Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(57)

That pretty much sums up how I feel about New York. I found I had to leave it in order to get a clear perspective on my life here and to write this book—most of which I did in Rome in a single five-week period less than six months after Oliver died.

One evening, I took a walk by the Tiber. I was going to take my usual route—across the Ponte Sisto and through the Palazzo Farnese—but changed my mind when the light turned green and headed west instead. I took a right on the Ponte G. Mazzini and stopped mid-span. Some people say Rome is a big, tough city, gritty, but I don’t find it this way at all. (Have they been to New York?) I find Rome gentle, magical. The sun had just set, and the light was extraordinary—smoky-rosy-golden-violet, light that cannot be captured in a photo or, for that matter, in words.

I found a pen in my jacket and wrote a note to myself on a tattered map, the only thing in my bag or pockets resembling a piece of paper:



Living in Rome makes me wish I were

Living in Paris, which makes me wish I were

Living in Amsterdam, which makes me wish I were

Living in Iceland, which makes me wish I were

Back home.

New York.



Back home, I find that the one question I am asked more often than any other these days (the one question other than, How are you doing?) is, Are you going to stay? Are you going to stay in New York?

“By ‘stay,’ do you mean forever?” I mean to ask but don’t. Stay till I die? Till I am too old to take care of myself, like my father?

“For now,” is my answer, but I don’t know, not really. If moving to New York at age forty-eight taught me anything, it is that I am capable of starting over in a new place. And yet, the thought of leaving it, of knowing how much I would miss, is too painful to contemplate.

I remember how Wendy once told me she loved New York so much she couldn’t bear the thought of it going on without her. It seemed like both the saddest and the most romantic thing one could possibly say—sad because New York can never return the sentiment, and sad because it’s the kind of thing said more often about a romantic love—husband, wife, girlfriend, partner, lover. You can’t imagine them going on without you. But they do. We do. Every day, we may wake up and say, What’s the point? Why go on? And, there is really only one answer: To be alive.

—New York, August 30, 2016



Under the Overpass





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


Grateful acknowledgment is made to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Leon Levy Foundation for their very generous support of my work, and to Blue Mountain Center and the American Academy in Rome for providing time and space to think and write.

I am equally indebted to friends and family. Special thanks to my wonderful agent, Emily Forland, and to her fellow agent, Emma Patterson, both such wise advisers; to my editor at the New York Times, Peter Catapano, who deftly edited several early pieces in this book; to the Virginia Quarterly Review; to Steven Barclay—such a big-hearted friend; to Jane Breyer, Paul Wisotzky, and Melaine Zimmerman, for being there twice (and many times more); to Joel Conarroe, Kate Edgar, Mark Morris, and Richard Rodriguez, for their encouragement and support; to Lisa Garrigues, for her careful read of the manuscript at a crucial stage; to Cindy Loh, George Gibson, Alexandra Pringle, and the entire team at Bloomsbury in the U.S. and the UK; and especially to my longtime editor and friend, Nancy Miller, who has believed in my work from the beginning. It is to her that I have dedicated this book, with gratitude. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my first agent, the late great Wendy Weil, who looked me in the eye one day years ago and told me I really should think about doing a New York book.