nyc snapshots

i.

There are remnants of Covid — an antigen testing station covered in plastic tenting on a street corner with a single worker looking at his phone; the requirement to display a vax card in order to get into a Brooklyn comedy show; floor decals in an apartment hallway spaced six feet apart; tubing where bits of shower curtains once separated restaurant tables; and all the outdoor eating huts, some of which look charming, others dilapidated.

In the midst of a short trip to NYC, I got a Facebook reminder of where I’d been on St. Patrick’s Day two years ago: a rainy drive to southeastern Iowa to get my first round of the Pfizer vaccine, which was delivered by nurses in green sequined shirts who, I swear, smelled of beer. This year was very different: I’m in MOMA in a sea of mainly unmasked humans crowded around Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

As Bella says it’s as though we’re stuck between wanting “normal” to return and canceling anyone who doesn’t believe we’re still in a pandemic. New York was the epicenter; it’s the place where one might have learned the most about what it could be to move to a place beyond either of those polarities. But I don’t sense that space has emerged - or ever will.

ii.

We walk along the High Line, still embraced in full body pleasure from an amazing gluten free everything bagel with cream cheese that suddenly makes clear how utterly unexceptional the stuff from the grocery store is. My daughter hasn’t had a bagel in ages. She is so happy. Something so radically simple. The sun is out and there are crocuses along the pathway. There is Hope. Energy.

When the trail curves, we’re lured by a dot on our map: Muji, a Japanese store we like. It turns out to be in a giant upscale mall that reminds me of Chicago’s Water Tower Place in the 80s, before it emptied out. We get sucked in, vacuumed up by the colors and products and textures, before we manage to pull the tentacles off and head back outside.

From there, we walk south through the gallery district. There are charmingly intimate still lives made from pounded metal scraps. And a provocative if simple pile of stones on a floor in front of a watercolor. I can’t tell you who assembled or painted or printed any of this, though, because there are no labels, only QR codes. This annoys me.

At the big name gallery, we’re met by giant canvases that are ugly. I am not being doltish. They’re just ugly. There’s also an immense Stonehenge-like sculpture made of styrofoam, which shares a warehouse-sized space with the likeness of a naked man sitting on chair with a hole all up in its on a gallery platform—some S&M-meets-art assemblage. It’s hideous, I feel bad for the guard.

The day continues in this way — the bounty of the city, both its charm and all of the reasons people have for continuing to bump against its monstrosity and glut.

When we enter a restaurant in Chinatown, I sigh with relief to be in a closet-sized space that likely hasn’t changed in decades. The hand-pulled noodles are so so tender, the dumplings mouthfuls of so dough and a puddle of hot soup. Everything in me slows with pleasure.

After we leave, walking west, it doesn’t take long for the odd arrangements of plastic bowls, discount suitcases, and yellowed plastic flowers in shop windows to give way to “flagship” boutiques and high-end restaurants. By the time we get to the next gallery in lower SoHo, it seems totally on cue that a woman is talking loudly about her relationship with Picasso’s “only legitimate heir.”

iii.

I remember this thing about apartments, how you can hear so much of other peoples’ lives. And how that’s sometimes more difficult than annoying.

As I wash my face and put on make-up, a child upstairs (or next door?) begins to cry. Just a bit. Not a wail but a soft letting go of unhappiness. A woman’s voice pounces: “Shut the fuck up! Just shut the fuck up!”

I don’t want to hear it. But I can’t not.

Then silence. Which is almost worse.

‘All day that child is with me., re-emerging through the throngs.

iv.

Public transportation has always seemed to contain short filmic moments — sometimes these are documentary, sometimes experimental arthouse. On one train, I’m facing toward the windows that looks into the next train. It’s a double window situation — the ones in my car directly facing the ones in the next car — and through those parallel panes I can see a woman and a girl. Mother and child, I think. Possibly grandmother? (I’m getting worse at gaging such things.)

What I know for sure because she is me and I am her is that the woman seems at once warm and vacant, present and exhausted, a caretaker stretched thin. She hardly moves as she stares toward me (at me?) while the girl, who is around 7, wiggles in her seat, twisting toward the window, asking for something and then sipping on the straw of a juice box. Eventually, she kneels on the seat so that her head is at the same level as her mother’s. Wrapping her hands around the woman’s neck in an almost suffocating gesture, she kisses her mother’s face again and again and again. Sloppy, insistent, playful, loving. The woman turns — her only movement — and gently places a single kiss on the child’s forehead. It’s as exquisite as a single dash of chartreuse on another wise muddied navy canvas.

As we twist through the subway tunnels and the cars lean to and fro, the scene is cropped and re-cropped, so that I can see only one of them, both of them, neither of them. I wait for the next image to unspool, their faces to reemerge. I am reminded of the way that mothering is an all-out experience; there’s no pause. Even kisses can be tiring.

v.

The galleries have gotten rid of wall labels. Even parts of museums have eschewed them. There are fewer menus, too. QR codes are the thing. Cell phones necessary to navigate nearly any transaction.

The subway stations have less music from what I recall. I heard just one lone cello.

The march of money and chains and the expected continues to bleed through all pocket of the city.

But the beauty salons on Flatbush Avenue were popping on that Friday evening. It was dusk and we were trying to find a place our friend recommended — a charming bistro that had a few different meats and greens braising in Dutch ovens, shared tables, and a back garden that was full despite the chill. We kept walking by beauty parlors and barbers, each more more packed than the last. My favorite was a side-by-side establishment with ladies filling all the chairs in one place while right next door men leaned against the window and squatted on plastic milk cartons as they watched the barbers buzz and clip at those in the chairs. The lights blazed as so many people laughed and gabbed on the brink of a weekend, a sound between rap and reggae wafted out — a party in the making.

Photo by Andre Wagner: https://www.andredwagner.com/