New York Stock

Published September 4, 2008

Joanne Seymour* answers the door in a thick fur coat, even though it’s spring. The coat continues for eternity in dense brown folds, like fat rolls on a bear. I try to estimate Ms. Seymour’s size by subtracting the volume of the coat from the person in front of me, but I come up with a negative number. It is amazing that such a frail woman can even support such a massive coat.

“Oh, you must be Jonathan,” she says. “I’ve been expecting you.” She speaks in an affected accent and waves me in with a flourish. I laugh, because I think she’s kidding, but she frowns at me.

At her living room table, I explain what I told her on the phone. “I’m writing about your neighborhood—about Turtle Bay—and since you’re so active in the neighborhood association, I thought you’d be a good person to interview.”

“Of course, of course,” she says. “But first, may I offer you a drink? Perhaps some tea or juice?” She downplays the words tea and juice as if she were offering champagne or coffee airlifted from Italy to her apartment.

Over several hours, she tells me how Katherine Hepburn used to live in her building, about a famous literary agent who lived across the way, about the influence of Irving Berlin on the New Yorkers who remember him. She had an affair with the agent once, even though he was married. When the third avenue elevated train closed in 1955, she and the agent stood in the street, watching, holding hands.

When she talks, she moves her head so excitedly that her wig—straight, shiny brown, to match her coat, which she still hasn’t removed—slips every so often. She mentions celebrities with intimacy and nostalgia, even if she never knew them personally. She lists famous authors who live down the hall or up the street. She paints a picture of New York City that never actually existed, except in the reconstructive memories of lonely romantics.

For the article I’m writing, I need to know about restaurants and bars in the area, about real estate for newcomers, about myriad details that don’t even interest me. I never ask my prepared questions, however, and I can use only two sentences of my interview with Ms. Seymour for the article, but this is not the point. Before leaving, I promise to visit soon.

I visit after the article prints, and a few times after that. We discuss old New York, real and imagined; I help her organize files and send e-mail; she calls me darling and uses the word fabulous to describe everything from theater to margarine. When she references actors from the 1940s and 1950s, I pretend to know them, because she deflates so easily when I don’t.

On my last visit to Joanne Seymour, she doesn’t answer the door as usual. Instead, I knock and hear a muffled “it’s unlocked” come from inside. When I open the door, I find her at the living room table surrounded by boxes of papers and knick-knacks.

The New York City pavement radiates with summer heat, but she still wears that fur coat. She waves me over to sit beside her and says: “I want you to help me sort all of this. I know you can sell things online, and I have all this stuff lying around.” She leafs through the boxes and pulls out movie tickets decades old, a flyer protesting the Vietnam War, an old manuscript given to her by her former lover, the agent who died a long time ago. She points to the framed movie poster on the wall featuring Clark Gable and a vase on the sideboard that might have belonged to Greta Garbo.

“You can catalogue these and sell them on Ebay, can’t you?” There is a new desperation in her voice—or rather, it is the same desperation that has always underlied her affectations, but she is no longer hiding it. To one side of her, a bill sticks out from a pile of papers, with the amount due circled in red pen. The due date, next to the total, passed several months ago. I get the same uneasy feeling in my stomach as when I visited my father in the hospital, not long ago: a needle in his arm, tubes in his chest, clad in a paper gown. He tried so hard to sit up straight in that hospital bed, surrounded by depressing pastel colors, pretending he wasn’t positioned above a bedpan.

“Yes, of course,” I say. I take out paper and pencil, ready to begin, but Ms. Seymour continues fishing through the boxes. She is not sorting, but remembering. She takes out a program—faded, but kept perfectly crisp—from an opera she saw in France in 1952. She holds the program for a minute, just staring at the cover, but then she returns to me, to the present, to New York City 2006.

She slides the program towards me and says, “This must be worth something, don’t you think?”

* A real person, but not her real name  -JS