Through the Children's Gate (46 page)

A
fter I reread Molly Hughes, I went for the first time since we came home, though it lies mere blocks away, to look closely, not just in passing, at our old apartment and the church windows it looked toward.

The apartment was still there, its basement window grilled as before. But the church windows were gone, or invisible. The asphalt playground that lay open before them and let us look at the church had been sold, and the lot's new owners had built a “splinter” tower, a high, thin building crowded jeeringly with apartments, each with its tiny terrace, completely eradicating the view. Like almost everything else that had been part of our first New York—twenty-five years ago, it's true, but still, only twenty-five years, a blink in Paris or London time—the view was gone, just as the German restaurants were gone, and the deli on the corner and even our Gristede's. (It had become another Duane Reed drugstore.) Now you had to walk all the way around to Eighty-eighth Street to get into the church, and you could see the windows only from inside, from their front-facing side. I went in and looked at the windows and, getting no sense of a usable past, went home. I did say a prayer, though.

I am not connected to Molly by the strange serendipity of things. I am not connected to her because our lives are alike. I am connected to her because there are no ordinary lives.

L
ast night we took the children to see
The Nutcracker,
as we do every year, and I enjoyed it greatly, as I always do. But I was struck uneasily, as I have been for the last few years at the performance, by how much tragic foreboding there is implicit in it. The two civilizations that came together to produce it, after all—the German Romantic civilization that E. T. A. Hoffmann came from, and the Russian one that Tchaikovsky celebrated—would both in the next century know catastrophes that would be unique in human history, if the other one wasn't arguably worse.

And one sees, in the first act of
The Nutcracker,
offered as play, the original source of the disasters: the small boys in a late-nineteenth-century Russian house all march as make-believe soldiers in mock drill, and everyone is delighted to watch them. It puts one inescapably in mind of John Keegan's point that it was the mass militarization of civilian culture in the late nineteenth century—the cultural change
that had monarchs out of their court robes and into military uniforms, complete with medals—that was the entirely new thing of the time, leading directly to the catastrophe of World War I. The boys in the Nutcracker house are in training for a war whose extent and destructive force they don't yet conceive. Watching the children play at war beneath the Christmas tree, I can't help but recall how easily liberal civilizations have been driven to suicide in the recent past by an infatuation with war and a fear of national humiliation. What awaits our own Nutcracker house is unknown, but the suicidal impulses are there every morning on the front page.

N
o matter how well I know the children, no matter how many books I read to them, and no matter how many meals I cook for them, I will never know them as well as their mother does, because she knows them better than they know themselves. She was away on a rare trip to see
her
mother, and we lost the remote control for the television. We three searched the bedroom, high and low, and couldn't find it, and were reduced to changing the channels manually, as though it were 1964. Since Luke's sports are around Channel 9 and Olivia's shows on the Disney Channel, up around 56, it was wearing on the dad's fingers. I sighed and explained it to Martha when she called.

“What kind of movie were you watching when you lost it?” Martha asked.

“I don't know—one of the
Star Wars
things, I think. Why does it matter?”

“Oh. Then it's behind the bed, on the floor behind the bed, on your side.”

“We looked there,
obviously.”

“Well, look again.”

And of course it was. “How did you know that?” I asked when she came home.

She sighed. “When Luke is watching a mildly scary movie he always plays nervously with the remote, and Olivia scoots over to be near you. He let it slip down back there while he wasn't paying attention and then Olivia would have been the one to look behind the bed,
since she was closest. Her arms are too short to find anything that's slipped all the way down, though—but she absolutely wouldn't admit that, so when you asked her if she'd searched there, she'd say she had. It was obvious.”

