11

Wanderings

When you first come to New York, you hardly notice the change of seasons: spring flows into summer and the gray autumn into grim winter and then back to spring with scarcely a mark, a flutter, in your mind. You’re too busy, and too driven, to sense the seasons, whose simplest signals—the accumulation of fallen leaves on the sidewalk I knew from my childhood in Philadelphia, the accumulation of white snow on the streets I knew from our youth in Montreal—were anyway hardly to be seen.

Gray streets under gray skies through gray months in gray weather. I used to joke that they called the clubbiest restaurant in town “The Four Seasons” because it was the only way a certain kind of New Yorker could be made even marginally aware of what the seasons were—could even tell that there were seasons at all. You looked at the menu, and it told you.

“The world here looks gray now because it is gray,” Martha would say to me, stubbornly, when I grew melancholy at the change. Yet, as life in the city went on, you did become more acutely aware of it—the length of the summer, the dreary year’s beginning, which stretches from January to April and the first stirrings of baseball season. That first week of January, when all the Christmas trees in the city are thrown, denuded of glory, into piles in the gutter, like plague victims, waiting to be carted away. There’s something inhuman and chilling about the ritual. All of these beautiful evergreens that scarce three weeks ago had been the centerpieces of parties and festivities in every apartment and loft in the city, so that you could see them in every window, taking Joe Mitchell’s rule of the second story and extending it out to Epiphany: look up and where, in the normal run of the year, everything seems clouded, there was a tree, with its own cloud of lights upon it. And then, suddenly, every one of them just tossed aside: stripped, denuded, disgraced, discarded. For the first five years, when the trees must, in truth, have been piling up on the street outside the Blue Room, I didn’t notice them. When they must have cluttered the curbsides where I searched forlornly for my pants, I didn’t see them.

But now I did.

And you began to register those darker notes—small ones at first, but then you saw that the city was filling up with larger ones. The “homeless crisis” was now impossible not to see every day. We were told by the experts that homelessness reflected medications untaken and shelters unvisited as much as poverty unrelieved. Nonetheless, you recognized, with what humanity you had, that it was deeply wrong that a city that celebrated wealth to the degree that this one did should be able to endure so easily the presence of so many people who had nothing at all.

One bitter cold February night, when Martha and I were walking home from a movie theater on Houston Street, we noticed a man opening the front of a newspaper vending machine. Then he curled himself up into a ball inside and shut the door behind him. It was an act both of contortion achieved and of comfort sought, apartment hunting in another dimension of desperation. We had lived for three years in a place not much bigger by local standards, but this was different. It was an image, once seen, that could never leave you. Those images began to crowd all around.

Toward the end of the decade, I felt for the first time, among all the lights, a certain sadness, even a kind of darkness in our own days. Our darkness was not the good melodramatic darkness so useful in fiction and films: needles and knives and betrayals and affairs. It was a smaller darkness of compressions and anxieties and the sheer exhaustion attendant on doing more things than the day can quite bear. The twoness that had been our unquestioned faith—the easy double faith that no room was too small to share, no city too big to conquer—began, not to fade, no, not that, but to tear a bit. It frayed around the edges of the hem, as happens to pants worn too long, if you have them.

For Martha this absence was more painful. I had not been aware—or had not chosen to be aware—of how much she missed the garden of the house where she had grown up in Montreal, how the grayness that I still sometimes reveled in, street upon street, seemed oppressive to her.

Work divided us, and the things that united us—going to dinner parties, attending openings, all that—divided us, too, in another way, since it broke the spell of shared fantasy that had supported us in the Blue Room, the belief that, by willing an imagination alive, you could will a world into being. It was not that there was less love in the room, but there was more static in the signal; the purity of emotion that we had sought and found, however ludicrous and absurd and even delusional, was passing.

The one analgesic I found was walking through the city, over and over. The two great technological gifts of the eighties were the Walkman and the hyper-developed sneaker, which, together, turned walking into an all-encompassing emotional activity. For a long time in the 1980s, I seemed to do nothing but walk around Manhattan. The modern sneaker, rising from Nike and Adidas, constructed with more architecture inside than most apartments, now allowed even the flat-footed to stride, Hermes-like, on what felt like cushioned air.

And then the Walkman made every block your own movie. Just as the period of the first flâneurs falls exactly between the rise of gas street lighting, which opened the city to twenty-four-hour idling, and the onset of the automobile, which made cities loud again, so walking in the 1980s lay right between the invention of the Walkman, which suddenly neutralized the noise of the cityscape, and the onset of the iPhone, which replaced isolation-booth serenity with our now frantic, forever-on-guard-ness.

I had my Walkman plugged into my head everywhere I went, listening to Paul McCartney (the soft Paul McCartney of the time, when he would put out a new record every year that had two good songs among a flutter of fill) or Stevie Wonder or, most often, James Taylor and Sting. A few years later, in the early nineties, when Bret Easton Ellis published American Psycho, it was disconcerting to discover that the cold-blooded Wall Street serial killer had the same tastes in music I did. Ellis’s point, I think, was that “soft” music was the soundtrack to hard passions, that, whereas honest-to-God death metal was at least honest, and so purgative, in its violent message, the Phil Collinses and Stings of the world kept their murderous rage beneath a façade of sweet tunefulness. I didn’t believe it. The sweet is often simply sweet, and though sweet and bitter together are a better solution than either apart, when forced to choose one or the other, only the distraught take the bitter.

