Do you exfoliate very often? This was the question I overheard a shop assistant ask a customer in Saks on Fifth Avenue. Exfoliate? What did she mean? Do her leaves fall off very often? Saks on Fifth Avenue, and for that matter, Fifth Avenue itself, seemed full of pretentious individuals whose lives exist on another plane of reality to those of other human beings. It is a place where money oozes out of the cracks in the sidewalk and drips from the parapets of the glass and steel towers erected to power and wealth.
The epitome of this wealth is Donald Trump’s megalomaniacal monument to himself, Trump Towers. Elevators take shoppers up five levels amid orange marble and polished brass, with the rest of the building’s 70 storeys towering above the glass roof of the shopping complex. Outside, in the humidity of a New York summer afternoon, the crowds rush and scramble and steam issues up from the cracks in the street as if some sort of volcanism is going on beneath.
We had a late start this morning, so it was around 11.30 am before we got into Manhattan. We cashed some traveller’s checks at Thomas Cook, then wandered around in the Rockefeller Plaza for a while. Across the street from the plaza stands the New York Cathedral, another oasis of quiet amid the growling city. We visited the cathedral briefly — huge columns reaching up to a vaulted ceiling — but a service was in progress and we couldn’t wander around.
We lunched on tasteless junk food in a restaurant called Roy Rogers — “Help yourself to condiments at the Fixins Bar” — then walked slowly up Fifth Avenue until we reached Central Park. Before we went into the park, we visited a large toy store where we wandered around amongst piles of soft fluffy teddy bears, played Nintendo Game Boys, and fidgeted with all manner of toys. On the way out, we got caught in a dungeon of Barbie dolls, a most hideous place to be, with rows and rows of garish pink Hollywood Barbies smiling sweetly down at us.
In Central Park, we sat beneath some shady trees, beside a knob of rock where I’m sure the closing scene of the Waterboy’s “Return of Pan” video is shot.
“From the olden days and up through all the years, from Arcadia to the stone fields of Inishmore, some say the gods are just a myth, but guess who I’ve been dancing with? The great god Pan is alive.”
Leaving the park, we walked up 6th Avenue, the Avenue of the Americas, where the buildings towered above us and the air was close and tropical.
By the time we reached Bryant Square and the New York Library, it was spitting and thunderclouds were gathering out beyond the skyscrapers. The library was like a tomb, huge, ornately decorated, and labyrinthine. We wandered around for half an hour or so while outside, the heavens opened and crescendos of thunder echoed down from the sky.
Pausing to look outside, we saw that the air had become the colour of soot, and visibility was down to about 500 metres. The rows of buildings down West 42nd Street rolled back into the black haze until they were swallowed up. We raced through the rain to the subway at Bryant Park, and went back to the apartment. The evening was thundery and wet, and Linda cooked up pasta for tea.
CurseOfTheTraveller 