Carrie and I caught the 6:00 a.m. Amtrak to New York. She slept most of the way down. I had to nudge her a couple times when she started to snore. The train was filled with business people. She woke up outside of Stamford, and I went to the cafe car and got her some coffee and a Danish. I was too excited to eat. The only time I had been out of Connecticut before was to go down to Misquamicut Beach in Rhode Island for senior skip day in high school. While the ocean was amazing, it was nothing compared to what I was seeing outside the window now as we approached New York City. Though I worked Hartford’s city streets, I felt like a country hick. There were no mountains or hilltops or parks, just streets and buildings, endlessly to the horizon, streets and buildings as vast as the ocean. It made me feel like a grain of sand in the desert. Carrie read her Cosmopolitan beside me. I put my hand on her leg, but continued to stare at the new world I saw before me.
When we stepped out of Penn Station, I felt like I was in a TV movie. If I had had a hat I’d have thrown it in the air, and spun around in circles like Mary Tyler Moore on that old show I used to watch with my mom. The city bustle, street vendors, taxis, skyscrapers, it was the big time. Carrie had been before, so it was nothing to her, but to me, it represented something significant, a turning point, a broadening of my world.
“You want to impress a chick,” Tom told me, “you take her to New York City for the day. She’ll never look at you the same afterwards.”
He mapped out a complete itinerary for me. “This is the Tom Spencer guaranteed-to-keep-her-legs-open-to-you tour. I have used this or variations of this tour on three separate women and every one of them I could call up right now, and tonight, I’d be hearing their happy-time moans, and having them cook me steak and eggs for breakfast.”
“You know where you’re going?” Carrie said. “You look lost. I wish you’d tell me what you have planned.”
“Leave it up to me,” I said. “I’ve got it all under control.” I stepped to the curb. “Taxi!” I called.
I held the door for Carrie, and then slid in beside her. “The Museum of Modern Art,” I said.
She looked at me, as she would often that day, with wonder, as if she was seeing a side of me for the first time, and it was causing her to reassess me in a most positive way. Her grip tightened on my arm.
“Now when you go to a museum,” Tom had told me, “the last thing you want to do is wander around aimlessly from room to room. After a while you’re tired, bored and everything looks the same and you wonder why you even went in the first place other than to just say you’ve gone. Here’s what you do. You go see one painting—one famous memorable painting. And if you’re going to the Museum of Modern Art—that painting is Vincent van Gogh. Starry Starry Night. You show her that painting and you tell about how van Gogh was this haunted young man, tortured by all his feeling for the world, who eventually killed himself, but how this painting captured the beauty of his vision, and then you sing a few lines of the song ‘Starry, Starry Night’ in her ear, and tell her that that song is about van Gogh and this painting. And she will melt. This whole trip is going to be like she is on Let’s Make a Deal, and she thought you were this little booby prize box, but then Monty lifts the box up, and inside the box is a sign that says ‘Door Number 3.’ And up comes door number three and it’s this great prize, and the prizes and surprises keep coming. At the end of the day, she is going to want to have your baby.”
She loved the painting—the blues and yellows and oranges and swirls. She had actually seen pictures of the painting before, but to actually see it in person was another thing. “It’s so rich and alive,” she said.
“It’s worth millions of dollars,” I said. “It’s priceless.”
“Duh,” she said, though she squeezed my hand, then added, “I had no idea you loved van Gogh.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” I said, “but there is plenty of time to learn,” and I squeezed her hand back.
At the gift shop, I bought her a scarf with the painting on it as a memento.
“We’ll come back here again another time,” I said, “but now we have someone waiting for us outside just up the block.”
I led her out, and we walked up to 59th Street where, just as Tom said, there was a waiting horse and carriage. For thirty-four dollars, we got a twenty-minute ride through Central Park. The only problem was the horse stunk, but Carrie was still in such a good mood that when the horse farted, she laughed and said, “I feel like I’m right at home. What is he, your brother?”
“Hey, yours don’t smell like roses,” I said. “Let’s be fair.”
I gave the guy a five dollar tip, then said, “Time for the highlight of our trip.”
“Why does that give me dread?”
“We’re going to the famous umbrella room for lunch.”
“The umbrella room?”
“Yes, noted for its fine cuisine. People come from all over the world to eat at the umbrella room.” We were standing on the street corner, and I pulled out my wallet and said to the hot dog vendor, “A hot dog for me and one for the missus, with the works.”
“This is the umbrella room?” she said, looking at the green umbrella over the man’s cart. “You brought me to New York to come here?”
“You go to New York, you’ve got to try the local tube steaks,” I said, handing her the steaming hot dog covered with relish, mustard and onions. “Fake out,” I said. “Dinner’s coming later. Eat up, we have another appointment.”
We caught another cab and I took her to a salon on 7th Avenue, where I had made an appointment for her to have a massage, facial and pedicure. “I’ll be back to pick you up in two hours,” I said. “Don’t worry, it’s all paid for.”
And the farting horse and the tube steak were forgotten. I winked at her as I went out the door.
While she had herself primed and beautified, I went to an arcade and played Doom for a couple hours. On my way out I saw one of those old-fashioned gunslinger machines, where you put your fifty cents in and have to outdraw the cowboy. I killed him on the first draw. “Aww, you got me,” he said. “There must have been sand in my eyes.”
And for a moment I thought about the sponsor of our trip, the nineteen-year-old drug dealer who’d caught a round in the heart. I wondered if maybe there had been sand in his eyes. I touched my chest and pointed to the ceiling, then nodded. “Thank you, brother,” I said.
We had an early dinner at a French restaurant, where the waiter poured a small amount of wine in my glass, and I did as Tom had told me, swirled it around, sniffed it and then tasted it. “Very good,” I said to the waiter. “Most excellent!”
He nodded his happiness at my approval and he poured Carrie’s glass, then filled mine.
The highlight of the trip for me was the next cab ride, when I got in, and the driver looked back at me for direction, and I looked at Carrie and smiled, then simply said, “42nd Street, Broadway!” and when the driver still looked at me, I added, “The New Amsterdam Theatre.”
“We’re going to a show?” Carrie asked, her face lighting up.
“Indeed we are, my little lion princess,” I said.
“No,” she said.
“Yes.”
And then to see her face when she looked up at the dazzling marquee, The Lion King, was to recognize the possibility to escape any burden that could hold a soul down. What joy we are all capable of.
So we were in the balcony and not on the orchestra floor, but she held me the entire show, often looking in my face with delight. When we walked out of the theatre, she had a bounce in her step and was singing “Hakuna Matata,” and even got me to join in.
We had an hour to kill before the last train left. She held my arm and leaned against my shoulder as we strolled. With her sweet scent filling my dreams, I believed we would find happiness together as bright as those Broadway marquees.