At the Strangers' Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  “Isn’t that nice,” Shirley said, with barely contained irony.

  “No! Really. I mean photography is my work,” Dick said. “No, really. I do all the covers for Vogue.”

  Shirley’s face, which was cast in a smirk of indulgence, now fell back into alarm. “Uh-huh?” she said, cautiously.

  “No,” Dick went on, oblivious. For he had spotted the problem: they weren’t Vogue readers. “I do all the covers for Mademoiselle, too,” he explained. “And for GQ.” He thought for a moment, as though digging something up from the back of his mind. “I’m Avedon,” he explained—cheerfully, benevolently. Suspicion turned to panic. Michelle and Shirley, scarcely pausing to say goodbye, turned on the madman with the Polaroids and the delusions and made off into the park, like squirrels.

  Dick watched them go. “Ah, fame,” he said. He seemed hurt. But then he looked down. He had the button.

  It was the same constant lesson, even if it came from different teachers: the means of art was just ceaseless labor to get the button right. You took as much trouble on something that no one would see, or know was yours—a single sentence in an anonymous “Talk” story—as you did in the big stuff you hoped to show the world. And the subject of art was always contradiction, an uxorious young husband exposed in casual flirtation, smirking at Shirley while claiming to be sad. Even if you had to invent the contradiction out of passersby in Central Park.

  But such happy encounters were rarer than long solitary wanderings. Walking on streets, walking through neighborhoods—Martha was even launched one night on an odd walk of her own. In 1990 we went to a party, the very last dinner party of the period, where one of the art dealers filled his townhouse with every imaginable figure of the art world and the money world of the period—Jeff Koons and Carl Icahn, Julian Schnabel and Peter Brandt, side by side. It turned out to be a party for a strange occasion—one of the billionaires was going off to prison the next day, and this was his farewell to New York. There were toasts raised to his bad fortune; the unfairness “of what’s called justice in this country” was cursed; the persecution of the very rich (!) defied.

  I was, perhaps, not in the best mind to take the evening in equably. The big show that Kirk Varnedoe and I had been working on for years about the entanglement of popular imagery and modern art had opened, and been much attacked. Nowadays, when I am on the road, it is the single thing that young curators cite most often and approvingly from all my work, proving once again the odd and unexceptional and rather Kiplingesque point that success and failure are so intermingled that they are distinct only at specific, not successive, moments in time. (Rather like modernist art and popular culture, come to think of it.)

  Still, all of the nastier elements of the eighties did seem to have condensed into one storm cloud that night. Everything that was turning ugly in the time was there. The entanglement of art and money was one I could look at with a certain aplomb when I considered it historically, but not so much when I saw the relation between a business culture that had increasingly come to value only what you could grab and exploit, seated side by side with an art culture that had become addicted to the drug of money. You knew that even if there was no definable difference between this relation and the relation of the Medici—who were certainly no more ethical or admirable than the rich people in that room—to the artists of the Florentine Renaissance, still, there was something overheated and weird about it, something that boded no good to anyone, something imbalanced, something fatal, something that no amount of historical perspective could wish away. Something new. Something strange.

  Martha said to me afterward—and I made it the basis for the first work of long fiction that I had ever succeeded in writing, a novella called “The Children of the Party”—that it reminded her of nothing so much as the dinner party at the end of Through the Looking-Glass, that gibbering, nightmare banquet, where everything turns from amusing nonsense into a wild phantasmagoria of appetite and absurdity, the creatures colliding with one another in a completely chaotic atmosphere of formalized horror.

  Alice gets out in the end, back through the mirror in the living room and fireplace. But there was no way that Martha could see of getting out, back through the mirror, going home to the fire and kitten. She got tipsy, which I had never seen happen to her before, and wandered the room. I watched her small figure, in a yellow Alaïa dress, circle the tables—officially, simply looking for the bathroom, but pressing ahead, touring the room, taking in the strange flat conversations and nervous eyes of the guests. At the end, she told me later that night, after she had grown too sick to be in a taxi and I had taken her into a little ATM room on Fifty-seventh Street to recover—one of the little glass cash rooms that had seemed so touching, so thrilling, a New York invention at the beginning of the decade and had now become a place only to escape into, a shelter from the larger storm of money—she had had, through some collision of champagne and chaos, a kind of vision, a waking nightmare.

