At the Strangers' Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  There is little room to walk amid the shoppers. This is, of course, a universal and not entirely to be mourned truth about New York. What changes is not the city—some twenty-something is even now walking the no longer ample or hilly Brooklyn, and writing it down. No, what changes is us. We start walking outdoors to randomize our experience of the city, and then life comes to randomize us. We decided at the end of the decade to begin to try to have children, and children are the greatest of randomizers: they’re like great abstract pictures, in that you know they must mean something, but the meaning takes the form of random-seeming splashes and improvised moments. They make walking unnecessary; we just circle them. Our walking ends as theirs begins.

  And then, coming back years later, we know that even our cells have begun to go random on us, producing small failures of replication that mark our surface. We are made for walking, but we are not very good at it; our backs and arches, like querulous Cabinet ministers, at first complain, and then resign. Footsore, we sit down and stay there, until, eventually, we leave the room, feet first, hoping only to be remembered within another head. When you walk in SoHo now, there are still no flowers beneath your feet, and the open basements below the illuminated sidewalks are invisible.

  Epilogue

  Not long after the last party, Martha decided that she wanted to leave New York, which had passed from enticement to encumbrance, and have a child. Since she did, I did, too. We began to revisit an older dream of going to France. Professionally, life had become mercifully simple. I had sold a piece to The New Yorker. Then I had sold another, and another, and then they had hired me to write about the city for the old “Talk of the Town” department, carefully caricatural reporting on the eccentrics of the city and their hidden rabbit holes, five years of pure bliss spent in anonymity, learning that hard craft of exacting wildness. After that, I did go to Paris and write and then came home and wrote about liberal civilization and my children, sometimes conflating the two.

  And almost forty years after our arrival in New York I look up and realize I have spent my entire adult life doing exactly what I wanted to do and it still feels as if I hadn’t done it. How this happens I’m not sure, except that I am sure it is a universal emotion: accomplishing something longed for never feels like an accomplishment, only an accommodation, one that others have made for you and that you have made for others. The brightest star on Broadway feels herself up there on sufferance and only for now. Certainly, the feelings that we anticipate will crowd around us once we’ve accomplished an ambition are never the feelings we get. (I’m sure that even Maxie’s museum was not the unalloyed blessing that he had imagined it would be.) The feelings we get are the same feelings that got us there.

  In me, the feelings remained the same urge to work in order to live. To “live,” in the raw sense that pushed me from Frick to MoMA to GQ back in the early eighties, the urge to make enough money to pay rent and buy groceries and keep the girl (or keep four people and a dog and a bird now). When Dick Avedon and I took one last trip together in 2004—he would die after a fall a few days later in Texas, taking one more portrait as he did—he said, “We’re providing for our families,” and for a moment we were just two Jewish gents in a cabana in Margate some lost summer, grunting, providing.

  But to live in another way, too. We write in order not to have passed by in vain. We write to offer proof of life, as the G-men say when they demand a photo of the kidnapped holding a newspaper, and as the kidnappers intend when they send an ear or a finger in return. Proof of life is what we traffic in as writers, before we traffic in ideas or even in emotions, even if our body parts get lost or mangled along the way. We like to say that the end of writing is connection, but the starting point is simple affirmation. We have left a trace. The book, shut closed on the tale, but bearing a title and the author’s name on its spine, is consoling in itself. I passed this way, and left this here.

  At least, the means of life were apparent, even if its meaning was as clouded as ever. I was writing, and it was all I did, all day long and most of the night. The great struggle from “but” to “and,” from contention to inclusion—an essayist trying to make the shapes of the sentences themselves embody a liberal view of life—went on every day. It still does. The shapes will never be as perfectly pregnant as they ought to be, but they grow shapelier. Writers are sentenced to their sentences, which sometimes set them free.

  It was just as the eighties turned into the nineties, when we were already spiritually packing to leave, that I finally got a copy of the complete Rodgers & Hart—a deluxe new edition from Knopf—with Lorenz Hart’s lyrics of “The Blue Room,” complete with a long explanatory verse that never gets sung. “Read the little blueprints,” the singer urges his bride. “Here’s your mother’s room. / Here’s your brother’s room. / On the wall are two prints. / Here’s the kiddies’ room, / Here’s the biddy’s room, / Here’s a pantry lined with shelves, dear. / Here I’ve planned for us / Something grand for us, / Where we two can be ourselves, dear.” The lyrics run and only then comes the familiar words “We’ll have a blue room….”

  It wasn’t a little basement room where two people could live in seclusion! It was a small study off some enormous West Side apartment, the kind of apartment that was stuffed with in-laws and kids, a charming library where you could retreat when stressed! It was a one-percenter’s perk, a rich man’s luxury, not a starting couple’s dream. It was a song of the Strunskys’ Manhattan. I had gotten it completely wrong.

