But Isabel! The poor dear woman. She stared at me in terror, and then she began to cry great rolling tears of grief. “My cats!” she sobbed. “My Delft platter.” She ran into the bathroom, slammed the door and locked it. I stood motionless, staring at the carrots on the floor, at the chips of china. The cats had disappeared. I shrugged, got a can of cat food from a shelf and opened it.
***
We were civil with one another after that one, walking on eggshells for about three days. Once, for no apparent reason, Isabel began to cry while reading her Hamlet. The air of the little apartment was thick with grief; I had no idea how to cut through it. On the fourth day I told Isabel I was going to move to the Pierre. She smiled faintly and said, “That might be best.”
It was early May when I moved out, packing up all I had lived with during the winter into one Synlon bag, paying off a few of Isabel’s major bills—her rent, the telephone bill, the winter assessment—before I left. She was at a rehearsal at the time. When I signed the checks my hand shook and I cursed at it for shaking. Another goddamned unreliable member. I looked around the place, nodded with controlled civility to the sleeping cats, bent down to pick up a two-dollar piece I had dropped on the floor probably a week before, sighed melodramatically, and left.
It was a surprisingly warm day and I had my heavy mackinaw unbuttoned as I walked up Park Avenue. There was a nice sense of life and bustle, with a lot of horses and a few methane taxis in the streets and people bicycling happily. My spirits picked up. I began to whistle.
Half the people on the street were Chinese. By midsummer New York always seems to be a Chinese city, a kind of cultural suburb of Peking. The Russians are ahead of everybody else at heavy industry; the art comes from Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro; the political life in Aberdeen and Hangchow is far more lively than New York’s; and if you want to make a really big business arrangement you go to Peking, the world’s richest city. But New York is still New York, even with its elevators not working and a total of one hundred fifty taxis permitted to operate (Peking has thousands, they are electric powered and have leather upholstery). But Peking is still a stodgy businessman’s city, with all the old China erased from its neoclassical architecture. The Chinese come to New York for the civilized life. New York is the major city of a second-rank power, of a country whose time is slipping away; but it still has a bounce you don’t find anywhere else. There are restaurants with white tablecloths, with waiters in tuxedos that look like they came from the last century, and, however they beer-feed and hand-rub their fat old steers in Japan, the Kansas City steak served in a New York restaurant, with the dim lights and the polished wooden bar and the tuxedoed waiters, is still one of the delights of the world. And New York theater is the only theater to hold anybody’s interest for long; American music is the most sophisticated in the world. The Chinese are still, behind those stuffy facades, the greatest gamblers on earth and the trickiest businessmen; they’ve accommodated their ideology and their asceticism of the last century to their present wealth with the ease of the Renaissance Popes; they are Communists the way Cesare Borgia was a Christian. And they love New York.
The Pierre is a grand place and I know its people well. I moved in there first when I was twenty-three and working on downhill mergers; the same man still tends bar in the afternoons and he calls me Ben. His name’s Dennis. I always ask about his kids. He has a son in the wood business in North Carolina; his daughter runs the office at the Jane Fonda Theatre. The manager says they’re going to name my suite the Belson Suite someday and I tell him I’m all for it, that it’ll make it easier to get my mail if there’s a plaque on the door. They always have fresh flowers for me when I move in. What the hell, something deep in me likes to live in hotels, to be ready to check out at any time. To live by the day and pay by the day.
I had an appointment that afternoon with Orbach, up on Eightieth Street. I looked over the suite, smelled the flowers, called Henri Bendel’s to order my cooking pots, and decided to walk to Orbach’s and pick up a few cookbooks on the way. Maybe there would be spring vegetables in, from the South, if the Mafia wasn’t in disarray from its quarrels. I called a couple of lawyers and gave them my phone number and left.
