The Boy Detective (4 page)

 

N
O MYSTERY TO
the Empire State, except that tall as it is, the building never surprises you. Perhaps that's because it is old and familiar, the city's favorite uncle, who just plants himself in the middle of the house. Standing on Thirty-fourth Street, I look up to it as ever. Its feeling of calm comfort is what appealed to King Kong, I am sure of it. Not the height, though he might have experienced a wave of fellow feeling with the tallest thing around for miles. He might have thought, This building knows how difficult, how demanding, how embarrassing it is to be the gorilla in the room. In that case, it could be assumed that King Kong did not so much scale the Empire State as embrace it. So that might have been his reason.

But I think it was something else. I mean, here was this big ape and here was the big uncle of New York City, the old man who implied merely by being: You are safe with me, King Kong. And even if it turns out that you aren't safe, even if you clamber to the top of me, your massive hairy hand enclosing Faye Wray, with one last chance at love within your grasp, and a swarm of biplanes swoop down out of nowhere and
ack-ack
at you, and you holding on to my rooftop pike where the blimps tied up, and you begin to lose your grip—even then, it will be all right. You have lived long enough, King Kong. A good life. A big life. The biggest. If you must fall, fall from me.

 

U
NREAL
N
EW
Y
ORK
. E. B. White's famous essay “Here Is New York,” which is neither half good nor half bad, keeps thumping away at the loneliness of the city and attaches loneliness to privacy. I, born and reared here, have never thought of the city in terms of loneliness and privacy. Perhaps those who hail from outside New York, like White, find things opposed to the life they led wherever they came from. Communities do not exist in the same ways in New York as they do in small towns or smaller cities, where their demands for conformity are more blatant and melodramatic. Transplanted to the big city, the out-of-towner thinks he's discovered loneliness and privacy by way of contrast.

Not I. Loneliness and privacy are real, whereas to me it is the unreality of New York that thrills the citizen soul. Wake up, dress, walk out your door, and there you are, my owl, in an area such as the one I wander in now, bathed in an unreal light. The trouble with those who associate New York with a certain condition or goal is that they are in search of conditions or goals. Real New Yorkers do not want anything of the city. Oh, White loved New York, no doubt about that. But he loved it like a swain who has noted and studied everything about the object of his affection, and then found pleasant words to make cohesive sense of the experience. New Yorkers abjure cohesiveness. We think in images, like detectives. We reason with our senses.

Want to know the city? A silver-haired gamine stands at the top of the steps of a brownstone apartment house, on the south side of Eighteenth, between Second and Third. She wears black sweatpants and a sailor's pea jacket a couple of sizes too big. I have been watching her for five minutes, and she hasn't moved an inch. Just stands there in the black arch of the doorway to the brownstone, craning her neck to the left, toward Third, as if she were on a railroad station platform in rural Alabama, or Arizona, or Russia, waiting for the arrival of a train. The night wind could lift her like a sheet of paper and float her on the cold air over the street, over everything. But she stands her ground. Nothing can shake her or divert her from her purpose—the woman at the top of the steps, peering to her left, and waiting for a train.
Here
is New York.

 

W
HO OWNS THIS
city, anyway? To go by the self-possessed Fifth Avenue apartment houses and the office buildings on Third, with their shit-eating grins, the answer is easy. Big people own this city. But since there are a lot more little people strolling around in New York, you could say that the city belongs to the vast unnoticed. Yet they are noticed here. Everyone is noticed in New York. You could focus the question on Dominicans. Surely they own the city. Or the Chinese. Or Puerto Ricans, Hassids, Mexicans, Koreans, Muslims. The African Americans definitely own New York. You can tell by the way they walk, the muted swagger. You can tell by the way everybody walks. Every citizen is a Dutch patroon inspecting his property. How about young versus old? Both are well represented on every block of my territory, where a cigar store from the 1940s nudges up against a granite mansion put up last month. Who, then?

You there! (See that rake standing like Jimmy Walker, his top hat tilted down on his forehead, supported by his silver walking stick? See his spats?) You! Jimmy Walker.
Walker.
You own this city, don't you, you sly devil? I thought so.

