The reluctant writer of the Upper West Side
She was about five feet four, with thick brown hair that came to just below her ears. She didn’t pay much mind to it. Her skin was pale. She had brown eyes and largish lips that were always painted with the gaudiest orange lipstick. She was forever rubbing it off her teeth with a forefinger. She had a seemingly permanent case of cottonmouth. When you listened to her talk, all you wanted to do was to give her a glass of water. She constantly tried to fight the dryness by smacking her lips, moving her tongue about or swallowing. Nothing worked. Her mouth miraculously stayed dry all the time.
Jan.
She was part of our writers group in the early 1980s in New York. Decidedly Jewish, sweet, shy, very talented.
She had a lovely smile, lipstick or not. Not a huge or even a big smile but a smile that broke through her melancholy so that you saw for a brief moment there was light in her. (I don’t have a photo of her. I wish I did.) But most of all, she was funny. She cracked jokes. They were almost always self-deprecating. When she opened the door of her apartment, she might say,
“Welcome to the Upper West Side Home for Celibate Jews.”
When she got on a roll, it was almost always about her nonexistent love life or her self-proclaimed unworthy body.
“Yesterday I called a plumber to fix my sink,” I remember her saying once. “It wasn’t broken, but it was the only way I could get a man into my apartment.”
Her delivery was worthy of standup, and this was before standup became a cult.
“I’m still a virgin,” she said another time. Then the perfect little pause. “I’m holding out for the Messiah.”
She was a proofreader at Simon & Schuster.
“I can’t get you published,” she would say, “but I can correct your spelling.”
She wasn’t just a verbal comedian, though. She was a good writer who cared about words, who could make you laugh with the written word as well as with the spoken word. She wrote a great deal about her mother, about the twisted, co-dependent (we didn’t have that term then, so had to make do) relationship the two of them had in the past and still had.
“My mother was a fanatic about modesty,” she read to the group one day. “She put so many clothes on me I didn’t know I had breasts until I was twenty-eight.”
All of us were immensely fond of her. Jan came to the writers group for about six months. You could tell she was pathologically insecure. (“I don’t even think I have a right to open my own mail.”) A lot of comedians are, but she seemed especially so. She was doubtful about everything, including her own humor. She didn’t think she was especially funny. And of course she thrived on guilt, the ultimate nourishment for any female Jewish comedian. She feasted on it.
“I feel incredibly guilty about sex. I even feel guilty about sleeping with myself.”
I adored her. I felt protective of her. I wanted her to be great, to write a marvelous book, to become famous, to share her lovely spirit with the world. I did everything I could to encourage her—we all did. And I meant it. I don’t think I’d ever been such a fan of someone before, not in this way, not in a literary way. I discovered that this, too, was one of the great joys of being in the writers group. That you could be a fan, an unabashed fan, of a fellow writer. That you could give them your support.
Of course there were different kinds of support. The somewhat token support you gave every person in the group when they read something. That was just manners. But I’m talking about the surge of admiration and possibility you felt from time to time about someone, about something someone read. Then you wanted to carry them forth on your shoulders, and show them to the world and say, “This person is someone you should read. This person is a writer!” This sense of selflessness the group provided from time to time cleansed my soul, as if I dipped into the healing waters, and I walked away feeling renewed and liking myself, something that I too often did not.
That was how I felt about Jan. I felt she was the real thing, that she was a marvelous writer, and that she deserved to have a career doing this. I meant it when I told her that.
There was always something in her, though, that didn’t listen. You could see it in her response. We can all be shyly modest when someone praises us, but Jan’s reaction was different. In some way she was always telling you, “I don’t believe you. It’s not true.”
Then one day she stopped coming to the group. She missed one, two, then three meetings, and so one of us who knew her, called her. He reported to us, “She says she’s not coming back.”
“Why?” three or four of us said at once.
“She wouldn’t say.”
We tried to convince her to change her mind. Two or three of us even went to her apartment and literally begged her. She just shook her head. I think I even got down on my knees to implore her. She laughed.
“No, no,” she said. “You guys have been very nice, but no.”
“Why? Why won’t you come back?”
She just shook her head again. “No, no,” she said. “I can’t.”
And so we had to grant her her privacy, had to grant her what she deserved—the right to fight her own demons in the way she wished. It was clear she had paid a large price for her humor. We tried to call her once or twice after that, but she wouldn’t return our calls. So she vanished.
I thought about her for a long time afterward. From time to time, I still do.
We just don’t want some people to leave.