Walking up Third Avenue, I found myself looking in store windows, not at cookbooks but at clocks. I was doing that a lot these days, developing a fascination with timepieces, with the passing of time. I noticed birthdays as I never had, would remember trivial things that had happened on a given day a year before. This started when I turned fifty. I was becoming aware that my days are numbered, that I am going to die and rot like everybody else and that I’d better get my ass in gear if I want to live my life as Ben Belson and not as some fucked-over replica of my father. I know I’ve made a lot of money and fame for myself, have traveled everywhere, have bedded a lot of women and eaten a lot of the world’s best food, and my father did none of those things. But for twenty years something in my soul has been on HOLD, waiting, going through the motions of having a filled and good life but inside feeling morose and sullen. And there, looking at clocks in yet another Third Avenue window, I was waiting for the time to run out, waiting to join my father in the underground brigade—to terminate, with the smell of wet earth.
And, realizing that, or some of it, I was seized with anger of a kind I hadn’t felt in years. I wanted to rush into the store and smash every clock in the place. Instead, I went in and bought a Chinese wristwatch. I’m wearing it now, here on Belson. I am an eccentric in many small ways; this watch is the first I’ve ever owned. Now that I have time to reckon with.
A voice in me cries desperately, Hurry, Ben!
***
Looking back on it, I can see that picnic on Juno was a turning point for me. I have become even more of a hermit now than ever before; but something happened there on Juno that moved a big chunk of the gray old glacier inside. In college I never sat around and drank with my classmates; if I were with two or more people at a time something became stiff in my soul. I did not hate people; I never have. But there was a coldness in me that would, to my despair at times, cut me off from my fellows. Somehow it dropped from me at that picnic and I felt an easy comfort in the presence of the crew that I had never felt before. Mimi sang “Downtown” and “Michigan Water Blues,” and I drank red wine from a passed-around bottle and lay back on that moist grass in the grape-flavored air; I would look at the faces of the crew and silently beam. Sometimes between songs everybody would be silent, listening to the quiet, papery sounds of those extraterrestrial leaves blowing in that fruity breeze, feeling the rich, oxygen-laden air on our cheeks. I thought from time to time of Juno herself, the original Juno who slept on hay and whose massive nostrils exhaled steamed horse breath into the Ohio night air at my side, and some of the deep old fondness I felt for her was transferred to this new and generous planet and to the people, mostly young, who lay about on its spongy and inviting surface with me.
Yet here I am alone on Belson.
Still, I have my vegetables. And my morphine. The rings are out. It’s time to shut off the computer that is typing this, collect the morphine from the synthesizer, and shoot up. I wish I could masturbate right now, here alone under the rings of my own namesake planet.
***
I first came to New York in 2025. I was thirteen. Aunt Myra had suggested I spend one of my high-school summers with her on the Upper East Side. I’d never met her. My parents sent me off on a Greyhound bus, telling me the city would help in my education. I bought my own ticket, and what Aunt Myra didn’t pay for in New York I paid for myself. I had a large coal route in those days in Athens. Burning coal in home stoves was still legal, and I pulled a child’s wagon around the poorer parts of town selling it by the lump: two dollars for the small ones and four for the large. My markup was 40 percent. I hauled that damned wagon up and down hills about eleven miles every day after school and my shoulders would ache from it for hours afterward, but I wound up, at fifteen, with a 5 percent interest i
n the mine it came out of. By the time I was thirty-five I owned most of the coal in America that the Mafia didn’t. I can picture myself now on that bus in my white shirt and tie and with a half-dozen hundred-dollar bills folded up and safety-pinned inside my shirt pocket. Half a fried chicken and two hard-boiled eggs in a paper sack beside me on the seat until I had a chance to throw them away. A fresh haircut. That may have been the last time in my life I wore a necktie. Except for my wedding.