You could walk anywhere then. Saturday all day, Sunday all day, I’d tramp through the Lower Manhattan neighborhoods. The differences, architectural and social, between TriBeCa and SoHo and the Lower East Side, to name only contiguous areas, were distinct and vivid and nameable then: cast-iron buildings shading off into old industrial egg- and paper-carton factories sweetly interrupted by small triangular parks, and then, edging over, as you walked east, into poor-law tenements, the new frontier being reclaimed by painters. Saturday mornings I would set off and walk all day, and achieve a feeling of happiness—which is, always, some kind of unearned release achieved unawares through absorption—in a way that I haven’t felt before or since. SoHo in the eighties was the finest place for walking there could have been, not only architecturally beautiful but, by accident, still beautifully composed: illuminated sidewalks still functionally illuminated the basements beneath, while the pioneering businesses were as chic but widely spaced as rocks in a Japanese garden—a single one-room restaurant with a handwritten menu outside, a block of old businesses, the odd charcuterie, a sole Korean deli for the whole neighborhood. At twilight you walked, so to speak, from campfire to campfire, with beautiful darkness in between.

I loved those walking Saturdays, began to look forward to them with an intensity that belied their simple aimlessness. I would walk up Mercer Street, the most beautiful and mysterious of SoHo streets—optically, if not actually, bounded on either end by the exclamation points of the two most romantic of all New York skyscrapers, the Chrysler Building at the far northern end and the Woolworth Building to the south. My official reason for walking so often and so long was to get to the gym: I had joined a “health club” that had a slightly sad mirror-and-rubber-plant décor, “like Cheryl Tiegs’s last marriage,” Martha said. Like every other member of our generation, I biked and I lifted and I steamed and I showered after. But I used the gym merely as a destination. I liked to walk up Lafayette Street for its own sake.

What was I searching for on those walks? What was it? Sometimes I could start walking at ten in the morning and not come back until six or seven at night—though my arms would always be filled with beautiful food that I had found at the Union Square Greenmarket, just coming into its own then, or at Dean & DeLuca. I would cook, and on Saturday nights we would listen to Sid Mark’s four hours of Sinatra on the FM radio. (He, and it, had become the subject of my first “Talk of the Town” story for The New Yorker, eccentric obsessions proving their value.) There was still something so different, so perturbed about that moment in our New York evolution. And all I could think was that I was still trying to do what wiser and older walkers had done, too, and that was to reconnect to my own aspirations through the simple hard physical act of perambulating, trying to remember what things meant by walking past where things were.

I began, graduate student that I still was at heart—Chekhov says somewhere that he spent a lifetime knouting the peasant out of himself; I have spent the same lifetime flogging the graduate student out, but he always comes back, as did Chekhov’s peasant; he’s his own Lopakhin—to read about walking in New York even as I was walking in New York, to define the peculiarly New York contribution to the meanings of walking. There was Alfred Kazin—whom I actually met once, and didn’t know whom I was meeting, fool that I was; had I met him only a few years later, I might have gotten something as useful as what I took from Joe Mitchell. (It isn’t whom we meet in life that matters, it’s when we meet them.)

Rereading the great New York walkers, you find one note that eluded the cynic-contemplatives of Paris: in New York, walking, even without companions, can still be an expression of companionship, of expansive connection; a happy opening out to an enlarged civic self rather than a narrowing down to a contemplative inner one; a way of scooting toward the American Over-Soul, in high-tops.

It starts with Walt. Whereas the Parisian poet-walkers of his time walk to take it all apart, dissect the scene, find the skull beneath the street lamps, Whitman walks to take it all in, see what’s up, get the life of the city right. Walking in New York, Whitman says, leaves him “enrich’d of soul—you give me forever faces.” Whitman is always walking through the city. “Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine,” he tells us of his walks, and then that “I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it,” which says something about the state of the waters then. Making his way down the streets, leaping into the Hudson: those are Whitman’s promenades. He seeks not a glimpse inside his own mind but connection: “Manhattan crowds…with varied chorus…Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.” This makes him a man of boats and bridges as much as of boulevards; his New York is as much Brooklyn as it is Manhattan. (And there’s his ferry, connecting them.)

Kazin, whose 1951 A Walker in the City, heavily haunted by Whitman, remains, I discovered too late to tell him, the best book ever written about New York on foot, is all about going somewhere. Kazin uses walking as a metaphor for ambition and escape; his is a study in how ambitious kids can ascend on foot from the provinces just across the bridge. He was walking all the time because he was getting the hell out of Brownsville, and couldn’t afford a taxi. You could take the subway—Moss Hart in Act One writes of taking the subway—but Kazin prefers to walk, because the subway is one of the chief things he is escaping from. (When Moss Hart escaped from it, too, he took taxis, Broadway hits being more helpful in that aim than Partisan Review pieces.)

As Whitman is walking through, Kazin is walking to and toward. He’s going somewhere with every step. (When he retreats to Brownsville, it is to see how far he’s gone.) Yet we find in both Whitman and Kazin a note of simple delight in the pure chance of walking in New York, what Kazin calls the walking that supplies “a happy, yet mostly vague and excited feeling.” Whatever else we walk to accomplish, we always walk in New York to randomize our too neatly gridded city existence. You go where your feet take you. Buses take routes and even subways have schedules, but everyone on foot goes where they want to.

Sometimes, those Saturday walks could be joyful. I went on long walks with Dick Avedon, a champion walker, who loved to set goals, ambitions. Once, he called me on such a morning, when Martha was away in Iceland with her mother, and suggested that we “walk the length of Manhattan, and look for masterpieces.”

