Alone Time

by Stephanie Rosenbloom

  A wise friend once told me that when you’re blue, what you’re experiencing is weather, not climate. And bad weather, he pointed out, is fleeting. I decided to wait out this particular stretch with a piglet named Porcellino, the bronze sculpture in the Piazza del Mercato Nuovo.

  “Piglet” suggests that its subject is cute. It’s not. The beast is as thin as a Labrador with a face as long as a goat’s. And, technically, it’s a boar. The hair on its hide is matted into a kind of fauxhawk from its spine to the top of its head. On either side of its mouth, from which water dribbles, splayed teeth curve upward like horns. Sculpted into the base around the boar’s pointy hooves slither creatures of mud and water: snails, a crab, a frog, a snake, a salamander, a turtle.

  At night, the boar has a sickly green glow, with the exception of its long snout, which has acquired a shine from people touching it for good luck, though the process of acquiring said luck is actually a little more complicated than that: After rubbing the snout, you must place a coin in the boar’s wet mouth and then get it to fall through a grate there amid the running water.

  This sounds easier than it is. For one thing, the boar is popular, often ringed by giddy onlookers. And because there’s no formal queue, it’s every wish-maker for himself. I seized my opening, pushed a coin into Porcellino’s mouth, and waited.

  It didn’t drop.

  I stuck my hand deeper into the pig’s cool, wet mouth, my fingers probing beneath the water for the grate, doubtlessly covered in some ancient Florentine fungus. Of course, the more anxious you become while doing this, the less likely you are to be successful, but I wasn’t about to slink away in defeat and jockey for a chance to try all over again. I fumbled around blindly, drenching the sleeve of my leather jacket, my eyes on the boar’s mouth, until—plop!—the coin fell.

  “Well done,” said an onlooker in Italian.

  At least that’s what I wanted to believe she said, just as I wanted to believe that the coin landed wherever it was supposed to land to ensure whatever it was supposed to ensure. Months later, I read that the way to make a coin fall easily through the grate on Il Porcellino is to use a heavy coin. Perhaps you get what you pay for.

  I headed back toward the Savoy, past bins of leather handbags and colorful Università Firenze hoodies being sold by sneakered men under electric lights. I passed a few Clet Abraham No Entry signs, including one picturing a stick figure smashing a guitar, rock star–style, over the white bar. I passed children in hooded jackets on horses on a carousel, its little bulbs like stars, the sole light in a black square.

  My own jacket was still damp when I returned to the hotel room. I pulled off my boots, shuttered the windows, and climbed into bed.

  The next morning, hours before my flight home, I woke up to a lovely soft chorus of church bells—lucky, after all.

  I left the Savoy and crossed the Piazza della Repubblica for a final walk. The streets had been hosed down. The Piazza della Signoria was empty: No one was photographing Neptune, and the copy of Michelangelo’s David was alone. The mountains were soft and blue in the distance.

  I walked over to the Basilica of Santa Croce and the Pazzi Chapel, a spare, serene space, which sets it apart from so many others in the city. Designed by Brunelleschi for the Florentine banking family that tried to overthrow the Medici, the chapel has a blue cupola above the altar with a fresco of zodiac signs. Glazed terra-cotta medallions picture the Evangelists, including Saint Mark with a lion and Saint John with a black bird. But for the most part, the chapel is white and pale gray. An umbrella dome is unadorned. Mary McCarthy called it a “sabbath of stillness.” And on that autumn day, it was.

  The doors were open to the morning and to the courtyard beyond. All cities have their silent hours. Even, as it turns out, Florence.

  I raised my iPhone to the vaulted ceiling to take a photo of the underside of the dome and as I waited in the soft light for the lens to focus, a bird shot out of nowhere and streaked across the chapel. For an instant I thought the ceiling had begun moving—that Saint John’s black bird had come to life.

