New York for Beginners (5 page)

Thank you, dear Universe, for the divine inspiration to put on lace underwear
, Zoe thought.

Later, Zoe attributed further events to certain neurological deficits that may have had something to do with sleep deprivation and the fact that she had half a bottle of champagne inside her. And that McNeighbor’s tongue could perform incredible acrobatics on her bare skin. And that he smelled like seawater, freshly mown grass, and sandalwood. And that she had whispered things in his ear that would get the average American in the Midwest arrested if said aloud in public. And that Zoe had simply fallen asleep after her one-morning-stand, before she could even ask McNeighbor who he actually was, where he came from, what he did for a living, why he had suddenly kissed her . . . and whatever questions journalists like her asked, when they weren’t having wild Sunday-morning sex with a stranger.

Right before Zoe had fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep, she thought about what Carrie Bradshaw had said about New York City being all about sex. In Zoe’s experience so far, Carrie was right on the money.

When Zoe woke up again, she was lying carefully covered in her bed, and McNeighbor was gone. Her cell phone pinged. Al had written back.

Seat 47A? In the airplane?

No, my neighbor. Apartment 47.

HOW delicious is he?

You mean WAS he.

Don’t tell me you . . .

McDreamy delicious.

No way! Go for it, girl! That’s what I call a new you.

Who would have guessed?

But what about your resolutions? Focusing on your career, no relationships with men, and all that?

A girl has a right to change her mind! Besides, I’m not planning to marry him.

You mean friends with benefits?

Friends with what?

Al was always so damn well informed about these cool American catchphrases. They popped out of her mouth so casually at cocktail evenings or dinner parties in Berlin. Everyone always pretended to know exactly what the phrases meant and acted like they weren’t the least bit impressed, but of course they were. They all ran to the powder room immediately to secretly Google things like “oversexed and underfucked,” “early adopters,” or “bromance” on their phones.

Friends with benefits are friends who can sleep together, without having claims on anything else.

Except for good sex?

Except for good sex!

Brilliant concept! And in complete compliance with bathroom mirror resolutions!

4

Some people need a double-decker bus tour with a trilingual tour guide to discover a new city. Some buy tickets for a yellow amphibious vehicle called a Duck, and conquer a city by water and land. Others begin at the highest point in the city—the Eiffel Tower, for example—to get an overview from above.

Zoe Schuhmacher had her own unique way of getting to know a city: She chose the longest street that stretched all the way across the city she wanted to explore, and drove, walked, or biked its entire length while observing the people. It was her opinion that the people and their fashion whims set the fundamental mood of the city. The blow-dried, perpetually tanned, air-kissing society ladies of Munich, for example, or the permanently cool, Barbour-jacket-wearing women of Hamburg, who were one step closer to the traditional ladies of London. Or the fashionable native Berliners, who still acted as though they were living in a city surrounded by a wall—except the enemy was no longer the Russians, but the West German know-it-alls who had nested into the middle of the city.

In her last post for StyleChicks, Zoe had written: “Bye-bye, Berlin. New York, here I come! StyleChicks is moving across the big pond, dear readers. On Sunday I’ll blog live about my first day in Manhattan. See you soon!”

Sunday was today, and while Zoe didn’t really want to write about the very pleasant start to her first day, she was happy to blog about the rest. It hadn’t been hard for her to choose a street for her little city marathon, because the oldest and longest street in the city, which crossed it from south to north and was over fifteen miles long, was Broadway. It began right at the tip of the island by Bowling Green and ran all through the city to Westchester. At least, that’s what she could discern from Google Maps. Charmingly, Broadway was the only avenue that broke with the otherwise completely rectangular layout of Manhattan’s streets. Zoe liked nonconformists. After all, ever since her spectacular departure from Berlin, she had counted herself as one.

It’s totally crazy how a non-dead man can turn your life completely upside down,
Zoe thought as she left her apartment. Without BNN, she never would have gathered the courage to move to New York, wouldn’t have gotten the business cards with the clever sounding job title of Senior Vice President—and wouldn’t have had a delightful one-morning stand with a charming stranger on the day after her arrival.

“Actually, I should thank Benni,” she said to herself. Then, for the seven-hundred-and-ninety-sixth time, she tried to imagine him kissing his old school friend, the avatar. She pictured her having cobalt-blue skin and a pointy nose. She shuddered. “No, actually, I should have strangled him.”

She glanced at McNeighbor’s apartment door, the sight of which immediately improved her mood. She paused. Allegra’s new favorite catchphrase was “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Apparently it was hanging on the wall at Facebook’s headquarters.

Zoe thought about it for a moment. “If I wasn’t afraid, I’d knock on his door now,” she said, answering her own question. She raised her hand to knock—and let it fall again. If she was honest with herself, she was actually quite afraid, deep down. Not just of knocking, but generally. She was afraid of this whole newfound courage, and this whole new Zoe.

“Women and self-doubt. No man would allow his brain to constantly think such destructive crap,” Al would have said. Zoe sighed. Unfortunately, Al wasn’t here. She turned and headed for the elevator.

When she arrived downstairs, Zoe was greeted by Devon the doorman, who was wearing his fancy dark blue uniform with shiny gold buttons. “Did you have a nice first morning here, Ms. Schuhmacher?” he asked. Zoe wasn’t sure if it was just pure American politeness, or an “I know everything, after all, I’m the doorman” type question. She carefully put on a poker face. That is, she did everything possible to repress the grin that was trying to creep onto her face, and she replied, “Wonderful, just wonderful. Thanks for asking.”

When Zoe finally stepped out of the Four Seasons Executive Residences onto 52nd Street, the puddles were starting to evaporate on the warm asphalt, and it had become noticeably cooler. The air seemed as clear as if it had been cleaned with Windex, and a fresh breeze was blowing. Zoe had obviously slept through the heavy thunderstorms the intern had forecast that morning.

The HopStop app on her phone recommended that she take the 1 train to South Ferry Terminal. As Zoe took the stairs down to the subway station, she noticed a small alcove in the wall at the landing about halfway down. It was a one-room barber and shoeshine shop with a hand-painted sign that read “Haircut & shoeshine for gentlemen, $16 + $2.” Women were obviously not part of their business model—which was definitely clever, because Zoe was certain any woman would rather die than voluntarily sit in one of the three greasy barbershop chairs in full view of thousands of commuters. Nevertheless, this hole-in-the-wall had its own kind of shabby charm, like the old black-and-white photos of the roller coaster at Coney Island that she’d recently seen in a German
magazine. Zoe paused, set her digital camera to black-and-white, and took a picture for her blog. Then she poked her head inside.

“Hi! Not much going on today, is there?” she said to the lonely shopkeeper. He was sitting in one of the barbershop chairs with his feet on the footrest, under the mirror, looking bored. He looked up from his copy of the
New York Post
.

“We don’t cut women,” he replied. Zoe did a double-take at his grammar, which she hadn’t learned in her English classes. Then she got it, and nodded. It would make a fantastic caption for her photo in the blog, she realized happily, quickly jotting down a note to herself: “We don’t cut women.”

When she got down into the subway station, she bought a MetroCard and approached the platform, which was full of tourists. There were countless people with Nikon cameras hanging around their necks and jean jackets tied around their hips, fighting to refold city maps before they got on the train.

The travelers pushed their way onto the 1 train as soon as it stopped in the station. Once Zoe managed to get in, a man kindly stood up and offered her his seat.

“Please go ahead,” he said.

Zoe was astounded. She wasn’t sure how to interpret this gesture. Was he trying to pick her up or something? She sat down hesitantly. “Thank you.”

“I’m getting off at the next stop, anyway,” the man said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to give up your seat for someone. Well, maybe it was, in a country like this. In Germany, where even people who were on vacation set their alarms for six in the morning to reserve the best lounge chairs at the pool, it was almost unthinkable.

As the signal chimed to announce the doors were closing, a woman came hurtling down the platform, desperate to get on the train. “Hold the door! Hold the door!” she shouted. The man who’d just given his seat up for Zoe valiantly threw himself between the closing doors to pry them open and let the woman on board.

Now there’s going to be trouble
, Zoe thought, already imagining the response.
“Holding the doors is forbidden! Didn’t you know that?”
or
“Now the train will be late because of you!”
Not to mention
“She should have left home two minutes earlier.”
Those would all have been typical reactions in Germany.
Alles Verboten!

But nothing like that happened. The general consensus in a New York subway car seemed to be somewhere between “I don’t care” and a kind of friendly solidarity against the system that made it difficult for the train to wait for five seconds.

The South Ferry Terminal station looked new, smelled new, and actually was new. At least, there were perfectly functioning escalators, and large mosaics on the walls that weren’t smeared with graffiti. They showed Manhattan in various periods of its history, in white, silver, and gold. Above, at the exit, there were all kinds of street sellers ready to descend on the tourists.

“Tickets for city tours! Come and go when you like!”

“Hotdogs! Pretzels! Water!”

