Wonderful Town 1 It’s 6:30, which means things are getting serious. Not necessarily a crisis – only a report, prospectus, due diligence. And that sense, however familiar and subdued, of rededication: quick wash, second shave, swipe of hand sanitizer. The slacks that appear, turning into the aisle between the cubicles the next room over, are a woman’s. Is she loyal, will she stay? … no, she’s gone, down to a block of freezing rain before her cab or subway. Four in the window office remain. A neocon I knew once became almost tearful, praising the connotations of the word *company. The eldest (I think) has slung his jacket over a chair. The possible young hope, young blood, or someone’s idiot nephew gestures – a repeated downward pump or jab. Striped shirt never moves. Green tie shifts once, is still. No laptops, stenograph, speakerphone, realtime output, which means this is serious? or that drinks and dinner are delayed somewhere for ideas? Their wall is bare and white. In these blocks, no “green” enterprises, NGOs, pro bono; so one knows, more or less, who they are … Now the Old Man looks out and down at the rain puddling the twentieth-floor setback, then at my hotel, at me, whom at this distance (mystery is distance) he can’t see. 2 The espresso machine like a Victorian monument bronzed, the tables like Braque’s *guéridons, the display case for cannoli, the notional chairs and between-table spaces, the walls brown from the smoking ages, the waiters’ trance, and this stretch of MacDougal don’t change with the decades. But today the place seems given to a private party, quiet and unannounced. The kid with his absurd beret and the one-volume Schopenhauer he doesn’t so much read as carry, the more or less fat guys with their Marx and journals, and a few older men seem at least in one sense together – they have eyes only for each other (and for the long-haired girl in a pleated skirt who doesn’t appear). Though no two glances meet. One probes a pocket for the number at which he must call his father from a payphone; another for his cellphone, to call his wife. The kid perhaps ponders; the thirty-something and forty-something read; another stops because the light’s too dim. They take out notebooks and write, or try to. Is that how they communicate? They’d deny it … (Outside, some sort of demonstration passes without a break, and fades; no one comes in. There’s no one to talk to, ever.) If they did write each other, what would they say? “You can’t write anything here. If you do, you’ll reject it later as sentimental.” Seeing which, the boy rises, surreptitiously tucks in his too-tight turtleneck, fills his bookbag, and leaves, expression resolute and dreamy because that’s expected of him. 3 Actually, we don’t discuss the obvious: arthritis drawing cries from him whenever he canes himself up, and slightly hobbling my own step when I cross the room to fetch some book he has pointed to. Or loneliness, or politics – the bullies that roam the body and the world will have their way, and meanwhile jabber; we ignore them, though they strain and shape all speech. He has grown very white since our last meeting, fifteen years and hundreds of emails ago, I very gray. The relics of his lover, who had disliked me on sight, lie small and quaint amid the clutter, and a ghost informs the collages – ties, real ties imposed on penciled – he’s doing. He gives me one. Reads new poems, *vers-de-société* of hell and the low slopes of purgatory. Paws what I bought at the Strand: Stead’s work since his stroke, Matthias sounding old, old. “Always the tourist,” he smiles. “You’re scoping out the terminal wards.” – “I want to see how much they transcend the personal, and if not, why they can’t.” – “Perhaps because there’s nothing else,” he says, provoking. – And one or two young free-associaters, who have no story but the stupid one the world imposes, “but at least aren’t chuckleheads”: thus I defend them, and bore him. He rarely leaves the apartment; is interested when I describe the cardboard, low-grade porn and verathaned ads at the New Museum on the rapidly gentrifying Bowery. “’*Unmonumental’ – that’s what they call the show. The wall-text talks about art ‘responsive to an age of broken icons.’ It struck me there’s a contradiction in that.” – “The longer I live, or last,” he says, “the more I address one question to whatever I see and read: would anything be lost if this didn’t exist? If the answer is no, burn it.” We have been drinking all this time: one glass each, slowly. Now he offers another, but I have to go. Once more I praise his recent work. “I was glad to meet you again,” he says. “You seem to be more yourself than I remember.” I tell him teaching helped. And poetry. “Not an afterthought,” he smiles. Stands, painfully; we embrace as if we’ll meet again. Afternoon sun pours down the airshaft to his window. 4 They queue, for rock clubs, movies, all-you-can-eat restaurants, even the tchotchke shops, to buy Liberty in snow-globes, foam, or pre-aged bronze. The lines intersect the crowds, so dense and slowed they feel as in dreams that the illusion of movement will fail any moment. Their coats absorb the smudged and trodden colors, poor relations of those above. To the east, the shows are letting out – the fishnet dancers in Cook County jail, a lion cub becoming king, a sexless lover with a mask – their music, in the minds of the new crowds exiting, merging at the corner with the noise. The new Stoppard may or may not have taught that rock-and-roll is freedom; that one can relax into freedom if one abandons murderous ideals. A couple next to us, with strict ideas of entertainment, squirmed at allusions to unfamiliar dates and names, to history, and left at intermission. There are cabs, but they rage, like other cars, for movement; we’ll take the E or 6 or walk crosstown to our hotel – the cold rejuvenating us, sustaining another hour the feeling that friends, drinks, dinner, window-shopping, the theater can go on. Call it joy, whose center is above this corner, all its plasma screens broadcasting fragments of it: cars, breasts, the sea, disembodied dancing handbags, market shares, wise commentators, an ecstatic Riemannian geometry of colors, colors, colors one yearns to rise and merge and splinter into, all motion effortless and theirs, reflected in the faces now surrounding us, blasé or brooding, avid for the possible.