A Plea for Eros

raucous, and nasty—but it’s also kind and dear. I’ve lived here for twenty-four years, and I’m not over my love affair yet. There are parts of this city so ugly, I find them gorgeous. I’ve always been attached to the litter, the graffiti, to the noisy, jolting trains, and it seems that despite my antipathy to them, I’m rather attached to surly garbagemen, mute cabdrivers, and overly charming waiters as well. There was a hush in New York for a while—an eerie calm that attends the rites of mourning. You still feel it near Ground Zero, but away from the site, people have been sniping at each other again for months. They’re yelling at meter maids. Truck drivers are howling obscenities at jaywalking pedestrians, and straphangers are shoving each other in the subway. But, just as before, people rush to help a person who’s fallen on the sidewalk. They dole out loose change to bums and con artists and musicians and troops of young boys who sing in harmony on the trains. And New Yorkers of both sexes and all classes still send you compliments or encouragement on the fly—”Love your hat, honey,” “Great coat,” or, “Hey there, slim, give us a smile.”

5
    One day in March, my husband was watching
42nd Street
on television—the 1933 film musical. Near the end, Ruby Keeler appears in a blouse and a small pair of shorts. She swings her arms and her feet start to tap like crazy—shuffling, sliding, and hitting her marks on the stage as if there’s no tomorrow. As Paul sat on the sofa and watched the gutsy dancer, at once tough and feminine, he felt tears come to his eyes, and he gave way to a moment of hopeless sentimentality. “For the old New York,” he told me, “not for September 10, but for what used to be.” Paul was born in 1947. In 1933, he was nobody, but the fact is that New York is as much a myth as a place, and because we all participate in that fiction, we make it partly real. After September 11, the imaginary New York of the century now gone—the wisecracking, rough-and-tumble world of gangsters and dolls, of cigarette girls in absurd outfits, of the Cotton Club, of hot jazz, of hipsters and Beats, of low-lying clubs dense with smoke or Abstract Expressionists at fisticuffs in the Cedar Bar—have become more poignant to us than ever.
    The inhabitants of this city have always known that the rest of the country doesn’t like us much, that New York inspires fear, anger, and irritation in middle America. I know. I grew up there. We had our moment in the sun. For a few months, we looked awfully good to other parts of the United States, but not a single person I spoke to in the city thought it would last, and it hasn’t. We’re not all that loved from the outside, so we love ourselves fiercely, and we perpetuate and celebrate our own myths—the poems and books and plays and movies and all those songs about our greatness—and the terrible wound inflicted on this town has only made a good number of us more fervent.

6
    Real New York and imaginary New York aren’t easily separated. The stuff of a city isn’t only material; it’s spiritual as well. What is true is that 40 percent of us are now foreign-born. A few years ago, I read in the newspaper that in a single elementary school in Queens, the children spoke sixty-four different languages at home. Riding the subway, I routinely see people reading newspapers in Spanish, Russian, Polish, Chinese, Arabic, and other languages I’m too ignorant to identify. New Yorkers aren’t bound by a common tongue or by similar backgrounds. We’re everybody from everywhere, and most of the time, we tolerate each other pretty well. The people in this city know that in this we are unique. No other place comes close to our diversity. We have our share of ugliness, brutality, and pockets of cruel and stupid racism, but the fact is that if you don’t like the hectic jostling of innumerable cultures and languages and ways of being, you wouldn’t want to live here. The terrorists understood nothing. When they hurt New York, they hurt the whole world.
    These days New Yorkers are talking about September 11, 2002, and how we will get through it. It isn’t only that people fear another attack on the city, but that the date itself will force us to relive a trauma, which, despite our efforts to live normally, is still raw and undigested. My sister Asti told me that she dreads the approaching anniversary so intensely that she tries not to think about it.