Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk Page 4

  On the television an adorable black boy in a red shirt deftly removes a cookie from the middle of a stack of a dozen without toppling it. A blonde girl with a simpleminded smile unscrews the two halves of her snack, just as I must have been doing in my kitchen as Phoebe looked on in mute feline horror. The camera pans a cellophane package, and then the voice is spelling out “O-R-E-O, goes great with imagination,” and I could just about scream.

  Imagination. I sip my Negroni.

  I don’t remember when I saw this ad before, but I certainly have seen it. I don’t remember wandering the grocer’s aisles with the idiotic jingle playing in my head, but no doubt I did. I don’t remember lifting the cookies from their shelf—thinking wistfully of my young Gian as I did so, I’m sure—and dropping them in my basket, but nevertheless they infiltrated my pantry. A nutritionally nugatory Trojan horse. And I ate them. I ate them while on the phone with my grown son.

  To sell a thing—goods, services, property—one tells a story. So we, the copywriters of my generation, were told, and it was true. Now, though, it seems the language of commerce has little use for stories. Stories take too much time. The span of attention—I see it like a bridge, a span of that sort—is shortening, shortening. Or being shortened.

  In my career I always assumed that advertising communicates with people in order to persuade them. But these ads don’t persuade; they barely bother to communicate. Why be clever? Why be novel? Why not simply find an asinine catchphrase and repeat it endlessly?

  No longer is there a bridge to span, a walking across from either side, seller to purchaser, a meeting in the middle. There’s just a stabbing at the base of the brain—so much the better if its targets aren’t even aware that it’s working. This seems to me like a great cheapening of all of us. Instead of appealing to my reason, my thrift, or my taste, those Oreos insinuated themselves into my unspoken desires and anxieties. My missing Gian back when he was young, still more my son.

  I have a great many unspoken desires and anxieties.

  Another commercial comes on, this one for Twix, clearly meant to be taken as happening in New York City. These ads are revolting and inaccurate, objectionable not just for being false but for being so much less interesting and vibrant than the city itself. The commercial shows an ersatz Jerome Robbins dance-routine vision of the city that is even less edgy than West Side Story. I do not see my city in it all.

  I want to tell Sam, who is down at the end of the bar, chatting with the couple, that his new TV and his Negroni have helped me to see what is so repulsive to me in these ads: the way they depict, and thereby encourage, this infantilization of the country. Through most of this century most of us Americans were treated as—or were encouraged to behave like—grownups, proper adults. But now we have turned, or are being turned, into a tribe of incorrigible brats.

  Given that the majority of communication to which we are subjected in a day consists of advertising, if nearly all of that advertising insists on regarding us as pampered children, what does that do to us? It winds us up with a godforsaken second term of smarmy granddad President Ronald Wilson Reagan for one. But I can’t say that to Sam. Gauche to bring up politics.

  Onscreen, a batch of housewives orgiastically fondle rolls of toilet tissue, then are instructed by a shopkeeper to “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin.”

  Sam comes back to check on me.

  “Sam,” I say. “I would like you to answer for me just one small question.”

  “Sure thing, Lily,” he says. “Fire away.”

  “Why has this establishment installed a television set?”

  “Not a fan of it?” Sam says.

  “Honestly not, no.”

  “Me neither,” he says. “But I guess the owner just thought it was due. Almost 1985 and time to get with the trend. People come into a bar, they expect to be able to watch the game, see the news.”

  “But the Yankees are terrible, and the news is appalling,” I say, and Sam laughs. “I don’t hate TV, just so you know. For example, Columbo is an excellent program. That Peter Falk.”

  “I love that guy,” says Sam, chomping an imaginary cigar and raising a hand to his forehead. “One more thing!”

  “I also enjoyed him in that Cassavetes movie, that Husbands.”

  “Really?” says Sam. “You don’t say. I heard it was depressing.”

  “Well, I think that was the intent,” I say. “But, Sam, to return to Columbo and my point, what I mean is that I watch Peter Falk in the privacy of my own living room. I do not go out into public gathering places to ignore other people while I watch him solve mysteries.”

