Maynard and Jennica

The skinny kid says, “Hey lady, he lying.” This is a tone of voice I recognize from my students—the sanctimony of a child who is trying to cover up his own misbehavior.

His chubbier friend says, “Shut up, son.”

But the skinny kid insists, “No. This is what happen.” And then he tells a tale to be reckoned with: he tells the conductor that he and his friends were outside the train, that the girls were teasing me, and that I got mad and pulled the brake so that I could make a citizen’s arrest. A citizen’s arrest—such is the fancy of youth. But in the midst of this tale, and timed perfectly to corroborate, the door between our car and the next car up lurches open and the three black girls appear—looking for their lost escorts, no doubt. The instant they see the conductor, all three girls squeal “Oh shit!” and scurry back the way they came—letting the heavy door lurch shut behind them. But they had served destiny’s purpose: they had corroborated the boy’s story.

The conductor may be masterful at being bossy, but—she’s gotten in over her head here. She grabs the overhead bars, blocking up the entire aisle with her skepticism and her grimace. The train is slowing down, as the trains always do in that last stretch before Grand Central. The two black kids clearly think they’ve told the truth, but they do not know what the adults are going to do.

I say, “Madam, I have no idea what these children saw.”

The skinny boy says again, “He lying—he the one that pull the brake.”

And this is when the woman with the beauty spots speaks.

She says, “Excuse me? I saw it from right here. All this man did was close the box. Those boys are the real, like, troublemakers.”

That like—very sexy. Sexier than the sweat rings in her shirt. Like, the watchword of eternal youth. But—what a gorgeous and irrepressible snitch! Cooperating with the authorities! To save my sweaty and luckless hide! Again I ask you: What was she doing there?

JENNICA GREEN still fails to explain what she was doing on an uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):

All right, so, the letter.

Dear Jenny,

I’m sorry to send you such a possibly weird letter.

And then Nadine tells me everything that’s happened to her in the last ten years. She got a divorce four years ago from the guy she married when we were twenty, so maybe it’s for the best that I didn’t go to that wedding after all, she says. She doesn’t know if I ever realized how upset she was at the time, that I didn’t come. She apologizes, anyway, for having been angry with me; she knows I was at Princeton and it was hard for me to find the money to fly home on short notice. Anyway, she promises to forgive me if I come to her next wedding.

His name is Oscar Seventeen-Other-Last-Names Dicochea.

She says he works as a counselor in the prisons and he is devoted to fixing up Mustangs, which is how they met, and he is an avid birdwatcher. Also he has two kids from his first marriage, who stay with them weekends. She adores the kids, who are super-smart firecrackers, but it’s hard, she says, because by the time the kids get used to living by Nadine and Oscar’s rules, the weekend is over and they have to go back to their mother. Also Nadine is pregnant, due in late December. Oscar’s kids are convinced that they get to name the baby, and they want to call it Dick O. Dicochea. Also Nadine and Oscar bought a house in Fresno, which needs a lot of work.

This kind of a letter. Your best friend’s life story.

The whole thing just gives me this feeling that I am … un-reachably far away from the place where real life is carried on. And that I have nothing to report. Like, what have I been doing here in New York? Playing with water? While everyone was back in California, working with … redwood? There are as many kinds of homesickness as there are kinds of common cold, and that’s one of them: the sudden feeling that you could have been so much happier if only ten years ago you had stayed put.

I almost forgot the best thing!

George (that George) just bought an apartment in Manhattan, and he says he wants to meet you. He says he forgives you for standing him up in 1989. How hilarious if the two of you hit it off.

And it was like, am I finally going to meet George Hanamoto? And will he be as funny as Nadine, and as exotic and good-looking? So I am thinking this … in my perfectly silent apartment, my broiling hot but perfectly silent apartment … there is this noise. Like, someone is in my apartment. A burglar is in my apartment.

