Things fall together
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Your room at the Quai Voltaire faces out over the Seine, and on the opposite side stands the Louvre. The sound of cars rushing along the street is so loud, even after midnight, that you close the windows. In near silence, tourist boats glide by, one after another, their floodlights trained upon the facades of buildings along the riverbanks. Before they penetrate your windows, the luminous broadsides strike the trees along the quai, turning their leaves translucent yellow green. Then comes a wash of color that
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distillation of it in some deep coffer of your memory. Suddenly exhausted. Almost asleep. Tomorrow when you’re fresher, you’ll find a way to give sensation words. But you know that game. You’d better write it now.
In preparation for leaving, you bought your RER tickets to the airport in advance. Today when you reach the turnstiles, a workman, Afro-Français, is repairing one of them. He sizes the three of you up, hauling your baggage, then with a barely perceptible nod toward the open gate, motions you through. You’ll use the tickets “l’année prochaine.”
The B-line passes by a huge stadium, some astonishingly grim residential cités and industrial suburbs, and delivers you to the spanking new departures terminal at Charles de Gaulle airport. It’s designed like one of Boullée’s fantasies – an absurdly long barrel vault with mind-boggling perspectives. Newly opened and still unfinished, the place has the air of precocious ruin. Easy to imagine a section of the ceiling collapsed, grass growing around the fissure where light pours in to illuminate a herd of Hubert Robert’s wandering cows.
You amble about in search of a coffee and drinks for your girls, and seeing no signs for services, find the snack bar by sheer persistence, located in a kind of basement cum slit-trench, visible only down a narrow escalator. On the ride back up, bearing beverages, the escalator’s rumble gates into a murmur that becomes a chant inside your brainpan: Trust your path. This sounds so pat, so stupidly new age coming from wherever it does that you turn at once turn it into a satiric acronym: TYP. Down the vast cavern you walk, in the direction where you last saw Katie and Gwen, sitting with the luggage. Sure, why not? TYP.
Takeoff, more or less on time. The instant the plane levels off, the guy in front of you tilts his chair as far back as it will go. You try to open up your laptop, but the space is too tight, and you can only unfold it half way. But you refuse to be defeated. You angle the computer so the hinge rests on your thighs, as though it was a large, half- opened cockle shell, and reach your hands inside to type, peering obliquely at the screen. You turn to Katie. The noise of the engines has masked her weeping. You
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Gwen’s turn, her face buried in the pillow. You reach across Katie’s seat to stroke her hair. Close the computer and twist forward to reach the handkerchief in your back pocket.
What are you going to do now, back home? Turbulence over La Manche. Gwen and Katie watch a movie on the little display screens built into the seat backs: a French 18th century costume farce. Afterward comes another movie: Queen Latifa and Steve Martin enacting a tired Hollywood comedy of the races.
Switch off your display. A parade of town names parades across your eyelids: La Bachelerie, La Mule Blanche, Fossemagne (Big Hole). And the sidestreets in Montignac: Chemin d’Araignée (Spider Way) and Impasse au bout de monde (Dead End of the End of the World). In Paris, near Quai Voltaire, the Impasse de deux anges (two angles) and Rue du chat qui pêche (cat that fishes) off the Quai St-Michel. Sudden memory on the tongue of a pastis you drank at a brasserie called Au père tranquille. The chilled-out dad. That must refer to you. The flight attendant is coming round with apéritifs. Atlantic below. Three layers of clouds. Groove through. Brother, you’re flying now.
To Jones Beach seeking saltwater cures for the back-in-New-York blues. Afternoon wanes. You walk along the shore, out toward Robert Moses, then turn to face the sea, letting the water lap over your ankles and calves. A few yards to your left, a young woman, dark-haired, wades out. A wave slaps her thighs, she pauses, then forges on. When she’s in waist high, she raises her left arm, and you see the white plaster cast from hand to elbow. A breaker hits her chest, knocks her back a step, but she keeps going, rests her arm on top of her head. She’s found her spot and stands there as wave after wave pummel her. The cast must be getting heavy, for she reaches up with her right arm to support it. Now she jumps up to clear a breaker.
There is something wonderful about this woman. You could watch her until the sun goes down. Doing exactly what she wants. Unto herself. Gone in as deep as she can go.
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“They told us when we first got deployed it would be six months – the whole thing. I thought I could handle that. I wasn’t aware of my wife’s situation [pregnancy] and I thought I could suck it up and drive on, as the soldiers say.” So Jory Preston, Specialist, 870th National Guard, told The New York Times.
Hurricane Isabel gives us a miss. Beats the stuffing out of North Carolina and Virginia instead. D.C. shuts down for fear of the wind god. But all NYC gets is a flick of her tail. After a night of rain and gusts, bright sun, warm and windy. And the clouds. Follow one across an expanse of sky and you find yourself tracking with your whole head. And even then its form has transmuted. And why not. This matter hurtling overhead is neither earth nor concrete. What passes is the play of air.
Anna and Stephan’s wedding party on a chartered yacht, the Diplomat, circumnavigating Manhattan island. Black tie – a first time for everything. Turn turn turn.
