I finish with a bit of mascara, plain black, then sit back and gaze at what I’ve done.
I think I look all right. But who’s to say? The insouciance of youth doesn’t stay, but shades into “eccentricity,” as people say when they are trying to be kind, until finally you become just another lonely crackpot. But I’ve always been this way. The strangeness just used to seem more fashionable, probably.
I pet Phoebe’s fur of purest white and walk to the foyer.
Now for footwear. The snow’s mostly melted following yesterday’s freak heat, but I’m not going to risk a fall, not me. Not these hips. I put on my riding boots, from when I used to spend time on horseback in Maine. With some socks inside, between boots and tights, they’re just right for me, a cold old lady.
I top it all off with my mink coat, obviously. The seams aren’t done the way anyone’s been working them for years, but I don’t care. I bought it for me. Myself. In 1942. It was not a gift from Max. I used my own money. I have enough to buy another, but this one is the one.
In my girl-poetess days, I wrote the lines:
I’d rather have a fur coat now
Than crumbs at fifty anyhow.
*
Why is Ogden Nash remembered when I am forgotten? The funny thing is, I was closer to fifty when I wrote that than anyone realized. That poetic sentiment now seems very early twentieth century. The only century I’ve known. Or so I claim—born in 1900, I always say. I’m lying, though, because my real birth year, 1899, made me sound like a grotesque relic, even when I wasn’t. A woman can never be too rich or too thin or too young, truly. So I revised.
I descend in the elevator, bid the doorman good-bye and return his “Happy New Year,” and then I am out in the late-afternoon light.
In the air hangs the scent of dampness and birthday candles blown out, which I have always associated with the presence of ghosts.
Since Max and I moved here almost forty years ago, I have felt at home in Murray Hill. The name sounds like a person: Mr. Murray Hill. Cheery Mr. Hill, a living friend, stalwart Murray who has not yet forsaken me.
I have a little under an hour until my reservation. Perhaps I can walk off the abominable Oreo cookies I savaged and dine happily after all?
Off to traipse the Century’s corpse outleant—or 1984’s, at any rate—I head east on Thirty-Sixth Street toward Third Avenue. Maybe I’ll walk by one of my old apartments, the second one I lived in after I first came to the city from that much duller metropolis, Washington, D.C.
That I was a success is not apparent now; that I would be a success was not apparent then.
Within a few steps, though, I feel that it’s hopeless. I can’t walk this fullness off by five. How am I still making stupid mistakes in my eighties? Whenever somebody says to me, “Maybe it’ll come with age,” I want to say, “I wouldn’t count on it.”
Gian is not wrong about the great decline. Even Murray Hill is shabbier than it should be. The sycamores looking sickly, trash gathered at their roots.
I have half a mind, next time we talk, to ask Gian to secure as my epitaph that most poetic of the signs planted in the parks back when I first arrived in this city:
Let no one say and say it to your shame
That all was beauty here until you came.
3
Your Brain Is Showing
In my reckless and undiscouraged youth, I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street.
When I arrived in Manhattan in 1926, I scrimped along on help from my parents and pittances from ballet performances until I landed the job at R.H. Macy’s: Forty dollars a week as a lowly assistant copywriter.
From the first moment I took to my desk and touched a needle-sharp pencil to a steno pad, I felt a sense of correctness that I have never known before or since. I would look down at the streams of strangers moving up and down Seventh Avenue, at the fog of their breath beneath their black and gray and brown hats, and I knew by instinct just how to buttonhole them. In my little walnut nook I was like a human cannonball, snug and ready to be launched above the unsuspecting crowd.
By one muggy morning in hot, late August 1931, I’d become a salaried institutional copywriter for that great department store, and the highest-paid advertising woman in America.
I had a front-page article in the New York World-Telegram to prove it: “Personality, Understanding, Interest: Those Are Keys to Success Says Mere Girl Who’s Found It,” read the headline.