at, but it had some details in miniature that one of us pointed out to the other.

Suddenly a guard appeared from around a corner and shouted, “No pointing! No pointing!” He then went into a spiel about how pointing is NOT PERMITTED and that we were in VIOLATION. One of us told him that neither of us had touched the glass over the painting or even come close, but that just agitated him more, and then even more loudly he said: “You pointed! Like this!” And he jabbed his finger in the air. “No pointing! You must not point! Don’t point!”

As we left the room, the guard made a decorous, formal bow and thanked us for coming in. The whole thing felt ridiculous and theatrical, but at the same time embarrassing, with other people looking at us as if we’d gone in and made tentacle fingers all over everything on the walls. It took the fun out of our visit, that was certain, so we left.

Out on Madison Avenue, my friend told me a funny story about her grandmother, a very proper and refined lady who lived to a very advanced age. My friend told me how she’d once taken her to a museum for her 85^th birthday. Her grandmother was curious about a large painting by Richard Serra, a very black, heavily textured work of art, and she reached out to touch it with the tips of her fingers. A guard hurried over and quietly told her to not touch, whereupon her grandmother said, “Oh, but I only did this,” and she reached out and touched the painting exactly as she had just done. I knew and respected my friend’s grandmother and imagining her doing such a thing, in all innocence, made me laugh.

The following week, my friend and I decided to go to the Morgan again. We went up to one of the galleries on the second floor, where there was a beautiful display behind glass of a large collection of tiny leather stamps in great variety, once used to imprint leather-bound books. Each stamp had gorgeous detail, and none were larger than the flat head of a nail. We both found them delightful. “Look at this one, the little skull and crossbones,” my friend said, and just then, a very petite but terrifying lady guard tore around a corner and announced to us: “You’ve been reported! You can’t be pointing and touching!” The expression on her face was somewhere between fury and despair.

I started to tell her that neither of us had actually touched anything, but she interrupted me with, “Shush! Shush! Don’t talk! You cannot point!” Then she too went into a loud, admonishing spiel. We had been reported, and we were on notice! She scolded us about how close we were. Much too close! The whole display could come crashing down because of us, she said. And in the same embarrassing way as the week before, people passing by were taking all of it in and giving us the kind of dreary looks reserved for the kind of people we obviously seemed to be. I asked the guard how far from the display I would need to be in order to point something out to my friend. She waved her finger around in a vague way and said, “Like this.” After she’d finished her scolding, she said, “Now, welcome to the Morgan.”

By then our hearts weren’t in it anymore, so we left. Out on Madison Avenue, we wondered aloud what was happening. In all the uncountable visits we’ve both made to the Morgan Library over so many years, we’ve never been spoken to at all by a guard. Now we’d been publicly and loudly admonished two weeks in a row, by two different guards in two different rooms, for pointing. And what did it mean when the second guard said, You’ve been reported? Someone had to be watching from an office somewhere, but we hadn’t touched a thing. There were no signs saying Pointing Prohibited. Was this just part of the creeping authoritarianism that seems to be currently permeating everything? My friend said it felt like the Stasi.

Not long after that, I told another friend of mine (my hairdresser), who also likes the Morgan, about what had happened. She thought I should tell the museum. “I’d tell them it’s psychologically damaging, that it took something from you,” she said. 

When she went herself to the Morgan a week or so later with a friend, they both did everything they could with pointing and touching to see what might happen. But nothing did. Nobody seemed to care at all, in fact, which surprised them.

Maybe I and my museum friend just have a questionable look about us. Like two ladies who might suddenly dump soup all over everything the way all those climate change activists enjoy doing. Whatever it was, it did take something from us—all authoritarian ham-handedness does—it took away a little bit of the familiar that the Morgan has always been. So, from now on, rather than point out some tiny detail or objet to anyone with me, I will just describe its vicinity: “The lower left corner, about three inches up—no, down an inch and over a little—” with my hands safely clasped behind my back. 

28 May, 2023 Copyright Romy Ashby

EVERETT & RAINDROP

On March 28^th 2022 Everett sent me an email, saying:

“Wanted to let you know that Raindrop went to be with God yesterday. I know you loved her. I’m gonna take her to the vet now.  I wrapped her in a white sheet tied in a lavender chiffon curtain. Glad she died at home. She hated the vet. Like she was going to the electric chair. Another vet once said she was the most anxious dog he’d ever seen in his life. I told him just to use a gentle shhhhh.” 