And, from my kitchen and bedroom, you can hear everything that happens in my neighbor’s kitchen and bedroom. I tell people that I can hear what happens in my neighbor’s bedroom, and they immediately think, Ooo! As if what you hear from your neighbor’s bedroom is always Ooo! It’s more like, if your neighbor has a dog, you can tell when the dog needs its nails clipped. Or, in my case, you can hear your neighbor building his loom, or whatever. But all the noises that come from my neighbor’s apartment are muffled in this particular way, and this sound, the burglar sound, as I’m sitting at the kitchen island with Nadine’s letter, is not muffled at all. It’s crisp, it’s in-the-room-with-me crisp. Someone is standing in the alcove behind my refrigerator, where the recycling is, which is the one part of the kitchen I can’t see, and is taking a knife out of a crinkling plastic bag.

And my reaction? My brilliant reaction? I freeze. Not, like, I grab my cell phone and run out the front door. No, I freeze. I sit there and wait to get hit over the head by the intruder. And then there it is again, the noise. The burglar is definitely in the alcove, and he definitely has a knife in a plastic bag. And apparently he’s having serious problems getting the knife out of the plastic bag …

So anyway, it’s a mouse. In my recycling.

I don’t even try to actually spot the mouse. I just leave Nadine’s letter on the kitchen island and run to the pet store on 6th Avenue. And I do mean run, because it was almost eight o’clock, and I didn’t want to wait another day for my cat. Because I’ve always wanted a cat, and I’m tired of never doing the things I most want.

GABRIEL GREEN discusses whether or not his sister does the things she most wants (early August 2000):

After college, she didn’t take any time off; she didn’t go to Thailand or Peru or anywhere. Three weeks after graduating, she started her first job, as an analyst for Hoffman Ballin. And the result was, for three years she never left America, never had a real vacation.

I would tell her, “Jennica. Take a leave of absence. Go to Thailand for a month. You can have massages every day, you can do an intestinal cleanse, you can take cooking classes, you can go to a yoga retreat on the beach.” She said she couldn’t take off that much time until she quit, and she didn’t want to quit until she found a new job in the arts, because the arts were her passion. I would tell her, “So start applying! You need a vacation.” But she didn’t want to start applying until she had paid off her student loans and saved up an emergency fund. I told her, “You don’t need an emergency fund. In an emergency, you can move to Vietnam. You can live the life of Riley there on nothing, on, like, three thousand dollars for six months.”

But no. Instead she had an apartment in Greenwich Village without any roommates, and she bought herself clothes, and every month she put the maximum amount into her 401(k). And so it took her three years to finally pay off her student loans and quit her job at Hoffman Ballin.

And yes, then she got herself a job in the arts, doing “development” at the New York Public Library. Meaning she was organizing parties for the library’s rich donors. But between when her job at Hoffman Ballin ended and when her job at the library began, she only gave herself ten days of vacation, which she used to go to Paris. And because of how little the library paid, she converted her emergency fund into an emergency clothes-and-restaurants fund.

And after barely two years at the library, she decided to quit. She said, “The library has some serious staffi ng problems.” What she meant was, “I am the best employee the New York Public Library has ever had; I’m the last one to leave every day; I do my own work and everyone else’s work too; I’m working harder at the library than I did at Hoffman Ballin.” She said, “If I’m living this sort of life, I might as well be making enough money not to have to deplete my emergency clothes-and-restaurants fund.” It’s like Jennica is so concerned with living sustainably in some financial-slash-prestige sense, but she doesn’t even think about whether she is living sustainably in an emotional sense.

See? She makes interesting decisions. She always wants to dress and eat and live so that everyone will think, “Oh, she’s friends with successful people.” But at the same time she wants to pay her own way. Rachel says, “A lot of women feel like that; money is different for women than it is for men. Women aren’t raised on the assumption that they will always be able to just make as much money as they want.” That’s one theory, but another theory is that Jennica is a Green and that we Greens all have money issues. If you put a Green in New York City and tell her to pay her own way and keep up appearances, of course she is going to work all the time.

