Goodbye to All That

How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and ten—
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again—
If your feet are nimble and light
You can get there by candlelight.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember
now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York
began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through
the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where
the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was
twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal
in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already,
even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some
instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read
about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never
was.

Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went "but
where is the schoolgirl who used to be me," and if it was late enough at night I used to
wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later
and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and
twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to
the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time
been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San
Francisco, but because I am talking about myself I am talking here about New York. That
first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I
could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and
then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of
the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in
blankets in a hotel room air conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a cold and a
high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it
did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never
called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young?
I am here to tell you that someone was.

All I could do during those years was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would
never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I
could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the
Triborough, and I stayed eight years.

In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges
were happier than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will see that as we go along.
Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months
can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those
years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick
shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at
twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street. But most particularly I
want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New
York.

It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is
less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere
else, a city only for the very young.

I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting a friend who
complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a party where there would
be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, "new faces." He laughed
literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back.
"New faces," he said finally, "don't tell me about new faces." It seemed that the last time
he had gone to a party where he had been promised "new faces," there had been fifteen people
in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two
of the men. I laughed with him, but the first snow had just begun to fall and the big
Christmas trees glittered yellow and white as far as I could see up Park Avenue and I had a
new dress and it would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral
of the story.

It would be a long while because, quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean
"love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the
first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember
walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they
were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and
bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and
reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway
grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that
it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from
there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a
high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities
then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen
any minute, any day, any month.

I was making only $65 or $70 a week then ("Put yourself in Hattie Carnegie's hands," I was
advised without the slightest trace of irony by an editor of the magazine for which I worked),
so little money that some weeks I had to charge food at Bloomingdale's gourmet shop in order
to eat, a fact which went unmentioned in the letters I wrote to California. I never told my
father that I needed money because then he would have sent it, and I would never know if I
could do it by myself. At that time making a living seemed a game to me, with arbitrary but
quite inflexible rules. And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the
Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking
very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks
working in clean kitchens and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful
children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor;
I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a syndicated
column for teenagers under the name "Debbi Lynn" or I could smuggle gold into India or I could
become a $100 call girl, and none of it would matter.

Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something
curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about. I could go
to a party and meet someone who called himself Mr. Emotional Appeal and ran The Emotional
Appeal Institute or Tina Onassis Blandford or a Florida cracker who was then a regular on what
they called "the Big C," the Southampton-El Morocco circuit ("I'm well connected on the Big C,
honey," he would tell me over collard greens on his vast borrowed terrace), or the widow of
the celery king of the Harlem market or a piano salesman from Bonne Terre, Missouri, or someone
who had already made and lost two fortunes in Midland, Texas. I could make promises to myself
and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up
all night and make mistakes, and none of them would count.

You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a
real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until
Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was most comfortable with
the company of Southerners. They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely
extended leave from wherever they belonged, disinclined to consider the future, temporary
exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my
case, California. Someone who lives with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly
different calendar. Christmas, for example, was a difficult season. Other people could take
it in stride, going to Stowe or going abroad or going for the day to their mothers' places in
Connecticut; those of us who believed that we lived somewhere else would spend it making and
canceling airline reservations, waiting for weatherbound flights as if for the last plane out
of Lisbon in 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of us who were left, with oranges
and mementos and smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering close, colonials in a far
country.

Which is precisely what we were.

I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what
New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South.
To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always had an uncle on Wall Street and who
has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at
Best's and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just
a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live. But to those of us who came
from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday
radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but
abstractions ("Money," and "High Fashion," and "The Hucksters"), New York was no mere city.
It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and
power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of "living" there was to reduce the
miraculous to the mundane; one does not "live" at Xanadu.

In fact it was difficult in the extreme for me to understand those young women for whom New
York was not simply an ephemeral Estoril but a real place, girls who bought toasters and
installed new cabinets in their apartments and committed themselves to some reasonable
furniture. I never bought any furniture in New York. For a year or so I lived in other people's
apartments; after that I lived in the Nineties in an apartment furnished entirely with things
taken from storage by a friend whose wife had moved away. And when I left the apartment in the
Nineties (that was when I was leaving everything, when it was all breaking up) I left everything
in it, even my winter clothes and the map of Sacramento County I had hung on the bedroom wall
to remind me who I was, and I moved into a monastic four-room floor-through on Seventy-fifth
Street. "Monastic" is perhaps misleading here, implying some chic severity; until after I was
married and my husband moved some furniture in, there was nothing at all in those four rooms
except a cheap double mattress and box springs, ordered by telephone the day I decided to move,
and two French garden chairs lent me by a friend who imported them. (It strikes me now that
the people I knew in New York all had curious and self-defeating sidelines. They imported garden
chairs which did not sell very well at Hammacher Schlemmer or they tried to market hair
straighteners in Harlem or they ghosted exposés of Murder Incorporated for Sunday supplements.
I think that perhaps none of us was very serious, engaged only about our most private lives.)

All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the
bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I
did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of
transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in afternoon
thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the
promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after
all, every evasion and every procrastination, every word, all of it.

That is what it was all about, wasn't it? Promises?