Raindrop was Everett Quinton’s adopted daughter dog, who he doted on and spoiled with love. I met her ten years ago when I went down to his place to interview him for Housedeer. I had already loved Everett to bits for a very long time then, ever since I first saw him on the little stage at One Sheridan Square in The Mystery of Irma Vep, in 1985. Like so many countless other people have said, no actor has ever made me laugh the way Everett could.  With just his voice, a little laugh from his vast collection of various giggles, or his making the sound of an ice cube dropping into a highball glass with his mouth, he could bring the house down. (Anyone who’s seen him perform will know exactly what I mean.) 

 

Everett and Raindrop, West Side Highway, March 2013  Romy Ashby

Everett & Raindrop by the River April 2013  R. Ashby

I sat beside Raindrop on the sofa for the interview, and Everett cautioned her to not growl at me or bite me, and she didn’t. She behaved herself. She was a character. She was an extremely intelligent girl. She could read the words FED EX on the side of certain trucks passing on Hudson Street. She hated them with a passion, and she let everybody know. Other trucks just like them but without FED EX on the side held no interest for her. She noticed terrifying cats in shop windows and they noticed her. She was a hunter, and she was exceptionally good at grabbing rats off the street.

In the interview I asked how many rats she’d caught, and Everett said:

“Four. She’s caught four rats. I called the vet and asked if it can hurt her and he said, ‘Is she eatin’ ‘em?’ And I said, ‘No.’ She doesn’t eat ‘em, so it can’t really do anything to her. My little baby Raindrop was an impulse. I came home from my sister’s one night and saw her on Facebook. “ This dog needs a home!” When I first got her she was emaciated. You could see her ribs. I thought maybe she was some kind of whippet. But a year later when she had put on a layer of body fat, I realized that she had been dying and I started to cry. But I didn’t know I was getting Attila the fucking Hun! She loves to catch rats. It’s the terrier in her. 

“One hot night we were walking on Downing Street and there was a mountain of black shiny garbage bags full of refuse outside this one restaurant. And millions of rats were running all over them. It was like a moving, gray-velvet ribbon all over this black shiny stuff . Zillions of rats just flying around the bags. And I know they’re plaguy, verminy, flea-bitten things, hahaha, but it was fascinating. They’re fast. That’s what scares us. If you have mice in the house they’re tiny but if you open the light, it’s that fast-moving thing that scares us.”

Raindrop & Everett, West Side Highway March 2013 R. Ashby

This week, ten months after the passing of Raindrop, Everett died too. When the word came that he had, I imagined the pageant that Raindrop must have given him when she saw him get off the elevator at the entrance to heaven. I remembered him talking in the interview we did about how ridiculous it is that some people just can’t accept the notion of a dog having a soul and going to heaven. He said, “You can see how the world is fucked up just by the notion that animals have no souls. I always say that Jesus had to be ascended bodily because if he was still here the constant rolling over in his grave would create earthquakes that would do us all in. And also, if there were no queers there would be no fucking pearly gates!”

Terrifying Deli Kitty & Raindrop's face between her paws Romy Ashby

During the lockdown in the early days of the pandemic  I recorded a few phone calls with friends in case we all perished, and today I listened to Everett talk about little food pleasures he was having. I’ll share those here for anyone who might like to try something that Everett considered heavenly:

“I discovered this culinary miracle: I was sittin’ here one day and I had this can of black-eyed peas that were gonna go bad in June. So I said, we gotta eat those! I didn’t want to throw them away. So I went to bed and I dreamed this. You ever go to Cowgirl, that restaurant on 10^thStreet? You go in and they give you this little appetizer of black-eyed peas in salsa. So I went and I got a jar of salsa and I threw it on a can of black-eyed peas. No fuss no muss! The first time I did it I rinsed the peas. But then I thought, I ain’t even gonna rinse ‘em! I threw ‘em in the bowl and it was heaven! It took five minutes, and lunch! 

