Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [3]
I’ll never know why she chose me. As I discovered later, she could have taken her pick from any number of men. Perhaps she saw something in me that I hadn’t seen myself—or something she could do with me that I would never have thought of.
Nineteen forty-six was a good time—perhaps the best time—in the twentieth century. The war was over, the Depression had ended, and everyone was rediscovering the simple pleasures. A war is like an illness and when it’s over you think you’ve never felt so well. There’s a terrific sense of coming back, of repossessing your life.
New York City had never been so attractive. The postwar years were like a great smile in its sullen history. The Village was as close in 1946 as it would ever come to Paris in the twenties. Rents were cheap, restaurants were cheap, and it seemed to me that happiness itself might be cheaply had. The streets and bars were full of writers and painters and the kind of young men and women who liked to be around them. In Washington Square would-be novelists and poets tossed a football near the fountain and girls just out of Ivy League colleges looked at the landscape with art history in their eyes. People on the benches held books in their hands.
Though much of the Village was shabby, I didn’t mind. I thought all character was a form of shabbiness, a wearing away of surfaces. I saw this shabbiness as our version of ruins, the relic of a short history. The sadness of the buildings was literature. I was twenty-six, and sadness was a stimulant, even an aphrodisiac.
But while squalor was all right outside, as an urban atmosphere, domestic dirt brought out the bourgeois in me. It was the first flaw in my new paradise. As far as I could see, Sheri never cleaned the apartment, and for me to do it would have seemed like a breach of contract, or a criticism. I tried to ignore it, to be philosophical. Perhaps the place is squalid, I said to myself, but it’s not sordid. What is dirt? I asked, just as in college we had asked, What is matter? Could this substance grinding under my feet be regarded as a neutral element, like sand? Was it like camping to live so close to dirt? After all, I argued, isn’t art itself a kind of dirt?
The first night I spent on Jones Street, I woke up before dawn because I had to pee. I shook Sheri and asked her where she kept the key for the toilet in the hall.
Pee in the sink, she said.
There are dishes in the sink.
They have to be washed, anyway.
But I found it difficult to pee in the sink, because the idea excited me.
It was the same way with the bathtub in the kitchen. I could never take a dispassionate view of it; it always remained for me a kind of exhibitionism to sit in a bathtub in front of somebody else. I was the only son of a Catholic family from the French Quarter in New Orleans, and no one is so sexually demented as the French bourgeoisie, especially when you add a colonial twist.
Perhaps the hardest test for me was the way Sheri dressed. Under her outer clothes, there was only a padded bra, because she was ashamed of the smallness of her breasts. She wore no underpants and no stockings, even in winter, and I was tormented by this absence of underpants. When we walked down the street, I imagined her most secret part grinning at the world. For all I knew, she might suddenly pull up her skirt and show herself to the people and the buildings. What if the wind blew; what if she slipped and fell?
She did fall once. It was in a stationery store on West Fourth Street and she fell because she bumped into W. H. Auden. In fact, they both fell. Auden lived around the corner on Cornelia Street and I often saw him scurrying along with his arms full of books and papers. He looked like a man running out of a burning building with whatever of his possessions he’d been able to grab.