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

points calmly at the heads of the fleeing crowd. “The white people. Don’t even belong. On the planet.”
    *   *   *
    When I ran into Manny Rader on Third Avenue, I hadn’t seen him in twenty-five years. He was the older brother of the girl in the neighborhood who’d been my best friend when we were twelve. After I turned fourteen, he’d begun staring at me. As soon as I saw him on Third Avenue, I knew I had to have him.
    I have a penchant for men I’ve grown up with. They’re like chloroform on a cloth laid against my face: I inhale them, I burrow into them, I want to bury myself in them. When I was a kid I wanted to be them—these dark, skinny, street-smart boys with hot eyes and ignorant passions who came together every day at the top of the block to laugh, curse, and kibitz themselves into existence—I never got over not being one of them. It wasn’t that I envied them their shared act of imagination—the one they seemed to have inherited, it came so naturally to them—it was that it frightened me when I realized I wasn’t one of them, and never would be. I felt imperiled then: without world and without self.
    â€œWho’d have thought you’d turn out a writer,” Manny said to me on Third Avenue, a bemused expression on his face. And then he laughed. “You were such a pain in the ass as a kid, always hanging around where you weren’t wanted.” His laugh brought it all back to me, made me see those feelings again as though they were standing in the air before me. He had had this rich, deep laugh I used to hear when I’d pass the boys standing on the corner. Only his friends had made him laugh like that, never the girls.
    We fell into bed and astonished ourselves with a strong, sweet happiness neither of us could have dreamed was coming. One afternoon when we were making love, I went down on him. As I came up I said, “The dream of every boy in the Bronx, that the girl down the street will suck him off.” Manny lay back on the bed and laughed that unguarded, in-the-world laugh of his. It thrilled me more than anything our bodies were doing together. I stared at the wall beyond his head, thinking, I’m safe. Now he’ll never leave me. But of course I didn’t really think Manny was going to do the leaving; if anything, it would be me who skipped.
    He had walked away from everything but the women all his life. He’d gone to college on a scholarship, then left in his third year to join the army; he’d entered business with a known embezzler, and within two years the business had gone under; he rose from technician to researcher in a biology lab, then got into a fight with his boss and quit; he worked on a large national magazine where he was quickly made reporter, then editor, and then fired because he disappeared for a week without explanation. On the block he was written off as a congenital fuckup. “He can’t find himself,” his mother moaned. “That’s a nice way of putting it,” his father sneered.
    But his mother was right: Manny couldn’t find himself. Whatever the circumstance that Manny found himself in, he couldn’t find himself in it. He never repeated the same kind of work twice. Each job remained just that, a job. None of them ever became more than an apprenticeship. The events of his life refused to accumulate into experience, and he would not act as though they had. This inner refusal of his seemed to be his only gift. Certainly, it was the talent he pursued. By the time we began sleeping together, he was starting to tell himself that refusenik was his condition and his destiny. Even though he knew better, and being with me made him see even more clearly what he already knew.
    When Manny and I hooked up, I was in a slump. That’s how I put it. “I’m in a slump.” Manny looked at me. “You’re in a slump?” he said. “What