Viviendo en Nueva York...
domingo, 11 de julio de 2010
El gran final
Llegó el fin de este viaje y el final de este blog. Estoy en el aeropuerto escribiendo mi última entrada, la de la despedida.
Hoy me levanté sin tener noción de lo que siento, estuve toda la mañana paralizada sin pensar en nada intentando descrifrar qué era lo que me pasaba. Tenía el peor de les sentimientos, el de no saber qué sentir. Por momentos sentía que si me concentraba un minuto en descubrir cómo me sentía me podría haber agarrado un ataque de llanto histérico, por otros momentos no pensaba en nada, me sentía un vegetal. Lo único que quería es que alguien me llevara a mí y a mis millones de valijas directo a Argentina, la verdad no tenía ganas de hacerme cargo de mi traslado personal. Hasta hoy estuve negada con la vuelta por eso frente a la situación concreta de volver, tomarme un avión, no supe cómo reaccionar.
Para salir de mi estado vegetal me obligué a salir. El día estaba increíble y decidí hacer algo que me encanta: caminar por el Central Park. Dejé mis valijas en stand by y me fui con un vestidito de verano y mi carterita a caminar por el parque. En mi recorrido por el frondoso parque empecé a escuchar por entre los árboles el sonido de unos bongo. Fui siguiendo la música a la que cada vez escuchaba con mayor intensidad hasta llegar a un esecnario en el medio del verde. Hoy tocaba Jimmy Cliff. Sin pensarlo hice la fila y entré.
El espacio era gigante y había miles de personas, unas acampando con sus habituales mantas adelante, otras en las gradas y el resto merodeando por las carpas en donde ofrecían jugos y comestibles. Era como un paraíso y al mismo tiempo el broche de oro para terminar mi estadía en esta ciudad, escuchando música en el Central Park.
Encontré un lugarcito adelante y una pareja que estaba sentada al lado mío me compartió su manta. Después como estaba sedienta me acerqué a la carpa de los jugos pero como no tenía plata sólo los miraba. Finalmente la señora que vendía vio mi cara de sedienta y me regaló un vaso con jugo de sandía. Felizmente volví a mi lugar prestado.
Tocaron dos bandas primero, yo estaba jugada con el tiempo porque tenía que partir hacia el aeropuerto (o podría haber perdido el avión????) y Jimmy no salía. Las dos bandas estuvieron buenísimas, música muy movida y todos bailando bajos los rayos del sol. La gente se sacaba las remeras, las chicas se quedaban en corpiño, cada uno hacía la suya. Todos viven y dejan vivir. En un momento se puso a llover entonces todos bailábamos abajo de la lluvia, como hacía calor fue un poco un alivio. Y Jimmy no salía. Yo ya me tenía que ir, la pareja amiga estaba al tanto de mi situación y sabían que me tenía que ir al aeropuerto. Entonces me despedí y cuando empecé a caminar hacia la salida escuché la gloriosa voz de Jimmy cantando "Beautiful People". Amén dije. Y ahí ya está, como cuando un cura al final de la misa dice las últimas palabras, "pude irme en paz". Hubiera sido una experiencia incompleta si no veía a Jimmy Cliff cantar un tema, pero fue como todo en este viaje, ideal.
Después de ese tema me fui caminando alejándome de los arboles hacia la calle y escuchando la voz de Jimmy Cliff que se iba desvaneciendo.
Volví a mi realidad, a mi cuarto con las valijas. Llegué justo cuando llegaba al auto. Pam me ayudó a cargar todo, ella estaba muy emocionada, me hizo un regalo y nos despedimos en la entrada del departamento.
Cuando el auto arrancó automaticamente empecé a visualizar todo lo que veía a través de la ventanas como si hubiera sido una película. Todo se torno increíblemente lindo, las calles, la autopista, los árboles, la gente. Siempre pasa eso cuando uno está volviendo de algún lugar, la mente hace un click y la mirada empieza a funcionar en retrospectiva. Ya no se ve simplemente lo que pasa en ese momento sino que se ve en pasado. Lás imágenes, incluso hasta las más cotidianas se empiezan a archivar en la carpeta de RECUERDOS PASADOS. Camino al aeropuerto yo ya no estaba más en Nueva York, estaba en Buenos Aires extrañando y añorando estar en Nueva York.
