“Are you—are you Oliver Sacks? The Oliver Sacks?”
Oliver looked both pleased and stricken.
“Well, it is very good to meet you sir.” She sounded like a Southern barmaid in a 1950s Western. But it wasn’t an act. “I’ve been reading you since way back. Oliver Sacks—imagine that!”
Oliver, I should note, had absolutely no idea who she was, nor would he understand if I had pulled him aside and told him. Fashion? Vogue magazine? No idea…
The two of them hit it off. She was fast-talking, bawdy, opinionated, a broad—the opposite of Oliver except for having in common that mysterious quality: charm.
Somewhere along the way, she explained the black eye: A few days earlier, she had walked out of a business meeting at which she’d learned that she had been “robbed” of a third of everything she’d ever earned, and in a daze walked smack into a scaffolding pipe at eye level on the sidewalk. She didn’t seem too bothered by it: Shit happens.
I looked up and saw that the room was empty by now but for Kevin and us.
“Well, gentlemen, I’m going downtown. Share a cab?”
“Uh, we have a car,” I said.
“Even better. Much more civilized. I’m downtown.”
How could one refuse? “Let’s go, shall we?” I said.
Lauren Hutton offered Oliver an arm and we walked slowly to the parking garage. I pushed things out of the way in the backseat; she tossed in her handbag, and dove in. She immediately popped her head between our seats—the three of us were practically ear-to-ear. Her incredible face blocked my rearview mirror. When O took out his wallet to give me a credit card for the parking, she spotted the copy of the periodic table he carries in lieu of a driver’s license. This prompted a series of questions about the periodic table, the elements, the composition of the very air we were breathing. A dozen questions led to a dozen more, like a student soaking up knowledge. We talked about travels—Iceland, Africa—and Plato, Socrates, the pygmies, William Burroughs, poets … She was clearly intensely curious, life-loving, adventurous. In passing, she said something about having been a model—“the only reason I did it was so I could make enough dough to travel”—but otherwise didn’t say anything about that part of her life.
I am terrible with directions in New York, and she was not shy about telling me where and how to drive—“left here, right there …” Traffic was thick, so it took quite a while to get downtown. Eventually, we reached her address, or close enough.
“Well, gentlemen, it has been a true pleasure. I cannot thank you enough. This is where I exit. Goodbye—for now.” And she was gone, as suddenly as she’d arrived.
Oliver took a breath as we headed west and home. “I don’t know who that was, but she seems like a very remarkable person.”
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
3-21-13:
Finding O writing letters and listening to the Bach festival on WQXR—“I can’t tear myself away,” he says. He burrows his head into my abdomen and talks as I scratch his neck. He tells me how he’d slept, of his dreams (all “dull”), and of an article in Science about genetic variation that led to the Ruffled Grouse’s ruffled head.
“I wish I could take a crash course in genetics,” O says.
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Undated Note—March 2013:
A heavyset young black woman is squeezed into a spot at the end of a bench near the door on a Brooklyn-bound 2 train. She is probably going home from work. She has her iPod on and her eyes closed—she’s clearly dozed off to sleep; you can see it in her slack face. She hugs a big chunky, bejeweled leather purse to her chest.
Sitting next to her is a small, rail-thin, young white woman—Eastern European?—who has a little boy in a stroller at her feet. The mother’s eyes are closed. The little boy is about two. He’s fidgety, as if he’s just awakened from a nap and eaten some sugar. He eyes the woman’s purse. He starts sort of swatting the purse, swatting at whatever is dazzling him—the colors, the rhinestones. Maybe he’s deliberately trying to get her attention—anyone’s attention. The woman feels something at her hands, brushes it off, her eyes still closed, as if it’s a fly.
The little boy loves this. He starts slapping back at her hands. The young black woman cracks open one eye to see what the heck is going on. All she sees, I imagine, is this little hand—bothering her. She pushes it away. He pushes back. He’s laughing now. She opens both eyes narrowly, and at first looks pissed but then can’t help smiling. She’s sort of giggling, like, “You little rascal, I’m gonna get you!” but also still half-asleep. She flicks his little hand away. He’s giggling now, too, and wants to play more. But finally, she tires of this pest. She repositions her purse and closes her eyes. The little boy turns and grabs for his mother, who smiles at him lovingly.
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