I Shudder Read online

  I am Elyot Vionnet. I am sixty-three years old, and for all of my adult life I have lived in my perfect studio apartment on a high floor of a building which almost overlooks Gramercy Park. My home is furnished with a polished cherrywood antique Venetian chair in the shape of a human skeleton, a small French writing desk and a brass campaign bed which can be completely disassembled for travel, and which once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte. I am semiretired from my career as a substitute teacher in the Manhattan school system, I sleep in crisply starched one-hundred-percent cotton pajamas with the thinnest, palest blue stripe, and I have had just about enough.

  You see, there are people in this world without manners, kindness, or common decency, and sometimes I want to kill these people, but I don’t. Not always.

  Because, you see, I’m here to help.

  For example:

  There’s a twenty-eight-year-old woman in my neighborhood whom I have never seen without a phone welded to her ear. I have glimpsed her on the street, at the supermarket, picking up her dry cleaning and ordering coffee, all without ever interrupting her wireless conversations to pay the slightest attention to the actual human beings behind the various counters and cash registers involved. A week ago I watched as this woman crossed a busy intersection, against the light, without glancing up from her call. I was of course hoping that a drunk driver or a speeding getaway van would send her flying, just so that I might find her phone in the gutter and tell the caller, “I’m sorry, but your call has been interrupted—by divine justice.” But, sadly, traffic swerved, and the woman looked up with a brief, annoyed grimace, as if she was blaming the universe for threatening to interrupt her social life. I had to do something.

  The woman’s doorman told me her name: Hallie Tesler. And a quick Google gave me her cell-phone number. Sitting in my apartment, I decided to start easy. I dialed, and when Hallie answered, I said, “You don’t know me, but please don’t hang up, just keep your friend, or whoever it is, on hold. Here’s my guess: right now you’re sitting in the backseat of a cab, where your incessant, mindless chatter has made you ignore not merely the glorious city right outside your window, but also the fact that you’re just about to arrive at your destination. And because you’ve been so relentlessly attached to your phone, only once the cab has stopped will it suddenly occur to you that it might be time to start rummaging through your immense designer shoulder bag, in order to dig out your wallet and begin calculating the lowest possible tip, all while you continue to take calls, thus wasting so many other people’s time, especially that of the elderly woman on the corner, who’s been waiting for a cab in the rain for forty-five minutes. So I want you to think about your behavior, and I also want you to study your shoulder bag and wonder why anyone in their right mind would ever buy, even at sixty percent off, an item with quite that many useless grommets, straps, and buckles, in grimy beige cowhide, an item which resembles nothing so much as a low-level Long Island mafioso’s finished basement convertible sofa.” As Hallie began to sputter, I quietly hung up.

  Two days later, I sat on my campaign bed, munching from a paper bag filled with unsalted, jumbo cashews, each as sweetly curved as a fetus, and another bag of chocolate-covered raisins. I believe in a benevolent God not because He created the Grand Canyon or Michelangelo, but because He gave us snacks.

  I called Hallie. “It’s me,” I began, “and I know that right now you’re at work, in your cubicle, chatting on the phone to various friends about what you thought about doing last night but didn’t do because you were so tired, what you watched on television instead, what the people you watched on television were wearing, and why it made them look dumpy, what you dreamed about, what you were wearing in your dream, what you’re planning on wearing tonight, and many similar topics, each so equally and exquisitely tedious that even you must assume that whoever you’re talking to is just grunting in robotic agreement while they check their e-mails.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Mr. Vionnet.”

  “Who?”

  “Here’s what I want you to do. First, use your computer to find your Facebook page, the one with those photos of you and your posse in Cancún from last spring, where you’re all wearing those tragically undersized bikinis and those grotesquely oversized sunglasses, and hoisting Big Gulp plastic cups filled with lite beer, the pictures where everyone looks so identical that it takes five of you to equal one still-trying-desperately-to-party-while-veering-dangerously-close-to-thirty-single-gal. And I want you to scroll down to the section titled ‘My Interests,’ where you’ve listed ‘friends, family, hanging out,’ and I want you to add, ‘lying to myself about everything.’”

