At the Strangers' Gate Read online

  “Premium” ice cream was the first small offering to the dispossessed. Häagen-Dazs is now one more standard item in the supermarket freezer. But at the 87 Deli across the street from the Blue Room, it was new to us. Invented in the Bronx by a brilliant ice cream visionary named Reuben Mattus, who saw that the day of the gummy old ice creams had passed, it carried an imaginary Danish origin, a meaningless pseudo-Danish name, and a map of Scandinavia with a little star marking its non-place of non-birth. (He had the best of motives for locating his real ice cream in this imagined place: the Danes had saved Jews.) It had a butterfat content twice as high as in Sealtest or Breyers, and so soon gave birth to other fake-Scandinavian ice creams, like Frusen Glädjé, which was sold in a domed, white plastic container.

  The inventor had spotted the vulnerable point in the change of generations. What we really wanted was not so much flavor or novelty or variety as simple richness, in compensation for the riches we didn’t have. It was a pun played on the palate. It was also the first of the consolation prizes that our generation would learn to accept. The apartments got smaller and the ice cream got fattier. Eating premium ice cream in a tiny space with roaches was almost the same as living in a reasonable amount of room. That was how capitalism, in its intuitively adaptive way and through the force of natural selection exerted by our changing needs, produced the product perfectly suited to our circumstance. We bought it. We ate it. (Häagen-Dazs was sold by its founder, complete with made-up name and map, to Pillsbury in 1983, another sign of corporate things to come.)

  ATM machines were another new event of the period, which carried a similar meaning. Countless little glass money-dispensing rooms, entered into by cool cards, right out of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., became a new architectural feature of the city. The idea of the cash machine, which now seems either self-evident or dated, seemed exciting then. Cautiously withdrawing thirty-five dollars at a time from our tiny fund, and doing it first at the Chase machine on Third Avenue but soon at cash machines all over town—Chemical Bank! Manufacturers Hanover!—we came into a different daily relation to money than our parents had done. My grandparents had belonged to a check-cashing generation, proud to be engaged in it. To have an institution as large as an American bank in effect endorse their signature on a little bit of paper as equivalent to money meant to be taken seriously as a citizen. My parents, in turn, were credit-card cultists—they loved having them, signing them, showing them, using them. For those who came of age in the boom times after the Second World War, the whole notion of credit, of sharing in a limitless improving future—of being trusted to buy now and pay later since later would be so much richer than now—had some of the same significance that the notion of being trusted with checks had for my grandparents.

  We in turn, generationally, had regressed, I realized, back into a cash economy—we used checks just to pay the utilities. The machines were one more instrument of that infantilization; we went to the machines for something that felt, at least, like our allowance. But the little glass rooms and the mysterious mechanisms they contained were one more way to make our permanent adolescence seem almost glamorous: the code, the room, the machine’s deep internal rumblings as it consulted the great chain of other machines, and then the sudden appearance of the actual money. It was one more consolation for our regression. (Later in the decade, the glass rooms became shelter for the homeless, and so doubled in meaning: you had to see, or pretend not to see, the helpless in their misery as you got your money, and so they became home to shame as well as cash, and oversaw their interaction.)

  The formula typically used to describe these two poles of life was public squalor and private affluence. Really, it was more like public squalor and private intensity, both realities ever present and conditioning your experience. You went from the surreally seedy subway to Fragonard at the Frick, and from the still-unmanicured lawns of the park to the mall and roller-skating civilization along the mall. Now the city is far more homogenous, safer, and more consistent, either from the inside out or from the outside in. But the extravagance of opposites that governed our first months is lost. The Blue Room was smaller than you could imagine; the big store, the world outside, bigger than you ever expected it to be. (Now, cynics say, we have remodeled the outer world in the image of our own comfort. But we couldn’t then.)

