I don't get out much. I'm the type who's eternally intending to buy curtains for the room that he lives in, so as to accommodate the juicy crazed orgy that he's forever planning eventually to orchestrate, but instead always seems to wind up curled into a ball on his lumpy futon with the sonnets of Lady Mary Wroth open before him, like a cat with a saucer of warm milk.
So some buds of mine—Melissa, Tammy, Sherry and Dwayne—set me up on a blind date. I made some noise about resisting and about how stupid the whole thing was, but of course I was actually grateful to them for doing the hard work of finding the attractive woman and inserting us into an at least nominally erotic context.
And speaking of nominally erotic, Candace—the woman—was a sexy, brainy blonde, in red pants no less. She was on the cusp of delivering her PhD thesis at NYU. Given my own pecadilloes, I would have preferred that she be giving it at Columbia, but like I said, she was wearing red pants; plus she did know an awful lot about post-colonial Haitian literature, and I'm always turned on by women who know more than me about some interesting topic, or about some topic that can be made interesting if you just think about it the right way, like for instance if you have some dynamic blonde twenty-six-year-old in red pants speaking about it impassionedly with her face two feet away from yours.
Anyway, it was a promising date; we went to see that documentary Man On a Wire about the guy who walked a tightrope between the two Twin Towers, and we both kept whispering “Jump! Jump!” and giggling and disturbing the other patrons and generally making ourselves feel like sexy outlaws, and afterwards we went to a small gallery with some de Koonings on display and pretended that we were thinking about buying a couple. We stepped into a corner where the gallery workers could just barely hear us and murmured gravely about the dimensions of our bathroom wall and how many more paintings it could hold.
Leaving the Upper East Side, we decided to cut west across Central Park. The idea was that we were just going for a walk—what I was thinking about, though, and what I hoped was running through her mind as well, was that the One train was on the west side, which is the train we would take if we went to her place (I hadn't yet gotten around to stocking mine with curtains) (still haven't). Although the days have been getting longer recently, I did feel a twinge of nervousness about cutting across the park so late in the afternoon. But, after all, the journey would only take fifteen minutes at most, and the sun was still in the sky. It was just my neuroses talking.
Although I did speak up when we didn't cut straight across. But she laughed at my nervousness; “Come on, live a little!” she said. “It's still light out. I'd like to cut through the Ramble.”
“It might wind up getting dark before we get out of there,” I objected. “I always get lost when I go through the Ramble.”
She looked at me like I'd nonchalantly mentioned that I still wet the bed. And in an amused way, if you know what I mean; not in a disgusted way, like if someone you were intending to soon sleep with said something like that. “Really?” she guffawed.
I laughed and shrugged. “No,” I said.
We talked about movies. It came out that I hadn't seen any of the recent ones (besides the one we'd just seen, of course, but we'd finished talking about it), since I'm so cheap that I just get DVDs from the library and watch them on my laptop, instead of paying to go to the theater. I mostly watch foreign ones, so as to supplement my language studies.
“So how many languages do you speak?” she asked.
“Oh, not any,” I said. “Or, well, English.”
We walked in silence for a while. I didn't have anything to say, but it wasn't shyness—I just didn't have anything to say. So I took her hand in order to maintain the date-ness of the whole thing, which she let me do. Surreptitiously I looked at my watch—she was letting me hold her hand, so there was a not-negligible chance that I would indeed be getting laid—in that case, I started trying to figure out what time I'd be able to get away from her apartment in the morning, so as to attend to my autodidactical studies.
She gave the movies topic another try, and started talking about Mean Streets; “I just saw it for the first time. Have you seen it?” she asked.
“It's been about ten years.”
“God, it broke my heart.”
“Yes. I love the part where Harvey Keitel is quoting Aquinas, and he can't understand why his girlfriend starts laughing at him.”
“Yeah. Why shouldn't Aquinas apply to his life, now, here, in modern-day New York? He can't see why the world he lives in should be so devoid of meaning.”
“And yet it is.”
“Yeah,” she said, satisfied (not with the fact that the world is devoid of meaning, but that we both liked the same good movie). She took a deep breath, let it out, enjoying the physical simplicity of the action, its body-ness. Then she added, “And I love how the city looks in that movie.”
“Oh, yeah. Super-picturesque.”
“God, we missed out. You know? On the real New York, the New York I used to daydream about moving to when I was wasting away in Lubbock as a little girl watching MTV. We missed out on the crummy Lower East Side, on the un-Disneyfied filthy Times Square.”
