There are endless ways, even for a visitor under the age of twenty-one, to spend a solitary evening in Manhattan. Unfortunately for me on one after-Christmas-but-before-New-Year’s December evening of last year, none of them are in the neighborhood of affordable. It seemed to me that there was nothing free to do other than walk, perfectly enjoyable in the crisp afternoon, but decidedly less so as the sun set and alley-strangled icy gusts began to suck the breath out of my lungs. I ate alone at a cheap-passing diner only for my meal (at a price of thirty-four dollars) to more or less clear my wallet out. My father had given me sixty dollars in cash for the entire evening, which in his Chicago-in-the-90s mind was more than enough. I paid my tab with a smaller tip than usual and left. I heard the distant screeching of brakes, like someone sharpening the cold of the night.
I went down 5th Avenue, then 6th, then 7th, feeling aimless like a moth among the golden windows and silver things and the steam from everything warm. Eventually I ended up on 58th Street. That was when I stumbled upon a temple. Protruding out into the sidewalk, dressed up in gold and pouring out light of the same shade, attended busily by uniformed bellmen, teeming with the passings of pearls and fur, was the entrance to the Essex House Hotel. I walked closer, passing a man asleep in blankets on a bus stop bench, and felt the warmth from inside reach through my jacket, into the center of my being. I stood in the vestibule for too long, unsure, enduring the sideways glances from the bellmen, until I passed inside through the massive rotating door.
The lobby is presented with an intricate patterned marble floor and huge onyx-black pillars reaching up to a ceiling of dark, carved oak. It was as though every sound from the clack of heels on the floor to the distant dings of the gold-doored elevators was part of one intricate, reverberating symphony, of which I was now a seamless part. Now that I had passed into the domain, no-one gave me hard glances, more than one employee offered to help carry my bag (the small backpack I was wearing), and they all eventually came to assume my parents had paid for a room here. I later tried to look up the price of a room at Essex House. No price is listed on the website. I’m reminded of one of my mother’s more pessimistic maxims: sometimes, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
I took a seat on a huge leather couch in the corner of the lobby, just adjacent to the bar, where neat corporate travelers drank colorful cocktails in crystal glasses and a woman in a navy dress played softly on a baby grand in the corner. I was tired from a day of walking, safe from
the cold, and lulled by piano music, I fell asleep.
When I woke I found that nobody had touched my bag. I became more aware of my surroundings than I had been, almost to the point of discomfort. I saw a man at the counter with a long, long black briefcase leaning at his side. I found myself imagining there was a rifle inside it, and that shortly after checking into his junior suite he would climb to the roof and someone would say “like a watermelon” to the police in Central Park tomorrow morning. He was the assassin now, and he would be forever. As he walked off and into the elevator I saw any other possibility for his identity go with him.
On the other side of the couch there was a handsome boy a few years older than me, crushing his hair with the hand not holding his phone and thumb-scrolling while he looked away and off into the street through the big windows. Around his wrist there was a sparkling silver bracelet, encrusted with precious gems. We made eye contact for a moment and we nodded to each other and then he was getting a call and stood up and was gone. He, too, left my life forever. Could that bracelet not be the heirloom of some exotic royal bloodline? Could he not be a prince? I had never seen anything like it in the windows of Tiffany’s or Van Cleef. Perhaps there truly was nothing in the world like it but that on his wrist. So I crowned him Prince of the Essex House Lobby.
I flirted with the imagined lives of a half-dozen other guests. I imagined the couple talking with cocktails at the bar did not arrive together and were meeting for the first time, that the woman on the piano had lost her place in the Boston Philharmonic to some long-running nemesis on whom she now swore revenge… But what drew me more than any of these was the thought that someone (even maybe the departed prince) might be conjuring such narratives about me. In every moment of eye contact I imagined an idle but brilliant story blooming around me. Then someone dropped a glass and the shatter shrieked through the whole building. I stood up and left, catching a glimpse of a janitor sweeping up the pieces of crystal, suddenly dull and dark on the floor.
Outside, the cold stabbed right through my jacket. It had dropped some fifteen degrees and bit with another seven worth of windchill. I had to cup my palm over my mouth to warm the air enough to fit it into my lungs. I walked down a congested 59th, looking like I was holding in a secret. The wind rose over a dark Central Park. I looked out and down and saw the carousel headlights from Columbus Circle ahead.
I passed by two men standing above towels on the ground covered in handbags. Chanel and Louis Vuitton and Burberry for prices spoken but not written. I saw an old woman pick up a Chanel. She fished out a twenty from the purse she was wearing, Prada. She did not thank the man who took her money, or even smile. Instead, she ducked away and vanished into the sidewalk congestion. I turned back to face the way I’d come. I saw ESSEX HOUSE in red neon letters looming in the foggy sky, little yellow freckles for windows inside which stirred more of the life I suddenly felt whirling all around me. I thought about that woman, the mythology of the bag she now owned. Nobody but me and a few perceptive others on the street would likely ever know that the Chanel was a fake. For twenty dollars she could think of herself the way that many would think of her on the street: as the kind of woman who can afford to throw away some three-thousand dollars on a leather bag.
New York is many things and it can be called many more: a beating heart, a carnivorous animal, a cesspit, heaven, hell. Call it anything. The place commands of all who enter that they abandon not all hope, but a great deal of themselves. Identity is not a solid, shapely thing on the streets of such a city. You, me, anyone walking on the streets of New York are not people, but flashes on film. This is a fate that no-one, at least with the entirety of their being, can accept. So we buy fake bags, sit in the lobbies of good hotels, haunt the counters of loud, expensive SoHo bars, so that someone like me will be there to make up stories about us.