The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (33 page)

The city was a vast repository of passageways and doors, any one of which might lead me to my destiny. To choose one door was to slam all the others shut. I remember one day, back when I was still in my 30s, coming home from one of a series of assignations with a woman who lived in a basement apartment on the Lower East Side. As I walked, the streets seemed to stretch out ahead of me like a cartoon stretched on Silly Putty, growing longer and narrower. Four-thirty in the afternoon. Ruddy, low-pitched sunlight spilled over the tops of buildings that frowned down at me, their cornices furrowed like brows. It might have been my imagination, but the doors of all the buildings seemed to have big padlocks on them and red-and-yellow signs shouting
KEEP OUT
and
SECURITY ZONE
. The gates were down on the bodegas. I had to resist the urge to run—a flight toward, or away from, innocence? The woman's name was Greta. Her lobby buzzer didn't work. To gain entry I had to phone from the corner or stand there on the sidewalk, hoping she'd see me through the bars of her window. We'd met at a loft party, a gallery opening, a play or poetry reading, somewhere where bad wine and cheese cubes were served. With a pocket full of toothpicks I'd left with her for her place in a taxicab. Her pet cockatoo squawked in its gilded cage. A pachinko machine hung by a mandala poster over her bed. All this is grasping at the past. There was no Greta, or there were dozens of Gretas, each as insubstantial as photographs in someone else's album, one for every address where I'd lived and for every woman I had loved and ought to have been faithful to. But I was never faithful. I was too circumspect, too terrified of anything binding, to be faithful. By choosing not to choose, I expunged all choices.

There were times when, on a busy street corner, I'd stand there, frozen, unable to make up my mind which way to cross, other pedestrians jostling me, casting me annoyed looks, cursing me under their breaths though still loud enough for me to hear. I'd learned my way around the city only to find myself directionless there. This lack of impetus led to awkward situations, like the time when the English actor intercepted me on the corner of Eighth and University. He was with the Old Vic, he said, in town to do a production of
Macbeth.
He looked like Richard Basehart, so I believed him. I had no hair; I'd shaved it off down to the skull. This attracted homosexual men. Macbeth wondered where “a bloke from out of town could get a good drink.” I was still living in Brooklyn at the time and said so. This didn't dissuade him. We went to Chumley's and from there to his place, the borrowed “flat” of some other actor. Having mixed us each a screwdriver, Richard Basehart lay on the floor fondling himself while reciting apt passages of one of Henry Miller's more explicit books. He didn't seem to notice or care as I stepped over him and out the door.

Another time, during a blizzard that fell on my 23rd birthday, a former priest who'd taken me to dinner for my birthday invited me to spend the night with him, which I did, gladly, having always resented those midnight subway expeditions back to whichever miserable borough I happened to be living in at the time. When the ex-priest took me in his mouth, I pretended to be elsewhere, with someone else, enjoying the dim ministrations of an altogether different set of tongue and lips. In the morning my host was beside himself with shame. Me, I couldn't have cared less. What did it matter? Why should I have cared?

Back then I was subject to a recurrent dream, a nightmare that parachuted me into the combat zone amid its vaporous lights and alleyways. Always in the dream I'd end up in a movie theater, one of those sordid theaters near Times Square, attached to an undeployed regiment of hunched men in Burberry coats, and where the naked bodies projected on the screen were always teasingly out of focus, looking more like Cézanne's peaches than like figures engaged in carnal Olympics. However, the soundtrack was always clear: a moan is a moan is a moan. As if by my own tumescence, I'd be lifted out of my seat and led toward a red sign glowing over the door to the men's room, behind which ultimate depravities lay in wait, tinted with ultraviolet light, perfumed with stale urine. Debased by my own dreams.

