New York is hard to write about. There’s so much of it and it keeps changing. So much human landscape, people breathing, tucking their feet. And the streets, where it lives, with this endless panorama. The feeling of spectacle and the dense sharp wild feeling of endless participation. The relating to the city in itself, a creature of its own. I have every day many tiny full ripe conversations with strangers on subways, in pharmacies (they sell vitamins shaped like Darth Vader’s head!), in bookstores. Sometimes we talk for a little while, like the Hispanic man with his huge happy smile on the way to Yankee Stadium with his kid, his young pretty wife who spoke up now and then “when there was least danger of it being heard,” his two mates who were African American. I love the Bronx-bound trains where racial normality prevails, exposing the patronising lie of that persistent white-privilege word ‘minority.’ He held up the flattened round ball of black when I asked about it, turning it to show that its two steel antennae were its little legs. “I thought it was an alien,” I told him, pointing, “I thought maybe it was your little pet.” “It’s a speaker,” he told me, turning it upright on the grimy floor to show. “When we get there, we going to listen to some music. My little girl loves it.”
Oftentimes when you have some exchange with a New Yorker you will both turn away afterward, so as to show – or so I think – that there is no harm, no foul, that we are both not crazy people, the city has not unhinged us and there is no intent to latch on and keep talking once the moment’s gone. You might both say, See you later, when one of you climbs out, and I always find that beautiful and moving. And how at the checkout at the grocery store it is normal, it’s friendly, to stand and chat whilst buying but if I were to stand another five minutes, chatting on as the next customer piled their bags, I would become instantly a freaky aberration. All that openness and friendliness now has an agenda: we recoil. And in fact that friendliness and openness often does have an agenda: I want all beings to be happy. That is my secret and now it’s out.
We walked clear up the centre of Grand Central Park, as my German-speaking companion calls it, til we reached the tiny walled gardens of the Conservatory Garden by East 104th Street. There is a lily pond there where water lilies bloom in threes: pink, and hydrangea blue, and a strange candling white. Fish churn under the water now and then and two gentlemen who bought them, from a shop in Chinatown, and who have wondered, they tell us, every year what to do with the koi when the pond is drained for winter (“they can survive underneath the ice”) stand feeding them, occasionally, lavishly, from a crinkling foil bag that says colour enhancing preparation. This whole day is colour enhanced, to me: I have in my hand the middling growth of a breastplate I’m building on a scarlet leaf that was just lying on the path by the lake, splendidly maple-pointed, and every time I find another blue or purpling spray of berries, a tiny lavender or soft pink flower, I pluck it (“darf ich?”) and add the stem to my thumbsward of stems. The day is purple and blue like a beautiful bruise. The grey winter days have cleared away and we are out, everyone is out, we’re all bleeding into each other in the sun. We are urban animals, we can survive under the ice. The beautiful young Black prince staring at his black sneakers on the subway, wearing his trackpants as though they were a suit, who held himself tensely waiting for the demand when I said, Excuse me. You have such a beautiful, striking face. I think – if you were to go into a really good quality modelling agency in Manhattan – they might be very excited about you. Then I turned away to my friend, to show him this is not a clumsy pick up, the agenda is transparent and shown. My friend said afterwards, casually, relieving me, “That man was smiling so much to himself all the rest of the ride. What did you say to him?” My first time in New York, scared and determined in 2011, I spoke to a tiny white-haired lady on the Harlem bus. This was my first foray into Madison Avenue and the expense had exhausted me. The legions of unhappy looking children, presaging an article I read later online which said How to Tell if Your Child is Spoilt. Question one read: do they find it impossible to be happy? When I climbed on the bus, drawn by the enchanting name Harlem, its juicy community sound, its soft music, this tiny lady was sitting opposite. I said, You’re so beautiful! And she looked startled, to my surprise. “No one’s ever told me that before,” she said. I said, “What? I would have thought people would have been telling you, all your life. You are a beautiful woman.” We gazed at each other til we both had tears in our eyes. I have thought of that lady and her seventy years’ bloom. I have wondered what kind of fears lurk in the hearts of men and families, that we cannot say to a beautiful woman, or man, this is your just tribute.