Invisible moon

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Meera Atkinson

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Meera Atkinson's biography and other articles by this writer

 

She stands at the window, dropped into a jet-lagged dream. The street below is covered in snow. She knows what subtropical heat feels like. She knows the frisson of an electrical storm, the thundering sound of violent rain on a tin roof, the clean, earthy smell and golden light that settles over Brisbane when it's over. She does not know what snow feels like. Exhausted and alert, she looks down at the barren trees searching for refer­ences. Traffic is universal, and the engines of Broadway comfort her. She feels held by the body of the apartment, as if it were keeping her defined in space, safe from the moil of humanity beyond. The room she stands in is like a small face; it has two large eyes that stare across into other people's windows. It has bland, even features, and a long, throaty hallway that leads to the bedroom, dark and warm and cramped. It has only two bud-like limbs: a tiny bathroom and a kitchen just large enough for a stove, sink, bar fridge and cutting board. She is on the Upper West Side, alone in a city of
8 million. She feels like the only one awake.

She spends the week making tentative tracks around New York, seeing the obvious sights. She visits the galleries and takes the lift to the top of the Empire State Building, where she sees Manhattan laid out in a simplifying grid that hides teeming labyrinths. She makes her pilgrimage from cele­brated site to celebrated site with determination. Like many before her, she enjoys the self-satisfaction of having arrived. Coming here, being here, has marked her. She is not content to live obscurely at the foot of the orb. She will be at its centre, its throbbing and calamitous heart. Having packed a sole inadequate coat, she shops for scarves, hats and gloves. She buys a long quilted parka fit for the Antarctic. It's well below zero and nearing the deep end of winter. At night, white lights wrapped around the trees blink through falling snow. She checks in at Columbia. She is here on a PhD scholarship, but despite having convinced them with her application, she has no idea what she will write. The point was to be here, the rest is strategy. By week three she asks herself if she misses home. Australia seems distant and obso­lete. She misses people, she decides, misses being known and knowing. She makes a memorial in a corner – framed photographs of family and friends.

Things she misses from home:

Mangoes

The Pacific

Above-ground trains

Medicare

Cattle dogs

The irreverence of Australian humour

Space, sky

She meets a man, a photojournalist, at a poetry reading listed in The New Yorker. He picks up on the accent, thinks she's English, finds it enchanting. He comes and goes, he says, works everywhere at a moment's notice. He lives in Brooklyn, he says, but it's only for sleeping and storage; there's just a bed, no fridge. He has an incredible voice, the inflection part Boston, part Brooklyn, a tough, beautiful mix. He offers to show her around. Under his tutelage the city opens up, slowly, like a seductive smile breaking on a formal face. He takes her through SoHo and Little Italy, telling stories, pointing out Umberto's Clam House, where a famous mobster was gunned down after a meal of linguini. They walk past an Italian with shifty eyes and a thin mous­tache standing in a doorway smoking a cigarette, a big wool coat over his shiny suit. The man who will be her lover is dark, too – tall, lean, a large fore­head, a sly, crooked grin. His skin is smooth and pale. They sit in a café and order coffee and cheesecake. The soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever plays and the only pictures on the shiny cream walls are posters from The Godfa­ther, Part II and Goodfellas. They stay there for hours. She listens to him talk. He likes her eyes, he says, moving her hair away from them with one elegant finger. Her skin tingles. She looks down. He kisses her at the door of the cab. Back at the apartment she can't sleep. She keeps hearing his voice. It's like a drug.

Even though he's away more than he is there she feels more able, pro­tected. She has a guide, an ally in this city of too many. He leaves her with instructions of what she should do while he is gone (compulsory clichés he calls them), and like a dutiful student she does them all. She takes the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, walks the length of Columbus Avenue and detours to gawk at the Dakota, of Rosemary's Baby fame, and the place of John Lennon's murder. She stares at the cobblestones where he fell and thinks of Yoko. She goes to an exhibition of Andy Warhol photos, then buys a Polaroid camera. Following a conversation about the changing face of Harlem, her supervisor invites her to a gospel church service. They sit up top and watch the congregation below, a bouncing sea of colourful hats. Women fan themselves and fleshy arms wave in the air. Voices holler praise, hands clap, feet stamp and ecstatic cries and singing fill the room. Afterwards they eat soul food (cornbread and grits) and visit an exhibition of young African-American artists' work. She wonders why this kindness has been extended to her. She figures she must
look lost.

