Missing Pieces | New York
Being Back Home Isn’t Ever What You Think It Will Be
A New York story
The city’s energy rises around me as soon as we enter, pulsing, buzzing, beating like a heart. I’m in a cab on the way to a reading for my book, Crooked Lines. I am trying to decide if I could live here again.
New York, in all its glory, looms over and around me, concrete, loud and never still. When I lived here many years ago, the energy made me feel like an adventure was always around the corner.
After living in the Midwest for longer than I ever imagined, I am almost a stranger here. Driving around midtown or the upper west side, it feels congested, like there are too many people on the streets.
At home, when I walk around the lake near my house, I may see seven or eight people; rarely more. Here, people are everywhere, and it’s all I can do to keep from running into them.
I am here not only for a book reading; I am here to see my sister, who is struggling with a variety of health issues. I am here to see friends and relatives and have spent a few days with my son and his family outside the city. Now it is New York’s turn, and I am up for that.
My first stop is a fancy-shmancy midtown hotel I can’t afford. It was chosen by a close friend who will spend the evening with me, before and after the reading. She felt strongly we needed a Manhattan option, since my sister’s apartment is close by.
My friend offered to pay more than half the bill, and because money is tight these days, I accepted. Magically, we meet up while I am in the lobby, trying to check in and in just a few minutes, we are on our way up to our room a few minutes later.
I am hoping I’ll be able to plug in my tablet inside the room, because, like everything that happens in New York (at least to me), the logistics of well-laid plans become daffy and fall apart in ways I never expected. A week before my trip, I was informed the reading had to be virtual rather than in person. COVID has still affected attendance at a lot of events, and there seems to be a surge going on.
At the same time, I couldn’t cancel my tickets and was also trying to set up another business meeting for a play I am beginning to write. That left me with one option: go to New York and deal with whatever comes at you — a good idea for every trip to the city, in fact.
My friend and I went out for a quick dinner and found a beautiful restaurant next door to St. Bartholomew’s church. Almost no one was in it, and we shared a dinner of appetizers and swapped stories for the next hour.
The reading went well, and my friend and I went out yet again that evening for dessert and coffee. The hotel was down the block from Cartier’s, and I asked my friend to look up at the windows, because the façade was so pretty. It was the kind of night where you realize the air is pregnant with promises, and you have to go out into the street and find whatever it is you’re looking for.
To me, that meant pouring my heart out to my friend and listening to whatever she wanted to tell me about her life and travels. It meant drinking in the warmth of the night around us, knowing winter was on the way.
The rest of the trip was about punting and improvising. Some friends and appointments had to be canceled, but that gave me more time to see other people— and I cherished every minute. I got to spend time with a close friend who used to be my roommate at college. She brought me to an exceptionally beautiful public garden in the Bronx overlooking the Hudson, and it felt like heaven to be there, bathed in flowers and sun.
Seeing my sister and niece became the heart of my trip, and wasn’t easy — but was wonderful, just the same. My sister and I couldn’t solve anything, and when I was with her, I felt sad sometimes — but somehow just being able to see her made things a little more tangible, so I wasn’t imagining the worst or inventing catastrophes.
If I had been able to stay in the city longer, I could, perhaps, have figured out more about how to deal with my sister’s situation. I know that means I will have to return. On the other hand, I was missing my husband and home terribly, and didn’t want to postpone seeing him again.
What I realized after a few days of being in the city, though, is that I am secretly afraid I will lose New York forever. The New York of my youth brought encounters I’d never find in the Midwest; friendships whose intensity can’t be matched elsewhere; possibilities I simply couldn’t find in other places.
There were also memories: skipping school to go to the Cloisters; seeing my play at Circle Repertory Theater and going to parties with some of the people I love most on the planet; and living through an almost endless number of theater escapades that either made me happy or broke my heart.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t been happy in the Midwest; but when I am restless, and these days I often am, there is a point where I want to do more than write about life — I want to put my laptop down and go out and live it. At home, there are walks and friends too, but the pulse of the city is missing; and I cannot afford to return to live there, no matter how many visits I make.
During the pandemic, my son and daughter-in-law to be were supposed to drive across the country to visit, but cancelled the trip when COVID was rampant. The only way to console myself was to comb through real estate listings on the east coast, but even then, I could find nothing in or near the city that was affordable.
I ended up looking at houses in places like Philadelphia or Lancaster, Pennsylvania or Portland, Connecticut. Part of me knew the places I found would likely be unattainable, with the housing market full of desperate people. The other part of me needs to be near family and old friends so badly I am willing to take on just about any challenge to make that happen.
Or am I? Writing this, I stare out the window at the lake across the street and know I’d miss seeing it, like a rare jewel popping up outside my window every day. I would miss my neighbors and the friends I’ve made here. Most of all, I would miss the space — the green/gray/blue vistas that stretch out above and around me, giving me the latitude and longitude to be who I want to be and to take my time figuring that out.
Perhaps I want both, as I am the kind of person who wants everything, knowing how futile that is, but wanting it anyway. I am trying to school myself to stop wanting, but I have never been very good at it. The only way I can think of changing is to focus more on being grateful for what I do have. And I am.
Still, the city calls. On days when I wake up feeling lonely, or scared, it calls harder, but it could be that what’s calling is the past, and as the writer L. P. Hartley wrote in a novel called The Go-Between, the past is a foreign country. And while I know I want to get back home, I think I’m going to have a wait on that a little longer.
And if New York is anything like it always has been — refusing to let go of me, no matter what I do — that’s okay, then. I can wait.