“And you know what I have developed? It’s called Dirty Cream of Rice. One day I got this chicken. I had to boil it, and I put all this fabulous stuff in with it and I decided the next day to break it up and make a little soup out of it. And then the next day I thought, well, why don’t we put some cream of rice in it? And it is fucking great! So now I can make this meal—it sounds like nun food—with two potatoes and two carrots and two stalks of celery. The first time I did it I sautéed ‘em first and then boiled ‘em. But you don’t even have to sauté ‘em first! You just throw ‘em in with a cup of water and you boil it. And then I have these vegetable bouillon cubes that are vegan, and you just throw one into the water and it cooks in like ten minutes. And then! You put in: cream of rice. And it’s like—it’s heaven!”

Until we meet again, sweet Everett. Thank you for everything.

Romy Ashby 25 January 2023

For anyone who would like to read it, here is a link to a PDF of my Housedeer interview with Everett. It is 7.5 MB in size so it can take a little time to load. 

http://romyashby.com/EverettQuintonHousedeer.pdf

BUT OF COURSE!

One evening not long ago I went for a walk, the way I usually go, down West 22^ndStreet to the river and then back along either 21^stor 20^thpast the seminary garden. I stop most days at the florist on 22^ndand 8^thto visit Sammy and Hazel, the two cats who live there and keep things okay on the block, and I stop whenever I notice a cat or a dog sitting in a window, too. 

Sammykitty passing Hazelkitty's Batman-like shadow on 22nd Street

I was on my way back home that recent evening when I saw a man put a lot of books out on the sidewalk and then hurry back inside the building he’d come from. I stopped to look at them—lots of musical scores, theatre books, travel books, a couple of histories of Puerto Rico, philosophy, Immanuel Kant and Lao Tzu, a biography of Domenico Scarlatti with musical scores included, a few about cats and all there is to know and love about  them, Ned Rorem’s New York Diaries of the 1950s, a few about marvelous tropical fish—and I was thinking that an old, gay, Puerto Rican neighborhood cat lover must have died. I was feeling the usual, Oh, no, oh, loss, when the man returned with more books to put on the sidewalk.

 

He told me to take as many as I wanted. “Bring a cart!” he said. He said that nobody wants books anymore, that you can’t give them away. I asked him about the person who had owned them, and he told me that his name was Eduardo. And not only was he not dead, he was very happy to have moved into a place full of other old people, and he was indeed an old, gay, Puerto Rican cat lover and musician who played church organs for many years and loved to travel and read and keep fish. He had lived in this old building for fifty-some years, the man told me, so his moving out made the landlord happy. During the pandemic Eduardo had felt lonely and isolated. So he was very ready to go live with the old folks, and he’d read all these books anyway.

 

In one of the buildings down the block from Eduardo’s there sat a white cat in a window who saw me passing by with my little pile of books, and I stopped to take his picture. One of the books I took with me was the diaries of Ned Rorem, which I had read once already, borrowed from my friend Indra who knows Ned. Indra took me to visit him once in his apartment on the Upper West Side, and we sat in his living room with his grand piano piled with sheet music and had tea and it was very exciting, in a very quiet way. 

For me it’s always the buildings and the shadows and the sound of the train down under the sidewalk and the Empire State Building standing there regarding it all that make the city so hard to stop liking. And I find that the cats everywhere have much the same attitude as the Empire State Building. When I’ve passed through Times Square recently it’s been filled with people from everywhere else, all of them excited. They all look thrilled. And why not? It’s New York! Even after almost forty years, even I still think New York is exciting. Even with everything that’s wrong with it, it’s still King Kong. 

I saw a double decker tour bus filled with  tourists waiting at the light on 55^thStreet and every single person looked enthralled. I thought of my friend Charlie, who for a long time was a tour guide on one of those buses, a job he was very good at. The tour guides were allowed to make their own tour—they didn’t have to follow a boring script, and I took Charlie’s tour once. He somehow made things I’d seen a million times feel surprising and fascinating. How did he do it? One of the details I will always remember is a moment when the bus was standing still, waiting for the light to change, and Charlie pointed out a spot on the corner with the double green light fixtures and said, “Look, see that? It’s the subway entrance! And see all those people going in? They’re all going home from work!” And there they all were, the working folks at just about six o’clock, and everyone on the bus saw them all, going down into the subway to go home.