Hang out at the forward end of the cabin with Katie, BJ and Ko, who try to spot landmarks in the twilight, through the rainspattered windows. Neon haze off the superstores of Fort Lee. Under the George-a-da-wash you go.
The Diplomat’s an elegant boat, late twenties or early thirties probably – clean lines, warm woodwork. Must’ve been a swank place to gamble back in the day. Against the bulkhead, a display case filled with models, one of them a battleship. This, according the little plaque beneath it, is “exactly what the Arizona looked like at 8 a.m. on December 7, 1941, just minutes before the attack on Pearl Harbor.” Aha, there’s a mind-blowing concept for you. When a ship’s about to sink, she shrinks!
Attempt to keep a portion of your French by reading Micromegas, wherein Voltaire recommends “il faut bien citer ce qu’on ne comprend point du tout dans la EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 429
the language one understands the least.
October 9
Up and went to Gagosian to see the Richard Serra sculptures. Serra had to go to Austria to find a plant that could fabricate the steel to his specifications. In one section of the vast gallery, a flotilla of sharp-ended, wavy, ship-like forms. But the huge maze, Blind Spot is the one that takes the cake – what’s illusory and impenetrable wrap round eachother inseparably. Not much to say. One simply has to navigate inward, following the course of the too-high stained, spattered, workboot scuffed walls, curving up and around, abruptly shifting direction when one faces no choice, until one reaches the implacable, unremitting center. Not immediately, only when you leave the gallery and walk east, no longer in the grip of the thing, it comes to you: Blind Spot is the only expression of form that would make sense where the WTC used to stand. The Bathtub must remain as it is. Build nothing above ground, honor the form of the foundation and the barrier against the tides. Blind Spot would go somewhere on that great concrete sub-surface platform. Then you could look down on its strange, crimped spiral shape from above. Or venture below, into that great cellar of the world, wend your way round all these impenetrable walls within walls. See what’s happening from within.
The wind blowing up Eighth Avenue, heavy, cool and salty, writes a maritime end to Indian Summer.
But it’s not so foggy that you can’t check out the latest augmentations to the top of the Empire State Building. Ah, the things that go on up there in the dead of night!
Hours after the great colored floodlights that illuminate the summit have been turned off, with the observation deck closed and its hordes of sight-seers sent safely back to terra firma, the welders and their torches take over. Gradually, over the past couple of years, a fantastic array of telecommunications gear has been attached to the main antenna and the superstructure just below it. And where else would it go, given that the Empire State has become, once again, the tallest point around? The result is that, by day, the spire has come to resemble an electronic cactus.
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It was Eric B. who alerted you to the lightshow and he was right, it’s well worth staying up for. Sparks cascade out and down in chemical arcs of near blinding intensity. One can only imagine that something’s gone terribly wrong – a short circuit or worse. But soon the spectacle takes on a kind of pyrotechnic beauty. Empyre State you think. Occasionally, an incandescent burst shows off the whole shebang: brackets, braces, dishes, guywires, weird pods the shape of bass drums, an antenna crown of thorns.
Gazing at it now, you can’t help but think that with every bit of techno-crap they stick up there the spire looks goofier, more out-of-control – a mockery of the clearly articulated lines of the structure below. Christ, what are they thinking? Comes a point where you might as well hang up a neon sign: Shoot Here.
• • •
Outside the café, a battered sanitation sweeping truck rumbles and hisses by on its quotidian pass – displacing the dust and refuse that gravitate into the gutters along the avenue. For some reason the name JOHNSTON has been stenciled below the windshield in large black letters. Who is JOHNSTON? The vehicle? The woman of medium build and early middle years who sits stolidly in the cab? Not likely her name since you’ve several other folks operating this same sweeper.
Steady at the wheel, she negotiates the right onto 21st Street and weaves deftly round an illegally parked car. Glimpsed in profile, the woman’s face seems rather carved by the elements than born of mortal clay. Could she be the reincarnation, in female form, of the Great Stone Face, lately crumbled in New Hampshire? Yes, and with big gold hoop earrings this time around!
Now can a traffic cop be far behind? Ah, there he is in his little three-wheeled clown cart, bearing tickets for the malingerers. If you had a kazoo, you’d run out on the street and play a fanfare now. October 14
They took off their high heels as they left their offices in the trade center. Scores of women, hundreds of them. Took off their shoes and left them behind. Abandoned EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 431
repeated: No cause for alarm. And beneath the field of fireworks? Does the city that has marched too long in its impossible shoes reclaim at last the ground for what can only be a barefoot dance? Something of moonlight. And over east, something of the morning too.
She goes to school by herself now. Your one and only daughter. Slings on her too-heavy backpack. Sometimes you calculate how long it takes the elevator to reach ground, then stand and watch her from your windows facing south. Which corner will she cross at? Twenty-fifth, Twenty-fourth? It all depends on which way the lights are with her. But sooner or later she’ll negotiate Eighth Avenue and before her lies broad expanse of Twenty-third Street. Fifty feet or so in from the southeast corner, she’ll wait beneath the scaffolding with the other kids and workers for the crosstown bus. You want to run downstairs and reel the years back, carry her on your forearm again. But if you did, even if it were possible, how could she claim the city for herself? How could she take it all in?
