Through the Children's Gate (12 page)

The city looks wonderful no matter how you squint at it, there's no denying that: the park restored, the shops freed from their goalie masks of protective cages, even Times Square, through which I had to trudge by night twenty years ago to extract Martha from seedy out-of-the-way film-cutting rooms. Where we once threaded our way among Dumpsters in which bodies turned up is now gleaming, but the cutting rooms have become condos, and the film editors have fled to some other place, as yet unknown.

The children are even happier to be here than I'd hoped. On that first morning, once the stores were open (the coffee shops, I had forgotten, never close), I bought Luke the one thing he wanted: a Razor-brand scooter, the kind that was invented while we were away and that now fills the streets here. (They have not yet made it to Paris.) They are one of those simple, amazing things that make you wonder enviously why no one—why not you!—had thought of it before: three pieces of hinged aluminum, a pair of plastic wheels, and you're whooshing off down the avenue to the delight of other children and to the doom of the calves of a thousand old ladies on Madison.

As he rushes down the streets, Luke's ears are still attuned to the new sounds of the city. I see him stop his scooter and leap from it in ecstasy: “Those girls are speaking English,” he informs me. “I think I'll talk to them.” This delivery to his long-dreamed-of paradise, the English-speaking city, is still beyond his comprehension. The density of space produces, famously, a wild variety of people. Luke, hostage to Parisian food, cannot believe the range of cheap takeout, the empire of menus. You press a button, and all the world's spices come obsequiously to your door: Indian food, Chinese food; the baby loves
chicken in pancakes, the boy loves steak fajitas, and without saying so, I see that he likes the sweetness of New York food, the way that, as I had forgotten, Americans put sugar in everything, in ketchup and mustard and cereal and bread. The incidental sweetness of American life is, to an unaccustomed palate like his, overwhelming and quickly addictive.

We took him to Luke's Bar and Grill, a hamburger joint on Third Avenue, because we thought he would like the idea of a place with a name the same as his own.

“Hey,” I said as he searched the menu and then the room. “Do you see why I brought you here?” I point to the menu: his place. “Yes,” he said solemnly. “Because you wanted me to know a place where, if I got lost, I could go where everybody speaks English.”

T
hey all speak English here.
It is one of the things that makes life so full and then so dense. Every exit from the house threatens to become an encounter, and every encounter threatens to become an entanglement. The joy of isolation is hard to find. Coming home has been strange and hard for Luke's parents, even though, or perhaps because, it is home. The taxi wars and rituals, for instance, are so odd. In France, we became accustomed to the rigorous conventions of taxi hailing. You walk to a corner, you see the blue sign, taxi, and you wait in line, uncomplaining, however long it takes. (You can send for a taxi by telephone, and if there's one available, you will get one. But if there isn't one, the phone line goes dead. You don't even get to whine about it, much less talk to the supervisor.) If, on your own, you find a taxi on the boulevard, you may hail it; but the driver may choose not to stop, and he may not be allowed to stop at all if he is anywhere near a taxi station.

Here at home, I am shocked, amazed, searching for a taxi to get us to a dinner or to take the children to the doctor, to rediscover what I once knew: It's every man or woman for himself or herself, and no rules at all. A man—or, more often, a woman—steps right in front of you half a block away, back turned but entirely conscious of your
presence (the New Yorker knows that sly half-look around), hand raised in taxi-hailing salute.

And there is nothing to be done: no reproach, no appeal to fairness, no pointing to the implicit social contract the philosophers love to write about, whereby we, in the ideal city, would grant one another a full city block of taxi-hailing rights, or at the very least adhere to some grandfather clause: We cannot cut in front of another human being who is late for the pediatrician and had his hand raised already.

The rule is not even conflict aversion. Perpetually hot headed in life if not on the page, I often grumble and mutter impotently, “That's piggish behavior,” or the like. The Other just stares or even smirks. The rule is combat avoidance. We won't actually come to blows over this taxi, but apart from that, anything goes. Absolute anarchy is a rule regulated not by the state but by a kind of wary understanding that fistfights have costs in the long term and should be avoided. Financial prudence about the outcome of lawsuits sometimes seems to be the only moral arbiter left in New York.

