Notes From The Journey
I returned from Thanksgiving in golden afternoon, bright slabs of it between county-long rafts of cloud. Northbound from New York, I always have a sense of ascending, as though up on maps is literally up. Coming over a rise on I-684 just below Brewster, one of the sections with its original concrete lanes, cacophonous and jouncing, I had a brief, wide prospect of brown, stippled hills purpled with distance, marbled with white pine green.
Northbound, I exhale freely to a degree I always had to do consciously in the city (how deeply I’m breathing! How relaxed I am. So very relaxed). Fifteen years, and I could never entirely shake the sense of having to be ready—for an invitation to a secret party; a mugger; a talent scout with a contract in the back of his Town Car, already made out to my name.
I miss it every day I’m away. But as Hemingway said of Spain and Paris in A Moveable Feast, I write much better about New York when I’m elsewhere and able to freeze the moment I choose, instead of being swept away by the moment I’m in.
The one occasion when I actually was invited to a secret party, I was in New Jersey, out for an afternoon run near my parents’ house, breathless from a long hill. Two young men got out of a black Mercedes 500 series (I noticed the number; it was strange enough being accosted that I noticed everything).
“We work for Russell Simmons,” one of the men said. “The rap promoter? You’ve seen Def Poetry?”
I hadn’t seen Def Poetry, though years before, at El Teddy’s, I’d ended up at the same table as Russell Simmons.
“I can’t.” I was too out of breath to say more. The men eventually believed me, or believed that I wasn’t going to get into the car with them. They circled the block, but by then I was off and running.
*
On the Tappan Zee Bridge there are signs, Life Is Worth Living, and phones connecting to the Lifeline suicide prevention hotline. I remember thinking when I first noticed them that I never would have thought of the Tappan Zee as a suicide bridge; there’s no sidewalk out to mid-span. Naive city girl! Between 1998 and 2008, twenty-five people killed themselves on the bridge.
In September Anne Morell Petrillo parked in the northbound lanes and jumped to her death, as her father had in 1994. As Gawker points out, the Times article could have used some editing, namely of this:
The two-story house [Anne] had occupied since roughly 2003 was attached and not particularly grand. That may be because the estate Anne Scripps Douglas left behind for her three daughters - the youngest sister, a daughter with Mr. Douglas, is named Victoria - was not strikingly large.