For years, whenever Jennica came out to San Jose, which were the only vacations she would take, Rachel and I would beseech her to move to Santa Cruz. Last year, when everyone in America was moving to the Bay Area, we told her that if she moved to Santa Cruz, I would teach her Web design and Rachel would teach her to surf, and Jennica and I could go into business together doing Web stuff and Rachel and Jennica could go to the beach together every morning for exercise, and we could all buy a bungalow together somewhere, and all go shopping at the Staff of Life together and restock our communal dry goods … But Jennica wanted to stay in New York. “I feel like I haven’t done everything I want to do there yet,” she said.

When she finally quit the job at the library, she went back to Hoffman Ballin, this time to run their personnel department. She said, “Gabe, I promise I’ll quit Hoffman again as soon as I have a down payment saved.” Fine, a down payment … in Manhattan. You want your older sister to be happy, but you also know that there are certain things your older sister is never going to be able to do. She lives out this self-fulfilling prophecy of anxiety. She’s successful because she works hard, but she only works hard because she is stressed out about being successful. She’s only happy because she’s unhappy. Right? I mean, I don’t mean to be harsh. But what could ever happen that would let her prove her success? And Jennica can’t live in California, because she thinks that successful people only live in New York.

JENNICA GREEN nearly explains what she was doing on an uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):

You may know this pet store. It’s on 6th Avenue and it displays Jack Russell terrier puppies in the window, or whatever’s in style. And it has this gigantic, bitchy, hoary macaw at the front of the store that sits dead still until you are right next to it and then screams its name in your ear.

I got to the pet store just before eight P.M., but it turned out that it was open until nine, so I sort of … perused. The aquarium section was very dreamy: like, dark, except for the purple lights in the tanks, and with that bubbling sound from the fish toys and with that weirdly good, silty smell? So I was dipping my finger into the water to pet the aquatic plants … Touching the turtle’s feet. Crinkling my nose at the mice. They had this whole pen of mice just beside the aquarium aisle, living in an inch of sawdust and tunneling into a stale loaf of oat bread. You feel bad for pet-store mice, since they obviously are sold as food for snakes, but I guess not bad enough that you aren’t going to buy a kitten to kill the house mouse that’s in your kitchen. Because, if it wanted to, my house mouse could go live in the loom next door, or whatever it is that guy is building, but pet-store mice have no escape.

I was working my way toward the kittens when the owner lady finally came over. She was like:

“The last time you were here, you were expressing some reluctance. You said you had issues with spontaneity and indulgence, and that you were concerned with how cat ownership by single women was perceived by single men in New York. We were discussing whether or not you should premise your day-to-day decisions on the likes and dislikes of the hypothetical male love interest.”

I like this owner. Very student-radical-feminist-turned-small-businesswoman-divorcée. Mid-fifties, obviously hanging around the Village since college for who knows what reason. You know, still smokes two cigarettes a day, wears these earthy clothes she bought in the early eighties. So I said:

“Well, he’s not hypothetical. His name is George and we’re being set up on a date by his sister.” I mean, I didn’t want the owner to think I was utterly hopeless. “Plus, I heard a mouse.” And she said:

“Okay, so you’ve reached a stage where delay is no longer emotionally viable. That’s healthy. Is there one of these kitties you have your eye on?”

And there wasn’t, really, which was one reason I kept going back. Because, I don’t want just some random cat. I want a hulking cat. One that will kind of spill over the edge of whatever he sits on. And a very intelligent cat. Because some people have these airhead cats, who obviously are unsettled by everything that is happening around them, and antsy. I don’t want one of those. I don’t want a cutesy cat, or a spastic cat. I want a cat that’s jaded. Affectionate, but coy. And I want a cat that is world-weary and a little wry. I want a well-read cat, a fat and autodidactic cat. I was trying to explain this to the lady, who … I like her, but she was giving me this look, like, Am I going to make a sale? Finally she asks me:

“Have you been to Practical Cats?” Which is their sister store, on Lex and 78th, and which only sells cats. A kitten from Practical Cats can cost from five to eight hundred dollars, but, for example, they have cats where they guarantee the cat will learn its own name. They’ve bred them for that. So she gives me their card and sells me a litter box and a bag of litter and one of those catches-the-mouse-alive traps that don’t work. And as I am going, the macaw, like, hollers in my ear.

