Artist in Residence

When I was nineteen I shared an apartment in Manhattan with the jazz singer Annie Ross, and it led to my doing something I now wish I hadn’t. She was fifty-eight at the time. It was 1989. We were on the sleepy northern end of York Avenue in a giant postwar building, one with a semicircular driveway in front and two columns of balconies on the facade. The apartment belonged to my girlfriend’s step-grandmother, who lived off and on in Los Angeles. Annie was an old friend of hers and would usually stay there when she visited New York. I was doing an open-ended apartment-sit, looking after the cat. One day my girlfriend said that Annie was coming to town and would be staying with me for a while. I had met her on one of her previous visits—she was friendly and husky-voiced, with a big laugh—so I was fine with the idea. Not that I really had a choice.

Annie had hit it big in the early 1950s as a glamorous and jaunty solo performer who sang with deftness and wit. In 1957 she became an international star as part of the virtuosic vocalese trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, vocalese meaning they sang lyrics they’d concocted to replicate instrumental jazz solos. By the ’80s Annie was mainly acting in small movie roles; that’s her getting turned into an evil robot in Superman III. Most of this was unknown to me then. When my girlfriend and I were still in high school together, she had played her parents’ Lambert, Hendricks & Ross albums for me, and I got a kick out of them, but I would’ve been a lot more excited if Lou Reed or one of the members of R.E.M. were moving in.

New York was already my home. I’d grown up and gone to high school less than ten blocks from the apartment on York Avenue. I was supposed to be in college upstate at Vassar that spring, but after my first semester I’d failed out. I wasn’t sure exactly why. In high school I was flummoxed by math and science and struggled to keep up in virtually any class that wasn’t English. If my girlfriend—let’s call her Daphne—hadn’t helped me prepare for my senior-year astronomy final, I might not have graduated. I hoped a small college where I could focus on literature, writing, and art would be the answer. But after giving it an earnest try for three months, I floundered. A sort of paralysis set in. I couldn’t write, I stopped reading. I agonized to the point of despair over my academic incapacity, but there were things I knew I was doing right: making friends, watching old movies in the student theater practically every evening, staying up late in conversation.

I accompanied one friend to an introductory meeting of the campus literary magazine. To become juniorI went to hear Mary McCarthy read from on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication; she seemed formidable, and with her white bouffant and red pantsuit she resembled Barbara Bush. In the campus chapel I listened to the critic Alfred Kazin deliver a lecture on American literature and get testy when a student asked afterward why he hadn’t mentioned any female writers. A full-page ad in which Donald Trump crowed about his recent purchase of the Plaza Hotel prompted a revelatory discussion with a Long Islander who lived across the hall from me: He was the first person I’d met who didn’t consider Trump a buffoon, and I was the first person he’d met who didn’t consider Trump a role model.