  “I hear you,” says Sam. He nods toward the flashing box. “Seems like it’s already making people less likely to talk to each other. Or to me.”

  “It hurts your tips,” I say.

  “It hurts my feelings,” Sam says.

  “I suppose there’s no going back, Sam.”

  “Nope,” he says. “Time only goes in that one direction. Or at least that’s how we go in time. You heading to Times Square later to watch the ball drop?”

  I decide not to tell Sam that I dislike Times Square. Times Square, much like these TV ads, expects little of us, if not quite the worst. Instead of treating one like an overgrown six-year-old with impulse control issues and a huge piggy bank ready for the smashing, as the ads do, it treats one like an enormous genital. A penis with a wallet, if one prefers.

  Rather, I say, still telling the truth, “I have dinner reservations at five, so I ought to be going. May I settle up with you?”

  “Of course. Pleasure meeting you.”

  I doubt I’ll ever come back here, so I leave a tip that’s thrice the cost of the drink. Gian’s kids will inherit most of my money when I die, but I might as well spread it around as long as I’m still here.

  A Negroni is meant to be an apéritif, a little predinner something to whet the palate. This one was delicious but seems only to have filled me up more. It’s a quarter to five, and I have to start walking.

  I have enjoyed watching Sam for the same reason I think people enjoy watching sports: seeing someone in full command of what he is expected to do, doing it better than most would, and doing so with joy.

  My work used to be like art for me: giving form to the world. I sometimes have a vague intimation that people were better read and smarter once upon a time. I could write a divisional ad for luggage with perfect anaphora and no one would doubt its effectiveness:

  If you are a man who is apt to decide at eleven o’clock to catch the midnight boat …

  If you are a woman with a penchant for weekends …

  If you are a student about to embark by Student Third Class …

  * * *

  It likely would have ended with something along the lines of: “One of Macy’s wardrobe trunks will add to your comfort.”

  Now I don’t work anymore, and the world is uncomfortable.

  5

  Lunch Poems

  People didn’t always hate pigeons in the city—in fact, one could look up and catch glimpses of homing-pigeon lofts atop a lot of the lower buildings, owners doting on the dear little things, circling on their wings high above the rooftops. But people have come to make a hobby of detesting the birds, I think, because they’ve come to see that pigeons are much like people: dirty and murmuring, greedy and abundant, flocking in a corpus of such shit and weight that one fears they may permanently deface or crush whatever they congregate on.

  But ever since we learned about augury in our advanced Latin class at Goucher College, I’ve had a fondness for them. The omen I always augur from the rippling gray waves of their massed flight is straightforward: If I am in a place with that many pigeons, then it is probably urban enough for me to want to live there and be satisfied with the quantity of urbanity.

  Manhattan has always been such a place, never more so than that day in early November 1931, when I was out walking among both the pigeons and the people. I was on my lunch break, on my
way to my publisher’s office to drop off a corrected set of final proofs for my debut book, Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises. My first poetry collection was coming out. It even had a birthday: April 5, 1932. A springy book with a springtime release, it had to go to press in time to send out advance copies for review.

  I could have sent the proofs by messenger, but I wanted to walk south from my office at R.H. Macy’s to E.P. Dutton at 300 Fourth Avenue, and though Broadway was the straightest route, I wanted to take Sixth Avenue. It would be just twenty minutes by foot.

  I always took walks on my lunch breaks. That, in fact, was when I’d written most of the book. For me, a peaceful atmosphere devoid of noise and distractions is absolutely the worst place for poetry, likely to wind me up in a doomed attempt to stare down a blank page. My funny old brain, like those of many poets, has always done its best work sideways, seeking out tricky enjambments and surprising slant rhymes to craft lines capable of pulling their own weight. Taking to the pavement always helps me find new routes around whatever problem I’m trying to solve: phrases on signs, overheard conversations, the interplay between the rhythms of my verse and the rhythm of my feet.

