On a Saturday or Sunday afternoon in the cold early months of 1988, I sat alone at a table for two in a Greenwich Village diner, twenty-four years old, hopelessly young, my notebook open in front of me. At the table next to mine were three people, all white: a woman and her very young daughter, and, across from them, another woman, who talked to the child in a kind way. I recall thinking that this woman was good with kids. When the mother took her little girl to the restroom, the other woman turned to me.
“What are you working on?” she asked.
I’m sure I smiled; that is what I did with everyone, that is what I do. “Trying to write a short story,” I said.
“I thought so from the way you looked,” she said. “I know that feeling of trying to get something on paper”—and she imitated my expression of paralyzed urgency. We laughed. We talked a little about writing. And at some point, apparently, I told her my first name and where I worked.
Where I worked was a book publishing company in Midtown Manhattan. Quite a few young people take entry-level jobs at publishing houses because they love books and also, often, secretly or not-so-secretly, want to write them. They sometimes learn the hard way that their passions have very little to do with the day-to-day business of making and publishing books. This is a way of saying that I didn’t love my job. But I needed to earn a living, meagre though it was, and I was at my desk, ostensibly doing that, when my phone rang two or three days after my visit to the diner.
“This is Liz,” the caller said. She added, clearing up my confusion and handing me a surprise, “We met in the restaurant the other day.” We talked for a few minutes, by the end of which we had agreed that I would come to her apartment in the Village that Saturday night.
Where do I begin describing the young man who went to Liz’s place? Let’s start with how he looked: darker than some black folks, lighter than some others. A few people, on meeting him, thought he was a teenager, because of his face and also, probably, because he was on the small side—five feet eight inches and skinny, a hundred fifty pounds or so, though with a small pot belly he tried to suck in. There were other parts of his body he wasn’t crazy about. He had the thinnest wrists and legs he knew of (he avoided wearing shorts and swimming trunks whenever possible), and the less said about his chin, the better. Partly for those reasons, partly for others, this young man’s manner did not scream “confidence.”
At this point you may not be thinking “woman magnet,” and yet our young man was not without experience in that area. He’d had half a dozen or so lovers, including two with whom he had been in serious relationships. He was nothing if not nice, which can sometimes carry the day, though hardly always. If it seems mysterious that this guy had had any luck at all with women, the mystery may be cleared up, or possibly deepened, by what a woman at his previous job had once told him: “I’ve never met anybody as good-looking and as underconfident as you are.” He might have dismissed the good-looking part, except that he’d heard it from other people. There was a diner waitress, in the town where he’d gone to college, who told him, unprompted, “You are really handsome,” and a group of young girls in the same town who stared at him from across the park where he sat with his date, giggling and shrieking before getting up their nerve to come over and say, “You look like Michael Jackson!”
None of this helped his confidence, at least outwardly. And yet, in there somewhere, he had some. It was a kind of forward-looking confidence, not about what he could do in the moment but what he would do some day yet a ways off; and it, this confidence, was not only present but completely, absurdly out of proportion to any evidence. Writing would be involved. He wanted to write—he did write—and he believed strongly that it would lead him somewhere. He had a lot to learn, and he knew it, and in his groping way he went about trying to learn: reading novels, seeking out screenings of classic films that he often attended alone, going here and there to an art museum.
This was the young man who made his way on a Saturday evening to Liz’s apartment. He—I—took the subway from the neighborhood very far out in Brooklyn where I had a one-bedroom apartment, the place that was my answer to the question of how to have an affordable space all my own. No doubt, as I sat among other black and brown folks on the lumbering J train, I had a novel or a story collection with me; no doubt, too, I was distracted from my already slow reading by thoughts of the evening to come. Who knows, this might be the start of a relationship. I hadn’t been in a serious one since I’d come to New York, a year and a half earlier.
