10/4/91
That same hot, metallic smell that holds conflicting memories for me: midtown, where I first lived, my mean roomates from college, and the office where I worked, and;
the Village, where I lived for two summers.
The hollow sound of a car's horn, echoing against the bare buildings, and bouncing up, having nowhere to go.
The hurt I felt when I first walked out on my job of three-and-a-half years. The uncompromising gray buildings rose all around me. Cars screeching by on every avenue and side street, criss-crossing the entire city.
That hurt little girl, so long ago, in the navy blue skirt, harmed by an aggressive blond woman in a business suit. Wandering among the vertical gray jungle of New York, as a car screeched through Manhattan and disappeared.
THE SOUND OF MUSIC
Opera is everywhere.
The taxi driver's radio serenaded me throughout the city, as we made our way from Penn Station, up Eighth Avenue, through Times Square, past the McGrath-O'Connor buidling where I used to work - did I dare look? - only for a minute - by 306 West Fifty First Street, where I first lived in New York City, the hot metallic smell greeting my memory; around Columbus Circle and its ever graceful fountains, water spraying out of Cupid's mouth; up Central Park West to my former roomate's apartment.
A uniformed man approached the taxi. I reached for the lock. He pulled at the car door. I pulled at the lock. "Sorry," I said.
I walked through the revolving door. My suitcases were waiting with the uniformed doorman. I mentioned my name. "Send her right up," the concierge at the front desk said. The doorman lifted my suitcases and carried them to the elevator door.
A, B, C, D, E...H, I, J, K..L, O, MEN, O, PEE...Apartment 15K...H though P to the left. I walked down the green carpeted corridor, turned, and rang the doorbell expectantly.
"Who is it?" a familiar voice said, and once again, I entered the world of opera. A sturdy white bulldog greeted me. Flowers festooned the cozy room, big Laura Ashley flower prints on the two couches, delicate silk mums on the glass coffee table, flowers on the fluffy throw pillows, on the draperies over the big picture window which overlooked the castle-like dwellings of the Upper West Side. Four aqua turrets decorated a distant rooftop. The famous Dakota sprawled its somber haunted castle appearance past the courtyard to the sidestreet below. Various townhouses, all in a row, mimicked the Italy of the operetta song projecting outdoors into the balmy fall afternoon.
A small awning ruffled in the breeze, high, high above the street. Faintly in the wind, the tinkling of chimes dangling from a high window across the street.
"Do you mind listening to opera?" Nicole said.
