The Ark

By Veil Keller

 

     In my late twenties, for what I then believed was the sake of a girl, I moved from the relatively small provincial capital of Amiens to New York, a city where, despite having grown up in the region, I had never spent more than one uninterrupted month.  I landed at Newark in the chill rain of mid-autumn, and my first impression of the city—indeed, of the native coast I had not seen in four years—as we broke the underside of the clouds was of an otherworldly remoteness.  Making my way through the doors and corridors, along the quays and sidewalks which seemed for those burdened like myself a catalogue of metropolitan impediments of an ingenious intricacy, I felt the air like thin wet wool draw across my shoulders: a tattered shawl, comfortless, trailing drops.  It was raining, too, the day I was to see, for the first time, the apartment she had picked out for our life together.  I still remember how undeviatingly I followed her directions, at every step along the trip seeming to memorize details—the disposition of brown and orange seats, amidst brown paneling, on subway cars; the scraps of newspaper caught in the pigeon spikes of the nearest pharmacy—as if willing into being a habit until the exercise no longer seemed to distract me from my anxiety that I would not be able to imagine a life in the apartment I was about to see.

     From the moment I stepped in, the super in his flannel shirt behind me, it was evident that, although I had studiously refrained from imposing any uninformed notions of size on the model that had since mid-summer held a mental place, the rooms were smaller than expected.  Moreover the floor plan I had, during our phone conversation, drawn in the corner of a strip of paper I was then careful to keep as a bookmark, was egregiously mistaken so that to the super’s perfunctory assertions in broken English of the apartment’s size and niceness I could only politely agree.  In every situation it seems there is an obvious emotional reaction leading to or having place in an obvious outcome or suite of events.  I had recently taken leave of a country which in the months preceding my departure had become increasingly dear, but wasn’t this slow turning of the head to gaze over the shoulder at an already receding shore a predictable reaction?  Couldn’t some predictable story be made of it involving premature loss, hasty decisions of a heart caught between wants, emollient nostalgia and irreparable rue whose moral, in so much as it had one, concerned the inevitable, irreversible trade of losing what you had in getting what you longed for (which, it would be lightly implied, was one of life’s harsh clauses) and wouldn’t such a story be desperately maudlin and unsurprising?  Wasn’t it better, then, even acknowledging a precipitate nostalgia for France, to resist my own impulses rather than give them free rein toward their foreseeable end of regret?  I have been told, variously, by friends and lovers, that though I am not at heart a cold person I can seem cold or forbidding  but I believe the instances of silence or cynicism to which they must have been referring were misunderstandings of the attempt to refrain from doing, saying or feeling the obvious.

     It was some time before I could remove myself from the window giving on to the roof of the neighboring building where, in the atmosphere of rain further darkened by the onset of evening, I could still discern the shapes if not the colors of various pipes, squat concrete stacks and what seemed a chimney but which ended in a soiled pyramidal skylight.  On the floor just below, framed by demi-curtains, a stout woman was rinsing vegetables in the same dim light, I realized, in which I now stood, the light of domesticity which for all its warmth of brown and invitation had always signaled for me the silent dinners and the incommunicable desolation of family life.

     My most lasting impression of that afternoon was not cleanliness—for apartments, past a certain age, can no longer achieve that illusion of uniformity we associate with cleanliness—but one of vacancy.  The blank walls confronted me with my own lack of expectation and this lack was something I was determined to hide, or at worst pass off as game equivocation, open and accommodating.  Walking from room to room with my arms outstretched so that I might at any time brush the walls with my fingers, I began to devise a strategy of defiance against the omens of inclemency and objection that I could feel urging me toward disillusion for the entire project of a shared life to come.

 

     The great vessel of our building seemed to have run aground generations earlier, arrested as though in its heaving traverse of a dune by sheer tonnage of sand but with its prow still quixotically jutting, at an angle of final rebuff, sharply midair, the mermaid of its bow replaced in a setting of scrollwork and vegetable motif by a concrete cartouche bare but for a few lead-puttied seams.  The ridge of the dune was Broadway, and the slope falling away in a reveal of the hull was 212^th Street, to which intersection the building proudly pointed a rounded corner crowned by the cartouche and columned in windows, giving on ogival rooms whose slight custom curve was betrayed as in an oil lamp by discrepancies in the ribbons of reflected light.  At this corner the building was anchored somehow reassuringly by a daycare center on whose windows letters cut from pastel paper spelled biblical citations concerning children.  Along and beside hung the fire escapes, each landing with its spindle-railinged struts like a lifeboat in its cradle of rigging.

     The color of our corridors and lobby was blue .  Two tones lined the halls and windows and flecked the tiny floor tiles.  The stairs and sills were gray marble streaked with pearl and black, and a weighty table of the same residing with stone permanence before a giant mirror added an elderly, largely neglected dignity to the waiting area left of the entrance.  Beribboned pilasters of molding divided the ceiling into rectangles framing gala plaster bouquets.  Painted to resemble the marble, a housing betrayed by a knock as wood, hid cables beside the windows.  Across from the giant mirror was another, before which a few plants failed, their leaves, still green, fallen from stalks, the tan filters of cigarette butts blending into the dried and pitted dirt.

