Heart of the City (10 page)

Sofia Feldman couldn’t remember the last time she’d ventured this far north of Twenty-third Street. A Gramercy girl who now lived in the East Village, she’d packed her viola and taken the uptown train to a dress rehearsal at Jazz at Lincoln Center. The performing arts center, at Sixtieth and Broadway, had asked the Greenwich Village Orchestra, an all-volunteer group Sofia was in, to play at the building’s grand opening later that week.

It was early October 2004, and it was late—after 10 p.m.—when rehearsal ended. Sofia, twenty-six, had to be at her day job, at a lab, early the next morning.

She waved goodbye to the other musicians and made for the Columbus Circle subway station, just steps from the music hall. But when she stepped outside, she was overcome by a sense of dislocation. This part of Midtown had always conjured a single, unpleasant image for her: a zoo. During the day, it crawled with suits from the office towers and with fanny pack-wearing tourists window-shopping the luxury stores on Fifth Avenue. It was one of the reasons Sofia kept her distance.

But on this crisp fall night, she looked across Columbus Circle at row after row of nearly deserted streets. She could hear wind hissing through leaves in Central Park. The traffic lights ticked green, then red, then green again, with no one passing save a few lonely cabs and an old man on a ten-speed. When the breeze picked up again, she could hear the sound of a plastic bottle skittering along the pavement somewhere in the darkness.

She was born and raised in New York. But she felt at that moment like a stranger.

MATT FITZGERALD, twenty-nine, left his therapist’s office after another session of fruitless soul-searching. His love life had grown so complicated of late that if it weren’t happening to him
it would have almost been funny. He had been months from marrying Amanda, a colleague he’d dated for four years, despite obvious problems. The wedding invitations had already gone out when he discovered that she was cheating on him. He had to call each of the guests to explain that the wedding was off.

A week later, their wedding planner called. “I knew you two weren’t right for each other,” she’d said. “I could just tell.”

Then
she
asked him out for drinks. The
wedding planner
. He was vulnerable and confused, and he accepted.

Earlier tonight was supposed to be his second date with the wedding planner. But she showed up with a man she described as a former boyfriend. “I told Ayden I was meeting you,” she said. “And he insisted on coming. Ayden does this.”

Matt finished his drink quickly. “I actually have to go,” he said, forcing a smile.

“You just got here.”

“I have a doctor’s appointment.”

“What kind of doctor is open at 9 p.m.?” the wedding planner asked.

Walking home along West Fifty-seventh Street after the shrink’s appointment, he continued to brood. Why did he feel compelled to stay with Amanda all those years, even in the face of all those warning signs? Why didn’t he stick up for himself more, be more open about his feelings? Did he really have a “nice guy complex,” as his shrink suggested? He grew up in Rochester, in upstate New York, and still had some small-town values, but that didn’t make him some hayseed. Nor could it explain why he kept winding up with the wrong women.

When it came to straightening out his career, he had been an ace. After a disillusioning stint in the music business, he spent nights and weekends teaching himself computer programming and had recently won a well-paying job as a software engineer at a financial firm. Why couldn’t reordering his love life be as easy?

THE INCONGRUOUS quiet of Midtown beckoned to Sofia, who had graduated from college four years earlier but in many ways still felt like a wanderer. Her degree was from Harvard, a place that was supposed to turn out graduates with a sense of their place in the world. But Sofia wasn’t one of them. While classmates were heading off to law and medical school, she threw a few sets of clothes in a backpack and set off on a fourteen-month solo trek across Asia and Australia. She hitchhiked, shot down rivers in bamboo rafts, stayed in the homes of oddballs she’d met on the road. A walk though Midtown on a Tuesday night wasn’t exactly a safari. But even after moving back to New York and taking the lab job, her thirst for adventure had persisted.

She decided to pass up the Columbus Circle subway station for a more distant one, several long blocks away. She walked onto Broadway and listened to the soft night music of a lonely city. She looked at the blurry pastel lights reflecting in the windows of the skyscrapers. A taxi sped past, then was swallowed in the darkness. For a long time, the only sounds were the clop of her old wooden clogs against the sidewalk.

She had no sooner turned onto Fifty-seventh Street than an old childhood memory caught her. She was eight years old and sitting in a row of chairs at Carnegie Hall, her violin in her lap. Her music school had brought students there on a field trip to see the auditorium and meet the violinist Isaac Stern.

Isn’t Carnegie Hall near here? she thought. It
was
. But where?

Then, out of nowhere, her name.

