The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick

gave her. She became his best reader, his most intelligent interlocutor, the one more than any other who understood all in life that went unspoken and unsaid. The same could not be said for James, who took flagrant advantage of all between them that went unspoken and unsaid. He seems, almost willfully, never to have grasped the depth of her anguish; or, if he did, he chose, with a hand shading his eyes, not to look directly into it. Perhaps it was that he knew if he did let that information penetrate him, he’d be forced to become more accountable to the friendship. Above all else, Henry James feared and hated being held accountable.
    In the spring of 1893, Constance—now deep into one of her serious depressions—occupies a flat in a palazzo fronting the Grand Canal. Henry is delighted and promises to come to Venice in the winter. She writes immediately to say the prospect of his visit is elating. No sooner does he get this letter than his anxieties begin to rise. In midsummer he writes to say he’s working on a new book, his plans for the winter are unsettled, it is more than likely that he will not come to Venice at all. She is silent. The summer drifts by, and then the autumn, with hardly a communiqu é passing between them. Then comes a letter from Constance casually announcing that the novel she’s been working on is finished. He knows that when she is between writing projects she rapidly starts to sink, but somehow the information does not register. He lets things ride.
    In January 1894, Constance Woolson jumped from a window in her Venetian flat, spattering her incredibly stripped-down life on a pavement washed by the waters of the most glamorous seaway in the world. After her death, the American diplomat John Hay said of her, “She had not as much happiness as a convict.” James, at home in England, felt horror, panic, guilt: whether or not he felt pain is not known. Somewhere within himself, he must have thought, If I’d gone to Venice, she wouldn’t have jumped.
    The truth of the matter is that neither Woolson nor James was equal to the task of friendship. While both cherished the connection, more compelling by far was the neurotic unhappiness within which each was imprisoned. Neither could do for the other what they could not do for themselves.
    *   *   *
    The night after I’d read about Woolson and James, I became a literary groupie. I dreamed that Leonard and I had both given up our own apartments in order to live together, and now, in the dream, he had called to say he’d found a place for us on the Upper East Side, where, in waking reality, neither of us would ever live. Quick, he says on the phone, come see it. I run uptown, enter a classy-looking building, push open the apartment door, and I am standing in a room, long and narrow, that feels like a coffin. At the far end of the room is a curtained window. I rush to it, thinking, The view will make up for it. I tear the curtain aside and I am staring at a brick wall.
    *   *   *
    I stepped onto the Number 3 bus on Fifth Avenue at Sixty-Sixth Street just as the afternoon rush hour was beginning. The seat near the door directly opposite the driver was empty, and I dropped into it. At Fifty-Ninth Street the bus began to fill up. As people crowded on, my eyes watched hand after hand drop and retrieve the MetroCard from the fare box and then move past my fixed gaze. At Fifty-Third Street someone got on without making the automatic gesture toward the box. I looked up and saw that it was an old man settling himself heavily in the seat diagonally opposite me.
    The bus went one more stop. Then the driver turned in his seat and said, “Sir, you didn’t pay your fare.” The old man didn’t answer; he was staring at the floor, his hands resting lightly on the head of a walking stick planted between his knees.
    The driver repeated himself.
    The old man looked up. “Yes, I