Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

  I’d found, in my luggage, one of Max’s old handkerchiefs, one my mother had embroidered for our honeymoon trip to Italy in 1935. I had it pressed, and I mailed it to him at his new address, the apartment where he’d moved in with Julia on the Upper East Side. I’d made the note out to both of them, because this was the new order of things, the rearranged way my life would have to be. I would not be rude. I would not shun or ignore them. Civility and courtesy were the refrain of my song in those days, more than ever.

  It seemed to work, I guess. Max called to thank me, and to apologize for his hateful Reno request.

  And Julia wrote me back at Silver Hill—on a card, no less. An American Greetings card featuring a child with eyes the size of asteroids surrounded by flowers and a swooping bluebird of happiness. She loved, as I would soon discover, kitsch of almost any kind: patriotic, religious, you name it. Her sentiments would always be highly sentimental.

  With all you have on your heart right now, it was so sweet and thoughtful of you to take the time to send this! she had written. I am sorry about everything, but I hope we can be friends.

  Friends, no. But I would not waste my exertions cultivating anyone as an enemy.

  And as the years went by, I would have to admit to a grudging admiration for Julia and the way, during the long summers that Johnny would spend with them, first in Chicago and then in California, she threw herself into the business of stepmothering. She quit work completely after she gave birth to her daughter with Max, and from what I could tell, never missed her job or looked back, treating both her own baby and Johnny with equally doting attention. All the child-rearing paraphernalia that felt to me like rigmarole, she enjoyed. I missed Johnny dearly, of course, during these bouts of shared custody. They made me feel, at first, like the summer was a marble mausoleum, and I was left behind, dispassionately, for those months’ entirety, interred and cold.

  But once I came to see how much Johnny liked his trips out west, and how well Julia treated him, I let myself enjoy my time alone as well. Because that’s the unspoken secret that had always troubled me in the first place: children can be so boring. Even the best of them. And their parents are always boring. But Julia was impervious to that boredom’s effect.

  * * *

  My last night at Silver Hill—after dinner and before lights-out—I went for a walk alone around the grounds. They finally let me, being as I was departing the next morning and would then be on my own indefinitely.

  Early June, the roses in bloom, all those blossoms like tiny mouths exhaling their perfume into the air above the path.

  The moon was full, and under its light the hills did look silver.

  I stood looking up at it and thought, without really meaning to, of Artie, my editor at E.P. Dutton, who had been dead for many years. Arthur Eugene Stanley, kind and courtly, who had published my first book of verse, Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises—though he’d wanted to call it Frequent Wishing on the Gracious Moon.

  I wondered whether my life might have turned out differently if I had gone with that title instead, as Artie had urged me to. Whether there was another world in which I had yielded to his request, and whether in that world I would not be standing alone under the full moon at Silver Hill, contemplating the wreck of my previous twenty years.

  But there was no way to know, and no way to go back. I could not revise. I had been who I had been, and so I largely remained.

  20

  The Golden State

  Never in my life have I shown up at a party empty-handed, and I am not about to spoil my record tonight.

  I need to get a hostess gift for Wendy, and something to share with her guests. I’m half a mile from my destination, so my prospects are diminishing quickly. This, perhaps, is for the best: When I have all of Manhattan to choose from I tend to dither, to hold out for perfection—but as any poet can testify, limits encourage both inspiration and decisiveness.

  Around Jackson Square, near where Greenwich Avenue meets Eighth, I spy a grocery store and video rental place—a bodega? I’m never sure what qualifies—and make my way toward its door. The window is crowded with rows of cut flowers, a hand-labeled price taped to each vase; above them, a Filipino flag is framed by dozens of dangling multicolored plastic rosaries.

  They remind me of Max’s mother, who was very devout. And an excellent cook. When I was in the vaguely distinguished twilight of my career, I often got requests from the author-dieticians of women’s magazines for favorite recipes to print in their “Culinary Corners.” I always gave them one I’d learned from Mrs. Dante Caputo, including a risotto that was a real filler-upper.