“Well. It's nice to look at. But, you know. People did kill each other a lot back then. It's nice, not getting shot.”
She sighed languidly, shrugged unconvincedly; “I guess.”
We were almost to the Ramble. No doubt it was my imagination—some effect of nerves—but it seemed to me that the park looked different somehow. Scruffier than usual. . . . I can't explain it.
It turned out to be not entirely my imagination, though; as we walked past a really surprisingly large number of crunched-up soda cans that had been abandoned in the dirt, Candace said, “Jesus, there's a lot of litter around today, isn't there?”
“Yeah,” I said, looking back at the soda cans, for some reason distracted by them. I let Candace lead me away. Only a few minutes later did I realize what had struck me—the logo on one of those Pepsi cans had been the old-fashioned one, that I hadn't seen in, jeez, fifteen years or something like that. Had that Pepsi can been sitting there for fifteen years?! No, it would have been buried by now, like the bottom layer of Troy (plus it would have been thrown away by park maintenance, even before that). Then had someone been saving a can of Pepsi in their fridge for a decade and a half?
It would have been worth doubling back for a second look, except that Candace had slowed down. I'd been holding her left hand in my right—now she transferred my hand to her right one, and ran her left up and down my back as she slowed her pace. We had just entered the outskirts of the Ramble, and the trees and bushes gave us a modicum of privacy.
She stopped completely and turned to face me; the fronts of our bodies were suddenly rubbing lightly together, noses to chests to bellies to thighs. “Well?,” she said, and then, without waiting for an answer, leaned in to kiss me, our fingers still entwined.
But the sky was getting darker. Although I returned the kiss adequately enough, I couldn't help peeking around, convinced suddenly that the only muggers left in Manhattan were watching us from the bushes. “What is it?” she asked, not unkindly, yet, but with a hint that she could get unkind pretty quick if my answer sucked.
“Maybe we should go somewhere else to do this.”
“What? It's our first kiss. Are we supposed to go back to my place for our first kiss? Anyway, I thought it was romantic. Out here in nature, or the Manhattan equivalent at least. With the light all gold and beautiful at dusk.”
“Well, yes, the dusk is part of it. It'll be dark soon.”
“What are you, a pussy?”
“I don't like being in secluded areas at night, especially when it's the kind of place where you might get lost.”
She was looking at me askance. “Is this, like, a thing you have?”
It sounded like if it was a “thing,” by which I assumed she meant “neurosis,” then she would suffer it, and so I said, “Yes, I kind of have a thing.”
Generously, she shrugged and acquiesced, and we went on our way. She couldn't help but add, though, “You know, I was reading that this used to be a cruising ground. The Ramble, I mean.”
“A what?”
“Like, a spot where gay guys would come to meet, back in the day. Before Stonewall I guess, or even in the eighties. They'd come here and hook up anonymously just before dusk and then once it got dark they'd do it, right here in the park. Guys who couldn't take other men home with them.”
I realized that Candace had a thing, herself. She'd wanted to do it in the Ramble, to live out a fantasy of the raunchy Manhattan she'd missed out on. It was as reasonable as any other fantasy, which was why I had to be extra careful not to acknowledge it, since, if she knew that I knew that she'd confessed something to me just now, the only decent thing for me to do would have been to acquiesce in this little sexual adventure. I limited myself to “Wow.”
(As Robert Smith says in that song,
If there's something you'd like to try,
Ask me, don't be shy,
I won't say no, how could I?
Well, don't ask me. Sorry.)
She waited. I didn't volunteer anything else. She changed the subject: “What kind of name is that?” she asked, as she yanked me along by the hand, “The Silver Maker?”
“English,” I said. “It's an English name.”
“Oh.” Two overweight middle-aged men regarded us from a park bench, one white and wearing middle-management attire, the other black and in a red exercise jersey and black spandex shorts, the bald white guy watching us nervously and the bald black guy unctiously. “I guess I always thought of English names as being more Vikingy,” she said. “Like Hruff, or Ordor, or Grackelschtalk.”
“I mean it's an English name as in the words are in English, like the words The, Silver, and Maker, they're all in English.”
“Ah. I see.” We rounded a corner and, as the odd couple passed out of sight, another came into view, sauntering toward us. They were walking more or less together, but separated by a few feet, and not making eye contact with or speaking to each other. They were members of different socioeconomic classes. Their eyes flickered first to me, a little sassily, and then to Candace with distaste.
Once they too were behind us Candace leaned over to me and hissed, “Did you see those guys?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“They're totally out cruising!”
“Do you think so?”