 

VI. Falling Out

 

The City of New York had become my illicit lover—a woman of the night whose sordid charms I could not resist but to whom I could never entirely give myself. I thought of my papa and of his “business trips.” Decades passed before I finally accepted that he'd kept a mistress in the city, maybe more than one, though a single name, Berenice (
Beh-reh-nee-chay
) stood out for me, having surfaced time and again in my parents' frequent fights, so those four syllables still send their chill up my spine. According to my mother, I once nearly drowned in the Hotel Paris swimming pool, my treacherous papa having left me there to attend to his courtesan upstairs. I refused to believe it. Anyway I never saw this woman, this
Berenice,
who to this day exists for me on roughly the same plane as Cleopatra or Attila the Hun. My father, too, was unfaithful. The city was his lure, his temptress, his domestic and moral undoing. For her sake he betrayed his own family. Though when all was said and done, my father chose us.

But then—as scorned mistresses will—the city avenged itself.

I remember one of the last times Papa visited me there, a year or so before the first of a series of strokes felled him. Paulette and I were still living on the Upper West Side, in the 94th Street deco apartment. My father and I lunched at a diner, where he ordered a bowl of vegetable soup. When I asked him how it was, he looked down at the soupspoon trembling in his fist and said, in a voice heavy with sorrow, “Not so hot.” He had come to the city to see me but also to gain an audience with the literary agent to whom he had sent his latest opus, a book titled
Beyond Pragmatism,
by which he hoped to advance William James's psychological theories into the 21st century—a hope against hope for this obdurate eccentric inventor who rarely read books published after the Hague Peace Conference and whose own manifestoes were riddled with hyphenated
to-day
s and plastered with Ko-Rec-Type. The agent had not returned his calls. Having paid for our disappointing lunch, my father repaired to a telephone booth across the street, where, for the 10th time that day, he tried to reach her, only to lose a quarter to the out-of-service phone. With uncharacteristic fury he slammed the receiver down. A few blocks uptown we found another phone booth, this one occupied by a young African American man, prompting my father, until then the least bigoted person I'd known, to combine one garden-variety epithet with one racial slur. “Papa, take it easy,” I said (or something to that effect). “What's the
matter
?” But I knew perfectly well. It was no longer my father's city, the one he'd invented for me, his son. It had become an unfamiliar, hostile place. As I led us away from that phone booth, in my father's murky pupils I read an accusation of betrayal, as if I'd let him down, and not the city or his agent.

Now here I was, a few years later, with my papa dead and I, his son, suffering from his ailments, his insomnia and indigestion, not to mention a hefty slice of his egocentricity and more than a few of his eccentricities, feeling no less betrayed by the city that had been our mistress. By then Paulette and I had completed our migration to the Bronx. Though our window faced the northern tip of Manhattan, and though Grand Central Terminal was but a 22-minute train ride away, we'd turned our backs on the real city. In the shallows across the turbid waters we watched a snowy egret—a feathered vase—do its slow-motion dance for fish. We kept a pair of binoculars handy. Like having one foot in the country, we told ourselves and the friends we had ditched downtown. They assumed that the move had been voluntary, but I knew better: I knew that the city had already forsaken me, that I had failed to live up to its promises. Not that we never enjoyed ourselves, my wife and I. We took regular trips to Europe, ate good meals, threw parties packed with Manhattanites who risked nosebleeds and blown eardrums to venture north of 14th Street. But an undercurrent of distress ran through my contentment. It was this undercurrent that often woke me in the middle of the night. I felt bloated with regrets, thinking we should never have left Manhattan, that we might as well have buried ourselves alive. I tried to reassure myself. I told myself I'd wanted light, air, sunshine, fewer car alarms and idling, poisonous-fume-spewing buses. If I never saw Upper Broadway—that ragtag tunnel of produce stands and baby strollers—again, it would be too soon. Besides, the city wasn't the city anymore. It had been co-opted by the sitcom crowd. The popularity of television shows like
Seinfeld
was commensurate with its cultural decline. How I missed seedy Times Square! How I longed for the days before the peepshows succumbed to Walt Disney! Such had been my logic, my excuse, for abandoning the city and the dreams of my youth, a move that would prompt me, on those sleepless nights, to stumble into the bathroom and demand of my no-longer-quite-so-young reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror,
What have you done to my dreams, fucker?

From the bedroom my wife asks, “Peter, what are you doing?”

I'm a poor underdog,/But tonight I will bark . . .
etc. “Brooding,” I respond.

