Leaving New York: An Experiment (Part IV)

[Joy Katz]

“There are just three days in the history of Manhattan: the day you first see it, the day you get to move there, and the day you, far smarter, much less intact, still find the strength to leave.”

Leaving New York for real is a divorce. You can’t simply drive off, the way I drove out of San Francisco, picking up my dry cleaning and pointing my car into the desert. There’s a lot of explaining to do, to dear friends dug in, with their hard-won jobs, their apartments made carefully personal over the years— apartments cunningly arranged so that everything nestles between the top of the refrigerator and the ceiling, the radiator and the wall. Apartments wherein every bit furniture has been thought about, thought so much about that it’s warm from the thinking, from being regarded with such fondness. In New York, our apartments are our bulwarks, our lifeboats.

All that, I can imagine leaving.

It’s the narrative makes it hard.

You know the narrative. It’s very familiar. If you’re living in New York, and you leave, it’s because you’re returning to some way you were, or to the people you Really Are, or because you hate the person you became there, or, worst, you can’t face the person you didn’t become. But what if that’s not so?

What if my people are in New York, but it’s not my city anymore?

Anyway, who could be so cruelly demanding, so petulant, as to say, if you admit, if you concede, maybe even with tears, that you’re weary and fed up and, yes, not all that intact in certain ways—if you say you’ve been unhappy for a while, and you tried to make it keep working, but it isn’t, in fact it’s killing a part of you—if you say quietly, I have to go, I need some time to think—who would be so slammingly assholish as to say, all right then, go back to your boring life, go off to Kansas (or St Louis, whatever)? Who would have so little imagination about anything outside itself, such a throbbing narcissistic disorder? Who would, then, after not bothering even to ruffle up a fight, jump into a cab and disappear for ever into Midtown traffic at four p.m., leaving you on the curb at Sixth and 43rd in the rain? (Wait: a cab? At four o’clock? In midtown, in the rain? And as for being narcissistic, I suppose it’s possible New York might be having a drink with Berlin.)

Who would do all this? Why, your grand, granite-bedded, mirror-skinned, busy busy all-lit-up polyglot city, the one you pledged yourself to.

*The quote is from one of my favorite New York stories, Plays Well With Others by Allan Gurganus.

Comments

[New York City]

How dare you leave me!

[Eddie Silva]

I sometimes wonder what was the time of New York I would have loved the best, and it doesn't take me long to imagine the early 60s: O'Hara writing poems on his MOMA lunchbreak on an Olivetti in a shop window, Sontag smoking cigarettes and going to foreign cinema, Dylan among other drifters (he's the one who ain't driftin'), a place with room for extravagant and intimate dreams. There's a marvelous book I read as a child, It's Like This, Cat, which described a boy's life in NYC, riding bikes to Coney Island and meeting a girl who was the daughter of beatniks. What a fabulous existence to imagine out in Oregon (where I went tograde school and jr. high).