The bus was a coal-burner and there was something wrong with the boiler; we kept losing power on hills. The trip took almost three days. I ate soy protein-and-gravy sandwiches at bus stops all along the way, and in men’s rooms in Pennsylvania and New Jersey read graffiti of the rankest kind I have ever seen. I knew almost nothing about sex except that it had something to do with social class and that people like my parents were alarmed by it; those graffiti shone in my brain like neon. Many of them were illustrated, with low draftsmanship but high energy. It was for me a connection, however disquieting, with an outside world in which things went on I had thought went on only in my own head. A couple of those drawings are still in my memory; they can still send a wicked thrill into my balls.
For several hours between towns in Pennsylvania an amply built young woman with glasses and dark nylons sat beside me. For a while she made bland comments on the scenery and on her job as a small-town video librarian; then she slept. As her body adjusted itself in sleep her skirt inched up her thighs. Oh Jesus, I remember those thighs! Those cheap dark stockings, the white flesh above them! She snored lightly, with her lips parted. At the first sidelong sight of inner thigh my joint rose with the mindless alacrity of a Marine’s salute. The smell of her Woolworth perfume intensified in my nostrils. I had become so sensitive, so alert, that I could even smell her flesh in its genteel sweatiness from my circumspect position sitting erectly beside her. Erectly. I could have driven nails with it. I pretended to be reading a book.
It was midafternoon; there were few others on the bus. If I were on that bus now I would reach my hand out toward her open lap rather than my own closed one. But what did I know then? I looked around and saw that no one was looking. I allowed myself to turn my head slightly, enough to see what was now a dark hiatus between her thighs, parted and inclined toward me. I let my hand fall gently in my lap and in that moment discovered self-abuse. My palm, touching myself, was instantly wet. My blood circulation had become disorderly; I felt faint. The pleasure had been momentary but so intense as to open a door in my spirit that has never closed. I saw in a flash that my parents were fools and that the world had punch.
An hour later I slipped my right hand into my pants pocket and did it again, more slowly. It was ecstasy. To hell with my undershorts. I would throw them away.
I would have given my soul to slip myself inside what that pink margin hid from view, to have felt it grip my adolescent member. It did not occur to me she might have liked it too. She had said she was on vacation for a week. I could have taken her to a Holiday Inn in some Pennsylvania coal town and we could have fucked ourselves silly. Oh Christ!
My Circe aroused herself from sleep, blushingly pulled down her skirt, and got off at New Hope, Penn. I never learned her name, nor what town she lived in.
Aunt Myra was my father’s older sister and had always been a shadowy black sheep of the Belsons’. I had not met her before that summer of my thirteenth year. Myra had clearly been around. I knew she’d gone to Duke with President Garvey, had played bridge with Kronstadt the demon poet, had written the lyrics for an operetta, was rumored to have had a baby by her chauffeur, and had been the mistress of three different millionaires. The last of these had left her a small fortune in cash and an apartment hotel in the East Eighties. She had lost the cash in the depression of 2004. Myra, my mother said in icy reflection over a martini, had taken her financial advice from Arab astrologers and Roman Catholic choirboys. She had lost the apartment hotel but managed to hang on to the twelve rooms of its penthouse for her lifetime. She owned nothing else.
Aunt Myra was about sixty-five that summer. She wore faded bib overalls and walked barefoot around her apartment, smoked Black Russian cigarettes and wore gold-rimmed glasses over which she peered at me in a kind of bemusement. She popped vitamin pills continuously and laughed a lot. She was a bit under five feet tall—I towered over her, even at thirteen—and despite crow’s-feet, gray hair and gray tee-shirts under her overall bibs, she looked youthful. I had never seen anyone like her. I arrived at her place about suppertime, having adjusted my tie a half-dozen times in the elevator. I was carrying my cheap suitcase. I felt awkward as hell. When I knocked on the elegant gold-and-white doorway of her penthouse I expected to be greeted by some kind of sagging debauchee with dewlaps and a gown. What met me was this pretty little person in overalls and bare feet.
“For Christ’s sake. Come on in,” she said, peering up at me over the gold rims of her glasses. She held out a tiny unmanicured hand and I shook it. It felt cool and friendly and as small as a child’s.
