Sleepless Nights (16 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Hardwick
Miss Lavore. It has been many, many years since I used to see her passing in the halls of the rooming houses near Columbia. Thumping by, heavy and preoccupied, on the go, with the vanity of a truck blasting through the avenues. Miss Lavore: now, there was a warrior with red feathers in her hair and the paint of many ambushes on her full cheeks.
The houses with their separate rooms and communal kitchens and baths were lived in by female graduate students, some reading
The Faerie Queene
, and by women who went out to work each day. The working women were talkative and yet evasive in the extreme. From many rooming houses they had gathered their expertise; knowledge of sudden alliances that turned sour in a moment finally produced their chatty guardedness. In their lives, what the rooming house represented for these persons, who had been in the same job for years, was the fear of the rental lease, of the acquisition of furniture.
No matter, they would put up curtains, cover the maple furniture tops with bits of cloth, add a better reading lamp to soothe the office-tired eyes.
And yet the women talked a good deal of the time about their memories of the houses of their youth. Damask Rose dishes in brackets on the wall were remembered, old lace, brass candleholders, serving spoons of coin silver, strongly ticking clocks with decorated faces, faded quilts, boxes of rosewood.
Perhaps little of it was true. Secretive persons tend to generalized memories, discreet editings, and the inevitable seasoning of sugar. Not one of the women would tell where she worked. And each one treasured the chastising sign, many times underlined:
Please Clean This Tub After Using
.
They cooked their small dinners and the wastebaskets appended the story with cracker boxes, candy wrappers, hot-dog cartons.
Miss Lavore had a life. Nearly every night of the week she went to Arthur Murray’s dancing classes. A framed, autographed portrait of Murray and his wife hung over her bed. It would be florid to say it hung there like a religious icon, but certainly the two secular persons filled Miss Lavore’s heart with gratitude. It could be said they had changed her life.
Miss Lavore was large and strong and homely and in her late fifties. At the end of the working day, she came home on the subway, came home alert with energy for her dancing, convivial nights. She cooked dinners rather more substantial than the usual, had a spell with the radio and the shower, and then reappeared in her full-skirted dresses. They were of the brightest, harshest colors: robin’s-egg blue, cherry, and kelly green. With them she wore her serviceable black suede pumps. Colored glass earrings and pins matched with her bright dresses. Coty’s cologne scented her strong arms. A daunting sight.
Off she went, a member of a special ten-year Arthur Murray Club, participant in parties, anniversaries, bonus lessons, prizes, and competitions. At midnight she was back once more.
The other women, seeing the shape Miss Lavore had given to her existence, timidly inquired sometimes about the possibility of sharing this night world, which could after all be purchased.
Miss Lavore had the skepticism of experience, the loftiness of her earned waltzing cups, her certificates, her souvenirs. She knew the ropes. The rustling dresses had seen service year after year.
To the ladies’ questions she might reply: Have you thought of bowling? There’s a lot going there, if you have the knack of it. Under persistence, she would grant a devastating interview in the hallways, an interview in which were mixed the tolerance and hopelessness of an old clerk knowledgeable about lies.
Do you dance at all? Now tell me, what do you mean when you say you dance a little? What is a little? Tango? Rumba?
The waltz, my friend, is not as easy as it looks.
What lust there was in her eyes. “This fellow” and “that fellow” punctuated her conversation with their drumbeats. Several nights each week, she was held in the arms of many dancing partners, new members and old. At the studio there was music, fruit punch, and the touch of beards on her cheek. At the end of it all, handshakes and embraces, joshing farewells to the staff and inquisitive smiles of encouragement to the diffident beginners.
One night I was coming home on the subway and I saw her at the other end of the train. She was wrapped, it seemed, in a pleasant, hard-earned fatigue. In her hand she held a small flower-strewn box and when she opened it there was a large piece of cake, decorated with pink-and-white icing, the kind ordered for celebrations.