  She had seen, she said, all of the artists and all of the billionaires, impaled like insects on that hideous, small-town snowflake that had been suspended, a few years before, above the previously pristine and thrillingly efficient intersection of Fifty-seventh and Fifth. (We didn’t know then that it was Donald Trump who had, by legend at least, helped engineer the ominous snowflake, so gross in its proportions and so nakedly needy of its ugly wire supports. It’s hard now to believe that Trump would have spent the money. But it hung, certainly, a piece of gargantuan and essentially suburban ostentation, outside his house.)

  When I close my eyes now, I can still see the vision she communicated to me, of revolution and chaos, the sanctuary defiled, the world gone wrong, and wonder if, in her yellow Alaïa, she had not been given the gift of prophecy by a small and fashion-conscious God.

  But smaller disquieting signs than that large prophecy also appeared. As the eighties turned into the nineties, there came new creatures walking above our heads. After the mosquitoes had come the mice, who raced along the floorboards and squeaked in the walls and, on that one memorable night, suddenly ran out, in formation, from corners in our loft that we didn’t even know were there, sending us in flight from our home.

  With each of these infestations, we had passed through the same emotional stages: first, panic and dismay; then impotent, beseeching phone calls to the landlord; then long nights of one-eyed sleep; the purposeful phone calls to a small exterminating company; and at last—as the traps began to snap on little gray bodies or the poison began to reveal, on the bathroom floor at night, flipped-over brown insect carapaces—an exhausted, vengeful satisfaction.

  Still, nothing in the past had prepared us for the arrival of the rats.

  It happened on a Sunday night. At about twelve-thirty, Martha called me into the bathroom. From high above, in the ventilator shaft, came the sounds of scratching and breathing and animal motion. A few moments later, the sounds migrated, skittering along above the stamped-tin ceiling toward the back door; they included, unmistakably, the sound of confident scrabbling feet—a sound of weight and certainty.

  We spent all of Monday in quaking denial. But on Tuesday morning we called up the other tenants and found out that the people down on the second and third floors had been hearing similar traffic in their walls for a couple of weeks. The city, I should add, had been tearing up some nearby streets for about that long, as part of a protracted and, given the city’s circumstances at the end of the decade, rather loopy project to re-cobble a section of SoHo in order to restore the neighborhood to some imagined condition of nineteenth-century charm. Then, on Wednesday morning, one of our neighbors woke us at around seven. “I saw one!” she wailed. “It was the size of a cat. It ran into the bathroom in the middle of the night, and when we finally worked up the courage to confront it, it was gone, but one of our sponges was torn to pieces.” Other sightings were reported throughout the day. “It was running down the hall,” another neighbor said grimly. “It just walked right down the center of t
he hall. Big as a dog.” Martha and I tried calling the “management agent,” but he was unresponsive, and then we tried calling the city, but the Department of Violations passed us on to the Bureau of Infractions, and it said that we needed to get in touch with the Commission on Intractable Problems, so we finally just called up the exterminating service, which I’ll refer to as NRN, and asked it to send a man over.

  NRN turned out to be an oddly intense, high-morale little business. When we had mice, NRN first sent Paul, a melancholic West Indian man, who told us (with what reliability I can’t say) that he had been the minister of agriculture of a good-sized Caribbean island nation “before the coup.” Then he gravely scattered packets of poison all around the loft, with the air of one conducting a sacred ceremony. The next day, to our surprise, Sam, the boss of NRN, arrived at our door. “I’m worried about Paul,” he explained. “He’s a very good man, but sometimes he’s thinking sugarcane when he should be thinking apartment.” Sam turned out to be a Method exterminator. He stood stock-still in the middle of our loft, head bowed, for what seemed to me a disturbingly long time. “I’m thinking like a mouse,” he whispered at last. “I’m thinking, If I were a mouse, where would I go? Where would I feel safe, trustful in this space?” He even wrinkled his nose from time to time. Then he laid traps and stuffed steel wool in all the crevices he found. We never saw another mouse. Lee Strasberg would have been pleased.

