The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick Read Free Book Online Page A

awakened feeling festive. Now I stood in the shower stricken, spots of grief dancing in the air before my eyes, the old loneliness seeping back in.
    Who is he? I thought.
    He’s not the right one, I thought.
    If only I had the right one, I thought.
    A year later we were divorced.
    I was still my mother’s daughter. Now she was the negative and I the print, but there we both were: alone at last with not the right one.
    I did not understand until years after I’d left Gerald that I was born to find the wrong man, as were Dorothea and Isabel. That’s what we were in business for. If this had not been the case, we’d all have found some useful work to do and long forgotten the whole question of the right man. But we did not forget it. We never forgot it. The elusive right man became a staple in our lives, his absence a defining experience.
    It was then that I understood the fairy tale about the princess and the pea. She wasn’t after the prince, she was after the pea. That moment when she feels the pea beneath the twenty mattresses, that is her moment of definition. It is the very meaning of her journey, why she has traveled so far, what she has come to confirm: the unholy dissatisfaction that will keep life permanently at bay.
    So it was with my mother, who spent her years sighing for the absent right one. And so it was with me.
    We were in thrall to neurotic longing, all of us—Dorothea and Isabel, my mother and I, the fairy-tale princess. Longing was what attracted us, what compelled our deepest attention. The essence, indeed, of a Chekhovian life. Think of all those Natashas sighing through three long acts for what is not, and can never be. While one (wrong) man after another listens sympathetically to the recital of a dilemma for which there is no solution.
    Gerald and I were Natasha and the Doctor forever talking, talking, talking. Behind Natasha’s enchanting conversation lies a passivity of monumental proportion—for which the Doctor is the perfect foil. Inevitably, Natasha and the Doctor must part. They have only been keeping each other company, spending their equally insufficient intent together.
    *   *   *
    A man and a woman sitting side by side on a bus strike up a conversation. She is black, middle-aged, well dressed; he is white, also middle-aged, slightly wild-eyed. Apropos of nothing he says to her, “I’m spiritual. I’m a very spiritual person. I accept all religions. All religions are okay by me. I hold only one thing against Christianity. Why they hate the Jews for killing Christ.” The woman turns full face to him and says, “Y’know? I’ve always thought the same thing. After all, it was the Romans who killed him. Why don’t they blame the Italians?”
    *   *   *
    If life begins to feel like the sum of its disabilities, I take a walk up to Times Square—home to the savviest underclass in the world—where I quickly regain perspective. On Broadway at Forty-Third Street on a windy evening in winter, a black man on a makeshift platform is speaking into a microphone. Ranged around the platform are perhaps a dozen black men and women. The man at the mike sounds like a television broadcaster. People hunched over against the wind are rushing past him, but he goes on speaking in the smooth, imperturbable tones of the evening news anchor. “It has come to my attention lately,” he says, “that sales are up on suntan lotion and sunblock. Now who do you think are the customers for this item? I’ll tell you who. White people, that’s who. Not you or I, brother. No, it’s white people.” His voice deepens. “Now what do you think of a people who keep telling us they’re superior, and…” Without warning he pauses, his eyes squeeze shut, and he screams, “They can’t even make it in the fuckin’ sun!” Back to broadcast news. “You—” He