On a balcony in New York
It’s just started to snow…
The buildings of New York
Look just like mountains through the snow
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 ‘Moments of Pleasure’ Kate Bush
We Love New York. We first went there in 1993, and that first visit and our relationship to the city is a subject for a whole string of postings yet to come. The city is hyper-real, a fantastic giant movie set filled with noise and colour and music and movement and incredibly strange beauty and vibrancy and hope and warmth and welcome and friends and love and… and we have, really, nothing but good memories of the place.
So when we needed to decide where and how we were going to spend Christmas 2004, it was an easy choice. We both said it almost simultaneously: “Christmas in New York!”
It’s Ella Fitzgerald Fabulous. It’s Jay Mc Inerny, Scott Fitzgerald, Jazz magnificence. It’s Rockerfeller Center, icerinks, Rockettes, snow in Central Park, Art Deco Deliciousness; Shopping in the East Village wrapped up in twenty layers of clothes, swathed in mufflers and hats, drinking steaming cups of coffee as we pretend (once again) to be Native New Yorkers.
It’s fantasy, made real, and we wants it…
Want it to be ours; want to own it. But we can’t. So we rent it, in multiple visits. Again and again, we strive to imprint the city onto ourselves, making our neighbourhoods, turning the mundane into our special places, creating our traditions, as we try to leave a trace of ourselves on the metropolis.
And that night, the city was most definitely leaving its imprint on us: The ice crystals that floated in the air; the biting cold wind that stung the cheeks, numbed your scalp, and made your eyes water like a young Drew Barrymore. The holiday atmosphere: The lights, the crowds, the sounds of the city going out to play, as we made our way to the Gershwin Theatre at West 51st street.
We had, once again, been the blessed recipients of some of that Magic that only New York can give: Two relatives of a friend of ours were going out of the city to Florida for the Holidays. They had a two bedroomed apartment on W49th St. Would we like to use it as our base during our stay? Would we? Would the pope like people to forget that little trouble with the Youth Wing of the National Socialist Party in the late thirties? Would the Ayatollahs like us to forget that bit where the god of Islam and the God of the Jews is reognised as one and the same? We jumped at the prospect.
So, we had our pied a terre, our Icy Winter night, and our trip to see the wonderful Wicked. The city was ours, and we gave ourselves to it willingly.
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Which may explain why, after we left the theatre, I tried to get D to come walking to Times Square.
“Why?”
“Because it’s romantic.” And it was; I still believe that Times Square, that gaudy tacky representation of all that’s wrong with conspicious consumption and pointless expenditure of the earth’s precious resources, is on some sort of magical lay line. It’s just on the pretty side of beautiful. It’s Shiny. Wondrous. And Romantic, in the way that a precosious teenager dolled up for her first party is pretty; too much makeup, perhaps, the clothes too self-consciously fashionable to be really stylish, the nervous energy, coupled with the belief that the world didn’t exist before this moment, and that nothing will ever be the same after it. That’s Times Square, at night, in December. And, as I say, I wanted it that night. Needed it. There was work to be done, and only a gaudy party-going teenager could accomplish it.
D, however, was not in a romantic mood: “It’s too cold,” he huffed, turning away from the square, and walking towards Eighth Avenue.
“Awww, c’mon! Let’s have a look at the lights.”
“They’re bright. And flashy. I’ve seen them. It’s cold,” he huffed, every staccatto sentence billowing forth as steam from his lips; he’s never forgiven the people who took down Marky Marks Calvin Klein Billboard, I thought. Let go of the past, baby. “Anyway,” he pressed, fixing a beady and rheumy eye on me, “What’s the big deal? You’ve seen them too. A million times. Oh,” he smiled, a look of wolfish cunning slipping over his face, “I get it.”
How could he get it? I hadn’t said anything, had been so determined not to say anything. How could he have worked out my plan?
“Virgin.”
It’s been a long time since anyone called me that, I thought, then realised the import of the word in this context.
“What didn’t you get at the megastore? It’ll still be there tomorrow,” he said, smiling, and, linking arms with me, turning me decisively away from the square and off towards the apartment on W49th between 8th and 9th avenue.
I had to do it. I’d been thinking of it, on and off, for two months now. Putting it off. Finding reasons not to bring it up. Maybe I could put it off again? Wait til tomorrow, say? No! A spark of courage flared up. I don’t know where it came from - all my life, I’ve been more familiar with fear than with courage. Oh, don’t get me wrong: I can display fortitude when called upon, just as I can converse in French in order to obtain food and alcohol, but I’m always amazed when I do. It’s always felt, somehow, unnatural. A foreign language, the sudden appearance of which, in my vocabulary, is unsettling. My native language is English. My natural state is fear.
Fear of being mocked; fear of being rejected; fear of not being liked; fear of being lonely; fear of failure; fear of success leading to standing out, leading to being mocked, leading to being rejected; fear that my over-analysing of every situation is a form of mental illness. You get the point.
