Wendy, whose Ohio parents raised her to be too humble, in my estimation, but just the right degree of courteous, worried that we should go somewhere nearby so I would not have to walk too far. I assured her that while I am not much of what I used to be, I am still a walker—that since everything else in my life is mostly gone, I just am in the city. I just like to be here.
As I pass the string of photography studios that line this block of Broadway—located here because it’s decrepit and therefore cheap—I find myself imagining her New Year’s Eve party in Chelsea. Loud strange music. Skinny youths in Dumpster-plucked clothes. Various substances stashed upon my arrival. Suspicious neighbors, in one or both senses of suspicious. And her husband, charming and venal. Or brilliant and petulant. Or moony and narcissistic. Wendy’s husband.
I think her invitation was sincere.
But whom is she kidding? An octogenarian staying up until midnight to hoot ecstatically at the onset of another year?
Then again, what else have I got to do? It’s not as though I have to wake up early tomorrow.
On Broadway the damp wind is cooler and more assertive, and I laugh a little because I realize that this is exactly how I’ve been imagining Wendy’s husband: cooler and more assertive.
She doesn’t wear a wedding band, I’ve noticed. Then again, I do, and I haven’t been married for almost three decades. Symbols, or their absence, do not always mean what they seem to symbolize.
Nevertheless, I suppose they always symbolize something.
I like presenting myself to Wendy—presenting myself as I want to be presented, and being received as such. Maybe I will stop by her party. We’ll see.
11
Fleurs de Rocaille
In my day I was great at parties. And let me say, there were great parties.
Even after the crash, a number of us in Manhattan just kept smashing along. We all had jobs, and thus a need to unwind and the money to burn in the unwinding. The skyscrapers to which we would all eventually become accustomed were either new then or still going up, getting high, getting higher, with some of us getting high along with them.
But me, I lived in a low neighborhood—in the low sixties on the Upper East Side. The neighborhood, long ago the site of the old Treadwell Farm, built up quickly after the Civil War, filling in with corny Italianate and French Second Empire confections, including mine, a four-story townhouse. I had the top floor. The place had no river view and no doorman, but it was a small oasis all the same, the street quiet and tree-lined. I’d been there since 1930, and although it was gorgeous, I was almost ready for a change. I’d move to Greenwich Village the following year, and that move would alter my life in ways I had vowed up and down never to let my life be altered.
One night in late August 1933 I threw an unforgettable party, maybe the best I had when I resided in that particular apartment. It was the party that caused Olive Dodd, my archrival and colleague at R.H. Macy’s, not to speak to me outside of professional contexts for almost a solid year.
I invited Hattie, the downstairs neighbor, of course, to avoid complaint, and because the more the merrier. She worked at the main branch of the New York Public Library, and luckily for our harmonious neighborliness, she got all the peace and quiet she needed while laboring amid the stacks: A little racket on the weekend was fine by her. She certainly wasn’t shushing anybody present that night.
I had pulled down the ladder so my guests could avail themselves of the stars and the streetlights and the breeze off the East River. Prohibition would end, finally, later that year, but that evening—just as anyone who enjoyed the night life had been doing since 1920—we were filtering the booze in through the loopholes.
My gentleman caller, for example—a square-faced man named Benjamin, who went by Bennie—had a physician’s prescription that permitted him to take a pint of liquor home from the pharmacy every ten days. He arrived with one tucked under each arm, each package labeled “Jim Beam: For Medicinal Purposes Only.”
I’d met him the week prior, while being interviewed by a society reporter about my ongoing reign as the highest-paid female advertising writer in the country, a story that journalists seemed never to tire of. Bennie had been the photographer.
I was happy to see Bennie’s liquor, if a bit disenchanted by its packaging. The prescription trick worked, but it always struck me as smug, inelegant, the wrong kind of clever. Most of us preferred to get our booze from honest crooks, who tended to be nicer and more interesting. It’s hard to deny that a willingness to risk prison imparts a certain magnetism in social settings.