He passes an exhibition of rocks and minerals taken from across America. Stones cleaved in two glitter and shine. The public pick them up to feel their weight. He moves past them all.
He finds what he is looking for, Christ and His Apostles, the white plaster figure of Christ with his head solemnly bowed, the twelve apostles his audience. Walt looks from statue to statue. He is very small and they are very large. He wonders what these statues could possibly mean in a world that is capable of producing all the other items on display. Are these statues so large because we wouldn’t know the subjects otherwise? If Christ exists then he is our size and walks amongst us. He mustn’t be set aside to admire.
Walt joins a gathering crowd. People are watching a demonstration by a man on a platform that has been hoisted into the air. The man is holding up a pair of shears and he cuts the rope that secures the platform on which he is standing. The crowd gasps but the platform holds firm. The crowd applauds and cheers.
What will happen in the future now that elevators exist? Bodies pushed into a box and raised high. It will change the landscape of the city. The city will grow vertically. When people are close enough to touch the heavens will they feel closer to God?
Walt dreams of the prison ships moored off the Brooklyn shore during the Revolutionary War. Prisoners are kept below deck. The only light to penetrate shines through the iron grate above their heads. Men rely on the whims of unsympathetic guards. Men sit in the dark and await their deaths. This stinking hole has become their whole world. The prisoners are dying of disease or are killed for insurrection. Their bodies wash up on the Brooklyn shore. When the weather is rough, the sand blows away, revealing a pile of bones buried beneath. The people of Brooklyn are outraged when they find them. They demand a proper burial site. They demand a memorial. God will not find these men if they remain buried here. There is a great parade in the men’s honour. The men are buried deep in sanctified ground. Life grows from them. Blades of grass.
I have been dreaming, Walt says.
Bucke covers him again with his overcoat and strokes his aged cheek; it is dry and warm. He traces the lines in Walt’s skin and thinks of the layers of age visible in rock. Walt closes his eyes. Bucke turns down the lamp. He imagines Walt standing on the Long Island shore when he was young. Walt’s breath is like the breaking ocean tide. All things are the same, his breath, the movement of the train as it passes across America, the tide of an ocean a thousand miles away. This is what Walt meant by his description of Brooklyn Bridge. It is no great revelation to see how things are connected. Bucke is able to visualize the bridge because Walt has described it, and now he is joined to Walt through this image. It is a connection that will survive all time and distance. Bucke closes his eyes and thinks of the bridge. The breeze coming in through the open train window is now the wind coming off the East River as he stands halfway to Manhattan, halfway to Brooklyn.
DAY TRIP, 1920
Before Jones Beach, before Robert Moses, a father packs his family into a car and sets off.
It’s bumper to bumper all the way. An hour in and they’ve not even made their way out of Brooklyn. The father looks over at the car beside them and sees kids crying in the back seat and Grandma overheating. His wife is silent. The kids are starting to complain that they’re hungry. He tells them to eat whatever they want. He’ll get more food later, he says, when they arrive at the beach.
They crawl through Long Island towns. At last he sees the entrance to a beach, but there is nowhere to park along the bank. A uniformed guard waves the cars on.
The father calls out the window, What’s the problem?
The beach is full. Please move along.
As they drive further east he looks at the ocean. Miles out to sea and nothing is there. The father can imagine the cool water and the gentle breaking waves against his body. Lying there, floating in the water, looking up at the blue sky above him, diving deep below the surface, moving his body to its extreme, his family watching from the beach.
Another forty minutes and they’ve made it to a fishing village with signs to another beach, but as he swings the car into the entrance a guard steps into the road and holds up a hand.
There’s no room. Please move along.
The road has become a dusty trail. The father has to roll up the windows to stop the dust getting in. But it’s too hot to have the windows closed so he rolls them back down.
At the remote tip of Long Island, the father scans the banks until he sees the entrance to a beach where the gate is open and the land beyond is clear.
At last, he says.
But as he turns the car into the entrance a man emerges from the bank and commands him to stop.
This is private land, he says. Please turn your car around. There are public beaches to the west, sir.
They’re all full.
This is not a public beach. Please move along.
But this beach is empty!
Please turn your vehicle around.
He does what he is told.
He drives back the way they came, through the towns.
His wife wakes up and looks at the ocean that is now on the other side of the car but she does not ask him to explain. The kids stare out the window at the fields and the woodland.
Don’t worry, kids. I know where we can go, he says.
The father pulls the car over before the Brooklyn Bridge approach. He orders his family to get out. They cross Fulton Street and walk towards the East River where tankers and sailboats are passing on the water and traffic rumbles over the bridge. They walk towards the palisades. He climbs over the barrier and onto the sand. He kicks the dirty cans to the side of the beach. He takes off his shoes and socks. He walks towards the grimy water. He looks back at his family. They are watching him in silence. He steps into the river. The water is cold. The oil-slicked surface of the water encircles his ankles. His family doesn’t follow him in. They don’t move from their position on the wall.
13
Robert Mapplethorpe tells the man to look left, look right. The man won’t smile unless Robert tells him to smile. Robert catches a view of New York through the window. Whether or not it can be seen in the photograph, this is where his subject has come from, from the streets of New York.
