Things fall together
January 2 – Noontime
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1998
When the mechanical bronze laborers flanking Minerva go to work in Herald Square, clanging out the hour with their sledge hammers against the enormous bell, the pigeons flap off in routine alarm, sweeping round Macy’s façade, the grand bastions of a former wedding-cake hotel, the squared-off neon ideograms of Koreatown, through the shadows of the Empire State Building to return, as the sounds die out to perch on goddess’s head, the shoulders of her servants and the granite pedestal memorializing James Gordon Bennnett’s vanished newspaper.
Walk northwest on Broadway. Thirty-fifth, thirty-sixth. Down which street was it Lily Bart sewed sequins on hats? Couldn’t have been around here come to think of it – these buildings hadn’t been built yet. Most likely, Lily worked downtown in the old garment district – east of Washington Square Park – near or even in the old Triangle Shirtwaist building, now classrooms for NYU.
Thirty-ninth. Your beacon to the north’s a new icon of beauty: Linda Evangelista, draped across a billboard four stories high. In Lily’s day, before the electric grid and neon, gaslight ruled Times Square – the signs literally on fire.
You’ve become something of a fixture here: The man at table 4. Only a few blocks from where you live, this northern outpost of the multiplying Gamins is where you gravitate in the a.m. on days when you have no firm obligations elsewhere. Strong early light over the rooftops, through the big panes facing onto Ninth Avenue. And a window at your back too, out onto 21st Street. Here’s a spot to plant yourself – lengthen your growing season.
If you’re writing longhand in your book, patrons at neighboring tables will sometimes ask if it’s a journal or comment on your fountain pen. When you’re working on your laptop, they interrupt less, since this looks more like business than play. If EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 42
laptops. Do you like your Macintosh? Later in the conversation, it will emerge that he is a writer, that she keeps a journal, attends a writing workshop, and wants to be a writer. Or that he is a newsman.
This newsman wears an electric blue cap emblazoned with his station’s logo even on his day off. Wide, pale blue eyes. Lashes perennially a little damp, Kewpie- like. His skin is preternaturally tanned, but you feel the booze underneath, coke too, probably, or pills, percolating to the surface, yearning to breathe free. He assumes you invest in the stock market and wants to talk about the crazy money he makes tapping away at the keys. You touch the side of your head and tell him all your capitals is invested here and this intrigues him more.
The newsman’s girlfriend sits across from him. A lawyer, it turns out. Harvard grad. By day, she teaches future DAs to throw away the key. In her spare time, she’s writing a book with big ambitions: rescue public education from lefty bureaucrats and “give parents choice.” She asks you a dozen questions and answers them herself. The free talk’s made her exuberant and she wants to kiss the newsman across the table, but its breadth makes the move awkward. When they leave, she leads him by the hand, home presumably, past the General Theological Seminary’s unassuming facade. He walks beside her like a pull toy, limbs stiff as wood.
Sixth Avenue, Avenue of the Americas. Same difference. Street with a split identity. Beginning in the late 1870s, an elevated train line rattled overhead, from Greenwich Village to Central Park, creating a valley of depressed property values below. Then, in the early thirties, Rockefeller Center rolled up against the El from the east and within a few years, the tracks were gone.
In the mid-fifties, you rode the bus up Sixth, gazed with a kid’s astonishment at the modern office slabs sprouting like huge dominoes on both sides of the avenue, from the lower forties north.
Then came the medallions – brightly colored insignias of every American nation, hung from sleek, curve-topped lampposts along the whole length of the thoroughfare. The emblems looked fascinating, very official, lots of detail, but impossible to examine EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 43
out: Uruguay, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, one by one, as you walked to school up the avenue, from 3rd or Waverly to 12th Street. You didn’t know it at the time, but the same Rockefellers whose name went with the Center had been busy south of the border too, sinking their teeth into a juicy melon called United Fruit. Not to mention great suckings forth of Venezuelan oil.
