At the Strangers' Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  He opened the door immediately, and we were in an auditorium the size of a large movie theater, though, as I recall it, much wider in articulation—four or five hundred seats, spread out panoramically across the room. And all the seats filled with these incredibly well-dressed people. All the men had on jackets and ties, and all of the women had on skirts and stockings, and there was a giant banner that said “Pluralism and Individualism: ’85.”

  Who are these people? I asked myself. Are they Scientologists? Are they libertarians? They’re certainly enthusiastic about the ideas of pluralism and individualism, to have come out at eight-fifteen in the morning. And though it might have been their “keynote,” they seemed not bleary-eyed but primed—keyed up already!

  So I got up and I gave a lecture that would have done Professor Irwin Corey proud. “We must always remember that, when we consider the nature of pluralism in modern society, it inevitably breaks down into the collisions of individuals,” I intoned. “And when considering the role of the individual as he or she realizes him- or herself in our world—we must remember that they cannot help but become plural, by their very nature.” On the one hand, I explained, individualism segregates and atomizes. On the other, community and cohesion—call them pluralism—bring the individualized individuals back together. Between the individual asserting his—or her—individuality, and the plurality of human kinds accepting their inexorable multiplicity and, to be sure, plurality, we would ever find ourselves defining each term—in terms of the other.

  I couldn’t have done better if I had been spouting it at MoMA, or writing it for October magazine.

  After keeping this up for twenty-five minutes, and getting what I still choose to believe was a warm hand at the end, I stepped down, walked back out, and found John waiting for me outside the auditorium. And I’ll never forget what he said; it sticks to my mind, like “it fit good.” He shook my hand and said, “Thank you, that was very healing.” And then, in the time-honored manner of conference organizers toward impecunious speakers, he passed me a white envelope that I suavely, or as suavely as I could manage at eight-forty-five on a Saturday morning, slipped into my inner jacket pocket.

  I waited a decent interval, until I had turned onto Lexington Avenue, and then I opened the envelope. The check was for five hundred dollars, an enormous amount of money for us in those days. I cheerfully put it back in my pocket, got on the subway, got off at Spring Street, and walked back into our loft.

  Martha was still asleep. By now, it was about nine-thirty.

  I took off my clothes, I got back in bed, and slept for another hour; then she woke up. I told her, “You will not believe what happened while you were asleep!”

  I showed her the check. And I insisted that we use the money for a celebration, for a blowout, for one more effort to try to scale Scott Fitzgerald Mountain. With this mad money, our windfall of five hundred dollars, we would do something truly glamorous and carefree, the eighties equivalent of jumping into a fountain. We would take this money and go out and have one great dinner. We would go to a wonderful French restaurant and we would have champagne and wine and brandy and all the things Scott and Zelda would have had, and we would truly enjoy ourselves. It was, I suppose, on an impossibly Lilliputian scale, the same dubious instinct that the money men of the time, the ones who wore yellow suspenders and worked in the then new business of hedge funds and private equity, insisted on: I have earned, and now we will spend.

  And, damn it, we did. We took it and had a great meal—a wonderful meal at Chanterelle, the restaurant around the corner, the most beautiful room in New York, apricot walls and silver-and-white linen cloths—and we came home drunk and happy, and I opened the door to our loft and turned on the light.

  There is nothing in the world that will sober you up as quickly as hundreds of mice dancing in your home. The scene inside our loft looked like one of those old thirties cartoons where you see a little barnyard and the mice are playing string basses and fiddles and dancing. Maybe there were ten mice, but it looked like a hundred. Even twenty mice is enough to sober you up. I pushed Martha back and out and said, “I think we ought to go someplace else to sleep tonight.” Now, this was in the days before ATMs, it was in the days before a taxicab would take a credit card. And we had spent every penny of that five hundred dollars at the restaurant. We had one dear friend who lived up on Seventy-fifth Street, and we knew that we could always stay with him—but the only way that we were going to get there was to walk. We turned around on Broome Street, and we started the long march at one in the morning, up to Seventy-fifth and First.

