Amanda knew her mother was really fretting over the fact that she had allowed her daughter to take the day off from school, to go into the city alone. All week, since the second column had been published on Monday, her mother had watched her like something that held the potential for sudden, shattering violence: a burnt package of instant popcorn, a champagne cork that had loosened in its berth and was just waiting to be liberated from its spindly metal cage.
Her father, on the other hand, barely looked at her at all. Apparently he was afraid that any stray bit of eye contact might indicate an apology or even, God forbid, remorse. And Madison had been the same, ever since that first morning. It really felt, to Amanda, that of everyone in their little circle she’d had by far the least involvement in whatever chain of events led to Bob D’Amico possibly losing his job. She really did not think all that highly of her own influence in matters of global finance, possibly even less highly than she thought of her own clout in the Greenwich, Connecticut, ecosystem.
And yet, apparently, she was the one everyone was desperate to avoid.
She stood up and brushed the folds of her dress, admitting to herself that she didn’t have any interest in finishing the soft pretzel she’d bought on a whim from one of the carts at the entrance to the park. For a moment she’d convinced herself that it would be delicious, that it would be one of those many things native New Yorkers (she liked sometimes to lump herself in with this crowd) always treated with unfair disdain. What if all these touristy trimmings actually were the essence of the city, what if they were secretly wonderful and had been ignored for too long by those who thought they were in the know? What if this pretzel was delicious, and she missed it?
Of course, it wasn’t. It was a throat-drying and yet also sodden lump of calories that couldn’t be saved even with liberal globs of yellow mustard, and she threw it in a trash can, then joined the dampened flow of human traffic making its way down Fifth Avenue.
She cut east quickly, telling herself that it was time to catch a train home and call her mother for a ride, but when she came within sight of the subway station on Eighty-Sixth Street the thought of going down into the closeness and the heat was revolting, and she decided to walk to Grand Central.
All around her the Upper East Side flowed at its usual lazy weekday rhythms. She felt silly for having expected anything otherwise, but she’d been thinking so much lately of that other September, when her parents brought her into the city every few days. Jake told her later that people said it bordered on child abuse, taking an eight-year-old with them to TriBeCa to serve hamburgers and pizza to the first responders. Most of what she remembered was sitting on top of stacks of cardboard boxes filled with paper napkins and utensils, the other women volunteers patting her head as they bustled by. Her mother appearing every so often, crouching beneath Amanda and taking her chin in the cup of her left hand to make sure she wasn’t afraid. It had smelled terrible, the smoke had clung to every tendril of her hair for days, but smells had never bothered Amanda and she’d liked being with so many adults, listening to them talk to one another when they forgot she was there. The way everyone liked one another for those few days. Susan Sarandon had been there, wearing an FDNY baseball cap and serving burgers, and that had been one of Amanda’s first brushes with celebrity, with the way a man might change the entire register of his voice just because he was talking to someone whose breasts he’d seen on a movie screen twenty years ago.
After they volunteered, for those weeks—and her parents were often taking her out of school for this, spending days at a time in New York, camping out in the guest rooms of friends on the Upper West Side—they always took her to do something fun, a splurge. Tea at Alice’s Tea Cup or an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History or scrambling over the craggy boulders of Riverside Park, despite Jake’s known aversion to grass and sunshine and the ever-looming threat of Lyme.
All that fall you had felt not only the open quality of the city but also the way everyone knew how unusual this was. The way people took one another’s hands to say hello when they passed in the doorway of Zabar’s or Barnes & Noble; the way strangers stopped to tell her parents what a precious child she was. Everyone was anxious for any excuse to linger and chat, trade stories and hearsay. The constant evasive, obsessive gestures at the treetops on the south edge of the park, toward downtown, “down there.”
There was nothing like this now, no such feeling of matched experience, and it was only in confronting this that Amanda realized how much she had expected this once more, this sense that everyone had dug, together, into their communal trench.
Near Sixty-Eighth Street a flush of older teenagers poured from the glass facade of one of the Hunter College buildings, their Converse sneakers dotted with marker drawings. The girls lifted their arms to expose wedges of soft skin between their tight tank tops and tight jeans. The boys clutched their headphones around their necks with casual pride, the way they’d carry sweaty gym towels after a rigorous workout.
Amanda let herself fall in with them, losing them when they descended into the subway but still imagining herself in some world where Bob D’Amico was a distant symbol rather than the man living in Madison’s house. Where her own father had the good sense to criticize from afar rather than embed himself in the thick of it all like some clumsy, outspoken spy. Amanda wiped the sweat mustache from her lip and let herself think about these things, the things she wanted. Walking the streets in New York always did this, filled her with this unstemmed sense of all the things she wanted and might never have.
She passed the pizza parlors and old lady clothing stores in the East Sixties and Fifties, heading down toward the skyscrapers, that sense of business being conducted high above her. Steel and glass everywhere, the part of East Midtown that she secretly loved. She was letting her eyes roam over it all, this stretch of Lex with everything only a few stories tall, a little village, the Eat Here Now diner and Le Pain Quotidien and the boutiques. She was moving so quickly and thoughtlessly when she saw him that she almost tripped over the ankle-height iron fence that enclosed a tree planted at the sidewalk’s edge.
She knew it was him without seeing his face: the barrel-shaped body, the way he had his hands in his pockets but leaned forward with his chest, a business-suit stance even though he was wearing sweats and a baseball cap. She could see the close-cropped pepper hair just at the nape of his neck, beneath the cap. And then he turned his body sideways, facing half uptown, toward Amanda, and she could see Bob D’Amico’s face.