“For God's sake, come back to bed!”

Then I say to myself, Wait, it's not over. There's still time, you're still young, you can still do it. You know the meaning and worthiness of art, that it makes life bearable by translating experience, letting us see universals and particularities in a kind of flickering way, that every artist holds the potential to delight and heal others by touching them with something genuine and of deliberate beauty. New York hasn't forsaken you, I assure my reflection in the mirror. That's your sense of gloom talking. And you haven't forsaken it. You just needed some peace and quiet in which to create.

Here was hope springing eternal; here was my childhood innocence shining its bright, dimwitted light again—the same innocence that 44 years prior had turned an ad slogan on the side of a fuel storage tank into a divine revelation. Despite my grown-up sense of gloom, I was still a child, still besotted, still as prone to bad judgment in hope as ever, still as wide-eyed with curiosity, expectation, and optimism as a six-year-old. Still as eager and willing as ever to march headlong into the arms of the enemy,
Berenice,
my father's ex-mistress. As if by conquering her I might atone for his sins.

 

VII. Ashes & Echoes

 

I'd meant to spend that September at a writers' retreat but came home early to attend a gala at Lincoln Center (and to pick up some warmer clothes; I hadn't realized how cold it gets in the Adirondacks). That morning I tried on my tuxedo to discover it no longer fit. I was about to head downtown to rent one when the telephone rang. It was the woman who had invited me to the gala, calling to say it had been called off. I asked her why.

“Have you got a TV?” she said.

Like half of the country, I spent the next five hours sitting with my hand to my lips in front of a TV. The city that I'd loved, resented, felt challenged and betrayed by, whose slushy sidewalks and ovenlike summer subways I had cursed—this place where I had been loved, mugged, produced, embarrassed, paid, exhibited, that had made me proud and angry and excited and bitter and tired and joyous and hungry and regretful, that had been the setting of so many youthful enthusiasms, where I'd walked arm in arm with and courted and made love with women, where I had suffered, celebrated, laughed, cried, whose myriad streets I could navigate blindfolded or by smell, whose subway turnstiles I'd jumped, whose taxi drivers and waiters and shoeblacks I'd tipped, whose cafés and galleries and atriums I'd haunted, whose streets I'd jaywalked, whose muffins and bagels I had ingested by the score, whose store windows had sampled my evolving reflection, whose landlords had charged me rent, whose employers had paid my wages, whose supermarkets and delis had supplied me with milk and pickled herring, whose water supply had kept me hydrated and hygienic, whose sewage system had eliminated four decades' worth of my excretions, whose thrift stores and flea markets had provided me with furniture and clothing, and whose populace had endowed me with friends, lovers, acquaintances, clients, and occasional enemies—that this setting that had graced a hundred charming
New Yorker
covers could be changed so suddenly into a tragic place, a grim war memorial, a Pearl Harbor, a Waterloo, the Alamo, a place to feel reflective and sad, made me wonder: What would future six-year-olds make of that blazing skyline? Would they look upon it with wonder and joy as I once had? Would they see a city of dreams? Or would they see only the memory of a single disastrous day, twin columns of air where a pair of skyscrapers had once stood?

Was I feeling sorry for the city or for myself? Was there a difference?

Sometimes it takes a disaster to put us in touch with our innocence, to remind us of just how romantic our delusions have been. Seeing her ravaged made me fall in love with the city all over again, made me embrace her with fierce, protective pride. Even the city's past calamities—the Black Tom explosion, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, the Fraunces Tavern bombing, the Kew Gardens train crash, tragedies quaint by comparison, were caught in my embrace, as were the rumble of the El, tuberculosis windows, horse walks, Horn & Hardart, those stately clocks along Fifth Avenue, the sunken treasures under the swirling waters of Hell Gate. In a fervor of indignation, I reclaimed my city, the one I'd inherited from my father. Nothing—not even an army of terrorists—would take her from me again.

 

VIII. Separation & Divorce & Reconciliation

 

In the end it wasn't terrorists or my own sense of failure that took me from New York, but a tenure-track position at a good university.