Pero bueno, todo tiene su final. Y ahora es hora de volver.
Esta es mi última entrada al blog porque ya no voy a estar más Viviendo en Nueva York sino que voy a estar en Argentina.
Hasta pronto, fue un placer compartir este blog con todos ustedes.
"Goodbye to all that"
Este es un ensayo de una escritora que conocí gracias a mis dos amigos del parque...Es largo, espero que lo disfruten.
GOODBYE TO ALL THAT by Joan Didion
How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and and ten—
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again—
If your feet are nimble and light
You can get there by candlelight.
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.
Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am talking about myself I am talking here about New York. That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room air conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was. All I could do during those years was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.
---
In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will see that as we go along. Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street. But most particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.
I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting a friend who complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a party where there would be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, “new faces.” He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. “New faces,” he said finally, “don’t tell me about new faces.” It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised “new faces,” there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already spelt with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men. I laughed with him, but the first snow had just begun to fall and the big Christmas trees glittered yellow and white as far as I could see up Park Avenue and I had a new dress and it would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story.
It would be a long while because, quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. I was making only $65 or $70 then a week then (“Put yourself in Hattie Carnegie’s hands,” I was advised without the slightest trace of irony by an editor of the magazine for which I worked), so little money that some weeks I had to charge food at Bloomingdale’s gourmet shop in order to eat, a fact which went unmentioned in the letters I wrote to California. I never told my father that I needed money because then he would have sent it, and I would never know if I could do it by myself. At that time making a living seemed a game to me, with arbitrary but quite inflexible rules. And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name “Debbi Lynn” or I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of would matter.
Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about. I could go to a party and meet someone who called himself Mr. Emotional Appeal and ran The Emotional Appeal Institute or Tina Onassis Blandford or a Florida cracker who was then a regular on what the called “the Big C,” the Southampton-El Morocco circuit (“I’m well connected on the Big C, honey,” he would tell me over collard greens on his vast borrowed terrace), or the widow of the celery king of the Harlem market or a piano salesman from Bonne Terre, Missouri, or someone who had already made and list two fortunes in Midland, Texas. I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of them would count.
You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was most comfortable with the company of Southerners. They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever they belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California. Someone who lives with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar. Christmas, for example, was a difficult season. Other people could take it in stride, going to Stowe or going abroad or going for the day to their mothers’ places in Connecticut; those of us who believed that we lived somewhere else would spend it making and canceling airline reservations, waiting for weatherbound flights as if for the last plane out of Lisbon in 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of us who were left, with oranges and mementos and smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering close, colonials in a far country.
Which is precisely what we were. I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.
In fact it was difficult in the extreme for me to understand those young women for whom New York was not simply an ephemeral Estoril but a real place, girls who bought toasters and installed new cabinets in their apartments and committed themselves to some reasonable furniture. I never bought any furniture in New York. For a year or so I lived in other people’s apartments; after that I lived in the Nineties in an apartment furnished entirely with things taken from storage by a friend whose wife had moved away. And when I left the apartment in the Nineties (that was when I was leaving everything, when it was all breaking up) I left everything in it, even my winter clothes and the map of Sacramento County I had hung on the bedroom wall to remind me who I was, and I moved into a monastic four-room floor-through on Seventy-fifth Street. “Monastic” is perhaps misleading here, implying some chic severity; until after I was married and my husband moved some furniture in, there was nothing at all in those four rooms except a cheap double mattress and box springs, ordered by telephone the day I decided to move, and two French garden chairs lent me by a friend who imported them. (It strikes me now that the people I knew in New York all had curious and self-defeating sidelines. They imported garden chairs which did not sell very well at Hammacher Schlemmer or they tried to market hair staighteners in Harlem or they ghosted exposés of Murder Incorporated for Sunday supplements. I think that perhaps none of us was very serious, engagé only about our most private lives.)
All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and ever procrastination, every word, all of it.
---
That is what it was all about, wasn’t it? Promises? Now when New York comes back to me it comes in hallucinatory flashes, so clinically detailed that I sometimes wish that memory would effect the distortion with which it is commonly credited. For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a perfume called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L’Air du Temps, and now the slightest trace of either can short-circuit my connections for the rest of the day. Nor can I smell Henri Bendel jasmine soap without falling back into the past, or the particular mixture of spices used for boiling crabs. There were barrels of crab boil in a Czech place in the Eighties where I once shopped. Smells, of course, are notorious memory stimuli, but there are other things which affect me the same way. Blue-and-white striped sheets. Vermouth cassis. Some faded nightgowns which were new in 1959 or 1960, and some chiffon scarves I bought about the same time.
