The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  When we were young and set off for the beach, I’d look out the window at all the landmarks we drove by—the Purina silo on the south side of Raleigh, the Klan billboard—knowing that when we passed them a week later I’d be miserable. Our vacation over, now there’d be nothing to live for until Christmas. My life is much fuller than it was back then, yet this return felt no different. “What time is it?” I asked Amy.

  And instead of saying “Who cares?” she said, “You tell me. You’re the one with a watch on.”

  At the airport a few hours later, I picked sand from my pockets and thought of our final moments at the beach house I’d bought. I was on the front porch with Phyllis, who had just locked the door, and we turned to see the others in the driveway below us. “So is that one of your sisters?” she asked, pointing to Gretchen.

  “It is,” I said. “And so are the two women standing on either side of her.”

  “Then you’ve got your brother,” she observed. “That makes five—wow! Now, that’s a big family.”

  I looked at the sunbaked cars we would soon be climbing into, furnaces every one of them, and said, “Yes. It certainly is.”

  PETER SELGIN

  My New York: A Romance in Eight Parts

  FROM The Missouri Review

  And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald, “My Lost City”

  NOT LONG AGO, while lurching through cyberspace, I chanced upon a luncheon menu from Schrafft’s, circa 1962. Especially among the city’s working women, Schrafft’s was once New York City’s most popular restaurant chain. The menu is an arresting artifact, one that might have been concocted to certify an era’s lost innocence—how else account for Jellied Tomato Bouillon, Browned Lamb Hash with Wax Beans, Deviled Tongue and Swiss Cheese Sandwich, Corn Soufflé, Minute Tapioca Pudding, Fresh Banana Stuffed with Fruit Salad, Green Apple Pie, and Grape-Juice Lemonade? Top center on the menu: “May We Suggest Bacardi Cocktail 70¢.”

  My eyes misted over. Here was the New York City I once fell hard for, the city of my childhood and young dreams. And though the menu belonged to a vanished time, still, it was real—as the Hotel Paris had been real, as the passenger ships lined up in their berths had been real. As my innocence, my ambitions, my disappointments, my failures, and a host of betrayals—mine, my father’s, the city’s—all had been real.

  I. Love at First Sight

  GAS HEATS BEST. They loomed: black, blocky letters on a yellow field painted on the side of a gargantuan corrugated hatbox. An ad for home heating fuel. But to my six-year-old eyes, it might have been God creating Adam in the firmament of the Sistine Chapel.

  It was my first trip to New York with my father. His “business trips,” he called them, though someday I would learn there was more to them than that. My twin brother, George, and I took turns, each of us going with him every other Friday. The trip took just a little over an hour, but as far as I was concerned, we might have been blasting off to Venus or Mars.

  We rode in my father’s Simca, an ivory wagon with whitewalls and a split tailgate. I watched him work the gearshift, a thin chrome rod with a pear-shaped knob—an object of fascination that I would secretly commandeer whenever Papa went into the post office or the bank, my vocal cords imitating the engine’s winding RPMs, ignorant of such things as clutches. As Papa backed the Simca past the dying birch tree in the turnaround, I’d see my brother and my mother standing there, my mother waving, my twin crying—as I would cry a week later when it would be George’s turn. Why our father took us separately I’m not sure. Maybe because we fought so much.

  At the end of the driveway we’d take a right onto Wooster Street and head to Danbury, where we drove past the war memorial and the fairgrounds. On Old Route 6 we’d pass by the Dinosaur Gift & Mineral Shoppe with its pink stucco tyrannosaurus, headed toward Brewster. Interstate 684 had yet to be built, so we rode on what would today qualify as “back roads,” past apple orchards, nurseries, and reservoirs, then down the Saw Mill River Parkway through exotically named places—Croton Falls, Katonah, Armonk, Chappaqua—tallying bridges and groundhogs.

  While driving, my father hummed: “The Blue Danube,” a Maurice Chevalier ditty, his cigarette dangling. He drove with an elbow out the window, preferring his arm to the car’s turn signal. The Simca’s glove compartment burst with road maps, but my father never consulted them. The city’s outskirts were a tangle of parkways, thruways, expressways, and turnpikes. That my father could untangle them amazed me, but then they seemed to belong to him, all those highways, as did everything to do with the city.

