Piecework

Who is the man with the white hair and the grave manner standing at that sixth-floor window? His hands are behind his back. He looks down into the avenue, but occasionally his mouth moves, he glances behind him. I imagine the air thick with Freudian orthodoxies, and some troubled human being supine upon a couch, while lacerated murmurs beg for peace.

Two floors above, there are four windows so filthy that the glass resembles membrane. I conjure an atmosphere of retreat and withdrawal, some final decision to avoid all further disappointment, to move until the end through loveless rooms full of shrouded furniture, dusty books, and old newspapers, like the Collyer brothers when I was young. On such days, I never investigate; sometimes the most terrible thing of all is to confirm what you have only imagined.

Those apartments are part of the Secret City, a place that is a part of New York, and therefore dense and layered and always plural. But that very density is always changing, those layers shifting, new elements being added to the pluralism. As soon as you think you have figured out New York, have located its poles and its center of gravity, the city’s axis shifts again. A disco or restaurant is suddenly hot; a year later, it’s in Chapter n. You read learned treatises about white flight, the triumph of the suburbs, the end of middle-class New York; within months, white families are contending with black families for the same run-down real estate and, hey, where did all those Koreans come from? The place is simply too large, too dynamic, too infinitely various and mysterious. Almost all of us live with what Alvin Toffler might have more properly called present shock.

That might be why there has never been a great novel about New York. The best New York novels have been fragments, pieces about the garment district, Wall Street, the lives of the rich, the agony of the slums, the treacheries of the theater or the Mob or the magazine business. They are often as brilliant as tesserae, and as incomplete. The New Yorks described by Scott Fitzgerald and Jerome Weidman, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, E. L. Doctorow and William Styron, Jimmy Breslin and Henry James, Jay Mclnerney and John Cheever, Edith Wharton and John O’Hara, John Dos Passos and Daniel Fuchs and Mario Puzo (to name only a few), simply have nothing in common with one another. Forget literary mastery, craft, the sense of place. It’s the vision of each writer that is completely different. Each sees a certain New York and reveals it to the rest of us. But it’s usually not our New York. We can go to London and still see Dickens. Balzac’s ghost prowls Paris. Raymond Chandler seems to have invented Los Angeles. But we never see one writer when we look at New York. The great novel of twentieth-century New York might be the Daily News.

There are, of course, a number of forces that sometimes unify the city we know and the Secret City: weather, sports, television. But when you see the children of the rich prancing like Lippizaner stallions through the Upper East Side, you do not need a degree in anthropology to realize that they are different from the people on the corner of 5th Street and Avenue C. Not better or worse. Simply different. Separated by money, history, and unearned privilege from their fellow citizens. The woman in Crown Heights, her husband gone, struggling to keep off welfare and send her children each morning to school, inhabits a universe different from that of those women with predatory faces that you see in Bendel’s. I know second-generation New Yorkers who have never been to Brooklyn; I know Brooklynites who have never been to Radio City Music Hall. Class separates us. And rank, identity, esteem, and prestige.

All such distinctions express themselves in a variety of ways, and many of them can seem alien. Young black kids in the Secret City of Bed-Stuy or Brownsville talk endlessly about “my image.” Not about the self. Nor about a true understanding of one’s strengths and limits. No: They preen and pose and brag about their elaborately constructed masks. They aren’t alone. The white kids downtown spend endless hours creating punk uniforms to trundle off to that week’s rock club. The rest of us stand off and watch, usually amused, almost always separated from any true contact because of the impenetrability of the masks. Look (we say): inhabitants of the Secret City. Sometimes we can marvel at their amazing labors and ferocious choices: They have decided to perform their lives instead of living them. But after the glance and the wisecrack, we move on. That’s their New York; it’s not ours. And, of course, they are making similar judgments about us.