Rachel and I once spotted Monica Lewinsky. She was walking down a street in the Meatpacking District. She wore a tracksuit of some kind and large sunglasses, and made her way across the cobblestones of Gansevoort Street in ordinary little steps. She was smaller than I’d imagined.
“She’s put on weight,” Rachel said interestedly. We watched as Monica disappeared around the corner of Washington Street. Rachel said, “Poor thing,” and we walked on and soon were diverted by something else. But the sighting had served as a luxurious instance of the city’s ceaseless affirmation of its salvific worth: even that bizarre class of deliverance fit for poor Monica, it seemed, could be looked for here. And if that were so, one instinctively deduced, then one’s own needs, such as they were, might equally be met. Not that we were in much doubt on this score. Our jobs were working out well — much better than expected, in my case — and we’d settled happily into our loft on Watts Street. This had a suitably gritty view of a parking lot and was huge enough to contain, in a corner of our white-bricked bedroom, a mechanical clothes rack with a swooping rail, like a roller coaster’s, appropriated from a dry-cleaning store: you pressed a button and Rachel’s jackets and skirts and shirts clattered down from the ceiling like entering revelers. We had plenty to feel smug about, if so inclined. Smugness, however, requires a certain reflectiveness, which requires perspective, which requires distance; and we, or certainly I, didn’t look upon our circumstances from the observatory offered by a disposition to the more spatial emotions — those feelings, of regret or gratitude or relief, say, that make reference to situations removed from one’s own. It didn’t seem to me, for example, that I had dodged a bullet, perhaps because I had no real idea what a bullet was. I was young. I was not much extracted from the innocence in which the benevolent but fraudulent world conspires to place us as children.
After my mother’s death I began taking long walks to Chinatown and Seward Park and the old Seaport area, pushing baby Jake in his stroller. On summery Pearl or Ludlow or Mott I’d find respite from our apartment and its transformation into a kind of parental coal mine, and walk and walk until I reached a state of fancifulness, of indeterminately hopeful receptiveness, which seemed to me an end in itself and as good as it got. These walks were, I guess, a mild form of somnambulism — the product of a coal-miner’s exhaustion and automatism. Whether that’s diagnostically right or wrong, there was a definite element of flight, and an element of capitulation, too, as if I were the one scooting along in the buggy and my mother the one steering it through the streets. For my outings with my baby were taken also in her company. I did not summon her up by way of remembrance but, rather, by fantasy. The fantasy did not consist of imagining her physically at my side but of imagining her at a long distance, as before, and me still remotely swaddled in her consideration; and in this I was abetted by the streets of New York City, which abet desire even in its strangest patterns.
All of which brings me to the second, and last, New York winter I endured on my own, when I wondered what exactly had happened to the unanswerable, conspiratorial place I’d found years earlier, and the desirer who’d walked its streets.
* * *
That was a very white winter. A blizzard on Presidents’ Day 2003 brought one of the heaviest snows in the city’s history. For a day or two, outdoor motions seemed a kind of mummery and the newspapers broke up the Iraq stories with photos of children tobogganing on Sheep’s Meadow. I passed the morning of the holiday in an armchair in my hotel apartment, mesmerized by a snowdrift on the wrought-iron balcony that grew and deepened and monstrously settled against the glass door, not completely melting until mid-March. It says something about my empty-headedness that I followed this monthlong thaw with something like tension. At least twice a day I peered through the French windows and inspected the dirty, faintly glowing accumulation of ice. I was torn between a ridiculous loathing of this obdurate wintry ectoplasm and an equally ridiculous tenderness stimulated by a solid’s battle against the forces of liquefaction. Random mental commotions of this kind constantly agitated me during this period, when I was in the habit, among other strange habits, of lying on the floor of my living room and staring into the space under my brown armchair, a letter-box-shaped crevice out of which, I may have hoped, an important communication would come. I wasn’t especially troubled by the hours spent flat on my face. My assumption was that all around me, in the lustrous boxes thickly checkering the night, countless New Yorkers lay stretched out on the floor, felled by similar feelings; or, if not actually poleaxed, stood at their windows, as I often did, to observe the winter clouds rubbing out — so, from my vantage point, it appeared — the skyscrapers in the middle distance. The magnitude of the vanishing was wonderful, even to a spirit such as my own, perhaps because it preluded the seemingly miraculous reemergence from the clouds of towers dashed from within with light. On Presidents’ Day, however, the vaporous, enormously disappearing city provoked a different response. Tiring of my snowdrift vigil, I hauled myself out of the armchair and traveled to my bedroom and, in search of a fresh point of view, wandered to the window there. Snowflakes like coffee grinds blackened the insect screen. Powdered ice, blown up from the window trough, had gained on the sill and now crept up the glass. I was, it will be understood, afflicted by the solitary’s vulnerability to insights, so that when I peered out into the flurry and saw no sign of the Empire State Building, I was assaulted by the notion, arriving in the form of a terrifying stroke of consciousness, that substance — everything of so-called concreteness — was indistinct from its unnamable opposite.
Kicking a rock or patting a dog is, I suppose, enough to rid most people of this variety of bewilderment, which must be as ancient as our species. But I didn’t have a rock or a dog to hand. I had nothing to hand — nothing but the glass of a window under assault from a storm. It came as a reprieve to hear the infuriating cheep of my telephone.
It was Rachel. She told me first about the huge antiwar rally that had taken place in London two days before and how Jake had carried a NOT IN MY NAME placard. Next she told me, in the tone of a person discussing a grocery list, that she had definitely decided not to return to the United States, at least not before the end of the Bush administration or any successor administration similarly intent on a military and economic domination of the world. It was no longer a question of physical security, she said, although that of course remained a factor. It was a question, rather, of not exposing Jake to an upbringing in an “ideologically diseased” country, as she put it, a “mentally ill, sick, unreal” country whose masses and leaders suffered from extraordinary and self-righteous delusions about the United States, the world, and indeed, thanks to the influence of the fanatical evangelical Christian movement, the universe, delusions that had the effect of exempting the United States from the very rules of civilized and lawful and rational behavior it so mercilessly sought to enforce on others. She stated, growing more and more upset, that we were at a crossroads, that a great power had “drifted into wrongdoing,” that her conscience permitted no other conclusion.
Ordinarily, I would have said nothing; but it seemed to me that my dealings with my son were at stake. So I said, “Rach, please let’s try to keep things in perspective.”
“Perspective? And what perspective would that be? The perspective of the free press of America? Is that where you get your perspective, Hans?” She made a harsh sound of mirth. “From TV networks funded by conservative advertisers? From the Wall Street Journal? From the Times, that establishment stooge? Why not Ari Fleischer, while you’re at it?”