“Oh man, sorry,” he says. “$10.55.”
I remove eleven dollars from my wallet and in the process discover that a faintly alarming quantity of bills still remains inside. This, I realize, is the result of an error, one of my little lapses: I took out cash from the bank yesterday, having forgotten until this moment that I’d also cashed a check at the market that morning. Nearly a hundred dollars. Traipsing through Chelsea after midnight with such a heavy pocketbook seems like a foolhardy undertaking.
“Listen, C. J.” I say, “Keep the change.”
I hand him the rest of the bills left in my wallet.
He looks flummoxed, even a bit angry. “What?” he says. “No way, Lillian. I’m not going to take all your cash. I didn’t tell you my story because I’m looking for charity.”
“I know that,” I say. “Come on, C. J. You’ll be doing me a favor. You see, I’m walking from here to a party in Chelsea, and then home to Murray Hill.”
“And so what? The cash is too heavy?”
“No, silly. I don’t want to be carrying that much money on me. I’d feel too vulnerable.”
He stares at me, open mouthed with exasperation. “Lillian,” he says, “that is the craziest thing I’ve heard in all of 1984. It’s New Year’s Eve! It’s going to be pandemonium out there! What if you get in trouble and have to catch a cab?”
“If I get in trouble,” I say in my sweetest old-lady voice, “I’ll catch an ambulance. Now, look, C. J., I don’t want to offend you, and I won’t try to make the case that you need this more than I do. But come on—Happy New Year.”
His gaze shifts from my face to the bills on the countertop. “All right,” he says. “All right. If you insist. Thanks, Lillian.”
“Thank you, C. J.,” I say, taking one parcel in each hand. “I hope you do make it to L.A. eventually.”
The little bell on the door rings as I step through it, out into the last hour of 1984.
21
Solvitur Ambulando
Among the many unsurprising facts of life that, when taken in aggregate, ultimately spell out the doom of our species is this: People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention.
For a time I commanded both. I attracted attention and held it. I wasn’t famous, exactly—Henry Luce never threatened to put me on the cover of Time—but those who knew my work kept tabs on me, watched to see what I’d do next. After R.H. Macy’s sent pregnant me packing, my devotees somehow grew even more passionate, distilling into a cult of hermetists eerily adept at spotting my freelance copy—to which, of course, my name was never attached. With my association with my longtime employer dissolved and my poetry collections on their way out of print, my following became oddly similar to those of the pseudonymous criminals from the outer boroughs who cover subway cars with bright, hyperelaborate, all-but-illegible graffiti: fans keen-eyed enough to recognize not only art but authorship. The Lillian Boxfish Society! Connoisseurs of the cast-aside! Taxonomists of trash! Secret agents of an aimless, harmless, bottomless conspiracy no one can unlock—me least of all. I once received a beautiful handwritten seven-page letter from a twelve-year-old girl on an Indian reservation in Idaho that made the observation—supported by a dozen examples drawn from twenty-odd years of poems and prose, ads and verses—that tropical birds appear with great frequency in my work. They often have funny names, I replied by way of explanation.
But I never garnered enough of either—enough respect, enough attention—to be invited to appear on, say, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Even when it was still based in New York.
And this is a shame, because I can say without undue pride that I would have been so good as a guest on those national programs: What’s My Line?, Hollywood Squares, all the rest. At a certain point in my career, at my quickest and cleverest, I even would have been great—but that point was long past when I appeared on TV for the very last time.
Although I never hit the television jackpot, over the years I did make several well-received appearances on local affiliates of the major networks: news programs, talk shows, the occasional bit of occasional verse during a Yankees or Dodgers broadcast. From the outset, though, that final appearance was different: a one-off for a public television program called Where They’ve Been and Where They’re Going, which took as its underwriter-seducing ambit the discussion of particular industries and the most eminent achievers within them.