 

So much closed down and emptied out in the last two years, but there is still a lot that didn’t. On 6^thAvenue in one of the old flower wholesalers there’s Maureen, an old kitty who I’ve known since she was a kitten. Whenever I pass by, which I do a lot, if it’s after hours I look at her through the window. And if it’s during the crazy business hours I go in and pet her. Here in this neighborhood at the florist on 8^thAvenue there’s Hazel, not yet old but much more sedate than he was some years back, and then there’s Sammy, who had a very sad life at first living in the back of the deli up the block until he ran away to live in the florist, and now he’s happy. I’d imagine Eduardo must have known Hazel and Sammy, living so close by. I probably saw him myself, since he lived just a few blocks away from me. I wish I knew what he looked like. 

Maureen in the flower wholesaler on 6th Avenue

Today I opened the Ned Rorem book that had belonged to Eduardo. I read a lot of it, and he’d made one little notation that I found, a check mark at this, that Ned wrote: “Can you polish a phrase about tears in your eyes with tears in your eyes? Yes.” To which Eduardo added in pen, “But of course…!” 

 

Today is my friend Charlie’s birthday. Happy birthday, Charlie!

 

May 24, 2022 

 

 

  

IN MEMORY OF RICO

Recently I heard that Rico, my old Super, had died sometime in March. I’d see him sometimes during the pandemic time from my window, and he looked haggard and frail. The kind of frail where I was not shocked to learn that he’d passed away, but I felt very sad to find out that he had. It had been some time since I saw him up close, but for a long time I ran into him quite a lot, even after he left as the building super, because he still lived in the neighborhood. He’d been in Chelsea for forty years.

Rico in 2006 Photo by Romy

 

Rico was a big queen from Costa Rica, and when he lived in the ground floor super’s apartment downstairs, he would make big pots of food and he fed a lot of the neighborhood characters. He always kept his door open. People would call him Mama Rico. He could recognize the footsteps of the tenants coming down the stairs without seeing them. When it was me, he’d say, “Is that you, Jolanda?” He liked to give people little nicknames, sometimes more than one. For me it was, "Is that you Jolanda? Is that you, Carmen?" It was a very affectionate little habit that he kept, and he was a sweetheart. And he knew all the neighborhood gossip.

I went looking in some of my old diaries and found him there, and I’m glad I wrote these little lines down, because some of it I might not have remembered otherwise. 

 

There was a good AC in the hallway one flight down and Rico said I can have it and that it works fine but the girl living there is rich and wanted a new one. He said her parents pay her rent for a year at a time.

 

*

 

I went to put my first loaf of bread in the oven but the oven didn’t come on. So poor Super had to schlepp up and light it for me. He looked at my dough and told me I would have to let it rise for 12 hours or I would end up with very hard bread like the bread in Jamaica. But I put it in the oven anyway. It didn’t turn out too well, but tomorrow I’ll cut the top off and toast it. 

 

*

 

On my way to the post office I saw Super standing in the doorway of a rich building he does work in sometimes, so I asked him if they have rats too, and he said, “Of course!” 

 

*

 

Today when I came in Rico was standing at his stove cooking, as he usually is, and he said, “Hey, lady, it’s raining an’ I just made spaghetti!” And then he said that he also had a nice piece of ham in the oven. 

 

*

 

Sinclair, one of the drunks from down the block was passed out like dead on the stoop in front of the door today. Rico called the ambulance but they just moved him over to the corner and lay him out there with a cup of coffee. Rico said the ambulance drivers never want to put filthy Sinclair in their nice clean ambulance. He said he wondered how Sinclair didn’t die of e coli, being so dirty all the time. 

 

*

 

Rico had caught a little mouse in a plastic bag and was going to put it out with the trash. He put a hole in the bag and gave it to me. I tore a bigger hole so the little mouse could get out by the trash. They are very cute, those little mice.

*

Super called and said, "Romy, your brown cat is down here if you're wondering." I said, "What?" And sure enough, somehow Honey had managed to slip out as the door was closing and go down to lounge around Rico's."

 

 

For years after he moved to another building in the neighborhood I would still see Rico a lot, down at the hardware store on the corner, or carrying his tools to do some job or another; “Hey, Jolanda!" Once he gave me a pile of mass market thrillers he'd saved for me to give to an old lady I'd mentioned to him, who loved to sit and read thrillers and eat M&Ms. He was thoughtful, he helped a lot of people, I liked him very much. I hope he woke up the day after dying to find himself in a glamorous paradise, and I hope he'll find Honey there too, my wonderful brown cat, if he hasn't already.

