A Sunday Kind of
Love
LOVE! ATTAR OF LIBIDO
IN THE AIR! IT IS 8:45 A.M. THURSDAY morning in the IRT subway
station at 50th Street and Broadway and already two kids are hung
up in a kind of herringbone weave of arms and legs, which proves,
one has to admit, that love is not confined
to Sunday in New York. Still, the odds! All the faces come popping
in clots out of the Seventh Avenue local, past the King Size Ice
Cream machine, and the turnstiles start whacking away as if the
world were breaking up on the reefs. Four steps past the turnstiles
everybody is already backed up haunch to paunch for the climb up
the ramp and the stairs to the surface, a great funnel of flesh,
wool, felt, leather, rubber and steaming alumicron, with the blood
squeezing through everybody’s old sclerotic arteries in hopped-up
spurts from too much coffee and the effort of surfacing from the
subway at the rush hour. Yet there on the landing are a boy and a
girl, both about eighteen, in one of those utter, My Sin,
backbreaking embraces.
He envelops her not only with his arms
but with his chest, which has the American teen-ager concave shape
to it. She has her head cocked at a 90-degree angle and they both
have their eyes pressed shut for all they are worth and some
incredibly feverish action going with each other’s mouths. All
round them, tens, scores, it seems like hundreds, of faces and
bodies are perspiring, trooping and bellying up the stairs with
arteriosclerotic grimaces past a showcase full of such novel items
as Joy Buzzers, Squirting Nickels, Finger Rats, Scary Tarantulas
and spoons with realistic dead flies on them, past Fred’s
barbershop, which is just off the landing and has glossy
photographs of young men with the kind of baroque haircuts one can
get in there, and up onto 50th Street into a madhouse of traffic
and shops with weird lingerie and gray hair-dyeing displays in the
windows, signs for free teacup readings and a pool-playing match
between the Playboy Bunnies and Downey’s Showgirls, and then
everybody pounds on toward the Time-Life Building, the Brill
Building or NBC.
The boy and the girl just keep on
writhing in their embroilment. Her hand is sliding up the back of
his neck, which he turns when her fingers wander into the intricate
formal gardens of his Chicago Boxcar hairdo at the base of the
skull. The turn causes his face to start to mash in the ciliated
hull of her beehive hairdo, and so she rolls her head 180 degrees
to the other side, using their mouths for the pivot. But aside from
good hair grooming, they are oblivious to everything but each
other. Everybody gives them a once-over. Disgusting! Amusing! How
touching! A few kids pass by and say things like “Swing it, baby.”
But the great majority in that heaving funnel up the stairs seem to
be as much astounded as anything else. The vision of love at rush
hour cannot strike anyone exactly as romance. It is a feat, like a
fat man crossing the English Channel in a barrel. It is an earnest
accomplishment against the tide. It is a piece of slightly gross
heroics, after the manner of those knobby, varicose old men who
come out from some place in baggy shorts every year and run through
the streets of Boston in the Marathon race. And somehow that is the
gaffe against love all week long in New York, for everybody, not
just two kids writhing under their coiffures in the 50th Street
subway station; too hurried, too crowded, too hard, and no time for
dalliance. Which explains why the real thing in New York is, as it
says in the song, a Sunday kind of love.
There is Saturday, but Saturday is not
much better than Monday through Friday. Saturday is the day for
errands in New York. More millions of shoppers are pouring in to
keep the place jammed up. Everybody is bobbing around, running up
to Yorkville to pick up these arty cheeses for this evening, or
down to Fourth Avenue to try to find this Van Vechten book,
Parties, to complete the set for somebody, or off to the cleaner’s,
the dentist’s, the hairdresser’s, or some guy’s who is going to
loan you his station wagon to pick up two flush doors to make
tables out of, or over to some place somebody mentioned that is
supposed to have fabulous cuts of meat and the butcher wears a
straw hat and arm garters and is colorfully rude.
True, there is Saturday night, and
Friday night. They are fine for dates and good times in New York.