Over decades, exhaust fumes and the elements took their toll on the medallions. The enamel rusted around the edges, the images faded, blending into the visual noise of the cityscape. But they disappeared for good only a few years back when the lampposts were scrapped and new ones went up, sans insignias. By which time the city had pan- Americanized to the point where Johnny Colón, East Harlem native and salsa legend, could, with a wink, spin the Big Apple a new nickname: El Gran Mango. And mangos come from southeast Asia too.
At 59th Street, Sixth Avenue turns into a tree-lined roadway, exchanges its linear flow for a serpentine drive northward into Central Park. Here, in a modest plaza carved out of the parkland, three bronze equestrian statues stand high atop black granite pedestals – larger than life. They depict heroic figures in the wars of American independence, and the relationship among the triumvirate is formal, deliberate. San Martín faces east, toward the Old World he returned to. Bolívar rides purposefully in the direction of Los Angeles. Martí looks as if he was about to leap south over 59th street when his horse reared up, pawing the air. Taken by surprise, the Apostle of his people reels back, frozen in disequilibrium.
Afternoon flurries over packed-down snow. You’re heading east, then north toward Hunter, stealing time from paying work to research the trade center book. Martí doesn’t move. Why should he? He witnessed plenty – a New York even more spectacular than your own. Reported from the city of his exile on the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, festivities for the Statue of Liberty, the great blizzard of ‘88. You evolve the impossible notion that he sees you trudge by beneath him, slip once on the glazed marble pavement. Then he urges you to go see Falencki about the occasional pains in your sternum. Falencki’s a good guy, treats patients on a sliding scale, but it’s still more than you can afford just now. Every xerox at the library costs a dime, same EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 44
grief, more likely.
A pigeon lights on Martí’s right shoulder. José, did you know that today, two million New Yorkers, citizens of that immense valve of pleasure open to an immense people have no health insurance? But Martí, green and oxidized is not listening. And for the first time in all the years you’ve known this statue, you finally read it. It’s not the taxis honking, the Lilliputian nags pulling buggies full of tourists that spooked his horse. Martí is home in Cuba, leading his column through the pass at Dos Ríos. Fixed in the moment of ambush – where the bullet found him.
On the way here, you walked past a fellow dressed for office with a big gray smudge on his forehead and had the immediate impulse to reach for your handkerchief and wipe it off. But then, a few steps on, you saw another smudge, and realized it was Ash Wednesday.
At the café around 10:30 the payphone rings. Deborah answers it, beckons you over. It’s Gloria. Basic Books has come back from the dead – resuscitated as the pole star of a venture capitalist’s constellation of imprints. John D. has been made publishing director, and he’s always liked your book. She wants to reapproach him with a revised WTC manuscript. Revised. Again? You hear the complaint in your voice. It’s been rejected by what, twelve publishers? The guy at Pantheon said he couldn’t find a coherent narrative line in it. The book needs an editor, simple as that. You have carried it as far as you can on your own. Gloria’s voice lowers in pitch and volume. “That was an earlier draft. And Eric, you know how to edit it yourself.”
Slow burn back at Table 4. No comfort out there, no hand of friendship extended to pull you across. But then something inside you softens. Gloria is right, you have to edit it yourself. You’re the only one who cares enough about this tar baby to figure out its secret name.
Subway poster for United Healthcare: Grocery stores have express lanes. Why not health plans? EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 45
Why not indeed? And they say the art of reasoning’s dead!
ciudad libre. You’re invited over. You try to slow your pulse, speak deliberately into the phone: “I travel with my family.” A silence on the other end that seems too long to augur well. This Darton is a more expensive package than they thought.
It’s settled. You will pay for Katie and Gwen’s airfare. Debate, bless their hearts, will cover the hotel, food and local travel for the three of you. Now, where to find the money for the plane?
Uptown to El Taller Latinoamericano to reanimate your moribund Spanish. If Bernardo can’t help you, no one can.