  We crossed over the Henry Hudson Bridge. At the tollbooth, Papa tossed a nickel into the yellow basket. We glided under the girders of the George Washington Bridge. Here the city began in earnest. We passed the Cloisters and Grant’s Tomb. Among drab shapes in the distance I saw patches of bright color, the funnels of passenger ships in their berths. To our left as we drove on, a skyscraper garden flourished, the Empire State Building sprouting like a deco fountain at its center. Amid this profusion of architecture rose the fuel storage tank, the one proclaiming GAS HEATS BEST. This utilitarian structure was no less awe-inspiring to me then than the Queen Elizabeth or the Empire State Building, subjects I’d sketch again and again in Mrs. Decker’s kindergarten class.

  The elevated ended; the Simca descended into a shadowy jungle of bumpy cobblestone streets. Somewhere along Canal Street we parked. Gripping my hand, Papa led me from one industrial surplus store to another, foraging for plastic and other parts for his inventions, his rotary motors, his color coders, his thickness gauges and mercury switches. The sidewalks were crowded, yet somehow to me the people weren’t real. They reminded me of the baubles on a Christmas tree, each with its particular charms and quirks but, unlike the buildings, insubstantial. There were no dogs and few children. New York City was a place for grownups.

  From Canal Street we walked to Chinatown, where we ducked into shops packed with lacquered trays and jade carvings. Here the streets smelled of fish. In one of those shops, my father bought me a wooden box (I still have it; it sits on top of the bookcase by the desk where I write). In Chinatown the plethora of street signs, their messages transformed into adornments by virtue of being illegible, impressed me even more. The enigmatic characters clung to the air, butterflies caught in a web of utility lines and fire escapes.

  Then to Greenwich Village, where we entered boutiques lush with beads and trinkets and suffused with the smell of incense, and where one shop window confronted us with a panoply of chessboards and pieces carved from rare woods and exotic minerals. Already I had begun to see the city as a colossal museum, with objects displayed in various galleries according to periods and styles. Beyond displaying its holdings, the city had no discernible purpose. It existed for roughly the same reason as the town park on Lake Candlewood or the Danbury State Fair: to amuse the likes of me.

  We lunched at Schrafft’s, then drove back uptown toward our hotel, stopping on the way at Manganaro’s Italian import store, where my father bought a pound of Parmesan cheese—a jagged hunk broken off a great golden wheel. By then the air had dimmed, the better to display the lights of Times Square, where flashing neon signs advertised everything from Pepsi-Cola to Castro Convertibles and a giant man in a fedora exhaled smoke rings from a cigarette into the electrified dusk. Then up West End Avenue to the Hotel Paris.

  Of all parts of the city, that hotel was my favorite, a wedding-cake-shaped fortress of garnet-colored bricks topped by a crenellated water tower, with a flagpole reaching even farther toward the sky. I recall a lobby of pink marble walls with a mirrored dining room adjacent and a caged, old-fashioned elevator attended by a colored lady (I use the term in keeping with the times), whose beehive of fire-engine-red hair was as imposing as she was diminutive. She let me man the controls, a courtesy for which I will never forget
her. You had to pull back on the lever just so, or the elevator and the floors wouldn’t line up properly. She put her brown hand on top of mine, her warm grip guiding me. At each floor the doors opened to different hallway carpeting, arabesques of blazing bright color that, in their inscrutable intricacies, mimicked the metropolis outdoors.

  Like all the rooms in the Hotel Paris, ours was small. It stank of the last occupant’s cigarettes, which was okay by me. I accepted the odor as part of the city—my father’s city, it came to seem to me, as if he had laid every brick and cobblestone and erected every skyscraper. As he unpacked his suitcase on the bed, I watched, engrossed. A suit jacket, a pair of socks, two pairs of underwear, a can of athlete’s-foot powder, his safety razor and battered shaving brush, a shoehorn, and a necktie.

