Other than a man I used to know from school who was collecting signatures on a petition to abolish the international police force, and the kid in Central Park who tried to rob me by saying he had a gun built into the shoe of his artificial leg, my memories of the months I lived in New York are more or less unpopulated. I know that I remember the dogs better than I remember the people—how the long patient faces of dogs being walked across the honeycomb pattern of hexagons in the pavement around the Museum of Natural History seemed every day to grow calmer, more detailed, more tolerant of their masters’ overloaded schedules.
Perhaps I could say it was the worst time of my life—all those sleepless hours in bed with no air conditioner, while boom boxes playing disco music moved slowly past the open window of my ground floor apartment, and those walks along Broadway through the airborne scraps of trash, as I composed over and over the letter I would write to the Times in response to someone else’s letter.
But now, when I remember those days in my apartment with the curtains pulled, I feel the same warmth that I feel when I think about the time a few years later when my insurance company allowed me to spend two nights in the hospital for what ordinarily would have been ambulatory surgery, because I had made the excuse that I had nobody to take care of me. I lay awake watching the steady, all-night quality of light in the hall, through which the shadows of nurses, silent on their white cork shoes, passed from time to time, in secret, the way the tires of taxis used to pass outside my apartment window when I was not quite asleep. Never has a city so opened itself to me, taking me in and giving me a place to walk around and around in the middle of the day, and never have I so opened myself to a city, let it take hold of me and shake me upside down, although we had nothing to offer each other beyond the fact of being relentlessly, in the expression that was gaining currency at the time, in each other’s faces.
But faces are what I remember least. I have no idea what my sister’s friends looked like, although I had dinner with them twice and once walked in circles with them beneath the tall pines in Pelham Bay Park, our heads tilted back on our shoulders, looking for owls.
I do remember the flag on their wall, from what country I did not ask: horizontal bars running above and below a central figure that looked like the transverse of a dime, everything in the same shades of yellow and brown and orange that I would see a few years later in the bumper stickers of parked cars when I drove past the local community college.
I remember summer better than I remember winter, day better than night, and the white litter of Broadway flying waist high when the wind picked up. The strange thing about being in New York is that even when you take time away from it, for a day or a weekend, you’re still there. You can walk down a neighborhood street in New Jersey, with kids playing in every other yard and the horizon low to the ground in all directions, or you can watch the dining-room window darken from a Thanksgiving table in Connecticut, and you’re still stuck in New York. Never has a city so taken me in, so swallowed me up whenever I came back to it, the outline of the midtown buildings growing taller in the blue haze as we approached them diagonally on the Carey Airport Express bus.
* * *
With nothing to put into it, time loses all shape, so that whatever I did over those long days I seemed scarcely able to fit into the hours available. Once I made a series of expensive daytime phone calls to Merv Griffin Productions to register my disagreement with the way Timbuktu had been spelled on Wheel of Fortune. I thumbed through the Manhattan Yellow Pages, and wherever an ad included a picture of the New York skyline, I drew a little cartoon H-bomb streaking down onto it. I walked and walked, never very far from my own neighborhood, watching how gently the sun fell on all the other people who were not working, watching how it glanced off the window of the Holistic Pet Care Center, where cats sprawled asleep among the carpeted plywood shapes of scratching posts and nesting boxes.
At the International Auto Show, I walked for hours among the displays, up and down the Coliseum’s long ramp, wondering if I was the only city person there among the tailored jeans and suede jackets of those who could think seriously about owning such vehicles—people who lived someplace where you could look straight ahead or right or left and there would be lawns and trees and places to park. I watched as the automobiles turned slowly on felt-covered turntables, each exhibit attended by a young woman with her face contoured by carefully applied makeup. The smiles of the models were mirrored in the hard wax of the cars, their lip gloss reflecting the same fluctuating lights that danced on the cars’ dark quarter panels. All that day I longed for the suburbs—their open-skied subdivisions, their sprawling, pasted-together high schools, built one wing at a time over twenty years, with empty football bleachers visible from the New Jersey Turnpike on the kind of Sunday through which you can drive for hours without ever seeing a person on foot.