Dr. Cooper pulls that falling-apart wisdom tooth. Una muela del juicio’s what you lost, according to Bernardo, a tooth of judgment. And in the same breath, he serves up perogrullo, a Sancho Panza figure, wise fool. And deriving from it, perogrullada – in one sense a platitude. In another, a deceptively simple statement containing a profound truth.
Elena from Debate calls. On the menu, a presentation, press interviews. Big spread in El Pais coming out – a review by an eminent novelist. She gave your book to the American cultural attaché who read it and liked it, and offers, if you wish, to host a luncheon for you at the U.S. consulate. Sure, why not? A wonderful snowball, all started by Marithelma.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 46
Come out of the clouds Come out of the sun Come out of the snow and rain Where he’s going, nobody knows But it just might be to Spain.
Keep your splendid sun, Keep your woods, O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods
Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your cornfields and orchards… and give me the streets of Manhattan!
Right, Walt. But did you ever climb the path to the Alhambra? Or wander the rose gardens of the Generalife in spring? Ten days in Spain is not enough.
The image has been popping into your head at random moments since you returned. So you take the F Train down to pay a call on the mural in the lobby of the building where your grandfather Meyer and aunt Gladys used to live, 208-212 East Broadway. Nearly twenty years since Gladys died, and on your last visits here, you were too preoccupied to notice much. A security guard opens the door and when you tell him it’s the painting you have come to see, he warms to the subject. He spends, after all, much of his workday in its presence. He’s logged plenty of hours studying it, taking in its nuances. Did you know that FDR’s eyes follow you, whichever way you walk down the hallway – left or right? The guard is not happy about the restoration the co-op did a few years back. A sloppy job. Added fleshtones and shadows – destroyed the artist’s purposely flat tonality. He’s right. The unfinished quality it used to have feels force-ripened now.
A woman around your age enters, falls into the conversation. Celia. She’s lived here in the Seward Park Co-ops since she was a kid. Every afternoon when she came home from school, for five or six months running, the painter would be there, up on his scaffold. Then one day he was gone. The mural was done. An elderly fellow comes
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 47
joins the little circle of art critics. “See,” he says, “what they did there?” He directs your eye to the image you came for, the Nazi helmet, with a sapling growing through a fissure in its crown. “It used to have a swastika there,” he says, and points out a crudely rendered bullet hole. “But some people complained, so they painted over it.”
A pabulum-like response emerges from your lips to the effect that people are always trying to rewrite history and Abe waves his hand dismissively. “They’re trying to eliminate history,” he says. You could kiss him for those words and the vehemence of their utterance.
Built as a working-class co-op, with capped equity to keep it affordable, Seward Park Houses served as a model for Penn South, where you live. Same basic plan, a cluster of red brick high-rises set in a park. But Seward has gone market rate now. The incoming residents want to put marble over the mural, says the security guard. After thirty-eight years, Celia is cashing out and moving to Florida.
You don’t drop your jaw. Don’t ask her what the hell she plans to do down there. Nor mention your own history in this place, that your aunt and grandfather’s apartment served as a refuge for several months after Jack chucked you and your mother out late one night in 1961. You too came home from school through this lobby, and at first you didn’t understand the iconography, thought that the sapling was growing through a cracked metal basin. Then Eichmann was captured and you read – surreptitiously, because Gladys tried to hide the book from you – about the deportations, the death camps. And saw pictures, some too awful to imagine, and some of soldiers in uniform that made you realize the basin was an upended helmet.
Objectively the mural is nothing to write home about. Didactic and bloodless, lacking any sort of passion. And the rendering’s perfunctory, mechanical. Watered- down WPA. The FDR portrait you can take or leave, Mona Lisa eyes and all. But to this day, the image of the sapling splitting the helmet – of nature reasserting her claim to an object whose material once came out of the ground – remains indelible, spontaneously reoccurring. Before you leave, you take photos. In case the marble goes up before you get back here.