Now when New York comes back to me it comes in hallucinatory flashes, so clinically detailed
that I sometimes wish that memory would effect the distortion with which it is commonly credited.
For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a perfume called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then
L'Air du Temps, and now the slightest trace of either can short-circuit my connections for the
rest of the day. Nor can I smell Henri Bendel jasmine soap without falling back into the past,
or the particular mixture of spices used for boiling crabs. There were barrels of crab boil in
a Czech place in the Eighties where I once shopped. Smells, of course, are notorious memory
stimuli, but there are other things which affect me the same way. Blue-and-white striped sheets.
Vermouth cassis. Some faded nightgowns which were new in 1959 or 1960, and some chiffon scarves
I bought about the same time.

I suppose that a lot of us who have been very young in New York have the same scenes on our home
screens. I remember sitting in a lot of apartments with a slight headache about five o'clock in
the morning. I had a friend who could not sleep, and he knew a few other people who had the same
trouble, and we would watch the sky lighten and have a last drink with no ice and then go home
in the early morning, when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained in the night? we never
knew) and the few cruising taxis still had their headlights on and the only color was the red
and green of traffic signals. The White Rose bars opened very early in the morning; I recall
waiting in one of them to watch an astronaut go into space, waiting so long that at the moment
it actually happened I had my eyes not on the television screen but on a cockroach on the tile
floor. I liked the bleak branches above Washington Square at dawn, and the monochromatic
flatness of Second Avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and empty in
their perspective. It is relatively hard to fight at six-thirty or seven in the morning, without
any sleep, which was perhaps one reason why we stayed up all night, and it seemed to me a
pleasant time of day.

The windows were shuttered in that apartment in the Nineties and I could sleep for a few hours
and then go to work. I could work on two or three hours' sleep and a container of coffee from
Chock Full O' Nuts. I liked going to work, liked the soothing and satisfactory rhythm of getting
out a magazine, liked the orderly progression of four-color closings and two-color closings and
black-and-white closings and then The Product, no abstraction but something which looked
effortlessly glossy and could be picked up on a newsstand and weighed in the hand. I liked all
the minutiae of proofs and layouts, liked working late on the nights the magazines went to press,
sitting and reading Variety and waiting for the copy desk to call. From my office I could look
across town to the weather signal on the Mutual of New York Building and the lights that
alternately spelled TIME and LIFE above Rockefeller Plaza; that pleased me obscurely, and so did
walking uptown in the mauve eight o'clocks of early summer evenings and looking at things,
Lowestoft tureens in Fifty-seventh Street windows, people in evening clothes trying to get taxis,
the trees just coming into full leaf, the lambent air, all the sweet promises of money and summer.

Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to
cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or
what I was doing. I liked walking, from the East River over to the Hudson and back on brisk days,
down around the Village on warm days. A friend would leave me the key to her apartment in the
West Village when she was out of town, and sometimes I would just move down there, because by
that time the telephone was beginning to bother me (the canker, you see, was already in the rose)
and not many people had that number. I remember one day when someone who did have the West
Village number came to pick me up for lunch there, and we both had hangovers, and I cut my finger
opening him a beer and burst into tears, and we walked to a Spanish restaurant and drank bloody
Marys and gazpacho until we felt better. I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons
that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world. And even that late in the game I
still liked going to parties, all parties, bad parties, Saturday-afternoon parties given by
recently married couples who lived in Stuyvesant Town, West Side parties given by unpublished or
failed writers who served cheap red wine and talked about going to Guadalajara, Village parties
where all the guests worked for advertising agencies and voted for Reform Democrats, press parties
at Sardi's, the worst kind of parties. You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit
by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in
new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly
possible to stay too long at the Fair.

I could not tell you when I began to understand that. All I know is that it was very bad when I
was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no
longer listen. I could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone
complaining of his wife's inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to
Connecticut. I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received
from their publishers, about plays which were having second-act trouble in Philadelphia, or about
people I would like very much if only I would come out and meet them. I had already met them,
always. There were certain parts of the city which I had to avoid. I could not bear upper Madison
Avenue on weekday mornings (this was a particularly inconvenient aversion, since I then lived
just fifty or sixty feet east of Madison), because I would see women walking Yorkshire terriers
and shopping at Gristede's, and some Veblenesque gorge would rise in my throat. I could not go
to Times Square in the afternoon, or to the New York Public Library for any reason whatsoever.
One day I could not go into a Schrafft's; the next it would be the Bonwit Teller.

I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off from the one
person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying
and when I was not, I cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went
to the doctor, he said only that I seemed to be depressed, and that I should see a "specialist."
He wrote down a psychiatrist's name and address for me, but I did not go. Instead I got married,
which as it turned out was a very good thing to do but badly timed, since I still could not walk
on upper Madison Avenue in the mornings and still could not talk to people and still cried in
Chinese laundries. I had never before understood what "despair" meant, and I am not sure that I
understand now, but I understood that year. Of course I could not work. I could not even get
dinner with any degree of certainty, and I would sit in the apartment on Seventy-fifth Street
paralyzed until my husband would call from his office and say gently that I did not have to get
dinner, that I could meet him at Michael's Pub or at Toots Shor's or at Sardi's East.

And then one morning in April (we had been married in January) he called and told me that he
wanted to get out of New York for a while, that he would take a six-month leave of absence, that
we would go somewhere. It was three years ago he told me that, and we have lived in Los Angeles
since. Many of the people we knew in New York think this a curious aberration, and in fact tell
us so. There is no possible, no adequate answer to that, and so we give certain stock answers,
the answers everyone gives. I talk about how difficult it would be for us to "afford" to live in
New York right now, about how much "space" we need. All I mean is that I was very young in New
York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore. The
last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the
people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in
New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and
on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine
all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still
kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles "the Coast," but they seem a long
time ago.