Part of the reason had to do with my approach to pursuing women, which was really no approach at all. It would be easy to put that down to a lack of confidence, but the real explanation is more complicated. In high school I had a crush on a girl—Cheryl was her name—and I asked my mother (my father was four or five years dead by then) if I ought to tell Cheryl how I felt. No, she said. She recommended going slow, trying to figure out first how Cheryl felt about me, because if I opened my heart to her blindly, “She might tell her friends, and they might laugh at you.” This was loving, well-intentioned, but unfortunate advice (for one thing, I realized later that Cheryl would have happily become my girlfriend if I had only said the word, and it seems everyone knew this but me), and it was advice for which I do not blame my mother one bit. Good parents—and my mother was a good parent—communicate to their children what they have come to understand; still, no one understands everything, and it is on the kid, eventually, to learn some things for his, her, their self. But I will say that my mother’s advice sadly fortified my unconscious feeling that there was something embarrassing, something shameful, about admitting that you wanted to be with another person, unless that person clearly wanted to be with you. And so, with rare exceptions, the relationships I entered were with women who pursued me, or who let me know in some way that they wanted to be pursued (cues that I would sometimes pick up on only years after the fact).
Now here was Liz. Even I understood that you don’t track someone down at his office, with only a first name and company name to go on, if you’re not interested in him romantically, and it was clear that I could become involved with her. The only question was whether or not I wanted to. The evening to come would determine that, since I knew very little about Liz, except that she seemed nice and interesting—and creative, from the sound of things. Some of it, much of it, for better or worse, would depend on physical attraction. I didn’t know whether I was attracted to her or not, because at the diner I had barely paid attention to how she looked. I didn’t recall thinking she was unattractive, which seemed a good sign—good enough for my mind to begin to construct a woman I hadn’t actually seen. As I got off the subway downtown and walked in the winter air to Liz’s building, then up to her apartment, I felt optimistic. And then she opened her door, and I got a lesson in how easy it is to con yourself.
The evening was pleasant—more than pleasant in some ways, which I’ll get to—yet I knew instantly that I would not become romantically involved with Liz. But I was here, we had the evening ahead of us, why not make the most of it? And maybe we could be friends. She had a comfortable home, the most memorable feature of which was smack in the middle of her living room: a playground-style slide. (I must have gone down it, though I can’t actually remember doing that.) Here, I thought, is someone with a great childlike spirit.
In a way, that spirit—the desire to transcend age—became the theme of our acquaintance. It came out during the evening that, at thirty-seven, she was twelve-plus years older than I was. “I thought you were about thirty-two,” she told me. (Months after that evening, I recited that line to another woman I was involved with briefly. “I’ll laugh later,” she said.) But our age difference didn’t matter to Liz.
As for the difference between our skin colors, it didn’t even come up, that night or ever, which impresses me in retrospect. We talked about writing; she had published a novel, which I dreamed of doing, and she gave me a copy—“It’s good to have copies of your book to give people,” she said, “for when it goes out of print.” Though she didn’t go into it much, I took in that she was involved in theater. At one point we stretched out on her floor to watch TV. She nudged me with her stockinged foot, and we held hands. I remember that she wore dark red polish on elegantly shaped nails; there was enough erotic tension that we rubbed the backs of our hands together, but not enough for me to proceed from there. At the end of the evening, when I put on my coat and stood at her door, she wrapped my scarf, smiling with her prominent front teeth, and gave me a light peck on the lips. She looked hopeful. That makes me sad now.
It is easy for someone my age to forget, and difficult for younger people to understand, how different life was before the internet. Had there been universal access to the World Wide Web in 1988, I could have Googled the name on the cover of Liz’s novel—Elizabeth Swados—and discovered a few things. She probably told me herself, and I’m sure I asked, where she grew up (Buffalo) and went to school (Bennington College). What she didn’t mention, and what I might have found out on the Web in a different era, is that while she was still studying music and writing at Bennington, she met Ellen Stewart, founder of the experimental La MaMa theater in New York; that through La MaMa she met the director Andrei Serban; and that, working with Serban and others, she broke new ground in musical theater. I might have learned that in the late 1970s, when I was a miserable, oblivious junior high school student in D.C., Liz’s Broadway show Runaways, and Liz herself, were racking up Tony Award nominations.
