So-Called Experience

One key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.
/Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad/

Over a glass of wine in a bistro I convinced my friend that it was our duty to go to the Goodreads party at Housing Works. "We both loved the Goon Squad," we rationalized. "And I somehow managed to dress myself well today." I had to stop first in a discount clothing store to buy a pair of men's swim trunks; standing in line I sniffed a candle shaped like a pear that smelled nothing like a pear. 

We skipped along bricks brightened by the city's sunset spray tan (yes! what a horrible, mockable metaphor!) to Housing Works, where the note taped to the door read SOLD OUT and people stood hopefully in a line halfway down the block. "Oh no!" we cried, and walked onward.

And walked and walked. It was a night for walking.

I pointed to a bright glass building and asked when it was built. "A few years ago, at least." I couldn't remember what was there before. This is a city where the tiniest things change around us and we think our world is collapsing, but then we barely remember what that world was to begin with.

We talked about films we wanted to see. Win Win, Bridesmaids. I laughed at the letters up on the IFC marquee: Herzog's CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS -- IN 3D, and we both bought Zazen inside a brown-tinged bookstore, where an old publishing luminary browsed books and magazines near the counter and quiet alternative hits peeped through a small speaker. "No bag, thank you."

On to Bigelow's, where amidst high shelves of creams, the women at the counter talked in low tones, muttering syllables from bright red lips; I circled the store looking for a lipstick I'd seen mentioned on a blog. I drew a line of the sample across the back of my hand, held it up to the saleswomen and said "I'd like to buy this" only to be informed that they'd just sold the last one that day.

"This has a been a day of 'no's and 'sorry's," I said to my friend in the shadow of Jefferson Market Library, swathed up to its tower in scaffolding. Library under construction. Surely that was a good sign.

I rode home on the subway next to an older woman I automatically liked who wore a grey stretch cotton pantsuit and clutched a woven black back in her lap. Across from us, a couple taking up three seats with their leftovers from dinner read sections of emails and the New York Times to each other. A woman in a skirt that looked made of long strips of bandages sat down on the other side of me and began to eat a cup of ice cream and read silently from a highlighted script. Nearly to the bottom of her cup, she emptied a little plastic tub of colorful sprinkles into the melted ice cream. The sound made me smile. I tried to remember the last time I ate ice cream on the train.

In the deli, I looked at astringents named after Spanish women with line drawings of bearded men on them. A woman on the street dressed in white barged into pedestrians, crossing against the light, mumbling something hateful under her breath. I wandered the store in search of bubble bath. Outside: sirens chasing each other. This city. Unique and special. No longer my city, but already one of another time.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

Comments

[sam]

oh this was so lovely.