I
t is three in the morning. I wake up and go into the darkened living room, looking out on the quiet avenue, and flick on my computer's AirPort, looking for ether. In the five years since we came home at the height of that enraptured millennial moment, we have been intending to join our century, get plugged in to a decent broadband line and have a Wi-Fi connection in the apartment. But something—the complexities of changing cable companies, Martha's distaste for cables snaking through the apartment—has kept us from it. So at night I become a thief, the only larceny I have ever practiced, stealing from my neighbor's Wi-Fi hot spots. I don't want to do it, and I apologize for doing it—I intend to get us wired, though I am baffled by how exactly to accomplish this—but I do it anyway.

Forgive me, neighbors. I promise that when (next week or next month, in the unknowable but surely approaching future) we claim our little bit of air, you will all be welcome.
All welcome, do you hear.
But for the moment I am awed by your presence, I see you on the Air-Port menu of my Mac and I know you are there,
clutching
your
laptop at your window, somewhere in this enormous building, tapping out, here in the middle of the night above the avenue, your blog or your schedule or your money or your life. (“Your money or your life!” the man said to Jack Benny, and he said, “I'm thinking it over.” Luke and I laughed when I told him that one, a great Jewish joke.)

I'm thinking it over, like we think of fleeing, and I flip open our laptop again and position my hands above the keyboard. This intermingling of essence, this sharing of ether, surely makes us more than neighbors. We are connected in a city of anonymity, where I must pass you at the Food Emporium as we buy dubious-looking fresh-chopped pineapple. Which are you, my ethereal neighbor? How can I pick you out, secret sharer, from among all the anonymous neighbors, the extra-weak ties? Are you the one who reads
Food & Wine
in the checkout
line as we wait, moving your lips to remember the recipe without buying the commodity? The grumpy man who buys brisket at the butcher's, or the beautiful woman in the wineshop? Is that you, Bob; is that your gaze I avoid in line, Marilyn? Let it be so. We are united in this strange act of staring at a screen and making marks on it that aren't even really marks, just electric registers, like the lightning in Ben Franklin's bottle so long ago.

But the air around us, the atmosphere that just sits here, is filled with us. Intimacy and anonymity, the two New York poles between which our lives endlessly oscillate, continue to produce their own kind of field. We live in it. We can't ride the light. There isn't really any light to ride. But we can share the air.

M
y fingers hover above the keyboard. I ought to go to sleep, but insomnia has me in its hold, as it does most nights. My eyes spring open at three, and I wander around the apartment, look for something to do. The dangerous thing is to go online, into that seductive world of foreign headlines, where it is already midmorning in Paris or London and the world's day has already begun to be organized. Or, worse, to go into the bloggy netherworld of angry opinion and attitude.

I try instead to write a few of the lines I might lose tomorrow, and then I wander through the apartment, “checking” on the children, as I promise them I will every night before they go to bed. “Check on me, Dad?” Luke asks, and of course I say yes, though I know—and he knows—that a sleeper cannot check that he is being checked on. I tell him I will, and he sets no test to be sure that I have done it. Olivia now asks for the same thing every night.

Check for what?
I think secretly. That they are breathing, as Martha does? That they are safe? But what could that mean? Though I tell them they are safe, none of us really knows what safety is, or means, or looks like when it is asleep. So I check on the children, and then on their fish, for whom the sign of safety is simply swimming, movement, obvious signs of fishy life. New Bluie and Reddie seem okay; Django is vital.

I realize, in the middle of the night, that the love I feel for the children is not at every moment remote enough from the need I feel for
them; all the discipline I attempt to prepare to let them go into their own world, where they make up their own minds and fly away on their own wings, gets lost when I look at them. I want them here, safe, I want them this age forever, I want this situation—two small children puzzled and, on the whole, happy at home, in a big city, not to change, even though I know that the parent's task is building up and letting go, Kirk's formula for the Metrozoids raised to a moral principle: break it down and build it back up, help them to break down life enough to make their own plays, their own Hail Marys. Life
does
have many worthwhile aspects, but the trouble is that the really worthwhile ones are worth too much and last only awhile. That the dear doctor forgot to say.

