by Paula Guran
I tried earnestly, stumblingly, to absorb what he was telling me. “So all that—I mean, the painting moving and guiding them, and all … ”
Phil gave me that crooked, deceptively candid grin he’s had since we were five years old. “I’m a good artist. I’m really good. But I ain’t that good.”
We sat in silence for a while, while the leaves blew and tumbled past us, and a few sharp, tiny raindrops stung our faces. By and by Phil spoke again, quietly enough that I had to lean closer to hear him. “But we were magic too, in our way. You rounding up every single map between here and Yonkers, and me … ” He hunched over, arms folded on his knees, the way he still does without realizing it. “Me at that damn easel, brush in one hand, gas-station map in the other, trying to make art out of the New Jersey Turnpike. Trying to make all those highways and freeways and Interstates and Tennessee and Georgia come alive for a family of mythological, nonexistent … hour after goddam miserable, backbreaking, cockamamie hour, and that San Juan candle dropping wax everywhere … ”
His voice trailed off into the familiar disgusted mumble. “I don’t know how I did it. Beagle. Don’t ask me. All I knew for sure was, you can’t let centaurs wander around lost in the Bronx—you can’t, it’s all wrong—and there I was.”
“It’ll get them to Mexico,” I said. “I know it will.”
“Yeah, well.” The grin became a slow, rueful smile, less usual. “The weird thing, it’s made me … I don’t know better, but just different, some way. I’m never going to have to do anything like that again, thank God—and I bet I couldn’t. But there’s other stuff, things I never thought about trying before, and now it’s all I’m doing in my head, right now—my head’s full of stuff I have to do, even if I can’t ever get it right. Even though.” The smile faded, and he shrugged and looked away. “That’s them. They did that.”
I turned my coat collar up around my face. I said, “I read a story about a boy who draws cats so well that they come to life and fight off demons for him.”
“Japanese,” Phil said. “Good story. Listen, don’t tell anybody, not even Jake and Marty. It gets out, they’ll want me to do all kinds of stuff, all the time. And magic’s not an all-the-time thing, you’re not ever entitled to magic—not ever, no matter how good you are. Best you can do—all you can do—is make sure you’re ready when it happens. If.”
His voice had grown somber again, his eyes distant, focusing on nothing that I could recognize. Then he brightened abruptly, saying, “Still got the brushes, anyway. There’s that. Whatever comes next, there’s the brushes.”
Weston offers customized insider tours of New York, but he never wants to take the tourists down to the unfinished city projects—tunnels, aborted subway stations, abandoned spaces—underneath the city he loves.
WESTON WALKS
KIT REED
When your life gets kicked out from under you like a chair you thought you were standing on, you start to plan. You swear: Never again. After the funeral Lawrence Weston sat in a velvet chair that was way too big for him while the lawyer read his parents’ will out loud. He didn’t care about how much he was getting; he only knew what he had lost and that he would do anything to keep it from happening again.
He was four.
Like a prince in the plague years, he pulled up the drawbridge and locked his heart against intruders. Nobody gets into Weston’s tight, carefully furnished life, and nobody gets close enough to mess up his heart.
Now look.
When your money makes money you don’t have to do anything— so nothing is what Weston ordinarily does, except on Saturdays, when he comes out to show the city to you. It isn’t the money—don’t ask how much he has—he just needs to hear the sound of a human voice. He lives alone because he likes it, but at the end of the day that’s exactly what he is. Alone.
It’s why he started Weston Walks.
He could afford an LED display in Times Square but he sticks to three lines in The Village Voice: “New York: an intimate view. Walk the city tourists never see.”
He’ll show you things you’ll never find spawning upstream at Broadway and Forty-second Street or padding along Fifth Avenue in your puffy coats. This is the insider’s walking tour.
Nobody wants to be an outsider, so you make the call. It’s not like he will pick up. His phone goes on ringing in some place you can’t envision, coming as you do from out of town. You hang on the phone, humming “pick up, pick up, pick up.” When his machine takes your message, you’re pathetically grateful. Excited, too. You are hooked by Weston’s promise: Tailored to your desires.
