Arguing against comments like these had gotten me nowhere, so I’d taken to simply ignoring them. “Let me take your picture by these roses,” I said.
While I treasured the occasional rural retreat—I adored Pin Point, for instance, the place in Maine we’d rented together the previous fall—the suburbs had always seemed mealy and unresolved. I understood that their in-between-ness—neither town nor country!—was supposed to be their very appeal, but I didn’t find it appealing. I always wanted either to be in, or get away from the city, not to just be close to the city. Were I off in the pastoral hills shingling my own roof or riding a horse, well then, what fun. And were I catching the subway for a night at the opera, well then, hooray. But in the suburbs I could enjoy none of those pursuits with ease.
As I snapped the rosy photos of Max for our scrapbook, I tried to convince myself, against my best intuitions, that I might be wrong. That perhaps the suburbs would turn out to be like ocean voyages, or Italian vacations: laden with suspicious superlatives, but actually magical. But where is the shuffleboard in the suburbs? my intuitions asked. Where are the mysterious ports of call? The engaging strangers?
Max smiled widely until I told him he could relax. He came to my side and put his arm around my shoulder, and I thought about how happy he made me and how badly I wanted to make him happy in return.
On the ship back to New York late that July, I conceded. A bad idea, I knew, but I had come to see that the only way out of this suburban scheme of his was going to be through it.
*
After we moved to our “cottage in the Garden State” as the real estate agent called it, I kept paying the rent on my place in Greenwich Village. Thank god I did, because the suburbs were god-awful.
I lost all my poetry-writing time to catching buses and trains. Worse, there was virtually no more walking, my beloved walking, to get to and from work—just the crushed five-minute dash from Penn Station to R.H. Macy’s.
Without the walking, I was more exhausted than I’d ever been with it.
No one walked in the suburbs. Our neighbors noted this with pride, but it was nothing to be proud of.
Max and I were back to living in Manhattan within two months. Whether the bulbs he planted in the first weeks of our Garden State sojourn ever sprouted and bloomed I never learned, and I could never quite bring myself to care. What rescued me, I think, was Max’s realization that he might not want to be within mere blocks of his parents any longer—after living under their roof his entire life—now that he had a wife.
On the day he agreed with me that we were, undeniably, a city couple, I think I was as happy as I’d been on the day I said yes to his proposal of marriage.
Because my abode was small, especially for two, we had to look all over again for a new place to reside.
We settled on East Thirty-Sixth Street in Murray Hill, a space that immediately felt like home to both of us: ten reasonable stories of sturdy red brick, with a doorman and an elevator and a live-in super.
We chose a three-bedroom, Max populating the extra two with future children in his mind, me mentally decorating the one with the best light as my in-home office. The building had quiet hallways and a burnt-toast smell on the afternoon that we happened to view it.
I associated that smell with comfort and safety forever after. Sometimes, in my darker hours, I would lightly burn toast in our toaster—from R.H. Macy’s, naturally—and it would make me feel better.
Years later, I would come to wonder why I even had that memory of standing in the empty apartment, soon to be ours, Max holding my hand and me breathing in toast. I couldn’t access that beauty—tangibly, it was as lost to me as that first trip to Italy: trivial and evanescent, but still so real.
18
Sulfur and Molasses
I never like to walk back the same way that I came if I can help it, but sometimes I can’t help it.
To get away from the waterfront I have to take Vesey again, but at Church Street I head north so as not to duplicate my earlier route down Broadway, and also because I need to keep west to get to Chelsea.
I bear left onto Sixth Avenue, now Avenue of the Americas, though nobody outside of travel guides really calls it that. The new name came just after the war, courtesy of Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor whom both I and Max’s family’s cherished above all others: I owing to his reform politics, the Caputos owing to his being Italian. “The Little Flower,” they always called him, which is what his first name literally meant, and he was small and florid, five-or-so feet tall.