Dick didn’t, it turned out, really mean to walk from Spuyten Duyvil to the harbor, but just the length of Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum to Washington Square—the navigable river of commerce and art on which most of his sixty-odd years had been spent.

Dick, planted in the middle of the cobblestones on the park side of Fifth, with the traffic going around, flowing around him, seemed to be watching the parade of buses on the avenue. “Do you know,” he said, looking east, “I grew up over there. At Fifty-five East Eighty-sixth. And my father and I always used to ride the double-decker buses together right here on Fifth Avenue on Sundays. I remember once we were on the bus and I had my autograph album with me. I always did in that period; I was maybe twelve. My father suddenly looked out the window, on the upper deck, and said, ‘There’s the mayor’s brother!’ Of course, it was the sort of knowing thing that fathers are supposed to say. Mayor La Guardia was fat, so another fat man had to be his brother. But I thought, The mayor’s brother!—and leapt from the upper deck, down the stairs, and jumped out onto Fifth Avenue, with my autograph book. I twisted my ankle as I landed, but I kept going, limping terribly as I raced after this poor, anonymous fat man.” Dick became for a moment his own younger self on the same pavement—crippled by his leap, dragging his wounded leg, autograph book still gamely held out before him, like a pilgrim’s cross. “I held out my autograph book to the fat man, and he looked at me in amazement. Of course, I eventually had to limp back to the bus. It was the sort of overeager thing I did that embarrassed my father.

“My God, how I loved autographs!” he went on, as we began to walk south along the park. “I had the most amazing collection of autographs. I had a whole section called ‘Great Jews and Great Judges.’ Rabbi Weiss, Governor Lehman. I had Oliver Wendell Holmes and Chief Justice Hughes, who signed on their beautiful Supreme Court cards. George S. Kaufman wrote on a blue card, ‘For Richard Avedon, and very glad to do it.’ I had Rachmaninoff and e. e. cummings. The only movie stars who interested me were Toby Wing and Lyda Roberti. No one has even heard of them now. Lyda Roberti introduced the Gershwin song ‘My Cousin in Milwaukee’ in a movie musical, which I thought was major. I had them both. Today, whenever anybody asks me for an autograph, I always send it back and write ‘signed with pleasure.’

“Let’s make a day of masterpieces!” he said suddenly, emphatically. “We’ll look at nothing but masterpieces. When we moved to Eighty-sixth Street, I practically moved into the Met. I would visit all the time when we lived near here, to look at certain things—the Fayum portraits from Egypt. The Modiglianis. The Soutines. And those figures—the Etruscans with their tiny waists and hips and their smiles. The Modiglianis and the Etruscans, above all.”

As we approached the Frick, Dick peered down Fifth toward the Empire State Building. “Avedon’s Fifth Avenue. Did you know that that was what my father’s store was called? It was on Thirty-ninth and Fifth. I used to go into my father’s room, after he lost the store in the Depression, just to look at the stationery and the envelopes and the sales slips and smell the carbon paper. Diane Arbus and I both came from department-store families—there was still a myth of the department store in our time.

“There was a certain kind of Jewish Broadway world of the period just when I was born, back in the twenties, that for our parents was a sort of an ideal. There was a family called the Strunskys—Simeon and English Strunsky. I think Simeon was the editor of the Times Book Review or something, and related to the Gershwins by marriage. I always heard about the Strunskys—the reach of the Strunskys and the depth of the Strunskys and the style of the Strunskys. I wanted to be a Strunsky, not a Dick. Years later, I was in a lonely little inn on Cape Cod and saw the most elegant elderly couple, gravely waltzing by themselves in Hyannis. I suddenly thought: Strunskys! They must be Strunskys. And they were!

“There was a certain Strunskyite ideal that governed my childhood; it’s hard to describe, and I’ve rediscovered it only fitfully. It was Gershwin and O’Neill and Dorothy Parker and crossword puzzles and Moss Hart and George Kaufman playing cards. The Marx Brothers when they were still in New York, and my mother couldn’t stop talking about them.”

We went into the Frick. Dick first took in a Memling portrait of a young man. “It doesn’t really work, does it? The trick with portraits…It has to be serious, to keep the romance of the surface—and deepen it at the same time. It’s those Germans: all that rigor and precision. It stays on the surface, though. It doesn’t look romantic at first, but it’s far more romantic in its materialism than—I don’t know—than Fragonard. Fragonard is all spirit.”

He walked a little farther into the next room and was stopped cold by a pair of Gainsborough portraits, a man and a woman. “My God, what doesn’t he know about aristocratic people! The silver hair and wigs, and the mismatch of the black eyebrows on her. It’s not the technique he employs, though it’s a perfect technique. It’s what he knows about that man, and that woman. Gainsborough comes close to certain Goyas—to Goya’s Condesa de Chinchón” (a touchstone for Dick). “That same kind of freedom, and welcoming contradiction. Gainsborough is as close to Goya as anyone, though you’re not supposed to say that.”

He made a quick inspection of the other faces in the room, dismissing the Lawrences (“too much flesh; nobody’s cheeks are that pink”) and the Hogarths, but being moved by a Reynolds portrait of an elderly lady with an elaborate wig, plaited with hanging silver ribbons. “What you can do with a hat—the pathos of the perfect hat against the aging face…”

We turned, and Dick pretended amazement at entering the room of Fragonard’s Progress of Love. “What doesn’t he know about movement!” he said. “What he can do with a kind of sexuality, constantly translating it into perfect controlled movement and yet keeping the nervous edge of it alive always, not simpering or posed. Real movement, rising from inside the lovers. You get past the chalky surface and the pastry in a half-minute, and then everything just takes off, he goes so far.” Dick approached the surface of the panel in The Progress of Love where the girl flees the boy, her arms spread straight out. He peered intently into it.

