Limitless

There were a couple of other encounters, too. One morning I went to my friend Dean’s place on Sullivan Street to pick up a book, and as I was leaving the building I got talking to a young woman who lived on the second floor. According to the bullet-point profile of his neighbours Dean had once reeled off, she was a single-white-female computer-programmer, twenty-six, non-smoker, interested in nineteenth-century American art. We’d passed each other on the stairs a few times before, but in the way of things in New York City apartment buildings, what with alienation and paranoia, not to mention endemic rudeness, we’d completely ignored each other. This time I smiled at her and said, ‘Hi. Great day.’ She looked startled, studied me for a nanosecond or two, and then replied, ‘If you’re Bill Gates. Or Naomi Campbell.’

‘Well, maybe,’ I said, pausing to lean back against the wall, casually, ‘but hey, if things are that bad, can I buy you a drink?’

She looked at her watch and said, ‘A drink? It’s ten-thirty in the morning – what are you, the crown prince of Toyland?’

I laughed. ‘I might be.’

She was holding an A & P shopping bag in her left hand and under her right arm she had a large hardcover volume, lodged tightly so it wouldn’t slip. I nodded at the book.

‘What are you reading?’

She released a long sigh, as if to say, Fellah, I’m busy, OK … maybe some other time. The sigh then tapered off and she said, wearily, ‘Thomas Cole. The works of Thomas Cole.’

‘View from Mount Holyoke,’ I said automatically. ‘Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm – The Oxbow.’ It was as much as I could do to resist continuing with, ‘Eighteen thirty-six. Oil on Canvas, fifty-one-and-a-half inches by seventy-six inches.’

She furrowed her eyebrows and looked at me for a moment. Then she lowered the shopping bag and put it down at her feet. She eased the large book out from under her arm, held it awkwardly and started flicking through it.

‘Yeah,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘The Oxbow – that’s the one. I’m doing this …’ She continued flicking distractedly through the book. ‘I’m doing this paper for a course I’m taking on Cole and … yeah,’ she looked up at me, ‘The Oxbow.’

She found the page and half held it out, but for us both to look at the painting properly we had to move a little closer together. She was quite short, had dark silky hair and was wearing a green headscarf inset with little amber beads.

‘Remember,’ I said, ‘the oxbow is a yoke – a symbol of control over raw nature. Cole didn’t believe in progress, not if progress meant clearing forests and building railroads. Every hill and valley, he once wrote – and in a fairly ill-advised foray into poetry I might add – every hill and valley is become an altar unto Mammon.’

‘Hhm.’ She paused to consider this. Then she seemed to be considering something else. ‘You know about this stuff?’

I’d been to the Met with Chantal a week earlier and had absorbed a good deal of information from catalogues and wall-mounted copyblocks and I’d also recently read American Visions by Robert Hughes, as well as heaps of Thoreau and Emerson, so I felt comfortable enough saying, ‘Yeah, sure. I wouldn’t be an expert or anything, but yeah.’ I leant forward slightly, and around, and studied her face, her eyes. She met my gaze. I said, ‘Do you want me to help you with this … paper?’

‘Would you?’ she said in small voice. ‘Can you … I mean, if you’re not busy?’

‘I’m the crown prince of Toyland, remember, so it’s not like I have a job to go to.’

She smiled for the first time.

We went into her apartment and in about two hours did a rough draft of the paper. About four hours after that again I finally staggered out of the building.

Another time I was in the offices of Kerr & Dexter, dropping off some copy, when I bumped into Clare Dormer. Although I’d only met Clare once or twice before, I greeted her very warmly. She’d just been in with Mark Sutton discussing some contractual matter, so I decided to tell her my idea about confining her book to boys, starting with Leave it to Beaver and taking it as far as The Simpsons and then calling it Raising Sons: From Beaver to Bart. She laughed generously at this and slapped the back of her hand against my jacket lapel.

Then she paused, as though something she hadn’t realized before was suddenly dawning on her.

Twenty minutes later we were down in a quiet stairwell together on the twelfth floor, sharing a cigarette.