Vivian Gornick: The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir

We walk on together, side by side; silent; mirror-image witnesses, each of us, to the other’s formative experience. The exchange will always deepen, even if the friendship does not.

* * *

It is now October. On a Saturday evening in midmonth, Daniel takes me down to the Winter Garden in Battery Park City to hear a group of Renaissance singers in concert. I have many times walked through this lovely open hall with its marble floors and great central staircase, the glittering shops and restaurants, and the tall arched window filled with New York Harbor. Who could have imagined that this elaborate piece of architectural commerce and kitsch would become such a New York treat? But it has, filling up at all hours with people streaming through to shop, eat, wander, listen to the free music and theater pieces presented most days at noon or in the evening at seven or eight.

We come early to secure seats close to the movable stage set up before the arched window, then wander off, buy sandwiches and coffee, sit beside the water. The evening is soft, with the harbor and promenade gleaming under the strung lights of boats and restaurant terraces, the atmosphere festive, sparkling, somehow (lovely word!) expectant. When we return to our seats darkness has fallen, and the great hall is buzzing with humanity. I look about me, and to my amazement the entire staircase, receding stadium-like, up the back of the hall, rising four or five stories high, is packed. Turning back in my seat, I feel a thrill shoot through my body, the kind that occurs when a nerve is touched. A thousand people are gathered here, grouped all over the hall, waiting to feel themselves in the music.

For the first time in decades, I feel the spirit of Lewisohn Stadium alive at my back, and I think, I’m always being told you people have left the city in droves, but look, you’re still here. Oh, you’ve shifted positions, to be sure, you don’t dominate the scene anymore, the city is no longer made in your image, but here you are; and here am I; and there are the singers. It takes all of us together to fill the hall with joy and, urban death or no urban death, the city is still up for it.

* * *

A friend reads what I’ve been writing and says to me over coffee, “You’re romanticizing the street. Don’t you know that New York has lost seventy-five percent of its manufacturing base?” In my mind’s eye, I stare into the faces of all the women and men with whom I interact daily. Hey, you people, I address them silently, did you hear what my friend just said? The city is doomed, the middle class has deserted New York, the corporations are in Texas, Jersey, Taiwan. You’re gone, you’re outta here, it’s all over. How come you’re still on the street?

New York isn’t jobs, they reply, it’s temperament. Most people are in New York because they need evidence — in large quantities — of human expressiveness; and they need it not now and then, but every day. That is what they need . Those who go off to the manageable cities can do without; those who come to New York cannot.

Or perhaps I should say that it is I who cannot.

* * *

It’s the voices I can’t do without. In most cities of the world the populace is planted in centuries of cobblestoned alleys, ruined churches, architectural relics, none of which are ever dug up, only piled one on top of another. If you’ve grown up in New York, your life is an archaeology not of structures but of voices, also piled one on top of another, also not really replacing one another:

On Sixth Avenue, two small, dark-skinned men lean against a parked cab. One says to the other, “Look, it’s very simple. A is the variable costs, B is the gross income, C is the overhead. Got that?” The other man shakes his head no. “Dummy!” the first man cries. “You gotta get it.”

On Park Avenue, a well-dressed matron says to her friend, “When I was young, men were the main course, now they’re a condiment.”

On Fifty-Seventh Street, one boyish-looking man says to another, “I didn’t realize you were such good friends. What did she give you, that you miss her so?” “It wasn’t what she gave me,” the other replies, “it was what she didn’t take away.”

As the cabbie on Sixth Avenue says, someone’s gotta get it; and late in the day, someone does.

I am walking on Eighth Avenue during the five o’clock rush, thinking of changing a word in a sentence, and somewhere in the Forties, I don’t notice the light turning red. Halfway into the path of an oncoming truck, I am lifted off my feet by a pair of hands on my upper arms and pulled back onto the curb. The hands do not release me immediately. I am pressed to the chest of the person to whom the hands belong. I can still feel the beating heart against my back. When I turn to thank my rescuer I am looking into the middle-aged face of an overweight man with bright blue eyes, straw-colored hair, and a beet-red face. We stare wordlessly at each other. I’ll never know what the man is thinking at this moment, but the expression on his face is unforgettable. Me, I am merely shaken, but he looks as though transfigured by what has just happened. His eyes are fixed on mine, but I see that they are really looking inward. I realize that this is his experience, not mine. It is he who has felt the urgency of life — he is still holding it in his hands.

Two hours later I am home, having dinner at my table, looking out at the city. My mind flashes on all who crossed my path today. I hear their voices, I see their gestures, I start filling in lives for them. Soon they are company, great company. I think to myself, I’d rather be here with you tonight than with anyone else I know. Well, almost anyone else I know. I look up at the great clock on my wall, the one that gives the date as well as the hour. It’s time to call Leonard.

Vivian Gornick is the author of the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments , a biography of Emma Goldman, and three essay collections, two of which, The Men in My Life and The End of the Novel of Love , were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. You can sign up for email updates here.