Heart of the City (20 page)

Chesa Sy had been traveling for nearly thirty hours when her plane landed at JFK. Sapped of any sense of time, she found a clock in the arrival area and realized that New York was precisely twelve hours behind Manila. Her home, in the Philippines, was literally halfway around the world.

It was August 2001, and nearing midnight. Her only thoughts, as she waited at the luggage carousel, were of the old high school friend she’d planned to stay with. Chesa had known Malaya since kindergarten in Dagupan City—both had Chinese fathers and Filipino mothers. They had been academic rivals in high school, dueling for the best grades. But Chesa had always cast herself as the more adventurous. So it was with some relish, Chesa thought, that Malaya announced a few years back that
she
was going to America, for a job as a nurse.

Chesa, thirty now, had a degree in accounting and a job as a bank teller in Manila. But in going to America—America!—Malaya had her beat. Malaya had even called Chesa back in May to bait her. “America is very different from the Philippines,” she sniffed. “Much better. You’d see if you ever visit.”

When the American Embassy finally sent Chesa a letter approving her visa, Chesa decided against giving Malaya the satisfaction of an advance warning. The best way to cut her friend down to size would be to show up at her door, unannounced. That would show her, all right.

But now that she was in this nearly windowless terminal, squinting at the airport map, she wondered whether she should have called Malaya first. The airport was labyrinthine and confusing. New York City, she suspected, would be even worse.

After collecting her bags, she followed a group of people she recognized from her flight. There was likely just one main route into New York, she thought, and this group seemed brisk and efficient in the way of people familiar with big cities. Outside a set of sliding glass doors, they all boarded a shuttle bus marked
“MTA/Subway.” At the subway station, the other riders scattered so quickly that Chesa was left standing alone at the curb. A sign said “Howard Beach.” But she had not heard of that part of New York. She feared that she was utterly lost.

MILTON JENNINGS should have been in New York eight hours earlier. He was flying home from Reno, Nevada, after a weeklong hiking trip with his parents near their summer cabin in the California mountains. But there had been flight delays, and Milton, clean-cut and six feet tall, with a native New Englander’s penchant for punctuality, was irritated at what he now saw would be less than a full night’s sleep, He had moved to New York just seven months earlier for a job as a classical music reviewer at a big online retailer. He was expected at work first thing the next morning.

After a week of crisp mountain breezes, August in New York felt like a swamp, even at midnight. God knew how often the A train stopped at Howard Beach at this hour. He was eager to get back to his one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, unpack, and go to sleep.

“Excuse me?”

The woman’s voice—accented and pleading—came from behind him in line at the token machine.

“Sir?”

He looked over his shoulder and saw a slender Asian woman with anxious eyes. Her dark hair, which glinted under the station lights, was tied in a loose ponytail that fell across the front of her shoulder. Milton raised his eyebrows to acknowledge her, but didn’t speak.

“Excuse me,” she said. “You know how I go to Chinatown?”

“Um, well, yeah,” he said. “Let me just get a token first.”

He led her to wall-mounted subway map and traced the blue line showing the A train’s route.

“You’ll come down here and across here,” he said, sweeping his index finger across Brooklyn and the East River. “Then look out for Broadway-Nassau Street. That’s your stop.”

“Broadway? Broadway?” she said, with some dim note of recognition.

“Broadway-Nassau,” he said. “It’s the name of the stop in Chinatown. The subway stop. You should get off there.”

“Tenk you.”

From the worried look she gave him, he suspected she had only partly understood. Fresh off the boat, Milton thought, as he duck-walked his suitcases through the turnstile. Scattered along the faintly lit platform at almost equal intervals were four or five other riders, shadows, worn-looking and alone. The station, Milton saw, was undergoing remodeling for something called the AirTrain, a new tram that would link the subway system to the airport. That explained why the place was an obstacle course of plywood ramps, wire-mesh fencing, and bare, dangling light bulbs. What a mess, Milton thought, growing anxious for the sound of a train.

The Asian woman appeared along the platform. He smiled at her, more out of courtesy—and perhaps boredom—than anything else. She nodded. She stopped about six feet from him and set down her bags. They were the only two people at that end of the platform.

CHESA WALKED in behind the gentle-looking man who had given her directions. He sat at one end of a long bench, and she, at the other. The train picked up speed. He had turned toward her and seemed to be saying something. But the train was shaking and rattling. She couldn’t hear. She scooted down the bench until she was at arm’s distance. The man, she saw now, had a very tidy haircut, precisely trimmed and brushed high across the forehead, the kind you saw on American presidents and little boys.