  And yet the night held a sense of epiphany about it, at the same time. The oscillations of inside and outside, of up-high and down-low, of suit-buying elations and trouser-losing deflations, that had been the rhythm of our first five years in New York seemed more settled, almost touched the edge of the serene. Because I suddenly realized what I had failed to in all that time in New York. And that is that we are the mice. The mice (or the cockroaches, or any other pest) are not the invaders—we were ourselves the country mice who’d chosen to come to New York. No one asked us here, no one had shown us in; so we simply have to struggle and fight for our little crumb of comfort, as the mice do. We would never escape the mice. We might never scale the Fitzgeraldian mountain. But we were here. We were here as the mice were here. And I knew, at that time, that I was never going to find my trousers again. I also knew that, if the mice had our loft, we, in some way that could not now be taken from us, now had New York. We didn’t sleep that night. We walked—no, we scurried—up the avenues, like mosquitoes fleeing New Jersey, like mice coming home.

  11

  Wanderings

  When you first come to New York, you hardly notice the change of seasons: spring flows into summer and the gray autumn into grim winter and then back to spring with scarcely a mark, a flutter, in your mind. You’re too busy, and too driven, to sense the seasons, whose simplest signals—the accumulation of fallen leaves on the sidewalk I knew from my childhood in Philadelphia, the accumulation of white snow on the streets I knew from our youth in Montreal—were anyway hardly to be seen.

  Gray streets under gray skies through gray months in gray weather. I used to joke that they called the clubbiest restaurant in town “The Four Seasons” because it was the only way a certain kind of New Yorker could be made even marginally aware of what the seasons were—could even tell that there were seasons at all. You looked at the menu, and it told you.

  “The world here looks gray now because it is gray,” Martha would say to me, stubbornly, when I grew melancholy at the change. Yet, as life in the city went on, you did become more acutely aware of it—the length of the summer, the dreary year’s beginning, which stretches from January to April and the first stirrings of baseball season. That first week of January, when all the Christmas trees in the city are thrown, denuded of glory, into piles in the gutter, like plague victims, waiting to be carted away. There’s something inhuman and chilling about the ritual. All of these beautiful evergreens that scarce three weeks ago had been the centerpieces of parties and festivities in every apartment and loft in the city, so that you could see them in every window, taking Joe Mitchell’s rule of the second story and extending it out to Epiphany: look up and where, in the normal run of the year, everything seems clouded, there was a tree, with its own cloud of lights upon it. And then, suddenly, every one of them just tossed aside: stripped, denuded, disgraced, discarded. For the first five years, when the trees must, in truth, have been piling up on the street outside the Blue Room, I didn’t notice them. When they must have cluttered the curbsides where I searched forlornly for my pants, I didn’t see them.

  But now I did.

  And you began to register those darker notes—small ones at first, but then you saw that the city was filling up with larger ones. The “homeless crisis” was now impossible not to see every day. We were told by the experts that homelessness reflected medications untaken and shelters unvis
ited as much as poverty unrelieved. Nonetheless, you recognized, with what humanity you had, that it was deeply wrong that a city that celebrated wealth to the degree that this one did should be able to endure so easily the presence of so many people who had nothing at all.

  One bitter cold February night, when Martha and I were walking home from a movie theater on Houston Street, we noticed a man opening the front of a newspaper vending machine. Then he curled himself up into a ball inside and shut the door behind him. It was an act both of contortion achieved and of comfort sought, apartment hunting in another dimension of desperation. We had lived for three years in a place not much bigger by local standards, but this was different. It was an image, once seen, that could never leave you. Those images began to crowd all around.

  Toward the end of the decade, I felt for the first time, among all the lights, a certain sadness, even a kind of darkness in our own days. Our darkness was not the good melodramatic darkness so useful in fiction and films: needles and knives and betrayals and affairs. It was a smaller darkness of compressions and anxieties and the sheer exhaustion attendant on doing more things than the day can quite bear. The twoness that had been our unquestioned faith—the easy double faith that no room was too small to share, no city too big to conquer—began, not to fade, no, not that, but to tear a bit. It frayed around the edges of the hem, as happens to pants worn too long, if you have them.