  I was stunned frozen. In a matter of seconds the bird was gone, but it had awoken the memory of my lost morning with Venus. I slipped the phone into my bag and stood still, and in silence contemplated the fresco, my days in the city, and all that I had learned—about art, history, architecture—in the hours I had to myself.

  That last morning, it was early enough to walk the Santa Trinita bridge and encounter no one other than the selfie-stick man, who at this time of day was sitting in a patch of sunlight and didn’t even bother trying to sell me a stick.

  A kayak sliced across the Arno. I crossed the river from the figure of Primavera with the crack around her neck, over to Autumn, Giovanni Caccini’s statue of a man holding bunches of plump grapes to the blue sky. But that’s as far as I got. I had a plane to catch.

  In a few hours I would be back in my own city. There would still be pumpkins and gourds on the stoops of the brownstones, though not for long. Soon there would be wreaths on the doors and evergreens twinkling in the windows. And one morning people would look out and see that first wondrous snow of the season, dusting the sidewalks of New York and making the autumnal days in Florence seem far away.

  Before crossing the bridge back toward the Savoy I paused at the bare feet of a marble sculpture by Taddeo Landini. It was a man huddled into himself, clutching to his naked, white chest a scrap of cloth, looking as cold as the stone from which he was cut: Winter.

  PART IV

  Winter

  New York

  HOME

  The City

  On Assignment

  Objects which are usually the motives of our travels by land and by sea are often overlooked and neglected if they lie under our eye.

  —Pliny the Younger

  I’ve lived in New York all my life, the last eighteen years in Manhattan—“The City,” as those of us who spent at least part of our childhoods in suburbia called it. We didn’t need to name it. There was only one.

  There was only one Manhattan, just as there is only one Chrysler Building, one Apollo Theater, one Metropolitan Opera House. Manhattan is where Walt Whitman strolled the Battery. It’s where Houdini escaped from a box in the East River; where Patti Smith still sings. Manhattan is the guy selling bananas on the corner; children playing hide-and-seek in an Egyptian temple beyond the sloping glass wall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  My first impressions of Manhattan were through a backseat window of the family car as we drove in from Long Island to see a play or musical. I would dress up. I wanted the people who lived in the city to think I lived there, too, with the lights, the yellow cabs, the buildings so tall I couldn’t see their tops even when I pressed my forehead to the window as we drove toward the Queens-Midtown Tunnel after the show. In the dark I would nod off to the rhythm of the road, the soft swish of passing cars, and when I opened my eyes we were on our driveway beside the weeping cherry tree under the stars. The whole night might have been a dream. But then I would look down at my feet and see a Playbill.

  Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that my first job in the city was with Don Frantz, a theatrical producer who at the time was fresh off of working on Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. I wasn’t qualified to touch so much as a horn on a wildebeest, but then Don didn’t hire me to work on Broadway. I was hired to assist with his labor of love: carving giant corn mazes—Amazing Maize Mazes—on family and living history farms where happy visitors get lost for sport. Not that I was qualified for that either, but the applicant pool was smaller.

  And so my early years in Manhattan were marked not by commutes past the Art Deco buildings of Midtown, but occasional forays to cornfields in Iowa, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas. When home, I was one of those young people in black helping backstage at benefits and readings—bringing Lauren Bacall an AIDS ribbon, escorting Chita Rivera to the win
gs—and taking advantage of a New York job perk: free, last-minute house seats to Broadway shows.

  This is Manhattan: One night you’re in an orchestra seat; another, you’re on a stranger’s stoop, eating a pint of ice cream. You can go around the corner for coffee and along the way pass a film crew shooting the next blockbuster, Anna Wintour, or any number of people hoofing it in styles you’ll never see in the pages of Vogue. Each of us has our tribes. And to each the city speaks: You with the little apartment and the big dream; you who are lost, cocky, unsure, uptight, all-in; you with the pink hair and the sad eyes—“Welcome to Manhattan,” as the green sign says. You can be whomever you want to be and still get invited to the party.