What these are, he determines on the basis of a preliminary interview conducted over coffee at Balthazar, on him—or at Starbucks, on you— depending on how you are dressed, and whether he likes you well enough to spend the day with you, in which case he’ll let you pay. He is deciding whether to take you on. No matter how stylish your outfit—or how tacky—if he doesn’t like what he hears, he will slap a hundred or a twenty on the table at Balthazar or Starbucks, depending, and leave you there. It’s not his fault he went to schools where you learn by osmosis what to do and what not to wear. It’s not your fault that you come from some big town or small city where Weston would rather die than have to be. Whatever you want to see, Weston can find, and if you don’t know what that is and he decides for you, consider yourself lucky. This is an insider tour!
You’re itching to begin your Weston Walk, but you must wait until the tour is filled, and that takes time. Weston is very particular. At last! You meet on the designated street corner. You’re the ones with the fanny packs, cameras, monster foam fingers, Deely Bobbers, Statue of Liberty crowns on the kids—unless you’re the overdressed Southerner or one of those razor-thin foreigners in understated black and high-end boots. Weston’s the guy in black jeans and laid-back sweater, holding the neatly lettered sign.
He is surprisingly young. Quieter than you’d hoped. Reserved, but in a good way. Nothing like the flacks leafleting in Times Square or bellowing from tour buses on Fifth Avenue or hawking buggy rides through Central Park. He will show you things that you’ve never seen before, from discos and downtown mud baths nobody knows about to the park where your favorite stars rollerblade to the exclusive precincts of the Academy of Arts and Letters—in the nosebleed district, it’s so far uptown—to the marble grand staircase in the Metropolitan Club, which J. P. Morgan built after all the best clubs in the city turned him down.
Notice that at the end Weston says good-bye in Grand Central, at Ground Zero, or the northeast corner of Columbus Circle—some public place where he can shake hands and fade into the crowd. You may want to hug him, but you can’t, which is just as well because he hates being touched. By the time you turn to ask one last question and sneak in a thank-you slap on the shoulder, he’s gone.
He vanishes before you know that you and he are done.
You thought you were friends, but for all he knows, you might follow him home and rip off his Van Gogh or trash his beautiful things; you might just murder him, dispose of the body, and move into his vacant life. Don’t try to call; he keeps the business phone set on silent. It’s on the Pugin table in his front hall, and if you don’t know who Pugin was, you certainly don’t belong in his house.
The house is everything Weston hoped. Meticulously furnished, with treasures carefully placed. A little miracle of solitude. Leaving the upper-class grid at venerable St. Paul’s and Harvard was like getting out of jail. No more roommates’ clutter and intrusions, no more head-on collisions with other people’s lives. He sees women on a temporary basis; he’ll do anything for them, but he never brings them home, which is why it always ends. It’s not Weston’s fault he’s fastidious. Remember, he’s an orphaned only child. To survive, he needs everything perfect: sunlight on polished mahogany in his library, morning papers folded and coffee ready and housekeeper long gone, no outsiders, no family to badger him; they all died in that plane crash when he was four.
He spends days at his computer, although he deletes more than he types, lunches at a club even New Yorkers don’t know about, hunts treasure in art galleries and secondhand bookstores, can get the best table wherever he wants, but girls?
He’s waiting for one who cares about all the same things.
Too bad that Wings Germaine, and not the first tourist he booked, the one with the lovely phone voice, whom he loved on sight at the interview, shows up for the last-ever Weston Walking Tour. While thirteen lucky tourists gather at the subway kiosk on Seventy-second at Broadway, Wings is waiting elsewhere and for unstated reasons—down there.
Weston has no idea what’s ahead. It’s a sunny fall Saturday, light breeze, perfect for the classic Central Park walk, so what could be easier or more convenient? It’s a half block from his house.
All he has to do is collect his group outside the kiosk, where they are milling with vacant smiles. They light up at the sight of his neatly lettered placard. Grinning, he stashes it in the back of his jeans, to be used only when for some unforeseen reason he loses one of them.
