Heart of the City (24 page)

CLAIRE TOLD Chuck that they should meet on September 26, a Friday, at 1 p.m., on the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building. It was an observation deck.

“I dig it,” Chuck said. “Aerial view. Very groovy.”

Not really, thought Claire. She had picked the city’s tallest building for purely practical reasons: in a bewildering metropolis, the Empire State Building was the only building you couldn’t miss. What’s more, she thought, the observation deck was a kind of fine-grained filter: it could fit only so many people, thus reducing New York’s swarming millions to a manageable group in which two people stood a good chance of finding each other.

She had reason for concern. On her only other visit to Manhattan, a couple of years earlier, a fellow Tougaloo professor who was a New York City native had tried to impress her with an insider’s
tour of the city. But the first day, he accidentally got on the wrong subway and they wound up in God-knows-where. Another day, looking out the window of his family’s apartment, she watched a mother and daughter, maybe six years old, wade into some kind of street fair. A few minutes later, she saw the woman again, frantic. She was shouting, “Has anyone seen my girl?”

If New York confounded its natives, what chance did she and Chuck have? In the Empire State Building, Claire, her scientific mind always churning, saw a way to confound New York. By rising above the streets and away from the people, you could actually make the place half navigable.

“Or,” Chuck said, “if you wanted to save on admission, I could just bring my bagpipes and belt out ‘Scotland the Brave’ in the middle of Times Square. In an hour, they’d have my name up in lights:
Pipes
, the new Broadway musical critics are raving about. You could meet me backstage—”

“Chuck, I have to go,” Claire said.

“Look, doll, I’m not too worried about hooking up. My question’s this: you find a nice girl for my friend yet?”

TOM TOLD himself he’d draw a line with Chuck. The big exam was looming, and Tom couldn’t let Chuck colonize the entire weekend. A short visit to the Empire State Building was fine.

Chuck turned up outside Tom’s dormitory a little after noon that Friday, his sleeves rolled up, with the look of a man ready to take Manhattan by storm. Tom told him that they’d have to stop at the Barnard College library first.

“Girl’s school?” Chuck said, grinning.

Tom nodded.

“You dog,” Chuck said. “One date isn’t enough for you? I’ll bet the place is teeming with sweet young things.”

“Actually just dropping off a book,” Tom said.

“Oh, come on, brother, can’t it wait?”

“It’s already five days overdue, and with New York so expensive as it is, I can’t really afford the fines.”

“Tell you what, the extra day’s on me,” Chuck said. “We got girls waiting on a skyscraper.”

“It’ll take a second,” Tom said. “It’s not just the money. It’s exam time. Someone else might need it.”

The detour to Barnard took longer than expected. They got turned around on campus, and then there was a line at the circulation desk. It was nearly 1 p.m. when they boarded the subway, and while transferring to a second train, Tom patted his pants pocket: his wallet was missing. “I must have forgotten it at the library when I paid the fine,” he said, looking down and shaking his head.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Can’t we get it tonight? I’ll spot you.”

“This is New York, Chuck. We better go back now.”

CLAIRE’S BOSS at Brookhaven knocked off early on Fridays to go sailing—the microorganisms in their lab had short life spans, and there was no point starting an experiment so close to the weekend. She slipped out just after he left and boarded the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station. The city was much as she remembered it: big, overcrowded, impersonal. As she crossed Seventh Avenue, a taxi driver didn’t so much as slow down as he whipped in front of her. Then, on West Thirty-third Street, a woman with bulging Macy’s bags over each shoulder elbowed her way through a crush of pedestrians, jabbing Claire in the ribs. No apology. Not a word. People in the Midwest didn’t behave this way. “So sorry,” Claire said, as if willing the words into the other woman’s mouth. But by then the woman was a good halfway down the block.

She was relieved at the sight of the Empire State Building. A few minutes in the city, and she was already eager to escape it—
even if only by means of altitude. With its setbacks, clean lines, and needle-tip mast, the building looked like some precision scientific instrument, a scalpel under operating room lights.

On the observation deck, assailed only by gusts of clean-smelling air, she commanded the city. To the north was Central Park, its lumpy green forms contrasting with the hard bright edges of the surrounding buildings. To the west, the glare of the Hudson River and the smokestacks of New Jersey. And the further south she gazed, the taller and more crowded the buildings, as if all the big boys in the school yard, in order to plot some mischief, had formed a huddle. Just try getting me up here, she thought, looking down at the taxis, yellow ants plying an unsolvable maze.