  Friends from my first years in the city have since moved away, though our haunts remain in one form or another: Down the Hatch, the basement grunge bar with “Atomic” chicken wings, is still in Greenwich Village; Zum Schneider, the Bavarian beer garden, is still in Alphabet City; the Limelight is still in Chelsea, though it’s no longer a nightclub in a Gothic Revival church—now it’s a few shops and a gym in a Gothic Revival church. Back then, the city vibrated. It felt like at any moment something could happen that might change your day or the course of your life. Sometimes, it did.

  Manhattan is dangerous, though not for the old reasons: muggings, pickpocketing, prostitution. The danger is that the longer you stay—the longer you’re bathed in the glow of blinking screens in Times Square, swept along by swarms of commuters, pursued by a mangy imitation of Mickey Mouse who wants a few dollars to pose for photos—the less you’re able to feel the wonder. The lights dim. The little battles with subway doors, your radiator, the rat that walks into you in Union Square as if you were the rodent, wear you down. You grow tired, switch off certain receptors.

  For years I paid little attention to my city, and in time, it disappeared. I put on sunglasses, put in earbuds, and blindly walked the streets that Billie Holiday and Roy Lichtenstein had walked. Every parade was an inconvenience, as was every stranger, talking too loudly, walking too slowly. I was living in one of the most visited cities in America, working in a skyscraper that people from all over the world stopped to photograph, and skipping town whenever possible.

  After my return to Paris, one thing seemed obvious: To see Manhattan again, to feel as good about New York as Liza Minnelli sounded singing about it at Giants Stadium in 1986 (Google it), I had to start treating it as if it were a foreign city; to bring a reporter’s eye and habits, care, and attention to daily life.

  But as that was the sort of vague self-directive easily ignored, I gave myself a specific assignment: Once a week, during routine errands, I would try something new or go someplace I hadn’t been in a long while. It could be as quick as a walk past the supposedly haunted brownstone at 14 West 10th Street, where former resident Mark Twain is said to be among the ghosts. It could be a stroll on the High Line, the elevated park with birch trees and long grasses growing where freight trains used to roll. Or it could be a snowy evening visit to the New York Public Library’s Beaux-Arts flagship on Fifth Avenue, where Pamuk wrote the first sentence of The Museum of Innocence. There I wandered past white marble walls and candelabras, under chandeliers and ornate ceiling murals, through the room with more than ten thousand maps of my city, eventually taking a seat at a communal wood table to read a translation of Petrarch’s Life of Solitude, too rare to be lent out.

  Tourist Tuesdays I called these outings, to no one but myself. I chose that particular day not for alliterative kicks but because it was the one I had set aside to run routine errands. Decades of research by B.J. Fogg, the director of the persuasive technology lab at Stanford University, suggests that new habits are most effectively formed if you start small and attach them to already existing practices, or “anchors,” as he calls them, like brushing your teeth or picking up the mail.

  So began my experiments as a hometown tourist. Throughout the winter I made weekly getaways, be it to the food hall in the basement of the Plaza hotel or to the World Trade Center Transportation Hub where, standing on platforms cantilevered over the main hall, I floated between its colossal white steel ribs, like Jonah in the belly of the giant fish. At the Strand bookstore I discovered Jean-Paul Aron’s account of eating in nineteenth-century France. At the Jefferson Market Library—the Victorian redbrick Gothic building with a turreted bell and clock tower in Greenwich Village—I paused before vivid stained-glass windows. The building had the trappings of a church, though rare is a house of worship with a Mae West community room upstairs (giving a wholesome spin to her line “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me”). Indeed, the library had not been a church, but a courthouse and a prison, where West herself had been jailed for an obscene performance in a play called Sex. Who knows how many times I’d walked by those stained-glass windows on the street, never bothering to find out what was on the other side. I had never followed the winding stairs up to the bell tower or down to the graceful brick arches of the basement reference room and the library’s Greenwich Village collection, which featured books like Haunted Greenwich Village and Boss Tweed’s New York.

