Manhattan Island

 Hell-bent from Paradise: Manhattan Island 

Junot Diaz by m ball

We drove to New York City, coming into Manhattan by way of the George Washington Bridge, so we could leave Roz for the night and part of next day with son Bart, his paramour Dominga, and her son, the pocket Junot Diaz, Alfredo, now nine. (See here. We spent Thanksgiving with them in their cramped Washington Heights apartment two years ago.) 
     Uncle Albert and I went on to our hotel, the Andaz on Fifth Avenue. And he called the reason he was in New York, a former student recently retired from teaching at CUNY.

“Does he know you’re coming?” I asked when he told me why we were in the City.

“Sort of.”

    “Meaning what?”

    “I told him I might be by sometime this summer.”

    “Oh.”

We met him the next morning, a bantam spider of a man in black jeans and black t-shirt, gray jacket - gray hair scattered sparsely around his ears and around his mouth; we met him at a sidewalk table someplace in SOHO. He was there before we were and stood up when we were still half a block away, then walked briskly toward us, “Albert, mon oncle,” he boomed - a remarkably deep voice, not what I had suspected when he’d stood up. “Maynard [Meh -'närr],” Uncle Albert croaked, “Comment ça va?” “Bien, mon ami. Très bien.” And they embraced, the spider man practically crashing into the old man leaning on his cane. I reached out and put my hand on Uncle Albert’s shoulder, but it was steady. It began to shake only because both men began to laugh, aloud.

We sat. Introductions. Cups of coffee all around, sugared and creamed to the color of peanut butter. Then, they began “chattering like waves,” as the Philosopher put it, in French. I gave up three sentences in, sat back with my coffee and watched the people swarming the street as they came in and went out of focus, narrow men in a narrower suits and wider men in jeans and work boots, women in short, black jackets and skirts, in clicking high heels, and women in swirling ankle-length pleats and flat sandals, men and women black, white, yellow, cinamon, and the color of peanut butter - in and out of focus.

     Until I heard my name. “We are switching to English now,” the spider man was saying. “I didn’t say before, I should have: I am Maynard [Mā-'nahrd] Hale, May. Your Uncle Albert and I went through the war together, I was the battlefield.” May had been a student of Uncle Albert’s pretty early on, one of those students of the early sixties, May said, that started out in Physics then descended to Math, Economics, and Political Science. He took a junior year abroad in Paris living on coffee and cigarettes, then stayed in school a fifth year, so he could get in every course the French Department offered. He moved to Lyon, somehow talked his way into a job teaching in the lycee there, married, divorced, and eventually - “much battered about” - found his way “home.” “I grew up here, in the City.

     “God, I was so glad to get away, somewhere quiet, for college. But there’s been nothing quiet since.
     “Even though I live by myself,” he laughed.

I wondered what that was like, living by yourself. I found I had forgotten.

08.09.17