The Hours Read Free

of a vast, inscrutable intention and everything in the world has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but is simply the sight and feel of the thing itself. This determined, abiding fascination is what she thinks of as her soul (an embarrassing, sentimental word, but what else to call it?); the part that might conceivably survive the death of the body. Clarissa never speaks to anyone about any of that. She doesn’t gush or chirp. She exclaims only over the obvious manifestations of beauty, and even then manages
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    a certain aspect of adult restraint. Beauty is a whore, she sometimes says. I like money better.
    Tonight she will give her party. She will fill the rooms of her apartment with food and flowers, with people of wit and influence. She will shepherd Richard through it, see that he doesn’t overtire, and then she will escort him uptown to receive his prize.
    She straightens her shoulders as she stands at the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the light. There she is, thinks Willie Bass, who passes her some mornings just about here. The old beauty, the old hippie, hair still long and defiantly gray, out on her morning rounds in jeans and a man’s cotton shirt, some sort of ethnic slippers (India? Central America?) on her feet. She still has a certain sexiness; a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm; and yet this morning she makes a tragic sight, standing so straight in her big shirt and exotic shoes, resisting the pull of gravity, a female mammoth already up to its knees in the tar, taking a rest between efforts, standing bulky and proud, almost nonchalant, pretending to contemplate the tender grasses waiting on the far bank when it is beginning to know for certain that it will remain here, trapped and alone, after dark, when the jackals come out. She waits patiently for the light. She must have been spectacular twenty-five years ago; men must have died happy in her arms. Willie Bass is proud of his ability to discern the history of a face; to understand that those who are now old were once young. The light changes and he walks on.
    Clarissa crosses Eighth Street. She loves, helplessly, the dead
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    televisio n set abandoned on the curb alongside a single white patent-leather pump. She loves the vendor’s cart piled with broccoli and peaches and mangoes, each labeled with an index card that offers a price amid abundances of punctuation: ‘‘$1.49!!’’ ‘‘3 for ONE Dollar!?!’’ ‘‘50 Cents EA.!!!!!’’ Ahead, under the Arch, an old woman in a dark, neatly tailored dress appears to be singing, stationed precisely between the twin statues of George Washington, as warrior and politician, both faces destroyed by weather. It’s the city’s crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads but you find it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city; that if you dug beneath it you would find the ruins of another, older city, and then another and another. Under the cement and grass of the park (she has crossed into the park now, where the old woman throws back her head and sings) lay the bones of those buried in the potter’s field that was simply paved over, a hundred years ago, to make Washington Square. Clarissa walks over the bodies of the dead as men whisper offers of drugs (not to her) and three black girls whiz past on roller skates and the old woman sings, tunelessly, iiiiiii. Clarissa is skittish and jubilant about her luck, her good shoes (on sale at Barney’s, but still); here after all is the sturdy squalor of the park, visible even under its coat of grass and flowers; here are the drug dealers (would they kill you if it came to that?) and the lunatics, the stunned and baffled, the people whose luck, if they ever had any, has run out. Still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows other