Heart of the City (36 page)

RETURNING TO New York University after a stroll through Greenwich Village, Sarah Cross felt more excited about the out-of-town visitor she was expecting that evening. Alejandro was from a chapter in her life that now seemed far away, when critics from the newspapers raved about her dancing (a body that was “boneless, weightless,” arms that moved “as if caressing long delicate strands of sea moss” or “swimming through honey”), when she performed at places like the Kennedy Center and toured Europe and South America. Alejandro, a fellow dancer, had introduced himself after a performance in Venezuela, and they had become lovers. Sequestered now in this more ordinary life, Sarah looked forward to a night’s escape. She had
enrolled at NYU that summer to do what she had never managed before: sink roots. Over a professional dance career that began when she was fifteen, she had started—and stopped—college a half dozen times. Now, at twenty-two, she was trying again. She hoped that NYU, her mother’s alma mater, would somehow be different. But would it? She had been in town just a few weeks, and though school was fine, Manhattan seemed altogether too much.

A daughter of the Washington, D.C., suburbs, she struggled to be herself here. Say something friendly to strangers on the street, and they looked at you as if you were either a scam artist or a candidate for a one-night stand.

She couldn’t hide behind that battle-hardened gaze so many New Yorkers wore. Maybe it was because of her sensibilities as a dancer, but she couldn’t deaden herself to the physical energy of people around her. And in Greenwich Village, as she walked along streets like Broadway and Lafayette—robins wheeling overhead, sunshine washing around her like a warm bath—the energy was nearly overwhelming.

DANIEL TOUCHED a handkerchief to his brow and ran his palm over his shirtfront to smooth creases. He paced outside the front door of the first address on his mother’s list, rehearsing an introduction. “Hi, my name is Daniel. I am a chef, but I am learning English. My mom says she knows you. Can you give me a job for two weeks, so I can practice the international language of business?”

It sounded so inane that a laugh escaped his throat. Ridiculous. No doubt New York had a million foreigners like him, all angling for a break. Why should anyone care about his problems? In the lobby, a wary-looking guard behind a semicircular desk asked, “May I help you?” Daniel took off his sunglasses and began to say something, but he was drowned out by a thunder-clap
of hip-hop from a passing car and then a burst of laughter from a group of young women in business suits who were waving key cards to summon an elevator.

“I’m sorry?” the guard said to Daniel, scrunching his face into a mask of incomprehension. “Couldn’t hear a word.”

“Please,” Daniel said, backing away. “It’s no problem.”

He left the building, balled up the list of addresses, and flung it in the first trash bin outside.

SARAH WAS sure Alejandro knew even less Manhattan geography than she did, and she had debated where they might meet without his getting lost. The only conspicuous place near NYU—an easy-to-spot green rectangle on her pocket map—was Washington Square Park.

But Sarah knew from having passed that it was big. It had statues, a fountain, and a set of interlacing paths the length of several city blocks. She had yet to finish her paper for her afternoon Spanish class. But glancing at her watch, she saw she could spare a minute to survey the park; she would settle on a meeting spot, then head to the library to write her paper.

Sarah entered from the north, walking under the white marble arch and glimpsing a carnival of flesh. The greens were so thick with sunbathers that people had to wobble on tiptoe between the bodies to find their towels. Nearby, at the foot of a monument, a shirtless man was strumming a guitar while a contortionist twisted herself into a pretzel. Teenagers on skates flew by so fast that Sarah shuddered. Down a side path, Sarah saw older men bent over tables of chess and young women in bathing suits slathering lotion on one another’s backs. She heard a shriek and wheeled around: a couple on a bench—NYU students?—were tangled up in a kiss.

Sarah reached into her bag for a tube of sunscreen. The energy here was overwhelming, too. But it was different from the kind on the street.

WITH HIS dress shirt untucked, Daniel walked and walked. Down Fifth Avenue. Onto Broadway. Through Union Square. He felt himself in a fever, as though the city and its people were spirits joined in some primeval rite of rebirth. The women, especially. Whenever a lovely one let her eyes linger, he felt electricity streak from his temples to his feet. For just one day, I won’t think about jobs, about school, about the future, he told himself. In sun like this, on streets like this, how could you not live for the moment?