A glance tells him this is a Starbucks bunch. With their cameras and sagging fanny packs, they wouldn’t be comfortable at chic old Café des Artistes, which is right around the corner from his house. It’s not their fault their personal styles are, well, a bad match. But they are. He’s one short, which bothers him. Where is that girl he liked so much? Too bad he has to move on, but maybe she’ll catch up. Nice day, nice enough people, he thinks—with the possible exception of the burly tourist in the black warm-up jacket with the Marine Corps emblem picked out in gold, who walks with his shoulders bunched, leaning into a scowl.
Never mind. It’s a beautiful day, and Weston is in charge. Happy and obedient, his tourists trot past the spot where John Lennon died and into the park on a zigzag, heading for the east side, where the Metropolitan Museum bulks above the trees like a mastodon lumbering away. He keeps up a lively patter, spinning stories as his people smile blandly and nod, nod, nod, all except the man with the scowl, who keeps looking at his watch.
Weston looks up: Ooops. Like a cutting horse, his ex-marine has the herd heading into a bad place.
Time to get out of here. He’ll walk them south on Fifth, point out houses owned by people he used to know. “All right,” he says brightly, “time to see how the rich people live.”
“Wait.” The big marine fills the path like a rhino bunched to charge. “You call this the insider tour?”
Smile, Weston. “Didn’t I just … ”
He points to a gap in the bushes; Weston knows it too well. “TAKE US THE FUCK INSIDE.”
No! Behind those bushes, a gash in the rocks opens like a mouth. He can’t go back! Weston struggles for that tour-guide tone. “What would you like to see?”
“Tunnels.”
The ground underneath the park is laced with unfinished city projects—tunnels, aborted subway stations, all closed to them; Weston has researched, and he knows. “Oh,” he says, relieved, “then you want City Spelunking Tours. I have their number and … ”
“Not those. The ones real people dug. Nam vets. Old hippies.”
“There aren’t any—”
The big man finishes with a disarming grin. “Crazies like me. I have buddies down there.”
“There’s nothing down there.” Weston shudders. He’s a client; don’t offend. “That’s just urban legend, like a lot of other things you think you know. Now, if you like legends, I can take you to Frank E. Campbell’s, where they have all the famous funerals, or the house where Stanford White got shot by Harry K. Thaw… . ”
“No. DOWN!” The renegade tourist roars like a drill sergeant, and the group snaps to like first-day recruits. “Now. Moving out!”
Weston holds up his placard, shouting, “Wait!”
Too late. Like a pack of lemmings, the last-ever Weston Walking Tour falls in behind the big man.
They are heading into a very bad place. No, Weston doesn’t want to talk about it. He waves his arms like signal flags. “Wrong way! There’s nothing here!”
The marine whirls, shouting, “You fucking well know it’s here.”
The hell of it is, Weston does. He is intensely aware of the others in his little group: the newlyweds, the dreary anniversary couple, the plump librarian and the kid in the Derek Jeter shirt, the others are watching with cool, judgmental eyes. In spite of their cheap tourist claptrap and bland holiday smiles, they are not stupid people; they’re fixed on the conflict, eager to see something ordinary tourists don’t see. The authority of their guide is at issue. They are waiting to see how this plays out. There is an intolerable pause.
“Well?”
One more minute and the last Weston Walking Tour will die of holding its breath.
If you knew what Weston knew, you would be afraid.
His only friend at St. Paul’s vanished on their senior class trip to the city. One minute weird Ted Bishop was hunched on the steps of the Museum of Natural History, shivering under a long down coat that was brown and shiny as a cockroach’s shell and zipped to the chin on the hottest day of the year. Then he was gone.
Last winter Weston ran into Bishop on Third Avenue, with that same ratty coat leaking feathers and encrusted with mud. It was distressing; he did what he could. He took him into a restaurant and bought him hot food, looked away when his best friend stuffed everything he couldn’t devour into his pockets with the nicest smile. “I went crazy. I hid because I didn’t want you to know.”