You walk along East Broadway, past the library, the Educational Alliance, the park, the old Yiddish Daily Forward building, the Chinese restaurant that used to be the EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 48
and beyond it, the Delancey Street subway stop. This neighborhood makes you go Pavlovian. You find yourself salivating for a Gus’s pickle. But where is Gus now? Is there a Gus’s now? Out of nowhere you start singing “Hit the Road Jack.” More than once in the months you lived down here, you fantasized things happening the other way around – your father having to leave the house instead of you – That’s right, hit the
singers, the Charlettes. And, like Ray Charles, all he’d offer in return would be a sheepish, Well I guess if you say so....
Yet somehow you and Bea eventually found a home – in a pile of bricks very like the one you just revisited. And now your mother’s gone, but your daughter wakes up every morning in what used to be your room. And looks out over the same city that’s altogether different now.
A violinist, Chinese you think, attempts to keep his footing as he navigates the aisle of the bucking subway car. A montage of Broadway show-tunes, but his intonation is on the money, and he plays from the heart. Bravura finale. You excavate a dollar bill. “Beautiful.”
His face brightens. For a moment he lowers his bow and instrument, leans in and whispers: “Most difficult part is keeping balance.”
Ah what you see when you look up from your book. A woman sits at the table just ahead, her back toward you. Her hair, dark brown, is done up in a score or more little pigtails, like mushrooms, arrayed more or less symmetrically over the top, sides and back of her head, and bound with red elastics, though a wisp escapes down the nape of her neck. She’s so thin her vertebrae stand out like a mountain chain beneath the cling of her brown knit shell. The diagonal lines of her bra straps and the curve of her ribs combine to suggest the shape of a butterfly. Suddenly, she sits up straight, tugs the hem of her top down, pulls her shoulders up toward protuberant ears and grasps her hair knots in both hands as though to keep her head from flying off. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 49
A man sits facing this woman, but all you can see of him is what frames her: tanned, hairless, gym-built shoulders and well-muscled upper arms. As abruptly as she clutched her head, she rises and leans across the table to embrace him. The dominant part of you must not want to see how this goes down, so you force your eyes over to the right where two youngish women incline toward one another, speaking intently. “OK, OK – the flowers of the world…”
“The flowers of the world, brought to you...” “Brought to you... or to your loved one!”
The woman on the banquette, blonde, jots it down. • • •
You can look at the physical evidence of your trip to Spain any time you want to. But the passage of only a few weeks has relegated it to a dreamscape. Is it possible that you were treated so well, with such consideration, as though your work mattered? One could wear out any residual good vibe fast making comparisons. Suffice it that once upon a time, you had such a moment.
What creature has 224 million teeth and 14 million feet? New York City! Dentists, you have your marching orders! Podiatrists, take heart!
• • •
“Nobody has a worse time than madmen who earn their living from other madmen.” So says Quevedo in The Swindler. And the anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes: “How many people must there be in the world who run away from others in fright because they can’t see themselves?”
• • •
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 50
Last night, a dream. Spidery men in cheap dust masks gut the city by inches. Everywhere you look, a brick lies at your feet, broken in half. May 30 The
big four-eight.
Do you want to spend the big five-oh in New York City. Hell no. But where? Your face is always half-turned toward Europe. Paris is where, at fifteen, you felt your first real surge of freedom. But how could you pull that off – economically, linguistically, any way?
Amoxicillin prescription from Falencki. Your lungs are twin Achilles heels. Any head cold wants to dive from your sinuses straight down into your chest and make mischief there. According to his records, you’ve caught bronchitis just about every fall for years. Never noticed the pattern. Strange to get sick now. Late spring’s usually your strongest time of year.
You are told, reliably, that death by pneumonia is by no means the worst way to go – it is, in fact, peaceful, narcoleptic. The old people’s friend they used to call it. But if you have anything to say about the timing, you’ll stick around until Gwen is at least sixteen. But who gets to choose?