“Yeah! Did you see them? Those guys don't know each other! As soon as the sun goes down, they're going to be having sex out here! It's that old-fashioned thing I was telling you about.”
I sighed; “God, it must be so great to have things be so simple.” Hastily I added, “Not that this isn't great.”
“It's weird,” she mused. “I'd heard that people used to do that out in the Ramble. But I didn't think it happened anymore.”
I nodded, but was only half-listening. “Doesn't it seem like it's getting dark awfully fast?” I asked.
And indeed it was, almost supernaturally fast. The lights went dim and took on that luscious velvety quality of the evening's last light; we both looked up, surprised, but still only expecting to see a cloud rolling over the sun. Imagine our shock when instead we saw that swatches of atmosphere seemed to have been torn away, leaving stars visible behind the blue gauze that was remained. The moon was high, fat and red.
“Jesus,” said Candace, “look at the moon!”
“Yes.”
“It's right up above us! When we left the gallery it was only just visible over the rooftops. And it was a crescent, I'm sure of it!”
“Well, that doesn't seem likely,” I said, but without much confidence. “Hey, what if we got out of here?”
Candace agreed, and we resolved to push through the rest of the park and get to the safety of Park West Avenue as soon as we could. But apparently we had wandered off the path, for the weeds and undergrowth pulled at our calves and hampered progress. We got sort of turned around somehow and couldn't figure out which way was west anymore. We tried to orient ourselves by craning our necks to see any skyscraper rooftops in the distance, but the trees seemed to tower over us like never before.
The darkness was thick now. “We've got to just push our way out of the Ramble!” I gasped, choking on the night. “We should get to some lights, at least! Then we'll be able to find our way out!”
Candace was hunched over, grasping her chest. Coughing, she waved me ahead, followed me with her head lowered so as to bull her way through the rough foliage.
Like moles we shoved through the tunnel of night. I wanted to hold Candace's hand but the nothingness pressed in on me with such pressure that I couldn't unpin my arms from my sides—all I could do was tramp forward, or in the direction that I hoped was forward, at least—for all I knew I was turning in circles.
Then I felt a brick wall scraping against my side as I walked and I stopped, and collapsed against it. I turned around to check behind me, and, yes, there was Candace, rattled but apparently unharmed. I saw that she was coated in a thin glistening sheen of moisture, then realized that the same held true of me.
“What the eff?” she said, looking at me like I might have the answer.
Instead of trying to make something up I looked around. We were in a run-down looking courtyard. Near the wall was a wading pool with what looked like a human being in it. After a moment's hesitation, Candace and I gripped hands and walked towards it.
It was indeed a human being, not hard to make out in the ambient city light. A man in tidy-whities, thirties, thin; at first I thought he might be dead, but then I saw his chest moving, and the sight of the spent hypodermic on the ground beside the pool cleared up the mystery. There was a garden hose in the tub, we heard the bubbling noise of its underwater nozzle continuing to fill the pool. This hose snaked down from above; craning our heads up, we saw that it originated from a fifth-story window. A rope also descended from that window, tied to a bucket which rested on the ground.
“They must do transactions with that bucket,” said Candace, excited. “Like, you put the money in the bucket, they pull it up, and then they put the heroine in the bucket and lower it again. That way there's no faces.”
Reasonable. Thinking it advisable to do a little more reconnaissance, we crept forward, then poked our heads out of the courtyard and looked at the street beyond.
A few, a very few, pedestrians. Some cars going by—old, but fantastically well-maintained.
Candace screwed her face up in confusion. “Why,” she said, “this looks like Avenue B . . . except. . . .”
Gunshots rang out in the night. Candace looked up at me in terror.
“My God,” she said. “This is Manhattan in the 80's!”
“Damn right,” I said grimly.
“What are we going to do?” she asked breathlessly.
“Whatever it takes,” I said equanimously.
She seemed startled. “You're taking this awful well. We're liable to get killed, you know.”
And what can I say? I did take it well—took it better than I'd ever taken anything in my life. It turned out that I'd been right all along. This was, indeed, what I'd been born for: danger.
I looked at her wet wide eyes and softened. I cupped the curve of her lower jaw in the palm of my hand and leaned in to kiss her, at least this once, full, on the mouth.
I took her hand and pulled her after me into the night . . . as for how we got through that long night of twenty-five years, through all its diversions, temptations, and razors' edges, and for how we returned here, to the placid safety of 2009: there isn't the space to say it all.
As to whether the moral of this tale is that you should or shouldn't let strange women lead you on rambles through the dusk?
That all depends on your mettle.