  For Martha this absence was more painful. I had not been aware—or had not chosen to be aware—of how much she missed the garden of the house where she had grown up in Montreal, how the grayness that I still sometimes reveled in, street upon street, seemed oppressive to her.

  Work divided us, and the things that united us—going to dinner parties, attending openings, all that—divided us, too, in another way, since it broke the spell of shared fantasy that had supported us in the Blue Room, the belief that, by willing an imagination alive, you could will a world into being. It was not that there was less love in the room, but there was more static in the signal; the purity of emotion that we had sought and found, however ludicrous and absurd and even delusional, was passing.

  The one analgesic I found was walking through the city, over and over. The two great technological gifts of the eighties were the Walkman and the hyper-developed sneaker, which, together, turned walking into an all-encompassing emotional activity. For a long time in the 1980s, I seemed to do nothing but walk around Manhattan. The modern sneaker, rising from Nike and Adidas, constructed with more architecture inside than most apartments, now allowed even the flat-footed to stride, Hermes-like, on what felt like cushioned air.

  And then the Walkman made every block your own movie. Just as the period of the first flâneurs falls exactly between the rise of gas street lighting, which opened the city to twenty-four-hour idling, and the onset of the automobile, which made cities loud again, so walking in the 1980s lay right between the invention of the Walkman, which suddenly neutralized the noise of the cityscape, and the onset of the iPhone, which replaced isolation-booth serenity with our now frantic, forever-on-guard-ness.

  I had my Walkman plugged into my head everywhere I went, listening to Paul McCartney (the soft Paul McCartney of the time, when he would put out a new record every year that had two good songs among a flutter of fill) or Stevie Wonder or, most often, James Taylor and Sting. A few years later, in the early nineties, when Bret Easton Ellis published American Psycho, it was disconcerting to discover that the cold-blooded Wall Street serial killer had the same tastes in music I did. Ellis’s point, I think, was that “soft” music was the soundtrack to hard passions, that, whereas honest-to-God death metal was at least honest, and so purgative, in its violent message, the Phil Collinses and Stings of the world kept their murderous rage beneath a façade of sweet tunefulness. I didn’t believe it. The sweet is often simply sweet, and though sweet and bitter together are a better solution than either apart, when forced to choose one or the other, only the distraught take the bitter.

  You could walk anywhere then. Saturday all day, Sunday all day, I’d tramp through the Lower Manhattan neighborhoods. The differences, architectural and social, between TriBeCa and SoHo and the Lower East Side, to name only contiguous areas, were distinct and vivid and nameable then: cast-iron buildings shading off into old industrial egg- and paper-carton factories sweetly interrupted by small triangular parks, and then, edging over, as you walked east, into poor-law tenements, the new frontier being reclaimed by painters. Saturday mornings I would set off and walk all day, and achieve a feeling of happiness—which is, always, some kind of unearned release achieved unawares through absorption—in a way that I haven’t felt before or since. SoHo in the eighties was the finest place for walking there could have been, not only architecturally beautiful but, by accident, still beautifully composed: illuminated sidewalks still functionally illuminated the basements beneath, while the pioneering businesses were as chic but widely spaced as rocks in a Japanese garden—a single one-room restaurant with a handwritten menu outside, a block of old businesses, the odd charcuterie, a sole Korean deli for the whole neighborhood. At twilight you walked, so to speak, from campfire to campfire, with beautiful darkness in between.