  I was hardly the only poet in the city who worked like this, of course. Manhattan was full of lunchtime poets in those days, and stayed that way for many years thereafter. In the sixties, long after I had been forgotten, a clever young man even published a well-regarded book by that title—Lunch Poems—and although I wanted to resent him for jumping my claim, I could not; his lines were too full of the real sounds of people’s voices and the vitality of the street. Even that seems long ago now. I wonder where today’s lunch poets are, and whether I would know them by sight.

  On that November day, however, I strolled in youthful, cheerful ignorance of the tradition in which I had been participating. This particular walk was like an early Christmas present to myself: the street beneath the IRT Sixth Avenue Line. The Sixth Avenue Elevated. Chow mein restaurants and diners with names like The Griddle. Cinders and ash and noise sifting down, shaking the ground, rattling the buildings. Above me, the commuters getting disgorged at one of the overhead stops dislodged a deposit of pigeons like a plume of smoke. I would not want to live there, but the walk was magnificent.

  Do not think that I romanticized every moment of my life in the city. I cherished my work, but I worked so hard. Each day there’d come a moment when I’d be tired to death. Practically out of breath from exhaustion. A dull pencil, a dull mind, in need of a sharpener, in need of a drink, or at least an unthinking wandering down the hall among the other copywriters on the thirteenth floor. Outside crocuses flaunting their carefree colors, me inside and sunk with care.

  The walks—morning, lunch, and home at night—revived me.

  I thought at times that poetry might be an elegant way of screaming. Oh, that I could be a local swan in the park. Or the sparrow loafing on the window ledge.

  But I never quite grew tired of being reliable. Even once I had money to burn—and it didn’t take me long to have it—I still had to work. I wanted there to be something to do in life besides mate and reproduce and die, and advertising was that, or it was for a long while.

  When I wasn’t walking, I had a window and a rubber plant in the sun on a radiator. If I craned my neck, I could see a brief but valiant silver sliver of the Hudson River. I could make myself find window washers as serene as buttercups.

  Irksome pedestrian behavior, I knew, but if I turned and looked behind me, I could see the Empire State Building, just completed. So I turned and looked behind me.

  They’d cut the ribbon a few months back, in May. It had practically been a national holiday.

  My mother would not let me forget that although the World’s Tallest Building was in New York, President Hoover had pushed the button to turn on its lights remotely from my old hometown of Washington, D.C. She always wanted me to come back to stay, but I never would. One might be able to control the electricity of the World’s Tallest Building from the nation’s capital, but there one could not work, as I did, at the World’s Largest Store.

  I hurried on, among all the other workers out on their lunch breaks. The skyscraper was already being called the Empty State Building because of its lack of renters. And they couldn’t land dirigibles there as they’d planned because of the updrafts caused by the building’s very height. But I thought that its beauty outweighed its folly, and that a little grandiosity in the Depression wasn’t actively harming anyone, even if it wasn’t necessarily helping, either.

  In truth, I suppose I identified myself with that skyscraper, and my fortunes with its own, rising while others foundered and fell. Each new triumph that I achieved became at once more dear and more private every time I descended from my snug apartment or my bustling office to step into the desperate street, where a dog whistle of raw panic seemed to quiver increasingly in the air. The creeping disaster that had started on Wall Street—part sickness, part madness, like a peril from Poe—had come finally to infect the whole country. People lost jobs and stopped buying. Prices plunged. Those lucky enough to still be working hoarded their pay, reluctant to buy today what they knew would be cheaper tomorrow, until the contagion took their jobs, too, and they joined the crowds wondering where this year’s Thanksgiving dinner would come from. Among many other things, the Depression changed how I felt about crowds: When I first came to the city, a line of people often helped me discover an exciting premiere or a big sale; in 1931, such queues more often ended at soup kitchens or collapsing banks.