“How do you do?” I said in the reserved way I had learned from Mother.
“Let’s have something to eat,” she said, and led me through a big empty hallway to a cluttered living room. But what clutter! One wall was covered with paintings and watercolors; there must have been twenty of them. Bright as an African stamp collection. Oriental rugs all over too. A black corduroy sofa. A half-dozen tables. Cats—six or seven cats. There were four cats on the window ledge, below high windows overlooking Central Park. It was a park filled with trees in those days. We passed through this astonishing room and into the kitchen. It was done in a spare way—Hungarian peasant, a turn-of-the-century style in rich people’s kitchens. Crude ceramic tiles, blue and white, on the walls. A grass rug on the wooden floor. Oak countertops. A terra-cotta stove. But she had a refrigerator, the first I’d seen. In Athens we used iceboxes. When Aunt Myra opened the door of her big brown refrigerator I saw shelves with bright jars and bottles, fruits and vegetables, like a picture in an old magazine. What she fixed me for dinner that night was a thick slab of pâté de foie on Bibb lettuce, a dozen tiny cornichons and a glass of Polish lager. I’d never eaten that eccentrically before. Dessert was chocolate mousse. It was delicious. I’ve been eating it ever since, in extended tribute to Aunt Myra and her liberation of the spirit.
She handed me a cracked Haviland plate with the lettuce and pâté on it and then the beer in a crystal pilsner glass and I stood there stupidly holding it while she fixed herself the same. Then I followed her out of the kitchen, and it took me a minute to realize that we weren’t going to sit down; this would be a peripatetic supper. I worked up the nerve eventually to set my beer glass down after one sip of the bitter stuff—it was my first taste of beer—and started eating the pate with my fingers. Myra led me around the apartment. She had four bedrooms, three of them empty and from which I could pick the one I wanted. I chose the one with the most windows. Its furnishings were all gray and white, and it had a little Corot on one wall—two old men at a table.
While we walked around she talked from time to time in a pleasant voice about the apartment and about her cats. She asked me about my father in a kind of offhand way, and when I said he was doing okay she sniffed and said, “I never could figure out that boy. He was always so goddamned calm.” It was strange to hear that and to realize that Aunt Myra was fifteen years older than my father and, from the tone of her voice, didn’t care about him much. She was nothing like my father or mother, nothing like any adult I’d known. She may have been the last person I loved—and it was love at first sight.
That summer with Aunt Myra gave me a sense of the possibilities of a city that has never substantially diminished. I have forgotten the plays and ballets we saw, but I remember the marble floors, the high-ceilinged lobbies, the soft lighting at the bars between acts, and the expansive feeling to be in New York City at the theater. We saw holo shows and two museum openings and sky music concerts in Central Park. I remembe
r elevators, before the Energy Acts outlawed them. I remember the lights in the upper floors of skyscrapers at night. And most of all, I remember walking down quiet streets on the East Side between rows of old brownstones, looking into the windows of brightly lit apartments, wanting to live in one more than I’d ever wanted anything before. I became a spiritual New Yorker while walking the East Seventies between Park and Second Avenue at the age of thirteen.
I also learned about eating from Aunt Myra—salads and desserts, arugula and chocolate mousse. My diet is a tribute to her memory. Myra taught me another thing—chess. After a week of shows and concerts, she announced that we were going to spend a night at home and entertain ourselves. “Do you play chess?” she asked me, looking up over her glasses. In her hand was a plastic packet the size of a billfold.
“No,” I said. “I play Monopoly.”
“Well, you can play that too with this thing. This electronic marvel,” she said. “But a smart young man should know chess.”
I started to say that no one played chess anymore, for the same reason no one ever did arithmetic: human effort had long been outclassed at that kind of thing. Luck games were what my generation played. But Aunt Myra was no dummy; she might have a point. “Okay,” I said, “will you teach me?”