I am about to deflect this as well, when it dawns on me that perhaps our improvised lunch is nothing more than an uncomfortably staged affair between a father eager to say a few things to his son and a son who doesn’t want to regret one day having failed to let him say them.
I take a first, shy, tentative step and ask, “Why did you ever marry her?”
“Whoever remembers?” he replies. Why did he have children? “Because I had to.”
But who ordered you? “No one,” he says, “it was just to make her happy.”
He looks around again. “All I wanted was to read books,” he adds. “On the second night of our honeymoon, while she slept, I opened the balcony door, and staring at the beachfront facing our hotel, I knew it was wrong. I wanted to study Greek, I wanted to write and travel and be free to love as I pleased. I wanted to leave our bedroom and go downstairs and keep walking past the empty garden and go away, but I didn’t dare.” Silence. “I forced myself to love her,” he says. “Then one day it was over. Or at least someone else made me see it was over.”
There is a strained pause in our conversation.
“Who?” I ask.
“You know who,” he says without hesitating, almost grateful I had made it easy for him.
He calls her That one. I say nothing and, instead, play the open-minded, freethinking grown-up who knows how to listen to such tales.
“She still calls me.”
This I can’t believe. More than thirty years later?
“In the middle of the night, when it’s daylight over there, she calls.”
“And what does Mother say?”
He shrugs.
I can just see him tiptoeing into the living room at three in the morning, tying his bathrobe, whispering in the dark to a woman halfway across the world and at the other end of time, who is probably irritated he’s mumbling and can’t speak any louder on the phone.
“She has a grown-up daughter. She misses me, she says. She thinks I’m still forty-five; I tell her I’m almost twice that. She doesn’t understand, she wants to come, she wants a picture of me”
He stares at me, as if to ask, Can you figure women out?
And suddenly I find myself saying something that is more shocking to me than news of the woman’s existence.
“Instead of pictures, why don’t you just go back for a few weeks. I’ll take care of the rest.” By the rest I mean my mother.
“But I’ve grown old, I’m a grandfather.” He turns to my son. “Besides, she says she’s fat now.”
“Just go,” I say, mocking his feigned reluctance.
My father sits quietly. There is no more coffee in his cup; he says he will get some for me as well.
“Everyone is allowed five good years in their life. I’ve had my five. Everyone meets a dangerous woman in his life. I’ve met mine.”
“Go to Egypt,” I interrupt without even looking at him.
“I need more coffee,” he says, standing up. “Anyway, first find me a decent picture and then we’ll see.” He throws a hand in the air to mean he doesn’t care, that he’s far too old for this, that the whole idea is one big nuisance.
The dining room is almost empty now, and as I watch him head for the coffee machine and disappear into the serving area, I am thinking of the years ahead when I’ll come here alone, or with my son, and remember this one day when we sat together as if posing for a mental photograph, thinking of Alexandria, listening to this cheerless tale of two lovers cast adrift in time. We’ll sit at this very table and wait for him, and think he’s only gone for coffee and is coming back shortly, carrying two fresh cups and dessert on a tray as he did that day when he returned to the table and asked almost casually: “By the way, do you happen to have a picture of me? I mean, a good one?”
Underground
Whenever the Seventh Avenue train races between Eighty-sixth and Ninety-sixth Streets and offers a fleeting, darkened glimpse of what looks like latter-day catacombs, the question invariably arises: What is it? From the windows of the Broadway Local the ghost of this Stone Age grotto, suddenly illumined by the speeding train, is a place only Dante or Kafka might have imagined. The walls are begrimed with thick 1970s-style graffiti, while something resembling a platform, strewn with debris, stands in the ashen dimness of places most cities would rather forget about.
But we stare all the same, until springing into view like painted letters on the hull of a sunken liner are the telltale faded mosaics spelling a station’s name: Ninety-first Street. The name appears again on a higher panel, framed by terra-cotta molding with golden numerals in relief, a combination typical of the cartouche created by Heins & LaFarge, the firm originally commissioned to design subway ceramics.
I became intrigued by the Ninety-first Street Station while riding the Broadway Local during one of its arbitrary halts. The train idled to a halt outside Ninety-first, and during my enforced wait, I became aware of, then curious about, this abandoned stop. On my first extended view of the place, I was most struck by what was absent: no old-fashioned wooden token booth, no benches. The benches, says Joe Cunningham, a transportation and engineering historian, were removed as fire hazards, while turnstiles, originally installed in the early twenties, were salvaged for parts. There were no print ads along the walls. A sealed bathroom door was slightly discernible behind a loud smear of graffiti.
Of course, there couldn’t be an outlet to the street, though a shaft of light seemed to beam along the skeletal treads of a stairway. At the tail end of the station, a barely perceptible, differently styled ceramic tile suggested that however short its life span, even this station had gone through a face-lift and bore the traces of its various incarnations.
Similar alterations are hardly unusual in New York’s subways or in the city itself, where everything is a patchwork of swatches and layers, of bits and pieces, slapped together until you cannot see the fault lines for the surface, nor the surface for the patchwork. Subway corridors, stairwells, and sidewalk entrances are known to have disappeared, and tiled alcoves, designed to accommodate vintage phone booths, have vanished behind newly erected walls that sprout doors to become makeshift toolsheds. Ancient men’s rest rooms, famed for their shady practices, have mended their ways and been converted into candy stands.
