There was nobody in the lobby so I let myself out onto the street and stepped straight into a clamor of noise and light so overwhelming that I had to stand still for a moment just to stay upright. In front of me the green oasis of Central Park extended for what looked like miles. To my left, the side streets were already busy—enormous men in overalls unloaded crates from an open-sided van, watched by a cop with arms like sides of ham crossed over his chest. A road sweeper hummed industriously. A taxi driver chatted to a man through his open window. I counted off the sights of the Big Apple in my head. Horse-drawn carriages! Yellow taxis! Impossibly tall buildings! As I stared, two weary tourists with children in buggies pushed past me clutching Styrofoam coffee cups, still operating perhaps on some distant time zone. Manhattan stretched in every direction, enormous, sun-tipped, teeming and glowing.
My jet lag evaporated with the last of the dawn. I took a breath and set off, aware that I was grinning but quite unable to stop myself. I walked eight blocks without seeing a single convenience store. I turned into Madison Avenue, past huge glass-fronted luxury stores with their doors locked and, dotted between them, the occasional restaurant, windows darkened like closed eyes, or a gilded hotel whose liveried doorman didn’t look at me as I passed.
I walked another five blocks, realizing gradually that this wasn’t the kind of area where you could just nip into the grocer’s. I had pictured New York diners on every corner, staffed by brassy waitresses and men with white pork-pie hats, but everything looked huge and glossy and not remotely as if a cheese omelet or a mug of tea might be waiting behind its doors. Most of the people I passed were tourists like me, or fierce, jogging hard-bodies, sleek in Lycra and oblivious between earphones, stepping nimbly around homeless men, who glared from furrowed, lead-stained faces. Finally I stumbled on a large coffee bar, one of a chain, in which half of New York’s early risers seemed to have congregated, bent over their phones in booths or feeding preternaturally cheerful toddlers as generic easy-listening music filtered through speakers on the wall.
I ordered cappuccino and a muffin, which, before I could say anything, the barista sliced in two, heated, then slathered with butter, all the while never breaking his conversation about a baseball game with his colleague.
I paid, sat down with the muffin, wrapped in foil, and took a bite. It was, even without the clawing jet lag hunger, the most delicious thing I had ever eaten.
I sat in a window seat staring out at the early-morning Manhattan street for half an hour or so, my mouth alternately filled with claggy, buttery muffin or scalded by hot, strong coffee, giving free rein to my ever-present internal monologue (I am drinking New York coffee in a New York coffeehouse! I am walking along a New York street! Like Meg Ryan! Or Diane Keaton! I am in actual New York!) and, briefly, I understood exactly what Will had been trying to explain to me two years previously: for those few minutes, my mouth full of unfamiliar food, my eyes filled with strange sights, I existed only in the moment. I was fully present, my senses alive, my whole being open to receive the new experiences around me. I was in the only place in the world I could possibly be.
And then, apropos of apparently nothing, two women at the next table launched into a fist fight, coffee and bits of pastry flying across two tables, baristas leaping to pull them apart. I dusted the crumbs off my dress, closed my bag, and decided it was probably time to return to the peace of the Lavery.
2
Ashok was sorting huge bales of newspapers into numbered piles as I walked back in. He straightened up with a smile. “Well, good day, Miss Louisa. And how was your first morning in New York?”
“Amazing. Thank you.”
“Did you hum ‘Let the River Run’ as you walked down the street?”
I stopped in my tracks. “How did you know?”
“Everyone does that when they first come to Manhattan. Hell, even I do it some mornings and I don’t look nothing like Melanie Griffith.”
“Are there no grocery stores around here? I had to walk about a million miles to get a coffee. And I have no idea where to buy milk.”
“Miss Louisa, you should have told me. C’mere.” He gestured behind his counter and opened a door, beckoning me into a dark office, its scruffiness and cluttered décor at odds with the brass and marble outside. On a desk sat a bank of security screens and among them an old television and a large ledger, along with a mug, some paperback books, and an array of photographs of beaming, toothless children. Behind the door stood an ancient fridge. “Here. Take this. Bring me one later.”
“Do all doormen do this?”
“No doormen do this. But the Lavery is different.”
“So where do people do their shopping?”
He pulled a face. “People in this building don’t do shopping, Miss Louisa. They don’t even think about shopping. I swear half of them think that food arrives by magic, cooked, on their tables.” He glanced behind him, lowering his voice. “I will wager that eighty percent of the women in this building have not cooked a meal in five years. Mind you, half the women in this building don’t eat meals, period.”
When I stared at him he shrugged. “The rich do not live like you and me, Miss Louisa. And the New York rich . . . well, they do not live like anyone.”
I took the carton of milk.
“Anything you want you have it delivered. You’ll get used to it.”
I wanted to ask him about Ilaria and Mrs. Gopnik, who apparently wasn’t Mrs. Gopnik, and the family I was about to meet. But he was looking away from me up the hallway.
“Well, good morning to you, Mrs. De Witt!”
“What are all these newspapers doing on the floor? The place looks like a wretched newsstand.” A tiny old woman tutted fretfully at the piles of New York Times and Wall Street Journal that he was still unpacking. Despite the hour, she was dressed as if for a wedding, in a raspberry pink duster coat, a red pillbox hat, and huge tortoiseshell sunglasses that obscured her tiny, wrinkled face. At the end of a lead a wheezy pug, with bulbous eyes, gazed at me belligerently (at least I thought it was gazing at me: it was hard to be sure as its eyes veered off in different directions). I stooped to help Ashok clear the newspapers from her path but as I bent down the dog leaped at me with a growl so that I sprang back, almost falling over the New York Times.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” came the quavering, imperious voice. “And now you’re upsetting the dog!”
My leg had felt the whisper of the pug’s teeth. My skin sang with the near contact.
“Please make sure this—this debris is cleared by the time we return. I have told Mr. Ovitz again and again that the building is going downhill. And, Ashok, I’ve left a bag of refuse outside my door. Please move it immediately or the whole corridor will smell of stale lilies. Goodness knows who sends lilies as a gift. Funereal things. Dean Martin!”