The other day I bought four postcards from an antique store on Queen East. Each one of the postcards were sent from New York City, by a man named Carter, to somebody named Matthew at an address in Kingston, Ontario.
There were thousands and thousands of people on Fifth Avenue on Sunday. I was sitting on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral watching them all. Life’s rich pageant, I thought. A beautiful view with the sun falling just so and all of the world in front of me. I wondered where she was. Surely I would meet her in a throbbing city of eight million people. I sat there waiting for the moment. I tried to pick her out of the crowd, the one who would smile at me with such warmth and beauty, the one cutting from all those waves of people, glowing, an ever-fresh and radiant possibility. And as if by happenstance she would sit beside me, a random epiphany that would seize my life in an explosion of light.
Saturday afternoon I was in Union Square–a dizzy place full of tall buildings and people moving in unexpected directions. It was completely overwhelming and so I took refuge at the W. The W is a boutique hotel with fine modernist furniture imported from Italy and the possibility of celebrities. In the lobby the waitresses wore black and men played chess on boards that looked like they belonged in museums. By the front window there was a young, blonde woman drinking tea. Pretty. She was posed in a certain way. I was reading my newspaper, but I could hear her talking to herself, again and again with different inflections.
When I looked over I noticed that she was reading from a script, rehearsing. And so this continued for some fifteen minutes, her stressing some words and then not others as she practiced her reading. When she got up to leave she passed right in front of me. I caught her eye, “good luck, I have a feeling you’re going to do just great,” I said, and she collapsed into such a sincere and grateful smile it looked as if her face might just split in two. She said thank you like she had just won the Miss America pageant, and then off she went to conquer the world.
In a park there was a tiny, contained dog run that was covered in wood chips. It was not much bigger than a standard sized living room. Three little dogs happily cavorted. A woman in an official orange Union Square dog run t-shirt presided. I wondered what her life must be like, how much she must love dogs–taking the subway in, thinking Dogs, Dogs, Dogs, Dogs.
Grand Central Station is an absolutely astonishing place—so beautiful and ambitious. I sat at Michael Jordan’s Steak House sipping wine while the bartender worked. He was a handsome black man who spoke with a French accent. You could just tell that he was an actor. Looking up at that famous ceiling, the strum of conversation and movement rising from the soft lights below, I felt as if I was sitting amidst clouds.