“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
This week I’ve been editing one story about a newcomer to New York and writing a new story about a different woman, years later, slowly realizing that her image of her life there is far from the actual city or her actual life. New York, the newbie and the hardened careerist are all such well-trodden ground; I hope mine are particular enough to make the stories unique. With the city a real actor as well, there’s the double challenge of getting it right but saying something new.
I was trying to remember what it was like, coming to the city for the first time on my own. Dizzying. Cold, this time of year, windy; nowhere to sit down without buying something to eat or drink.
In a way, Fitzgerald got it backwards: can one ever see the city for the first time, anymore? Most of us who come to New York already have so many semi-mythical versions of it that instead, at first, we are hyper aware of the fact of perceiving it—I’m in New York!—and less aware of what, exactly, we’re perceiving. Plus the sheer sensory overload, before you’re used to it. Forget peripheral vision for a while. When I’m new to a place my sense of scale and perspective is completely off. Those early days come back to me in El Greco elongation, in splotches of Hopper color, at weird skews, snatches of people and architectural detail detached like Chagall’s flying goats from silly encumbrances such as gravity.
I was there for a job interview in the old New York Central building, which from where I was standing on Forty-fifth Street after arriving by a too-early train seemed far less squat than I later realized it is. I sat in the L.A. Coffee Shop feeling a little sick to my stomach until it was time to go upstairs. Most of the rest of the day I spent there and in a second interview across midtown, in tiny rooms that were stuffed with binders of financial data. By the time I caught a train home it was well after dark.
Very little about my early interactions did anything to confirm that the aesthetic bliss of arrival had any bearing on the kind of life I would lead there. Petty tyranny, back-office cruelty, naïve ambition, impatience, boredom and drunkenness. But I was certain! Hope and even expectation for what I would achieve, be a part of and experience fused indivisibly with anxiety lest none of it come to pass, and suspicion that I’d come to late to the party, that all around me was evidence that the best had already happened, and I would only ever be able to guess how it had been.
That receded pretty quickly. Instead, now, occasionally, there’s retrieving that first, sharp intensity—as Joan Didion wrote, “was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.”