She ate the cake, retied the ribbon on the box and stored it away in a large black handbag, from which it would be extracted and placed on the table in her room reserved for happy memories. Happy memories, triumphs, the long ledger of her life, displayed on tables and dresser tops, tucked away in tissue paper. Adding up.
In the late evening, Miss Lavore was a transitional ghost, wandering in the indistinct moment between night and day. Over her green dress she was wearing a coat of heavy black cloth. Her green earrings dangled under a gray felt hat shaped like a pillow. A gray lock of hair touched rimless spectacles I had never seen before. She was drifting slowly into the body of the one who went out to work year after year.
Suddenly she fell asleep, lulled by the motion of the train. With a great sigh, she nodded into rest, the pillow hat slipping down her brow.
At the 110th Street station she awakened with a start, the alarm clock of experience, and gathered herself together for the push up the stairs to the street. She passed back and forth in the darkness and then in the slashes of light her earrings would shine out for a moment.
It occurred to me than that her name was probably not Lavore. That was her green and robin’s-egg-blue name, not the signature of the black coat and rimless spectacles.
She is, in her dreams, part of a team and when she whirls and dips she is caught by a slim man in a black tail coat, a man with a Balkan name like people in the circus. She spins around him, brilliant as a cockatoo in a cage. They are Lavore and ——, famous European dancing team.
We passed open bars and closed shops. One corner would be deserted, as if an entire side street had turned off its lights and closed its eyes. Another would be filled with people standing in groups, alert, sleepless, looking about for the next stop of a night that had just begun. A woman in white nurse’s shoes appeared in the red of the stoplight. Miss Lavore and the nurse stand side by side for a moment. They take in each other briefly. The last dying flutter of curiosity in two hearts that are already beating on the edge of sleep.
A taxi comes to the curb and a young man jumps out to buy the
Daily News
and jumps back in. Miss Lavore pauses as if struck by this cue for ways to prolong the night. But she has no interest in the news.
Whistling noises fill the air suddenly and die down once more. At last Miss Lavore and I nod in the elevator and slip into the hall of the strange apartment with its peculiar cells for the protection of a vast, overwhelming privacy. She goes to the left and I to the right. Doors open and eyes peer out to check on the intruders; the cautious hinges are squeaking out a sort of accusation.
Someone is running a bath, someone is listening to the late-night preacher on the radio. He is asking for contributions for “our ministry.” Box 234 for the expenses incurred in God’s work. And then a man and woman harmonize “Love Lifted Me.”
...from the waters lifted me and safe am I...
It is all right. Tomorrow one of the young women will take her suitcases and leave forever, since it has never been her idea to stay beyond her purpose. For the older women it is different. They are like poor cattle herdsmen in a drought. Annoying waits in the kitchen, irritation with the habits of strangers, nightmares. What began as a green start may turn overnight into a desert filled with alarm, with impossibility. So move on. Try out a similar arrangement on Riverside Drive. But defiantly, as if to say: You cannot destroy a ruin.
1973
Dearest M.: I have sold the big house in Maine and will make a new place to live, beginning with the old barn on the water. I will not say a new place to live newly in. Wouldn’t one have to go off to something like an island for that, without newspapers, books, and friends. Newness seeks a mild temperature, doesn’t it? I will stay in the three or four towns of my life—and the climate rough in each in its own way.
“Existing barn,” the architect’s drawings say. But I fear the metamorphosis, the journey of species. The barn, or so I imagine of all barns, once existed for cows and hay. Then later it came to us, especially to him who has left, as a refuge with a menacing swallow’s nest near the door.
Will the barn consent to become what I have decided to make of it? I don’t know. Sometimes I am sure I am building for a tire salesman from Bangor whose wife will not be kind to the wounds of such a building—the claims, the outcry of old animals, the memories. The claims and cries of Lightolier, Design Research, colored rugs on the painted wood.
