At Sheridan Square she turned east and continued along Fourth Street. The Village looked more and more the way she had guessed it would look from the books and articles she had read about it. There was a cellar bar cluttered with beer-drinkers, a coffee house with operatic arias on the jukebox.
And all over were the people. There were people and more people, people being moved along by a policeman, people entering and leaving the coffee house and the bar and all the little shops.
“Don’t buy clothes in the Village shops,” Ruthie had warned. “The prices are half for the clothes and half for the labels.”
Dear Ruthie, she thought. Dear Ruthie, who doesn’t really know me from third base, but who has a mad, wonderful apartment that will be mine for the whole damn summer.
She smiled and kept on walking.
The streets had names instead of numbers, and she decided that this was better and much more interesting. She passed Jones Street and Cornelia Street, crossed Sixth Avenue and walked for one more block, until she came to a sign that said Macdougal Street.
I am here, she thought.
She was at the center of the Village, if the Village really had a center. She looked at Washington Square Park, a block of grass and trees that didn’t seem to belong in New York at all, with benches by the hundred and stone tables where old men played chess. There were pigeons strutting and bums sitting on the benches and people walking all around, back and forth.
Washington Square. She saw the NYU dorms across the way, and the Circle at the foot of Fifth Avenue where the folksingers gathered on Sundays, and she was seeing it for the first time but she felt almost as though she were returning to it. It was all new; at the same time it was all very familiar.
She started to walk through the park, then changed her mind. Instead she turned south on Macdougal, the street Ruthie called “the Village’s most Village-y street.”
She saw at once what Ruthie meant. Macdougal Street was a commercial enterprise and it didn’t attempt to conceal the fact. It was evident in the little shops that tried to attract by their novelty, in the way that every store front was groomed to draw in the passer-by and the tourist. It was artificial and unreal; it was also quite likable.
Macdougal Street looked alive. It was joyously, vibrantly phony, as though claiming that everything could and did happen there, and she liked it. She walked up and down the street, hardly conscious of the fact that she was walking, looking at everything, staring into the windows of the little shops with the jewelry that was too “modern” and the dresses that were too extreme and the decor which would look ridiculous anywhere else, but which somehow seemed to belong here.
She passed all the stores and bars and coffee houses, and the stores selling musical instruments and the stores selling books and records, and the men with beards and bare feet and the men who minced and glided by, and everywhere the tourists, men and women from somewhere else who walked arm in arm and stared at everything.
Finally she entered one of the coffee shops, wondering vaguely how she had managed to select it from all the others. It was called Renascence, for some reason which escaped her completely, and it seemed a good deal more relaxed and natural than the other coffee houses on the block. The men and women at the tables looked and acted as though they all came to the place several times a week; while they were not dressed strangely in any way, they were obviously Villagers and they were obviously at ease in the cavernous candle-lit room.
There was a piece of doggerel in the window by a man who had been hailed as a great poet in the 20’s and had drunk in the 30’s and 40’s and was finally murdered in the 50’s by his wife’s lover. There were four muddy oil paintings on the wall. Heavy oak tables and benches and chairs made dark islands on the cold cement floor.
When she walked inside everyone looked up for a moment. Then, not recognizing her, they ignored her and returned to their chess games or cards. There was a bridge game in progress at the front table and several pairs of men were playing gin rummy.
Jan heard music coming from the back room behind the small kitchen. She walked in the direction of the music, finding a very small room containing one huge table surrounded by benches. Feeling a little like an intruder, she took a seat on one of the benches and sat without moving, listening to the music.
A tall, rangy boy with light brown hair that fell into his eyes was sitting with his back against the wall and one foot up on the bench. He was strumming a guitar, playing sad and driving blues chords and humming along with the music. There was a girl sitting next to him, and Jan thought that she might be pretty if she wore a little lipstick and less eye make-up. There were two others, another boy and girl, but Jan hardly noticed them.
The boy stopped playing the guitar and took a sip of his coffee. “Mike,” the other boy suggested, “play Danville Girl.”
The boy called Mike nodded shortly, took another sip of coffee and set the cup down on the table. He played softly and slowly, and when he sang his voice was husky and sad, almost mournful. Jan had never heard the song before.
He was looking down at the guitar, completely absorbed in the chords he was playing and the song he was singing. He sang it very well. She could feel the strength of his voice and the rhythm of his guitar matching the pulse beat of the city, rising and falling as his foot tapped the bench in time to the music.
The girl’s eyes were on him all the while.
He raised his head slightly and his eyes caught hers. She glanced away nervously but she could see him out of the corner of her eye, still looking at her, probing her with his eyes. He seemed to be singing to her and for her, as if she were the only other person in the room.
Stop it, she thought, angrily. Stop staring at me like that, damn you.
He was good-looking. He shouldn’t have been, for his features by themselves were not good at all. His nose was too long, and when his lips turned in a smile the smile was crooked. And there was a haggard look in his eyes, as though he had stayed up too late for too many nights and eaten too little and smoked too much. But the whole was greater than the sum of its parts — he was definitely attractive.