  “Shut up! I’m calling the police!”

  “And you’ll report me for doing what? For knowing everything about you, from just one look at your bulging, painfully side-zippered purple suede boots with the stacked heel and the stains from the drips of lo-cal ranch dressing?”

  “I love my boots! Everyone loves my boots!”

  “Everyone? Do you know that many seventies hookers? Let’s face it, you’ve bought your boots, and all of your ideas about life, at the wrong strip mall. So here’s how we’ll start to fix all that. After I hang up, you won’t make any more calls, and you will in fact actually get some work done, with a surprising sense of satisfaction. Then, on your way home, you won’t instantly suck on your cell and begin trading overnight agendas. You won’t inhale your iPod either, as you will actually walk home without an artificial soundtrack. You will look at other people, at buildings, at shop windows, at animals, and at New York City. You will actually experience the dusk, rather than narrating it to your friends.”

  “I don’t do that!”

  “Not anymore,” I said, as I clicked off, and pictured Hallie as she moved through fury, frustration, and finally her first moments of acceptance, as she unwrapped a mini Tootsie Roll and, for the first time in years, actually savored its delicious chemical bouquet.

  The next evening, which was Saturday night, I was wearing my pajamas and lying beneath my chaste white cotton sheets, with my head supported by four nondecorative pillows. I imagined that I was an impossibly wealthy patient suffering nobly from some fatal yet appealingly nonsymptomatic illness in an elite Swiss clinic high in the Alps. I lay absolutely still, as if I was being painted for posterity by a gifted surrealist. As I looked at my ceiling, appreciating my chandelier, I felt so blissfully clean and weightless that, once more, I decided to share my good fortune. I phoned Hallie, and the background hubbub gave me all the clues I needed. “It’s Elyot,” I said, “and I realize that you’re slouched on a banquette at a club which has lost just enough of its exclusive, first-three-months trendiness so that it now has to begin admitting yearning acolytes like you and your friends, who are all wearing desperately short, spangled black dresses, which are all cut low enough to reveal that each of you has a matching, tiny navy blue star tattoo, a spray-on tan, and a light dusting of body glitter.”

  “Shut up! Shut up!”

  “And of course, because you’ve spent your entire evening on the phone, receiving updates from other nearby clubs and hangouts, no man has dared approach you, especially not that deeply cute, just-tousled-enough, possible-art-director, possible-bass-player across the room, who really does have a great crooked smile and whose jeans fit him with such sexual-yet-baggy nonchalance that they might be either plain ol’ Levis or $1,200 Japanese custom-fit. But that man will never give you a second glance, and here’s why: because while a man might pursue a woman with a few extra pounds or a few missing fingers, and while he might even lust after a woman who looks completely out of place in a nightspot filled with so much painfully processed hair swinging in front of so many Lasik-surgeried eyes, that man will never, and you know I’m right, he will never speak to a woman with even the tiniest, shiniest, most current phone permanently slapped to her ear, like a growth that could only be successfully removed along with a sizable chunk of skull. That omnipresent phone tells hi
m that this woman is eternally hedging her bets, forever seeking some mythical better offer, that this woman does not exist in the moment, which is the essence of flirtation, that this woman has the world on permanent hold.”

  There was a pause, and then a small voice wondered, “Is that really true?”

  “Here’s how you’ll find out. In thirty seconds, you will place your phone inside your teeny metallic leather clutch bag, beside the lip gloss, the condom, the ATM card, and your doubts. Then, rather than immediately turning to your friends to initiate a pointless, shouted-over-the-DJ conversation, you will sit quietly, but with interest. You will lean forward, watching the room, not with judgment but curiosity. You won’t panic, or affect some hideously false come-hither allure. You will not play with, chew on, or flip your hair, or your hair extensions. You will not sip provocatively from your $8 bottled water. You will simply appear engaged in the night. Then I guarantee that within ten seconds that man will smile at you, and instead of immediately beginning to select private schools for your future children, you will smile back.”