  But when I called about the rats I noticed that even the people at NRN, who were usually pretty breezy about pests, seemed to have a disturbingly healthy respect for them. Ginny, the woman who answered the phone, said flatly, “We’ll have to send Gilbert.” Gilbert turned out to be a gentle, extremely tall man with a dry, pawky sense of humor and a soft, almost lilting voice. I got the key to the basement from the super—we figured that the problem was originating in the basement—and let Gilbert in, and then retreated upstairs. About an hour and a half later, Gilbert came up. “Yeah,” he said. “You got them, all right. You got the big boys. You got the super-rats.”

  “What do you mean, the super-rats?” I asked, brilliantly impersonating a calm person.

  “Well, let’s put it like this.” He thought for a moment. “These rats, if you see one, they look at you like you the problem.”

  Gilbert set some traps in the empty loft next door—huge traps, with wooden backs the size of racquetball paddles—and pumped poison under the floorboards. “Yes,” he said cheerfully. “You won’t be troubled by no mice now. They can’t coexist with these boys. Nobody coexists with these boys. Yes, you got the big boys now.”

  I didn’t want the big boys. Gilbert turned to me as he finished and said, “Now, you shouldn’t be seeing them, but you may hear them at night. They eat this powder as they run along the beams, and then they cry with fear to their mates when they find that they’ve been poisoned.” He imitated the sound of a poisoned rat calling out in lament to its spouse. “Now, that’s a good sound, for you,” he said. “It means we’re turning the tide. You hear that sound, you remember, that’s a good sound for you.” I tried to meet Gilbert’s eyes, since I suspected that there might be a certain amount of Schadenfreude inflecting his professionalism, but when I did they seemed completely earnest. “The one thing is,” he said as he packed his equipment into his cart, “I think you ought to come down the basement sometime. I think if you’re taking responsibility for these boys you ought to see the basement.” All week long, people in the building kept calling for Gilbert’s services, and eventually, he and I became friends. He showed up almost every day to solve one problem or another—somebody had a dead rat for him to remove, or somebody had found a crack in the ceiling on the first floor—and I would follow him from loft to loft. We would talk rat talk and rat lore. “There is the same number of rats in the city as people,” Gilbert might say as he sealed up a rat hole with steel wool and putty. “Same number. You see one of the big boys—maybe that’s you, your rat. It’s a weird kind of thought.” Each afternoon, he ended his work by saying, “I really think you ought to come and see the basement,” or “I’d like to show you that basement,” or just “Someday, we’ll go down to the basement together, and then you’ll understand about the big boys.”

  Then, coming home one afternoon, I saw a brown-snouted creature patrolling outside our building like a sentry. It was the size of a Miata. I watched it march into a crack in the building’s cast-iron façade. Two women, strangers, were walking alongside me. “Did you see that?” one asked the other.

  “That’s my home,” I burst out. “That’s my home.” I don’t think I’d ever been so upset. That evening, I went to see my formidable German psychoanalyst. “So what about rats—what does it mean if you’re afraid of rats?” I asked impatiently.

  “Nothing,” he said calmly. “Rats are not symbolic of anything. They are a fact. They must just be coped with.”

  Facts to cope with. This seemed like useful advice, so the next morning I hired a welding crew to close the crack in the façade; I insisted that the super come along a little later and seal the holes in the bricks in the side of the building with putty; and I called up Gilbert to get him to cast an eye on all this work. When Gilbert arrived, pushing his neat, well-ordered little cart, I showed him everything: how the welders were welding the crack together, how I had the super stuffing the holes. “I think we’re coming along here, Gilbert,” I said.

  Gilbert smiled. “I really want you to come down and see the basement,” he said. I shrugged—I had welders to supervise—and he disappeared. An hour or so later, Gilbert came to get me. “Now you gotta come down to the basement,” he said. “You got to.”

