Through the Children's Gate (43 page)

Luke and his friends now sit together in the kitchen soberly and silently making tiny figures out of glue and plastic and pain. The GameCube is, like, so over. At least the new game is a way into the pages. Motivated more by the game than even the movies, the boys are reading Tolkien—not just reading but scrutinizing, trying to find the mythological logic behind their mythologizing game. The screens have been defeated by the combined force of airplane glue and literature.

* * *

I
t is amazing to contemplate the number of games Luke has embraced obsessively and discarded definitively in four short years. Each one, I see now, was a kind of cocoon against all that has been unfairly harsh and perplexing in his experience: chess tournaments and the Yankees right after 9/11, Yu-Gi-Oh! and football to get him through his godfather's illness and death. The wise men tell us that all the games we play—social games, language games, and sexual games—are a way of straight-arming harsh and perplexing experience, a way of building fences against the dreadful things that lie just outside the circle. We grown-ups play games in the face of fear and pain and death. Children do that, too, but with an added charge, an extra fillip, of abstraction, of doing the thing for the thing's sake. They play games in the face of grown-ups. Each poem we write may be a concrete way of organizing difficult experience, controlling it by giving it form; but each game children play is an abstract way of organizing experience for its own sake—see, you can control
something.

But then the force of fashion among small boys in New York has by now become much keener than it is among grown women, who will remain loyal to a favorite dress, an old look, or a trusted pair of shoes for longer than you might suppose. Women have, in their over-stressed, overbusy world, a kind of permanent truce to admire one another's Narcissos when they wear them, and the rest of the time to forgive one another their tracksuits and sneakers. Everyone knows which moment is which, and though the old jokes about cattiness and competitiveness are not entirely false, they no longer apply consistently. The mothers are like warriors; they are in the arena, or they are not.

Luke and his friends, on the other hand, are as fashion- and trend-conscious as the people in
The Way of the World,
miniature Millamants and Mirabells. They wear only T-shirts and request new haircuts (“I want to have a sort of heavy-head look,” one boy in the crowd explained to his mother). They are, like all fashion-conscious people, at once intently conformist—the Charvet shirts and corduroy pants Martha brought back from Paris would be unthinkable for Luke now, even if they still fit—and at the same time insanely conscious of small
details: this T-shirt, with this cryptic insignia of broken words and pattern, is cool; this one, with the Knicks insignia writ large upon it, is not.

The reason they are the fashionable group is clear enough: They are the leisure class. They are occupied, of course, with school and homework, too much of both. But where their mothers have conceded polish to exhaustion—one sees beautiful women standing bleary-eyed outside Artists & Anglers in baseball caps and jogging pants—the boys still share modishness with one another. Students are always at once a leisure and a laboring class, and, like the boys at Oxford in
Brideshead,
our boys make up for their implicit subservience with dandyism. Kenneth Clark, in his beautiful account of his Edwardian childhood, writes of sitting soberly in his sailor suit while the childless ladies of fashion paraded themselves for his judgment. Now it is the children who are the masters of fashion, and the beautiful young matrons, their mothers, watch from nearby, in uniform, as they parade.

T
hey are leaving us, they are going away, they have a date across the water, like the Elves in Tolkien, whom Luke so carefully constructs, on the rare days when he invests in the Good. The children
are
Tolkien's Elves, a superior race of poets living among us mere mortals, on their way to the sea—from which they will return, of course, as more mere mortals. They are becoming artists, writers, themselves makers of stories and shapers of experience, no longer merely their parents’ subjects. Luke is writing his memoirs for school, and they are, I find to my delight, largely about the funny, mixed-up things his father has done: the time I thought I was ordering strawberries in Italy and got string beans instead, the time I forgot the word for the cheese I wanted and, finally recalling it, shouted out “Pecorino!” on the beach, as though it were a hunting cry. He has the soul of a writer, getting even in the guise of geniality.