  The necktie fascinated me most. Though I’d seen it often before, hanging in his closet back home, here it took on a new aspect. With its yellow paisley drops against a maroon background, it was no longer just my papa’s necktie; it was his New York City tie. At that moment, that necktie became the city for me, as the stale cigarette smell in that hotel room became the city, and the gaudy hallway carpeting, and the red-haired elevator operator, and the hunk of Parmesan cheese, and the passenger ships in their berths, and the GAS HEATS BEST sign, and the groundhogs digging holes in the lawns along the Saw Mill River Parkway. It was all my New York back then, courtesy of my father, who had invented it just for me.

  II. Puppy Love

  At 15, my friend Chris Rowland and I used to visit his neighbor Clara. A spry, matronly woman in her 80s, she lived across the street from the Rowlands in a white shingled cottage by the brook. Chris would bring a casserole his mother had made. Clara would thank him and put it away. Then we’d sit in her parlor, Clara in a thronelike wicker chair, eating cookies with cider while she sipped tea from a china cup. We thought it was tea.

  New York City was Clara’s favorite subject. She still kept her apartment there. She spoke of how, in her younger days, she and a friend had opened a teashop in Chelsea, and of the Broadway actors and actresses who had patronized it. “Oh, we had quite a time of it, quite a time,” said Clara, fanning herself with a Japanese fan.

  One day Clara gave us the keys to her apartment. Chris’s father drove us to the station in Brewster. Through the green-tinted window—to the rhythmic clacking of train wheels—we watched the familiar world of houses, church steeples, and trees morph into a landscape of buildings, viaducts, and bridges. Then we plunged underground. For a while everything turned black. We stepped out of the train car to find ourselves in a grimy marble cathedral vaulted with sallow stars.

  At the newspaper kiosk, Chris bought a box of Good & Plenty; I got a Bit-O-Honey bar. We both chipped in for the Daily News and a folding map of the city. We couldn’t decide whether to walk to Clara’s place or take the subway. Walking, we would see a lot more, but a subway ride would be thrilling. We took the subway.

  It was late September, but the subway platform still hoarded the summer’s heat. The station’s dim lighting gleamed off the edges of its innumerable tiles. A man in a gray suit leaned against an iron pillar; others stooped impatiently over the tracks. None said a word. My friend and I obeyed the unwritten law by which New Yorkers pretend to ignore each other. A muffled roar and a fusty breeze heralded the subway train’s arrival. The roar grew deafening as it squealed to a stop and its doors slid open.

  We careened under the city, each of us clinging to a strap as the subterranean world rushed by, a murky blur punctuated by lustrous stations whose waiting passengers could only watch in envy as we roared past on express tracks: 34th Street . . . 28th Street . . . 23rd Street . . . At the place called Union Square, we jumped a set of iron teeth that stretched to fill the gap between subway and platform. Then up we bounded through a maze of latticed stairways and catwalks into a world of blinding sunshine.

  To judge by our map, Clara’s apartment was five blocks east on 18th Street. We passed a Chock full o’Nuts and a corner fruit stand. We carried our suitcases and walked fast, as if our arrival were not already accomplished—as if by walking any slower we’d dispel the magic of this dream, like those dreams in which you will yourself to fly. Now and then we faced each other to share a grin that said we’d gotten away with something, or were about to.

  Clara’s apartment was on the top floor of a tenement. We bounded up the three flights. An elaborate series of keys was required for entry. The apartment smelled of mothballs and musk. Should we open a window? Was that allowed? The walls were covered with framed photographs, theatrical posters, and quaint watercolors of Parisian street scenes. A bronze Laocoön graced the fireplace mantel. Even up there with the windows closed, we heard the traffic below, the impatient horns of trucks and taxis. While Chris unpacked, I studied the photographs, mostly of Clara and a friend, presumably the one with whom she had run the teashop. In one they both wore fur coats; in another they showed off identical plumed hats. It had never dawned on either of us that Clara might be lesbian. “Oh, I’ve had many, many beaux,” she’d said to us more than once while sipping from her china cup. Even seeing the photographs, the thought didn’t occur to me, as it didn’t occur to me that someday I would live in the city, that I would engage my ambitions, inflame my desires, commit various acts of ignominy and treachery, and experience a multitude of triumphs, disappointments, sins, failures, and betrayals there.

