Now I have to cross under the wreckage of the West Side Elevated Highway. They shut it down more than ten years ago—shut down the whole highway!—after a dump truck fell through it—a whole dump truck, and a sedan right after it!—at Twelfth and Gansevoort.
Walking the surface street, I cannot deny, is scary: a bizarre no-man’s-land. There are people down here, not many, who are as good as ghosts. In order not to bother or be bothered by ghosts, you just act like you’re one of them. That’s what I do.
And I say to myself—out loud, I mean, I actually say it, because sometimes it is to one’s advantage to sound a bit crazy—the sort of thing I always say when I am walking and need to remember to not be afraid.
“The city is a city,” I say. “But it is also a house. This city is my house. I live in this city, and this part is being remodeled. The ceiling of the highway has been pulled down, and the floor’s been extended, and the water’s farther away. But this is my house. It is still my house.”
Beyond the ruins of the elevated highway the old waterfront is unrecognizable. For one thing, it’s not at the front of the water any longer. I haven’t been down here in ages, but they’re building a whole new neighborhood, a planned community, a little slice of suburbanoid life right here at the edge of Manhattan’s tip: Battery Park City, that’s what it’s going to be. Constructed on landfill. Three million cubic yards of it, or so Gian—who loves quantifiable proof of humankind’s colossal ingenuity—told me last week while he was visiting for Christmas. Rock and soil and garbage excavated during the erection of the World Trade Center.
To my disappointment, I cannot get to the water’s actual edge. The construction site is blockaded with fencing, chain-link here, barbed-wire there. All I can do is stare through the looped diamonds at the river beyond.
I’ve always been fond of the Hudson. It’s the path by which ocean liners leave the city to take passengers across the Atlantic. That’s how Max and I left Manhattan—twice—to travel together to Italy. The first time was the best: our honeymoon cruise.
It’s windy here tonight, making me feel less ridiculous, more vindicated, about wearing the mink. I hold on to my hat.
When we took that first trip in the summer of 1935—June, following our city hall wedding—our vessel carried us way down the Hudson, starting from the New York Passenger Ship Terminal near Midtown. The piers were new and blindingly white, the big passenger ships having just moved there from the Chelsea Piers—more toward Wendy’s party, now that I think of it. When the ships got too big, Chelsea came to be used for cargo only.
Max had been so excited to show me Italy. I’d been so excited to see it.
Our second voyage, I’m sorry to say, was quite another matter.
“Hey!” someone shouts from across the construction site. “Hey! You by the fence! What do you think you’re doing?”
I turn around to face my inquisitor. Running across the muddy wastes is a short, wiry man in an off-brand uniform: coplike, but decidedly not a real cop.
“Pardon me?” I say when he’s close enough to hear me without my having to shout. “I was just looking at the river. Is that not allowed?”
He’s breathing hard from his jog, in front of me now, looking me in the eyes as if to appraise me.
“It’s all right as long as you’re not going to jump,” he says, his eyebrows furrowing into concerned blond caterpillars.
“Jump?” I say, and feel insulted. “To commit suicide?”
“People do,” he says.
I look at him, then past him. “I’d have to cut through the fence,” I say. “And then the water’s not more than ten feet below. If I were going to kill myself, I wouldn’t do it that way. What a mess. The whole goal would be for me to die quickly, not to pass torturously of blood poisoning or god knows what months after the fact.”
“Look, lady, I’m sorry I yelled at you,” he says. “I’m just trying to do my job, you know.”
He looks about thirty. Up close his expression is more sad than angry, and his speaking voice is softer, more reedy, having lost the edge it carried when he first yelled.
“I respect that,” I say. “When people are committed to a job.”
The blond caterpillars huddle again. “Are you making fun of me?” he asks.
With the streetlight behind me I can see his face better than he can see mine. “I most certainly am not,” I say.
“It’s not even that I’m that committed,” he says. “I actually hate this job. I just don’t want anybody killing themselves or otherwise getting in trouble on my watch.”
“So you’re a night watchman?”
“Basically, yeah. Security guard. Rent-a-cop. Whatever you want to call it,” he says. “I don’t have any, like, authority. And it’s boring. Yelling at you is probably the most excitement I’ll have all night. And I don’t particularly get off on yelling at old ladies.”
“I have a name,” I say. “Which is Lillian Boxfish. You?”
“Stu,” he says. “Stu Koszinski.”