As for the other, sluffed-off house, I mourn and regret much. The nights long ago with H.W. and her worn recording of Alice Raveau in Gluck’s
Orfeo
. I hear the music, see H.W. very tall, old, with her stirring maidenly beauty. The smell of the leaves outside dripping rain, the fire alive, the bowls of nasturtiums everywhere, the orange Moroccan cloth hanging over the mantel. What a loss. I will never cease to love the old lady who gave to us and to me alone so much, even to me the old house and barn. Otherwise where would they have come from—for me? Who had no thought of Maine, so far from home.
For the rest of the loss, perhaps my memories betray me a little and bleach the darkness of the scene, the agitation of the evenings. I am as aware as anyone of the appeal, the power of the negative. Well, we go from one graven image to the next and, say what you will, each house is a shrine.
Meanwhile here in New York I just saw a horse and rider amidst the threatening taxi cabs. The man rides the horse indeed as if he were driving a cab, nervously, angrily, looking straight ahead, in his own lane. One way it is, held on the conveyor belt of traffic, needing only a horse horn of some kind to show that man may in New York turn a horse into a Dodge.
When we first came here the house opposite was a stable. A handsome brick building painted in a dusty mustard shade, like an Italian villa. Sometimes the old structure seems to return, coming out of the afternoon haze, rising from the sea of cement. But what good would the return do itself, me?
The horse and rider escaped to the park. Where old stables stood there is a parking lot. A hundred beautiful chariots rest there in the afternoon sun. And at night sometimes the car of someone I know sits there all alone, waiting for midnight.
Much love, as always,
E
LIZABETH
That was then, four or five years ago. The New York car has gone and in Maine the reclaimed barn now shudders in the sudden coastal winds. The white chairs on the terrace are cleaned by the mist, and the terrace itself, anxious grounding, seems slowly being washed away to the sea. The ancient white flowering bush, splendid with its murderous, curved thorns, stands guard on the bank. A handsome boat is edging toward a red plastic mooring. Goldfinches in the alders. Scenery, changing with the light in the sky. I look at it often, and often, like others here, congratulate myself for having done so.
On the battered calendar of the past, the back-glancing flow of numbers, I had imagined there would be felicitous notations of entrapments and escapes, days in the South with their insinuating feline accent, and nights in the East, showing a restlessness as beguiling as the winds of Aeolus. And myself there, marking the day with an
I
.
In truth, moments, months, even years were magical. Pages turned, answering prayers, and persons called out, Are you there? The moon changed the field to the silvery lavender of daybreak.
And yet the old pages of the days and weeks are splattered with the dark-brown rings of coffee cups and I find myself gratefully dissolved in the grounds as the water drips downward. As it must be, perhaps, for one who dislikes the theater and would instead stay at home reading the text out of which spring the actors in boots, letters on trays, and handsome women at the window, looking out on a painted backdrop of trees and factories.
At times I am not certain who is imagining the working people living in their clashing houses, lying in their landscape, as if beneath a layer of underclothes. Or those gathering rubbish, dear indeed to them as relics. Or those threading through love, missing the eye of the needle.
Words and rhythms, a waterfall of clauses, blue lights, amber eyes, the sea under a burning lake. Should I remember the perfection of a pointed chin and the abundant, prickly halo of amorous, black Levantine hair? Or my rival, the girl with the pale-green letter paper?
Oh, M., when I think of the people I have buried, North and South. Yet, why is it that we cannot keep the note of irony, the jangle of carelessness at a distance? Sentences in which I have tried for a certain light tone—many of those have to do with events, upheavals, destructions that caused me to weep like a child.
...O you could not know
That such swift fleeing
No soul foreseeing—
Not even I—would undo me so!
Mother, the reading glasses and the assignation near the clammy faces, so gray, of the intense church ladies. And then a lifetime with its mound of men climbing on and off.
The torment of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the disguise, and in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of paragraphs.
Sometimes I resent the glossary, the concordance of truth, many have about my real life, have like an extra pair of spectacles. I mean that such fact is to me a hindrance to memory.
Otherwise I love to be known by those I care for.
Public assistance
, beautiful phrase. Thus, I am always on the phone, always writing letters, always waking up to address myself to B. and D. and C.—those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to throughout the night.