I must put forth dual images of myself and neither is correct. There is the perceived strong she-can-handle-anything me (not true) and the she’s-so-fragile me (not true) but never is there the strong yet vulnerable me that even Bob Dylan had met, not knowing me, but someone like me, who was a woman in every respect yet when she breaks, she breaks just like a little girl. I don’t know if there is any other way to break, quite frankly. Do you break like an adult and fake it and pretend everything is fine? Is there some organized way” of having a minor breakdown of which I missed the mass mailing and details because if there is, I don’t know the rules.
I found myself, after months and months of pressure, after accomplishing so much in the past few years that I am honestly proud of. Whether or not anyone else is sort of relevant and sort of not. Yes, I care: but I care more that I did it. That’s the key. You do it for yourself. So after a crisis a year or however long ago, I threw myself headlong into work – unthinking, what about that space, that maybe even an inch or nth of a space, when the work is over – the space between projects – when suddenly everything stops and the work is done and handed over and there you are and the world is spinning and you realize suddenly that you have stopped.
This happened to me, of course unexpectedly, on Madison Avenue the other day, rush hour. I was seeing my friend Jacob, who is a kind man and a jeweler there and whom I have gotten to know because he works across the street from The Morgan Library where I spend and have spent a great deal of my time these past two and one half years for a project. So there I am with Jacob on an 80 degree balmy night and about to visit a dear friend just up the street at Grand Central, my favorite place in the world – Madison and Grand Central and Lex and all because, let’s be honest, we fill these places with memories and they are chock full for us and these are mine and the last time I was in this or that place, things were wholly different. It was the same weather, the same warmth, the same time of day, I had also just seen Jacob when I met a friend and we walked, as we did every day, hand-in-hand to Grand Central through the haze and the humidity, sides bumping and it was just our end of the day routine.
One time, Tom Wolfe crossed our path and I remember thinking, is it good luck or bad luck if Tom Wolfe crosses your path, as if he were a cat. I am a superstitious Scottish girl. It is in my heritage to be such. I am a witch – I consult our family’s book of white magic often. It’s been in the family for eons – it dates back to 18-something and is a rare book and I use it. It works on cosines really and algorithms but to me, it is pure magic. And more, it is always right. Or it seems to be.
I could be wrong.
I digress, as always. So there I was, after a particularly successful trip to New York again, and it’s May and I’m happy and I feel good and I know I look healthy right now and perhaps I can allow myself some light – that someone tells me, You look light, as I’ve been told a thousand times over so I buy it. Okay, I look light. So I leave Jacob, and why is it then that I get a half block and begin to bawl? Why is it that even before I left Jacob, I began crying? Much to his confusion, I just began to cry. I believe it was “Are you going to see your friend?” and he meant my friend from last time. No – I said, A different friend now.
Nobody would be meeting me on this day. Nobody would be waiting for me or me for them or holding my hand or carrying the proverbial books home from school. No. It was just me and my heavy bag and my sun-freckled face and my dress and my Converse sneakers and suddenly I felt stupid and lovesick and years of yearning came flooding in.
Jacob does what he knows how to do – all he can do. He hands me tissues. He says, “It’s okay, it’s okay” knowing it’s not really okay. Then because he knows I collect gold bands and that I show him one that is very sentimental to me and he is one of the few who knows the story, he brings for me a three ring band like a Cartier rolling ring of rose, white, and yellow gold and he says, Please, take – I want you to have it for $35.
It is at least a three-hundred dollar ring, but when he slips it onto my middle finger it fits like Cinderella’s fragile shoe, and the ring makes me cry more. Jacob is lost. I pay him the money because I can’t say No because he won’t let me, so I take this ring and with this ring I leave and I wear it next to my other gold bands on the wedding finger on my right hand (European wedding finger and I am European) and it makes it all the worse. Here I am, a lucky girl: I have everything going for me, so I’m told these days especially. And I am on the corner of 38th and Madison and by now, I am really crying and trying hard not to show it and walking slowly because I can’t carry the weight of my own anything anymore; that which I carry literally, that which I carry figuratively.
I did – that is, before all of this I did. I never let my friend carry my bags really. Sometimes, the biggest ones I could not manage. But it was just having a hand in mine at the end, the beginning, any part of the day really, that made it more bearable somehow, because life can be so unbearable. I do not mean to say that mine is so awful, only that there are considerations that others do not have to consider and that’s fine. I ask for no special accommodation than that handhold, and so there I was, without it, with no consolation, no shelters from the storm anymore, no safe harbor, mix all the metaphors and I felt utterly lost.
A few kind people asked if I was okay. And they say New York is a rude city. Hardly. People stopped, concerned, worried. I told them all the same lie: I am fine. A simple lie, and I put on my big sunglasses and lit a cigarette and said to myself Enough, and Stop and made my way to Grand Central on the main concourse where I did meet my friend and we had drinks and it was lovely. Truly lovely with someone I adore – and was looking, am always looking, forward to seeing, for there are few people with whom one can truly trust and share. So me, the wine, his Cosmopolitan or something like that, and me in my summer-dress and outside we go afterward for a cigarette because even though neither of us “really” smokes, I happen to have cigarettes so why not – so there we are on Lexington, smoking cigarettes by the door of the terminal, trying to give the damn things away to homeless people who are scrounging the ashtrays for half-smoked cigarettes, yet even in that, they will not take a full one form us. They retain their pride. Nothing’s for nothing, they think, and they move on. We decide the best approach then is to plant the cigarettes like tulips in the sand of the “ashtray” and we pop them out as if arranging flowers, ready for the picking. This way, there is no obligation. We leave them there.
He tells me, my friend tells me, after looking at me: my hair, falling down but held in a bun by two pins, falling about a flushed and freckled face and a summer dress and my shoes in my bag and my Converse on my feet because I just have a “thing” which he says is a “Lolita thing” which is attractive, or is to some. I’ve heard that before to. He said that. Always said it was the “juxtaposition” of the feminine of me with such things as my Yankees hat or my Converse. Me in a beautiful silk dress that drops to my blue Converse. That’s me. Unmistakable. Untrying. I’m not cool. I’m not “arty” I’m not anything other than me.
So, back to the beginning: I am vulnerable, I am strong. I am neither, I am both. I am that girl you saw on the street corner on Madison, triumphant in the moment, entering Jacob’s shop with a bright and luminous smile on my face and I am that same girl you saw leave, lost and sobbing, trying hard not to show it, missing everything I do not have and wanting only to rewind or move forward in some way that is possible. I believe anything is possible, but it takes two. It takes two and I am one. I walk alone these days, arms loosely at my side, and my nightmare, so stupid, it takes the form of listening to O Mio Babino Caro – I am listening, trying to get my friend to listen to because it is his, truly his, as I always knew, but he cannot hear, or won’t hear. I can’t say. I only know I am there, standing in the same place with the same aria and the same Converse and looking, later, over the same Harlem River and everything has changed and nothing has changed.