“Souvenirs! Souvenirs!
Souvenirs!”

Their cacophony was only drowned out by an ambulance that turned onto Water Street at breakneck speed, sirens wailing.

For Zoe Schuhmacher, New York was, above all, an acoustic experience. Even the subway that had brought her to the southern tip of Manhattan had rattled, squeaked, and groaned, sometimes in turn, but mostly simultaneously. The loudspeakers that announced the stops emitted an incomprehensible mix of a droning male voice and static crunches and whistles that hurt her ears. For Zoe, New York was extremely noisy. But for the nonchalant locals, it just seemed to be the normal background noise of a big city.

Zoe didn’t bother with the Staten Island Ferry terminal. Instead, she walked north along historic Battery Park, where she was amazed to find the fenced beds of the Battery Urban Farm, where organic vegetables were being grown right there in the middle of Manhattan’s Financial District. Anyone who wanted to could become a member and regularly have a seasonal selection of ecologically friendly plant matter delivered directly to his or her door. Zoe was told all this by a woman with streaks of gray in her long, curly hair, a straw hat on her head, and Birkenstocks on her feet, who was sitting at a warped wooden information table, distributing flyers.

“Would you like to join our organic vegetable club?” she asked, smiling.

“Sorry, I’m only visiting,” Zoe lied, because she didn’t want to disappoint the nice lady. “But can I take your picture?”

“Sure,” the woman answered, arranging the basket of zucchini and summer squash in front of her and striking a pose. Caption: “Organic vegetables in the middle of Manhattan.”

Broadway officially began at Bowling Green, with house number one. A little farther on, guarded by two policemen, the famous bronze Wall Street Bull waited, its head eternally poised to charge. Tourists—mostly Asians armed with umbrellas to protect against the sun—stood politely in line to touch and photograph it. Zoe stood across the street with her camera and zoomed in sharply on the bull, using the umbrella-bearing tourists as a slightly out-of-focus, colorful foreground.

A little later, she let herself be carried along with the stream of pedestrians, and jaywalked across almost every street. Everyone did that in this city—even when a policeman was standing on the corner. New Yorkers seemed to have a unique approach to rules and regulations. And New York cops obviously had better things to do than write out tickets for jaywalkers. They were probably hunting down drug dealers or murderers.

A little farther down the road, Zoe came to a row of old barbershop chairs from the fifties that had been set up along the fence of Trinity Church. It was a makeshift shoeshine shop, complete with a whole crew of shoe shiners who also seemed to have come from the fifties. Zoe thought it was like a scene from Havana, and she decided to take a photograph with her wide-angle lens. Caption: “Shoeshine, five dollars.”

She strolled along City Hall Park past a few market stalls selling lavender, freshly baked fruit pies, honey, and jam that were run by farmers from places like Pomona and Cutchogue. The commercial part of Broadway only started north of Canal Street, with the futuristic-looking G-Star Raw jeans shop. There, the scene was set by carefully styled tourists on shopping trips.

Shopping on Sunday, what a luxury
, Zoe thought. She had spent countless Sundays in Germany window-shopping. The idea of walking past closed stores and pressing one’s nose up against the glass without being able to buy anything suddenly struck her as seriously un-American.

Before she knew it, it was late afternoon, and Zoe was already hungry for dinner. In Germany dinner was long past. She turned onto Prince Street to look for Café Gitane. Al had rhapsodized about it after every one of her visits to New York, and Zoe couldn’t wait to see it for herself. She had barely set foot off Broadway when she seemed to have crossed an invisible border, beyond which mysterious unwritten laws seemed to apply. Here on the boundary between SoHo and Little Italy, no one was allowed to be over thirty-five, and everyone had to ride bicycles. And there also seemed to be a hat requirement. People wore fedoras, beanies, or scarves artistically draped on their heads. Zoe found countless subjects for her photographs. At a shop called Pinkyotto, there were antique dressmaker’s dummies in the windows instead of the generic mannequins the chain stores on Broadway had. Someone had put teddy-bear heads on them to create a rather odd but charming effect. On the display table in front of McNally Jackson, one of the few remaining independent booksellers in the city, lay a stack of small books with a classic fashion sketch on the cover. It was called
The Manhattan of Fashion Insiders: A Private & Friendly Guide
. An actress Zoe recognized from some romantic comedy (Emily Blunt? Claire Danes?) was flipping through it curiously. Zoe remembered that the guide had been
the
talk of the last Berlin Fashion Week. She slipped into line behind the incognito Hollywood star, and surreptitiously snapped a photo. Then she bought a copy.