I suppose that a lot of us who have been very young in New York have the same scenes in our home screens. I remember sitting in a lot of apartments with a slight headache about five o’clock in the morning. I had a friend who could not sleep, and he knew a few other people who had the same trouble, and we would watch the sky lighten and have a last drink with no ice and then go home in the early morning, when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained in the night? we never knew) and the few cruising taxis still had their headlights on and the only color was the red and green of traffic signals. The White Rose bars opened very early in the morning; I recall waiting in one of them to watch an astronaut go into space, waiting so long that at the moment it actually happened I had my eyes not on the television screen but on a cockroach on the tile floor. I liked the bleak branches above Washington Square at dawn, and the monochromatic flatness of Second Avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and empty in their perspective.
It is relatively hard to fight at six-thirty or seven in the morning, without any sleep, which was perhaps one reason why we stayed up all night, and it seemed to me a pleasant time of day. The windows were shuttered in that apartment in the Nineties and I could sleep for a few hours and then go to work. I could work the on two or three hours’ sleep and a container of coffee from Chock Full O’ Nuts. I liked going to work, liked the soothing and satisfactory rhythm of getting out a magazine, liked the orderly progression of four-color closings and two-color closings and black-and-white closings and then The Product, no abstraction but something which looked effortlessly glossy and could be picked up on a newsstand and weighed in the hand. I liked all the minutiae of proofs and layouts, liked working late on the nights the magazines went to press, sitting and reading Variety and waiting for the copy desk to call. From my office, I could look across town to the weather signal on the Mutual of New York Building and the lights that alternately spelled TIME and LIFE above Rockeffeler Plaza; that pleased me obscurely, and so did walking uptown in the mauve eight o’clocks of early summer evenings and looking at things, Lowestoft tureens in Fifty-seventh Street windows, people in evening clothes trying to get taxis, the trees just coming into full leaf, the lambent air, all the sweet promises of money and summer.
Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing. I liked walking, from the East River over to the Hudson and back on brisk days, down around the Village on warm days. A friend would leave me the key to her apartment in the West Village when she was out of town, and sometimes I would just move down there, because by that time the telephone was beginning to bother me (the canker, you see, was already in the rose) and not many people had that number. I remember one day when someone who did have the West Village number came to pick me up for lunch there, and we both had hangovers, and I cut my finger opening him a beer and burst into tears, and we walked to a Spanish restaurant and drank bloody Marys and gazpacho until we felt better. I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.
And even that late in the game I still liked going to parties, all parties, bad parties, Saturday-afternoon parties given by recently married couples who lived in Stuyvesant Town, West Side parties given by unpublished or failed writers who served cheap red wine and talked about going to Guatalajara, Village parties where all the guests worked for advertising agencies and voted for Reform Democrats, press parties at Sardi’s, the worst kind of parties. You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.
---
I could not tell you when I began to understand that. All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. I could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone complaining of his wife’s inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to Connecticut. I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received from their publishers, about plays which were having second-act trouble in Philadelphia, or about people I would like very much if only I would come out and meet them. I had already met them, always. There were certain parts of the city which I had to avoid. I could not bear upper Madison Avenue on weekday mornings (this was a particularly inconvenient aversion, since I then lived just fifty or sixty feet east of Madison), because I would see women walking Yorkshire terriers and shopping at Gristede’s, and some Veblenesque gorge would rise in my throat. I could not go to Times Square in the afternoon, or to the New York Public Library for any reason whatsoever. One day I could not go into a Schrafft’s; the next it would be the Bonwit Teller.
I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, I cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor, he said only that I seemed to be depressed, and that I should see a “specialist.” He wrote down a psychiatrist’s name and address for me, but I did not go.
