Monday, November 13, 2006

Autumn in New York

The wind is whipping up against my windows like an animal tonight. But I couldn't sleep anyway. So now I sit here writing by the light of my computer screen and I will tell you about a party.

It was a warmer than usual night, and the couple had gathered their friends and parents and assorted others; like the girl who came in tall and lanky, in opaque black tights and a gray flannel miniskirt with a face from a movie that could have starred Marcello Mastroianni.

The lights were warm and soft. Guests were sweating from a strange heat even as it neared midnight on this November evening. On a stretch of avenue in downtown Manhattan, the apartment sprawled beyond what could be called very big: It likely took up a larger space than any apartment you will be privileged to see in this city in your lifetime, and then it joined itself to another of the same size. Blond-wood floors, expanses of white, books. One small barking black dog.

An elevator opens into the living room. On the walls are so many Picasso and Matisse lithographs and drawings they begin to feel like woozy backdrop rather than rare and fantastic objects, each to be admired on its own. Then, maybe, you remember to look at them, one by one by one, and you lose yourself for an unspecified amount of time as you examine every angle of the face of a horse/woman or a sprawling nude. You wander through each room with a glass of prosecco or vodka or red wine in hand and you find yourself stopping to stare at a tiny Miro, or a print by a contemporary of Malevich.

An older couple plays host tonight, former hippies who have the culture-soaked intelligence of Old New Yorkers, people who probably smoked pot with abandon and hosted similar soirees forty years ago, only in tinier apartments with smokier airs. The young couple we have gathered to celebrate is handsome and smart and look sparkling and in love, if a bit stressed to be the center of attention. They are less sure than their hosts, but the kind of people who know how to mix with couples forty years older than them, appreciate what they can teach and offer, which, on this night, is the quiet kind of love that throws young couples parties.

In a back room, one host offered a young woman three fingers from his secret stash of tequila. They laughed at their covert sharing of what he called his "new drug," new because he had long stopped taking another kind, he confessed. She drank with him, then wandered back to the epicenter of the party and spent the rest of the night sipping from what seemed a renewable glass of alcohol, a cup that appeared to never actually drain, never truly be empty.

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