An Englishwoman in New York
Before Frances Wilson won a New York Public Library fellowship, she had no idea American oldies had such a swell time in Manhattan
There are no oldies in New York, where I’ve been living for the past ten months. This is because there is no retirement age. Instead of disappearing into their semis (there are no semis), their gardens (there are no gardens) or their sheds (no sheds), the 60-somethings rule the city’s clubs and cocktail bars where everyone – regardless of loss of hair, memory, eyesight, skin elasticity or general mobility – is required to carry proof that they are over 21.
Who said this was no country for old men? The Republic of New York is the only place on earth where you can shine in your prime. It’s also a country for old women: the phrase you are least likely to hear in this city, where the oldies have far more style than the youngies, is ‘dress your age’.
Many British women over 40, whose sartorial model is the Queen, fret about baring their knees or wearing tight jeans. Here, the octogenarians – a glitter of hair, nails, teeth, leather jackets, miniskirts and Manolos – own the sidewalks, and the changing rooms of H&M are filled with hags trying on leopard-print leggings and body-con dresses.
The Upper East Side recalls Thiniville in André Maurois’s classic children’s book Fattypuffs and Thinifers: in addition to their Hollywood glamour, the vintage women have limbs as lean and lithe as strips of biltong, and bones as light as balsawood.
In New York, getting older is a mark not only of accumulated credit but also of sexual superiority; because it has no sell-by date, New York sex appeal can only increase in value. New York’s women are born hot and get hotter. So, by the time they reach their nineties, they are positively smokin’.
Andy Warhol’s friend Rene Ricard, who loved to watch the city’s crones, said, ‘When you see an old lady in New York City, she’s not just any old lady. She was once a showgirl.’
The absence of ageism has its downside, too. Because all Americans are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, the teenage boys hog the seats on the subway trains while the former showgirls sway in the corridors, before being mown down by the Fattypuffs on the station platforms.
I came here last September on a writing fellowship at the New York Public Library. Only in America, where writing – like everything else – is seen as a competitive sport, do fellowships like this exist. Writers in England muddle about at the bottom of the food chain, but in America writing is a considered a career choice rather than a form of unemployment, and its practitioners rank high in the evolutionary system.
As such, I have been given a room of my own, a stipend and unlimited use of the library’s resources. There are 14 other fellows and we inhabit our isolated wing like contestants in the Big Brother house.
Coming to New York has been like crossing into a looking-glass world. Everything here is reversed: old people are cool, writers are encouraged and people own dogs rather than dogs owning people. The hounds of New York sashay politely on their leashes rather than pounding free-range down the pavements, and the humans live their private lives in public. They play chess in the squares, make important phone calls on the sidewalks, barbecue chickens on the front steps, and eat three times a day in diners, cafés and restaurants.
The reason people eat out is that they can’t eat in, and they can’t eat in because there are no kitchens in New York. Apartments are designed around sleeping and washing, with the kitchen added as an afterthought. The most spacious room will be the shower, while the average New York kitchen is no bigger than the fridge.
New York is a metropolitan eating disorder: food is both everywhere and nowhere. Some friends who came over last spring had an Airbnb with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room and no kitchen – no kitchen at all; the assumption being that they, like everyone else, would be in cafés from dawn to dusk, or else getting their food delivered.
Wherever you look, food is being delivered. Liveried delivery boys stagger beneath high-rise piles of pizza boxes; electric bikes buzz about transporting trunkloads of garlic bread and vats of ice cream.
New Yorkers argue about whether it is cheaper to buy groceries or to order take-out, and there’s probably not much in it: a bag of salad, a block of cheese and a litre of milk can set you back $40.
It is certainly less stressful to have meals delivered: being in a Manhattan supermarket can be like finding yourself stuck with a braggart at a party.
Back home, my local mini-market stocks two types of tinned tomato: chopped and whole. Here, the local Food Town has an entire aisle of canned tomatoes: seven shelves, each eight feet long, packed with pulped tomatoes, pulverised tomatoes, sieved tomatoes, crushed tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato purée, fire-roasted diced tomatoes, sliced Roma-style tomatoes, sliced tomatoes in oregano, and fire-roasted and sliced tomatoes in oregano and basil – with each coming in a variety of sizes. This excess of choice is seen as a constitutional right, but I’ve still not found the tin I want.
Where restaurants are concerned, everywhere, regardless of quality, charges the same amount (around $35) for a steak or a burger, while a plate of pasta is about $17. The 20% gratuity, considered compulsory, pays the waiters’ wages and if for any reason you don’t tip, you will be pursued down the street by a mob wielding pitchforks.
French food is taken seriously, and the best to be had is in Café Luxembourg on West 70th and Broadway, or any of the Vin Sur Vingt wine bars.
Reached the point of choosing a restaurant for its acoustics? You can hear your dining companions in Café Loup (also French) on West 13th. In most bars a glass of average plonk is about $16, and happy hour means what it says: drinks are half-price, and the business of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness can now begin in earnest.
Nowhere, however – least of all the churches – is quiet because New York is a talk show in which everyone exercises their right to free speech and impromptu song. The beggars in the subways perform musicals; the doormen in the library debate, with fantastic levels of assertion, more or less everything. Dinner parties are a fistfight of conversational aggression in which any topic is up for grabs – except one.
Edmund White once said that the difference between American dinner parties and French dinner parties is that the Americans talk about money in order to avoid talking about sex, and the French talk about sex in order to avoid talking about money, but that’s no longer the case.
The Americans now talk about sex in order to avoid talking about Donald J Trump. Not once, over the last ten months, has his name been mentioned in my company. This is in the hope that before long he will retire and disappear into his potting shed.