  In most places in the city the outside was terrible and the inside wonderful. In the subway, the outsides of the cars were wonderful and their insides terrible. The subways were still covered in what years later I would learn to call “wild style” graffiti, and the cars as they arrived in the stations seemed fluorescent and beautifully psychedelic—as wild as Frank Stella’s constructed exotic birds. But their insides were sordid and angry, covered with cranky random “tags,” an assault of scratched-in names and indelible black scribbles. The discrepancy of styles—which to the MTA was, of course, no discrepancy at all: vandalism inside, vandalism out—seemed to our unargumentative eyes part of the larger doubleness of the still-wonderful city. The subway was a parable of New York life, turned inside out: beautiful in passing, it was alarming within. It would take until the end of the decade for the cars to be cleaned, but by then even the vandals would be gentrified; the graffiti artists would have names and reputations and European collectors, even as their work was successfully eliminated from the trains. “It’s not what that homeboy is saying to my face that bothers me,” the artist called A-One would tell me at the end of the decade at a dinner party in SoHo. “It’s what he’s saying to Sotheby’s.”

  I had persuaded myself, with some misconceived gallantry, that it was unsafe for Martha to be coming home late at night from the cutting room on Ninth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street, where she was an apprentice, syncing documentary films all day. But I was not being entirely hysterical. They had found a dead body in a dumpster on her first day at work. Nowadays, people long for such excitements—you could sell condos to the new generation of hipsters if you promised them a dead body in the basement dumpster—but in those days there were still a few too many corpses for comfort. Today’s dead body might produce tomorrow’s, and you should guide your girlfriend home in safety to be sure she would not become it.

  Though now the subway is as crowded at ten at night as it is in the high afternoon, in those days the subway rolled mostly empty, with its windows down, and the hot stale air rushing inside (little air conditioning yet, and one entered the few air-conditioned cars with a shock of ice-cream-like delight). A few lines still had seats covered with lacquered straw, and real straps to hang from, across from the open windows. Grim-faced kids strolled back and forth between cars, in search of something—I used to joke that they must be looking for the dining car. (Martha would laugh at that. The honeymoon is really not erotic but comic: however long your spouse continues to laugh at the same jokes, until her face begins to twist in a grimace of mordant “here it comes” irony.) I even wrote Martha a song, called “God Bless the IRT”: “God bless the IRT / Brings my baby back to me / God bless the downtown train / Brings her to my arms again. / Someday we’ll ride in cabs / Bathe in tubs of Häagen-Dazs /Till then the IRT was all that / Brings her safe to me.” (Okay, it was an off rhyme—“Dazs” and “cabs”—but, I still think, a resourceful one, and true to its time.)

  Sometime in that first fall, I discovered toggle bolts. There was a hardware store right around the corner, run by the Weinstein brothers, and they patiently diagrammed the workings of the toggle bolts with the same slightly bemused look of “Is this level of ignorance really possible?” that art historians might wear explaining to first-year students that famous pictures were usually displayed in frames. The toggle bolt is a weird little device, the hardware equivalent of a cockroach and just as essential in New York apartments. “Ya drill a hole in the wall, ya know, into the Sheetrock—your walls aren’t made of cement or granite or anything, ya see?” one Weinstein brother would explain dubiously, demonstrating how it worked. “And then these pop out”—on the other side of
the wall, the toggle’s two little wings spread out in an instant, just like a cockroach’s. “They hold it in there, so you can hang your shelves or whatever.”

  I bought a drill, and spent days drilling holes and then popping in the toggle bolts. They made a wonderful “plop!” sound as, invisibly, they opened in the space behind the wall. It was a lovely 2001: A Space Odyssey slow-motion docking sound. The ash smell of the burning holes and then the plop of the toggle bolt…It’s probably the closest I’ve ever come to understanding the appeal of semi-automatic weapons.

  We hung the glass shelving all around the apartment and put our books out. The glass shelves looked light and beautiful, as the sun glinted through the venetian blinds and caught them. I quickly discovered, though, that the least touch on any of the shelves would make them all tremble, sympathetically, as during an earthquake. I straightened one slightly, or intended to, and the toggle bolts gave way, just bending right down and coming out of the wall, since (I realize now) the little wings weren’t anchored to anything but the flimsy drywall. Then the shelf slid off the bracket, sending the books piling down onto the next shelf. I could easily imagine one fallen shelf bringing down the next, like an old casino building being imploded.