 

I
PUT IT
to my memoir students: In what do you believe if not in dreams? The pluperfection of experience? The so-called reality of your life? Surely, you're not saying that you believe in things you can see, touch, hear—things that happen in the world. The kiss? The firing squad? Who could possibly believe in them? Ask yourself if they ever really happened—the embrace, the knife, the tulip. Take an autobiographical inventory of all the disconnected moments, and they will seem like what? A dream. But dreams themselves, which bind the moments together in a night, and blur the tenses—dreams are real. And one reason to use them in your memoir—daydreams, night dreams—is that it allows others, your readers, to enjoy their own dreams without shame.

So what is the difference, students, between memory and dreams? Are they not the same, each the other? Or will you tell me that memories are accurate and dreams are mere impressions? Of course, you will not. You have never had an accurate memory in your life, whereas your dreams are always on the money. Which is why you wake up in a sweat. Which is why Nabokov held sleep in such contempt. He claimed to hate sleep as an evasion of reality, but I think he hated the reality of dreams. He, too, did not believe in time. How does one dismiss time and dreams, both, since dreams, too, do not believe in time? Such a strange detective.

 

G
INNY HAD A
dream in which she learned (she did not say how) that what she was dreaming constituted the real world, and that the world into which she would awaken constituted a dream. Furthermore, it came to her (she did not say how) that this reversal of states of being made sense to her, since she understood so little of the waking life, she might as well be dreaming. To be sure, one does not find that much understanding in a dream, either, though there usually is a moment of calm or distance when one acknowledges that one is, in fact, dreaming. That, I suppose, is a form of understanding. The problem (is there a problem?) . . . the problem may lie in the criteria for understanding in the first place. If reality is defined by our understanding of experience, of anything at all, well, that's one thing. But if reality is simply a prolonged state of confusion, why not go for dreams, where mysteries are taken for granted?

And just as I am trying to work all this out—about dreams and reality, I mean—a scrawny woman in a flower-print dress and a hat with a blue ostrich feather accosts me, gets right up in my face, and asks if I was the one who shot Abe Lincoln. And I say, “Me? Shoot Abe Lincoln? Why, you jackass, Abe Lincoln was done in a hundred and fifty years ago. Do I look a hundred and fifty years old to you?” Make that one hundred and seventy-five years ago, since I would have had to be at least twenty-five when I shot the president. “So you
did
shoot him,” she said, her voice crackling like cellophane, and trembling with such loathing it filled the street with smoke and darkness. And I tell you: I was more afraid of that look of hers, and her rattling bones, than I ever was the night I leapt from the Ford's Theatre balcony and broke my leg, after plugging Honest Abe in the ticker.

 

I
S HE A
memory or a dream—southern, courtly Carroll, the doorman at 36 Gramercy, who wore his gray uniform with the epaulets like a soldier, like Emil Jannings in
The Doorman,
only Carroll was gentle and proud to be what he was. That was when people were proud to be what they were. Much of my little life was spent with Carroll greeting my mother and me and the other residents with such official politeness. He stood tall like a column of mercury in front of two gray stone knights on pedestals, who guarded the building with him. Above him was a long dark green awning. So dramatically classy was Carroll that a director put him in a movie for which they were using number 36—
East Side, West Side
—with James Mason, as the philandering husband of Barbara Stanwyck, on whom he cheats with Ava Gardner. My building was in the opening scene, as Mason and Stanwyck arrived in a yellow taxi. The movie people had cordoned off the entrance. I stood in a crowd beside my mother. Turner Classic Movies showed
East Side, West Side
some years ago. I watched it to see Carroll open a taxi door as no one could ever open a taxi door, and shut it as no one could ever shut it.

 

B
EHOLD THE
upright people.

Behold their dogs.

Make way for princes, to say nothing of kings.

Say nothing of kings.

Prosperous folks to the left.

Phosphorous folks to the right. Stay in line, please.

“Hello, Charlie! Howzitgoin?”

