Alternate Side(78)
“In ten years there won’t be any poor people in that neighborhood, trust me,” Nora said. “I don’t know if there will be any anywhere in the city.”
“The Bible says they’re always with us,” Bob said.
“Yeah, pushed into places we don’t want to live.”
“Now, don’t you go getting jaded on me,” he said. “You were right for this job because you weren’t, not a bit.”
Nora’s walk in the morning was different now, north instead of south, east instead of west. When she went downtown to visit another foundation, or to look at a charter school, she encountered new pieces of her past, her former self, her ancient history. The tired white-brick office building where she had once interviewed with a Princeton alum who had apparently been unimpressed; she had been rejected. The school where she had once been considered for a position as director of development; they had hired instead a very slick young man who later was indicted for writing checks for warm-weather vacations and bespoke suits. A restaurant where she and her sister had once had lunch and Christine had spelled out the plans for her new business; a Christmas party at another restaurant when she was pregnant with the twins and had thrown up shrimp puffs in a dark restroom that had an unpleasant smell. The beautiful building on Fifth Avenue, its paneled lobby seen only as a glossy sliver from the street, where she had spent a weekend with a college classmate who had briefly been a friend. Every time she passed it, two thoughts crossed her mind. She wondered how Missy was, and she recalled how, entering Missy’s parents’ duplex from an elevator that opened directly into it, she had seen the living room with its pale-yellow sofas and apple-green drapes, Central Park a decorative accent through the enormous windows, and thought, This is what it is like to live in New York. She’d laughed once, recalling it to Christine as they split a bottle of rosé in the living room, how she had thought life in the city would be so grand when it ended up quite different from how the Landis family had lived. But Christine had raised one brow and said, “If that’s an invite to a pity party, I’m not going.”
Phil was right: New York was a city of the mind. It was a ghost city, and one of the ghosts was Nora Nolan, young, not so young, single, pregnant, mother, married, not. Somewhere there was the apartment where she and Charlie began, the hospital room in which the twins were born, the office where she and Charlie had met with the mediator. Somewhere there was the goose woman, the juggler, the men playing dominoes, the cooler of Dr Pepper, the aluminum house, George walking his pugs past the place where there had once been a parking lot. New York City was all the strata of the earth. The old was covered over but it never disappeared. Somewhere in the bake shop (gluten-free) was a flyer for the old pizza parlor, and the shoe repair place that was there before that, and the kosher deli, and so on and so forth, down to the rocky remainders of the creek that once flowed through midtown before there was a midtown, before there was an America, that lay now beneath concrete and tar and earth. The price so many of them had paid for prosperity was amnesia. They’d forgotten where they’d come from, how they’d started out. They’d forgotten what the city really was, and how small a part of it they truly were.
Reinvention, newness was all, all built on the sturdy back of what was past. Somewhere a metal shard hammered by a Dutch worker centuries before oxidized in the ground beneath layers of street and road. And above it all the great city now, today, glittery new, just made, a monumental illusion.
Nora turned at the corner toward her office, her face raised to a glimmer of light between buildings. “You have a blessed day,” said the man handing out free papers on the corner.
“You, too,” she said.