It will be a long time before our children are really gone, but we feel them getting ready, picking out disguises for the break, eyeing the laundry trucks. Our friends the M's, with one boy in college and another in tenth grade, are, miraculously, a couple again, going to
movies and restaurants, dating. We hear the distant bells of possibility, too, and we try to make love in the afternoon. From our bed, we see the window washers suddenly rise up on their scaffolding with the timing of a Buster Keaton comedy, and Martha dives beneath the covers, and love is over. I watch the window washers, who try to look studiedly indifferent, high-mindedly virtuous. The scaffold takes them up to the higher, dirtier windows, and at last they are just boots.

M
aybe there is no city left, and these familar comedies of density—the window washers rising on their scaffolding to stare in the windows, the children whooshing down the sidewalks on their Heelys as the matrons shriek—are busy parts of a soon-to-be consigned past; we are in a Brueghel painting and not wise enough to know it yet. New York, which was lost, and then found, and then lost again, only to be found again, at least for now, may be as doomed as the dodo no matter what we do or whom we vote for.

This is the thesis of several new books that I have been reading about the crisis of New York: For good or ill, the city—not just this one but all of them—as we have known it is a relic, and it will disintegrate as we watch. The Venetian metaphor is no metaphor. It's no accident that New York, as Paris did twenty years ago, is becoming a tourist spot (a tourist trap). People come to see the streets where bohemians once roamed. The city is dead, killed by the growth of the edge cities where suburban sprawl meets the semi-urban mall; by the final triumph of the car; by the need for schools and lawns and cheap shopping. Terrorism has done its part, too, making concentrations of people too dangerous. Flight from the city, which seemed, in the past twenty years, to have been stemmed by the property tycoon's child-bearing revolution, the late-arriving baby, is really (the argument goes) a force as inevitable as continental drift or evolution itself. All of life will soon be an exchange of pixels from seated positions in secure rooms.

So cities are dying, though their death will not be, as we long thought, slow and violent. They are just being strangled. Cities will
die sighing, not screaming, but they will die. They will be inherited not by feral gangs and rampaging hordes but by aging yuppies, professionals, like ourselves, who will linger to remember the Last Bohemia, Soho and the Village, after their children have fled to the edge or to the Sunbelt, as they age and their apartments drip value, like coffee filters, year after year. If the city remains intact at all, it will be as a relic, just as Venice is now, which people will visit for “culture” (rather than for the life of art) and for recreation (meaning sex in a hotel room, for people who can afford it). London is already nearly Londonland, Paris already a city of the rich and retired, and there is no more Venice at all, really, just a kind of simulacra of it, drained of inhabitants, if not of floodwater, and all in the past twenty-five years. Ten years ago New York seemed as much a city as Dickensian London was a city—a great grim lamp shining with greed and need, drawing people, like insects, to a doom they didn't quite mind. Now New York is sinking beneath our feet.

I have an interest in this, as someone whose entire wealth, or, rather, whose entire weight of optimistic debt, is sunk into the city, and as one who has learned that he will never be able to drive (or sail or swim or do anything save walk), and so I do not want it to be true. But when I walk the streets, I don't feel something coming to an end, as one did in the early seventies, when the previous New York of immigrant manufacture was dying and no new thing was yet clearly being born. What I feel instead is a thing coming into being through common need, which is all a city is. The immigrant stories of this generation will be epic when the immigrant children come to write them: Already the children's babysitters have included a Korean girl, now at law school, whose family's rise from twenty-four-hour groceries will be every bit as astounding as my own family's rise from Ellis Island, which passed by way of groceries, too.

A sense of still-here pervades even the bits that are long-standing. To stand in Fairway on a Saturday afternoon, where the olive-oil tasting goes on alongside the search for monster boxes of All, or to walk through the meatpacking district, now decarcassed, where the twentysomethings with their BlackBerrys send each other—what, exactly, I don't know—billets-doux of the newer kind, is to see a world of
engagement, of brief exchanges, of bumping into, something that certainly feels necessary and urgent, not indulgent and nostalgic. Every time I take a taxi home from La Guardia, I don't feel anything like nostalgia (as I must admit I do when the cab from the airport turns toward Paris) but rather wonder, relief—relief that it's still there, that I will be there soon, delivered from the netherworld of other places, my flat feet solidly on the flat ground.