Behold the military heroes, women as well as men.

And the citizens of Gramercy Park in their frightful dignity, and the trees with their shorn boughs shaking. Behold them.

I love a parade.

 

MORTON STAMPS
. W
HAT
the painted sign read in the barely lit hallway. What Mr. Morton called his one-room shop on Twenty-third between Park and Madison. Tonight I stand looking up at the whitewashed window no longer his, which bears an incomprehensible sign:
WWW.UNDISPUTEDCORP
. And beneath that:
FOR RENT
. Morton Stamps. The shop was like a hideout, located one long flight up a metal staircase. Mr. Morton hardly acknowledged me when I entered, which was at least twice a week when I was eleven and twelve. He never addressed me by name, just stood behind the glass-and-wood cabinets in which the stamps were displayed. Heavy and bald, his face bearing no character, like linoleum. I took to him the way children take to people who do not like children. He regarded me only as a paying customer—the meager dollar or two I could spend on the cheapest stamps. I don't know why I collected stamps. I am not a collector by nature. I think I simply enjoyed looking at them. The colorful ones from Ivory Coast and Togo. And the German stamps, with the profiles of Hitler.

He was German, Morton; his accent was German. A war criminal perhaps—Morton stamps on Jews—or a Jewish refugee himself. I had my eye on him. I took notes. Nazi or Jew, he was secretive and dour enough for either, like the man who outlived the concentration camps in
The Pawnbroker
and who slammed his hand on the pike that held store receipts, to see if he had any feeling left. Never did I encounter another customer in Morton Stamps. I would sidle silently from display case to display case, peering in for half an hour or more. Morton would watch me through eyeglasses with thick brown rims. Occasionally he would produce what he thought was an interesting stamp within my price range. Usually I went away with prepackaged bags of the cheapest stamps, hoping that the one with the upside-down biplane, the most valuable stamp in the world, had slipped in by mistake.

At the Jerusalem Book Fair in 1985, Milan Kundera surveyed the gorgeous auditorium of gleaming wood, addressed the attendees, and said he was looking at all the culture of Europe. I sat with other writers in the audience. Several people wept. What time is it in Israel? What time is it here? Do you have the time? What time was it when my Berliner cousins, whose names I will never know, were hauled off to Birkenau and tossed into ovens, while I played capture the flag in Gramercy Park? Was it the same time? By your watch, I mean.

 

N
OT THAT ANY
of this could explain Ira Fink, one of the neighborhood kids who used to play with us in the park and blurt out, “I'm Hitler!,” after which we all would pummel him. No one was quite sure why Ira, otherwise a nice, quiet kid, would ask for it by claiming to be Hitler, unless it was an attention-getting device, which certainly worked. The matter was made more confusing whenever we played hide-and-seek, and Ira would yell, “I'm hit” instead of “it.” Did he have a speech impediment that caused him to mispronounce
h
's? If so, when he was announcing that he was the Führer, was he
really saying, “I'm Itler,” which made even less sense? In any
case, Ira reminded us kids that a war was going on. He, and the radio news reports, and the air raid drills—my father with his warden's armband, the neighborhood pitch-dark.

Something you learn in the detective game: Everything deadly turns funny eventually. One evening Liz Smith was doing her TV gossip column. She deadpanned: “We've just learned that Claus von Bülow was a ring bearer in Hermann Göring's wedding. I know it's boring,” she said, “but we get so few social notes from the Third Reich these days.”

 

T
HE LONELINESS OF
the private eye is not the same as God's. One may only guess whether or not God is lonely in his uniqueness. He may be so removed from the concept that he has no idea (does God have ideas?) what loneliness means, or what companionship means, for that matter, or the love or contempt of others. But the private eye, whose distinction of privacy applies equally to his clients and his nature, he does know loneliness. Earlier in his life, he has been with others—a wife, friends, the police force itself—and, for one reason or another, he now finds himself alone. And he discovers that he prefers to be alone, for only in aloneness can he pursue and judge purely. He is not godlike in this, after all. He is the god who interferes.