Before I can answer, Peter adds, “Wendy’s right. The streets aren’t safe this late at night. You should stay off them.”
“I appreciate your concern,” I say, and I do, although I also find it annoying. “But there’s no need to get me a cab. As you young sophisticates probably already know, New Year’s Eve between 10:30 and midnight is the best time in the entire year to catch a taxi. I’ll just walk toward Penn Station and find something.”
“No!” says Wendy. “Whatever you do, do not go by Penn Station. A lot of our friends have gotten mugged up there.”
“Thank you, Wendy,” I say. “I am grateful for the warning. Thank you, Peter. I’ll be all right, believe me. I’ll see you again soon.”
I put on my coat, give them each a hug, and weave semisteadily back down the art-filled hallway toward the freight elevator. As I walk out, the music on the stereo starts to affect me the way music only does when I’ve been drinking: I suddenly want to say I love this song to everything that comes on, and I start hearing messages that seem meant just for me. As I slide aside the elevator’s scissor door, a man’s pretty voice is crooning low, then singing high, something about how pretty girls make graves.
I am not a girl anymore. I haven’t been one for a long, long time.
Whenever “everyone” is doing something, I seek to avoid it. But whenever someone tells me not to do something, that thing has a way of becoming the only thing that I want to do.
I leave the building and pull the metal door shut behind me. The soft clang of its closing comes back as an echo, ricocheting up and down the empty street.
23
The Best Technique
On postcards it never rains. Our honeymoon was like a postcard.
Our second ocean voyage was not like our honeymoon.
It was more like a card with an appealing photo on the front—perhaps one hand-tinted in an age long gone: a hint that its rosy report is not quite current—but with a reverse scrawled with sprawling misgivings.
Max and I departed for Italy on New Year’s Day 1955, just under twenty years after our first such trip together.
I knew it was a luxury to take such a vacation. The voyage was a gift from his favorite aunt and uncle, who’d prospered in the import business, and who’d noticed that we seemed to need a little time away, a little perking up. By we they meant me.
I had always been praised, in public and in private, for my love of fun—for seeming young forever, forever young.
But.
Happiness and a love of fun are not coextensive, and their relationship may even be divergent. If one were happy, then one might stay in with a book, say, and not go out hunting for fun.
As I watched the Manhattan skyline shrink away, Max and I were not holding hands, and no one was on shore to see us off. His parents were staying in our Murray Hill place to watch Johnny while we were gone for the month.
Gian, not Johnny, I kept having to remind myself. He’d be turning thirteen in a few weeks and had tired of the nickname. Babyish, he’d deemed it.
The symbolism of setting sail on New Year’s Day was deliberately heavy-handed, handpicked by Max’s well-meaning family.
The hope was that with a new year we could have a new start.
The idea was that I would be renewed by being in a newish place. It would still be wintry, but not nearly as much so as New York City at that time of year. A sweet thought on their part, but honestly, I might as well have been commuting on the IRT as floating on an ocean liner. It was all the same to me. Everything felt flat and featureless.
Even during the weeks we toured the Italian interior under the still-robust winter sun, I was at my wits’ fucking end, if you’ll forgive the phrase, being in a place where the weather did not reflect my mood. I was raining; the sun mocked my sadness.
I have always loved the pathetic fallacy, in verse and in life.
For a long time I could remember almost nothing of this second honeymoon, which resembled the first the way an embalmed corpse resembles the lost beloved. My mind was a wreck then—my perception dulled, my perspective poisoned—and the electroshock cure, when it finally came, swept away all my thoughts from this time, along with the person I was when I thought them.
But I left myself a path back: a travel diary, diligently kept. For years it lay forgotten at the bottom of my old steamer trunk; for years after I uncovered it, it remained unread. I feared it was a trap I’d set for myself: a trick by my old adversary to gain readmittance. I resolved to destroy it, but I never did, and then one Halloween, after a call from Gian and the kids—who were about to get a late start trick-or-treating after an hour of shaping Lily’s hair into buns above her ears, the crux of a costume I utterly failed to follow—I found myself in the mood for a ghost story, and I dug it out.