Nothing is ever really demolished or dismantled down below, but everything is tentative and amorphous. From the width of platforms to the shape of lamp sockets down to the form of pillars (round, square, steel-beam), everything changes in the space of a few yards and betrays the many ways in which the city has always had to adjust to shifting demographics.
Stations whose token booths are absurdly positioned at the extreme end of the platform—Seventy—ninth, Eighty-sixth, and 110th Streets on Broadway, for example—will have their madness forgiven once you are told that they were designed to accommodate trains far shorter than those of today It was because the Eighty-sixth and Ninety-sixth Street platforms were extended to twice their size to receive ten-car trains that the Ninety-first Street Station, caught between the two and nearly touching both, saw the writing on the wall. It became obsolete. Its time, like that of the Eighteenth Street Station on the East Side or of the Worth Street and City Hall Stations, had run out. On February 2, 1959, the Ninety-first Street Station was closed permanently.
When asked, middle-aged New Yorkers seldom recall even missing the station. Like a friend who died and whose name mysteriously disappears from the Manhattan telephone book, the Ninety-first Street Station no longer exists on any of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s maps. It is extinct. Or is it, perhaps, just vestigial?
Indeed, the question I ask when passing the Ninety-first Street Station is not simply What is it? or What happened here? but something more wistful and unwieldy: What if? What if, instead of having the train dawdle awhile between stations, the conductor stopped at Ninety-first Street and on a mad impulse announced the station’s name, and then, carried away by the sound of his own words, forgot himself
and suddenly opened the doors and began discharging passengers? Some of them would actually walk out, half startled and dazed, heading for imaginary turnstiles, past the old token booth, clambering up the stairway onto a sidewalk awash in the early-evening light as passengers had done for six decades until that fateful day forty years ago.
What if, for a split second, the mid-fifties were suddenly to rush in, the way the thought of them invariably takes hold whenever I think of using not the side entrance to a prewar building on Riverside Drive but the defunct main gate on the drive itself, a gate no one uses any longer, but that, being sealed, beckons like a portal to vanished times?
And what if awaiting me barely a block away is the New Yorker Theater at Eighty-ninth Street, and farther up, the Riviera and the Riverside at Ninety-sixth Street? What if the films they’re about to show this year are Black Orpheus, Room at the Top, North by Northwest, The 400 Blows, and other late-fifties classics? What if things didn’t always have to disappear? What if time took another track, as subways do when there’s work ahead? Not backward, just different: a track we can’t quite fathom and whose secret conduits linking up the new with the old and the very, very old are known only to the loud yellow repair train that appears from nowhere in the dead of night and then lumbers away like a demoted god.
What if, in spite of its dead silence now, this station were a gateway to an underground that is ultimately less in the city than in ourselves, and that what we see in it is what we dare not see in ourselves? What if, for all its beguiling presence, the Ninety-first Street Station is really not even about time, or about hating to see things go, or about watching places grow more lonely and dysfunctional over time? Instead, what if this underground cavern were my double, a metaphor for the pulsating, dirty, frightened dungeon within all of us which feels as lonely and abandoned, and as out of place and out of sync with the rest of the world, as we all fear we are, though we try to hide it, eager as we are to patch up our uneasiness as fast as we can, hoping that, as fast as it can, too, our train will pass this station by, put it behind us, and take us, like people who have been to see Hades, back to the world of the living?
I finally went to visit the old station one day with a small group of subway aficionados led by Mr. Cunningham on a tour run by the New York Transit Museum at Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in downtown Brooklyn. We got on at Ninety-sixth Street and rode in the first car of the Broadway Local. At Ninety-first the train did in fact stop, just as I had fantasized. The conductor opened the front doors only, and to the baffled gaze of the other passengers, we stepped out. Then the doors closed again, and the train left, everyone watching us as though we were spectral travelers headed into a time warp. Wandering through this modern underworld, I tried to think of the great poets and the caves of Lascaux and Planet of the Apes, but all I could focus on as I negotiated my way through a thick mantle of soot was dirt, rats, and a faint queasiness.
The platform was filled with trash: broken beams, old cardboard, and a litter of foam cups. This wasn’t just the detritus of a subway station but the leftovers of mole people. There was enough of it to confuse future archaeologists, whose job, it suddenly occurred to me, is not only to dig up the past but also to scrape the rubble of squatters from that of the great civilizations whose abandoned homes squatters made their own.
I stood there, staring at what must surely have once been the gleaming tiles of a perfectly proportioned station with its perfectly curved platform. Like all armchair archaeologists, I had come here to prod the raw cells of the city’s past and see how everything, down to an unused subway station, can be touched by time and, like the layers underneath the city of Troy, is ultimately sanctified by time.
I wanted to see how inanimate objects refuse to forget or suggest that all cities—like people, like palimpsests, like the remains of a Roman temple hidden beneath an ancient church—do not simply have to watch themselves go but strive to remember, because in the wish to remember lies the wish to restore, to stay alive, to continue to be.