Instead I got married, which as it turned out was a very good thing to do but badly timed, since I still could not walk on upper Madison Avenue in the mornings and still could not talk to people and still cried in Chinese laundries. I had never before understood what “despair” meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year. Of course I could not work. I could not even get dinner with any degree of certainty, and I would sit in the apartment on Seventy-fifth Street paralyzed until my husband would call from his office and say gently that I did not have to get dinner, that I could meet him at Michael’s Pub or at Toots Shor’s or at Sardi’s East. And then one morning in April (we had been married in January) he called and told me that he wanted to get out of New York for a while, that he would take a six-month leave of absence, that we would go somewhere.
It was three years ago he told me that, and we have lived in Los Angeles since. Many of the people we knew in New York think this a curious aberration, and in fact tell us so. There is no possible, no adequate answer to that, and so we give certain stock answers, the answers everyone gives. I talk about how difficult it would be for us to “afford” to live in New York right now, about how much “space” we need, All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore. The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles “the Coast,” but they seem a long time ago.
[1967]
GOODBYE TO ALL THAT by Joan Didion
How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and and ten—
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again—
If your feet are nimble and light
You can get there by candlelight.
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.
Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am talking about myself I am talking here about New York. That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room air conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was. All I could do during those years was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.
---
In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will see that as we go along. Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street. But most particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.
I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting a friend who complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a party where there would be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, “new faces.” He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. “New faces,” he said finally, “don’t tell me about new faces.” It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised “new faces,” there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already spelt with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men. I laughed with him, but the first snow had just begun to fall and the big Christmas trees glittered yellow and white as far as I could see up Park Avenue and I had a new dress and it would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story.
It would be a long while because, quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. I was making only $65 or $70 then a week then (“Put yourself in Hattie Carnegie’s hands,” I was advised without the slightest trace of irony by an editor of the magazine for which I worked), so little money that some weeks I had to charge food at Bloomingdale’s gourmet shop in order to eat, a fact which went unmentioned in the letters I wrote to California. I never told my father that I needed money because then he would have sent it, and I would never know if I could do it by myself. At that time making a living seemed a game to me, with arbitrary but quite inflexible rules. And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name “Debbi Lynn” or I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of would matter.
Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about. I could go to a party and meet someone who called himself Mr. Emotional Appeal and ran The Emotional Appeal Institute or Tina Onassis Blandford or a Florida cracker who was then a regular on what the called “the Big C,” the Southampton-El Morocco circuit (“I’m well connected on the Big C, honey,” he would tell me over collard greens on his vast borrowed terrace), or the widow of the celery king of the Harlem market or a piano salesman from Bonne Terre, Missouri, or someone who had already made and list two fortunes in Midland, Texas. I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of them would count.
You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was most comfortable with the company of Southerners. They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever they belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California. Someone who lives with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar. Christmas, for example, was a difficult season. Other people could take it in stride, going to Stowe or going abroad or going for the day to their mothers’ places in Connecticut; those of us who believed that we lived somewhere else would spend it making and canceling airline reservations, waiting for weatherbound flights as if for the last plane out of Lisbon in 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of us who were left, with oranges and mementos and smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering close, colonials in a far country.
Which is precisely what we were. I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.
In fact it was difficult in the extreme for me to understand those young women for whom New York was not simply an ephemeral Estoril but a real place, girls who bought toasters and installed new cabinets in their apartments and committed themselves to some reasonable furniture. I never bought any furniture in New York. For a year or so I lived in other people’s apartments; after that I lived in the Nineties in an apartment furnished entirely with things taken from storage by a friend whose wife had moved away. And when I left the apartment in the Nineties (that was when I was leaving everything, when it was all breaking up) I left everything in it, even my winter clothes and the map of Sacramento County I had hung on the bedroom wall to remind me who I was, and I moved into a monastic four-room floor-through on Seventy-fifth Street. “Monastic” is perhaps misleading here, implying some chic severity; until after I was married and my husband moved some furniture in, there was nothing at all in those four rooms except a cheap double mattress and box springs, ordered by telephone the day I decided to move, and two French garden chairs lent me by a friend who imported them. (It strikes me now that the people I knew in New York all had curious and self-defeating sidelines. They imported garden chairs which did not sell very well at Hammacher Schlemmer or they tried to market hair staighteners in Harlem or they ghosted exposés of Murder Incorporated for Sunday supplements. I think that perhaps none of us was very serious, engagé only about our most private lives.)
All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and ever procrastination, every word, all of it.