At last, we reached our destination: the central hall of the mansion, lined with Mr. Frick’s choicest pictures. Dick walked immediately over to “it”—Rembrandt’s Polish Rider. He stood still in front of it. “My mother would bring me to see it when I was nine, and for a long time that picture meant everything in the world to me. I was that young man, and I was in love with him—with myself, my idealized vision of myself, what I might be. I saw him as me, that possibility in life—everything lying ahead, and not yet knowing it, not looking at the road, but out. It sounds so grandiose, I know, when you say it, but the sense I had was so strong that someone else, Rembrandt, had felt everything I was feeling. I was so reassured by that picture. Everything I want for my work is still in it—in that contradiction, the beautiful rider and the broken-down horse.” Then he added, with a smile, but more softly, “I was the rider. And bit by bit, I’ve become the horse.”

Dick slowly disengaged himself from the Rembrandt, and walked up, peeked at the Piero, and then turned left, to look at the shiny blue satin Veronese, The Choice of Hercules. Hercules in Veronese’s picture is a slight, weak-chinned, aristocratic Venetian boy in a ballooning white silk suit, looking pettish as he is pulled between the two imposing, pneumatic goddesses. “Veronese was in the worst kind of bind,” Dick said. “But we’ve all experienced that. It’s one of those things. The guy said to him, ‘Paint me as Hercules. In my white suit.’ ”

We turned off past the Frick and into the park. Dick looked down. “It’s funny, about portraits”—he was still back at the museum—“how the best portraits are always emperors or postmen. People who are all self-image, or people who have no self-image at all. They come with a kind of dignity to the camera.”

Then on through the dark underpass that leads to the children’s zoo. As we approached it, we came upon an odd, familiar little park personage—the button man. An ageless, white-bearded man, a figure right out of Joe Mitchell, wearing a heavy, stained overcoat covered, studded, with a thousand photo-buttons—Polaroid snapshots of passersby who have come to him to have their pictures taken, wrapped in plastic, and laminated to a tin lapel button: you can wear a picture of yourself.

Dick looked at the photo-button man with a combination of awe, curiosity, and possibility. He sized him up.

“This might be just the thing,” he said at last. “Don’t you think? For Martha? A photograph of us, enjoying a day in the park? She can wear it all over Greenland.” I didn’t correct him as to Martha’s homeland.

He walked up to the button man, who, in his long, studded overcoat, proudly surveyed his domain. He looked like the mayor of Munchkin City, and seemed magisterially unconcerned by the lack of custom.

“How are you?” Dick said, walking up to him, hand outstretched. “Have you been doing this for long?”

The photo-button man in turn sized up the famous photographer. “Awhile,” he said, as one not inclined to give away too much too quickly.

“We were thinking, actually, of having a button made.” Dick said this gaily, affirmatively, eagerly—but with exactly the right inflection of tentativeness and uncertainty to make it clear that he, the patron, was willing but that it was, in the end, in the final analysis, up to the artist—the button man—to decide whether or not this portrait made sense in terms of his mood this morning, and in terms of the corpus of his work.

Understanding this, the button man played his part. He turned and slowly looked over the two men—both schleppy in jeans and T-shirts—gravely. At last he sighed, as one whose gifts are consistently wasted on inadequate material, and said, “Sure.”

Dick and I stepped up. “Stand over there,” the button man said, gesturing to the brick wall of one of the outbuildings of the zoo. His camera was set up on a tripod facing the wall. “The light,” he said shortly.

Dick considered these words with immense gratitude, and looked up, melodramatically, at the hazy overcast sun, as though he had never before considered the possibility that light might affect a photographic portrait, and then allowed himself to be positioned, mug-shot style, against the wall.

“Do you always use this background?” Dick asked. The button man, a little exasperated, stopped just short of rolling his eyes.

“Yeah,” he said. “The light.”

“Oh,” Dick said. The light was, in fact, coming right into their eyes, causing both men to squint a little as the button man returned to his tripod and slowly settled on the shot.

“You’re using a flash?” Dick inquired, in spite of himself.

The button man looked back up, warningly. Dick subdued himself.

“Let’s make it a really…natural, easy, candid snapshot,” he murmured. “No hysteria in the smiles. We’ll just make a nice…candid snapshot.” He sounded, though, a little dubious about the approach. Then he assumed his idea of a natural, easy, candid look, which was vaguely sinister in its guilty, not-quite-anything-ness—like the smile of a footman who has been caught in the hall closet with the second-best parlor maid.

The button man snapped the shutter, the flash went off in the middle of the park, and then he stepped back. “Let’s try again,” Dick said. Now he assumed another “candid” look: studied, severe, and unsmiling. The flash and shutter went off again in mid-expression.

“Okay,” the button man said wearily. Again the quick little tongue of the Polaroid darted out of the camera, and the button man carefully laid the second photograph on a nearby stone balustrade alongside the first.

We crowded around to watch the two images develop. Dick characteristically thrust his jaw out at the two pictures, as though willing them to become deep and human and extravagant. In fact, one made us look like a couple of nervous lounge lizards in mufti; the other, like a pair of Nebraska convicts caught after a father-and-son killing spree.

