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

peace, began traveling regularly to Japan to consult the Zen healer who has given him the wherewithal to get out of bed in the morning in New York. He must be sixty by now.
    Standing here on Fourteenth Street, a Con Ed drill blasting in our ears, Victor croons at me, “Dahling, sweetness, beautiful girl, how are you, still living in the same building?”
    â€œYes,” I reply.
    â€œStill doing journalistic work?”
    â€œNo, Victor, I teach now.”
    He pushes his chin out at me as though to say, “Tell me.”
    I tell him. He listens intently as the words fall rapidly from my mouth, nodding steadily as I speak of the deprivation of spirit I suffer living for months at a time in one university town or another.
    â€œIt’s exile!” I cry at last. “Exile pure and simple.”
    Victor nods and nods. His brown eyes are dissolving in watery pain. He knows exactly what I mean, oh, no one in the world will ever know better than he what I mean. His face goes dreamy. My own starts feeling compromised. Car brakes screech, sirens pierce the air, the Con Ed drill stops and starts, stops and starts. No matter. Victor and I are now quarantined on this island of noise, spellbound by matters of the soul.
    â€œBut you know, dahling?” he says ever so softly. “I have discovered there’s a lot of love out there.”
    â€œOh yes,” I reply quickly, suddenly aware of the harm my relentless negatives may be doing.
    â€œA lot of love,” he repeats reverentially.
    â€œAbsolutely,” I agree. “Absolutely.”
    The Con Ed drill starts up again.
    â€œI mean, people care .” By now Victor’s face is radiant. “They really do.”
    And it is me who is nodding and nodding.
    Victor puts his hand on my arm, leans toward me, looks searchingly into my eyes, and delivers himself of his wisdom.
    â€œDahling,” he whispers in my ear, “we’ve got to let it go.”
    Yes, yes, oh yes, I know just what you mean.
    â€œLet it all go .”
    *   *   *
    After 9/11, an atmosphere difficult to describe enveloped the city and refused to abate. For weeks on end the town felt vacant, confused, uprooted. People walked around looking spaced-out, as though permanently puzzled by something they couldn’t put a name to. The smell was eerie: like nothing anybody could describe exactly, but when your nostrils inhaled the air, you felt anxious. And all the while a kind of otherworldly quiet prevailed. In restaurants, theaters, museums; shops, traffic, the crowd itself—all seemed muted, inert, even immobilized. A man who loved New York movies found himself turning the television set off when one came on. A woman who enjoyed seeing photographs of the city in a storefront she passed daily now flinched as she approached the shop. The pictures, she said, felt like “before,” and nothing “before” gave comfort.
    One soft, clear evening about six weeks after the fateful day, I was crossing Broadway, somewhere in the Seventies. Halfway across, the light changed. I stopped on the island that divides the boulevard and did what everyone does: looked down the street for a break in the traffic so that I could safely run the light. But there was no traffic: not a car in sight. I stood there, hypnotized by the grand and awful emptiness. I couldn’t recall the time—except for a blizzard, perhaps—when Broadway had ever, even for a moment, been free of oncoming traffic. It looked like a scene from another time. Just like a Berenice Ab—, I started thinking, and instantly the thought cut itself short. In fact, I wrenched myself from it. I saw that it was frightening me to even consider “a scene from another time.” As though some fatal break had occurred between me and the right to yearn over that long-ago New York alive in a Berenice Abbot photograph. That night I understood what it was that had been draining out of