Gray

Chapter 21

It's later. New York City on a February morning, in a winter that just won't quit. A hotel near Times Square, a wind that tears through the city streets, a cold that grips you and won't let go. Businessmen in trench coats, collars turned up, hustling to work. Neon signs just waking up. Or just going to sleep. Steam billowing up from somewhere down below, rank and heavy, the way you see in old movies. Coffee from a cart, in a paper cup, sugar congealed on the bottom. Me in a dream, taking it all in, skin blue, smoke pouring from my lips, hands dug in my pockets. My coat is somewhere in Chicago. My apartment, long vacant, probably burned to the ground. My life just as empty, and quite possibly as charred, the smoldering remnants put out on the street. Alone. Low. Months since I've shared a bed with another warm body, since I've put my hand on soft skin. An ad on a bus for laundry detergent, a smiling woman in a white robe, an angel here to rescue me. She disappears around a corner in a cloud of exhaust. Typical.

 • • • 

 The guys are meeting the shareholders without me. They are playing them the record they made in spite of me. It's probably better that way. I am barely in the equation; I am a remainder at best. Maybe a decimal point. I have nothing to do, no place to be, and I can't bear to sit in my hotel room any longer, so I'm just wandering around the city, up and down the streets, with no coat on. It's almost as if I were on vacation, except I don't want to be here. I walk down to the water, stare at the old aircraft carrier rusting by the pier. It's called Intrepid. It is a floating metaphor. They've turned it into a museum, and tourists stop and take pictures. You can buy souvenirs up on the flight deck. New Jersey squats in the background, tiny rows of condominiums crowding the shoreline. The smokestacks of a factory. The darkness on the edge of town. Somewhere out there, Bruce Springsteen is waking up and having breakfast with his wife. Thinking of the Boss in his bathrobe makes me sad. The wind whips off the water, so I turn and walk off in the direction of nothing in particular. Eat breakfast at a diner even though I'm not hungry. Take a cab ride up and down the avenues, even though I've got nowhere to go. The driver looks at me in the rearview with his wild African eyes. I tell him anywhere is fine, and he dumps me on some corner on Eleventh Avenue, down by the Lincoln Tunnel. The air is thick with the smell of gasoline and the sound of mufflers. Huge buses hiss and downshift, full of passengers escaping the island. I can see the rear of the Intrepid off in the distance . . . I drove around for twenty minutes and only traveled ten blocks. 

It's only around 10:00 a.m.; the meeting probably hasn't yet begun. I picture the guys sitting in some expansive lobby, being asked if they would like anything to drink. The Animal will say yes, because he always says yes. Martin will say no because he is polite. I laugh to myself and dig my hands even deeper in my pockets, start to walk back across the city, through the dingy parts of Ninth Avenue, with its old butcher shops and even older Italian restaurants, smoke- filled bars already open for business, bums hunched over in doorways, like another world, an- other time. Past the Port Authority Terminal, dank and smelling of urine, terrified kids from Indi- ana clutching their suitcases and looking up, always up, at the towering skyscrapers, some guy in a leather jacket trying to steal one of their wallets, everyone smoking. Beneath the shadow of the New York Times Building, white and regal and ramping up toward heaven. Back through Times Square, the tourists now posing for pictures with cops on horseback, the Ferris wheel in the Toys "R" Us lit up and slowly turning, laden with children. I'm nearly hit by a cab as I'm crossing Broadway, the driver throwing his hands in the air, me pounding the hood with my palms for added effect. Down to Bryant Park, old black men playing chess even in the cold, the grass slightly frosted even as the sun begins to poke through the February sky. Around to the front of the New York Public Library, those famous steps dotted with people, those famous stone lions sentinel and stoic, proud and vigilant. Even the pigeons won't go near them. Then over to Grand Central Terminal, cavernous and bustling, people pulling suitcases in every direc- tion, children crying, voices and heels echoing around the space, off the marble floor, up to the constellations on the ceiling. The four-sided clock in the center of the room. The massive display board above the ticket booths, listing destinations (Katonah, New Canaan, Mount Kisco). Train tracks at the end of mysterious, gilded corridors, a temple full of secret passageways, and I fol- low one of them down below, see the trains snort and kick and whinny on the tracks, yearning to break free and go, and for a minute I think of getting on one—any one, it doesn't matter which— and heading north, but instead I just watch them fill with businessmen and women and babies, then shudder and depart, reminding me that there are other places in this world I could be, other places that are not here.