Fantastic Metropolis

Matt often thought of Dylan, Ellie having loved those early songs so much, and right now, looking out of the window, he wondered if the singer had once walked along these streets in that long-ago summer of 1962 and whether he and Ellie had ever been looking out of these very same windows to see him, walking along, his head filled with tunes and his neck arched back to take in the building fronts and the sights of the great city.

Matt’s house was a big double-fronted with shuttered windows and a gabled roof, a direct throwback to the great brownstones of a bygone age and a forgotten time, its back windows overlooking what was surely once a communal courtyard servicing four other apartment buildings but which had since been partitioned into roughly-equal quarter sections, a high wall containing the four left and right, and each bearing its own individual character.

Summer nights, with their back windows opened wide to the sounds of the city, Matt and Ellie would stop every now and again and marvel at the sound coming in, a collective sound of life and all the misery and wonder that goes with it, looking out over the rooftops of the two houses opposite, craning their necks to the left to face Washington Square Park and letting out soft heartfelt sighs of astonishment at the distant glow of the theater district and Midtown lighting the dark sky that looked down on Manhattan.

And in the haze of winter, when the temperature fell so low you could feel your eyebrows crackle when you raised them and the snow lay heavy and thick on the streets, Matt and Ellie would watch out of those same windows at their son, Richard, building thick-girthed men and squat igloos in the yard.

All year long, season in and season out, those back windows stared in wide-open fascination at the houses opposite, bringing their cooking smells into the apartment and making Matt and Ellie—and Richard, when he had lived there with them—hungry enough to eat a horse between two mattresses… and, in the evenings, wafting in the faint strains of a mixture of musical rhythms, some of which almost had continued to resemble the great sounds that Matt and Ellie used to listen to in their courting days. Almost, but not quite.

The seven rooms of the apartment were still sparingly furnished. Matt and and Ellie had never gone in for a lot of clutter, a fact more noticeable now since the inconsequential but somehow strangely important debris that life throws up was nowhere to be seen.

Matt had spent most of the tearful week following the accident removing all trace of Ellie… the handwritten notes telling him she’d gone down to the store for something she’d forgotten, and the anniversary and birthday cards they had sent each other and which they’d collected—ghoulishly, on reflection, Matt had decided reluctantly—in a long drawer that ran almost the full length of the polished light oak dining table in the kitchen. Out they went, along with the scuffed and battered soft leather mocassins that Ellie used to wear while they watched the television; the various lipsticks that Ellie would leave around the apartment and then forget where she’d put them… Matt found every one, eight of them, each discovery feeling like an arrow through his soul; the photocopied grocery lists that Ellie had produced on Matt’s word processor—he’d trust to luck and memory from now on… he couldn’t face filling in those columns any more than he could face walking the supermarket aisles with people staring at his bloodshot eyes. And, anyway, he wasn’t eating that much these days. Not since the accident. Now life was simply a matter of shitting and shaving, with Matt’s requirements from the 24-hour convenience store on Broadway more-or-less comprising only toilet tissues and razor-blades, with all other sustenance provided either by the liquor store on the corner of West 3rd and Sixth or Ssbarro’s call-out pizza service over on Broadway.

“You can’t exist on pizzas, Dad,” Richard had said when he and his shrew-faced wife, Sandra, the dental receptionist from Des Moines, had come down to stay with Matt over the funeral week, turning his face away in that mock-laugh of his, adjusting his glasses like he was delivering lines at a stand-up amateur night. “Listen to reason, will you,” he’d said, getting agitated, thumping his chest against the indigestion that always seemed to start up when things weren’t going quite the way he’d planned them. “Goddam Ssbarro’s profits must be going through the roof, for Crissakes.”

Matt had kept calm, though he couldn’t understand why. A coronary would have been good news that week… would have meant he didn’t have to stand alongside the open grave at the small cemetery adjoining St.-Lukes-in-the-Field over on Weehawken, while a man Matt and Ellie had never met said nice but inevitably insincere and therefore meaningless things about Ellie, calling her Eleanor, which Ellie hated—had hated—Matt turning and glaring at Richard, who had arranged the service… Richard seeing the look and glancing away quickly, staring down at his shoes, sensible lace-ups, polished respectfully.

But respect was only a game to Matt’s son, the grown-up man who had replaced the boy who used to build snow figures in the yard back when the world was younger and happier. For Richard, ‘respect’ was simply a piece of clothing he pulled on when he deemed it necessary and never because he felt it with his heart. Richard was corporate through and through, a trait that had secured him a high managerial position with a savings and loan outfit based in Connecticut, whose name Matt could never remember—a source of annoyance to Richard that pleased his father no end, though Matt was not by nature a malicious or vindictive man.