---
That is what it was all about, wasn’t it? Promises? Now when New York comes back to me it comes in hallucinatory flashes, so clinically detailed that I sometimes wish that memory would effect the distortion with which it is commonly credited. For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a perfume called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L’Air du Temps, and now the slightest trace of either can short-circuit my connections for the rest of the day. Nor can I smell Henri Bendel jasmine soap without falling back into the past, or the particular mixture of spices used for boiling crabs. There were barrels of crab boil in a Czech place in the Eighties where I once shopped. Smells, of course, are notorious memory stimuli, but there are other things which affect me the same way. Blue-and-white striped sheets. Vermouth cassis. Some faded nightgowns which were new in 1959 or 1960, and some chiffon scarves I bought about the same time.
I suppose that a lot of us who have been very young in New York have the same scenes in our home screens. I remember sitting in a lot of apartments with a slight headache about five o’clock in the morning. I had a friend who could not sleep, and he knew a few other people who had the same trouble, and we would watch the sky lighten and have a last drink with no ice and then go home in the early morning, when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained in the night? we never knew) and the few cruising taxis still had their headlights on and the only color was the red and green of traffic signals. The White Rose bars opened very early in the morning; I recall waiting in one of them to watch an astronaut go into space, waiting so long that at the moment it actually happened I had my eyes not on the television screen but on a cockroach on the tile floor. I liked the bleak branches above Washington Square at dawn, and the monochromatic flatness of Second Avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and empty in their perspective.
It is relatively hard to fight at six-thirty or seven in the morning, without any sleep, which was perhaps one reason why we stayed up all night, and it seemed to me a pleasant time of day. The windows were shuttered in that apartment in the Nineties and I could sleep for a few hours and then go to work. I could work the on two or three hours’ sleep and a container of coffee from Chock Full O’ Nuts. I liked going to work, liked the soothing and satisfactory rhythm of getting out a magazine, liked the orderly progression of four-color closings and two-color closings and black-and-white closings and then The Product, no abstraction but something which looked effortlessly glossy and could be picked up on a newsstand and weighed in the hand. I liked all the minutiae of proofs and layouts, liked working late on the nights the magazines went to press, sitting and reading Variety and waiting for the copy desk to call. From my office, I could look across town to the weather signal on the Mutual of New York Building and the lights that alternately spelled TIME and LIFE above Rockeffeler Plaza; that pleased me obscurely, and so did walking uptown in the mauve eight o’clocks of early summer evenings and looking at things, Lowestoft tureens in Fifty-seventh Street windows, people in evening clothes trying to get taxis, the trees just coming into full leaf, the lambent air, all the sweet promises of money and summer.
Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing. I liked walking, from the East River over to the Hudson and back on brisk days, down around the Village on warm days. A friend would leave me the key to her apartment in the West Village when she was out of town, and sometimes I would just move down there, because by that time the telephone was beginning to bother me (the canker, you see, was already in the rose) and not many people had that number. I remember one day when someone who did have the West Village number came to pick me up for lunch there, and we both had hangovers, and I cut my finger opening him a beer and burst into tears, and we walked to a Spanish restaurant and drank bloody Marys and gazpacho until we felt better. I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.
And even that late in the game I still liked going to parties, all parties, bad parties, Saturday-afternoon parties given by recently married couples who lived in Stuyvesant Town, West Side parties given by unpublished or failed writers who served cheap red wine and talked about going to Guatalajara, Village parties where all the guests worked for advertising agencies and voted for Reform Democrats, press parties at Sardi’s, the worst kind of parties. You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.
---
I could not tell you when I began to understand that. All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. I could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone complaining of his wife’s inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to Connecticut. I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received from their publishers, about plays which were having second-act trouble in Philadelphia, or about people I would like very much if only I would come out and meet them. I had already met them, always. There were certain parts of the city which I had to avoid. I could not bear upper Madison Avenue on weekday mornings (this was a particularly inconvenient aversion, since I then lived just fifty or sixty feet east of Madison), because I would see women walking Yorkshire terriers and shopping at Gristede’s, and some Veblenesque gorge would rise in my throat. I could not go to Times Square in the afternoon, or to the New York Public Library for any reason whatsoever. One day I could not go into a Schrafft’s; the next it would be the Bonwit Teller.
I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, I cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor, he said only that I seemed to be depressed, and that I should see a “specialist.” He wrote down a psychiatrist’s name and address for me, but I did not go.
