New York
12.6.2004
Dear Mum,
I would have called but the time difference doesn’t really fit around schedules here, so I thought I’d shock you by writing. First letter since that short-lived stint at Priory Manor, I think. I wasn’t really cut out for boarding school, was I?
New York is pretty amazing. It’s impossible not to be infused by the energy of the place. I’m up and out by five thirty every morning. My firm is based on Stone Street down in the Financial District. Nigel fixed me up with an office (not corner but a good view across the water – apparently these are the things by which we are judged in NY) and the guys at work seem a good bunch. Tell Dad that on Saturday I went to the opera at the Met with my boss and his wife – (Der Rosenkavalier, bit overdone) and you’ll be happy to hear I went to a performance of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Lot of client lunches, lot of company softball. Not so much in the evenings: my new colleagues are mostly married with young children so it’s just me trawling the bars …
I’ve been out with a couple of girls – nothing serious (here they seem to ‘date’ as a pastime) – but mostly I’ve just spent my spare hours at the gym or hanging out with old friends. Lots of people here from Shipmans, and a few I knew at school. Turns out it’s a small world, after all … Most of them are quite changed here, though. They’re tougher, hungrier than I remember. Think the city brings that out in you.
Right! Off out with Henry Farnsworth’s daughter this evening. Remember her? Leading light of the Stortfold Pony Club? Has reinvented herself as some sort of shopping guru. (Don’t get your hopes up, I’m just doing it as a favour to Henry.) I’m taking her to my favourite steakhouse, on the Upper East Side: slabs of meat the size of a gaucho’s blanket. I’m hoping she’s not vegetarian. Everyone here seems to have some sort of food fad going on.
Oh, and last Sunday I took the F train and got off on the far side of the Brooklyn Bridge just to walk back across the water, as you suggested. Best thing I’ve done so far. Felt like I’d stepped into an early Woody Allen movie – you know, the ones where there was only a ten-year age gap between him and his leading ladies …
Tell Dad I’ll call him next week, and give the dog a hug for me.
Love, W x
With that bowl of cheap noodles, something had changed in my relationship with the Gopniks. I think I grasped a little better that I could bolster Agnes in her new role. She needed someone to lean on and to trust. This, and the strange osmotic energy of New York, meant that from then on I literally bounced out of bed in a way that I hadn’t done since working for Will. It caused Ilaria to tut and roll her eyes and Nathan to view me sideways, as if I might have started taking drugs.
But it was simple. I wanted to be good at my job. I wanted to get the absolute most out of my time in New York, working for these amazing people. I wanted to suck the marrow out of each day, as Will would have done. I read that first letter again and again, and once I’d got over the strangeness of hearing his voice, I felt an unexpected kinship with him, a newcomer to the city.
I upped my game. I jogged with Agnes and George every morning, and some days I even managed to last the entire route without wanting to throw up. I got to know the places that Agnes’s routines took her to, what she was likely to need to have with her, and wear, and bring home. I was ready in the hallway before she was there, and had water, cigarettes or green juice ready for her almost before she knew she wanted them. When she had to go to a lunch where the Awful Matrons were likely to be, I would make jokes beforehand to shake her out of her nerves, and I would send her cell-phone GIFs of farting pandas or people falling off trampolines to pick up during the meal. I was there in the car afterwards and listened to her when she told me tearfully what they had said or not said to her, nodded sympathetically or agreed that, yes, they were impossible, mean creatures. Dried-up like sticks. No heart left in them.
I became good at maintaining my poker face when Agnes told me slightly too much about Leonard’s beautiful, beautiful body, and his many, many beeeyoootiful skills as a lover, and I tried not to laugh when she told me Polish words, such as cholernica, with which she insulted Ilaria without the housekeeper understanding.
Agnes, I discovered quite quickly, had no filter. Dad always said I used to say the first thing that came into my head, but in my case it wasn’t Bitter old whore! in Polish, or Can you imagine that horrible Susan Fitzwalter getting waxed? Would be like scraping the beard off a closed mussel. Brr.
It wasn’t that Agnes was mean per se. I think she felt under such pressure to behave in a certain way, to be seen and scrutinized and not found wanting, that I became a kind of safety valve. The moment she was out of their company she would swear and curse, and then by the time Garry had driven us home she would have recovered her equanimity in time to see her husband.
I developed strategies to reintroduce a little fun into Agnes’s life. Once a week, without putting it into the diary, we would disappear to the movie theatre on Lincoln Square in the middle of the day to watch silly, gross-out comedies, snorting with laughter as we shovelled popcorn into our mouths. We would dare each other to go into the high end boutiques of Madison Avenue and try on the worst designer outfits we could find, admiring each other straight-faced, and asking, Do you have this in a brighter green? while the sales assistants, one eye on Agnes’s Hermès Birkin handbag, fluttered around, forcing compliments from the sides of their mouths. One lunchtime Agnes persuaded Mr Gopnik to meet us, and I watched as, posing like a catwalk model, she paraded a series of clown-like trouser suits in front of him, daring him to laugh, while the sides of his mouth twitched with suppressed mirth. You are so naughty, he said to her afterwards, shaking his head fondly.
But it wasn’t just my job that had lifted my spirits. I had started to understand New York a little more and, in return, it had started to accommodate me. It wasn’t hard in a city of immigrants – outside the rarefied stratosphere of Agnes’s daily life, I was just another person from a few thousand miles away, running around town, working, ordering my takeout and learning to specify at least three particular things I wanted in my coffee or sandwich, just to sound like a native.
I watched, and I learnt.
This is what I learnt about New Yorkers in my first month.
1. Nobody in my building spoke to anyone else and the Gopniks spoke only to Ashok. The old woman on the second floor, Mrs De Witt, didn’t talk to the couple from California in the penthouse, and the power-suited couple on the third floor walked along the corridor with their noses pressed to their iPhones, barking instructions to the microphone or at each other. Even the children on the first floor – beautifully dressed little mannequins, shepherded by a harried young Filipina – didn’t say hello but kept their eyes on the plush carpet as I walked past. When I smiled at the girl, her eyes widened as if I had done something deeply suspicious.
The residents of the Lavery walked straight out and into identikit black cars that waited patiently at the kerb. They always seemed to know whose was whose. Mrs De Witt, as far as I could see, was the only person who spoke to anyone at all. She talked to Dean Martin constantly, muttering under her breath as she hobbled around the block about the ‘wretched Russians, those awful Chinese’ from the building behind ours who kept their own drivers waiting outside twenty-four seven, clogging up the street. She would complain noisily to Ashok or the building’s management about Agnes playing the piano, and if we passed her in the corridor she would hurry by, occasionally letting slip a vaguely audible tut.