Let there be children and old people but few whose occupation is neither hope nor memory. Let there have been immigration at some point: enough to fill the convenience stores, the foreign restaurants, but let it be forgotten. Let the children be all in school, a breath held in, released at 3 o’clock across the park. Let the town’s rhythm be unquestioned. Let me be single: no children, no family. Let me not fit in.
Let there be a college where art students dream of cities they do not leave for.
Let art for the old people be something colorful and, for the young people, something black. Let their art be always things. Let the colorful things appear sometimes in the windows of the shops that sell homemade homewares. Let the art students sometimes fill an empty shop lot with black things. Let the old people go right up to the windows of the empty shop lot and squint and frown.
Let there be a coffee shop next to a head shop where the art students hang out. Let the coffee shop serve bad coffee. Let it have only yesterday’s news and the local papers (let small crimes occur, and let occasional larger crimes, on the outskirts of town beyond the ring road, be personally motivated, down to nothing more than bad marriages, bad upbringings). Let me sit in the coffee shop and, while drinking bad coffee, hear the rumor that someone famous was to come to town but that the visit was cancelled. Let the woman behind the counter shake her head, her toweled hand continuing to spiral in the persistently streaked glass.
HALF THE WORLD OVER
I. FITZROY
You look at your feet at the end of the bath. They are still quite plump and pink. You are waiting for the day blue veins will stick up from them, when a yellow knob will angle the joint of the big toe. That will be when you will have ended up. You have always wanted to be old. The rest, the unwrinkled plumpness, is a fake, a mere waiting.
You have traveled to a conference where you are lionized, though no one in this country seems to know your work. You are put up at an expensive hotel where you are sad to find there is a gym but no swimming pool.
Another disappointment: you wanted to buy your ex-husband a book signed by the keynote speaker, but it turns out she will not speak until after you have left. You spend your days working: panels, seminars, interviews. You have little free time.
In your hours of leisure no sooner do you go somewhere than you want to be somewhere else; no sooner are you sitting than you want to be walking; no sooner eating eggs than you want to be eating chocolate. Always you wish to be in two places at the same time, always you want to be connected. Here it does not seem possible.
In this city the streets are straight and cross each other at right angles. It is easy to find your way. The buildings are either very high or very low. The shops say what they are on their fronts, vans go by with signs like Tip Top Butchers, house numbers are prominently displayed.
People tell you to take the tram but the distances they describe do not seem far to you. You walk and you walk.
You shiver in your jacket and thin dress but you do not want to wear the other clothes you brought with you. You go into shops where the clothes do not suit you, but because you are not at home you do not mind — still you do not buy anything. You walk some more, and all the time you walk you think you should be sitting.
In the cafés you sit then shift chairs to get a better position, a new view. The girls here wear their hair in knots on the tops of their heads. This is just like everywhere else. It seems always to be time for breakfast. A man bends down to feed his chow a strip of bacon. Out of habit you order soup, the cheapest item on the menu. You return to the counter to ask for butter. You are always hungry, always a meal behind.
You cannot communicate with your children, your ex-husband. To be connected you must stand very near a wall of glass.
Outside the café a homeless man is shouting What happened? What was it? Does anybody know? Can anybody explain it to me? His face is bleeding. He cannot leave the circuit of these streets.
But you like being here. At the hotel, where there is a restaurant at which you cannot afford to eat but where there is also a bowl of free apples in the lobby, the women behind the desk address you in French. On the 37th floor you sleep on your usual side of the bed.
You walk out of town to a sea you have never seen before. You intend to reach down and touch it, which you have never done before, so when you return to your own country you can say you have touched it, but in the event it is too cold and smells of seaweed.
All around events are advertised for children: they have given up on the adults. They have given up on everything here that is old: age is accelerated in this young country by the sea. Salt rots the ironwork’s optimistic balconies.
You intend to enjoy walking along the pier but it is not possible. No one sees that you did not touch the sea. No one sees that you did not enjoy your walk.
At the conference’s closing party you ask the head of a television network to show you the river. It is midnight and he has stood talking with his arm around you all night, but when you ask about the river, he says he is married.
You mention a friend who once traveled here. When you say friend, say acquaintance, say how do you say ex-nearly-lover? You describe him and what he does without calling him any of this, hoping to see his reflection jump into your listeners’ eyes.
A writer gives you a copy of his book, yellowed along the edges. There must be a stack of them at home.
The man in the café wipes his chow’s mouth with a paper napkin. What happened? Can anybody explain it to me?
You become worried that the head of the television network might have thought you wanted him for his power and his money.
From the 37th floor at dusk you can see the lights going on below, snaking the gridded streets. And at dawn someone is swimming in a pool on a lower rooftop. Everything is so like what you would like New York to be like. Perhaps now you will delay going to New York in case it is not enough like this.
Tap, bath, toe. Soon you will be going away. You will not see the writer or the chow or the homeless man or the head of the television network again.
Luckily there are so very many new places in the world.
II. NOTRE DAME
Sitting in the café opposite, I am happy I am not one of the tourists flowing across the road to see the cathedral, but I am happy I can see them. They are wearing yellow trousers, emerald trousers, blue boots. They are wearing red heels; they are wearing turquoise flats. Having a limited amount of space in their airline suitcases, they have thought for a long time about what they would like to wear to see this place. They have thought about what the place would like to see them wearing, and what their fellow tourists would like to see them wearing and what I, sitting in this café, would like to see. And even if they discovered — as soon as they got here — that their clothes were wrong for the weather, the setting, the occasion, they’re stuck with them and they’re going to stick with them. The tourists are mostly women, or perhaps I don’t notice the men, who wear shapeless beige pants, shapeless beige hats. The younger women are all dressed the same, in the current fashion. The older women are dressed either more primly or more provocatively than the younger women, but always in reaction to them.
The locals flow past the café and over the river in a stream of gray.
I came to this café because it is not the café across the street. This is not the café I would normally come to. The café across the street is better but there are advantages here. From this café I can see the beautiful people in the café across the street: sitting at that café, I could only be among them. As I sit at this café I develop a certain affection for the people here, which makes me feel I might have chosen this café after all. They are not so well-dressed as the people in the café across the street, and more of them smoke. Their voices are more raucous, and especially their laughter. Their hair is not so expensive and is stiffer and comes in colors that are easily named.