Dick looked the two possibilities over. “The second one, don’t you think,” he said at last. “It has a certain gloomy authority that may appeal to her. We look tragic and lost without her.” He handed the image back to the photo-button man, who expertly wrapped it around a blank tin button so that the two men’s heads, unsmiling, candid, were all that was visible, and trickily covered it with clear plastic, using a little hot iron extracted from the depths of his coat to seal it. Money was exchanged. Dick looked at the button happily, but a little dubiously. Then he shook hands with the button man again, and began to walk on, toward the bridge leading to the zoo.

“This is no good for Martha. It’s unthinkable that we send this to her!” he said at last. “We have to go back and make a real button.” He turned violently around and began to trot back toward the button man, I following at his heels.

When he got there, he shook hands once more with the still-bemused (and business-less) button man in his overcoat.

“Listen,” he said, “now, you and I are going to get to work. What you have here is something amazing. The possibilities of what you can do with this technique are endless. You haven’t begun to scratch the surface of everything that’s in this technique, and that’s in you to express. We’re going to work together and push the stick forward for your craft. Let’s make a button that’s a button.” The button man looked a little bewildered but game.

“We need models for the shot…” Dick said, and then stepped forward into the traffic of people coming up along the red stone walk. A stream of young women walked by: girls in bicycle shorts, girls with small children. Dick looked them over, his head bobbing back and forth like a wary boxer’s.

Two young black girls appeared, impressively cast in leopard-skin tops and tights. “Don’t you think?” he whispered. “Girls,” he said, stepping forward with a planted, man-at-work smile set on his lips, “I wonder if you could help us out…I’m…”

The two stepped a solid step out of the way, disdainfully, and walked on by. Then another two, and still two more. “Girls…could you…I wonder if you’d…” Dick sputtered a little as the stream of femininity rejected its interpreter.

Finally, Dick gathered himself together. Two rotund women, dressed oddly alike—white blouses, the kind of high-waisted pants that cry out to be called slacks, fastened with woven leather belts—were nearing. Both wore glasses in the shape of hearts—valentines, tinted pink. “Ladies,” Dick said, “I wonder if you’d work with me for five minutes.” He held out both hands pleadingly. “I’m working on a picture over here with a friend; we’re making a kind of comical button to send to his wife.” Dick put into “wife” a virtuous, hands-off, “no pickups around here” quality. The two women, a smaller and larger version of the same type—mother and daughter, clearly—looked at each other, giggling and shrugging.

“You must be sisters,” Dick said, throwing dignity and truth to the Central Park winds.

“No,” the mother, as she obviously was, said. “This is my daughter, Michelle, and I’m Shirley.”

Dick feigned elaborate disbelief, all the while stepping back with tiny steps, drawing his subjects into the little charmed circle where the button man in his studded overcoat and I waited. “That’s amazing. What brings you to New York? Is it a vacation?…”—keeping up a steady, innocuous patter as he drew them in. His body had taken on the shape of unthreatening virtue: eyebrows raised, arms close in to his side as though bound there, palms out; a man fastened by his own rectitude—unthreatening as a leprechaun.

At last, he had lured Michelle and Shirley, still giggling and shrugging, into the cameraman’s light. He looked around intently, judging angles and backgrounds. “Let’s use that as a background,” he said, pointing to the back of a gray dumpster. It was, apparently, the nearest thing he could find to a white no-seam. “If we use that we can make it work.”

“I wouldn’t try it,” the button man said, professionally.

“Well, let’s experiment for a moment. We’ll set up over there, and then…we’ll see.” He began to block the positions of his little company. “Now, Michelle, dear, can you put your arm around Adam, and then, uh…let’s bring Shirley in….Right…Now, everybody…leer.” The three subjects, all intensely embarrassed, tried to leer.

“That’s not a leer,” Dick said. “We’ve been picked up! Leer.”

He clasped them in and stepped forward to demonstrate a leer—Groucho Marx come to life, bent over double with aching lechery and desire.

They tried again. Still, no leer. Now, instead of insisting, Dick dropped his voice, and, with the intimacy of a teenage boy making a picture of his girlfriend at a Fotomat, just repeated their names: “Shirley. Michelle.” The intimacy of the intonation worked, and their faces passed from self-consciously coy to high-heartedly seductive. Dick nodded violently to the button man, and he hit the shutter.

Dick, almost dancing with joy, took three quick tap-dance steps of pleasure. “Mmmm, I think this is going to be something,” he said, and he thrust his jaw out and looked at the picture. “Now, that’s a picture.” He held it in his palm and showed it to his company. Michelle and Shirley and me.

Michelle and Shirley, who were beginning to enjoy themselves, relaxed as the button man walked over to the balustrade and began to laminate the picture onto a button. He finished and handed it to Dick, who cupped it in his hand.

“You know,” Dick said, happy, and wanting, obviously, to enrich the experience for them—to make it into a moment—“it’s funny. This is my work,” he said conversationally. “I’m a photographer.”

“Isn’t that nice,” Shirley said, with barely contained irony.

“No! Really. I mean photography is my work,” Dick said. “No, really. I do all the covers for Vogue.”

Shirley’s face, which was cast in a smirk of indulgence, now fell back into alarm. “Uh-huh?” she said, cautiously.