“I wouldn’t have minded.” Weston’s stomach convulsed.
“At first I was scared but then, Weston. Oh!”
It was terrifying, all that naked emotion, so close. He shrank, as if whatever Ted had was catching.
“Then they found me.” Bishop’s pale face gleamed. “Man, there’s a whole world down there. I suppose you think I’m nuts.”
“Not really.” Weston reached for a gag line. “I thought you’d gotten a better offer.”
“I did!” Ted lit up like an alabaster lamp. “One look and I knew: These are my people. And this is my place! You have to see!”
“I’ll try.” He did; he followed the poor bastard to the entrance—it’s right behind these bushes, he knows—and stopped… . “Wait.”
… and heard Ted’s voice overlapping, “Wait. I have to tell them you’re coming. You will wait for me, right?”
Weston wanted to be brave, but he could not lie. “I’ll try.”
He couldn’t stop Ted, either. The tunnel walls shifted behind his friend as if something huge had swallowed him in its sleep. Its foul breath gushed out of the hole; Weston heard the earth panting, waiting to swallow him. Forgive him, he fled.
Awful place, he vowed never to … But they are waiting. “Okay,” he says finally, plunging into the bushes like a diver into a pool full of sharks. “Okay.”
With the others walking up his heels, Weston looks down into the hole. It’s dark as death. Relieved, he looks up. “Sorry, we can’t do it today. Not without flashlights. Now—”
“Got it covered.” The veteran produces a bundle—halogen miner’s lamps on headbands. Handing them out, he says the obvious, “Always … ”
Weston groans. “Prepared.”
He stands by as his tourists drop into the tunnel, one by one. If they don’t come out, what will he tell their families? Will they sue? Will he go to jail? He’s happy to stand at the brink mulling it, but the marine shoves him into the hole. “Your turn.”
He drops in after Weston, shutting out daylight with his bulk. The only way they can go is down.
All his life since his parents died, Lawrence Weston has taken great pains to control his environment. Now he is in a place he never imagined. Life goes on, but everything flies out of control. He is part of this now, blundering into the ground.
Weston doesn’t know what he expects: rats, lurking dragons, thugs with billy clubs, a tribe of pale, blind mutants, or a bunch of gaudy neo-hippies in sordid underground squats. In
fact, several passages fan out from the main entrance, rough tunnels leading to larger caverns with entrances and exits of their own; the underground kingdom is bigger than he feared. He had no idea it would be so old. Debris brought down from the surface to shore up the burrow sticks out of the mud and stone like a schoolchild’s display of artifacts from every era. The mud plastering the walls is studded with hardware from the streetcar/gaslight 1890s, fragments of glass and plastic from the Day-Glo skateboard 1990s, and motherboards, abandoned CRTs, bumpers from cars that are too new to carbon date. The walls are buttressed by four-by-fours, lit by LED bulbs strung from wires, but Weston moves along in a crouch, as though the earth is just about to collapse on his head—which might be merciful, given the fumes. Although fresh air is coming in from somewhere, there is the intolerable stink of mud and small dead things, and although to his surprise this tunnel, at least, is free of the expected stink of piss and excrement, there is the smell that comes of too many people living too close together, an overpoweringly human fug.
At first Weston sees nobody, hears nothing he can make sense of, knows only that he can’t be in this awful place.
Dense air weighs on him so he can hardly breathe—the effluvia of human souls. Then a voice rises in the passage ahead, a girl’s bright, almost-festive patter running along ahead of his last-ever Weston Walking Tour, as though she and the hulking marine, and not Weston, are in charge.
Meanwhile the mud walls widen as the path goes deeper. The tunnels are lined with people, their pale faces gleaming wherever he flashes his miner’s lamp, and it is terrifying. The man who tried so hard to keep all the parts of his life exactly where he put them has lost any semblance of control; the orphan who lived alone because it was safest is trapped in the earth, crowded—no, surrounded—by souls, dozens, perhaps hundreds of others with their needs, their grief and sad secrets and emotional demands.
The pressure of their hopes staggers him.