We no longer take homeland security alerts as seriously as we once did, as perhaps we still should. The mayor went on television to say, “They're coming,” and New Yorkers said, “So what if they do?” We have not outgrown fear but been worn out by it. What we practice is not resignation, really, but a kind of self-deluding guessing at the averages—what baseball managers call playing the percentages. If it happens, it is, given the size of the city, unlikely to happen to me, to us. On the way to work, I took the weird, newly renamed W train, thinking in some desperate deal-making-with-the-demons part of my superstitious soul that Osama bin Laden has certainly never heard of the W and that, out-of-towner that he is, he will think only of the 6, and the Broadway local, like Sauron looking past the Shire.

It is not exactly an inspiring sight, this subway car on the W train—our usual car filled with a look so full of exhaustion that you might think we had been riding on this car forever. But one senses that if you look hard enough, you can see the things that draw people to cities, that drew my grandfather here seventy years ago and drew me here, too: possibility, and plurality, keep us riding still. I suppose that possibility is just as possible in the suburbs of Dallas or Phoenix, in some edge city near Atlanta, some floating island of residence levitating between two malls, but I don't quite believe it. Possibility still, in some significant part, depends on density; hope is the thing in a sweatshirt, riding the W train and reading the
Daily News,
a bird of another feather.

In five years, we have been through the hyper-excitements of the millennial arrival, through the darkest slough of despond there has been, then through a long nervous night, to emerge at last, not in the sunny uplands—there are no sunny uplands—but on the rational plateau, back to the park, where liberal pleasures were long ago
planned from resistant materials. The amazing thing is not that we have gotten the children through it—they are made to be adaptable—but that they have gotten us through it, and made us glad. From the overstressed, ironic exasperation we felt when we first came home, to fear, to a tender appreciation of the city's rituals and joys underlined by its new vulnerability to—well, I suppose I ought to say to a deeper, more mature understanding, but really, it's just the old ironic exasperation, now revealed to be a kind of love. Every time the exasperation and the expense and even the plain worry rises, which it does regularly—why are we doing this? what for?—something holds us back. There's a lovely Dave Frishberg song about a man who leaves Manhattan, “Do You Still Miss New York?” He does. We would. We do already, when we think about it. The rush of emotion that rises as the car pulls down the Hudson Parkway, as the cab comes across the Triborough Bridge from La Guardia, the sense of a scale too big to be credited and of a potential too large to be quite real—all that remains available, which is the most you can say of any emotion. The other emotions—the daily frustrations, the long-term fears—remain available, too. The city we are in, the home we have made, and the other city we long for all remain in existence, and we travel with the children back and forth between, just the way I did when I was a child.

P
erhaps the virtual world is the true immensity. (That's something I read, too.) The computers encircle the city, like the Orcs around Minas Tirith, and their grip on us is palpable. (The switch hotel was the first tent of the new occupation, and we as New Yorkers have become mere parakeets, interesting oddballs.)

To a frightening degree, our life is already like that of a minor, failed wizard in Tolkien: staring all day into a palantir, a seeing stone—for what else is an Internet connection? Denethor, the last Steward of Gondor in
The Return of the King,
goes mad because he stares into his seeing stone and sees not what is actually there, the real Middle Earth muddle, but only what Mordor wants him to see: the massed Orcs, the hopeless mortals, the gathering armies of the night.

We, in the same way, see only our own Mordor, the wasteland where metaphor and extended argument have all been blasted away, and all that remains are the massed Orcs of attitude and opinion.

This is Denethor's fallacy, Denethor's folly. In truth, just as there was more resistance left in the West than he was allowed to see, there are more variety and resilience and common sense and eccentric appetite and just plain individual taste in America than the partial view can provide. Every day when we look up from the screens and smell the coffee—in this case, the triple-grande cappuccinos that have overtaken the continent—hope begins again. The screens give a good sense of the American unconscious, but a very poor, or partial, sense of American life.