  In the old days I’d always arrange to bring something homemade to a party, but that’s not an option tonight, and anyway there’s no sense in being sentimental. In retrospect most of those bygone canapés appall: grisly assemblies of cocktail wieners and maraschino cherries and liver paste that a decade of war and privation barely managed to cast as indulgent. Instead, I walk up and down the fluorescently lit aisles, searching for some packaged treat that Wendy might like.

  “You looking for anything in particular?” asks the clerk, a young man—in his late teens or early twenties, probably—with jet-black hair and tired eyes.

  “Yes,” I say. “Party foods. But I do believe that I have found them.”

  I pick up a bag of kettle-cooked potato chips—a brand Gian and the kids brought back from Cape Cod that I’ve never before seen in the city—and a packet of Mexican mazapan with red roses on the wrappers, which I know will charm Wendy. I bring them to the counter.

  “You know these aren’t marzipan, right?” says the clerk as he gets ready to ring me up.

  “Yes, I do,” I say. “Thank you.”

  “I ask because the other day some guy bought them and came back in here mad, wanting a refund because they’re made from peanuts, not almonds.”

  “How unfortunate,” I say. “I love marzipan, but I’ve had these before and they’re delightful. I read that they make them this way because peanuts are easier to grow in Mexico.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he says. “I just don’t want to get blamed for anybody else’s bad choices.”

  “Rest assured, I take full credit and blame for all my choices, good and bad,” I say. “What’s your name?”

  “Cesar Julius,” he says. “I go by C. J.”

  “I’m Lillian,” I say, and point to the flowers in the window. “If you were having a New Year’s Eve party and I were coming over, which of these flowers would you most want to see me carrying?”

  C. J.’s eyes meet mine for the first time since I walked in. “Is that a serious question?” he says. “Like, do you want me to tell you what’s popular, or are you seriously asking me what I would want you to bring?”

  “I’m generally very precise,” I say. “This is not an exception.”

  C. J. squints, then smirks. “Okay,” he says. “Be right back.”

  He glides past me from behind the counter, disappearing into the aisles, and I hear a storeroom door open with a jingle of keys. For a moment I’m alone on the sales floor, peering between the rosaries at the massive art deco façade of the Greenwich electric substation and the red brick ziggurat of the Port Authority building farther on. They’re both somewhat obscured by my reflection, which—thanks to backlighting and my broad-brimmed hat—appears faceless, headless, like an apparition out of M. R. James. This pleases me.

  I scarcely have time to take in this view before C. J. returns, takes his spot at the register, and ceremoniously sets before me a glazed terra-cotta pot full of dirt.

  He slouches against the countertop to gauge my reaction.

  “That,” I say, “seems to be a pot full of dirt.”

  “Yep,” he says. “There’s a bulb in it.”

  “Amaryllis?”

  He grins. “You’re good,” he says. “It’s a hippeastrum, really. Winter-blooming. But if you call it that nobody’ll know what you’re talking about, so it’s an amaryllis
. A Dutch amaryllis.”

  I slide off a glove to brush the top of the soil, and sure enough, my finger finds the pale green ridge of a shoot just breaking the surface.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” C. J. says, “I like cut flowers and all. But it’s New Year’s Eve. Do you want to give a present that’ll start wilting by tomorrow, that’ll be dead in a week? Does that make you feel good about the future?”

  He taps the terra-cotta rim. “Right now,” he says, “this is a pot of dirt. But by the first week of February your friend will have a big bunch of flowers better looking than anything you see in that window. I’ll throw in a little card that tells how to keep it alive, make it bloom every year. It’s pretty easy. Now, if you and your friend don’t want to wait a month to see some flowers, I don’t blame you. There’s lots of great stuff in the window, and you can take your pick. But—to answer your question—this is what I’d want you to bring to my party.”

  “Sold,” I say.

