A Plea for Eros

kind of religious education, that religion remained a fact of most people’s lives and provided the ground for moral life. I was startled to discover, however, when we were assigned the first book of the Bible for a literature class, that a majority of my fellow students had never read Genesis. Nevertheless, I wasn’t an “odd duck” in New York, the city that accommodates or ignores all ducks. And despite the harshness of everyday life—the raw, cold, scraping sensation of never leaving the street, because my apartment felt as if it were
in
the street—I was at home in New York. This feeling of being “home at last” corresponds to my idea about the city, an idea shaped by books, movies, and plays, an idea of infinite possibility.
    There is an incident, however, that made me understand what New York is for the people who come here to stay. I had been living in Manhattan for two years. I had met my future husband, and we were invited to a dinner at Westbeth—the housing project in the West Village for artists. I was delighted to be there in that company. I was in love. I was happy without having sought happiness. I vaguely remember wearing something silly, but no one minded. Everyone at the table looked like a marvel to me, but there was one man in particular who shone that night. It seemed to me that he had stepped right out of a Noel Coward play. His jokes were witty, his repartee sharp, and his manner nonchalant. He had written a book on Andy Warhol—no surprise. He was the most urbane creature I had ever laid eyes on. And I laughed and smiled and felt like Miranda: “How beauteous mankind is. O brave new world that has such people in’t.” The conversation wandered, as conversations do, and people began to talk about where they had grown up. Nobody, if I remember correctly, had been born and raised in New York City, and where had my idol sprung from, this divinity of culture and wit? Where had he spent his entire childhood and youth? In Northfield, Minnesota. I hadn’t known him, because he is several years older than I am, but there it was: he and I had grown up in the same small town. New York City is the place where people come to invent, reinvent, or find the room they need to be who they wish to be. It’s a place where fictions run freely and plentifully, where people are allowed a certain pretense about themselves, where cultivating a persona or an idea of how to live is permitted, even encouraged. This is the glory of urban freedom and indifference. It has its drawbacks, of course. One summer I was alone in New York. All my friends had fled the city heat, and I remember thinking, If I died right now in my apartment, how long would it take before anybody noticed?
    I now live in Brooklyn, the place that nobody visits but where many people live. It is more ethnically diverse than Manhattan. The buildings are lower. We have more trees. I have zealously attached myself to my neighborhood, Park Slope, and defend it loyally. But all the time I’ve lived in Brooklyn, I’ve been writing about other places. I wrote a book called
The Blindfold
here, about a young graduate student who lives near Columbia and has a number of peculiar adventures. She and I aren’t the same person, but she’s close to me. And I put her in my old apartment, the one I rented on West 109th Street. When I wrote her stories, I saw her in my apartment and on the streets I knew so well. What she did wasn’t what I had done, but I don’t think I could have written that book had I not put her there, and I couldn’t have written it had I still been living in that building.

5
    Long before I had heard about the New Critics or structuralism or deconstruction, teachers liked to talk about “setting” as one of the elements of fiction. It went along with “theme” and “character.” I can’t remember how Paul and I started our discussion of place in fiction or how we arrived at his startling comment about
Pride and Prejudice.
But I clearly remember him saying that Austen’s novel had taken place in his parents’ living room in New Jersey. Although any self-respecting junior high school teacher would have scoffed at such a remark about “setting,” I realized I had done the same thing while reading Celine’s novel
Death on the Installment Plan.
When Ferdinand finally takes refuge in his uncle’s house, I imagined him in my paternal grandparents’ little white house outside of Cannon Falls. Ferdinand says, “Yes,