  And then, not too long after that, I happened upon a biography of Issa, the Japanese poet whose beautiful little haiku I had taken with me on the 5 train when we went to be married. “The world of dew is / a world of dew, / but even so.” I had read it as a rueful admission of the possibility of pleasure even as one accepted the transitory nature of existence….In fact, his life was more eventful and more tragic than I had imagined. He had married and had a three-year-old daughter, Sato, who was the light of his life, and who had died of smallpox. It was not a poem of rueful, “mindful” celebration. It was a poem of pure grief: yes, everything passes, but not this, no, this should not have passed for me. The truer translation read: “The world is a dewdrop world. Yes…but.” There: the shameless little ellipsis, which I offered the GQ fragrance editor, put in the service of the unimaginable pain.

  Just before we left for Paris, we walked back to the Blue Room, for sentimental reasons, one last look, and noticed what I had never noticed in all the years we lived on East Eighty-seventh Street. The single biggest sign on the street, the single most imposing neighbor directly alongside our basement room at 340 East Eighty-seventh was…a funeral home. The Walter B. Cooke funeral home, at 352 East Eighty-seventh. We had lived right beside it for all that time, in the valley of the shadow of death. Mourners must have been going in and out all day—bodies must have been going in and out all day! Stiffs, conveyed feet-first inside as we read to each other aloud, and then embalmed as we made toast and coffee and love—and I had never noticed any of it. It was right there, right next door, mortality itself, to remind young lovers as it does the shepherds in Poussin’s painting Et in Arcadia Ego….The truth is that young lovers are too busy looking at each other to look at the world. The Arcadian shepherds, if they are having fun, never look at the inscription on the tomb, at the signs of mortality, even when they are right next door, under a red awning, in a townhouse with red shutters and a giant sign that says “Funeral Home.”

  I had managed to get every single important thing wrong: the size and nature of the Blue Room, the meaning of the poem, the sentiment of the song, the purpose of life, the presence of death. It was time to begin.

  But meanwhile—no, no “but,” not even a “Yes…but,” as in Issa, just an “and.” And meanwhile, at least we were still married, and there were many mornings when, as in the Blue Room, I couldn’t see her for seeing her, couldn’t tell Martha’s face from my eyes upon it. I hope I never shall.

  Acknowledgments

>   Many of the stories in this book I first told onstage for the Moth, the matchless story-telling group that has become such an essential part of my imaginative life, as it has become essential to New York life in general. I thank all of the men and, mostly, women of the Moth, and especially my friend and director Catherine Burns.

  Some other stories in this book first appeared, often in very different form, in The New Yorker. My editors there, to whom I am forever grateful, included Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, David Remnick, Charles McGrath, Ann Goldstein, and Henry Finder. And all of the innumerable fact-checkers who were present to nudge and amend get my thanks, too. George Andreou at Knopf, my old stomping, or barking, grounds, turned these stories into a book. I thank him, yet again, for doing that.

  There are too many friends and colleagues from the past and present to name, but I do want to nod, briskly and inadequately, to Alec Wilkinson and Louis Menand. It was Alec who was my first and favorite companion into the mysteries of a wild exactitude, and Luke Menand who, with Emily Abrahams, became the first to encourage me to explore this dubious territory of my life for a book—chiefly I suspect because they had heard the stories of lost pants and keys so often around the table that they wanted to see them permanently retired between covers, as one sends aging parents to Florida. I thank them both.

  The Gopniks—Myrna, Irwin, Alison, Morgan, Hilary, Blake, and Melissa—are forever the front line of my consciousness. The Gopnik-Parkers—Luke and Olivia—are forever the front line of my conscience. Martha Parker finally got the dedication for what she has been, hour by hour, to my life; but she also gets my thanks for what she added, sentence by sentence, to this book.

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred Publishing, LLC, and Williamson Music for permission to reprint an excerpt of “The Blue Room” from The Girl Friend, words by Lorenz Hart and music by Richard Rodgers. Copyright © 1926 by WB Music Corp. and Williamson Music, copyright renewed. Copyright assigned to Williamson Music and WB Music Corp. for the extended renewal period of copyright in the USA, Canada and BRT Territories. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing, LLC, and Williamson Music.

  Excerpt of “Epistle to a Godson” from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, copyright © 1969 by W.H. Auden and renewed 1997 by Edward Mendelson. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ADAM GOPNIK has been writing for The New Yorker since 1986. He is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays and for Criticism and the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting, and in March 2013, Gopnik was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Republic. He lives in New York City with his wife and their two children.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.