Once a year, you can see the sun set from your apartment. On that day, the sun drops not behind, but in the gap between two close-set buildings. You never remember the precise date. But you can sense it in the angle of the sunrise. You couldn’t swear to it, but you’re pretty sure today’s the day.
Bea’s birthday. She’d be 94. And proud of Gwen’s artwork, her poetry, and strong, elegant touch on the piano.
Who knows why, but on your way toward Le G., you flash back to once upon a time – got to be at least four years ago – when you went by the café, more or less in the same graying, soon-to-fade light to clear your head and have a coffee before going back to work on Divided…. As you approached down the street, you saw a man standing outside staring through the windows in a manner you imagined wistful.
“How long has this place been here?” he asked. You told him and he nodded. He used to live in the neighborhood, remembered the mom and pop store that came before. Where does he live now? “I’m homeless,” he said, “I live everywhere.” EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 432
Standing there, you fell into a conversation and before long he reached into his pocket, took out a small piece of black paper and a tiny scissors and began cutting, pausing every now and then to look up at you. It took a while for you to realize he was forming a miniature portrait, in silhouette. “Contact paper,” he responded to your unasked question. When he finished, he asked if you had a piece of paper. You pulled one of the manuscript pages from Divided… out of your bag. Carefully he peeled the backing off and adhered your image to the blank side of the page, pressing with his thumb against his palm. Handed it to you. Extraordinary. A fair likeness, and so finely wrought.
“I’d love to give you something for this,” you said, “but I’ve hardly anything on me.”
He cocked his head to one side and looked at you squarely, almost accusingly. “What’s the matter? Can’t you accept a blessing?”
In truth not really. Not in the moment. Just stood there calculating what was in your pocket.
“I can stand you to a cup of coffee.” “Sure,” he said. And thus continued the conversation inside, until in an hour or so you went your separate ways.
“You’ll talk to anybody,” Jack used to say to Bea, half disparaging, half admiring. And he was right. But then the fact was, he’d talk to anyone too.
Fog but not too cold. Open the window, put on a Cheb Mami CD. Hop on the Nordic Trak. Close your eyes and cross country ski in your living room. Open your eyes when you’re close to the end of your workout. What’s that? A big chunk missing from a stepped roof down at the WFC. Look harder – nothing amiss – only steam rising off a lower building, the foreground gray blending with the sky beyond. Everywhere across the Lower Manhattan skyline, tops of buildings with bites taken out, restored in the next windshift, then demolished again. Most days, you relish the view of facing south, the play of clouds over the buildings, particularly when they’re scudding east. It’s then that a horrible apparition
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distance. And then you see them crumbling and the nausea comes.
Dinner at Teddy and Ladan’s – always a convivial and fascinating affair. Philippa, an Episcopal priest of a lively air explains the difference between Catholic transubstantiation and Protestant consubstantiation. For the latter, during the timespan of the communion, the host and wine coexist with the actual body and blood, as in Luther’s example of the temporary unity between an iron and the fire that turns it red- hot. What happens to the leftovers then, after the Eucharist is over? Do they return to being so much wine and wafer? Well, in a sense yes, says Philippa. Yet the interesting thing is this: the wine is not just poured down the sink, nor the wafer chucked out with the everyday garbage. Instead they are stored discretely, and disposed of in a special ritual.
A man you’ve never seen sits at Table 4. Usually you are that man in the corner spot by the windows, but today another fellow’s beaten you to the draw. He’s got a roundish open face – head shaved a week or so back, growing out stubble – square black-framed glasses, a wedding band, and what used to be called a downtown air. He chuckles his way through the New York Post, and then as he reads the A section of the Times he breaks into several protracted bouts of laughter.
Yesterday, over coffee, Eric B. said he might move back to Liverpool. It makes a certain sense. He has a back to move to, complete with a grown daughter and grandchild, possibly a flat in the family’s house. It would be an adjustment for Rebecca and Veronica, but Becky’s young enough to see it mostly as adventure, and Veronica would be Veronica anywhere.
In early February, Bronwyn’s off to Turkey – got a gig teaching English at a university in Istanbul. All the Jacks and Jills seem to be hitting the road. Where would you move to? Will you live out your life here – entailed to you birthplace – unable to wrest yourself from the spot where multitudes flock for a taste of freedom? Your father expatriated to Vermont when he was ten years younger than you are now. But he’d EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 434
New York City was – however ephemerally – El Dorado. Destination, not origin. Like her father, Gwen was born here. Where does her path lead?
The other day you came upon a line in Bloch’s Principle of Hope. “If the world caves in, I will stand amidst the falling rubble.” The wonder is not how the words got on the page, but how they got inside you, long before you read them. It might not help, but still you wish you knew. In what year, on what day, in what precise hour, did you become that “I”? EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 435
BUSH OF GHOSTS January 17, 2004 – February 11, 2005
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Something infinite behind everything appeared, which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. –
Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations |
