Spinster (17 page)

Z seemed surprised to hear my voice.

I'd met Z in the fall, during my first full flush of New York City. He was at least six foot six, and three times my width. A scar tore down the left side of his face. His knuckles were the size of walnuts. But when he stopped me on the subway platform to ask for directions, none of this registered. Someone had asked me—a person who didn't leave the house without her plastic-coated folding map, which she consulted while standing on street corners, in broad daylight—for directions. Grandly I escorted him up the escalator.

He had a rich, pleasant drawl. He was from Georgia, I learned. The bag in his hands held his boxing gloves. He was on his way to the gym. He was going to be the next Mike Tyson. Next month
he was fighting at Madison Square Garden, and would I come watch?

Would I ever! I'd never known a boxer! I gave him my cell phone number and told him to call me with details.

Like a proud cat I brought my story home to R, just in case he needed reminding that New York City is leagues more exciting and interesting than Boston.

At first I liked it when Z called. He was funny and, unsurprisingly, contentious. He would needle me to attend his fights; dictate long, convoluted instructions about how to get there from Brooklyn Heights, involving multiple subway changes, a bus ride, and a long walk, all of which I would scrawl with good intentions on the back of receipts, and then he'd call me a week later to tease me for not showing up. We'd banter, I'd strike another bargain, and then I'd forget about him until he called again.

I didn't mean for him to become a secret. Somehow his phone calls arrived at odd, private moments, when I was deep in the library stacks, or waiting in line to buy a blueberry muffin for breakfast—moments that slip unspoken among a day's detritus. Unthinkingly, I stopped bringing the story back home to R.

A few weeks before Christmas Z had called to say he'd bought me a present. “I may have only met you that once,” he'd said, “but I remember you perfectly, and this will
fit
.”

I'd never felt threatened by Z, but this was creepy. I reminded him, as I often did, that I had a boyfriend, who might not appreciate the gesture. Z sighed, exasperated. “Kate, I know that. This present is about me appreciating you for being my friend. It will fit perfectly.” For a while, when I saw his number flashing on my cell phone, I didn't answer.

The holidays had come and gone, so when the phone vibrated this January evening, I forgot to screen it.

Z started in on the usual litany about his fights, as if nothing had changed. A chill went through me. Something about the call
coming in the middle of my snowy park reverie made his voice seem an invasion. I so badly wanted him to end his monologue and hang up that at first I didn't understand what he was talking about; I just heard the shift in his tone…“And she was small, like you,” he was saying. He was talking about his old girlfriend, back home in Georgia. “And so when I saw you on the subway, and you were nice, you reminded me of her. And she died, you know. She died last year. So when I saw you, small like her, all these feelings came back up. I just want you to be my friend, Kate,” he went on. His voice was low and serious and rushed forward like a gathering mob. I didn't know how to stop him. “And so this is what I want. I want you to talk to me on the phone once a week, for just fifteen minutes, that's all, and I will give you three hundred and fifty dollars. I just want you to be friendly; you don't have to do anything. Just talk to me.”

My heart slammed shut, as if he'd just unzipped his fly and exposed himself. I mumbled something about how I didn't want to do that, and immediately hung up. When he called right back, I didn't answer. (He never called again.) All the way home I burned with shame. Who was I to treat his naked loneliness like an affront? I'd been stringing him along, enjoying the illicit thrill of talking in secret to a strange man, safe in knowing I never had to see him in person. Obviously he was lonely; why else did I think he called me all the time, gamely ignoring my deflections?

For days I chastised myself. What had I possibly been thinking? It was one thing to play at being alone, another to actually be it. I was deluded, I decided, to think myself like Neith, “born a bachelor,” even if I was armed with “individuality, pluck and a sense of humor.” I had absolutely no instinct for self-preservation, and, worse, I wasn't merely naïve—I was willfully so. Even when all the signs pointed to danger, I professed not to see them. For what? An ego boost? I suspected it was even darker than that: I only had learned how to be good, so when I wanted to be bad, I
had to pretend at it. If I let this disingenuous self loose on the world, I'd likely wreak destruction and get killed in a heartbeat.

Besides, I'd be so
lonely
; who wants that?

And yet…wasn't learning how to cope with loneliness integral to learning how to take care of myself? And become an adult?

Those were the emotional costs; what about the economic ones? Could I afford solitude? I'd gotten used to splitting expenses with R. Striking out on my own in one of the most expensive cities in the world while trying to break into a profession as notoriously low-paying and unstable as writing seemed possibly idiotic. (In fact, it was.)

