End of September

Sleeping fitfully, as usual. Even the quiet of nighttime here isn’t quiet; the usual drunken shouting walk home of a group of friends, at what I guessed was 2am, although it could have been later, was the first aural parade to march into my dreams. That was followed by a collection of trucks crashing over the metal plates in the highway known as Second Avenue. They came and went at regular intervals with the traffic. Around 7am, the neighbors I can see through the window were having a spirited discussion about something that was only loud enough to wake me up, rather than to inform me. They left finally – to where? Golf? An outing? I thought they were all gone, they I looked up to see a dark figure skittering past, and disappearing darkly like a bug back into a corner of the apartment that I could not see. I’ve spotted a woman there, tall and blond, a contrast to her stocky male companion, who I only mostly see from the back, as he slumps in a kitchen chair, partially blocked by a statue of the Buddha.

My new downstairs neighbors seem to be another set of this pairing – tall blond woman, and shorter, dark haired man. I nearly ran into her as she was coming out with some old game boxes – FSU monopoly, as in Florida State University, I’m guessing – for recycling. This building is a little, or a lot, like Dorm 2.0, as they say over here for anything new, as though sticking software development numbers on something makes it especially modern. Everyone lands here right after college, drawn no doubt to the cheapish rent, decent location, and lively world of wooden paneled bars that show college football, right next door to an assortment of restaurants that deliver food, or offer brunches with unlimited mimosas for an extra 15 dollars. You can literally drink yourself into oblivion, crawl up to bed around the corner, and be out on the streets again by twelve to ease the hangover with some badly prepared eggs, made by the mostly Hispanic chefs and kitchen staff who swing down on the 4 or 5 train from the Bronx to keep all these scions of suburbia well watered and fed.

During the week, they all scurry off to their banking jobs, looking sharp in button downs and blouses, so they don’t mind so much that the street is rattled with explosions from the subway construction. Generally, they seem so determined to be urban and grown-up, one step away from the fixed opinions of their parents, that they don’t notice much, and they find it hard to negotiate the streets when they walk either with a cell phone into which they are tapping important messages, or with their friends three abreast. My street also contains the NY Republican Club; an ugly room that you can peek into as you pass, decorated outside with the youngish, shortish haired, white male symbols of a viewpoint, who clutch highball glasses, smoke, and inspect the passersby without catching anyone’s eye. Park Avenue is a few aerobic steps away, containing a collection of family parcels of blond haired and extremely clean children, being herded off to school, sometimes by mothers who stand in groups of three discussing outings, or playgroups, or gossip, sometimes by fathers looking slightly harried at this impediment to a direct route to the office, sometimes by nannies who mostly say nothing. The other day I walked by a doorman helping a very good looking older man open his umbrella to step out from the safety of the awning into the rain. Our eyes met for a moment; perhaps he was aware of both the continuity of his good looks, as well as the delightful staging of master/servant his unwieldy umbrella had produced. I believe I looked away first. And as I walked further away, I wondered what we would have to say to each other, if a situation for conversation ever did arise. The superficial similarities of possible shared schooling, or cultural capital, would no longer be enough, I thought, if they ever were. The economic distances were now too great, the choices made by our families and ourselves too divergent.

And as I walked by the funeral home where my grandmother was given her final send-off, I wondered, yet again, why so much seemed to have conspired to land me here, in a place that seemed at once both completely familiar and completely alien.  Each sensation of complacency and isolation followed the other, in an odd swirling dance, the way the leaves falling from the trees would have moved if there were any breeze.