But for the dalliance of love, they are just as stupefying and
wound up as the rest of the week. On Friday and Saturday nights
everybody is making some kind of scene. It may be a cellar cabaret
in the Village where five guys from some place talk “Jamaican” and
pound steel drums and the Connecticut teen-agers wear plaid ponchos
and knee-high boots and drink such things as Passion Climax
cocktails, which are made of apple cider with watermelon balls
thrown in. Or it may be some cellar in the East 50’s, a
discotheque, where the alabaster kids come on in sleeveless
minksides jackets, tweed evening dresses and cool-it Modernismus
hairdos. But either way, it’s a scene, a production, and soon the
evening begins to whirl, like the whole world with the bed-spins,
in a montage of taxis, slithery legs slithering in, slithery legs
slithering out, worsted, pique, grins, eye teeth, glissandos,
buffoondos, tips, par lamps, doormen, lines, magenta ropes, white
dickies, mirrors and bar bottles, pink men and shawl-collared
coats, hatcheck girls and neon peach fingernails, taxis, keys,
broken lamps and no coat hangers … .
And, then, an unbelievable dawning;
Sunday, in New York.
George G., who writes “Z” ads for a
department store, keeps saying that all it takes for him is to
smell coffee being made at a certain point in the percolation. It
doesn’t matter where. It could be the worst death-ball hamburger
dive. All he has to do is smell it, and suddenly he finds himself
swimming, drowning, dissolving in his own reverie of New York’s
Sunday kind of love.
Anne A.’s apartment was nothing, he
keeps saying, and that was the funny thing. She lived in Chelsea.
It was this one room with a cameo-style carving of a bored Medusa
on the facing of the mantelpiece, this one room plus a kitchen, in
a brownstone sunk down behind a lot of loft buildings and truck
terminals and so forth. Beautiful Chelsea. But on Sunday morning by
10:30 the sun would be hitting cleanly between two rearview
buildings and making it through the old no-man’s-land of gas
effluvia ducts, restaurant vents, aerials, fire escapes, stairwell
doors, clotheslines, chimneys, skylights, vestigial lightning rods,
mansard slopes, and those peculiarly bleak, filthy and misshapen
backsides of New York buildings, into Anne’s kitchen.
George would be sitting at this rickety
little table with an oil-cloth over it. How he goes on about it!
The place was grimy. You couldn’t keep the soot out. The place was
beautiful. Anne is at the stove making coffee. The smell of the
coffee being made, just the smell … already he is turned on. She
had on a great terrycloth bathrobe with a sash belt. The way she
moved around inside that bathrobe with the sun shining in the
window always got him. It was the atmosphere
of the thing. There she was, moving around in that great fluffy
bathrobe with the sun hitting her hair, and they had all the time
in the world. There wasn’t even one flatulent truck horn out on
Eighth Avenue. Nobody was clobbering their way down the stairs in
high heels out in the hall at 10 minutes to 9.
Anne would make scrambled eggs, plain
scrambled eggs, but it was a feast. It was incredible. She would
bring out a couple of these little smoked fish with golden skin and
some smoked oysters that always came in a little can with ornate
lettering and royal colors and flourishes and some Kissebrot bread
and black cherry preserves, and then the coffee. They had about a
million cups of coffee apiece, until the warmth seemed to seep
through your whole viscera. And then cigarettes. The cigarettes
were like some soothing incense. The radiator was always making a
hissing sound and then a clunk. The sun was shining in and the fire
escapes and effluvia ducts were just silhouettes out there
someplace. George would tear off another slice of Kissebrot and
pile on some black cherry preserves and drink some more coffee and
have another cigarette, and Anne crossed her legs under her
terrycloth bathrobe and crossed her arms and drew on her cigarette,
and that was the way it went.
“It was the torpor, boy,” he says. “It was beautiful. Torpor is a
beautiful, underrated thing. Torpor is a luxury. Especially in this
stupid town. There in that kitchen it was like being in a perfect
cocoon of love. Everything was beautiful, a perfect
cocoon.”