So, yes—she was, in her way, quite famous. There was more, though. “I recall thinking that this woman was good with kids,” I wrote in the first paragraph of this essay. I didn’t know the half of it. Runaways is a series of sung monologues by teen characters who have fled their broken family lives. As research for the show, Liz interviewed numerous hard-luck young people, and later cast them in actual parts. Others of her works, such as The Hating Pot, would take on themes of racism and anti-Semitism. (Liz was Jewish.) This was the profoundly talented, open-hearted, special person I had taken one look at when, to put it plainly, I thought, Nah.
We got together again. I went to her apartment, and from there we went walking. There was, that evening, the feeling of the Village, maybe all of Manhattan, being her playground. We went to a place that was having a dance party—possibly La MaMa, because Liz pointed out Ellen Stewart, who was floating around the huge room like a giant bee. I must have indicated that I didn’t know who she was, because Liz said, “Don’t tell her that. She’ll kill you.” Liz introduced me to a man—white, fortyish, good-looking, wearing a blue suit—whose name and possibly very important occupation I have forgotten. I do recall that he smiled at me in a friendly way while his eyes asked: What is she doing with you?
Later we went back to Liz’s place. We talked—mostly she talked, about our age difference, which she seemed to think was holding me back from getting involved with her, and whose unimportance she tried hard to impress upon me. “I had a relationship with a man who was sixty-nine years old,” she told me. “He was one of the greatest men I’ve ever known. Age doesn’t matter. What matters is what people are like inside. There are some people you meet, sometimes they’re young people, and they’re walking around, but it’s like they’re already dead.” I had little to say. What she was saying was true, but it missed the point, and I didn’t know how to tell her what the point was without hurting her.
What I’ve learned about Liz since that evening has led me to reflect on the possible significance, for her, of the word “dead.”
The book she gave me a copy of is Leah and Lazar, a novel published in 1982. Her nonfiction book The Four of Us: A Family Memoir came out in 1991. I don’t know what became of my original copy of Leah and Lazar, but I acquired and read both of those books recently. The memoir has four sections, one for each member of Liz’s quintessentially dysfunctional immediate family. The first section is about Liz’s older brother, Lincoln, a highly creative schizophrenic who was Liz’s chief tormentor and the biggest influence on her life, a doomed soul who was disabled after throwing himself in front of a subway train and who later became a street person, dying in a hovel in 1989. The second section tells the story of Liz’s mother, a depressed woman of unrealized artistic gifts who committed suicide when Liz was a young woman. Next up is Liz’s father, a lawyer who brought big-league hockey to Buffalo, a bellicose man with contempt for those—e.g., his wife and son—who gave up on their own lives; he identified himself and his daughter as survivors. Finally, there is Liz herself, whose youthful adventures included living among coal miners in Appalachia, teaching in an African village, performing as a musician with, among others, Pete Seeger, and appearing on soap operas (all the ones my grandmother watched: I probably saw her on TV at some point).
Leah and Lazar was a fictionalized version of all this, remarkable, among other reasons, for telling the story of the death of the brother—Lazar, in the novel—with alarming accuracy, seven years before the fact. One part of the novel seems to have been influenced by the research for Runaways: the Liz character, Leah, becomes a teen prostitute in Florida before returning to her rather blasé parents. But in a figurative sense, that section of Leah and Lazar is perhaps autobiographical. Liz was a runaway from the spirit of death in her family. A refugee, a survivor. Defiantly alive.
One evening, the last one we spent together, Liz and I went to the movies. We saw Moonstruck, a romantic comedy in which the Cher character falls in love with her fiancé’s brother, played by Nicolas Cage. It was not lost on me that I was a twenty-four-year-old man sitting with a thirty-seven-year-old woman as we watched the twenty-four-year-old Cage declare his love for the forty-one-year-old Cher. Afterward, as we walked to Liz’s place, I hummed or whistled part of Moonstruck’s soundtrack, which I dimly recalled having heard before but couldn’t place, and asked Liz about it. Even then I could feel what she must have been thinking when she looked at me: He really is young. “It’s from Puccini’s opera La Bohème,” she said evenly.