  By noon Chris and I were back out in the street, burdened no longer by our luggage, carrying only the folding map and an eagerness to see everything. Uptown or down? We went down. To the tip of the Battery we walked, passing the still-unfinished towers of the World Trade Center. We stood by a railing watching seagulls wheel over the decks of a ferryboat taking tourists to the Statue of Liberty. From there we walked uptown through the Chinatown I first came to know with my father; its cagey streets seemed less magical without him guiding me through them. Then up to Little Italy, with its green-and-red pennants and flags, past the iron-fronted buildings of the Bowery to the East Village, where, at the crowded counter of a Ukrainian café, we slurped twin bowls of blood-red borscht. As we were leaving, I gave a quarter to a panhandler.

  “Don’t spend it all in one place,” I said, earning a disapproving look from Chris.

  Midtown. Rockefeller Center. Radio City. Central Park. The Met. The names arrested me with their authority. At the Guggenheim we balked at the price of admission: $3.50 to penetrate a colossal Carvel ice-cream cone. To hell with it! In the district known as Harlem, the streets were in every sense browner, its buildings slung low to accommodate a sky brought to its knees by dense, ponderous clouds. We walked faster, the gusts flapping the lapels of our Windbreakers, passing a building shaped like the parabolas we’d learned to draw in algebra class. At every other block, a sudden whirlwind whipped grit into our eyes and made us grip our jackets at our throats and hunch like old men.

  We’d started across town, hungry for Broadway and humanity, eager to arrive at the colossal pinball machine known as Times Square, when the rain caught us. We carried no umbrellas. We’d bought extra tokens, but there were no subways in sight. Taxicabs were prohibitively expensive. Headlong and purblind, we plunged into the monsoon. By the time a subway entrance arose out of the tempest, we were soaked. We clutched our knees, laughing and coughing as we caught our breath. The subway zoomed us to Times Square, where we emerged into a sea of black umbrellas backlit by blurred neon signs. At an establishment called Nedick’s we ordered two “frankfurters” apiece and large cups of orange drink and ate while watching people hurry by in the rain. Even soaking wet, New York was a great place, a wonderful, lewd, sexy, forbidden place. Those trips with my papa had been mere flirtations, as chaste as my grandmother’s kisses. Now I was a man, and the city was mine to embrace less innocently.

  By the time we left Nedick’s, the rain had softened to a drizzle. We passed under a succession of marquees featuring slasher and porn films and peepshows for 25 cents, a Coney Island boardwalk of X-r
ated sex. Had Chris, whose parents were of New England Puritan stock, not been there to shame me, I’d have ducked into one of those seedy theaters. I’d have paid a quarter for a peepshow—or two. Or three. Two women in leopardskin miniskirts and high heels emerged from the shadows to offer us a good time. I showed interest; my friend didn’t. I had started a conversation with them when, saying “We’re already having a good time, thank you,” Chris took my arm and kept us walking.

  We got “home” after dark. What a strange feeling, having those apartment keys. “The keys to the city!” one of us joked as the door to Clara’s apartment swung open. The musty smell was still there. So was the Laocoön. It wasn’t even half past seven, but we were both beat. Though the rain had stopped, still, the city seemed less inviting by night, consisting only of bars and other forbidden and overpriced venues.

  Instead we brewed a pot of tea and sat there, in Clara’s living room, talking in hushed, tired voices to the murmurs of traffic until our eyelids grew heavy and we slouched to bed, proud of ourselves for having passed, to our own satisfaction, the city’s audition. It was the first of many such trials, but I didn’t know that then.

  III. Romance

  The rat was as big as a squirrel. It twitched in a trap next to the walk-in fridge. My boss, a retired New York City cop, kept his old service revolver in his office. He took aim, told me to stand back, and blew the thing to furry pink bits, which afterward I scooped into a metal dustpan and carried to the Dumpster.

  It was my first job in New York. I’d hoped to be a bartender or a cook, but the owner of the Rozinante Tavern had different plans for me, so I spent most of my time there in the basement, peeling potatoes and cementing cracks in the concrete floor.