It was a glorious day—a thermometer she’d seen on her way said seventy degrees. The sun warmed her cheeks, and a north-west breeze lifted her hair. Nearly a thousand feet above the streets, everything was quiet. The trucks and cars were so distant that traffic sounded almost peaceful, like water rounding smooth stones in a stream. She glanced at her watch; it was now past 1:30. Where was Chuck? He was always early, sometimes comically so. If you invited him for dinner, he was liable to show up for lunch. She made a slow lap around the crowded observatory deck, scanning faces. There were mothers hoisting children, old men extending shaky fingers toward the Brooklyn Bridge. In one corner, a man in a rakish suit was pitching a woman backward for a kiss, as if in some classic movie still, while another man—“to the left, so I can fit the Chrysler Building”—took a photograph.

Feeling overwhelmed, Claire went inside the glass enclosure. She wanted to sit someplace where she could watch new arrivals from the elevators. But there were no seats. Even the radiators bore spikes. Management seemed to want you to fill up on views, then get out. Another fifteen minutes passed with no Chuck. Claire walked around the parapet again, then back through the glass enclosure. It was now two, a full hour after they’d planned to meet. Claire took a long breath. Chuck had swashbuckled his
way through the back roads of Europe, she thought, but in New York City he may have finally met his match. She just prayed he wasn’t in Times Square making good on his threat to regale tourists with his “Broadway musical.”

With Chuck, though, anything was possible.

FROM THE subway stop at Herald Square, Tom and Chuck jogged the quarter mile to the Empire State Building. They were still breathing hard—Chuck, wheezing—when they stepped out of the elevator on the eighty-sixth floor. “Thank Jehoshaphat you’re still here,” Chuck said, striding toward a woman standing by the door to the observatory deck. “I’ll let my oldest, best pal Tom here explain why we kept m’lady waiting.”

Tom blushed when the woman turned toward him. She was pretty: tall and slim, with shoulder-length chestnut hair, long legs, and a floral-patterned miniskirt. Shoot, Tom thought, Chuck’s a lucky guy. He even felt a little jealous. In college neither had been a lady’s man. Chuck was overweight and at times overbearing. Tom had a friendly face, but was shy. When it came to girls, they both played in about the same league—or so Tom had thought.

On the observation deck, Tom, squinting into the sun, hemmed and hawed through an explanation and apology.

“You were returning a book to Barnard?” Claire asked, giving him a skeptical look. “You were at a girl’s school?”

“Um, well, you see,” Tom began, “Columbia, as big as it is, has only so many copies of even the most popular books.”

“Right,” Claire said, laughing, but letting her eyes linger. “Whatever you say.”

“So where’s his skirt?” Chuck said to Claire, stepping between them and taking each by the arm.

“Where’s yours, Pipes?” Tom said, a little defensively. “You’re the great Scot of Youngstown.”

“Mellow out, cat, sheesh,” Chuck said. “Slang. Skirt: chick, girl. Where’s Tom’s date?”

“I tried, Chuck,” Claire said. “But I don’t know many people in New York.”

“What about the lab? Must be another eligible lady scientist or two there, right? Women’s lib and all that.”

“Just a middle-aged woman who I’m pretty sure is married.”

“Tom would be okay with that,” Chuck said, squeezing his friend’s shoulder. “Right pal?”

“Hey, look at that horizon,” Claire said. “I wonder how many states you can see from up here?”

Claire, Tom thought, sounded eager to change the subject, as if all this talk of dating had made her uncomfortable. He knew it made
him
uncomfortable.

“Actually,” Tom said, walking to the railing beside her, “on a clear day you can see something like eighty miles. It’s pretty neat. You can see New Jersey and Connecticut, and I think even Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.”

“My goodness, how do you know that?” Claire said.

“Tom’s a
New Yorker
now,” Chuck interjected. “Columbia man. He’s gotten too fancy for his old Ohio friends.”

“At least he’s polite,” Claire said.

“What?” Chuck said, in mock exasperation.

“What do you mean, What?” Claire said.

Tom wasn’t sure what was going on. But he sensed that Chuck may have misrepresented, or at least exaggerated, the nature of his relationship with Claire. It wouldn’t be a first.

“Actually,” Tom said, clearing his throat, “the reason I know about the visibility up here is that the last time I came here I was ten years old.”

“Oh, yeah?” Claire said.

“With my mom and dad. And for weeks before leaving Youngstown, I read books about New York buildings.”

“You must have been beside yourself when you finally got here.”

“Actually,” Tom said, “it was a little disappointing.”

“Really, why?”

“I think the books did a number on my imagination. When they said skyscrapers, I thought they literally scraped the sky, even went up into space. My mom told me I turned to her while we were right about here and said, ‘So it stops here? This is it?’”

“You see what books do to a perfectly good brain?” Chuck said. “Fills it with so much corn that the real world just has to let you down.”

“Come on, Chuck. Leave the poor guy alone.”

After dropping Claire at her hotel that night, Chuck turned to Tom and winked.

“Smoking girl, huh?”

“She seems very nice.”