The Upper West Side

Has it always been like this, or am I just noticing it?

One of the bad things about depression is that you do a remarkably poor job of seeing the world. You’re internally absorbed—lost in your misery of defeat and despair, so you’re barely able to peer out anyway. And if you do—what do you see? Right: it’s not pretty.

And so when I came to New York all those many years as a depressed person, the city overwhelmed me, and I retreated by going deeper within. Completely unnecessary, of course, since the city bore me no grudge and certainly wasn’t hostile. It may, in fact, have been doing its best to beguile, and I was churlishly refusing its efforts to engage me.

Which is to say that simple things came hard—hailing a cab, engaging in conversation, dealing with a doorman. Absurd to the non-depressed; real to the others.

And yesterday I flew in to Manhattan, since Erica, one of my nieces, is celebrating her 40^th birthday. So there I was, mostly decaffeinated and walking through what had to be the longest airport terminal I have ever paced, searching for the AirTrain—the little tram that carries you around to different terminals, and then finally to the subway. OK—at this point the subway has lost its “sub” and is now just a “way:” it’s running on land, not under it. And of course I got confused, went the wrong way, and instead of going into Manhattan, I was heading for the last, outer limits to the city, across a long stretch of an inlet of the Atlantic, water mixed with marshes with russet and gold reeds with feathery white plumes. Ducks and geese were circling above, and the fall colors were spectacular against a grey, sullen sky. It was New York as the Indians must have seen it, and it was magical.

“Why are you taking the subway in?” asked John, when I called to tell him of the adventure. I was now waiting as I would for a half hour for the train back into the city.

John takes a cab, which takes forty minutes and 80 bucks. But the subway costs six bucks. Do I need to say anything further?

Well, I can also tell you—it takes two hours, especially if you go the wrong way at first. And then you land—if like me you have absentmindedly gotten on to the Eighth Avenue Express—at 125 Street. You get out, and are immediately behind a black guy who is muttering, “and the fucker raped a fucking two-year old.” This information—jarring as it is—is made more jarring by hearing him repeat it ceaselessly as he walks behind you down the platform. ‘Right,’ you think, ‘it may be better to be behind this gentleman’ and so you stop, pretend to fish something out of your pocket, and proceed out to the heart of Harlem.

Not a problem, since Harlem is considerably more upscale than it was—still, you’re one of the few non-brothers on the street. Right, so you call Jeanne, and then hail a cab. Oh, not before getting completely drenched in a sudden thunderstorm.

Life on the Upper West Side—very nice. It’s a neighborhood that pushes affluence to the border of opulence. What keeps it from going over the border? It’s understatedness—everybody is a corporate lawyer or has just written the definitive text on the expulsion of the Moors from Andalucía or has returned from a sabbatical in Oxford researching…. You get the picture.

And the apartment where John and Jeanne live is very much their creation—filled with books, crammed with interesting food, and spacious: a pre-war, the hallway into the dining room is almost the exact length of a bowling alley. And on entering the apartment, I saw that every light was on, and that the black extension cord led to a vacuum. And Ángela, from Guatemala, was there cleaning.

We’ve met, we’ve chatted, and so we greeted each other. So I went to do my thing—which was to rent a cello. I’ve just gotten back my calluses, and I didn’t want to lose them. (Think about it, Reader—you spend three hours a day pressing your fingers rapidly on steel strings: what do you think your fingers feel like at the beginning?)

So I google “rent a cello New York City” and there it is: a place ten blocks away. And started four years ago by a nice guy named Elliot, when his daughter wanted to learn the violin, and he realized there were no acceptable, reasonably priced instruments to be rented. So I call him up, and tell him I want a cello for the week, and the answer?

No. He only rents for three months.

And here is where I know—I am not the depressed, mousey character who is trying to slip by, hoping the city won’t bite me. Because I want a cello, and he has a cello, and I have a credit card so…?

“Do you have a cello,” I ask.

“Is anybody using the cello?”

“Are you getting any money out of the cello?”

“Well, you are in business, aren’t you?”

And so I go to see Elliot, who has agreed to rent me for 100$ the very best cello China can mass-produce. Expensive, but this is New York.

And so I get the cello and am practicing and playing with the sonorities and thinking, ‘wow, am I lucky to have the cello I have,’ and Ángela comes to say goodbye. She pauses, unsure of what to say, and then says, “I don’t understand the music, but I like…”

“If you like it, you understand it,” I said. I was playing Bach cello suites, and the movements are based on dances. And dance is integral in every culture, so what’s the big deal? It’s not dissimilar to the folk dances of Guatemala—just dressed up.

She left, I put down the cello and thought. And here’s where I am, this day after meeting the city on its own.

I’ve just wandered through John and Jeanne’s apartment—the one Ángela cleaned, yesterday—wondering how to say this and here it is: the class lines are invisibly but rigorously defined. When I traveled through Brooklyn, I was one of two whites in the subway car. Then, magically, there were two stops when the blacks all got off and the whites all got in. What had happened? The black people were getting off to do their jobs in the stores and the cafes and the homes of the white people. Then, at Columbus Circle, all the white people got off—because the next stop was Harlem.

Elliot—the cello guy—lived in an apartment very similar to the one that Ángela was cleaning. And he had checked me out, and must have known that, well…I was one of his kind.

“Where are you from,” he had wanted to know.

“Oh, we have an apartment in Old San Juan,” I said. Notice—the “have” implies ownership, and I’m not saying that I’m from Puerto Rico, which has many a slum.

“And what do you do down there?”

“Oh, I’ve just finished writing a book….”

“Could you fill out the contact information and send it to me?”

We had been doing over the phone what dogs do when they meet—sniffing each other’s behinds. And now he would do it electronically, via Google. Fair enough—I had done it to him.

And the doorman, when I got to Elliot’s building, had no terror for me, and turned out to be a pleasant chap.

I’m lucky to live in the world of books and space and cleaned-by-somebody else and cellos. But I wonder—are Ángela’s kids going to be able to get into my world? Because none of the black people on the subway—getting on in Brooklyn—looked as it they had had much chance. And if that’s true?

We’re fucked.