And meanwhile there was the other side of the picture: those visions of pure, dripping gold. Furred models stepping from limos to shop for diamond ankle bracelets; tanning parlours where god-like bodies revolved under ultraviolet lamps… Even just the food stores: to behold for the first time those illuminated tiers of fruits and vegetables, the forests of flowers spilling out their scent and colour from the East Village bodegas; to walk on and be confronted, on the same block, by another, then yet another such Wunderkammer; to go inside and fill a basket with delicacies you had never bothered to distinguish in your mind from the nectars and ambrosias of myth, so little had you ever expected to taste them; to watch your bill being created by nothing more than the passing of each item over the glass-topped counter’s mysterious scarlet ray – all of this was an astonishment to me; one that merely increased as I discovered that these bodegas occupied not the highest but in fact the very lowest position on the city’s hierarchy of stores, that above them were the more resplendent Korean groceries with their banked, year-round fires of grapefruit and peach and strawberry, that these in turn were as nothing to the crammed volumes of the Gristedes and D’Agostino chains, which were themselves eclipsed by the mighty cornucopias of Zabar’s, Balducci’s, Dean & DeLuca, where the entire planet seemed to have concentrated its riches for one’s delectation; our own Baltic condensed into a hundred types of smoked fish, the Mediterranean gemmed and gleaming in jar after jar of olives; all of this of course entirely commonplace to other shoppers, but to us as startling as if a New Yorker should walk into a shop and find delicacies from Jupiter and Venus casually on display. And then the buildings themselves, the skyscrapers, my childhood fetishes, rising south and north over the humbler rooftops of the Village: the Empire State like a great syringe with some fiery elixir of the city vatted inside it, the Helmsley in its gold tiara, the Twin Towers reading each other’s paragraphs of light…
How I loved this place! Having spent my teenage years dreaming of being reborn as an American, I should not have been surprised by this, but the reality of the country so exceeded my wildest imaginings that I would sometimes find myself in a state of almost painfully overfulfilled expectation. Even the shelter we supervised on the floor below us was a source of unexpected joy. I had imagined it was going to be a place of pungent squalor and criminality; that to pass muster there I was going to have to find the resources of a prison guard somewhere inside me. But I was mistaken: the men who lived there, far from being the brutal or broken spirits my anxiety had conjured, seemed to me to embody, in a peculiarly pure form, precisely the qualities I had always most desired for myself: vitality, innocence, hope. Their stripped-bare lives, even the undeniable craziness of one or two of them, elevated them in my eyes, giving them an almost heroic air. I remember them vividly: David, young, lean, furiously energetic on his diet of protein powder and homegrown alfalfa sprouts, a fanatic reader of memoirs by billionaire executives, monopolising the pay phone with his own labyrinthine moneymaking schemes; Donald, bankrupted by medical bills, lumps all over his neck, forever poring over an enormous dictionary, convinced he needed only to master the rules of ‘orthography’ in order to get his life back on track; Jean-Luc, a qualified doctor (so he claimed) who had come to America from Haiti in search of a job, had his suitcase stolen with all his medical certificates, and been marooned ever since, his kindly eyes signalling, as he told you this, that he didn’t expect you to believe a word of it and forgave you in advance for your scepticism…
In the evenings, as they drifted in from the streets after we unlocked the door (our principal duty, along with keeping the store-cupboard stocked with laundry soap and toilet paper), I would sit with them in the communal room, spellbound. Their conversation revolved around two themes, each as intoxicatingly ‘American’ to my hyperattentive ears as the opening notes of Appalachian Spring or some other purebred anthem: their eager willingness to take responsibility for their own predicament, and their unquenchable optimism for the future. They were homeless, they believed, simply as a result of what they called their ‘bad choices’. But they also believed that the good life was attainable to anyone in this great country of theirs, themselves included, and that all it required was for them to make, instead of those bad choices, the ‘right’ choices, which they would make as soon as they were ‘ready’. As simple as that! No talk of bad luck or the inherent injustices of the social order; nothing between themselves and their destiny: an apocalyptic nakedness! Every one of them, it seemed, was a millionaire-in-waiting: right now they were just going through their shelter phase, as the heroes of legend go through their obligatory spells in the desert or the pauper’s hovel. Absurd as it may sound, I wanted to be as they were: emptied out of everything but faith and hope! Their glamour extended from themselves to the physical space they inhabited. Dingy as it was, with its soiled woollen curtains, calcium-bearded radiators, narrow beds and bits of old carpet remnant, the place had a rock-bottom sufficiency that I found strangely appealing. The hot water worked; the kitchen always had plenty of store-donated food in it; there was company if you wanted it, but no one imposed on you. I remember thinking that if we failed to make a go of things in this city, I, for one, would be content to end up in such quarters.
But there was no reason to believe we would not make a go of things. We had a glamour of our own. We were young, exotically foreign; people wanted to know us; they wanted to help us. My father’s old opposite number at the UN, Jim McGrievey, now an attorney in private practice, received me in his midtown office soon after we arrived. A spry, mirthful-eyed man, amused to be in the position of being called on by the son of his old ‘sparring partner’, he fired a few innocuous questions at me about my life in Berlin. I told him, in the vaguest terms, about my literary endeavours, predicting, correctly, that he would not press me for details. With the innocently satisfied look of a person matching two puzzle pieces together, he leaned over his desk and said to me: ‘Listen. I’m going to introduce you to a good friend of mine, Gloria Danilov. She’s a wealthy lady – very politically connected but she also likes to have creative people around her. Play your cards right and she’ll do something for you, I’m sure of it. Here, I’ll have my secretary arrange a meeting right now…’
And a week later, by the gliding logic that seemed to govern our lives in those days, I was being shown by a butler into a flower-filled waiting room in a vast residence on Park Avenue. My audience with Gloria lasted no more than a few minutes – delegations of businessmen and politicians were no doubt waiting their turn in other parts of the building – but the brevity of our meeting in the alcove of her library, looking out on the late summer dusty greenness of the park, merely seemed to concentrate its impact on me. I remember the dreamlike strangeness of being addressed as if it were an established and incontrovertible fact that I was a distinguished Man of Letters and bona fide political dissident. There was no reason, of course, for Gloria to question my credentials: McGrievey would have recommended me in flattering terms, while her own burnishing propensities naturally raised my alleged accomplishments to yet more unrecognisable heights of brilliance. What did surprise me was that, while in the past such credulousness would have made me uneasy, here I found myself fully acquiescing in Gloria’s version of myself. It was as if she had some magical power of suspending the true nature of whatever came into her orbit, and persuading it to conform with her preferred vision of things.