Heart of the City (35 page)

THEY MADE plans to meet again two nights later, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which had mounted a solo exhibit of works by the modernist sculptor Mark di Suvero. Bob was there at exactly 5:30. He didn’t want to pass up so much as a minute with her. But there was no Mara. Ten minutes passed, then thirty. Bob wandered distractedly through abstract figures of wood and steel. The Met had worked such magic. He was hoping to find even more here. But without Mara, the art
seemed empty, lifeless. Was she okay? She was street-smart. But New York City, on the brink of bankruptcy, had made headlines of late for its soaring violent crime rate. He should have met her outside her office. That would have been the gentlemanly thing to do.

Shaking his head at his stupidity, he left the exhibit and entered a dark side room. Inside, the Whitney appeared to be screening something from its collection of experimental films. Bob pawed his way through the gloom, finding a seat atop a row of bleacher-style benches. On the screen was an out-of-focus shot of a hand opening and closing a bread box. Again. And again. He watched the hand, and the bread-box door, opening and closing, for a half hour.

Pressing his fingers against his temples, he just felt sorry. For himself. For his situation. For whatever it was that was keeping Mara.

EVEN WHEN she was falling for someone,
especially
when she was, Mara hewed to routine. She had learned in her twenties how easy it was to lose perspective, to give up the everyday things that made you happy because of a man. She had rashly accepted two marriage proposals in the past, only to break them after her senses returned. She was older now and, yes, wiser.
The Venerable Mara
, she sometimes called herself.

Bob was perceptive, a cultural savant, a good talker. When they were the only two people in that theater to wonder why the subtitle writers couldn’t have just said “tossed himself out a window,” she knew he shared not just her vocabulary but an eye for the absurd. In her family, nobody laughed. And yet, here was this man—“The One,” as she wrote in her diary—who laughed.

But this date at the Whitney would be their third in the four days since meeting. Some pacing, she felt, was prudent. She had ballet after work, and would stay for the whole class, even it
meant running a little late. If Bob didn’t understand, well, that was something better to know now than later. After changing back into street clothes and looking at her watch, though, she realized she had lost track of time: she was nearly an hour late. When her cab got stuck behind a line of cars at a red light, she nearly panicked. She bit her nails, then dug them into the edge of the vinyl seat. “Please, is there any other way?”

“It’s New York at seven on a weeknight, lady, whaddaya want?”

She dashed upstairs to the di Suvero exhibit, brushed a loose strand of hair from her face, and circled through the rooms full of oddly joined wood planks and mangled machine-age steel. She was on her third lap when she noticed something: a shadowy room branching off one of the halls. She entered, her heart flopping against her chest, and was struck blind by the darkness.

THE FILM reel clicked, and the bread box opened and closed, and opened again. Bob was in a kind of stupor when he registered someone entering the room. A woman’s figure, wading through the murk, then turning and surveying the seats. Bob couldn’t see the woman’s face. But he knew. From her height. From her figure. From the way the light from the projector frosted the outlines of her hair, like some illuminated saint.

He padded down the steps beside the seats. “Mara?”

She turned. With her palms on his chest, she pushed him backwards until his boot heels struck the rear wall. She looked up, and their lips touched. “I had to find you,” she whispered fervently. “I had to.”

IN THE spring, they moved in together. Bob juggled oranges by the kitchen counter in the mornings to make her laugh. He served her omelets and ice cream and Portuguese wine. His face was so expressive that Mara could read in its arrangement of
creases how happy she made him. He was some magical redress, it sometimes felt, for all her childhood privations.

They went to movies and museums. They held hands through performances of the New York City Ballet and the New York City Opera. When he played pickup basketball by the East River on weekends, she’d bring him iced coffee. Then she’d sit on a bench, by turns studying him and reading a book, until he was ready to go home.

One afternoon, as they returned home in locked hands after a summer walk through the city—beads of sweat at their temples, bliss etched on their faces—an old woman stepped out of an apartment building and cried, “It’s Romeo and Juliet.”

The analogy was truer than the woman could know. Bob’s family, Orthodox Jews descended from a long line of rabbis, would never consent to his marrying a gentile. Her family, aristocratic Lutherans, bore old-world prejudices toward Jews.