  We had locked ourselves into a small, cantilevered, explosive cage. The entire room was booby-trapped; or, rather, a booby had made a trap out of the entire room. If a single glass shelf above the bed were to fall, the ensuing crash seemed likely to end with our being shredded as we slept. It was like living inside a hand grenade, with the pin pulled. We would lie in our unfolded bed at night, one eye scanning the baseboard for the cockroaches, the other on the glass shelves, waiting for signs of an avalanche. What lovemaking we did we did discreetly, for fear of agitating all the glass. We lived and breathed as lightly as possible. I suppose it would have been a one-day story in the New York Post: “Glass Warfare: Newlyweds Die in Uptown Basement.” Then the super would have swept us out, sent another couple in, and shut the drawer on them, in turn.

  All of this is what that one good suit was going to protect us from. I thought of it often, even while it was away at the tailor’s. Its neat dark blue wool, so filled with poetry, would distinguish us; its suave stylishness set us apart from the pavement just outside our window. I don’t think I’ve really described the suit adequately. It was a simple two-button suit, cinched at the waist in a way that struck us both as “classic”—a quiet word we liked, applied to suits. Navy blue was a color we both had doubts about. It could look “ordinary,” Martha’s word, in a way that black did not. But if the navy blue crowded into black, backed into black, was that not in itself a sort of superior condition? Just as all art aspires to the condition of music, we reasoned, then all navy blue aspires to the condition of black—and wasn’t the business of aspiring the thing you wanted everything in your life to indicate? We wanted a wool that yearned a little. The suit was itself another toggle bolt; its two legs and arms would insert themselves through the dubious drywall of our new life and cling tight, anchoring our existence.

  Martha had gone back to Montreal to collect our few things when I took the Ted Lapidus suit to a tailor. (I am short, and all my pants have to be hemmed.) Those days, if you lived on the Far East Side in Yorkville, as we did, you lived in a genuine neighborhood. Eighty-sixth Street was lined with German restaurants, so much that the Ideal Restaurant at 5:00 p.m. looked like a George Grosz engraving, pale and obese Middle Europeans dining on fat and starch. There were streets filled with the smell of Hungarian paprika, and a restaurant that specialized in curried goat. And so there were tailors of every imaginable ethnic affiliation, too: Greek tailors and Jewish tailors, Korean tailors and Chinese tailors, each sewing in the window of his storefront, a strange New York form of street theater. I took the suit to a Greek tailor, and as he measured me I knew that life was going to be okay, because, despite the cockroaches, despite the tininess of our room, despite our absolute lack of funds, despite the urban blight that threatened to blight us, too, I had a suit. I had a suit. A suit that now would fit.

  About a week later, when I had been told the suit would be ready, I went back to collect it from the tailor, my heart full. I tried it on. It was everything I had ever hoped a suit could be. “It fits nice!” the tailor said, which he wasn’t, I decided, obliged to do. He slid the suit reverently into a garment bag, I threw it over my shoulder, and I walked it back to our tiny basement apartment, where I unzipped it just to feast my eyes once more at this deliverance, the garment that would keep me safe and in poetic elevation from the cockroaches and the subway and the world around me.

  As I unbuttoned and parted the jacket, I realized…that the pants were gone. They were…gone! Gone completely, gone away—just not there! I knew that the pants had been there when I left the tailor’s. Then I looked again at the garment bag—and I realized it had no bottom. It was a New York garment bag: a vinyl envelope over a slippery hanger, with no bottom to hold things in. It was as gaffed as Sky Masterson’s imaginary deck of cards. The pants, I realized, had slid right off the smooth plastic hanger and were sitting somewhere out there on the street. They were gone. Gone for good. I knew it at once.

  The truth is that fish don’t really have a theory of water. That’s the truth about fish being out of water; they know two states: fine and “Oh my God!” That’s all fish really know about water, and that was all I knew at that moment. The trousers were gone and the suit was ruined. I ran back to the Greek tailor and he said words that I will never forget as long as I live, because they were so perfectly elegiac: “It used to fit nice. It used to fit really nice.”

