Gotham Diary:
Closed For Renovations
28 March 2013
When I say that I’m having a “low day” today, I don’t mean to sound alarms or elicit sympathy. I have at least one low day every week, and I don’t see how I couldn’t. Low days are for the back office of my brain to sort out all the incoming. Ever since high school, when I returned from summer vacation to find that I actually understood the subjunctive mood, a matter to which I had given no thought for months, I have known that my brain needs time off, time away. I don’t need months anymore; a day in bed will do. As I myself do not require a day in bed, I thought that today would be a great day for lunch at the Seahorse Tavern. I got dressed after our cleaner left (now the apartment is ready for Easter dinner, but for a bit of superficial tidying), and headed over to 85th Street. There was something about the lighting at the Seahorse that always made it look closed from the outside during daylight, but today, it really was closed — “for renovations,” as the euphemism has it. C’est fini! The Seahorse ran for about two years, and I soon learned that it was much nicer at lunch than at dinner. At dinner, the room was even noisier than it had been as the New Panorama Café. At lunch, it was pretty quiet (too quiet, it seems), but more than that, there was the view. I would take a table by the window and sit with my back to the room. I would look up, now and then, from my reading, and lose myself in the local. Once, I remember writing, I felt I was sitting on the edge of a backstreet canal in Venice — last spring, I think. The windows were open and the whole immediate world was vernal. Today, it wouldn’t have been so pleasant. But it was what I needed, on my low days: sitting by the window and looking out on the passersby and their incalculable missions, my attention completely diverted from the static and buzz of neural reset. I will miss it.
Soon, however, I hope to be making salads for lunch on the balcony, which it seems certain we’ll regain access to within a month. Instead of gobbling them down, as I tend to do at meals taken alone at home, I shall try to take my time, enjoying the view. Passersby there will be none, but there are always planes landing at LaGuardia, and I know the two flight paths that come in from the south.
***
When her children went off to school (or thereabouts), Elizabeth Bogert Stille took a job a Reader’s Digest, condensing books. She had done a lot of work as a copy editor, and at one publication she was known as “the queen of the cutters.” It embarrassed her to work at the Digest, not least because of its owners’ staunch support of the Republican Party’s sweep to the right, but it was steady work, and she had to show up in Pleasantville (Chappaqua actually, of course) only three days in the week. This left her the long weekends to spend either in town or at her refuge in Great Barrington.
Reading what her son, Alexander, has to say about growing up on West 11th Street, collecting coats from the great and the good people who came to his parents’ cocktail parties, I saw the awful truth of my life: I grew up at Reader’s Digest. By the time I came along, Bronxville had lost the minor legion of New Yorker writers and other “creatives” who had lived there between the wars (including Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis — that improbable and unhappy couple). The Kennedys were gone, too, so the Village seemed designed to protect its inhabitants from any contact with interesting people. (That is undoubtedly why Jack Paar lived there — he knew he’d be left alone.) There was never the remotest chance that a house down the street would be blown up by an amateur Weather Underground bomb — as happened, of course, to Stille, foreshadowed moment he mentioned that Dustin Hoffman lived on his block. (After the explosion, which tore a hole in the actor’s living room that exposed it to the open, “we never saw Dustin Hoffman again.”)
Life is very, very unfair.