The Odd Woman and the City Read Online Free PDF

couch.
    â€œThe other day,” I tell him, “I was accused of being judgmental. What a laugh, I thought. You should have known me ten years ago. But you know? I’m tired of apologizing for being judgmental. Why shouldn’t I be judgmental? I like being judgmental. Judgmental is reassuring. Absolutes. Certainties. How I have loved them! I want them back again. Can’t I have them back again?”
    Leonard laughs and drums his fingers restlessly along the wooden armrest of his beautiful couch.
    â€œEveryone used to seem so grown up,” I say. “Nobody does anymore. Look at us. Forty, fifty years ago we would have been our parents. Who are we now?”
    Leonard gets up and crosses the room to a closed cabinet, opens it, and takes out a torn package of cigarettes. My eyes follow him in surprise. “What are you doing,” I say, “you’ve stopped smoking.” He shrugs and extracts a cigarette from the package.
    â€œThey passed,” Leonard says, “that’s all. Fifty years ago you entered a closet marked ‘marriage.’ In the closet was a double set of clothes, so stiff they could stand up by themselves. A woman stepped into a dress called ‘wife’ and the man stepped into a suit called ‘husband.’ And that was it. They disappeared inside the clothes. Today, we don’t pass. We’re standing here naked. That’s all.”
    He strikes a match and holds it to his cigarette.
    â€œI’m not the right person for this life,” I say.
    â€œWho is?” he says, exhaling in my direction.
    *   *   *
    At ten in the morning, two old women are walking ahead of me on West Twenty-Third Street, one wearing a pink nylon sweater, the other a blue. “Did you hear?” the woman in pink says. “The pope appealed to capitalism to be kind to the poor of the world.” The woman in blue responds, “What did capitalism say?” As we’re crossing Seventh Avenue, the woman in pink shrugs. “So far it’s quiet.”
    At noon, a man at a grocery counter stands peering at the change in his hand. “You gave me $8.06,” he says to the young woman behind the cash register. “I don’t think that’s right.” She looks at the coins and says, “You’re right. It shoulda been $8.60,” and gives the man the correct change. He continues to stare at his open palm. “You put the six and the zero in the wrong place,” he says. “It shoulda been the other way around.” Now it’s the woman who stares. When at last the man turns away, I shake my head sympathetically. “What I put up with all day long,” she says with a sigh as I pile my purchases on the counter. “Would you believe this? A guy comes up to the counter with an item. It’s marked wrong. I can see right away, it’s the wrong amount. I tell him, ‘Listen, that’s the wrong price. Believe me, I know the prices, I been working in the store two years.’ He says to me, ‘That’s nothing to be proud of,’ and he marches out.”
    At three in the afternoon, a distinguished-looking couple is standing under the awning of the posh Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. The man has iron-gray hair and regular features and is wearing an expensive overcoat. The woman is alcoholic thin, has blond, marcelled hair, and is wearing mink. She looks up at him as I pass them, and her face lights up. “It’s been a wonderful afternoon,” she says. The man embraces her warmly and nods directly into her face. The scene excites my own gratitude: how delicious to see people of the moneyed classes acting with simple humanity! Later I run into Sarah, a tired socialist of my acquaintance, and I tell her about the couple on Park Avenue. She listens with her customary Marxist moroseness and says, “You think she knows from a wonderful afternoon?”
    *   *   *
    In the