By and by they would get dressed,
always in as shiftless a getup as possible. She would put on a big
heavy sweater, a raincoat and a pair of faded slacks that gripped
her like neoprene rubber. He would put on a pair of corduroy pants,
a crew sweater with moth holes and a raincoat. Then they would go
out and walk down to 14th Street for the Sunday paper.
All of a sudden it was great out there
on the street in New York. All those damnable millions who come
careening into Manhattan all week weren’t there. The town was
empty. To a man and woman shuffling along there, torpid, in the
cocoon of love, it was as if all of rotten Gotham had improved
overnight. Even the people looked better. There would be one of
those old dolls with little flabby arms all hunched up in a coat of
pastel oatmeal texture, the kind whose lumpy old legs you keep
seeing as she heaves her way up the subway stairs ahead of you and
holds everybody up because she is so flabby and decrepit … and
today, Sunday, on good, clean, empty 14th Street, she just looked
like a nice old lady. There was no one around to make her look
slow, stupid, unfit, unhip, expendable. That was the thing about
Sunday. The weasel millions were absent. And Anne walking along
beside him with a thready old pair of slacks gripping her like
neoprene rubber looked like possibly the most marvelous vision the
world had ever come up with, and the cocoon of love was perfect. It
was like having your cake and eating it, too. On the one hand, here
it was, boy, the prize: New York. All the buildings, the Gotham
spires, were sitting up all over the landscape in silhouette like
ikons representing all that was great, glorious and triumphant in
New York. And, on the other hand, there were no weasel millions
bellying past you and eating crullers on the run with the crumbs
flaking off the corners of their mouths as a reminder of how much
Angst and Welthustle
you had to put into the town to get any of that out of it for
yourself. All there was was the cocoon of love, which was complete.
It was like being inside a scenic Easter Egg where you look in and
the Gotham spires are just standing there like a little gemlike
backdrop.
By and by the two of them would be back
in the apartment sprawled out on the floor rustling through the
Sunday paper, all that even black ink appliquéd on big fat fronds
of paper. Anne would put an E. Power Biggs organ record on the
hi-fi, and pretty soon the old trammeler’s bass chords would be
vibrating through you as if he had clamped a diathermy machine on
your solar plexus. So there they would be, sprawled out on the
floor, rustling through the Sunday paper, getting bathed and
massaged by E. Power Biggs’ sonic waves. It was like taking peyote
or something. This marvelously high feeling would come over them,
as though they were psychedelic, and the most commonplace objects
took on this great radiance and significance. It was like old
Aldous Huxley in his drug experiments, sitting there hooking down
peyote buttons and staring at a clay geranium pot on a table, which
gradually became the most fabulous geranium pot in God’s world. The
way it curved … why, it curved 360 d-e-g-r-e-e-s! And the clay …
why, it was the color of the earth itself! And the top … It had a
r-i-m on it! George had the same feeling. Anne’s apartment … it was
hung all over the place with the usual New York working girl’s
modern prints, the Picasso scrawls, the Mondrians curling at the
corners … somehow nobody ever gets even a mat for a Mondrian print
… the Toulouse-Lautrecs with that guy with the chin kicking his
silhouette leg, the Klees, that Paul Klee is cute … why, all of a
sudden these were the most beautiful things in the whole hagiology
of art … the way that guy with the chin k-i-c-k-s t-h-a-t l-e-g,
the way that Paul Klee h-i-t-s t-h-a-t b-a-l-l … the way that
apartment just wrapped around them like a cocoon, with lint under
the couch like angel’s hair, and the plum cover on the bed lying
halfway on the floor in folds like the folds in a Tiepolo cherub’s
silks, and the bored Medusa on the mantelpiece looking like the
most splendidly, gloriously b-o-r-e-d Medusa in the face of
time!
“Now, that was love,” says George, “and
there has never been anything like it. I don’t know what happens to
it. Unless it’s Monday. Monday sort of happens to it in New
York.”