Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(80)
I had even worn poor Helen out: Her reassurances gradually waned in the face of my stolid despair. We were sitting in silence when we heard the Morse-code tap of sensible heels down the corridor. The supervising nurse appeared at the door, and visiting hours were over.
I was left alone again to think, and to listen to the traffic outside: a throbbing note appropriate to the irreparable wreck of Cupid’s barque. An almost tidal-sounding score perfect for the choreography of the passage of time, a dull and dogged reminder that I was just like everyone else in suffering the injustice of chronology: I could only walk through it facing forward, going in that one direction.
24
A Secret
Although I have promised Gian that if I am ever confronted by muggers I will not resist, this turns out to have been an untruth.
I do not discover my falsehood immediately after emerging from the party, but rather outside of Penn Station. It takes a few minutes.
Walking north to Thirty-Third Street, leaving Peter and Wendy’s place, I pass numerous idling cabs, yellow and hungry like the golden Pac-Mans in those video games my grandchildren love. Single-minded, the drivers trawl the curbs, aiming to devour little ghosties like me. With just moments to go until midnight, every cabbie is waiting for a fare, all hoping that whoever drunkenly stumbles through their doors after ringing in the New Year will be a short trip: each seeks to pack as much earning as possible into this, the cabbie’s busiest night of the year.
As I walk, I’m weaving a little—hard to say just how much—from the effect of drinking cheap vodka two hours past my usual bedtime. It makes me a target, but I want to be a target. A spectacle. A catalyst. Things used to happen around me.
It hasn’t rained, but the sidewalks are as damp and gray as tombstones.
I arrive at Penn Station, by which I mean not Penn Station but the atrocity they erected in its place in 1968. I have walked by it hundreds of times since then, but the nastiness of the place still claps like a slap across the face. It is so ugly.
The old station, the one that stood when I arrived in 1926, was a Beaux-Arts marvel of pink granite and glass and steel that evoked not just travel by rail, but also travel through time: the splendor of an ancient Roman past, plus the possibility of a future where beauty and civic function are not just valued but understood to be in harmony.
I will not make it all the way there before 1985, but I have decided that I would like to walk by R.H. Macy’s on my way back home. The last stop of the night.
Stay off the street, Peter told me. Stay off the street, Wendy agreed.
I am not going to stay off the street. Not when the street is the only thing that still consistently interests me, aside from maybe my son and my cat. The only place that feels vibrant and lively. Where things collide. Where the future comes from.
Where lights snick on and off in unreachable windows, like the ones above me. Even when the street is not majestic or momentous, it fascinates me. The lights that working people leave on after they go home: pies in a pie case bathed in bulb glow, the desk lamp burning in the funeral home, the hundreds of indistinguishable desks in fluorescent-washed offices, waiting for the next business day to restore their significance.
Footsteps to my left and a deep voice. “Hey, lady,” it says.
I turn to face it and see three teenagers, three young black men.
“We’re gonna need five dollars from you,” says the voice. It belongs to the tallest one—taller than me but just as skinny, wearing blue jeans and a red leather flight jacket striated with glittering zippers. It’s a handsome jacket, but too short for his arms, leaving his wrists bare to the midnight chill.
“Excuse me?” I say.
The kid to his left—shorter, but stronger looking—steps in closer. The third hangs back, his eyes darting from me to the street to the sidewalks to the nearby buildings and then to me again. He seems not to want to be here, and his nervousness makes me nervous, snaps me partly out of my drunken overconfidence.
“Give us five dollars,” the short one answers, “is what the man said.”
His eyes are closed off, as impersonal and unwelcoming as Madison Square Garden looming beside us. He’s dressed in an Adidas tracksuit; his tennis shoes have no laces. All three of them are shivering, dressed for this morning’s warmer weather. They’re a ways from home, wherever that is—across the Harlem River, probably.
Five dollars. This, I remember, was exactly the request that prompted the Subway Vigilante’s act of violence, if the news coverage can be believed. I wonder whether these boys know this—whether they’re referencing it deliberately, or whether it’s just the standard protocol for muggings these days.
“You boys should be careful in this neighborhood,” I say. “It’s a dangerous area. And you don’t know what people are liable to do.”
The tall one and the short one exchange incredulous looks. “You’re not understanding what I’m saying,” the tall one says.
The nervous third steps closer to get a better look at me. He’s dark skinned and slight; his eyes—shrunken by the lenses of black-framed spectacles—are still frantically scanning our surroundings for any hint of danger, like those of a doughboy in no-man’s-land.
“Yo,” he says. “This is an old lady right here.”
“I know what it is,” the tall one says. “I got eyes.”