  I looked at Gilbert. I realized that we were entering heavy, Iron John–type territory here. I was scared, and so I said, simply, “Gilbert, will I see dead rats?”

  “No.” He laughed. “I got them in bags—body bags.” He seemed full of an odd kind of gaiety. I screwed up what courage I could, and followed Gilbert down the dark basement stairs.

  What was I expecting? The word “basement” summoned up for me, I suppose, the picture of a rec room—knotty-pine walls, and shag carpeting, and a humming dehumidifier. The basement of our building, though, was right out of the second act of The Phantom of the Opera. One huge room—one huge chamber, really—followed another. Each had a high, vaulted ceiling, supported by a set of vast, imposing cast-iron columns with gloomy Corinthian capitals. “Piranesian”—that is the word I am looking for. Our basement was Piranesian. What could Elisha Sniffen, the architect of the building (his name is in the AIA guide), have been thinking of?

  Gilbert took me on a tour of the labyrinth, and after a lot of twists and turns we came to what I realized was the space just under the sidewalk—I could hear the welders buzzing away, still at work outside. A black Hefty bag was standing on the floor. Gilbert waved his flashlight toward the bag. “I got some one-pounders in there,” he said jovially as he picked up the bag; it sagged with the weight.

  “Now, look,” he said, pointing toward the space under the sidewalk, and I did.

  The space was simply open, below street level, to the underside of the whole street. You peered out and you could see pipes and ducts and the underside of asphalt. You could hear the N train running, over on Broadway, three blocks away.

  “You see!” Gilbert said with uncharacteristic emotion. “That’s why you had to come down to the basement. That stuff, that welding—that is a joke. This place is open to the world! They’re coming in and going up there, and there, and there.” He pointed his flashlight at the top of the basement walls. “Nothing’s been done here since the nineteenth century. My family was slaves the last time somebody come down this basement.” It was an exaggeration, but I got his point.

  “What you’re telling me, Gilbert,” I said finally, “is that there’s nothing to be done. That everything I’m doing is not going to do any good.” I felt sick.

  “No. I am not telling you that,” Gilbert said. “I’m telling you that there’
s no solution. You can’t keep the rats out of your building. It would take twenty thousand dollars’ worth of masonry—it would take a century’s upkeep that somebody forgot all about—to keep the rats out. I’m telling you there’s no solution, but there’s a technique. Did I tell you about the three cons?” I shook my head, helpless. “Okay. The three cons. We got to contain, confine, and convince. We got to contain the rats in one area of the basement, then we got to confine them to one feeding place, then we got to convince them that this is not a happy place for a rat to be. Move them on to the next building. Where there is another basement, just like yours. You can do that. You keep the service, you have me come, and we’ll move them along.”

  Then he showed me some of the darker secrets of his craft. I watched him mix sugar water with poison, and for half an hour we laid out some black plastic trays full of poisoned tuna fish, and then we left the basement.

  The problem receded. Soon, I walked out into the bright sunshine and didn’t see a thing. The cheap welded-iron net in place on the façade of the building looked awful, but it gave my neighbors confidence. Had the rats gone away, really, because of what Gilbert did? Or is it just that the re-cobblestoning work on the street had moved on to the next block?

  Is it even possible, I wonder, that Gilbert’s philosophy of containment, which seemed to me at the time to strike some deep, permanent truth about New York, was marked by a little self-interest? He is, after all, the man who is paid to keep the three cons going. All I know for sure is that I no longer listened so intently for sounds in the middle of the night, or scanned the sidewalk quite so jumpily walking home. Life is different after you have seen the basement.

  I go back to SoHo often, and try to walk those same streets again. Now Mercer Street is stuffed with mall retailers; there’s even a branch of our once-beloved Bloomingdale’s. There are no art galleries. The illuminated sidewalks are often paved over. What’s there below, Gilbert’s open city, has been patched, and the patching has gone on long enough so that it seems permanent, curative. The furtive noises, when they return, are mostly unheard, or bought off.