“No,” Dick went on, oblivious. For he had spotted the problem: they weren’t Vogue readers. “I do all the covers for Mademoiselle, too,” he explained. “And for GQ.” He thought for a moment, as though digging something up from the back of his mind. “I’m Avedon,” he explained—cheerfully, benevolently. Suspicion turned to panic. Michelle and Shirley, scarcely pausing to say goodbye, turned on the madman with the Polaroids and the delusions and made off into the park, like squirrels.

Dick watched them go. “Ah, fame,” he said. He seemed hurt. But then he looked down. He had the button.

It was the same constant lesson, even if it came from different teachers: the means of art was just ceaseless labor to get the button right. You took as much trouble on something that no one would see, or know was yours—a single sentence in an anonymous “Talk” story—as you did in the big stuff you hoped to show the world. And the subject of art was always contradiction, an uxorious young husband exposed in casual flirtation, smirking at Shirley while claiming to be sad. Even if you had to invent the contradiction out of passersby in Central Park.

But such happy encounters were rarer than long solitary wanderings. Walking on streets, walking through neighborhoods—Martha was even launched one night on an odd walk of her own. In 1990 we went to a party, the very last dinner party of the period, where one of the art dealers filled his townhouse with every imaginable figure of the art world and the money world of the period—Jeff Koons and Carl Icahn, Julian Schnabel and Peter Brandt, side by side. It turned out to be a party for a strange occasion—one of the billionaires was going off to prison the next day, and this was his farewell to New York. There were toasts raised to his bad fortune; the unfairness “of what’s called justice in this country” was cursed; the persecution of the very rich (!) defied.

I was, perhaps, not in the best mind to take the evening in equably. The big show that Kirk Varnedoe and I had been working on for years about the entanglement of popular imagery and modern art had opened, and been much attacked. Nowadays, when I am on the road, it is the single thing that young curators cite most often and approvingly from all my work, proving once again the odd and unexceptional and rather Kiplingesque point that success and failure are so intermingled that they are distinct only at specific, not successive, moments in time. (Rather like modernist art and popular culture, come to think of it.)

Still, all of the nastier elements of the eighties did seem to have condensed into one storm cloud that night. Everything that was turning ugly in the time was there. The entanglement of art and money was one I could look at with a certain aplomb when I considered it historically, but not so much when I saw the relation between a business culture that had increasingly come to value only what you could grab and exploit, seated side by side with an art culture that had become addicted to the drug of money. You knew that even if there was no definable difference between this relation and the relation of the Medici—who were certainly no more ethical or admirable than the rich people in that room—to the artists of the Florentine Renaissance, still, there was something overheated and weird about it, something that boded no good to anyone, something imbalanced, something fatal, something that no amount of historical perspective could wish away. Something new. Something strange.

Martha said to me afterward—and I made it the basis for the first work of long fiction that I had ever succeeded in writing, a novella called “The Children of the Party”—that it reminded her of nothing so much as the dinner party at the end of Through the Looking-Glass, that gibbering, nightmare banquet, where everything turns from amusing nonsense into a wild phantasmagoria of appetite and absurdity, the creatures colliding with one another in a completely chaotic atmosphere of formalized horror.

Alice gets out in the end, back through the mirror in the living room and fireplace. But there was no way that Martha could see of getting out, back through the mirror, going home to the fire and kitten. She got tipsy, which I had never seen happen to her before, and wandered the room. I watched her small figure, in a yellow Alaïa dress, circle the tables—officially, simply looking for the bathroom, but pressing ahead, touring the room, taking in the strange flat conversations and nervous eyes of the guests. At the end, she told me later that night, after she had grown too sick to be in a taxi and I had taken her into a little ATM room on Fifty-seventh Street to recover—one of the little glass cash rooms that had seemed so touching, so thrilling, a New York invention at the beginning of the decade and had now become a place only to escape into, a shelter from the larger storm of money—she had had, through some collision of champagne and chaos, a kind of vision, a waking nightmare.

She had seen, she said, all of the artists and all of the billionaires, impaled like insects on that hideous, small-town snowflake that had been suspended, a few years before, above the previously pristine and thrillingly efficient intersection of Fifty-seventh and Fifth. (We didn’t know then that it was Donald Trump who had, by legend at least, helped engineer the ominous snowflake, so gross in its proportions and so nakedly needy of its ugly wire supports. It’s hard now to believe that Trump would have spent the money. But it hung, certainly, a piece of gargantuan and essentially suburban ostentation, outside his house.)

When I close my eyes now, I can still see the vision she communicated to me, of revolution and chaos, the sanctuary defiled, the world gone wrong, and wonder if, in her yellow Alaïa, she had not been given the gift of prophecy by a small and fashion-conscious God.

But smaller disquieting signs than that large prophecy also appeared. As the eighties turned into the nineties, there came new creatures walking above our heads. After the mosquitoes had come the mice, who raced along the floorboards and squeaked in the walls and, on that one memorable night, suddenly ran out, in formation, from corners in our loft that we didn’t even know were there, sending us in flight from our home.

With each of these infestations, we had passed through the same emotional stages: first, panic and dismay; then impotent, beseeching phone calls to the landlord; then long nights of one-eyed sleep; the purposeful phone calls to a small exterminating company; and at last—as the traps began to snap on little gray bodies or the poison began to reveal, on the bathroom floor at night, flipped-over brown insect carapaces—an exhausted, vengeful satisfaction.

Still, nothing in the past had prepared us for the arrival of the rats.

It happened on a Sunday night. At about twelve-thirty, Martha called me into the bathroom. From high above, in the ventilator shaft, came the sounds of scratching and breathing and animal motion. A few moments later, the sounds migrated, skittering along above the stamped-tin ceiling toward the back door; they included, unmistakably, the sound of confident scrabbling feet—a sound of weight and certainty.