“I was asking if you know anything about New York.”

He wore a pained look, as though discomfited, she thought, by the necessity of raising his voice.

“Oh, yes, tenk you,” she said, pointing to her ears. “I know Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Why are you here?”

“I see a friend from Philippines.”

“Is that where you’re from?”

“Manila.”

“And you came by yourself to New York? That’s pretty, well, brave.” He looked at her kindly but gave his head a half shake. Did he maybe not approve of a woman traveling alone?

She shifted to what she hoped was a safer subject. “You like basketball?” she asked. She had played on her high school team and still watched NBA games on satellite TV. “Tim Duncan? San Antonio Spurs?”

He laughed. “Yeah, I don’t know. If I watch any sport, it’s baseball.”

“I play guard in school,” she said. “I make good free throws.”

“Really?”

“In Philippines, they say I am tall.”

He gave a shy laugh, looking at her sideways with a boyish smile. She pushed her hair over her ear, nodding enthusiastically. She was glad no one else was on their car. In her country, she would have felt self-conscious talking to a man alone in public.

MILTON, THIRTY-FOUR years old, was not the chatty sort. He grew up in the Berkshires, in the rural northwestern corner of Massachusetts, and had been a reticent child, the son of art historians at the local college.

As a boy, he preferred the recordings of Mozart and Beethoven to the rough shouts of the schoolyard. His interest in music had blossomed so young that he had to ask his father to lower
the phonograph needle onto the grooved vinyl—his own hands were too unsteady. He studied piano and trumpet and then shifted in college to obscure early music instruments like the harpsichord and cornetto. He was in the middle of a doctorate in ethnomusicology at Princeton in late 2000 when one day—he wasn’t sure why then exactly—he suddenly lost heart. He had submerged so deeply in his studies that he had few friends and little life beyond the ivory tower. He hadn’t dated a girl—not really—in five years. When a friend joked at a recent birthday that he was nearing middle age, it had stung. He was no longer sure he wanted the life of an academic, with its isolation and endlessly deferred gratification. When he saw a listing for the classical reviewing job in Manhattan, he glimpsed a way out. In New York, he knew, he’d live among some of the finest symphonies and opera companies in the world. He would inhabit music, not dissect it. He would share his discoveries not with some preening thesis adviser but with ordinary listeners as passionate as he.

In New York, music traveled with him everywhere. On the subway, to tune out the rush-hour clatter, he would load his portable CD player with some new album from work, shut his eyes, and lose himself in the wash of notes. Were more people on the train now, he would have done just that. Anonymity—the ability to be simultaneously surrounded by and withdrawn from other people—was one of the subway’s chief pleasures. But tonight there was just one other rider in his car, and it would have felt awkward, particularly since they’d already spoken. The woman wore a lost look, and he felt a tinge of sympathy. Not that long ago, he had been a newcomer to the city. He still found the subway system mystifying enough to go nowhere without his pocket map.

The more they spoke, the sorrier he felt for her. The Brooklyn Bridge and the New York Knicks? If that’s all she knew about the city, she was in trouble. At a minimum, Milton thought, her
friend should have met her at the airport. “My stop is next,” he told her, looking a little apologetic. His one-bedroom apartment, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, was a few blocks from the Lafayette Avenue station. “You’ll stay on this line for maybe fifteen more minutes. Look for signs on the wall that say ‘Broadway-Nassau Street,’ okay?”

“Tenk you,” she said. “Please, sir, you can give me your phone number?” She said that because he had helped, she was obliged to return the favor.

“It’s no problem, really.”

“In my country, yes, it is necessary.”

He took the fold-up subway map from his pocket and wrote his phone number in the margin. “This is a map—you may need it.” Never expecting to hear from her again, he gripped his bags and disappeared into the night.

AS SOON as Milton stepped off, a few drunk-looking teenagers piled in. They tumbled atop one other on one of the rear seats, snorting and laughing. Chesa hugged her bags and kept her face to the window, scanning the walls for station names. She hoped the man didn’t misunderstand her request for his phone number. She wanted only to be proper. When she was a girl, her father sometimes reacted to ingratitude in his children with a Chinese expression: “If you do me one favor, I am honorable only if I return you ten.” It wasn’t enough, he told them, to reciprocate in kind. To restore
bao
, or balance, to a relationship, one had to repay a favor with a greater one. Her father had said it didn’t matter when or how, so long as it was done eventually.