“Sofia,” a high-pitched voice cried. “Sofia Feldman?”

Sofia wheeled toward the voice. Standing beneath the sign for the crosstown bus was a woman about her age who looked familiar but whom Sofia couldn’t quite place. Next to her was a man—both were smiling.

“It’s Emily, from Harvard,” she said. “This is my husband, Sam.”

“Oh, my gosh! No way!” Sofia shouted, dashing over to embrace her. She and Emily had been friends freshman year, but Sofia hadn’t seen her in—what was it now?—something like eight years.

The night, it seemed, was full of surprises.

THE CAT-LIKE grin, the laugh, the expansive hand gestures—Matt wasn’t sure what first drew his eye. But as he neared the woman talking with two friends at the bus stop catty-cornered from Carnegie Hall, he felt his legs almost involuntarily slow. An attractive, open face was framed by twirls of dark wavy hair. There was a tossed-off quality to her clothes that made her look approachable: olive corduroy pants, a threadbare hooded sweatshirt under a short brown corduroy jacket. He had once been a musician—he had gone to the Berklee College of Music before switching careers. He could tell she was carrying an instrument of some kind on her back.

He felt an aching somewhere in his chest. A conversation with her—or a woman like her—would save him the way no end of therapy could. He immediately recognized his irrationality. He knew nothing about this woman. But the way his life had been going lately, he couldn’t help but feel everything deeply.

He was about five steps from her, passing on the inside of the sidewalk, when he was almost certain she looked at him. There was a weak smile, too, but was it meant for him or the people with whom she was talking? He had no idea. He kept walking, but his brain churned. Was there a way to cut into their conversation gracefully? Was there some clever thing to say?

Then a rush of self-doubt. Who am I kidding? he asked himself, feeling something tighten in his gut. And so he crossed to the other side of Fifty-seventh Street—which was closer to home—and kept walking. As he waited for the walk signal on Seventh Avenue to change, he stomped his heel against the pavement, disappointed in himself. “If you had bigger
cojones
,” he told himself, “you would have said something.”

SOFIA SAID goodbye to her friends and quickly glimpsed a set of familiar-looking red banners: Carnegie Hall. The building, she could see now, was just across from where she was standing. She crossed to the other side of Fifty-seventh Street and turned left across Seventh Avenue until she was under its marquee. She pressed her face to the darkened doors. How earnest she must have seemed all those years ago, dutifully rosining her bow as Isaac Stern asked each eight-year-old to play him something. She shook her head and stifled a laugh.

The Fifty-seventh Street subway station was just a block away, and she returned to her regular walking pace—the supersonic clip of a native New Yorker. She was rapidly gaining on a man a quarter block ahead of her, and became suddenly self-conscious of the racket her clogs made against the sidewalk. They were the only two people on the block, and against the silence the clop-clopclop of her shoes seemed to be caroming off the walls of buildings. A few steps from overtaking him, she tried to change the angle of her foot, to soften the clatter. But one of her heels caught on something, and she tripped. She stumbled forward, her viola bag thumping the man in the back.

“I’m so sorry,” she stammered, worried what kind of dirty look this guy would shoot her.

But when she regained her balance and looked up, the man was looking over his shoulder and absolutely beaming. It was one of the goofiest, most cartoonish grins she’d ever seen—like something you’d see on some West Virginia coal miner who’d just been told he’d won the lottery and would never have to work again.

“What’s in the case?” the man burbled. “A trumpet? A violin? Because I bought an electric violin a year ago, and have been trying to teach myself how to play.”

“It’s a viola.” Sofia walked fast, looking at him warily over her right shoulder.

“A viola? Cool. You must be a musician. I was, too, a while back. Electric guitar. I went to music school, now I write software. Do you play in a band?”

“The Greenwich Village Orchestra.”

“Okay. Yeah. I’ve heard of them. The electric violin I got, it’s a Zeta, the same kind that Boyd Tinsley plays, you know, the violinist for the Dave Matthews Band? Well, every time I try to play it, it makes this super-weird noise, and I can’t figure out why. Have you ever played electric?”

Wow, thought Sofia. A slow walker, but a speed-talker. She allowed herself a closer look: he was probably the same man who’d passed her a block before while she was talking with her friends. He’d smiled at her. She’d remembered the baby face, those apple-rubbed cheeks.

Oh, my God, she thought. He probably thinks I bumped into him on purpose. She was mortified, but unsure about how to pull away—or for that matter do anything—gracefully.