We spent all of Monday in quaking denial. But on Tuesday morning we called up the other tenants and found out that the people down on the second and third floors had been hearing similar traffic in their walls for a couple of weeks. The city, I should add, had been tearing up some nearby streets for about that long, as part of a protracted and, given the city’s circumstances at the end of the decade, rather loopy project to re-cobble a section of SoHo in order to restore the neighborhood to some imagined condition of nineteenth-century charm. Then, on Wednesday morning, one of our neighbors woke us at around seven. “I saw one!” she wailed. “It was the size of a cat. It ran into the bathroom in the middle of the night, and when we finally worked up the courage to confront it, it was gone, but one of our sponges was torn to pieces.” Other sightings were reported throughout the day. “It was running down the hall,” another neighbor said grimly. “It just walked right down the center of the hall. Big as a dog.” Martha and I tried calling the “management agent,” but he was unresponsive, and then we tried calling the city, but the Department of Violations passed us on to the Bureau of Infractions, and it said that we needed to get in touch with the Commission on Intractable Problems, so we finally just called up the exterminating service, which I’ll refer to as NRN, and asked it to send a man over.

NRN turned out to be an oddly intense, high-morale little business. When we had mice, NRN first sent Paul, a melancholic West Indian man, who told us (with what reliability I can’t say) that he had been the minister of agriculture of a good-sized Caribbean island nation “before the coup.” Then he gravely scattered packets of poison all around the loft, with the air of one conducting a sacred ceremony. The next day, to our surprise, Sam, the boss of NRN, arrived at our door. “I’m worried about Paul,” he explained. “He’s a very good man, but sometimes he’s thinking sugarcane when he should be thinking apartment.” Sam turned out to be a Method exterminator. He stood stock-still in the middle of our loft, head bowed, for what seemed to me a disturbingly long time. “I’m thinking like a mouse,” he whispered at last. “I’m thinking, If I were a mouse, where would I go? Where would I feel safe, trustful in this space?” He even wrinkled his nose from time to time. Then he laid traps and stuffed steel wool in all the crevices he found. We never saw another mouse. Lee Strasberg would have been pleased.

But when I called about the rats I noticed that even the people at NRN, who were usually pretty breezy about pests, seemed to have a disturbingly healthy respect for them. Ginny, the woman who answered the phone, said flatly, “We’ll have to send Gilbert.” Gilbert turned out to be a gentle, extremely tall man with a dry, pawky sense of humor and a soft, almost lilting voice. I got the key to the basement from the super—we figured that the problem was originating in the basement—and let Gilbert in, and then retreated upstairs. About an hour and a half later, Gilbert came up. “Yeah,” he said. “You got them, all right. You got the big boys. You got the super-rats.”

“What do you mean, the super-rats?” I asked, brilliantly impersonating a calm person.

“Well, let’s put it like this.” He thought for a moment. “These rats, if you see one, they look at you like you the problem.”

Gilbert set some traps in the empty loft next door—huge traps, with wooden backs the size of racquetball paddles—and pumped poison under the floorboards. “Yes,” he said cheerfully. “You won’t be troubled by no mice now. They can’t coexist with these boys. Nobody coexists with these boys. Yes, you got the big boys now.”

I didn’t want the big boys. Gilbert turned to me as he finished and said, “Now, you shouldn’t be seeing them, but you may hear them at night. They eat this powder as they run along the beams, and then they cry with fear to their mates when they find that they’ve been poisoned.” He imitated the sound of a poisoned rat calling out in lament to its spouse. “Now, that’s a good sound, for you,” he said. “It means we’re turning the tide. You hear that sound, you remember, that’s a good sound for you.” I tried to meet Gilbert’s eyes, since I suspected that there might be a certain amount of Schadenfreude inflecting his professionalism, but when I did they seemed completely earnest. “The one thing is,” he said as he packed his equipment into his cart, “I think you ought to come down the basement sometime. I think if you’re taking responsibility for these boys you ought to see the basement.” All week long, people in the building kept calling for Gilbert’s services, and eventually, he and I became friends. He showed up almost every day to solve one problem or another—somebody had a dead rat for him to remove, or somebody had found a crack in the ceiling on the first floor—and I would follow him from loft to loft. We would talk rat talk and rat lore. “There is the same number of rats in the city as people,” Gilbert might say as he sealed up a rat hole with steel wool and putty. “Same number. You see one of the big boys—maybe that’s you, your rat. It’s a weird kind of thought.” Each afternoon, he ended his work by saying, “I really think you ought to come and see the basement,” or “I’d like to show you that basement,” or just “Someday, we’ll go down to the basement together, and then you’ll understand about the big boys.”

Then, coming home one afternoon, I saw a brown-snouted creature patrolling outside our building like a sentry. It was the size of a Miata. I watched it march into a crack in the building’s cast-iron façade. Two women, strangers, were walking alongside me. “Did you see that?” one asked the other.

“That’s my home,” I burst out. “That’s my home.” I don’t think I’d ever been so upset. That evening, I went to see my formidable German psychoanalyst. “So what about rats—what does it mean if you’re afraid of rats?” I asked impatiently.

“Nothing,” he said calmly. “Rats are not symbolic of anything. They are a fact. They must just be coped with.”