I knew I would never come here again. But I also knew that I had not put this station behind me either. In a few days I would pass by again and, again as if I’d never stopped here at all or had bungled an experiment I now needed to repeat, would ask myself, again and again, the one question I’ve been asking each time I speed by Ninety-first on the Broadway Local line and am invariably brought to think of the past: What if the train were to stop one day and let me off?
A Celestial Omnibus
As it approaches West Seventy-second Street on its way uptown, the M5 bus crosses lanes and begins to bear left on Broadway, hesitating by the old subway house, where it stands and shifts awhile in the shadow of the Ansonia like someone waiting in the cold. Then, with a sudden, jittery swoop, it takes a sharp left turn and enters what will always remain, despite the crowd, the traffic, and drab, faded storefronts, a beguiling kingdom where, enchanted by twilit snow, ordinary city life turns solemn and almost magical.
This is the moment everyone has been waiting for since riding up the Avenue of the Americas and turning left on Fifty-seventh Street; and this is probably why the route was originally conceived years ago. For after turning and picking up more passengers on Seventy-second Street, the bus is suddenly buoyed, as though freed of all cares, shedding the grumpy, snub-nosed character it assumes to get by in the city, while those aboard want to burrow into snug little corners, sip something hot, and, having opened the window just a crack to let in the snowflakes, sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride, as the bus picks up more and more speed, steered by spellbound hands.
This route lasts for forty-four blocks, from Seventy-second Street to 116th Street, where, after its moment of glory, the bus finally turns right and goes up Claremont Avenue, like a frog who has had his few minutes as a prince and must now jump back into the pond.
But while it lasts, for about twenty minutes or so, you are totally elsewhere, as though headed to the countryside late on a snowy Friday afternoon. And you begin to feel warm and safe, as the bus wends its sinuous course up Riverside Drive, which is lined by buildings on one side and overlooks Riverside Park on the other. Beyond this narrow strip of a park, built by the public works program during the Depression years, is the West Side Highway, which runs the entire length of western Manhattan along the Hudson River. The magic occurs not during the day, nor at night, but at dusk, perhaps because this is when I first took the M5 more than fifteen years ago, by mistake, as these things always happen.
Riding a bus I thought might take me up Broadway but never did, at each successive stop I kept wondering whether to get off, only to find myself postponing my exit every time, mesmerized as I and everyone else was by the oblique sweep of snow racing past the bus windowpanes and, right behind the snow, a stark-lit park from where one could make out mournful slabs of ice inching their way down the Hudson like a flock of lost sheep.
From the other side of the bus, however, a swerving magnificence of concave and convex prewar buildings dutifully follows the contour of the Drive at dusk, coming into view and then receding, allowing the landscape to conjure by turns the country, then the city, only to suggest that perhaps this is really neither the city nor the countryside but an unusual small town that could just as easily have been called St.-Rémy or Bedford Falls. I was, it seemed, not in a bus at all but in a late-nineteenth-century train that would any moment now stop at a snowed-in station where, in the old stationmaster’s hut, I was sure to find Frank Capra’s pharmacist and van Gogh’s postman warming their hands over a cup of red mulled wine.
The bus had begun to take a steep downhill turn, followed by yet another incline, when the driver finally shouted, “One hundred and twelfth Street!” But in the twilight and the snow, and the scant light along the Drive, there wasn’t the slightest sign of 112th Street. I got off and watched my bus leave, wistfully, with the snow padding its lank shoulders as it shuffled off like an empty vessel headed toward destinations and sights unseen.
F
acing me was a small, deserted, bushy knoll over which perched the statue of Samuel J. Tilden, the governor of New York famous for losing the 1876 presidency to Rutherford Hayes by one electoral vote.
I was, it occurred to me, in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps I shouldn’t have come at all, I thought, feeling quite silly to be lugging a plastic bag in which two bottles of wine kept clinking despite the piece of cardboard the man at the liquor store had inserted between them I decided to scale the hill and take a look. I heard the voices of children. A large Saint Bernard hovered nearby. And two boys came sliding down Tilden’s incline on a makeshift sled. We were in a medieval village on the first night of winter.
Suddenly before me sprang the arrogant façade of a building I had spotted moments earlier on the bus, its lighted windows speckling like a constellation. Inside, I pictured quiet, contented households where children always started homework on time and where guests, ever reluctant to leave, enlivened dinners where spouses seldom spoke. Straight ahead, in the distance, loomed the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. It made me think of Leipzig and of Bach choirs and of the way the slightest accident sometimes opens up new worlds and new friendships we can no longer live without.
A doorman showed me to the elevator and, sticking his large uniformed arm behind the sliding door, pressed the button for me. I felt at once honored and inept. The old-style wooden elevator, with its miniature latticed dome and a beveled mirror framed in faux rosewood, spoke of Old World opulence gone tacky at the hands of rent-control landlords. Someone was already inside the elevator. She was wearing a dark blue raincoat, busily stamping snow off her boots. I caught myself wishing she was one of the guests. But she got off on another floor.