Yet not entirely so. The impressive thing, on reflection, is that even nonviolent confrontation is almost always evaded, and not by following rules but by following social instincts. When you do see conflict—one taxi driver yelling at another, a cop yelling at a trucker—it is rare enough to, well, stop traffic. What an unbelievable concord of invisible trust is required to live in the city at all! This is true of every city, but in New York, it somehow has the force of a daily miracle. Even more amazing than the taxi truce is the car compact, the social contract grumbling at you from every car engine stopped at this light for this moment but still ready to launch.
Thousands
of tons of metal crash down the avenues, while thousands of pedestrians play a wary game of chicken with them, and all that holds one back from destroying the other is a kind of minimal trust between the reckless walker and the reckless driver. There are no zebra crossings, as in London, and not many scowling traffic policemen, as in Paris; there is simply an understanding, like the understandings among neighbors, that though we may hate and resent one another, we will not kill one another, at least no more often than we have to. Untune that string, and New York
would become what by all rights it ought to be, what it was: hell, a place of absolute anarchy, the Hobbesian universe.

But who tuned the string? Cities are self-organizing, but they also once seemed self-devouring. Even at its most Hobbesian, New York was never entirely so (more Wellsian, actually, with the Eloi on one side and the Morlocks down below). Even then the cascading, flowing trust that enabled the city to go on was there. Coming home, though, I am overwhelmed not just by the fact that the city doesn't explode into murderous conflict more often than it does, but by the sedation, the domestication, of the place. A city of cars and strollers; even the subway is cleaner now, shocking as that may be. A strenuously considerate male voice regularly announces, “Stand clear of the closing doors!”—a voice of benevolent oversight, like the celebrity voices urging you to buckle up in the backseats of the taxis. Pedestrians cross the street even earlier than I recalled, treating Second Avenue as a country lane: One peek, nothing oncoming, and you walk. And yet all the cars wait for the light to change, even when the pedestrians, crazily, don't.

A
nd I can see how everything is reversed, like coming back through a mirror, and not being able to adjust to seeing things the right way round. At the gym we went to inspect, there are actually screen monitors on every stationary bicycle, where you can read your e-mail as you pedal, and check your stock market quotations as you pant. I took the children on the carousel in Central Park. It whirls and heaves at a truly frightening speed. It makes music at its center, old-fashioned wheezing fairground organ music, from the turn of the last century. The children hang on for dear life, where in Paris they turned in stately time to the cranking of the ancient motor and chain, with silence all around.

M
artha still has dreams of another place. She tells me she has the New York dream, as common among New Yorkers as the student-anxiety nightmare in which you are facing the final exam for a class
that you registered for but then forgot all about (I still have that one). In the New York dream, you discover that your apartment has one more room than you remembered, one more room than you realized when you moved in. You open a closet door, and there it is—another room! She has it every other night.

She dreams of escape, too, of flying away. As she always has, when we have a long way to go downtown at night, Martha will ask cab-drivers to take the “East Side Highway”—and no matter how often, or how obnoxiously, I tell her that there is no East Side Highway, that it is called the FDR Drive, or just the Drive or the FDR, she persists. The East Side Highway is a sacred place for her somehow, the Yellow Brick Road of her mind and heart, never really settled in New York, still dreaming of Canada or Paris and a road to take you there.

She also always gives the cabbies intense, complicated local information: “We're going to ABC Carpet? At Nineteenth Street? But not the old building on the east side of Broadway; the other one, across the way.” Or she tells them to take her to Bergdorfs, “men's-store side.” The drivers give her patient, wary, opaque looks. Her mental map of New York is still so minutely drawn, so realized in intricate curlicues of familiar places and imaginary retreats, that even after years away, it is hard for her, as for all of us, to realize that her map is only hers, hers uniquely, and that the little sign that says you are here
!
points only to the place that she is standing, all alone.