  The lines of automobiles on Sixth Avenue, however, still struck me as merry. It was pleasing to be alongside the stream of cars as they rushed uptown and down—or tried to rush. I have always been comforted by vehicle traffic, by being near but not in it. Taxis kept honking, trying to see if I wanted a lift, but I kept waving them away. What I wanted was that walk: slate and windy, the sky overcast but not threatening rain.

  I enjoyed walking outside even in bad weather. I took my lunchly strolls even when the snow was hard and sharp—little ice pellets flying at one’s face like fingernail clippings—as it had been that first year here, back in 1926.

  I spent my first Christmas in the city alone. Alone, but not lonely; in the state of being solitary but not the condition of wishing myself otherwise. Solitude enrobed me like a long, warm coat.

  Eating Christmas dinner by myself in a restaurant far from home and hearth, I wondered whether lightning would strike me if I dared to take mushrooms and a steak instead of turkey, cranberries, and buttered rolls. I ate the steak. I ate it rare. Mother could not care about what Mother did not know. Depraved, depraved. But Christmas was the copywriter’s most frantic season—Saks and Hearns and R.H. Macy’s, of course, all hitching their copy to the Star of Bethlehem. Profane, profane. On subsequent holidays I’d been able to head southward to the welcoming bosom of family once more, but that first year, a mere forty-dollar-a-week assistant, I’d wanted most of all to impress my employers, and impress them I did. What an extravagance that steak had seemed! And yet how meager compared to the bounty spread on nearby tables, where supped financiers and stock operators. Five years later those fellows were all gone, their capital vanished like so much cigar smoke, while I churned out the only commodities that still held their value: courage, poise, humor, and hope.

  If I’d kept walking down Sixth, past the turnoff to my editor Artie’s office, I’d have hit Ladies’ Mile, the department stores which Artie, a sharp but nostalgic man, still called dry goods stores. Faint and fading, R.H. Macy’s aging competitors. But of course I turned left at Twenty-Third Street to head for my destination: the sixteen-story Beaux-Arts building in which Dutton made its home.

  I admired E.P. Dutton as a publisher inherently, or else I’d never have sent them Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises. I also admired their current president, Mr. John Macrae, who embodied the sort of up-by-the-bootstraps narrative that is so appealing—and so vanishingly rare, when one actually considers who else has done it. My fat
her found his rags-to-riches story of greater interest, or at least greater ease of understanding, than the basic fact that my book was to be published. So did my mother, as she disliked my poetry writing even more than my writing advertising. “You sound so unhappy in those poems!” she would say. My father was proud, my mother embarrassed.

  Macrae had started as an office boy at the company in the 1880s and remained aboard in various increasingly lofty capacities until Dutton himself died in 1923, at which point Macrae ascended to the presidency. His commitment to taking the press in a more refined direction was why my books had a home there. I never dealt with him personally, but his staff was superb.

  Artie was waiting for me, and I was happy to see him, his drooping, almost totally gray mustache betraying his age, which was better concealed by his Brilliantined hair, still abundant and mostly black. His mustache and adroit civility reminded me of my father, though Father was an attorney and not a man of letters.

  My editor’s given name was Arthur Eugene Stanley, and he went by A.E. professionally. So Housmanian, I’d told him upon our first meeting, and he’d smiled at the comparison: It turned out he’d studied Classics with Housman, very briefly when he was a scholar abroad at Cambridge. But he was always Artie to me, even though in his formality he rarely called me anything but “my fair Miss Boxfish,” courtliness being the gear that his engine idled in. He was as courteous to the office boys as he was to me, but he also managed to make me see that I was as dear to him as he was to my own heart.

  There was a market for poetry then. My verses had appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Life, and The Saturday Evening Post, and on and on—a list that had not only published but also paid me exquisitely. And yet Artie was the first editor who had believed in my verse as a body—an oeuvre, as he’d written in response to my query letter—and his assistance in editing and assembling Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises had proven invaluable. Starting from the moment he let me know that Dutton would offer me a contract, his assessment of my compositions was always praiseful, perceptive, and farsighted, even—indeed, especially—when we didn’t see eye to eye.