What THE MACAW hollered (Summer 2000):

Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!

JENNICA GREEN finally explains what she was doing on an uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):

Anyway, that was Monday night. When I got home from the pet store, I set up the mousetrap, turned my air conditioner on low, and ate my leftover falafel salad out on my fire escape. Where there are no parquet floors radiating heat, and where there is a breeze to keep me cool while my air conditioner gets started, and where the only wild rodents are pigeons. And squirrels. I decided that I liked the idea of going on a date with George Hanamoto. We could get white wine at a rooftop bar somewhere; I’d been fantasizing about rooftop bars since the start of the heat wave. Maybe there was one with a pool, like on the fourth fl oor of the Fairmont. Anyway.

And I decided that I liked the idea of a store called Practical Cats. I could take a few hundred dollars out of my money market account, which supposedly is the account I use to save up for my down payment, but whatever. And I work in midtown, where Hoffman’s administrative offices are, but Tuesday morning I had a meeting at the downtown office, where our traders work, so after that meeting I could take an early lunch and go shopping for my five-to-eight-hundred-dollar cat. Which is why I was on an uptown 6 train at 10:25 A.M. on a Tuesday.

MAYNARD GOGARTY comes within a whit of finishing the story of what happened on the uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):

So! Half a minute south of Grand Central on an uptown No. 6 train. The skinny black kid has denounced me to the authorities, and the woman with the beauty spots has in turn denounced the skinny black kid to the authorities, saying, “Those kids are lying, and their cases are full of graffi ti pens.”

The conductor decides to take charge. She says, “Miss, I know that Mr. Peanut here”—meaning, alas, me—“didn’t pull the brake. It was someone at the front of the train.” Apparently she heard this from the motorman when she was in her booth. “I am just telling Mr. Peanut to keep his hands to himself with the brake box.” Meanwhile she is considering the boys’ trumpet cases, and so now she says, “Show me what you’ve got.”

Well—then I have my brainstorm. Oh, it cut right through the old hot and humid brain haze, this brainstorm of mine did. Follow me: if I could confuse the situation for just a moment, the conductor would have to go back into her closet to announce the next stop. Then the boys could escape when the train doors opened at Grand Central, and then I would have a lovely segue into conversation with the beauty-spotted woman on the way to 51st Street. And I knew that the woman with the beauty spots would stay on the train at least as far as 51st Street, because if she were getting off at Grand Central, why would she not have stayed on the express train back at Union Square? Ah-ha! Is my brain not infallible?

I say to the conductor—audaciously, “You are not going to search the boys’ trumpets.”

The conductor says, “Mister, I have had enough from you, and I have heard enough of your so-called opinions. Either everyone wants me to call the police in here or these two boys will show me what they’ve got.”

So! Pointing my attaché at the woman with the beauty spots, I say to the conductor, “Madam. The lady here misinterpreted what she saw. There were no graffiti pens. Very likely she saw two rambunctious black kids—.”

And just as I’d predicted, the conductor goes back into her booth to announce Grand Central. All right—mea culpa! Mea own regrettable culpa. I shouldn’t have implied that bigotry was at work in what the beautiful woman said. I shouldn’t have implied that she was only denouncing the black kids because they were—black. But I meant only to diffuse the situation. I would apologize to her on the way to 51st Street.

What I’d forgotten was that the black boys had dates in the next car up, so naturally they weren’t going to get off the train, not without their girlfriends. And I also didn’t account for another possibility.