  That use of the past tense sealed the fate of those pants somehow. And when the moment of irretrievable loss takes place, the feeling, no matter how trivial the object, no matter how small the thing lost, that moment—when the vase breaks, when the trousers are gone, when the car crashes, when the ship begins to go down—induces the same feeling in the pit of your stomach, that sudden sick feeling of no turning back, of life altered forever. The value of the things lost differs; the lurch of irretrievable loss is always the same.

  I ran up and down First Avenue for hours. It was just when homeless people were beginning to appear on the streets in New York, and I eyed every homeless man I saw, sure that he had taken my size-29 trousers and was wearing them. I still do that, gaze turning sidelong, to this day.

  I called Martha in Montreal, even though calling long distance was still a reasonably big deal. “Darling,” I said, “I’ve lost the trousers. I lost the pants of my suit!” And she said, “Oh my God, oh no,” because only she knew the depth of the loss that this was for us. And then she said something very strange. She said, “Have you looked in the park?” and I realized that she had a kind of theory that all lost things—like the Island of Misfit Toys—were sort of immediately, magically displaced into Central Park.

  I began scouring the streets of Manhattan looking for my lost pants, from First Avenue to Seventy-ninth Street and back down. I had in those days a strong synesthetic association with the numbered streets on the Far East Side. The eighties were yellow-gold. The seventies were red. The sixties, rich people’s country, were cooler green, and the fifties gray-blue. The map of colors overlays the map of memories as I search for my lost trousers, peering into gutters and looking for what might be now a crumpled ball of blue fabric, yet still be retrievable as pants.

  I walked and searched for hours, past the point of rational hope of recovery. The streets seemed darkened and transformed. What had only hours ago seemed the jaunty stage set of a musical, storefronts scented with Hungarian paprika, now seemed hostile and vertiginous and barbed, like the set of a German Expressionist film rising up in angular facets. No one cared that I had lost my pants. They’d been washed away in the great nothingness of the city. Every wire had been cut, and they fell not just to the ground but out of the imaginative realm that gave them meaning in our minds. In Montreal, a pair of pants having slipped from a hanger would have lai
n there on the ground, on Sherbrooke Street or Mountain Street, unavoidable. People would have stepped around them. Someone would have picked them up and put them on a fence. There would have been a whole “What is this?” thing. Here there was no thing at all, just the vast flowing current of people and filth and objects that somehow moved up and down First Avenue, carrying my pants along inexorably with them, as though toward a waterfall somewhere around the Queensboro Bridge. I had imagined living in a Scott Fitzgerald story, and now here I was in something out of Gogol, where a poor clerk searches the dark streets for his briefcase or overcoat or nose. And I knew that this loss was real and that I would spend the rest of my life in New York searching for my lost trousers.

  A month later, John Lennon was murdered outside his New York apartment, and that, too, changed the contours of possibility, and darkened the colors of New York life. His love and ingenuous appreciation of the city—so tourist-like—had not been able to protect him from its lethality. (I remember weeping into the New York Post. In the Blue Room there was no corner to put anything away in—everything loomed immense, and the Post headline about Lennon worst of all.) Our basic sense of life’s essential salubriousness had been damaged. There was no safety in Ted Lapidus suits. The Beatles had represented the good fortune of three generations: the generation their own age, who had grown up with them; those right behind them, like us, who had been educated by them; and those just ahead, who had been rejuvenated by them. Their essential lesson was one of optimism. Now that optimism would be impossible to sustain. The only turn to make was inward, while looking outward, another form of the poles that I was already beginning to sense, though only just beginning, would govern our experience. There were two worlds, sharply opposed worlds of comfort and death, the hearth and the street. I was, as I say, beginning to sense this, though it would be years before I really grasped it. The space between sensing things and grasping them, between trying them on and really wearing them, is large, and includes most of what we mean by wisdom. It was exactly the experience I had been deprived of when I lost my pants.