On all your birthday cards, Bea would write bis ein hindert und zwansich, one of the few Yiddish phrases she knew the Hebrew letters for. You should live to a hundred and twenty. Sure, you’ll take that.
A young woman, hair up in a bun, sits eating an orange crêpe. With every mouthful she appears to be overtaken by a soundless orgasm. She half closes her eyes, extends her neck, rolls her head. Never have you seen anyone demonstrate such an lover-like relationship with food. Yet she seems unguarded, not exhibitionistic, as if Table 11 was an absolutely private place. After every bite she takes a sip of café au lait, lifts her napkin from her lap and demurely pats her lips.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 51
On her way out she leans over the counter. “That was very good!” she says to Mario. He’s chopping, looks up, offers her his radiant smile. Immediately she suffuses with color. Opens the door, and before stepping out, glances back wistfully toward her empty plate.
You page through Andrew Ross’s Real Love, and discover that the artists Komar and Melamid have made a series of paintings that deliberately seek to displease people at the level of their particular national tastes. Here’s a reproduction of “Holland’s Most Unwanted,” a venerable domestic Dutch interior. But the view from the window is not the skyline of Delft, it’s the towers of the WTC.
Gwen calls them “the tower twins.” July 7 – Le Gamin – Midafternoon
All morning tangled up in the WTC manuscript. Roland Barthes begins his book on Michelet by saying that before anything else, “we must restore this man to his coherence.”
But you are bent on something utterly quixotic: making a narrative for a subject that never possessed coherence in the first place.
buildings from a state of looming and fearful threat – from something mythic – so big, so armored, yet uprotected, that it cannot be truly seen – into a historical object that may at last be used, and eventually perhaps, even loved.
You can’t put that in an introduction. Even if someone’s daft enough to publish this thing.
A young woman passes by outside the window. Agonizingly thin. July 8 – Abingdon Square – Early Morning
Breakfast with Elizabeth. Of all your friends, she has borne the closest witness to your struggles with the Trade Center book. Unfailingly when you talk about it with her, she asks the million dollar questions. You’ve come to love the WTC. How did that
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 52
maybe more than you do. You want to make the buildings inhabitable, not just steel to slide off. Afternoon, downtown to visit them. Wander about in Austin Tobin Plaza. In the shadow of towers, speakers tinkle new age music.
Head toward the cul-de-sac formed by the Vista Hotel. All these times down here and you’ve never really looked at the memorial before, read the text carved in English and Spanish on the red granite ring: “On February 26, 1993, a bomb set by terrorists exploded below this site. This horrible act of violence killed innocent people, injured thousands and made victims of us all. This fountain is dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives.”
And then the names: “John DiGiovanni, Robert Kirkpatrick, Stephen Knapp, William Macko, Wilfredo Mercado, Monica Rodriguez Smith and her unborn child.”
What about that as a formulation: “made victims of us all”? What exactly does that mean? July 14 Gwen’s now-we-are-sixth. July 16 – Battery Park, in Sight of the WTC – Midafternoon
burning sand. This practice, considered a wholesome exercise, lends itself to a certain superficial, vulgar and boisterous intimacy to which these prosperous people seem so inclined. – José Martí, “Coney Island”
they use it for, those people of the late 20th century? Surely not to live in. Did it have some astronomical significance? And what strange form of stargazing did they practice anyway?
What if the bombers had taken down a tower? July 18 – Le Gamin – Afternoon EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 53
At Table 13, two Asian women, thirtyish, compactly built, Korean if you had to guess. Each drinks a bowl of café au lait. The woman wearing the baseball cap looks the more stolid of the two. She sits rooted, nearly squatting, as though the seat were a milking stool, across from her companion, thinner, poised, wavy henna’d hair. But the body language of the heavyset woman belies her attention to style and color: the purple sun logo on her cap matches her Capri jeans. Sunglasses hang by an earpiece from the V-neck of her teeshirt. Between sips, the women focus intently on their respective magazines, Allure and Marie-Claire. Are you projecting, or do they subtly alter their expressions in response to the images on the pages they snap through, mobilize their facial muscles to a more plastic disposition?
