each burst of
nitrogen from its cartlilagenous confines
sounding for all
the world like the crack of a starter’s pistol
as the racers
stumble out of the blocks, not pumping knees
and elbows like
well-oiled pistons but guffawing and squirting each other
with warm fizzy
beverages and slapping each other
with empty pizza
boxes and loose seat cushions
as they lurch and
stumble toward, not a tape
across the oval of
the track, but the 10:30 p. m. curtain,
at the lowering of
which they leap to their feet
and rain down on
the heads of Liam Neeson
and Laura Linney
and their cohorts such an ovation
as they are
unlikely to enjoy ever again.
Meanwhile, back at
the Washington Square hotel, I begin
to accumulate
evidence that bad manners are not the sole province
of New Yorkers,
for the temporary residents of that establishment,
whose accents
suggest they hail from every state in the union,
not to mention a
smattering of the foreign countries,
are, when calling
an elevator car, like those who call
elevator cars
everywhere in that their minds never entertain
the thought, much
less the notion or whimsy, that that car
might already be
occupied by others, and so you’re riding along,
up or down, as the
case may be, and the door opens,
and there’s this
countryman or -woman of yours
or else a
representative of some sovereign alien power,
and they’re just
standing there with their stomach sticking out,
hoping you’ll
evaporate, or, my favorite, lurching forward
a half-step as if
to see whether or not the change in air pressure
will dispel the
airy phantasm that is you.
Truth to tell,
though, the gentry of my home state of Florida
are no better, as
evidenced by the consistent misbehavior
of the hotel and
motel dwellers who get up at five a. m.
and slam! the door
on the way out, and so it is
to these
fisherfolk and the faithful attendees of early mass
that I say, "Fear
not, The One Who Got Away will elude you yet again,
and the soul’s
journey toward heaven will be
neither aided nor
impeded by your presence or absence at holy services,
though your
Shakespeare rod and reel
or your rosary
beads are likely to fall from your hands
as you say ‘That
is not what I meant, not at all’
when a naked
57-year-old white man leaps screaming
out of room 615
and lands on your back, his spindly shanks
encircling your
waist, his yellowing canines sinking into your neck,
your ear lobe, the
pad of fat that’s beginning to accumulate
at the base of
your neck."
And even I, who
utter a chirpy "Thank you!"
to the policeman
as he hands me my ticket, who sits quiet
as a corpse in the
theaters and concert halls I frequent,
who bows others
out of the elevator car before
thrusting myself
forward, who eases every door shut,
still, early in
the day as well as late, even I find myself often
with the strange
distraught air, as Maeterlinck says,
of someone
standing in sunlight, in a beautiful garden,
at the same time
that he is expecting a great misfortune,
even though he
can’t specify the precise nature
of that impending
calamity. I don’t say so, however,
as I do not wish
to be like the noblewoman
in The
Charterhouse of Parma who, by imagining herself
the most unhappy
woman in the world, made certain
she was the most
boring, this being,
other than the
approach and inexorable arrival of death,
perhaps the
greatest certainty of her otherwise insipid existence,
for any life is so
much like a game of cards,
viz., the one in
Pushkin’s eponymously-titled Queen of Spades,
wherein sometimes
you get the one and the seven and the ace,
but most of the
time you get the one and the ace
and then some
other card or else you get the other card first
and then the ace
and the seven and so on, down to the end
of the series of
finite combinations.
I. e., most of the
time you are going to get a hand you don’t want!
And how else will
you buy your way out of this dilemma
but with the
exquisite coin of manners, as it has been
throughout
history, for churlish deportment is not the sole province
of the
chowderheads, ninnyhammers, and clodpolls of our own age,
or Della Casa
wouldn’t have written in his Galateo (1558):
"Nor is it seemly,
after wiping your nose, to spread out
your handkerchief
and peer into it as if pearls and rubies
might have fallen
out of your head." Nor are ill manners
an attribute
solely of the uneducated or unrefined or ill-paid,
as in the case of
the previously-mentioned Professor Morris Dickstein,
who looked to me
as though he was doing okay,
or that of the
World Health Organization delegate
who was part of
our party when we were dining in New Orleans
just last week and
who, when I asked if she was enjoying
her tasty trout
amandine, hissed, "Am I ‘enjoying’ it?
No, as a matter of
fact, I’m not ‘enjoying’ it! Why does everyone
in the South have
to ‘enjoy’ everything?"
Sometimes I wonder
if it’s morality that keeps us from misbehaving
so much as the
desire not to do something ugly or stupid—
that bad taste
leads to crimes, as Stendhal says,
just as surely as
the greatest pleasure that can be given,
and this is true
for both the giver and the givee,
be he or she (and
he or she) high- or low-born
or well- or
poorly-heeled or professor or student
or teenager from
Pennsylvania or Connecticut or Westchester County
or graybeard from
those precincts
or any others
adjacent to the metropolitan New York area
or Washingtonian
or Estonian or Catholic of the charismatic
or cultural or
Tridentine strain or fisher of walleye, pike,
redfish, bluefish,
triggerfish, any kind of fish—
the greatest
pleasure is that embodied in a gesture
at once courteous,
learned, witty, and self-abasing,
as when the wife
of Johann Strauss, Jr.
asked Johannes
Brahms for an autograph,
and Brahms
responded by writing down the opening notes
of Strauss’s
Blue Danube and signing them . . .