Facts to cope with. This seemed like useful advice, so the next morning I hired a welding crew to close the crack in the façade; I insisted that the super come along a little later and seal the holes in the bricks in the side of the building with putty; and I called up Gilbert to get him to cast an eye on all this work. When Gilbert arrived, pushing his neat, well-ordered little cart, I showed him everything: how the welders were welding the crack together, how I had the super stuffing the holes. “I think we’re coming along here, Gilbert,” I said.

Gilbert smiled. “I really want you to come down and see the basement,” he said. I shrugged—I had welders to supervise—and he disappeared. An hour or so later, Gilbert came to get me. “Now you gotta come down to the basement,” he said. “You got to.”

I looked at Gilbert. I realized that we were entering heavy, Iron John–type territory here. I was scared, and so I said, simply, “Gilbert, will I see dead rats?”

“No.” He laughed. “I got them in bags—body bags.” He seemed full of an odd kind of gaiety. I screwed up what courage I could, and followed Gilbert down the dark basement stairs.

What was I expecting? The word “basement” summoned up for me, I suppose, the picture of a rec room—knotty-pine walls, and shag carpeting, and a humming dehumidifier. The basement of our building, though, was right out of the second act of The Phantom of the Opera. One huge room—one huge chamber, really—followed another. Each had a high, vaulted ceiling, supported by a set of vast, imposing cast-iron columns with gloomy Corinthian capitals. “Piranesian”—that is the word I am looking for. Our basement was Piranesian. What could Elisha Sniffen, the architect of the building (his name is in the AIA guide), have been thinking of?

Gilbert took me on a tour of the labyrinth, and after a lot of twists and turns we came to what I realized was the space just under the sidewalk—I could hear the welders buzzing away, still at work outside. A black Hefty bag was standing on the floor. Gilbert waved his flashlight toward the bag. “I got some one-pounders in there,” he said jovially as he picked up the bag; it sagged with the weight.

“Now, look,” he said, pointing toward the space under the sidewalk, and I did.

The space was simply open, below street level, to the underside of the whole street. You peered out and you could see pipes and ducts and the underside of asphalt. You could hear the N train running, over on Broadway, three blocks away.

“You see!” Gilbert said with uncharacteristic emotion. “That’s why you had to come down to the basement. That stuff, that welding—that is a joke. This place is open to the world! They’re coming in and going up there, and there, and there.” He pointed his flashlight at the top of the basement walls. “Nothing’s been done here since the nineteenth century. My family was slaves the last time somebody come down this basement.” It was an exaggeration, but I got his point.

“What you’re telling me, Gilbert,” I said finally, “is that there’s nothing to be done. That everything I’m doing is not going to do any good.” I felt sick.

“No. I am not telling you that,” Gilbert said. “I’m telling you that there’s no solution. You can’t keep the rats out of your building. It would take twenty thousand dollars’ worth of masonry—it would take a century’s upkeep that somebody forgot all about—to keep the rats out. I’m telling you there’s no solution, but there’s a technique. Did I tell you about the three cons?” I shook my head, helpless. “Okay. The three cons. We got to contain, confine, and convince. We got to contain the rats in one area of the basement, then we got to confine them to one feeding place, then we got to convince them that this is not a happy place for a rat to be. Move them on to the next building. Where there is another basement, just like yours. You can do that. You keep the service, you have me come, and we’ll move them along.”

Then he showed me some of the darker secrets of his craft. I watched him mix sugar water with poison, and for half an hour we laid out some black plastic trays full of poisoned tuna fish, and then we left the basement.

The problem receded. Soon, I walked out into the bright sunshine and didn’t see a thing. The cheap welded-iron net in place on the façade of the building looked awful, but it gave my neighbors confidence. Had the rats gone away, really, because of what Gilbert did? Or is it just that the re-cobblestoning work on the street had moved on to the next block?

Is it even possible, I wonder, that Gilbert’s philosophy of containment, which seemed to me at the time to strike some deep, permanent truth about New York, was marked by a little self-interest? He is, after all, the man who is paid to keep the three cons going. All I know for sure is that I no longer listened so intently for sounds in the middle of the night, or scanned the sidewalk quite so jumpily walking home. Life is different after you have seen the basement.

I go back to SoHo often, and try to walk those same streets again. Now Mercer Street is stuffed with mall retailers; there’s even a branch of our once-beloved Bloomingdale’s. There are no art galleries. The illuminated sidewalks are often paved over. What’s there below, Gilbert’s open city, has been patched, and the patching has gone on long enough so that it seems permanent, curative. The furtive noises, when they return, are mostly unheard, or bought off.

There is little room to walk amid the shoppers. This is, of course, a universal and not entirely to be mourned truth about New York. What changes is not the city—some twenty-something is even now walking the no longer ample or hilly Brooklyn, and writing it down. No, what changes is us. We start walking outdoors to randomize our experience of the city, and then life comes to randomize us. We decided at the end of the decade to begin to try to have children, and children are the greatest of randomizers: they’re like great abstract pictures, in that you know they must mean something, but the meaning takes the form of random-seeming splashes and improvised moments. They make walking unnecessary; we just circle them. Our walking ends as theirs begins.

And then, coming back years later, we know that even our cells have begun to go random on us, producing small failures of replication that mark our surface. We are made for walking, but we are not very good at it; our backs and arches, like querulous Cabinet ministers, at first complain, and then resign. Footsore, we sit down and stay there, until, eventually, we leave the room, feet first, hoping only to be remembered within another head. When you walk in SoHo now, there are still no flowers beneath your feet, and the open basements below the illuminated sidewalks are invisible.