As you stand up to leave, something draws your eyes to the feet of the woman in the purple Capris. She wears flip-flops. Her toes are bulbous, macerated-looking, the nails half-destroyed. The new world order has yet to spread its beneficence to her most distal parts. Give it time.
• • •
Six o’clock news: a crane falls in Times Square. Condé Nast building. The site’s had way more than its share of accidents. A Maclowe job. He likes to step things along. Flair for drama too. Got fined back in the early eighties. The city wasn’t moving fast enough on his demo permit, so he hired a company that used this monster machine to tear the guts out of a building on the square in the dead of night, kaboom. Rubble. One fell swoop. Rats running everywhere. Open gas lines, exposed wiring, the works.
And damn, that Condé Nast thing is an ugly, carnivorous-looking piece of work. Go on, leave, why don’t you? Your city is always being stolen. Turn around once and whatever you think beautiful or worthy has been bulldozed by someone who knows better than you do what this place is for. You were just born here – didn’t choose it. The seed doesn’t get to pick its soil.
You know trees can be extracted by the roots – Haussmann lined his spanking new boulevards with thirty-year-old arbres extracted from the Bois de Boulogne. To dig ‘em up, he had a special machine engineered that served a kind of obverse function to the one Maclowe used. The tree lifter transferred instant history to newly minted
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 54
forgotten.
But here’s your sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: You’ve grown here all your life, but could your roots find more propitious soil? Might you not be better off transplanted?
Gwen’s birthday picnic on the sloping lawn south of the boat basin. Astronomically hot. And so humid, the icing doesn’t want to leave the spatula for the top of the cupcakes, but somehow it all gets done. An Odyssey just to find some bags of ice – eight, ten blocks uptown on Madison.
Desultory attempts at frisbee. Distribution and deployment of water guns. Snatches of bossa nova from the Summerstage festival. Brazil’s in town! Party favors and tickets to ride on the carousel for all. Squeaka-squeak. Pull the shopping cart, now laden with gifts and leftover food, through the park to Columbus Circle and the downtown C Train.
Funny connection among two of the dads hanging out, their kids both classmates of Gwen’s. Chris’s father designs jails, “justice architecture,” he calls it. Victoria’s pop works as a guard at Riker’s Island. Little bright clusters in the gorgeous mosaic.
Alane introduces you to Shahid Ali. Wild(e) fella. Diaphanous veiling. Acts the clown. Isn’t. Tan inteligente, as Bernardo would say of someone so sharp-witted and erudite. And he’s got a gift for one-liners:
Lunch meeting with Nancy at Le G. She hands you her latest pages: a nearly completed first draft. She hasn’t come up with a good title yet, but that will come. Probably from a phrase already in the text itself. You allow yourself a moment of pedagogic pride. In just a bit over a year she’s come further, faster, deeper than any other student you can recall. But then, dancers are used to hitting the ground, digging EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 55
epigraph from Barbara Clark: Each one teach one. August 26 – Le Gamin – Early Morning At the back of the café, the payphone rings. Deborah gestures it’s for you. Gloria on the line, just to say she’s working to “push John off the fence.” She sounds optimistic and her mood is infectious enough to get you to open your notebook and take another run at the introduction:
awestruck silence, this book seeks to trace the fine and at times nearly invisible line at which power meets madness, monument shades into monstrosity.
But even further down in the underlying material, questions raised by the distortions of class: Planner Tobin, Architect Yamasaki, Overseer Tozzoli – what might their energies have produced had they not fallen prey to a mania for domination? Yamasaki somehow intuited the atmospheric shift coming on at the end of the century and designed his towers as emblems of the culture of fear.
You don’t remember the quote exactly, but T.E. Lawrence said something like the really dangerous men are the ones who dream while they are awake. Download 7.05 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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