“Maybe we just tell people what they want to hear,” Bob had said one Saturday morning, in a bout of exasperation.

“No,” Mara said.

She could live with disapproval but not dishonesty, not in a relationship she felt had been born of candor. Mara completed her conversion to Judaism a few weeks before their wedding. She did it neither for God nor to spite her parents, but so that she and Bob would not have to lie to his family. Bob and his widowed father had grown estranged after he married a woman Bob never took to. He knew that if his father had doubts about Mara’s faith, he’d keep them to himself. But Bob was close to his mother’s parents—they had grown closer since his mother’s death—and he worried they’d demand assurances of Mara’s Jewish identity, and that of their great-grandchildren. In the end, despite her high Nordic features, his grandparents never asked.

Bob Koppel and Mara Gailitis were married in late 1976, in two separate ceremonies. The first, on Thanksgiving Day, at a Newport courthouse, was for her family. The second, a couple of
weeks later, at Temple Emanu-El, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, was for his. Their families would never meet.

After Mara had moved her last box of clothes into Bob’s apartment, he asked if there was anything she wanted to change.

“You’re making me queen?” she asked, relieved.

“To a degree.”

She was less than fond of the bizarre Symbolist posters on his walls and the giant black “King Kong couch” he’d had since forever. Their destinies lay elsewhere, she told him, and like a teenager realizing he’d outgrown his GI Joes, Bob relented.

When the trash men had hauled it all away, Bob asked Mara to make something new. “Anything so we don’t have to look at these blank walls.”

She set to work on a painting of the two of them nuzzling at their favorite park by the East River. The city’s fiscal woes had left little money for park upkeep; lawns had browned and trees withered. In the painting, however, Mara depicted the park as a scrupulously landscaped British estate.

Sightlines

WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK

Daniel Letourneau stepped out of the car he’d borrowed and into the bedlam of Broadway at noon. Eddies of tourists carried him through the narrows of Times Square before dispersing into the glittery light of a nearly cloudless sky.

The air was spiked with spring and motor exhaust and scents reeling off warm bodies. Daniel walked and walked, like some lion on the loose, turning down one street, then another, feeling his way across the city with his senses. But after an hour, he found he could no longer ignore the torn envelope in his pocket, the one where he’d written the addresses from his mother.

Daniel, who was twenty-four, had told people back home, in France, that he was going to New York to learn English. A Paris business school he’d applied to had said that without near fluency, he could not be admitted. The school, he had hoped, would give him the kind of direction he’d failed to find either in college or afterward as a chef.

But it was June 2000, a month into his trip, and his English was as shaky as ever. The trouble was that even in America, he was surrounded by French speakers. He waited tables at a French bistro in New Jersey. The owner was Bernard, a temperamental older Frenchman whose French-speaking children Daniel baby-sat in exchange for room and board. When Daniel went out, it was with a Frenchman named Pierre, an old friend from culinary school who was the bistro’s sous-chef. Adding to Daniel’s claustrophobia were Bernard’s increasingly frequent tongue-lashings. “Because you cooked at a three-star restaurant in Paris makes you better than me?” Bernard had said, resentful of Daniel’s popularity with the kitchen staff. “Here, I am boss, you understand?”

Instead of a crash course in English, the summer was turning into a dispiriting study in the insularity of French expatriate life in America.

With just two and a half weeks until his return flight to Paris, Daniel called his mother. Though she was the owner of a small Spanish-French translation agency in Paris, she had a pragmatic streak from an earlier career as a nurse. On the phone a few days earlier, she had told Daniel to look for a short-term job at a translation agency in New York. “Put on a nice shirt and tell them you’re my son.” She read off a few Manhattan addresses where she had contacts. “Maybe one them will let you be a fly on the wall for the next two weeks.”

“But what would I do, exactly?” Daniel asked.

“Observe. Listen. Make coffee. Whatever they ask. It will be good for you.”

Daniel, who grew up in the working-class suburbs of Paris, didn’t have much in the way of business attire. He had packed for a summer of restaurant work and baby-sitting, not cold-call office interviews in one of America’s most cutthroat cities. At the bottom of his suitcase, he found a passable navy-blue shirt and his one pair of gray slacks without scuffed hems. Then he borrowed a car from a friend at the restaurant and pointed it toward Midtown Manhattan.