There was once a man named Robert Opel who lived in San Francisco. Imagine it: the Golden Gate Bridge, sunshine, hills, streetcars moving up and down the roads, easy afternoons in the Californian sun, the Castro, store doors sprung open, a cool ocean breeze, the occasional vehicle ambling. Imagine being this far away from New York. Everyone says this man is Robert Mapplethorpe’s doppelgänger – a controversial artist prone to naked stunts and famous for riling up polite society. He has a female partner who writes poetry – another Patti Smith, people say. This Robert dies very young. He is murdered, shot down in his own gallery. They say it was a robbery, but, you know, what kind of gallery keeps cash on the premises? Robert Mapplethorpe would never be caught up in anything like that. He has a knack for slipping out of places before there is trouble.
At an art exhibition in Midtown, Robert looks at mannequins displaying cancerous tumours. The tumours in some cases are very large. His own shadow is cast across the floor in between the models, in between disease. The beauty of New York is that when you turn around there is always something worse to see.
He walks out onto 42nd Street and everything is the same, tumours all around him, people, disease, and the opposite: physical perfection, the human body, perfect fomations, the casual stroll of a figure, the running of a body across the street, skin as smooth as marble, faces like glass, the demarcation of muscle in an upper arm, a neck, a frown, the extended line of a pointed hand and finger, an arm reaching up. The body is an architectural structure with an external form holding everything in.
14
A few weeks ago Edmund received an email from a fan named T asking if the two of them could meet. T is an actor in his thirties. You should meet me, I’m cute, the email said. Edmund
quickly responded.
Now Edmund is waiting for a reply from T. He is tired of pretending he doesn’t care. He wonders if T is one of the men he is passing in the street. It could be him, or him, or him, he thinks.
The traffic along Eighth Avenue is a gushing river. Edmund White feels the thunder and rattle of trucks, the stifling sun, suppressed beneath awnings under which he is passing, pausing, tired out by the merciless crowd. He turns down 34th Street, looks into a hole cut into the road, an intricate web of pipelines and cables bathed in artificial orange light. He cannot see where the cables reach; the hole is too deep. Workmen pass buckets up and deposit their contents into a dumpster. The dumpster seems too close to the edge of the jagged hole.
Edmund turns north up Fashion Avenue, pausing to look into a bead-store window. He looks at the buttons, ribbons and bows, mannequins, and fabrics trimmed with lace. He crosses the avenue. A 70% Off Closing Down sale sign has faded yellow. The window shows a row of ugly mannequins displaying prices, divas from the seventies, dressed in sequined evening gowns and crooked wigs. They stare out at Edmund. He walks into the shade of 40th Street, past the parking garages and garbage depots, crosses Broadway. The traffic is one continuous boom. Something inside of him is expanding. The people who pass him create small gusts of air. The traffic moves, caught ahead, moving on. Heat, miserable, folded in layers, he is connected, spiked through, pinned down, trailing threads, losing time – it spills – building up, how long, hours? Years? Decades? He is incredibly hungry. The snack carts wilt in the shade. Dirty yellow sun umbrellas, rain umbrellas, advertising signs. He looks ahead at the space of Sixth Avenue. There is the entrance to Bryant Park. A truck accelerates, revealing an oasis of green.
The fountain gushes. Busy people walk clutching coffee cups, confident, wealthy, healthy, lie stretched on fold-out chairs, sit lined up in the sun, legs in the sun, feet up on a wall – work break, lunch break – busy – business dates, lunch dates, salad bowls scraped with plastic forks, cans of soda emptied and crushed. Legs pushed up against the roped-off lawn. Don’t step on it, now. Do not step one foot upon the grass. There are the stop-start honks of traffic on the avenue. Buses hush to a pause. Babies scream in off-road strollers. Edmund struggles through them all.
Here is the outdoor Reading Room. The shelves are lined with books. Sparrows are bathing in the dirt.
Edmund sits in his regulation fold-out chair. He can see the Empire State Building behind a black tower that is decorated with gold. Kindergarten kids are passing him. They clutch rope circles that are tied onto a long rope line. One boy is proudly singing his alphabet.
Edmund remembers when Bryant Park used to be empty of people except for the homeless and lonely men. Now the public are sitting on picnic chairs, reading newspapers, peering into lunch bags, balancing laptops on their knees, closing their eyes against the sun.
The long branches of Bryant Park trees hang suspended over the path where he is sitting but he does not feel protected. He looks up at the Empire State Building. He can see the windows and the window blinds clearly. Grey clouds move behind the building. They do not penetrate exterior walls. This is what it feels like to have it not go in, to find out that one’s body and soul are too hard. I used to be as tall as the Empire State Building. Once upon a time I stood higher than the rest. You could see every eyelash, every speck of colour in my eyes. I was not afraid to be seen in detail.
Edmund used to segment the city according to different types of lovers. There were the eye-openers of Greenwich Village, the seedy males of the Meatpacking District, the gaudy show-offs of Broadway.