A little after three, his throat dry and his calves pulsing with a pleasant exhaustion, he entered a small grocery. He set a bottle of beer and a couple of crumpled up bills on the counter. The cashier dropped the bottle into a brown bag and handed it back. He took a long sip. He had tried to blot Elena from his mind these past few days, but now thoughts of her returned. They had met when he was thirteen, during a year he’d spent at a high school in Madrid. They fell in love and stayed together for the next decade. But the past couple of years had been unhappy. Growing up had cast a harsher light on their differences. The physical part of their relationship was gone. And with both working long hours to get a leg up in the restaurant industry—Elena worked as an assistant cook—they rarely had time for each other. It felt sometimes like work was just an excuse, a convenient way to avoid confronting their problems. They had quarreled just before Daniel left, and their e-mails during his visit to America were strained. With the beer inside him now, he wondered how she was doing. He wanted to know whether all this craziness was in his head or if their relationship had simply run its course.

He found a pay phone, and with the calling card in his wallet, he dialed France. The walk, the heat, had infused him with a kind of serenity. The phone rang and rang. Then her voice,
faint, foreign, on an answering machine. He left a message that sounded, even to him, distant. Across the street was a park, and at one end a giant marble arch. It reminded Daniel of another arch, and he walked toward it, drinking from his brown bag. The sight of sunbathers and street performers made him feel like an investment banker who had somehow parachuted onto a beach. He was wearing a button-down shirt, slacks, and oxfords in a sea of tank tops, sandals, and swimwear. His untucked shirt made it even worse: people would probably think he’d had too much wine with lunch.

He wanted badly to change. This shirt, these pants—they were not who he was. Passing a hot dog vendor and a sketch artist, he found a seat on a ledge under a tree along the periphery of the central plaza. People wouldn’t notice him here. After the day’s exertion, the beer was making him a little light-headed. He anguished for a moment over what to tell his mother about his aborted job search. Then he reminded himself: not today.

About thirty feet to his right, something caught his eye: a slender woman with a pen and notebook. She was sitting in a lotus position, her back a perfect line. She had a pixie haircut and a tomboyish dusting of freckles. But what struck Daniel was her impeccable posture. Just sitting there, in an act as everyday as reading a book, she had arranged her limbs—effortlessly, it seemed—into a pose worthy of sculpture.

Daniel rose, dodging an in-line skater as he walked to another ledge, just ten feet from the woman. Up close, she seemed both twice as beautiful and twice as unreachable. He was glad now for one part of his wardrobe: his sunglasses. He could admire her undetected.

A FEW steps down one of the curving walks, Sarah sized up the granite likeness of George Washington, robed and serious. Could she meet Alejandro here? Down another path, she considered
the bronze of Gen. Giuseppe Garibaldi, bearded, with flowing hair, cast in the act of unsheathing a sword. But then she noticed a woman about her age spread a picnic blanket on the grass. Sarah inhaled deeply and then released the air, slowly, through her mouth. Her search, and the library, could wait. She walked to the periphery of the central plaza and sat down on a concrete ledge in the shade of a tree. It was the perfect place—close in, but protected—to watch this manic samba of color and flesh and sound.

Sarah had been writing in her Spanish notebook for about fifteen minutes when she got the feeling that someone was looking at her. Turning to her left, she noticed a man in a dress shirt and dark glasses. He was sitting about ten feet away, under the shade of the same tree but on a ledge slightly higher than hers. He was definitely looking in her direction. But because of his dark sunglasses, she couldn’t tell whether he had been specifically looking at her.

She turned back to her notebook for a few minutes. But that feeling of being watched—a fixity at the edge of her vision—didn’t go away. When she turned to her side this time, she was sure. The man’s sunglasses were now resting on top of his head, and he was, yes, looking right at her. He was handsome, about her age. Something about his willowy posture and brushed-back dark hair—she had seen his type before on her overseas travels—suggested that he was not American. It was not the hard stare she was accustomed to from American men. No, it was open, earnest, something like a boy’s.

With his nice shirt and slacks, he must be some kind of businessman, she told herself. One of these guys who gins up his lunch break with aimless flirting. Whoever he was, he’d soon be back at some soulless job in a corporate office.

Her cellphone jangled, and she quickly turned away, reaching into her bag. She had gotten the phone a few days before, but the technology still bedeviled her. When she went to answer, she
pressed what turned out to be the off button and found herself speaking into a dead line. The phone rang twice more, and again, each time, she accidentally hung up on the caller. “Hello?” she said. “Hello? Is anyone there? Can you hear me?” She looked to her left again and saw that the man was still there. And he was laughing. At her.