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

* * *

Every night when I turn the lights out in my sixteenth-floor living room before I go to bed, I experience a shock of pleasure as I see the banks of lighted windows rising to the sky, crowding round me, and feel myself embraced by the anonymous ingathering of city dwellers. This swarm of human hives, also hanging anchored in space, is the New York design offering generic connection. The pleasure it gives soothes beyond all explanation.

* * *

The phone rings. It’s Leonard.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Reading Krista K,” I reply.

“Who’s she?” he asks.

“Who’s she!” I say. “She’s one of the most famous writers in Eastern Europe.”

“Oh,” he says matter-of-factly. “What’s the book like?”

“A bit claustrophobic.” I sigh. “You don’t really know where you are most of the time, or who’s speaking. Then every twenty pages or so she says, ‘Ran into G this morning. Asked him how long he thought we could go on like this. He shrugged. Yes, I said.’”

“Oh,” Leonard says. “One of those. Bor-ring.”

“Tell me,” I say, “don’t you ever mind sounding like a Philistine?”

“The Philistines were a much maligned people,” he says. “Have you seen Lorenzo lately?”

“No, why?”

“He’s drinking again.”

“For God’s sake! What’s wrong now?”

“What’s wrong now ? What’s right now? What’s ever right for Lorenzo?”

“Can’t you talk to him? You know him so well.”

“I do talk to him. He nods along with me as I speak. I know, I know, he says, you’re right, I’ve got to pull it together, thanks so much for saying this, I’m so grateful, I don’t know why I fuck up, I just don’t know.”

“Why does he fuck up?”

“Why? Because if he’s not fucking up he doesn’t know who he is.”

Leonard’s voice has become charged.

“It’s unbelievable,” he swears on, “the muddle in his mind. I say to him, What do you want, what is it you want ?”

“Tell me,” I cut in, “what do you want?”

“Touché.” Leonard laughs drily.

There follows a few long seconds of vital silence.

“In my life,” he says, “I have known only what I don’t want. I’ve always had a thorn in my side, and I’ve always thought, When this thorn is removed I’ll think about what I want. But then that particular thorn would be removed, and I’d be left feeling emptied out. In a short time another thorn would be inserted into my side. Then, once again, all I had to think about was being free of the thorn in my side. I’ve never had time to think about what I want .”

“Maybe somewhere in there is a clue to why Lorenzo drinks.”

“It’s disgusting,” Leonard says softly. “To be this old and have so little information. Now, there’s something Krista K could write about that would interest me. The only problem is she thinks information is what the KGB was after.”

* * *

In the drugstore I run into ninety-year-old Vera, a Trotskyist from way back who lives in a fourth-floor walk-up in my neighborhood and whose voice is always pitched at the level of soapbox urgency. She is waiting for a prescription to be filled, and as I haven’t seen her in a long while, on impulse I offer to wait with her. We sit down in two of the three chairs lined up near the prescription counter, me in the middle, Vera on my left, and on my right a pleasant-looking man reading a book.

“Still living in the same place?” I ask.

“Where’m I gonna go?” she says, loudly enough for a man on the pickup line to turn in our direction. “But y’know, dolling? The stairs keep me strong.”

“And your husband? How’s he taking the stairs?”

“Oh, him,” she says. “He died.”

“I’m so sorry,” I murmur.

Her hand pushes away the air.

“It wasn’t a good marriage,” she announces. Three people on the line turn around. “But, y’know? In the end it doesn’t really matter.”

I nod my head. I understand. The apartment is empty.

“One thing I gotta say,” she goes on, “he was a no-good husband, but he was a great lover.”

I can feel a slight jolt in the body of the man sitting beside me.

“Well, that’s certainly important,” I say.

“Boy, was it ever! I met him in Detroit during the Second World War. We were organizing. In those days, everybody slept with everybody, so I did, too. But you wouldn’t believe it…” And here she lowers her voice dramatically, as though she has a secret of some importance to relate. “Most of the guys I slept with? They were no good in bed. I mean, they were bad, really bad .”

Now I feel the man on my right stifling a laugh.

“So when you found a good one”—Vera shrugs—“you held on to him.”

“I know just what you mean,” I say.

“Do you, dolling?”

“Of course I do.”

“You mean they’re still bad?”

“Listen to us,” I say. “Two old women talking about lousy lovers.”

This time the man beside me laughs out loud. I turn and take a good long look at him.

“We’re sleeping with the same guys, right?” I say.

Yes, he nods. “And with the same ratio of satisfaction.”

For a split second the three of us look at one another, and then, all at once, we begin to howl. When the howling stops, we are all beaming. Together we have performed, and separately we have been received.

* * *

No one is more surprised than me that I turned out to be who I am. Take love, for instance. I had always assumed that, in this regard, I was like every other girl of my generation. While motherhood and marriage had never held my interest, and daydreaming myself on some revolutionary barricade was peculiar among my classmates, I always knew that one day Prince Passion would come along, and when he did, life would assume its ultimate shape: ultimate being the operative word. As it happened, a number of PP look-alikes did appear, but there was no ultimate anything. Before I was thirty-five I had been as much bedded as any of my friends, and I had also been twice married, twice divorced. Each marriage lasted two and a half years, and each was undertaken by a woman I didn’t know (me) to a man I also didn’t know (the figure on the wedding cake).

It was only after these marriages were over that I matured sexually — that is, I became conscious of myself as a person preoccupied with desiring rather than being desired; and that development gave me an education. I learned that I was sensual but not a sensualist; that I blissed out on orgasm but the earth didn’t move; that I could be strung out on erotic obsession for six months or so but was always waiting for the nervous excitement to die down. In a word: Lovemaking was sublime, but it wasn’t where I lived. And then I learned something more.

In my late thirties I had an affair with a man I cared for and who cared for me. This man and I were both drawn to the energy of mind and spirit that each of us felt in the other. But for this man, too — intelligent, educated, politically passionate as he was — the exercise of his sexual will was central to any connection he made with a woman. There was not a moment when we were together that he wasn’t touching me. He never walked into my house that his hand wasn’t immediately on my breast; never embraced me that he wasn’t reaching for my genitals; never lay beside me that he wasn’t trying to make me come. When, after we’d been together some months, I began to object to what had started to feel like an on-automatic practice, he would invariably put his arms around me, nuzzle my neck, and whisper in my ear, “C’mon, you know you like it.” As I did genuinely love him and he me — we had memorable times together — I would stare at him at such moments, shake my head in exasperation, but then let it go.