Our conversation at her apartment was listless, dismal. I don’t recall what we said, because it was trivial, and because Liz’s tone made our exchange like a dubbed film—her lips were saying one thing, but I heard something else: I’ve tried. I’m obviously not going to persuade you. I don’t know what else there is to say. Before long, I left. I never saw or spoke to Liz again.
Unless you count this. One day, more than two decades later, when I was spending, as usual, way too much time on Facebook, I found Liz’s profile. I sent her a friend request. She accepted. There was no exchange beyond that. I don’t know if she even remembered who I was, and for my part, I wouldn’t have been sure what to write. (Hi, twenty-odd years ago you wanted us to be lovers, but I wasn’t interested. How’s it going?) You might ask why I looked her up at all. It’s a good question, one I’ve often asked myself, particularly since early 2016, when I saw the news of Liz’s death. Complications after surgery for esophageal cancer. A month short of her sixty-fifth birthday.
How well Liz is remembered depends on whom you’re talking to. I recently mentioned her to two well-educated friends, both men, one several years older than I am, the other nine years younger. Both immediately thought of the writer Harvey Swados—was Liz his wife? Daughter? (He was a cousin.) On the other hand, the New York Times ran a substantial obituary of her (which mentioned, among many other things, that she was survived by her wife) and months later published remembrances of Liz by major theatrical figures, including Meryl Streep.
When I remember Liz—and maybe this has something to do with the Facebook friend request—I think of what she said about some people already being dead. What Liz thought of me is ultimately, of course, both unknowable and unimportant, though I do wonder if she considered me one of those walking dead folks because, as she must have thought, I deferred to societal mores about age differences. But what is important is what I think of myself, and I realize that over the years I have used Liz’s words as a kind of personal yardstick. Have I lived as an alive person?
Writing is the one thing I have always pursued whether I knew anyone was interested or not. That fickle, elusive object of affection has nonetheless taken me to some interesting places. (Some of them are Liz’s old haunts. I’ve taught nonfiction writing at Bennington, where she was a student, and NYU, where she was a professor.) I have written steadily; I write because I can’t imagine not doing it, because I need to. But one also needs to make a living, and I spent a couple of decades doing work few would describe as glamorous to support myself and the family I always wanted. Would an alive person have done it differently? Would he have put writing front and center, always, until he either hit it big or died the death of Lazar? Looking at these questions written in my notebook, I think I have the beginnings of an answer; but maybe that is less important than asking the question—not about what we’ve done, but what we’re doing.
It is tempting for a human being, especially a writer, and most especially an essayist, to find cause and effect between one event and subsequent events. And if you’re not careful, you can end up with an essay that might as well be a short story. So I will simply list some things that happened after I last saw Liz.
That spring, my office had a dance party. I asked a co-worker to dance (the one who said “I’ll laugh later”), and as we were dancing, I asked if she wanted to have coffee after the party. We went from Midtown to a diner in the Village. When we left there and were about to part for the evening, I kissed her. I didn’t know if she wanted me to or not. Turned out she liked it.
Four years after that, I married a (different) woman I love deeply and am still with. We’ve told our daughters the story of our courtship, which at first seemed anything but that. They laugh at how we had to overcome our first impressions, or non-impressions, of each other. “Love at fiftieth sight,” our older daughter said once.
One thing about settling down is that it’s good for establishing routines. One of mine is going to the Y. Between that and the fact that, lately, my metabolism appears to have been run over by an eighteen-wheeler, my little body has gotten a bit bigger. Some of that, though not a lot, has made its way down to my legs. I wear shorts and swimming trunks now without a thought. You could call this confidence, or you could say I no longer care, or you could conclude that often the two amount to the same thing.
The other day I listened to a recording of La Bohème with Maria Callas singing the part of the fatally ill Mimi. The passage of the music included in Moonstruck is actually a very small part of the opera. But it is lovely, and a little sad, and memorable, and once in a while it goes through my head.
Clifford Thompson’s most recent book is What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues. He graphic novel, Big Man and the Little Men, will be out in the fall of 2022.