C
ombat is avoided, but conflict cannot always be, it seems, not if the irritant is sufficiently small. We are already at war with our downstairs neighbors because, they say, we are too loud. They complain that the children's footsteps drum into their consciousness, giving them broken days and sleepless nights (though how could they? The kids are asleep by eight or nine, sometimes ten). The neighbors send us letters, they knock on our door, they call the doorman, and they complain.

We write back; they write again. A correspondence, almost eighteenth-century in its variety and viciousness, ensues. The solution—carpeting and tolerance—is obvious, just as the solution to the Middle East problem is two states. It's getting there that's hard, requiring a
road map and a leap of faith. To concede anything would be to concede everything; it would make the other side's story the true story. We shop for carpet, sufficiently thick to absorb all sound, sufficiently lovely to avoid any obvious sign of concession. I write long, ornate, indignant, elaborately Madisonian letters, full of “not with standings” and “urge you to remind your clients.”

I feel the need for the intercession of some other, more mordantly combative sensibility—S. J. Perelman, say. (“Laughing gaily at the implication that our offspring—a light-footed lad of some twenty stone and a bright-eyed sylph of a girl, banished from ballet class not, as rumored, as a danger to the other performers but out of the sheer spite of her teacher, Madame Offenskoff—could be causing them to lose sleep, I dashed off a quick feuilleton of indignation, a screed to rival for length
The Federalist Papers
and for satirical verve the collected works of H. L. Mencken, and that would have caused them to abandon their petty plaints like the French government abandoning Paris in 1940—had I not, as my doxy pointed out, chosen in my haste to write it with the secret-spy pen from the young lad's Intelligence play set, leaving it readable only to those specially equipped with a plastic decoder ring and Bunsen burner …”) High-spirited comic indignation, the old sensibility.

“Tell them to move to the suburbs,” a friend at the office says flatly, shrugging it off. My indignation, which is real and absolute—children have a right to be children, especially good ones like ours—wars with my liberal guilt, or at least with my liberal urge to see everything from two sides: Just how loud
are
the children's footsteps? (The liberal always asks if he might be wrong, on his way to asserting that he knows he's right. This is better than being a radical, who asserts his righteousness without asking if he might be wrong, but the cash value is about the same.) When we left New York, it was the rats in our loft, as much as anything, that helped drive us away. Now
we
are the rats, and I see things from the rats’ perspective: We are here and will remain what we are. It is our nature.

Shaken by the conflict, we raise it with the other neighbors, with other friends. Everyone has a noise dispute story. People sue each other; they measure the neighbors’ racket in decibels with noise
meters. The cartoon image of the city deep inside everyone's mind is that of the man with the broom banging on his ceiling, which is his neighbor's floor—and this turns out to have actually happened to our friends the Ws. Their boy ran across the floor, and a neighbor, right on West End Avenue, started banging their floor, his ceiling, with a broom. We were stunned to hear it, the cartoon made real, as though, after having paid his taxes, someone was actually obliged to walk down Third Avenue in a barrel.

Noise is
the
New York issue, yet why should it be so? Surely all cities are equally noisy, but I have never heard anyone in Paris complain about the noise, and in San Francisco, my sister's family seems to thrive unnettled by other people's noises. Yet Paris is as loud as it gets: the streets with traffic, the families with dogs; and in San Francisco, they play the stereo all night long. Noise in New York is, must be, a symbol, a referred pain, for something else. It is an issue on which no compromises seem possible. The anger comes from elsewhere, even if (as they claim, and as we refute at length) the noise comes from upstairs.

A
s our neighbors complain about the children's footfalls, I think of saying to them, “We will teach them to fly!” Because we will. The kindergarten production in Luke's class is to be
Peter Pan
—the full musical, complete with the wonderful Moose Charlap music. They do it every few years, apparently, with incredible aplomb, under the direction of the saintly, energetic, all-seeing teacher.