Just before I went to sleep, I had had a last IM exchange with Luke, five feet away from me in his bedroom. He sent me LOL, and I sent it right back to him. We do it a lot now, again. In the end, after all my embarrassment about LOL, we didn't reject the ambiguity, give up after the misunderstanding. No, now we live within the ambiguity—we sustain the misunderstanding, have kept the miscommunication going back and forth across the net.

My sister had confided in me that she, too, had made the same mistake, keyed off by mine—using LOL for love when it was really meant for laughter—and that her children had eventually mocked her, as Luke had me. And for a while I had thought that this was the essential exchange of parent and child: We give them lots of love, they laugh out loud, and we don't even know that they've done it.

But now I think that the really significant thing was that, through all those months of my not knowing what LOL really meant, Luke had never protested—he had never thought it weird or strange or odd that I had been laughing at him, or thought it odd that I had never complained when he was laughing out loud at me. The truth is that between parents and children, there are very few circumstances where saying, “I love you a lot,” and saying, “I am laughing out loud in your presence,” don't effectively mean the same thing. Though love and laughter are not entirely interchangeable—if they were, we would not grieve when those we love die—they are near relations, brothers and sisters. There are, in fact, very few letters we can write where the
final words “lots of love” and “laugh out loud” are that different in meaning—where the vast apparent difference in private languages do not add up to nearly the same thing, a near-miss, a close enough application. In the great majority of messages we send, electronically or face-to-face, what we mean by “LOL”—lots of love—and what some other language game players, the children in this case, mean by “LOL”—laugh out loud—turn out to be strangely synchronous, oddly the same, acceptably close. Luke was puzzled by my strange and private use of the abbreviation, but he never was puzzled enough to object.
It just
worked—just, but it worked. Saying, “I am laughing out loud in your presence,” and saying, “I love you,” are close enough to count.

They are close, too, because in the end neither is really that complex. We can't entirely screw up loving our children, as we can't entirely screw up laughing at old Jewish jokes, as we can't entirely screw up games or Christmas music. They work, in some odd way. Laughter and love are close enough for a creative misreading to be a decent half-truth.

So now the very last thing we write to each other every night is LOL. LOL, Dad, LOL, Luke, and it doesn't really matter what it means. It means what it means at that moment, to us. We turn its meanings off and on like a light.

So I shall send out LOL to whoever happens to catch it, and whatever it may mean to the one who does. There are other lights on in other windows, across the way, just a few—but a few in this city means, when you count them, a great many. Density is fate, and density also makes firefly-like light, flickering at nearby windows even in the middle of the night. The light is on in the supermarket across the way, and a manager in a white apron goes in, just as my grandfather, who bore the name of the island, did into his grocery store at five every morning. The newspapers still blow on the pavement, and the little man who walks on the stoplight still bends forward, and then the ominous staying orange hand appears next on the stoplight, like the hand of Saruman on the shield of a Warhammer Orc.

Down Eighty-eighth Street, looking east, I can see … my goodness! a solitary light, hyper-bright, shining low in the sky, just above
the buildings: a planet, surely, the morning star! Whatever the hell that is—Venus? I think so. What do I know from stars? I am a New Yorker and know only from stoplights. (Old Henny Youngman joke: Two men pursued by a monster. “What kind of animal do you think that is?” “What do I look like, a furrier?” Tell it to Luke when he wakes up.)

All of us still awake at this moment would form, if seen from above, a kind of cartoon drawing, in black and white, a thousand solitary insomniacs at our windows with our keyboards, looking for the light of another writer across the way. LOL to you all, companions of the night, friends along the way, LOL! Though not too loudly, please, your family is sleeping, as mine is, but still, LOL, whatever it may mean in the private language you write and that we, sometimes anyway, share, all of us at home at night in the city sitting in our windows, making sentences and serving time, LOL to everybody waiting for the light of a New York morning to fight its way past buildings, come in the window, and start the common day again.