 

Farewell, Rico. 

Rico walking Charlie, 2006 Photo by Romy

 

NYC April 2022

 

 

 

 

 

THE FIRST DAY OF FEBRUARY, 2022

This morning I went out for a walk around the neighborhood in the pretty winter light. It is still very cold outside, and there is still snow all over a lot of what’s out there. And if you take notice, there are some very big icicles on some of the old houses. Some of them come to points as sharp as the top of the Chrysler Building, but with the points aimed straight down at the street like terrible glass spears. Looking at one of them today I thought of a story that my friend Liza Stelle once told me about a giant icicle.

One of the icicles in the nabe

She was at an old-fashioned boarding school for girls, somewhere cold in the winter—Massachusetts or New Jersey or upstate New York someplace—and just outside the window of her top-floor room, attached to the eaves above, was an enormous icicle. At its base it was big around as a dinner plate, and it ended in a sharp point many feet below. It fascinated her. She pushed at it with both hands, and the thing was solid as a lamppost. So she decided that she had to have it. Her dilemma was how to somehow dislodge it and get it into her room, where she could then figure out what to do with it. 

After thinking on it awhile, she came up with an idea for how this might happen. She found a length of rope, and opening the window, tied one end of the rope around the giant icicle and the other end she tied to one of her bedposts. Then she pulled a chair over to the window, sat on it, and used both feet to push against the icicle. She felt it give, and heard the cracking sound as it separated from the eaves, and in one sudden whoosh it came loose and swung downwards, dragging her bed by the post up against the window, along with a great crashing sound from down below. The rope went slack and she quickly untied it from the bedpost and pulled it in. She pushed the bed back to its place, ran out of the room and down the back stairs leading to the kitchen, and made herself busy washing dishes. 

 

What had happened was that the giant icicle had swung down on its rope and crashed through a big window of the dining room, where people were sitting at a table having dinner. Fortunately for everyone, a great, thick curtain had been pulled across the window to keep out the cold, or things might not have ended well. Somehow, someone figured out that she was the one responsible very soon after, and I don’t know how much trouble she got in, but no doubt some. 

Liza was wonderful, and kind of a bad girl in her school days. I thought of her while looking at a spectacularly scary icicle on 22^ndStreet today, and I felt the pang of missing her that really can feel like an icicle sticking me somewhere. She died in January, 1999, and I remember that day so clearly, her pretty room in the Village, the pristine snow all over her fire escape, how quiet everything was. 

Sammykitty, glum 

I saw a lot of dogs outside today, and on my way westward, at the start of my walk, I saw Sammykitty in the florist shop on 8^thAvenue before it opened. He was sitting among his flowers, glum. Sammy likes to be outside, to lounge on the sidewalk, and it’s much too cold for that. 

I passed a window with a very pretty little baby in it, looking out. We looked at each other for a few long moments. Then she waved and I waved back, and I took her picture. She was curious curious curious. Most people on the streets, including me, were wearing masks because of the bug so she couldn’t see what I look like, but it didn’t seem to matter to her. At her brand-new age, things just are what they are, funny masks included. I wonder if one day she’ll have a memory of that moment, or one like it, a memory of the kind like an impressionist painting. I have lots of such memories from when I was very small.

I remember being in a campground once, in a deep forest, probably in British Columbia or Alberta, where my dad liked to go and camp. There were little clearings where people put their tents up. I remember my dad carrying me along a little dirt road that made a loop around the campsites. A lady exclaimed and he stopped to chat with her. I remember her face, all smiles at me, and she handed me a little metal cup. I took it, but when I went to drink from it, it was empty. I still remember an unpleasant feeling of shock and embarrassment, and I cried. And I remember her running to a red cooler and coming back with a bottle of soda so I could have something. She apologized all over herself and she and my dad laughed a lot, which felt irksome to me. What the hell is wrong with these people, I think I might have wondered. That lady was probably in her forties or fifties, at least from the impression in my head, and probably not here anymore. But I still remember you, Lady, whoever you were. 

On the way back home again I stopped into a store across from the florist and bought two avocados. Then I went over to look in at Sammy, now that his shop was open. He had moved to the table where they wrap bouquets, and his face was even more glum-looking than it had been when I passed by the first time. I have a feeling he thinks he’s missing a lot, being stuck inside. But at least he is at no risk from any of the sharp icicles, which are now melting all up and down that block.

