The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (31 page)

“I don't know that it had anything to do with us,” my father said. But how could it have not? Doesn't the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?

At the far end of the parking lot was a stand selling reptiles. In giant tanks were two pythons, each as big around as a fire hose. The heat seemed to suit them, and I watched as they raised their heads, testing the screened ceilings. Beside the snakes was a low pen corralling an alligator with its mouth banded shut. It wasn't full grown, but perhaps an adolescent, around three feet long, and grumpy-looking. A girl had stuck her arm through the wire and was stroking the thing's back, while it glared, seething. “I'd like to buy everything here just so I could kill it,” I said.

My father mopped his forehead with Kleenex. “I'm with you, brother.”

When we were young and set off for the beach, I'd look out the window at all the landmarks we drove by—the Purina silo on the south side of Raleigh, the Klan billboard—knowing that when we passed them a week later I'd be miserable. Our vacation over, now there'd be nothing to live for until Christmas. My life is much fuller than it was back then, yet this return felt no different. “What time is it?” I asked Amy.

And instead of saying “Who cares?” she said, “You tell me. You're the one with a watch on.”

At the airport a few hours later, I picked sand from my pockets and thought of our final moments at the beach house I'd bought. I was on the front porch with Phyllis, who had just locked the door, and we turned to see the others in the driveway below us. “So is that one of your sisters?” she asked, pointing to Gretchen.

“It is,” I said. “And so are the two women standing on either side of her.”

“Then you've got your brother,” she observed. “That makes five—wow! Now,
that's
a big family.”

I looked at the sunbaked cars we would soon be climbing into, furnaces every one of them, and said, “Yes. It certainly is.”

 

FROM
The Missouri Review

 

And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “My Lost City”

 

N
OT LONG AGO
, while lurching through cyberspace, I chanced upon a luncheon menu from Schrafft's, circa 1962. Especially among the city's working women, Schrafft's was once New York City's most popular restaurant chain. The menu is an arresting artifact, one that might have been concocted to certify an era's lost innocence—how else account for Jellied Tomato Bouillon, Browned Lamb Hash with Wax Beans, Deviled Tongue and Swiss Cheese Sandwich, Corn Soufflé, Minute Tapioca Pudding, Fresh Banana Stuffed with Fruit Salad, Green Apple Pie, and Grape-Juice Lemonade? Top center on the menu: “May We Suggest Bacardi Cocktail 70¢.”

My eyes misted over. Here was the New York City I once fell hard for, the city of my childhood and young dreams. And though the menu belonged to a vanished time, still, it was real—as the Hotel Paris had been real, as the passenger ships lined up in their berths had been real. As my innocence, my ambitions, my disappointments, my failures, and a host of betrayals—mine, my father's, the city's—all had been real.

 

I. Love at First Sight

 

GAS HEATS BEST
. They loomed: black, blocky letters on a yellow field painted on the side of a gargantuan corrugated hatbox. An ad for home heating fuel. But to my six-year-old eyes, it might have been God creating Adam in the firmament of the Sistine Chapel.

It was my first trip to New York with my father. His “business trips,” he called them, though someday I would learn there was more to them than that. My twin brother, George, and I took turns, each of us going with him every other Friday. The trip took just a little over an hour, but as far as I was concerned, we might have been blasting off to Venus or Mars.

We rode in my father's Simca, an ivory wagon with whitewalls and a split tailgate. I watched him work the gearshift, a thin chrome rod with a pear-shaped knob—an object of fascination that I would secretly commandeer whenever Papa went into the post office or the bank, my vocal cords imitating the engine's winding RPMs, ignorant of such things as clutches. As Papa backed the Simca past the dying birch tree in the turnaround, I'd see my brother and my mother standing there, my mother waving, my twin crying—as I would cry a week later when it would be George's turn. Why our father took us separately I'm not sure. Maybe because we fought so much.

At the end of the driveway we'd take a right onto Wooster Street and head to Danbury, where we drove past the war memorial and the fairgrounds. On Old Route 6 we'd pass by the Dinosaur Gift & Mineral Shoppe with its pink stucco tyrannosaurus, headed toward Brewster. Interstate 684 had yet to be built, so we rode on what would today qualify as “back roads,” past apple orchards, nurseries, and reservoirs, then down the Saw Mill River Parkway through exotically named places—Croton Falls, Katonah, Armonk, Chappaqua—tallying bridges and groundhogs.