 

HE'S BACK AND THEY SPEND DAYS IN BED WATCHING LEAVES SPROUT on the branches outside her open bedroom window, their skins stroked by a lulling breeze. She is frightened of never wanting to give this up. He smokes furiously, his wiry arms gesture as he talks, and his hair falls down his face in unplanned perfect symmetry. She watches him smoke and marvels that it does not repel her. He will not let her leave. She cancels appointments, neg­lects her books, ignores email. Finally, when the food is finished, they go out. They walk through Central Park, stopping to feed squirrels. The bold ones scamper forward and fill their cheeks with nuts. Most of them are bold. On the Upper East Side they browse the boutiques and watch manicured women and their pram-pushing nannies walking Fifth Avenue. They glimpse old-world bohemia off the tourist tracks of Greenwich Village, and are fused together by the bustle and trinket stalls of Chinatown. Each neigh­bourhood imprints on her memory a kaleidoscopic essay of first impressions. She is falling under the spell of this metropolis (compulsory cliché). She is (compulsory cliché) in love.

He has flown off again to some Asian region she's never heard of. The days are long and lonely. He says his life, when he's away, is impossible. He cannot be contacted by phone or email, at least not reliably, and so she deter­mines not to try. They agree it is the best way. Make the cut clean, if temporary. She makes a start on the thesis but it's hard to concentrate. She tries to read but her eyes go over the same line repeatedly before she realises she is thinking of his hands. She makes no other friends. She tries to talk to people but they are cocky or preoccupied. The worker bees are tired. She sees the middle-aged women on the buses and subways, their faces drained of joy. New York, for the un-rich and unblessed, is a dull and demanding master. It no longer flirts, no longer intoxicates with its charm. She wonders if it's easier for the tired middle-aged back home. The potential is more muted there; more tempered with doubt, and the opportunities neither so many nor so grand. Their disappointment is, perhaps, a little less sharp. The inhabitants of Gotham are taunted by a perpetual sense that anything and everything is possible. Before she felt the pulse of that heady hope it seemed hackneyed at best, a contrivance of brutal capitalism at worst. But being here she feels the promise is real (if not always realised) and dizzily addictive; the Magi's star for generations of hopefuls, its gravitational promise draws them and holds them all captive.

Spring has passed. The days have been taken up with waiting and with trying to read and write, a frustrating and isolating existence. To break the monotony she goes out and eats new and alien foods: knish and pickled cucumbers. She awaits his return and the proverbial heat of high summer.

He takes her to a fourth of July barbecue party on a rooftop in Alphabet City. She saw the neighbourhood once in a film about child addicts and shoot­ing galleries. He tells her it's come up, or at least parts of it have, but there is a hardness to the place unknown uptown, a sense of menace in the air, or a sense that menace lurks around the corner. The building is an old tenement peopled by the ghosts of poor Irish immigrants. The apartment itself is a rabbit warren of rooms with floorboards like waves in motion. It is glorious up on the roof, where the Chrysler Building glimmers in the sunset through a hazy mist of light rain. When it darkens, fireworks erupt from a barge on the East River. She stands in his arms, overwhelmed with a sense of, what is it? Not pride, for she is not American and cannot make a claim to its "independence". It is a sur­prising respect for the history and struggle being honoured, a small insight into the character of this country she has observed from so far away. By the time they leave it's pouring. The rain is familiar but the alien Alphabet streets are not. She examines people as they pass, suddenly vigilant and anxious. A sense of foreboding roils in her belly. In her mind they are threatening; she feels they hate her, that they would harm her. She rushes him towards the West Village, searching for a cab. Her feet scream in new shoes as the cabs sail past. The flip side of New York has presented itself like the comeuppance moral at the end of a fable. Finally, they resign themselves to the subway and stand with sweaty backs and arms pressed against them as it speeds north. They never go to his place. He seems to prefer hers. It's become habit.

She has been in New York City for six months. There are times she can understand the fierce loyalty people have to it. As the bus crawls up Madison Avenue she notices film crew trailers. She cranes her neck around to see scut­tling crew. Further up, the pavement is iridescent with floodlights and motion. And then she sees them; a luminous Samantha from Sex and the City standing on the corner in hot pink playing a scene with a frustrated Miranda. There it is, a New York moment, out of the blue. There are times she loathes the burdened island, its malodorous streets, impossible traffic, pushy opera­tors who jump cabs and plough ahead in queues. There are times when its beggars and subterranean despair depress her, when the buildings and the bodies – their difference and sheer numbers – oppress her, when the currents overwhelm her. But there are also moments, fleeting but more and more fre­quent, when she adores it. Who wouldn't love a town where Marvin Gaye pipes out of supermarket sound systems?