Neith had done it all without a tremor. When her Uncle Elia had tried to scare her into marriage, she took him to the mat:

You ask me if I look forward to being a lonely old maid of forty? I answer no for two reasons. First—because the principal joy of being independent is to take no thought for the morrow, much less a morrow a score of years removed. Second—and conclusively, I shall never be an old maid, because I have elected to be a Girl Bachelor.

I was twenty-eight. It was the year 2000. Nobody was making me marry anyone. But the pull toward it felt as strong as an undertow, the obvious next step in a mature and orderly existence. And when I thought about being alone at forty—the inconceivable far future—I froze.

When I'd spoken to Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, Neith Boyce's biographer, she'd generously offered to send me an advance copy of her annotated version of Neith's never-published memoir, which she was preparing for publication. I'd gone from having next to
nothing at my disposal about this “forgotten” woman to hitting the jackpot. The memoir encompassed her
Vogue
era, unplugged, complete with details not fit for print.

The sheaf of typewritten pages made an unusual document. Neith worked on it off and on for more than thirty years, finally finishing it in her mid-sixties. Along the way she changed the voice from the first person to the third, and her name from Neith to Iras, so it reads more like a novel than a memoir. Yet it also has a labored, almost stilted, feel and isn't nearly as funny as her Bachelor Girl column.

Even so, being privy to these private reminiscences was a thrill. There's a lunch date with the wife of her newspaper editor: the “rather stout matron had a juicy steak and salad,” while Neith could only afford coffee and a doughnut. “But she did not mind Spartan fare—the meals at the hotel were rather skimpy too—and did not mind that her room looked out on dingy backyards and tenement fire escapes festooned with flapping garments. It was all her own, and her complete independence was enough. How she enjoyed it!”

Unlike the stereotype of the frivolous urbanite of our own time, or even the high-born New Yorkers who made a game of “slumming” in hers, Neith is refreshingly self-aware. She “liked to feel herself a worker among workers,” yet, “certainly she had better conditions than most: the priceless privilege of doing work she liked, a place of her own.”

Indeed, Neith's primary romance is with the work that makes her single life both possible and worthwhile. “Just going out of the door in the morning, looking on the Square, waiting at the Bleecker Street station till the El train came screeching round the curve, riding with other wage-workers downtown, walking up the dirty worn steps to the office and the day's work—she liked it all.”

The newsroom is a boys' club, where the men are so unaccustomed
to the presence of women that they “dressed simply in pants and undershirt, with their suspenders hanging down.” Initially her being there is an annoyance; she can hear them grumble, “Here comes the lady copyreader,” when she approaches, but soon enough her diligence and professionalism win them over.

It intrigued me to see firsthand evidence that Neith's status as a single woman, far from being a detriment, expressly facilitated her career.

Unencumbered by the demands of a husband and children, she was free to devote all her time and energy to doing exactly what she wanted, which was to work as much as possible. The world opened up. “She was working hard, money was needed, and ideas for stories blossomed on every bush.”

Neith's little room—“her niche in the great city, like a swallow's nest on a cornice”—was not unlike how I'd imagined it: spare, with two windows, two chairs, and a tea table. She befriended a pair of fellow boarders, both newspaperwomen, and after work they'd get together and talk about their jobs. Some nights a shy Welsh painter would drop by, and he and Neith would sit “talking and drinking tea till the small hours of the morning.” Other evenings she'd visit the “miniature salons” hosted by women living alone in the narrow houses of the West Village, where coffee and cake was served, and “talk was about art.”

True to form, she has a few scathing words to say about marriage. At her cousin May's wedding, she's shocked by the bride's radiant smile:

Surely marriage was nothing to look so exuberant about, and coming down the aisle chatting and smiling to one another, as though they were dinner partners, seemed all wrong. Considering what marriage led to—children, bills, quarrels, the frightening forced association of two human beings—surely it was
nothing to be light-minded about. [Neith] thought there should be a touch of sackcloth and ashes about it.

I wasn't a woman who needed convincing that she wanted to be alone, but I did need help seeing clearly what that reality might look like, and evidence that there were indeed rewards to be gained if I was bold enough to pursue them—that, as Vivian Gornick had put it, “a world was waiting to welcome me if I was willing to enter it alone.” Neith Boyce offered all the proof I needed.