While driving, my father hummed: “The Blue Danube,” a Maurice Chevalier ditty, his cigarette dangling. He drove with an elbow out the window, preferring his arm to the car's turn signal. The Simca's glove compartment burst with road maps, but my father never consulted them. The city's outskirts were a tangle of parkways, thruways, expressways, and turnpikes. That my father could untangle them amazed me, but then they seemed to belong to him, all those highways, as did everything to do with the city.

We crossed over the Henry Hudson Bridge. At the tollbooth, Papa tossed a nickel into the yellow basket. We glided under the girders of the George Washington Bridge. Here the city began in earnest. We passed the Cloisters and Grant's Tomb. Among drab shapes in the distance I saw patches of bright color, the funnels of passenger ships in their berths. To our left as we drove on, a skyscraper garden flourished, the Empire State Building sprouting like a deco fountain at its center. Amid this profusion of architecture rose the fuel storage tank, the one proclaiming
GAS HEATS BEST
. This utilitarian structure was no less awe-inspiring to me then than the
Queen Elizabeth
or the Empire State Building, subjects I'd sketch again and again in Mrs. Decker's kindergarten class.

The elevated ended; the Simca descended into a shadowy jungle of bumpy cobblestone streets. Somewhere along Canal Street we parked. Gripping my hand, Papa led me from one industrial surplus store to another, foraging for plastic and other parts for his inventions, his rotary motors, his color coders, his thickness gauges and mercury switches. The sidewalks were crowded, yet somehow to me the people weren't real. They reminded me of the baubles on a Christmas tree, each with its particular charms and quirks but, unlike the buildings, insubstantial. There were no dogs and few children. New York City was a place for grownups.

From Canal Street we walked to Chinatown, where we ducked into shops packed with lacquered trays and jade carvings. Here the streets smelled of fish. In one of those shops, my father bought me a wooden box (I still have it; it sits on top of the bookcase by the desk where I write). In Chinatown the plethora of street signs, their messages transformed into adornments by virtue of being illegible, impressed me even more. The enigmatic characters clung to the air, butterflies caught in a web of utility lines and fire escapes.

Then to Greenwich Village, where we entered boutiques lush with beads and trinkets and suffused with the smell of incense, and where one shop window confronted us with a panoply of chessboards and pieces carved from rare woods and exotic minerals. Already I had begun to see the city as a colossal museum, with objects displayed in various galleries according to periods and styles. Beyond displaying its holdings, the city had no discernible purpose. It existed for roughly the same reason as the town park on Lake Candlewood or the Danbury State Fair: to amuse the likes of me.

We lunched at Schrafft's, then drove back uptown toward our hotel, stopping on the way at Manganaro's Italian import store, where my father bought a pound of Parmesan cheese—a jagged hunk broken off a great golden wheel. By then the air had dimmed, the better to display the lights of Times Square, where flashing neon signs advertised everything from Pepsi-Cola to Castro Convertibles and a giant man in a fedora exhaled smoke rings from a cigarette into the electrified dusk. Then up West End Avenue to the Hotel Paris.

Of all parts of the city, that hotel was my favorite, a wedding-cake-shaped fortress of garnet-colored bricks topped by a crenellated water tower, with a flagpole reaching even farther toward the sky. I recall a lobby of pink marble walls with a mirrored dining room adjacent and a caged, old-fashioned elevator attended by a colored lady (I use the term in keeping with the times), whose beehive of fire-engine-red hair was as imposing as she was diminutive. She let me man the controls, a courtesy for which I will never forget her. You had to pull back on the lever just so, or the elevator and the floors wouldn't line up properly. She put her brown hand on top of mine, her warm grip guiding me. At each floor the doors opened to different hallway carpeting, arabesques of blazing bright color that, in their inscrutable intricacies, mimicked the metropolis outdoors.

Like all the rooms in the Hotel Paris, ours was small. It stank of the last occupant's cigarettes, which was okay by me. I accepted the odor as part of the city—my father's city, it came to seem to me, as if he had laid every brick and cobblestone and erected every skyscraper. As he unpacked his suitcase on the bed, I watched, engrossed. A suit jacket, a pair of socks, two pairs of underwear, a can of athlete's-foot powder, his safety razor and battered shaving brush, a shoehorn, and a necktie.