     Sometimes at night, feeling my way to the bathroom along cool unfamiliar walls and still in the sway of sleep, the nautical impression returned, as though the grounded liner could feel from a missing ocean pitch and yaw as from a phantom limb.  I remember the imperfection of the wooden floors that ran to the walls without quite meeting their edges, my feet learning the warps in which, were the ship tossed in a storm, water would gather.

 

     Even today, when, in reading, I come across the French phrase, sombrer dans l’anonyme, I am transported by its dark sonorities and connotations of drowning to those first months in Manhattan, to the sensation of cold and lucid layers drawing with an eerie beauty over my head, between myself and a steadily dimming light.  I found an unremarkable job in a large building whose name, though doubtless it had one, remained unknown to those who passed me first with hellos, then in the silence of a slight smile on a floor grudgingly boxed by partitions the color of gruel.  I traveled to and from this building five days a week at hours when it seemed almost everyone else did as well, the buses trudging through clinging traffic to make pneumatic genuflection at the start of each block.  I watched the man whose hair was still mussed from the shower rinse his mouth with a gulp of coffee and sat beside the girl the wale of whose shawl was so wide as to seem the strands of a rope.  I passed the vendors in their hulking jackets with their pomegranates grim and pitted as the bitter winter.  I lunched in city eateries crowded by mirrors whose tint seemed to bring out the brass of rails and knobs as wan and gaudy as used wrapping paper.  I walked past the drivers of tour buses shouting into their cell phones, past repairmen whose tools defiled the stylish store windows whose paneling they had come after hours to repair, past the hygienist alone with her merciless light and her chair on the second floor of a luxury building.  Time was told not by the days that took so long to die nor in the weeks that disappeared so swiftly, but, out of step with the calendar, by purely personal memorials as each haircut, each monthly purchase of a Metro card, the deposit of each biweekly check made me remember how little had changed since the last identical event.  Into the stations I descended, having slept either poorly, too little, or both but never neither, and by the clocks at reassuringly regular intervals, all of which resembled one another down to the minute hand advancing in such imperceptible increments as to argue credibly for motion while never acquitting the suspicion of inertia, it seemed I was always slightly though never seriously late for the place I next needed to be.  I sat in the cars where a blind accordionist wheezed his way through an indistinct tune the train plowed over like a truck over a pushcart.  His song seemed an expression of a surrender that had stranded him in apathy, the instrument that somehow found itself between his arms adding barely any meaning to their movements of opening and closing, repeated as though, for lack of words, only this gesture, though it had long since ceased to communicate, were left him, to be performed, sometimes manically, sometimes exhaustedly, always desperately, in an infinite futility. 

      Somewhere in the evening a woman was stalled, scratching a ticket with a coin, outside a drugstore fluorescently oblivious to the business hours ending all around it.  Under the scaffolding, newly risen in our neighborhood like a garrison of faraway midtown, I marched, perspective channeled by the metal struts with their cross and x braces, by the roof whose corrugated steel, lit by caged bulbs, shuddered thudding with the boots of workers above, pacing the plywood ramparts that slowly filled with the debris of renovation.  Scaffolding was the contempt of balconies for the sidewalk, imposing on its victim storefronts a dinginess so that even at midday an indoor pallor colors the makeshift corridor, an insomniac fluorescence widening over the sidewalk.

     The city that winter was the city saved from drowning a minute late—sodden and lifeless, dripping from every pore and crevice; collecting, in its pockets and depressions, pools a mere cough struggling breathward would scatter in droplets, but no will, it seemed, was there to battle shivering toward warmth.  Mist clung in the air.  Under tilting umbrellas, or one hand clutching the hoods of slickers over their heads, pedestrians hurried, bent into the slanting rain.  By the curbs floods welled and poured into the gutters.  The cold turned vicious overnight.  One day the clouds, and not the sky, were blue, and it began to snow.

     The city was parceled off, block by block, one from the view of the next.  The sense of isolation was greater than in the wild, amidst mountains or the dense and vivid trees, perhaps because I knew of entire buildings shelved with homes and lives a minute ago high and to my right.  Or of streets I had walked, to either side of the one I was walking tonight, the contents of whose blocks from corner to corner I could, if pressed, probably summon, some by name and some by scene remembered from a window, some by doorman and some by awning, though not in order, like an encyclopedia set jumbled from rushed browse.  Their disappearance in the blizzard reinforced my isolation.  I traveled, every day, in a glassy oval I had ceased to notice.  How else to inure myself to the moving roomfuls of strangers I entered and left unchanged each morning and evening?  I lived in a private city identical in every respect to the city collectively inhabited except that I was its moving center.  How strange, then, to have that observer’s reality I exerted on all sides made actual in suddenly deserted avenues and a visibility whose limits, as the moving center of which, I would never escape.  When at last I reached home it seemed the last building on earth, at the edge not of a hazardous precipice from which it might tumble into wreck, but of that even grayness which is our vision of unbeing, into which it might simply dissolve.