Postcard from New York: week ending June 30th, 2006
The view from the 20th floor of 4 Times Square, soon to be obscured.
Well, my week has had it’s ups and downs just like this spot next to 4 Times Square, the home of Conde Nast, and The New Yorker. There used to be a few peep shows and a strange sort of burlesque museum here, even a small merry-go-round, if I recall well. Then there was a huge space like a childish gap between someone’s teeth through which one could see the buildings on north 43rd street. Now, as the days pass, this construction site rises closer and closer to the 20th floor, from whence I took this photo. Soon its metal and concrete frame will develop an exocarp. (Yes, I’ve been playing with the thesaurus! I’d originally thought “exoskeleton,” but got curious and ended up with “exocarp.”)
You can see Bryant Park and the back of the New York Public Library (the one with the lions) over to the right. Sometimes, from the fact checker’s side, you can see a long sliver of setting sun being lightly brushed along the tops of the trees on the left, across from the Grace Building.
I’d have liked to get a postcard snapshot of a cartoonist crying in the rain on 86th street (sadness over my best huckleberry friend preparing to move out of town). Because even as the waterworks began it occured to me that the raindrops were having the retch-effect on me. You know, when someone within earshot starts retching and gagging in the preamble to vomiting, something in you involuntarily begins to retch too? Similarly, perfectly content babies catch the cry-bug from some other bawler in the playroom. It seemed the torrential outburst of rain had that treacherous retch-effect on my tear ducts, and that made me want to laugh as much as cry. I’d have welcomed meeting anyone, no matter how silly I looked—in fact hoping to look very silly, memorably silly—just for the laugh of it. But they blended into the rain like my wet dress, and I made it home to dry off and nibble at chinese food while I reminisced and dabbed my eyes a couple more times.
The cynics all love to say good things never last, damn them! (I never believed them till now!)
NB: The next person to say those words to me will incur the petty revenge that is the volatile flip side of acceptance. Queries about my style of revenge may be directed to my old Paris garret neighbor, Anna Popovic, who will never lock all six security locks on her door while going to the hall toilet again.