YVETTE BENITEZ-BIRCH announces that the train is going express (early August 2000):

You cannot make it too clear for these people. I said, “Fortysecond Street, Grand Central Station. Transfer to the 4, 5, and 7 trains and the shuttle to Times Square. Ladies and gentlemen, listen up. Listen up, people. This train is making express stops only to 125th Street. Express stops only. This train will not be stopping at 51st Street, 68th Street, 77th Street, 96th Street, 103rd Street, 110th Street, or 116th Street. If you want to stop at 51st Street, 68th Street, 77th Street, 96th Street, 103rd Street, 110th Street, or 116th Street, get off this train and get on the local immediately behind.”

You cannot make it too clear for these people.

When we had left 42nd, I went back into the car to straighten things out. The condescending gentleman in the hat was still there, and the two little boys who had called him a liar were still there, but the woman in black was gone. She’d exited the train at 42nd to catch the local. God’s truth be told, I was relieved that the woman was gone. I do not need all this insanity. I got enough grief.

I said, “I am only surprised that you all didn’t get off the train.” I told the boys to leave the TA’s property alone, and I gave the condescending man in the hat a look to say, Mister, you are not forgiven, but you are dismissed. And then I went back in to announce 59th.

JAMES CLEVELAND tells the stupid ending to the story (early August 2000):

It’s a stupid ending to the story, I’m warning you.

For example, if you make a show about camel caravans in the Sahara for thirteen, you better show me two caravans crashing into each other in the desert and fighting. If they don’t want to fight, it’s your job to make them fight. The point being is, don’t tell stories if they only have a stupid ending, and I’m warning you that this story has a stupid ending.

Everyone left the car but me and Chief and the white guy. And the white guy had a look on his face like this all was just about what he had been expecting.

So I said, “Hey, mister.”

And Chief said, “Son, shut up!”

But if the guy in the tie wanted to get us in trouble, he would have done it already. I said, “Hey, mister, they not trumpets.”

And the guy said, “I know.”

So I said, “Then why you said they was?”

And he said, “I was trying to be nice. Stay out of trouble with those pens.” And he wanted to know where we got the cases from and if we did play the trumpet.

So I said, “We in band camp.”

And he said, “I thought maybe so.” And then he said, “I’m a musician too, and we musicians need to stand up for each other. But the trumpet is a noble instrument that deserves your respect. Don’t you neglect it.”

Making me feel guilty, like I was supposed to be practicing trumpet all day. I told you it was a stupid ending. The interesting part was later, after me and Chief ditched Brittany and Juney and Shawna.

MAYNARD GOGARTY provides an epilogue to the story of what happened on the uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):

I have no epilogue to the story of what happened on the uptown No. 6 train. So may I untangle myself from the res that I am in media of here and tell you about how I sold the rights to my fi lm, or do you demand an epilogue?

Fine, then—an epilogue:

Prevailing wisdom—that oxymoron—prevailing wisdom has it that there is something exceptional about New York, some ineffable spirit to Manhattan Island, an esprit de pays above and beyond that esprit de corps that supposedly typifies New Yorkers. The esprit de pays is the notion that Manhattan cannot be improved upon. It has something to do with how the city manifested itself in 1948 or 1957 or 1994. When, six weeks after moving into student housing at NYU, some aspiring bachelor of arts condemns as “gentrification” a proposal that a reviled East Village pervert parlor that sold only beers and massages be replaced with a bright Duane Reade that sells floss and fl oor polish and flowers? That’s the esprit de pays. When salaried Democrats braggadociously complain about the twenty-six thousand dollars they spend so that their child will not have to participate in the public schools? That’s the esprit de pays. When levelheaded retirees send lachrymose letters to the Times bewailing the fact that the MTA is retiring the horror-show redbird subway cars in favor of sleek, airy trains designed in Osaka? That’s the esprit de pays. I reject this lunacy. Because if you subscribe to the esprit de pays, then of necessity you also subscribe to the belief that the only way to be happy is to leave New York.

One form that the esprit de pays takes is the insistence—by the young and the lusty—that missed opportunities are romantic, that it is romantic that in New York no one meets anyone twice. Bosh! Esprit de pays! It is not romantic that no one meets anyone twice in New York—it is appalling! Because it means that if you believe in being reserved, you must always be alone.