  He wraps the pot in a cellophane cone with two loops of twine supporting the bottom, then finds a bag for my chips and my candy. “Speaking of your party,” I say, wriggling back into my glove, “do you have one to go to tonight? Or is New Year’s Eve’s not your thing?”

  “I should be going to a party,” he says. “But I have to be here all night. It’s my parents’ store. I’m giving them the night off. But they don’t really even want me here. They didn’t work their whole lives just so I can do the same thing they’re doing. I have a high school diploma, plus almost thirty hours at QCC, studying to be a lab tech. I speak three languages. English, Tagalog, and Spanish. I should be doing something else.”

  I’m at a loss for a response that’s not false or patronizing. “It’s a very nice shop,” I say.

  “It’s not a nice neighborhood, though,” he says. “My dad’s been held up twice in the last year. I want him to sell the place, but they need the income.”

  “How long have they had it?” I ask.

  “Since 1970,” says C. J. “Not all at this location. They were in Queens for twelve years before they moved here. Lots of immigrant people work in Manhattan hospitals now, and they need a place to buy their stuff.”

  “That’s a long time, since 1970.”

  “Too long if you ask me,” he says. “We’ve been in the States for twenty years, ever since I was a little kid. We came when a lot of other Asian people came, after the law changed.”

  “I remember that,” I say.

  And I do, more or less. I remember Kennedy talking about the need for it—calling the old system of racist quotas intolerable—though it was Johnson who finally signed it. I used to be able to remember these things perfectly: Names and dates leapt to mind with no effort, along with a half-dozen rhymes, and maybe a pun or two. Now I find myself in a golden age of trivia—as evidenced by that board game Gian and all his friends love so much, with its polychrome plastic pies—just as my recall has started to fade: a gunslinger growing slow on the draw even as the Gold Rush is breaking out. The Hart–Celler Act! How could I forget? Emanuel Celler, Brooklyn’s long-tenured hero! Defending the huddled masses in the shadow of Liberty herself!

  C. J. is watching me from over my wrapped parcels; I have let myself drift. “What’s that you’re watching?” I ask, diverting attention from myself, pointing at the small black-and-white television set on the counter behind him. “Dick Clark in Times Square?”

  “It’s about to be the Tonight Show,” he says. “It’ll be a rerun.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I say. “If you’re short on holiday spirit, at least show some civic pride.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m still mad at Johnny Carson for moving his show to L.A. It was so adult when he was here in Manhattan. It was for grown-ups. It had an edge. Now that it’s in beautiful downtown Burbank, or Bakersfield, or wherever, it just isn’t the same.”

  “He used to do the show here?” C. J. says. “I never knew that. I guess I’ve seen some of them, those old shows of his. I don’t always understand them. Maybe he didn’t really have people like me in mind when he made them. Young people. Brown people. Anyway, I guess a lot has changed since then.”

  “That is true,” I say. “A lot has changed.”

  “Well, I don’t blame him for moving. L.A. is where the stars are, right? I’d go there myself if I could. That’s where my family came in—on the West Coast, anyway—but then we kept going, to New York City. I have no idea why. We should have stayed put. The Golden State. I’ve got a ton of cousins out there. I’m thinking of going back.”

  “Oh, C. J., I hate to hear promising young people say things like that. This city needs you.”

  “Lillian, no offense,” says C. J., “but you just met me. I haven’t been feeling so promising lately. To make our rent here, we’ve had to start staying open all night. My parents have to sleep sometime, so I’m taking a break from school to help. I’m scared for them. I don’t want my mom or my dad working here alone in the middle of the night. If the neighborhood gets any worse our customers will stop coming. We’ll just be here to get robbed. But if it gets any better the rent will go up. It’s not a good situation.”

  C. J. is looking at the television, not really watching it. On the screen are crowds of people, laughing and waving, some holding hand-lettered greetings to the folks back home, others raising two fingers for peace. The volume is either off or too low for me to hear.

  “Since you have a date with the Best of Carson, and I have a party to get to, I won’t bore you with the specifics. How much do I owe you?”

  “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.