  On those Tuesdays I became a student, learning that in the city’s museums and libraries you could find van Gogh’s Starry Night; an autographed manuscript of a Mozart symphony; and, afloat in the Hudson River, a nuclear missile submarine. In the offices of my own newspaper, from which Times Square takes its name, I stopped to admire Hirschfeld drawings and historic maps, and the writing desk of Henry J. Raymond, a founder in 1851 of the New-York Daily Times. I looked closer, went slower, read about local lore. Buying physical books, touching paper, made it easier to savor. I spread out a map, reminding myself of the city’s shape, its arteries and possibilities. Almost every street has a story. Knowing even a little about them refreshed places that were so familiar I had stopped seeing them.

  I began reading about urban planning, a subject that had long interested me. To fall in love with your city again, try seeing it through the eyes of an urbanist. You become a benevolent narrator, observing how your characters negotiate daily routines as they hurry about their lives. You come to understand how a new building affects a nearby park, how a few chairs placed under a tree can transform a street. Even things that are irritating—the biker flying down the sidewalk, the plaza with no place to sit—become a puzzle to solve. What design might be better? What would bring everyone together? What pulls them apart? The spirit of investigation began to return, and I was back on the sidewalk, looking for clues.

  Research shows that not long after we get home from a vacation, we tend to return to our particular baseline level of happiness. To help prevent that from happening, I didn’t fully leave the cities I’d visited but instead made them filters through which I saw my own. I stopped into small bread and cheese shops, took my time with my coffee. Seemingly cheerless streets became opportunities for observing graffiti and strangers, for “coloring the external world with the warm hues of the imagination,” as Anthony Storr described creative living. Avenue by avenue, through old streets and fresh snow, churchyards, coffee shops, and independent bookshops, Manhattan came into view again.

  I began to see it when I began treating my hometown just as I had treated any other city I visited; as if there were only so much time to drink it in.

  * * *

  It was on one of these Tuesdays that I remembered I lived on an island. If you’ve ever seen an aerial photo of Manhattan, this likely strikes you as absurd. But a daily life spent in subway tunnels underground and in canyons between buildings that loom like fortresses can easily make you feel landlocked. High-rises are being made ever higher, so though you may be near one of the rivers that surround the borough, you can’t see them. And getting to them isn’t necessarily easy or pleasant. You may have to cross a highway only to find yourself standing on a sliver of asphalt, or behind a chain-link fence, or being blasted by the wind from the blades of a helicopter as it takes off for someone’s count
ry house. So yes, it’s possible to forget that Manhattan was once a maritime city, a place with high tides and Atlantic sturgeon; where men were “fixed in ocean reveries,” as Melville put it; where the word “skyscraper” originally referred not to something rooted in the ground, but to the topsail of a clipper ship.

  And had it not been for a Tourist Tuesday at the Guggenheim, I might still think of my city’s essential elements as concrete and steel. Friends had been talking about an Agnes Martin retrospective at the museum, which led me to go online and reserve a ticket. Hours later, as I stepped up to the information desk inside the Frank Lloyd Wright building among the mansions of Fifth Avenue, it struck me that this was the first time I was visiting a museum alone in my own city.

  How could that be? I began ticking off in my head my solo museum trips: the Barnes in Philadelphia, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid . . . but none in New York, home to Museum Mile.

  It was opening hour, and a number of visitors, many of them locals like me, were there on their own in half-open coats, silhouetted by Martin’s stark grids and stripes.

  “I’ve lived alone all of my life but I didn’t get lonely,” Martin once said in an interview at her studio in Taos, New Mexico, her home on and off throughout her career. “I thought I was lucky. The best things in life happen to you when you’re alone.”