As If: An Autobiography

4. Rehearsing the Impossible: The Widening Gyre

four Rehearsing the Impossible the widening gyre They want to put up a fence now, and lock it, to keep out the vagrants, the druggies, the dealers, the homeless ready for sleep, on the benches or withered grass, the late-hour couples making out, or even the midnight strollers, but when I ‹rst entered Washington Square it was as in Henry James, on an autumn afternoon, with pigeons and hawthorn foliage, honey locust and ambered maples, but hardly anyone there, not even the chess players, now juxtaposed with the dog run as part of a daily spectacle. It was Bea who took me into the park, down from Fifth Avenue and through the triumphal arch, and we sat on the rim of the fountain, where there was once a potter’s ‹eld, and then the site of a public gallows. The history came later, with the reading of Henry James (who didn’t like the square). There were no high-rise buildings behind us, nor anything much aloft on the Greenwich Village side except the square belfry of the Judson Memorial Church, not yet the activist center of the performative counterculture. We had actually done a little tour, from where Bea lived on Cornelia Street, across Sixth Avenue, then above the park to East Eighth Street with its bakeries, pet shop, shoe stores, dress, lingerie, fabric, and bauble shops— and the upstairs studio of one of her friends, aristocratic, brilliant, gay (not the word for it then), a painter who made jewelry—over to the numbingly overstocked bookstore, which in its attention-de‹cit disordering catalytic surplus seemed to have everything, the new poets, experimental prose, the offbeat books and journals that I knew I ought to be reading. 101 P When I made that ‹rst call to Bea, there seemed a moment’s surprise, then even before I asked, an invitation to come and visit, to which I said without a beat I could come that very night—of course, if she wasn’t busy. And then I couldn’t believe it when she said, sure, she’d be there. When it came time to go, I put on a jacket, took off a jacket, and settled on a sweater, but instead of taking the subway I borrowed my father’s car, that aging blue Pontiac—yet still devoutly washed, simonized, cared for like an heirloom—and drove it to the Village. She lived in a slim three-story building, with brick and mortar front, and a chipped-brick inscription, a rather dysgenic ›ower, between the iron grills on her windows, there on the lower ›oor, a narrow ›ight up from the street. (That Auden was a window over, in an adjoining building, didn’t quite impress me yet, because I barely knew who he was.) As for her apartment, it was really a tiny space, a living room where she also slept, on a convertible couch, with her son Dick in the bedroom, and a smaller than broom-closet kitchen. Still, it was Greenwich Village, and there was an aura to that, attested to, moreover, by an abstract landscape over the couch and another beside the door, somewhat Cézanneish paintings in an enshrouding light. “Albert’s,” she said, when I asked who did them, which was the ‹rst time, actually, that I’d heard anything about him. Small as the living room was, it hardly diminished her, or those qualities I’d felt at Stanford, in part through her presence on stage. And while it made her all the more appealing, and I barely intuited it then, there was through all seeming assurance a self-doubting reserve which—even that ‹rst night in the Village, in that ill-lit shadowy room—instead of subtracting from it, brought out the elegance too, in what she said and didn’t say, as a penumbra of containment. She had her trials over the years, but even then, though she could be vivacious, outgoing, and funny—even surprisingly clownish, Laurel berated by Hardy, scratching her head with a grin— the repose came back at will and she knew how to hold her peace. I hadn’t seen the red greatcoat yet or the voluminous scarves, but even when simply dressed she was very subtly in fashion, although I’m not quite sure that I caught it when she opened the door that night, because Dick came out of the bedroom and, as she was reminding him that we’d met, took...