* * *
From my bedroom on the ground floor I could see, thrown onto a small area of the ceiling, the vague shapes of people and objects moving outside. Like the pinhole viewers that schoolchildren build to safely watch an eclipse, the gap at the top of my window where the curtains did not quite come together would throw onto my ceiling a blurred picture of people and vehicles passing outside: the yellow sweep of a taxi making a half-circle across the small projection area near the pinhole; the tiny figure of someone in a red shirt scissoring across the ceiling in the direction opposite from the way the person was actually walking. I would think of all the dogs being walked in the sunlight—how beautiful they were with their calm, tolerant faces and the white parts of their fur somehow whiter than anything else in the city—and sometimes I would go outside just to see them.
Coming home, I would usually stop at a small grocery store on Columbus Avenue. What a vacancy it was to walk, without a job and without anybody telling me to start looking for a job, into the shadowy cramped spaces of that store, into its stale banana smells and cheese smells and the smell of the powdery duff of sawdust and dried onion skins and miscellaneous half-dehydrated vegetable residue that collected, out of reach of the push broom, in the cracks between the floorboards.
Everything was close together—the round grapefruits gathered in their net bags; crowds of heavy and dim-colored vegetables, whose names and uses I did not know, framed in shallow boxes forming a slanted flat surface; the soda bottles upright in the cooler, jammed together so closely that it was hard to reach in without something falling out. What simplicity to walk home with the groceries, in sunglasses, with oranges and a quart of ginger ale, on the hottest day of the year; what an eventless holiday to come home to a building while everybody else was at work, to loosen with a twist the cubes in a plastic ice tray and pour them into a waxy green Tupperware bowl, perhaps cradling a few cubes in the palm of my hand and cracking them into two or three smaller pieces with the handle of a steak knife, and to sip ginger ale in a room without a fan, where I had never even thought about getting a fan, sitting back in my one comfortable chair with ink-darkened channels worn into its armrests from hours of running a ballpoint pen back and forth along the grain of the wood, sitting still in the almost motionless apartment air, which blended sometimes with a breath of the moist, clean smell of my white tile bathroom. I always got the kind of oranges with the thickest skin, so I could squeeze the skin next to a match flame and watch the volatile oils flare up, again and again, sometimes in a remarkably large burst of fire. Soon the air would be filled with black motes of carbon from the burned oil: wispy, wormy shapes spiraling and drifting in the slight turbulence that the heat from the flare-ups had generated.
What a lazy smell on a summer afternoon—the air sharp with sulfur and burned orange oil, and the metallic ozone refrigerator smell of ice cubes melting in the plastic bowl—while the gesticulating images of people outside crossed my ceiling and the taxis flashed past, throwing a fan of yellow through the pinhole.
* * *
There is no privacy deeper than the privacy of sunglasses. I could walk however many blocks in whatever direction I found myself going, then turn, perhaps, and cross at a light and walk in some other direction. I could watch the beautiful dogs with their adult faces, who seemed to have come to terms with the burden of heat that wrapped itself around their unsheddable coats, watch in the thick sunlight among the brick buildings the slim people who had somehow provided room in their lives for dogs, and think how after dark the dense red bricks would radiate back into the street the heat they had absorbed all day. One corner seemed the same as any other, one hour the same as any hour, among the masonry, among the moving pastels of shorts and tank tops in colors that were so much easier to remember than the faces of the people who wore them. What puzzles me most is how fervently I told myself over and over again that I hated those days. I even had a spiral notebook lined with blank staffs of music in which I wrote little jingles about how terrible everything was: the year, the city, even myself, behind sunglasses, walking slowly along streets full of dogs, with the rest of the day sprawled out in front of me, at once empty and booked solid as a doctor’s office, the hours shapeless and swollen beyond all consideration of getting anything done within their sleepy and breezeless schedule.