The Millennium Hotel: The Rider Quintet, vol. 2

3: The Path

3 The Path What would John Constable do faced with these disappeanng urban vectors and/or/if interrupted in media stroke on this frozx-n windblown corner by a shrill, hysterical, and underdressed woman—a human being—(for whose misery I am not responsible) who walks away before I can dig into my pants for the obligatory quarter. (Why not more?) Would he see her as part of the landscape or an aberration?—an insult to the lovely harbor stasis: boats on ice, boats wrapped in tarps, a stillness broken only by the groan of wood when wind and wave break the rhythm the walkers create, the women walking fast enough to get their heartbeats up but not too fast to miss what the world wills them to see: this whitish light as it ignites the parapets. . . There are souls worth saving! I can hear Frederick Law Olmstcad saying that. Let them see each other, but at a distance. There was no path before they burst out, 29 a man and a woman, in full stride, supple, heels landing softly yet firmly, the light creamy now, engorged. The runners slip out of sight, they move similarly, maybe alone, they will dream of each other . . . — while at the pier the familiar pilings lift off like rockets, the metal fences and warped, waterlogged planks cut loose from disused docks are listening; and branches reach out, but only slightly, since there is no wind or what wind there is is scarcely measurable, scarcely more than air, air itself; but this rough turquoise—coin toss between teal and ultramarine—this stammering delirium threatens the flavescent leaves and the women wearing monochromatic tights while everythingabove the waist is so rainbowed as to send Joseph's weavers back to the loom. It is the privilegeof the living to create a tone and rhythm that never will be again; that defines their generation. The chaos, as on the Corso, reflects selves found, not lost, among the many. The boats wrapped in tarps, chaste— 30 yet actively rocking on the swells, as if their keepers had decreed to let them maunder, unused, in their slips, throughout the forcverncssof the long offseason. Should we let the calendar determine our lives? Or was their anticipationof the cold wind blowing in off the Hudson prescient and just? (My wife shaking out her auburn hair and threatening to tighten this abundant drift into a bun.) We never get to any other place: the chestnut-haired parapet, the hush of the river, the city in the clarity of winter light; the sky like a blue window I could look through endlesslyforever, as if it cared enough to dare me to stare long enough to find out how Ions, how far. But the pavements of upper Broadway and Greenwich Avenue were not put there for prolonged metaphysical speculation; nor are the circumstances in which I find myself there, en route to meet a commitment, aware that closer study of the layout of the street 31 would cause me to be late: a public school playground reconciles the row of beleaguered tenements with the happiness of two-story brownstones. 32 ...