Instead I got married, which as it turned out was a very good thing to do but badly timed, since I still could not walk on upper Madison Avenue in the mornings and still could not talk to people and still cried in Chinese laundries. I had never before understood what “despair” meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year. Of course I could not work. I could not even get dinner with any degree of certainty, and I would sit in the apartment on Seventy-fifth Street paralyzed until my husband would call from his office and say gently that I did not have to get dinner, that I could meet him at Michael’s Pub or at Toots Shor’s or at Sardi’s East. And then one morning in April (we had been married in January) he called and told me that he wanted to get out of New York for a while, that he would take a six-month leave of absence, that we would go somewhere.
It was three years ago he told me that, and we have lived in Los Angeles since. Many of the people we knew in New York think this a curious aberration, and in fact tell us so. There is no possible, no adequate answer to that, and so we give certain stock answers, the answers everyone gives. I talk about how difficult it would be for us to “afford” to live in New York right now, about how much “space” we need, All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore. The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles “the Coast,” but they seem a long time ago.
[1967]
viernes, 9 de julio de 2010
Cortos!!!!!!!!!!!
Bueno, finalmente tengo mi página oficial. Es como un departamento nuevo, hay muchas cosas por cambiar y arreglar pero ya se pueden ver los cortos que filmé acá...
Estan invitados a entrar, criticar y disfrutar la página. Advierto que es muy amateur porque la hice yo pero bueno, hay que empezar por algo.
www.filminasite.com
Estan invitados a entrar, criticar y disfrutar la página. Advierto que es muy amateur porque la hice yo pero bueno, hay que empezar por algo.
www.filminasite.com
miércoles, 7 de julio de 2010
Miércoles 7 de Julio
Acabo de volver de ver la película "The hangover". La proyectaron en un pantalla gigante justo al lado del río Hudson, en una pasarela rodeada de agua...Fue increíble, la película y el estar ahí en una típica noche de verano manhattaniana. Había miles de personas sentadas con sus toallas y picnic bajos las estrellas mirando la película. El gordo de la película que es muy gracioso me hace acordar mucho a mi compañero de cine Henry. Si se entera Henry pobre se muere porque el gordo es impresentable pero es muy muy cómico.
Fui por última vez a la prodcutora de Anne y Debra y estuve trabajando todo el día. Es muy triste, me quiero quedar. Ellas también estan tristes porque me voy, quedamos en que el próximo proyecto que tengan me vengo directo para aca. Por suerte a la película le está yendo muy bien acá, hay público todos los fines de semana, y lo más difícil cuando se estrena una película no es que vaya mucho gente a verla al principio sino que la película se mantenga. Pero "Winter's Bone" es muy buena, espero que se estrene en Argentina algún día...
Fui por última vez a la prodcutora de Anne y Debra y estuve trabajando todo el día. Es muy triste, me quiero quedar. Ellas también estan tristes porque me voy, quedamos en que el próximo proyecto que tengan me vengo directo para aca. Por suerte a la película le está yendo muy bien acá, hay público todos los fines de semana, y lo más difícil cuando se estrena una película no es que vaya mucho gente a verla al principio sino que la película se mantenga. Pero "Winter's Bone" es muy buena, espero que se estrene en Argentina algún día...
martes, 6 de julio de 2010
6 de Julio
Nueva York está que arde!!!!!!!! Y no exactamente en un sentido sexy, hacen 40 grados centígrados!!! No se puede caminar por la calle, la ropa se pega al cuerpo cortando la movilidad y no corre una gota de viento, por lo tanto hay que respirar sólo en los CVS, Duane Reader o tiendas cerradas con aire acondicionado y ahorrar aire para salir a la calle nuevamente. Quiero mencionar que son las 11 de la noche y hacen 40 grados, la verdad no me quiero ni enterar cuánto hizo cuando pegaba el sol sobre el pavimento. Nunca padecí tanto el calor y eso que soy una amante del verano, pero esto es inhumano...
Por suerte hace poco Pam incorporó en mi cuarto un aire acondicionado así que por lo menos por las noches soy feliz y puede dormir. Una persona que puede dormir a la noche no puede pedir más.