  I hung up and settled against my pillows, with my arms atop the sheets in perfect, unbent symmetry. I was now the sculpted marble figure of a saint atop my bier in St. Peter’s in Rome; I was the saint everyone touched for good luck, and I tried not to be repulsed by all of those sticky, crippled fingers, and all of those gelato-scented, moistly murmured prayers.

  Hallie called me the next day, on Sunday afternoon, to thank me, I assumed, for being both so rude and so mind-bendingly accurate. “I need to meet you in person,” she said, and I took this as an excellent portent of the new Hallie, choosing human contact over technology. We arranged to meet at 4 p.m. in a small park near both our homes. I love city parks, because they’re the most artificial version of nature possible. Parks are nature with a falafel cart and a view of the boutique across the street which offers sunglasses for the price of a condominium.

  I perched on a bench and watched as Hallie approached. She was not using her phone, and I detected a fresh rigor to her step, a clearness in her eyes, and she was even dressed simply; she looked ten years younger, just out of high school. She easily located me, maybe because I was the only person holding a hand-lettered cardboard sign reading, “You’re Welcome.”

  “Mr. Vionnet?”

  “Yes?”

  “I did everything you told me. Over the past week, whenever I’ve taken a cab, I’ve looked out the window, and I’ve always had my wallet out and ready at least a block before I got to wherever I was going.”

  “Hallie,” I said, deeply touched, because I find anything involving proper cab etiquette ineffably moving.

  “When I was at work, I stayed off the phone and I got way more done, and my boss even noticed and now she’s going to recommend me for a raise and a promotion. And on my lunch break, I took my apple and cheese to Washington Square Park and I watched people. I listened to street musicians, I gave helpful directions to out-of-towners, and I even eavesdropped on a tour group, and I learned all of this amazing stuff about the history of the Square, like about which corner was a Potter’s Field, and which tree was used to hang Civil War deserters. And I watched three incredible kids on their skateboards, while another bunch of guys did a poetry slam, topping each other with their descriptions of the fountain and the dogs and the sky.”

  “I love New York,” I said with complete sincerity, because Manhattan has never lied to me.

  “And last night, at the club, I put my phone away, just like you said I should, and I leaned forward and I smiled. And I thought about how lucky I was, to be young and healthy and to be living in the greatest city on earth. And I started laughing, I was just sort of elated, and that cute guy did come over. He’s a novelist who also teaches at NYU and today we had brunch at this place overlooking the river.”

  “Bravo!” I cried, humbled by her imminent gratitude, and by the gift which she’d most likely brought along—perhaps a small, blank diary bound in alligator, or a candleholder of colorful Mexican tin.

  “Fuck you,” Hallie continued, her eyes suddenly the steely gray of a Home Depot poured-resin, look-of-granite countertop. “When I wasn’t on my phone, I noticed how disgusting the backseat of a cab really is. There’s almost always somebody’s half-empty plastic thing of take-out salad, and somebody else’s used tissues and one grimy pink mitten. And a driver started hitting on me because he thought I didn’t have any friends so I’d be an easy mark, and he was sixty-two years old and he smelled like air freshener and corned beef!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “And because I wasn’t making personal calls all the time at work, my boss saw how much free time I had and gave me three times more shit to do, and she kept hanging around my desk and telling me about her divorce and showing me creepy Polaroids of her fucking parrot! Dressed in different outfits for different holidays! And when I took my lunch to the park, because I wasn’t on my phone, this one guy kept trying to sell me a phone card and this other guy kept trying to tell me about the Jehovah’s Witnesses and another guy kept telling me about how he only needed five more dollars so he could get his babies out of Darfur! And because I wasn’t on my phone I couldn’t just politely ignore everyone and I had to talk to them!”

