There’s a chill today in the May Manhattan air that gives me old shivers. Haunting ghosts are riding on it, swirling just above me. Or are they at home, here on first avenue? I haunt them. My new old haunts, these streets. I invade them again, they greet me teeming, and cool. This sensation is strong, like an undiluted perfume splashed on too liberally. I want to cry. I am relieved. Garbo haunted this neighborhood. Is that true? Can living people haunt a place? Or, was she not living, not really? Was she haunted? By…?
Wait, I feel that certain folks who took so many of my emotions, gave some of theirs to me, wrestled mine, theirs, controlled mine, even, sometimes, but absolutely furiously stirred me—by my choice because I had to cooperate—these people are dead to me, so they can be only ghosts now. Garbo was here among her people, her meddlers and partners and robbers and mutual stirrers. As each one died, did that person join the ghost club, and was Garbo glad to meet them again and again, here in the old haunts? She could have fled. Inward. But she did that a long time ago, I guess. We hear. Who can know? Be careful. Be full of caring for her life, its secrets and patient, stern solitude. I ran away years ago from some of my burglars. Thieves of hearts. I was a second story man, though. I was. I wanted and wanted, and there was no end to my wanting (Carl Sandburg?). I would think of Garbo’s leaving in Hollywood what I longed for. She had it all. It! And she smiled and took a walk.
What I would give to have some of it. What? I wouldn’t give anything else, only what I had always been prepared to give, my attention and talent, time, devotion, energy, patience. Patience? Can you be patient by choice? You are neglected to a conditioned position of patience. Who chooses to be patient? It’s a quality, patience, that is foisted on your psyche. You don’t want it or want to be in a position to need it. Do you? You want what you want, and patience be damned! Garbo wanted to be alone. Maybe company tried her patience. Maybe she was impatient with directors, cameramen, actors, writers, and all the fuss. Maybe she didn’t have or need patience to be alone. I had been a thief. I went after them, ghosts now, with love, I thought, feeling mostly lust, and gave to get, then felt dispossessed of myself. So I ran away. I had to be patient, to wait for the almost irresistible grip of obsession to relinquish me, I had to resist contact with those beings I had wanted. But Garbo might have had to be patient while she was with the people she wanted, in order to get what she wanted. Money that would give her the freedom to flee and stay alone?
Then she walked, we are told, up and down Manhattan, and around her seven-room apartment, did exercises on her balcony—I once saw a photograph of her on her back, legs way up over her head, parallel to the ground, stretching—keeping in shape to walk? For years. And she hid. She disguised herself, or just covered up, while I tried to make a spectacle of myself. I kept my privacy, though, as she did but in public. I’ve wondered if she helped anyone. Well how could she, if she hid all the time? She might have sent money to the needy, but she wouldn’t make an appearance for them, or we would’ve heard about it. So what did Garbo do in this sharp May air? She breathed deep. The air used to be cleaner. She was gulping it down here in the 40’s. I was in clean, simpler Wisconsin. Quicker, too. But she took way down into her very dirty air in the past few decades. Of course, she travelled, too. And when she got to a new place, did she want to be alone, or did she visit people? Probably both.
I got to New York and stayed put, mostly. I was afraid to budge. I was afraid to stay put, too. I was a mess. I had thought I knew what I wanted, but I didn’t know. Garbo knew. I got more than I bargained for, some of it dull and bitter. I wonder if Garbo found in these shops every thing she needed. I’m just now re-discovering First Avenue. I guess I avoided it for years. I would tend to go out and turn right, heading for Second Avenue. Is that the tendency, to turn toward your handedness? Did Garbo turn left out of her building; was she left handed? Where did that take her? To some of these sun shops, sometimes in the heavy acrid heat of the New York summer, sometimes on a crystalline afternoon like this one. Oh, Gretta Gustafson, I know the loneliness of the lovely drinker, which I suspect you were. Lonely drinkers live with people that are alone, and they drink with people, but stay lonely. One sort of self-condemner eats vitamins and exercises vigorously then soaks his organs in alcohol. To preserve them? To preserve the loneliness, perhaps. Loneliness is full of oneself. There is no room left in that place for responsibility.