Es mi última semana en esta ciudad y estoy cerrando cosas, despidiendo gente, haciendo mis últimos trabajos, comprando regalos y haciendo los últimos trámites. Como ya tengo mis cortos terminados los estoy entregando a mis actores, que lamentablemente no los voy a ver más. Le regalé a Pam un dvd especial con el corto de la gorda. Parece que lo vio porque entré pasé por su estudio y ella estaba hablando por teléfono, pero me escribió en un papelito "IT'S HEAVEN your film" (con corazones) estaba re emocionada y agradecida. En los créditos al final le puse un agradecimiento especial.
Pam es una fanática televidente de series como "The Bachelor", "Dancing with the stars" y "American Idol". No se pierde ni un capítulo de estas series y siempre me mantiene al tanto (a mí que nunca en la vida vi ninguna) de todo lo que está pasando. No me gustan las series pero me encanta como Pam me transmite a su manera lo que absorbe de esos programas. Sus relatos son muchos más románticos de lo que pasa realmente en esos programas. Por ejemplo hace poco leí el titular de una revista onda "People" que la pareja de The Bachelor se había divorciado después de haber pasado sólo un par de meses casados porque en realidad no estaban enamorados. Le comenté esto a Pam y cometí el error de decir lo que me parecía: que para mí estas parejas son una mentira y que sólo van a los programas porque quieren hacerse conocidos. Pam no quiso saber nada de este chisme y me dijo que si realmente es así ella prefiere quedarse con su versión.
Pero bueno, me alegra que le haya gustado el corto. Nada de esto hubiera pasado si yo no caía esa noche en su departamento, así que hay agradecerle a Pam y sobretodo a Steven, no hay que olvidar a Steven.
Por suerte hace poco Pam incorporó en mi cuarto un aire acondicionado así que por lo menos por las noches soy feliz y puede dormir. Una persona que puede dormir a la noche no puede pedir más.
Es mi última semana en esta ciudad y estoy cerrando cosas, despidiendo gente, haciendo mis últimos trabajos, comprando regalos y haciendo los últimos trámites. Como ya tengo mis cortos terminados los estoy entregando a mis actores, que lamentablemente no los voy a ver más. Le regalé a Pam un dvd especial con el corto de la gorda. Parece que lo vio porque entré pasé por su estudio y ella estaba hablando por teléfono, pero me escribió en un papelito "IT'S HEAVEN your film" (con corazones) estaba re emocionada y agradecida. En los créditos al final le puse un agradecimiento especial.
Pam es una fanática televidente de series como "The Bachelor", "Dancing with the stars" y "American Idol". No se pierde ni un capítulo de estas series y siempre me mantiene al tanto (a mí que nunca en la vida vi ninguna) de todo lo que está pasando. No me gustan las series pero me encanta como Pam me transmite a su manera lo que absorbe de esos programas. Sus relatos son muchos más románticos de lo que pasa realmente en esos programas. Por ejemplo hace poco leí el titular de una revista onda "People" que la pareja de The Bachelor se había divorciado después de haber pasado sólo un par de meses casados porque en realidad no estaban enamorados. Le comenté esto a Pam y cometí el error de decir lo que me parecía: que para mí estas parejas son una mentira y que sólo van a los programas porque quieren hacerse conocidos. Pam no quiso saber nada de este chisme y me dijo que si realmente es así ella prefiere quedarse con su versión.
Pero bueno, me alegra que le haya gustado el corto. Nada de esto hubiera pasado si yo no caía esa noche en su departamento, así que hay agradecerle a Pam y sobretodo a Steven, no hay que olvidar a Steven.
sábado, 3 de julio de 2010
It's a beautiful day
Es terrible porque hoy fue el peor y el mejor día de toda mi estadía en Nueva York.
Me levanté a las 7 de la mañana porque no podía dormir más de los nervios y me tomé un tren a Brooklyn para ver el partido con un documentalista americano que conocí en la facultad. Nos conocimos así: el vino a dar una charla a una de mis clases de documental, nos mostró su película y habló un poco acerca de todo, desde cómo buscar plata para hacer el documental hasta cual es la vida por lo general de una persona que hace documental. La película es increíble y ganó muchos premios, se llama "Control Room" pero la verdad a la clase le gustó tanto la charla que todos nos quedamos anhelando un poco el ser parte de esa vida de documentlista. Viajar, filmar, escribir, investigar para desarrollar ideas e historias remotas que suceden en diversas partes del mundo.