The necktie fascinated me most. Though I'd seen it often before, hanging in his closet back home, here it took on a new aspect. With its yellow paisley drops against a maroon background, it was no longer just my papa's necktie; it was his New York City tie. At that moment, that necktie became the city for me, as the stale cigarette smell in that hotel room became the city, and the gaudy hallway carpeting, and the red-haired elevator operator, and the hunk of Parmesan cheese, and the passenger ships in their berths, and the
GAS HEATS BEST
sign, and the groundhogs digging holes in the lawns along the Saw Mill River Parkway. It was all my New York back then, courtesy of my father, who had invented it just for me.

 

II. Puppy Love

 

At 15, my friend Chris Rowland and I used to visit his neighbor Clara. A spry, matronly woman in her 80s, she lived across the street from the Rowlands in a white shingled cottage by the brook. Chris would bring a casserole his mother had made. Clara would thank him and put it away. Then we'd sit in her parlor, Clara in a thronelike wicker chair, eating cookies with cider while she sipped tea from a china cup. We thought it was tea.

New York City was Clara's favorite subject. She still kept her apartment there. She spoke of how, in her younger days, she and a friend had opened a teashop in Chelsea, and of the Broadway actors and actresses who had patronized it. “Oh, we had quite a time of it, quite a time,” said Clara, fanning herself with a Japanese fan.

One day Clara gave us the keys to her apartment. Chris's father drove us to the station in Brewster. Through the green-tinted window—to the rhythmic clacking of train wheels—we watched the familiar world of houses, church steeples, and trees morph into a landscape of buildings, viaducts, and bridges. Then we plunged underground. For a while everything turned black. We stepped out of the train car to find ourselves in a grimy marble cathedral vaulted with sallow stars.

At the newspaper kiosk, Chris bought a box of Good & Plenty; I got a Bit-O-Honey bar. We both chipped in for the
Daily News
and a folding map of the city. We couldn't decide whether to walk to Clara's place or take the subway. Walking, we would see a lot more, but a subway ride would be thrilling. We took the subway.

It was late September, but the subway platform still hoarded the summer's heat. The station's dim lighting gleamed off the edges of its innumerable tiles. A man in a gray suit leaned against an iron pillar; others stooped impatiently over the tracks. None said a word. My friend and I obeyed the unwritten law by which New Yorkers pretend to ignore each other. A muffled roar and a fusty breeze heralded the subway train's arrival. The roar grew deafening as it squealed to a stop and its doors slid open.

We careened under the city, each of us clinging to a strap as the subterranean world rushed by, a murky blur punctuated by lustrous stations whose waiting passengers could only watch in envy as we roared past on express tracks: 34th Street . . . 28th Street . . . 23rd Street . . . At the place called Union Square, we jumped a set of iron teeth that stretched to fill the gap between subway and platform. Then up we bounded through a maze of latticed stairways and catwalks into a world of blinding sunshine.

To judge by our map, Clara's apartment was five blocks east on 18th Street. We passed a Chock full o'Nuts and a corner fruit stand. We carried our suitcases and walked fast, as if our arrival were not already accomplished—as if by walking any slower we'd dispel the magic of this dream, like those dreams in which you will yourself to fly. Now and then we faced each other to share a grin that said we'd gotten away with something, or were about to.

Clara's apartment was on the top floor of a tenement. We bounded up the three flights. An elaborate series of keys was required for entry. The apartment smelled of mothballs and musk. Should we open a window? Was that allowed? The walls were covered with framed photographs, theatrical posters, and quaint watercolors of Parisian street scenes. A bronze Laocoön graced the fireplace mantel. Even up there with the windows closed, we heard the traffic below, the impatient horns of trucks and taxis. While Chris unpacked, I studied the photographs, mostly of Clara and a friend, presumably the one with whom she had run the teashop. In one they both wore fur coats; in another they showed off identical plumed hats. It had never dawned on either of us that Clara might be lesbian. “Oh, I've had many,
many
beaux,” she'd said to us more than once while sipping from her china cup. Even seeing the photographs, the thought didn't occur to me, as it didn't occur to me that someday I would live in the city, that I would engage my ambitions, inflame my desires, commit various acts of ignominy and treachery, and experience a multitude of triumphs, disappointments, sins, failures, and betrayals there.