Free The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick Page B

us,” he wrote, “has not dreamt, in his ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetic prose … [that would] adapt itself to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the wave motions of dreaming, the shocks of consciousness. This ideal … will grip especially those who are at home in the giant cities and the web of their numberless interconnecting relationships.” This crowd, Benjamin wrote, of whose existence Baudelaire is always aware, “has not served as the model for any of his works, but it is imprinted on his creativity as a hidden figure.”
    I’m walking up Fifth Avenue at noon straight into the cold hard sunlight of a morning in November. Mobs of people are coming at me. Once the dominating color of this crowd was white, now it is black and brown. Once it wore blue and white collars, now it is in mufti. Once it was law-abiding, now it is not. The idiom has changed, but the character remains stable. Every now and then I see a face and a figure mixed in among the regulation jeans and parkas—something narrow faced and creamy skinned in glossy furs (Paris, 1938); something swarthy and dangerous in island Spanish (Cuba, 1952); something sloe-eyed and timeless (Egypt, 4000 B.C. )—and I am reminded of the enduring nature of the crowd. New York belongs to me as much as it does to them: but no more so. We are all here on Fifth Avenue for the same reason and by virtue of the same right. We have all been walking the streets of world capitals forever: actors, clerks, criminals; dissidents, runaways, illegals; Nebraska gays, Polish intellectuals, women on the edge of time. Half of these people will be lost to glitter and crime—disappearing into Wall Street, hiding out in Queens—but half of them will become me: a walker in the city; here to feed the never-ending stream of the never-ending crowd that is certainly imprinting on someone’s creativity.
    *   *   *
    Leonard and I are passing a bookstore. In its window we see a display of a book on cosmetic surgery written by a woman I know.
    â€œShe’s only forty-two,” I say. “Why is she writing about cosmetic surgery?”
    â€œMaybe she’s seventy,” Leonard says. “What do you know?”
    *   *   *
    A writer of my acquaintance (I’ll call her Alice) was felled at eighty-five by infirmity. Arthritis had attacked her from head to toe and left her so crippled that she had herself admitted to an assisted living facility in upper Manhattan. Composed of about a hundred studio apartments, a complete set of common rooms, a bright and airy dining room, the facility was both comfortable and attractive. Equipped (as it was) with excellent care, the place at first seemed a dream come true: a worthy woman laid low was being admirably attended to in her hour of need. But this facility was run by a development company heavily supported by federal moneys: which meant that differences in class, wealth, and education were reduced to accommodate a culture of the lowest common denominator. Therein lay the tale of a dream gone bad.
    Alice, who was some twenty years older than me, had been a writer of reputation thirty years before the time I knew her. When I was in college my friends and I read her novels with interest and admiration. She was also glamorous. A slender woman with marvelous hair and great taste in clothes, she had a handsome husband, a house in the Hamptons, and an apartment in the Dakota. I didn’t get to know her until she was nearly eighty, by which time her fortunes had reversed themselves. Her books were no longer being published, her husband had left her, and she was living in a residence for women.
    Ours was one of those peculiar friendships based not on shared sensibility, but on the complications of emotional need. Shortly after Alice and I met I found that I actually didn’t like her. Her mind was alert, her mental energy intact, and her desire for