When he wrote Hotel de Dream he imagined Stephen Crane’s Painted Boy. He imagined what it was like to want the thing you cannot have, to see it standing in the street, to speak with it, touch it, but to never have it for yourself.
The lawn of Bryant Park is lush and green. Sparrows peck at the neatly shorn blades. Edmund watches two women talking at its edge. They have made their way down from the bar to smoke cigarettes. One slips her stockinged foot out of her high-heeled shoe and places it delicately onto the restricted grass.
15
1936 is Moses’ swimming-pool year. He opens the renovated Hamilton Fish Pool and Bathhouse in Manhattan on June 24th. This pool is large enough to accommodate over two thousand swimmers and holds 485,000 gallons of water. There is a diving pool and benches with planted trees for shade and a wading pool, locker rooms and playing fields for sports. On June 27th the Thomas Jefferson Pool and Bathhouse is opened in Harlem providing relief from hot summers for the people in the surrounding tenements. On July 2nd the Astoria Pool and Play Center opens in Queens, positioned in front of the Triborough and Hellgate Bridges with views of the Manhattan skyline. It is big enough to accommodate 3,000 people and is lit by underwater floodlights in the evening. On July 7th the Joseph H. Lyons Pool is opened on Staten Island to a crowd of 7,500 people. The Highbridge Pool and Bathhouse in Manhattan on July 14th, the Sunset Pool in Brooklyn on July 20th, the Crotona Pool in the Bronx on July 24th, the McCarren Pool in Brooklyn on July 31st, the Betsy Head Pool in Brooklyn on August 7th, the Jackie Robinson Pool and Recreation Center on August 8th, the Sol Goldman Pool in Brooklyn on August 17th.
Moses likes to swim. He swims whenever he gets the chance. He will swim morning, noon or night. He is formidable in the water.
16
Walt’s dress shirt is hanging over the waistband of his trousers. Bucke’s own clothes are pressed and tidy. This is the difference between the two of them. It is something Bucke cannot ignore. Bucke wants to look smart for Walt. Walt has not changed his clothes in several days.
Don’t you think we should send word ahead to the engineer? Bucke asks.
The figures in the car through which they are passing are relaxing before dinner, reading books, sitting quietly. There is a mother bouncing a baby on her knee.
Walt laughs. He is determined to see how everything works.
When they reach the engine carriage they see a man standing before the furnace. He is blackened with dirt but his eyes are bright.
Walt shakes him vigorously by the hand, dirtying his own hand.
How much will she take? Walt says.
Whatever we give her, she’ll use.
May I try?
Walt throws logs into the furnace. What fun he is having.
Look at me, Bucke!
Bucke is watching. Bucke sees everything very clearly. Time is moving too swiftly. Times are changing. Train travel is becoming popular. High towers are being built. People can now climb to the top of a building and see the boundaries of a city. They can see where things begin and end. These boundaries don’t appear to concern Walt. Here he is playing with the engine of a train as a child would. Walt is not the age he is physically. He doesn’t notice any contradiction in the world. Walt describes the city as if it was a natural place. To him, the city is as natural as the woodland, as calming as the ocean. He describes Trinity Church and Castle Clinton as if they had grown right out of the earth. At other times, he says that the wonder of the whole universe can be found in the form and structure of a single leaf.
Walt wants all the things he cannot have. He says that when he is in one environment he is sure to be longing for another. For the hustle of Fulton Street, he says, or his beloved Broadway when he is looking at Camden’s streams and fields. The city holds treasure for Walt. But Bucke is an expert on the mind. This is where real treasure lies; it can be found in human consciousness. By developing consciousness we can learn to see from above. Walt sees from above. Even when he is asleep and disconnected from his surroundings Walt sees everything, while Bucke can only see boundaries and borders, lines preventing one thing from connecting with another.
Walt is writing a letter in the dining car. He is hunched over the paper, consumed by his writing. Bucke is working on his manuscript. It occurs to Bucke that he and Walt are not sitting in the same place. They are both together on this train but they are separated – one is in
his letters and poetry, the other in his biography.
Walt is writing to Peter Doyle. He is explaining that it would be far easier for Peter to visit him in Camden when he goes there later in the year rather than Walt travelling to Washington. He is feeling very tired. He thinks he has eaten something that doesn’t suit him. He must be more careful with his diet. His appetite has not changed with age.
He crosses this out and begins another letter.
He writes that he is feeling better than he has felt in a long while, yet there is so much work to do back home that it would be best if Peter were to visit him rather than Walt travelling to Washington. When could he come?
Walt folds the letter then crushes it into a ball and stuffs it into his jacket pocket. He stands up. He waves his napkin as a goodbye to Bucke.
Bucke watches him go.
In their compartment, Walt is describing the assassination of Abraham Lincoln as if he had witnessed the event himself.
Did you really see this, Walt? asks Bucke.
In a way, we all have seen it. Either we are sitting low down in the centre of the stalls or we are perched high upon the balcony. It depends who is telling the story. The position of our imagining shows others who we think we are. I used to see our president in the camp. One morning he crossed through the medical unit and stopped to talk to the soldiers there. He shook the hand of every man he met as if he was a friend.
Everyone is Watching Page 5