  “Perhaps a different park…”

  “Then, last night at the club, that guy who came over to me? Sure he was cute, but he’s a fucking aspiring novelist! He has two chapters done, after ten years! He’s a teaching assistant who makes ten grand a year and he wants to move to Alaska and live off the grid! And if I’d been using my phone I would’ve heard about another party just a block away, where all of these lawyers were celebrating their quarterly six-figure bonuses and were buying cars for strangers! And now all of my friends have dumped me because for the past week I haven’t been taking their calls so they think that I feel superior to them and that I’m a bad friend and a fucking loser, and now they’ve changed all of their numbers and they won’t give them to me, although I heard that someone used their phone to take a picture of me sitting by myself and laughing at the club, and now it’s been posted all over the Web with the caption ‘Got Meth?’ And it’s all your fault! Just because I talk on my phone, it doesn’t mean that I’m shallow or useless or stupid! It means I have friends! It means I’m alive! I love my phone, and I think that you’re just some nasty, bitter, backwards old fart who’s jealous of anyone who knows how to speed-dial! So if you ever call me again, I will use my phone to call the police and have you arrested for trying to ruin my life! You fucking fuckwad fuckhead!”

  With that she reached into her purse and grabbed her phone, which flew to her ear like a hummingbird to a gardenia. Hallie spun away from me, chattering ferociously as she marched across the street, sadly unaware of the oncoming double-decker hop-on/hop-off sightseeing bus, which mowed her down, killing her instantly, as the tourists on the upper level captured the tragedy with their picture phones, to the instant delight of their grandchildren back in Oslo.

  Hallie was buried later that week in her Long Island hometown, where all of her friends gathered, discreetly text-messaging each other at the graveside to indicate sightings of any totally cute mourners at nearby interments.

  Hallie was buried with her phone, and sometimes I still like to call her, first to hear the ringtone echoing off the metallic walls of her casket, and then to hear her last, strangely prophetic recorded greeting: “Hi, this is Hallie, and I’m either screening or on the other line, but please leave a message because I’m dying to talk to you! Luvya lots!” Although I’m sure that by now the microchip is full, I always leave a message, saying, “Darling, this is Mr. Vionnet. Call me.”

  Hewen and Schifty

  1.

  New York may be the city of ambition, but it’s also a safe harbor for many full-tilt eccentrics. Small towns sometimes embrace their acceptably unhinged cat ladies or irascible gun collectors, especially if they’re members of solid local families, but New York all but recruits the most defiantly
bizarre personalities, the people who couldn’t possibly live anywhere else, at least not without police protection.

  As a child, I’d always imagined that simply living in New York, and getting to meet such people, would be my career. As a recent college graduate, I was broke, so I begged my way into a meeting with Helen Merrill, who was known as not just a radically independent-minded literary agent, but as a force of mystery and terror. She lived and worked in an apartment on the second floor of a brownstone in Chelsea, and as I entered, a heavily accented German voice barked, “Vait!”

  The apartment was arranged with a cozy but deliberate mix of family antiques, Danish modern sofas, and offbeat touches: all of the curtains were made from hanging ropes of linked soda-can pop tops. After waiting for twenty minutes, I stood and peered into the tiny galley kitchen. Helen was standing over a large, steaming, battered metal stewpot on the stove. She was small and slender, with a silver pageboy haircut, a stained Ms. magazine T-shirt, white canvas pants, and faded blue Keds. She was using a metal ladle to stir what I assumed was enough soup to feed a regiment; taking a closer look, I saw that the pot was filled with boiling water, and floating with envelopes. “I am steaming off the stamps and the postage-meter labels,” Helen informed me, “so I can use zem again. It saffs money, and I am just a poor German lady.” This was how I discovered that Helen was notoriously cheap; I found out later that, after gluing the secondhand postage onto new packages and letters, she’d send an assistant out for hours to deposit the goods, only a few items at a time, in different mailboxes many blocks apart. Helen believed that this canny technique would help her to elude the attention of the FBI.

  “Go! Sit!” she commanded, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. Then she lit the first of many, many unfiltered Camels, and unwrapped a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup; over time I learned that cigarettes and Reese’s were Helen’s entire diet. She was then in her early sixties, but she looked both ancient and ageless, like a particularly hard-living sphinx. Her face was lined with spidery wrinkles and there were serious rumors that she was, in fact, Greta Garbo. Several friends insisted that Garbo, having abandoned her film career, had changed her life and her name, and moved downtown. Helen would sometimes repeat this rumor, laugh, and do nothing to discourage it.