“Is he poor?” Eunice asked.
“I guess so,” I said. “Middle-class.”
“He’s a bus driver,” a woman said.
“Was,” said another.
“They cleared him out for the central banker dude’s visit,” said a third.
“The Chinese Central Banker.” This was the first person, an older woman in an odorous T-shirt who clearly belonged to the marginal classes (what was she doing in this part of Manhattan anyway?). Several of her cohorts looked at Eunice, not in a friendly way. I wondered if I should declare to the gathering crowd that my new friend was not Chinese, but Eunice was absorbed by something on her äppärät, or pretending to be. “Don’t be scared, sweetie,” I whispered to her.
“He was living by the Van Wyck,” said the marginalized know-it-all. “They don’t want the Chinese banker seeing no poor people on the way from the airport. Make us look bad.”
“Harm Reduction,” a young black man said.
“What the hell’s he doing in the park?”
“Restoration ’thority not going to like this. Uh-uh.”
“Hey, Aziz,” the black man yelled. There was no response. “Hey, brother. Better scoot out of here before the National Guard comes.” The man in the MTA cap continued to sit there, scratching and meditating. “You don’t want to end up in Troy,” the younger man added. “They’ll get your lady too. You know what they’ll do.”
This Aziz guy must have been part of the new “bottom-up” Great Depression movement Nettie Fine was talking about. Only a few hours together, and Eunice and I were already witnesses to history! I took out my äppärät and started to take Images of the man, but the young black man yelled, “What the fuck you doing, son?”
“A friend of mine asked me to take an Image,” I said. “She works for the State Department.”
“State Department? Are you fucking kidding me? You better put that thing away, Mr. 1520-Credit-ranking got-me-a-bitch-twenty-year-younger Bipartisan motherfucker!”
“I’m not a Bipartisan,” I said, although I did as I was told. Now I was completely confused. And a little scared. Who were these people all around me? Americans, I guess. But what did that even mean anymore?
The conversation behind me was turning to the sensitive subject of China-Worldwide. “Damn China banker,” someone was shouting. “When he comes, I’m going to cut up all my credit cards and throw them at him like confetti. I’m gonna shoot his lo mein ass.”
The Chinese tourists on the outer perimeter were starting to disband, and I thought it would be wise to move Eunice along too. I looped myself around her shoulders and gently walked her down the hill, away from anyone who could cause her harm, and toward the Model Boat Pond. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” she said, squeezing out of my embrace.
“Some of those folks looked a little street,” I said.
“And you were going to put your nerd moves on them?” Eunice said, laughing brightly.
Some vestigial teenage memory ran up and down my gut, making me cramp. I was perhaps the least popular child in secondary school. I never learned how to fight or carry myself like a man. “Stop calling me that, please,” I whispered, rubbing my stomach.
“Ha! I love it when my nerd feigns defiance.”
I growled a bit, taking note of her use of the possessive. My nerd. Would she really take ownership of me?
We walked slowly and meditatively, neither of us speaking, both of us a little unhappy and a little content. Early-summer evening was settling over the city. The sky was the color of ghosts. The atmosphere, warm but breezy, reeking of pollinated sweetness and baked bread. Crowding around the boat pond were young Euro couples, playful as children, amorous as teenagers, pressing devalued dollars into the hands of T-shirt and trinket vendors, excited by the twilight country around them. Asian kids, learning to be loud and impetuous, chased one another’s radio-controlled sloops across the still, gray waters of the pond.
Up above, three military helicopters, evenly spaced, rumbled across the put-upon sky. The fourth, barely tagging along, seemed to hold a giant spear in its maw; the spear glowed yellow at its tip. Only the tourists looked up. I thought of Nettie Fine. I had to believe in her optimism. She had never been wrong before, whereas my parents had been wrong about everything. Things were going to get better. Someday. For me to fall in love with Eunice Park just as the world fell apart would be a tragedy beyond the Greeks.
We were walking hand in hand now along the vast grassy Sheep Meadow, which felt comfortable and familial, like a worn rumpus-room carpet or a badly made bed. Beyond it, on three sides, lay the constellation of once-tall buildings, the old ones mansard-topped and stoic, the new ones covered with blinking information. We passed a white-and-Asian couple enjoying an early-summer picnic of prosciutto and melon, which made me squeeze Eunice’s hand. She turned around and brushed my graying hair with her moisturized hands. I prepared myself for a comment on my age and looks. I prepared myself to become Chekhov’s ugly merchant Laptev again. I knew this hurt so well, it actually had left a strange foretaste in my mouth, that of almonds and salt.
“My sweet emperor penguin,” she said instead. “You’re so beauticious. You’re so smart. And giving. So unlike anyone I’ve met. So you. I bet you can make me so happy, if I just let myself be happy.” She kissed me quickly on the lips, as if we had already exchanged a hundred thousand kisses before, then ran into a passing field of green and did three graceful somersaults-one after the other after the other. I stood there. Delirious. Taking in the world in tiny increments. Her simple body parting the air. The parabola of her spine in motion. The open mouth breathing hard after the light exhaustion. Facing me. Freckles and heat. I steeled my chest against what it expected of me. I would not cry.
Gray clouds bearing some kind of industrial remnant moved into the foreground; a yellow substance etched itself into the horizon, became the horizon, became the night. As the sky darkened, we found ourselves enclosed on three sides by the excess of our civilization, yet the ground beneath our feet was soft and green, and behind us lay a hill bearing trees as small as ponies. We walked in silence, as I sniffed the sharp, fruity facial creams that Eunice wore to fight off age, mixed in with just a hint of something alive and corporeal. Multiple universes tempted me with their existence. Like the immutability of God or the survival of the soul, I knew they would prove a mirage, but still I grasped for belief. Because I believed in her.
It was time to leave. We headed south, and when the trees ran out the park handed us over to the city. We surrendered to a skyscraper with a green mansard roof and two stark chimneys. New York exploded all around us, people hawking, buying, demanding, streaming. The city’s density caught me unprepared, and I reeled from its imposition, its alcoholic fumes, its hubris, its loud, dying wealth. Eunice looked at some shop windows on Fifth Avenue, her äppärät crawling with new information. “Euny,” I said, trying out a shorter version of her name. “How are you feeling right now? Are you jet-lagged?”
She was looking at an alligator skin stretched into a meaningfully large object and failed to answer me.
“Do you want to go to our house?”
Our house?
She was busy scanning the dead amphibian with her äppärät as if it contained an answer. Her lower face was now covered with a smile that was a smile in name only. But when she turned away from the store window, when she appraised me, there was nothing on her face. She was looking into the smooth white emptiness of my neck.