Sammykitty after the shop opened, still glum

THE MAN ACROSS THE STREET

Before the pandemic, when I was still taking the bus now and then, a man sitting across the aisle told me, on the way up Sixth Avenue, that Liz Taylor had given him brain damage while cutting his hair. There was definitely something not quite right about this man, and I would have liked to hear more details, but he got off at the next stop. 

The nice thing about the bus is that you don’t have to walk. In New York the bus is no faster than walking, really, it’s just that you can sit instead. I’ve had all kinds of things said to me on the bus and one of them, not all that long ago, was something that signaled my being a little on the old side, when a young woman saw me and stood up and offered me her seat. I wasn’t offended. That would be ridiculous. If everyone who sees me would offer me some perk because of my age, I would feel pretty lucky. I remember the actual moment I knew I was a grown up lady with absolute certainty because of things people were saying. It happened in Italy, where I used to go quite a lot. For the longest time strangers in Italy who spoke to me always called me Signorina. And then, on this particular visit, I was suddenly Signora. To everybody. There was no disputing it. And I liked it. I felt as if I’d been given a promotion.

While sitting by my window just before dark yesterday evening, I looked across the street just in time to see a man at his window, wearing exactly nothing. Before drawing his curtains closed, he paused, to look out on this very gray and foggy late afternoon, unclothed in the same manner as the lady two floors below, when she opens her curtains in the morning, wearing nothing. Those little glimpses always feel a little thrilling to me in the way that it feels thrilling to see a humming bird, or a moose in the wild. There’s such an innocence to it. On occasion, in big new buildings with big windows, I’ve seen a naked person standing there obviously on purpose. Some of the newer buildings are full of horrible exhibitionists. Once, from the street, I looked up and saw one standing in a window of the Standard Hotel, “stark naked” as the saying goes, and if I ever wished for a spear gun, it was then. 

I’ve always been a prude, I will admit it. I don’t think anyone should go naked anywhere in public, and they especially should not go naked in a nudist colony, which in my opinion should be outlawed. But the little glimpses in New York City windows feel different to me, up above the street, and more akin to some of the paintings in the Met, where in the intimacy of their little worlds from hundreds of years ago, people sit alone in their rooms undressed. 

 

One of my friends told me some time ago that at three in the morning she went out into the common area on her floor to put the trash in the incinerator, completely naked, without thinking. She realized what she’d done when she heard the click of her door locking behind her, and had to wake her neighbor and let him see what he would see. She’s not too squeamish about things like that, but even so. 

 

I remember a derelict building I used to see from the window whenever I went upstate on a Metro North train, just after leaving the elevated 125^thStreet stop. It was a slender brick building of the kind built in 1900 or so, five or six stories tall with an ornate fire escape and decorous cornice, completely empty. The windows had no glass and through one of them, at the top, I could see into a bare room,with peeling wallpaper as the train pulled out. In an open closet was a suit jacket on a hanger, the whole picture in shades of brown. For years I looked for the suit jacket from the train, and there it always was. I wondered about the person who had lived there once, and left it. The sight of it felt private somehow, as if it should never have been seen and wouldn’t have been but for the elevated train. Eventually the building was demolished and now a bland new building stands on that spot.

Not far from where I live is a very old and crumbly trio of buildings where at the top is a window that was always kept open with a globe of the earth or a cello propped there. I watched birds going in and out of that window as they pleased, both pigeons and doves, but I never saw the person who lived there. I always imagined it being a man. Now those buildings are wrapped up in plywood getting ready to be torn down. I wonder what became of the globe and the cello and whoever it was who owned those things. 

Across the street is a well-kept building of about five stories. I would imagine that the people who live in the upper apartments would have been able to look into the window kept open with the cello or the globe, and see the person who lived there with the birds. Somehow I can’t imagine whoever that was being unclothed near the window, and why that is I do not know. I’m not the type to walk around the house unclothed myself, but this is New York. Sometimes even I come out of the bathroom after a shower and go into the bedroom to get dressed without closing the curtains. There is always the chance that someone across the street might look over and catch a glimpse of una Signora in her birthday suit, for better or worse. I hope it hasn’t happened, but I won’t die if it has.

2 January 2022