  I loved those walking Saturdays, began to look forward to them with an intensity that belied their simple aimlessness. I would walk up Mercer Street, the most beautiful and mysterious of SoHo streets—optically, if not actually, bounded on either end by the exclamation points of the two most romantic of all New York skyscrapers, the Chrysler Building at the far northern end and the Woolworth Building to the south. My official reason for walking so often and so long was to get to the gym: I had joined a “health club” that had a slightly sad mirror-and-rubber-plant décor, “like Cheryl Tiegs’s last marriage,” Martha said. Like every other member of our generation, I biked and I lifted and I steamed and I showered after. But I used the gym merely as a destination. I liked to walk up Lafayette Street for its own sake.

  What was I searching for on those walks? What was it? Sometimes I could start walking at ten in the morning and not come back until six or seven at night—though my arms would always be filled with beautiful food that I had found at the Union Square Greenmarket, just coming into its own then, or at Dean & DeLuca. I would cook, and on Saturday nights we would listen to Sid Mark’s four hours of Sinatra on the FM radio. (He, and it, had become the subject of my first “Talk of the Town” story for The New Yorker, eccentric obsessions proving their value.) There was still something so different, so perturbed about that moment in our New York evolution. And all I could think was that I was still trying to do what wiser and older walkers had done, too, and that was to reconnect to my own aspirations through the simple hard physical act of perambulating, trying to remember what things meant by walking past where things were.

  I began, graduate student that I still was at heart—Chekhov says somewhere that he spent a lifetime knouting the peasant out of himself; I have spent the same lifetime flogging the graduate student out, but he always comes back, as did Chekhov’s peasant; he’s his own Lopakhin—to read about walking in New York even as I was walking in New York, to define the peculiarly New York contribution to the meanings of walking. There was Alfred Kazin—whom I actually met once, and didn’t know whom I was meeting, fool that I was; had I met him only a few years later, I might have gotten something as useful as what I took from Joe Mitchell. (It isn’t whom we meet in life that matters, it’s when we meet them.)

  Rereading the great New York walkers, you find one note that eluded the cynic-contemplatives of Paris: in New York, walking, even without companions, can still be an expression of companionship, of expansive connection; a happy opening out to an enlarged civic self rather than a narrowing down to a contemplative inner one; a way of scooting toward the American Over-Soul, in high-tops.

  It starts with Walt. Whereas the Parisian poet-walkers of his time walk to take it all apart, dissect the scene, find the skull beneath the street lamps, Whitman walks to ta
ke it all in, see what’s up, get the life of the city right. Walking in New York, Whitman says, leaves him “enrich’d of soul—you give me forever faces.” Whitman is always walking through the city. “Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine,” he tells us of his walks, and then that “I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it,” which says something about the state of the waters then. Making his way down the streets, leaping into the Hudson: those are Whitman’s promenades. He seeks not a glimpse inside his own mind but connection: “Manhattan crowds…with varied chorus…Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.” This makes him a man of boats and bridges as much as of boulevards; his New York is as much Brooklyn as it is Manhattan. (And there’s his ferry, connecting them.)

  Kazin, whose 1951 A Walker in the City, heavily haunted by Whitman, remains, I discovered too late to tell him, the best book ever written about New York on foot, is all about going somewhere. Kazin uses walking as a metaphor for ambition and escape; his is a study in how ambitious kids can ascend on foot from the provinces just across the bridge. He was walking all the time because he was getting the hell out of Brownsville, and couldn’t afford a taxi. You could take the subway—Moss Hart in Act One writes of taking the subway—but Kazin prefers to walk, because the subway is one of the chief things he is escaping from. (When Moss Hart escaped from it, too, he took taxis, Broadway hits being more helpful in that aim than Partisan Review pieces.)

  As Whitman is walking through, Kazin is walking to and toward. He’s going somewhere with every step. (When he retreats to Brownsville, it is to see how far he’s gone.) Yet we find in both Whitman and Kazin a note of simple delight in the pure chance of walking in New York, what Kazin calls the walking that supplies “a happy, yet mostly vague and excited feeling.” Whatever else we walk to accomplish, we always walk in New York to randomize our too neatly gridded city existence. You go where your feet take you. Buses take routes and even subways have schedules, but everyone on foot goes where they want to.