Chapter One
It was the spring in New York, that uncertain season. I had just flown in from the other coast. I heard there had been snow in April in New York, followed by incessant rain, and then one of those heat waves in the high 90s that occur once in a century. There was a massive thunderstorm the night I arrived to visit the city in late May. At my hotel the security guy and the doorman discussed sports, in their common humanity, watching the tremendous storm. Maybe you have to live in the desert to really appreciate rain. The town I had just come from on the other coast, not far from the Mexican border, was very parched. Every day the sun blazed out of a clear blue sky, a sun that could be destructive of all you have known and believed. But it had not destroyed this: my loyalty to the East Coast and the green Atlantic.
The weather in New York, unlike the desert, was volatile. The next morning it cleared up completely. I headed down Fifth Avenue in the sterling spring day among the fascinating men in horn-rim glasses with achievements and bow ties. New York was suave. Men walked down the streets smoking cigars while talking on cellular telephones. But they didn't do that until I recently moved away after living there for fifteen years. Wall Street was not doing well when I lived in New York. The whole place at that time had hit a new low. Then when I left, New York suddenly achieved a pinnacle of glory: the stock market went through the roof, the Yankees won the World Series, crime plummeted, Broadway had its best season in seven decades. The Bronx botanical garden was recultivated. The Brooklyn botanical garden was renovated. Times Square was revitalized. And New York characters from opera stars to doormen were constantly celebrated in huge articles heralding the renaissance in the New York Times, which I read from my remote location, as I had since been exiled to a barbarous region of the world.
Some people have a song — as in, "They're Playing Our Song." I had a place. My husband and I used to go there every Saturday night when we lived in New York. It was a dive on Fifty-first Street in Hell's Kitchen, an unpretentious French bistro. I thought I would go there for old times' sake. As usual they were playing French accordion music, the kind that at first sounds exotic and elegant and reminds you of a Mediterranean port in North Africa at a Moroccan café, where Marlene Dietrich would perform in the thirties, while sun-drenched legionnaires march off toward the desert...but as it goes on, you suddenly realize that it's kind of grating, and they could actually play it in a torture camp to get you to confess.
As usual there were a number of empty tables. Probably their former occupants had confessed and run out screaming. I took an inconspicuous table in a corner.
The place was run by a French family who had emigrated from the Riviera. You would think they would have preferred the Riviera to Hell's Kitchen. There was an elderly grandmother who did all the cooking, and on her breaks sat chain-smoking at the bar gazing despairingly into her drink. There was a dark handsome grandson who was obsessed with the Riviera and had painted a vast and elaborate mural of the Mediterranean that was ingeniously wrapped along the walls. Assorted relatives performed the duties of proprietor, waitress, bartender — against the endless expanse of the Riviera depicted by the grandson — and lived above the restaurant, bound by the morose yet occasionally exhilarating malaise of the émigré.
A sudden glamour descended on the place, as across the room I saw someone I knew. My heart leapt up unexpectedly. I took out a card and wrote a short note. I called the waiter and asked him to deliver it.
"To Mr. Lieberman. He's that man over there in the black suit with the white hair," I said.
"Oh, I know who Mr. Lieberman is," said the waiter. "Everyone knows who Mr. Lieberman is."
So he brought Mr. Lieberman my card. "Fleming Ford" — my name was engraved — "sends regards," I wrote beneath.
Mr. Lieberman turned slowly to scan the room and signaled suavely at me, made a brief tense sign, as if he were bidding at auction. He had an air of sangfroid. A skeptical glance, a brief suave sign, an eyebrow slightly raised — this was the extent of the impact you could have on such a man. Nothing would surprise him, you felt. You could ride in on a mule and it would not surprise him. You would get the eyebrow slightly raised, the grave wry glance.
He was tall and towering, with a broad-shouldered grace, white-haired, bow-tied, the works. He could have been seventy-five. He could have been sixty. It was impossible to tell. But I knew that he had seen the last of seventy. He looked as if he would hold steady through storms, and it looked as if there had been many, for he had the quality of a gallant tortured soul. You knew instantly, when you saw him, that something sad had happened to him. But you could see the struggle: as if he had a long adversarial relationship with his grief, and had reached a sort of smooth agreement with it. It was an uneasy peace and had been hard won.
Some things are ingrained with truth, I was thinking: it is never easy to learn the story of a man's life. Mr. Lieberman was a type who scented out trouble, for he had a need to try to fix things. He must mend a broken wing, protect the weak, resurrect the failure. Mr. Lieberman was a mogul. He owned newspapers, among other things, on both coasts. I had worked for him when I first came to New York fifteen years ago, in what seemed like another life. Soon after my recent remove to the other coast, I heard that he had lost his wife. It was known that he was not taking it well. For such a man to have been in love at all must have been frustrating because his way was to be a loner. Now he was alone again. But the mechanism of his heart went haywire. It would prove that he could not stay in New York, where he and his wife had lived together. Mr. Lieberman was British, and he may have wanted to go home, but he could not bring himself to do that, for some reason, and so went even farther from his home.
He suddenly turned back to stare at me across the room as if he had forgotten something. Then the skeptical glance was gone. He had the most tortured eyes that I have ever seen.
But that was for Adelaide. His deep blue eyes transmitted an electrifying sorrow. It was a pain so deep that it cast him adrift. At the same time he also had a vitality, as anyone in his still rising position would, conglomerating empires, acquiring companies, consolidating his dominions. He was a dazzling individual.
I did not know it then, but this moment was only to prolong my exile to a barbarous region of the world.
For I too would go so far — "When shall we meet again, / Dearest and best, / Thou going easterly, / I, to the West?"
Excerpted from Malaise by Nancy Lemann. Copyright © 2002 by Nancy Lemann. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright © 2002 Nancy Lemann.
All rights reserved.