Finalmente nos contó a toda la clase que su próximo proyecto iba a ser filmado en Cuba y que iba a necesitar un equipo que hablara español. Autómaticamente a mí se me iluminó la cara y apenas terminó la charla me acerqué al director y le pregunté: cómo es el proyecto de Cuba?? Y desde ahí (que esto fue hace 3 meses) que estamos en contacto.
Como yo me estoy volviendo en una semana quedamos en encontrarnos para hablar antes acerca del posible documental a Cuba. Todavía no hay nada concreto porque no hay fondos para subsidiarlo, pero pegamos buena onda así que siempre es muy interesante hablar con el. Aparte es fanático de Argentina así que quedamos en ver el partido juntos. Durante el partido me presentó a otros dos amigos suyos también americanos pero que siguen ardientemente los partidos del mundial e hinchan por argentina. Vimos el partido, compartimos la amarga derrota y coincidimos en que la agresividad pseudo militar de Alemania proviene de sus camisetas. Dan miedo todos esos alemanes vestidos de negros, listos para arrasar con todo y como bien advirtió Klose Alemania fue capaz de herir a la Argentina. No vencer ni ganar sino herir, lastimar esas fueron sus palabras.
Después del partido nos fuimos a un mercado de pulgas abierto que hay en uno de los parques de brooklyn, comimos unos sandwiches de cerdo y nos tomamos unos jugos. El día estaba increíble, despejado y caluroso pero con viento. Al rato mi amigo se tuvo que ir a hacer unos trámites y me dejó hablando con sus otros dos amigos, uno de ellos hacía cuatro años que estaba viviendo en Nueva York y hoy mismo partía de nuevo a su ciudad de origen. Faltaban cinco horas para irse y el decidió aprovechar sus últimas horas en NY al máximo. Entonces nos fuimos a recorrer y a caminar por Brooklyn hasta que nos instalamos en un parque. Nos sentamos los tres en un banco entremedio de toda la arbolada y el verde del verano y nos quedamos charlando horas y horas acerca de todo. Ellos dos se conocían entre sí pero yo nunca los había visto en mi vida, pero creo que en esa plaza sentados en ese banco tuvimos una de las charlas más interesantes que jamás tuve en mi vida...Era muy gracioso porque hablábamos como si nos conociéramos de toda la vida, como tres amigos. Pero en realidad éramos tres personas desconocidas que lo único que tenían en común era estar viviendo transitoriamente en Nueva York. Hablamos mucho de Nueva York, y como yo también me estoy volviendo en una semana la charla tomó como un gusto nostálgico. Coincidimos los tres en que NY es una ciudad con una energía muy cambiante, uno todos lo días puede llegar a conocer a alguien nuevo y en ese mismo día se puede generar un vínculo muy fuerte pero este vínculo sólo dura lo que dura el presente, no perdura en el tiempo ni a la distancia. Nueva York es una ciudad llena de personas diferentes entre sí, hay una mezcla de edades, nacionalidades, culturas, religiones como en ninguna ciudad y todo ésta variedad se acepta y convive en una misma ciudad pero jamás estas culturas se fusionan. Todo el mundo acepta la variedad pero nadie quiere compartir del todo su individualidad con el resto. Es una ciudad sociable y solitaria a la vez.
Por ahí todo esto que escribo no tiene sentido pero en ese momento me pareció que no podía se más clara y más certera nuestra conversación. Lo que pasaba en ese banco pasa todos los días en una ciudad como New York. Los tres charlando horas y horas como íntimos amigos sabiendo que a la vez nunca más ibamos a volver a vernos.
Cuando ya se acercaba la hora de que nuestro amigo partiera lo acompañamos a su casa a buscar las valijas y después a la estación de tren. Ahí lo despedimos y el tren partió. Yo hasta casi sentí que lo iba a extrañar. Iba a extrañarlo sólo por el hecho de estar despidiéndolo porque en realidad era un desconocido para mí.
Después quedamos dos solamente y cómo queríamos seguir conversando nos atravesamos todo Brooklyn, cruzamos de nuevo parques, playas, fábricas hasta llegar al puente. Caminamos por el puente al atardecer hasta llegar a Manhattan y ahí nos despedimos para tomar cada uno su subte correspondiente.
Fue el mejor día desde que llegué y creo que es sólo porque falta una semana para irme.
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