FOURTEEN
On the day we moved, with two weeks still left to go on our lease, I already felt nostalgic for the city. This condition had been building steadily, and on D-day I woke up and actually started to cry when I heard a jackhammer start up on the sidewalk below.
When you've lived in Manhattan, no other place feels quite as real: It's the solid, looming presence of all those high stone buildings, not the aristocratic skyscrapers but the solid middle-class structures of fifteen stories or so. They make all those two-story suburban houses look like flimsy stick-and-straw affairs, something a wolf could blow down. And then there's the fame factor, which makes Manhattan seem so oddly familiar, even to Belgian factory workers and Lancastrian sheepherders. You see this one narrow island everywhere you go—in print ads, on television, on multiplex screens—the quintessential city: noisy and glamorous and dirty, a village packed tight with avant-garde toddlers, mentally unstable artists, businesslike Europeans, marginal actors, hopeful immigrants from Haiti and Ohio, drug dealers, cat collectors, the unapologetically successful and the walking wounded—one layer overlapping the other, the uncivilized center of the civilized world.
And I didn't want to join the ranks of the deserters, claiming to still love the city's energy and culture but frightened off by muggings or wildings or blackouts or terrorist bandits. Like there's safety somewhere out there in a small town, like no child ever disappeared on a cricket-filled summer night, on a bike ride home from church. At least in New York, hearing the worst about human nature is never a complete surprise.
Think of your favorite urban myth. Stolen kidney? Crispy fried rat? Radioactive subway? Chances are, when you imagined it happening, you imagined it happening in Manhattan, with smoke billowing from manhole covers, and rude pedestrians yelling across broad avenues, and gray and brown pigeons teetering along as yellow taxis shot past.
In those final days, I went to museums, the Empire State Building, Bloomingdale's. Halfway through the Planetarium space show, when my seat began to vibrate like a rocket ship and the whole Milky Way galaxy receded until it was no more than a distant spot in an alien sky, I began to choke back tears. My home, I thought. The known universe.
Of course, you don't think about these sorts of things unless you've just arrived, or are on your way out. With my job already gone, leaving a gaping, empty wound in my days, I had time to sit around and notice things. I realized that in the country I would need a car to get a tube of toothpaste and began to miss being able to walk everywhere even though I hadn't left yet. I began to feel as if Manhattan were a lover I was giving up to save my marriage.
As if to torment me, Manhattan pulled out all the stops as I prepared to depart.
A few sidewalk maples had begun to turn yellow and there was a briskness to the air that made you want to look at all the new clothes in the shop windows, lovely deep purples and oranges and deep wine shades, like a dark glass of rich burgundy after a summer of acidic whites. The grinning faces of death had already been put out on display in all the stationery and drugstores along Broadway, and as I walked down the aisles of my local supermarket I watched as child after child pressed the button on the snarling zombie display.
While a small army of Israelis moved our belongings into one of their huge Samson Movers trucks, I had a last breakfast at Barney Greengrass, sitting alone at a table for two while a pair of old men argued politics over platters of sturgeon and belly lox. I had promised my doctor that I would eat fish from time to time to keep from becoming anemic, and so I sat there with my whitefish salad, feeling a little drunk from all the salt and protein. My father, born in Barcelona, loved fish. Especially the skinny oily ones with heads and tails.
“Don't become a vegetarian,” he'd told me the summer I stopped eating meat. “Vegetarians are boring.”
“I just don't want to eat corpses anymore, okay?”
“This is your mother's fault. In Europe, children grow up seeing that chickens have feathers. You pluck them, you cook them, you eat them. Here everything's stripped and cleaned and wrapped up like a piece of candy, and by the time you kids figure out that what you're chewing used to have teeth of its own, you're shocked.”
“I'm not eating these shrimp, Dad.”
“Crayfish.”
“What ever. I just feel it's hypocritical to eat something that used to be alive, unless you're willing to kill it yourself, like aboriginal peoples do.”
I still remember my father's smile. “So kill it yourself. You need a bit of killer instinct to get along in this world.”
Fourteen years older and less sure of my reasons for not eating meat, I spread a last schmear of eyeless, toothless fish salad onto my bagel and checked my watch. It was time to go change my entire life.
Hunter, who disdained anything with scales, had said he would meet me outside. He arrived only two minutes late, looking wonderful in faded jeans and a white fisherman's sweater. The haunted look had left his face, and he had begun to shave and shower regularly again. In fact, he seemed ebullient these days, energized by the prospect of our move.
“Ready?”
I folded up my grease-stained copy of The New York Times and hooked my arm in his. “Ready,” I said.
As we made our way toward our car, I felt the first, faint stirrings of excitement. This would be a new beginning for us. An adventure. Couples who had adventures together lasted. I would join a country practice and become a partner within a few years. I would know everyone in town by name and my children would go to kindergarten in winter along a snowy path marked by deer prints.
Hunter squeezed my hand with his bicep. “You're quiet, Abs.”
“Thinking happy thoughts.” At Eighty-third and Amsterdam, a skinny, dark-haired woman strode past walking an aristocratically anorectic borzoi, a husky, a standard poodle, and two shih tzus. She hailed a man in a knit hat, who was walking a rottweiler, a golden retriever, a Yorkie, a wrinkly sharpei, and a lamblike Bedlington terrier.
Jut as we passed, the rottweiler and the poodle started barking, followed by the Yorkie and the shih tzus. The Bedlington terrier wrapped itself around the man's legs, cringing, while the retriever and the husky joined in, the former yodeling low, like a hound, the latter giving a long, low wolflike howl.
“Je-suz, Candy, pull them back,” said the male dog walker, struggling with the tanklike rotty. “Your monsters want to eat my babies.”
“They're usually so calm, even the pood—argh, down, boy! Poodle,” said Candy, hauling with all her famine-thin, gym-toned might. But the aggressiveness of the big French dog seemed to have inflamed the husky and borzoi as well. They yanked and leaned their full body weights against their leashes, struggling to break free.
“Well, that was a Manhattan moment,” Hunter said, laughing and guiding me along the sidewalk, away from the dogs.
“Maybe I should stay, in case they need help,” I said, looking over my shoulder.
“Not our fight, Abra.”
As Hunter led me gently but firmly away, I realized that the dogs had already begun to calm down. Only the husky and the little Yorkie still barked, and they didn't seem to be warning each other off.
Perhaps it was my own guilty urban conscience working overtime, but they seemed to be directing all their canine territorial rage at Hunter's departing back.