And the point, right there, right then, was fear. If I do this, the fear reasoned, I’m opening a door. And it’s a door that can never be shut; a word that can’t be unsaid. Better, maybe, to never open the door, to never say the words? Better to heave a deep sigh and accept that this, here, now, is good enough, and that you don’t need to expose yourself to ridicule, to rejection.
But I’d made my decision. One golden-orange soothingly warm sunset evening two months before, as we sailed across the Caribbean on a cruise ship, somewhere between Cozumel and Grand Cayman. I wanted him forever. I wanted to let him know this. I wanted the world to know this.
Fear. Biting, icy winds, and a solid, bitter chill that left my head numb, my scalp stinging, my eyes watering, and my throat dry. Fear can do a lot of things: It can keep you down, keep you isolated, keep you afraid of being truly honest with the people closest to you. But it can’t keep you numb. Not forever. Eventually, the pressure of all the unopened doors, the unspoken words, the missed chances, the what-if’s, becomes unbearable.
We’d been walking in silence for some time now. He thought I was sulking over the refusal to visit the Virgin Megastore. The night - so perfect in every respect - was about to be ruined.
“You know they’re changing the law at home?” I spoke, hearing my voice from afar, and wondering who it was that was doing such a spot on impersonation.
“The law?”
“Yes. They’re bringing in a new law. Changing it to allow for gay relationships to be recognised. Registered.”
I’m not a hugely political gay. Many people boil everything down to one simple question: Is it good for the gays? Depending on the answer, the issue is either vitally important, or irrelevant. I can’t be that isolated. I’m political, but recognise that there are larger societal issues that are perhaps more important than those that really don’t affect me. But I keep abreast of politics as far as they impact my people. And I knew he knew about the changing law.
“Yep. Is it in yet?”
“I think it comes in next year, but the change is law.”
“That’s good.”
Silence.
We cross Eighth Avenue, once a hotbed of hookers and johns, pimps and pushers. The only porn cinema I’ve ever visited stood here once. Now, it’s probably a Burger King. Progress, sweeping away all the grime, but failing to eradicate the underlying filth that balances out the puritanism that America is built on; a few, mostly neutered but still quite heavy sex shops cling to their spots, providing something for the tourist who’s wandered away from the Square in search of something a little more unusual than the ‘My brother went to NYC and all I got was this Lousy T-Shirt’ merchandise.
I speak again, my heart in my mouth. He’ll laugh, I hear Carrie’s mother cackle. He’ll say ‘Why would we be so stupid,’ and you’ll never be able to visit it again. “Well, would you?”
“Would I what?” He’s a little ahead of me, so I’m talking to his back. But at this point, he stops, turns slightly. Snow begins to fall: Fat soft balls of it, floating silently downwards, as though some artistic director somewhere has decided that what this scene really needs is an old fashioned flurry.
“If we could, would you… you know?” I’m close to hyperventilating. Fourteen years, and it’s going to be fucked right here, right now. He’ll laugh. He’ll say ‘Why would we be so stupid,’ and you’ll never be able to visit it again. And you’ll be filled with a shame and a sorrow that you exposed so much of yourself - so much of what you tuly desire, political correctness be damned - and it will be irrevocably altered, all of it.
He frowns. His words come as pillows of breath. “Are you asking me to marry you?”
“I- yes. Yes,” (more firmly this time. The Rubicon has been crossed, what matter now how miserable his reponse makes you feel?). “Yes, I am. I am asking you to marry me.”
I have a prepared speech; something about how I realised, that perfect sundown evening in the middle of an endless ocean, that I wanted some way to make sure - to let him know I wanted to make sure - that we’d have forever. That I’d take the choppy tides, and the mirror-flat seas, and the millpond-still sunsets of the voyage - I’d take whatever - but I wanted him there, to grow old with, to grow less frightened with, to be, perhaps a little braver every day with. That he might think it was silly, or too liberal, or not very English, or embarrassing, or… But I wanted it, and I had to open the door, let the genie out, say the words.
But I don’t get to speak. Don’t get to do my speech.
Because he smiles. “O.K.” He says. “When?”
And I think I pecked him on his scarlet, frost-bitten cheek. And I think we held hands for a moment. And maybe the cold made my eyes water a little more than they had been. I can’t say, because all I remember is wanting to remember exactly where we were: Not on Times Square, the center of the world. Not below the vast prairies of flashing lights and moving pictures of pointless celebrities. We didn’t need their blessing; didn’t need the gaudy tacky heart of New York. We had this place: Our Special Place.
Which is how we will now be obliged to spend our anniversaries remembering how I proposed outside of one of those few remaining Porno stores/theatres on Eighth Avenue, and why we will always think fondly of the BangLand xXx Porno Store, Booths, Live Girls (as opposed, one supposes, to the dead sort) 50c Rentals, DVD and VHS.
A month ago, on the 15th of July, we got married, and the seas, so far, have been calm. And the horizon looks wonderful. Will keep you posted.
Just being alive
It can really hurt
And these moments given
Are a gift from time
Just let us try
To give these moments back
To those we love
To those who will survive
And I can hear my mother saying
“Every old sock meets an old shoe”
Isn’t that a great saying?
“Every old sock meets an old shoe”
Here come the Hills of Time
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