Sadece Litres'te okuyun

Kitap dosya olarak indirilemez ancak uygulamamız üzerinden veya online olarak web sitemizden okunabilir.

Kitabı oku: «Windows on the World», sayfa 3

Yazı tipi:

8:39

As I finish my cappuccino, I look at the other customers, who do not look at me. A lot of sporty redheads. There’s a table of Japanese tourists taking photos of each other. There’s the adulterous stockbrokers. There are American tourists like me, nouveau riche rednecks and proud of it, WASPs wearing suspenders, yuppies with brilliant-white teeth. Boys in striped shirts. Women with ultra blow-dried hair, their pretty hands sporting long manicured nails. Most of them look like Britney Spears twenty years from now. There are Arabs, Englishmen, Pakistanis, Brazilians, Italians, Vietnamese, Mexicans, all of them fat. What the customers of Windows on the World have in common is their paunches. I wonder whether I wouldn’t have been better off taking the kids to the Rainbow Room, on the sixty-fifth floor of the NBC building. The Rainbow Room: twenty-four windows in the heart of the city. The architects of the Rockefeller Center wanted to call it the Stratosphere. But my kids wouldn’t have appreciated the thirties mirrors, the reflections of Manhattan, the legacy of jazz big bands, the whiff of the roaring twenties. All Jerry and David want is to stuff themselves with sausage and muffins in the highest restaurant in New York. Luckily for my wallet, the Toys Us in the lobby was closed otherwise they’d have cleaned the place out. My kids are tyrants and I have to follow their orders to the letter. As I bolt my breakfast, I look down: from this height it’s impossible to make out people. The only moving things in Lower Manhattan are the cars coming and going across the Brooklyn Bridge, tourist helicopters over the East River, and the boats passing each other under the suspension bridges. I’d copied a quote from Kafka into the guidebook: “The bridge connecting New York with Brooklyn hung delicately over the East River, and if one half-shut one’s eyes it seemed to tremble. It appeared to be quite bare of traffic, and beneath it stretched a smooth empty tongue of water.” Amazing how he can so accurately describe something he never saw. Directly in front of me, I can see the Chase Manhattan building, to the left Manhattan Bridge, and to the right, at the end of Fulton Street, South Street Seaport, but I would be incapable of describing them. And I realize that I love this crazy country of mine, the fucked-up times we live in, my annoying kids. A surge of affection overwhelms me—probably last night’s vodka catching up with me. Candace took me to Pravda, and we kind of overdid it on the cherry vodka. Candace did a photo shoot for Victoria’s Secret, I mention it just to give you an idea of how hot she is. But things aren’t going too well between us: she wants us to get married, have a baby, live together, and these are precisely the three mistakes that I want to avoid making again. To punish me for wanting to stay single, she doesn’t come anymore when we fuck. They say some women say no when they mean yes, Candace is the opposite: when she says yes, she means no.

“Why are you so bullish about the NASDAQ?” asks the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“You can’t lose now the Internet bubble’s burst,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren, “pretty much anything’s gonna run up three sticks, the stocks have completely crunched.”

“Yeah, but look at the cash flows, it’s all off-balance-sheet transactions,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole. “I’d be worried about getting jigged out.”

“I bought some stock in Enron,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren. “The company’s a scalper’s dream. Have you seen their earnings?”

“I’m with you there, almost worth holding a position on. WorldCom, too. Their EBITDA is sweet as a million-dollar bill,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole. “Otherwise I don’t fancy being a bottom fisher in that market.”

“Yeah, well, one way or the other, 2001 is gonna be shit, all the bonuses are going to be slashed,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren. “You can kiss your villa in Hawaii goodbye.”

“I think it’s pretty simple: fuck the Porsche, I’m holding liquid,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole. “But 2002 has got to be better, we just have to wait and see what Greenspan does on rates.”

“I love you,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“God, I want to launch a hostile takeover bid on you,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“Leave your fucking wife,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“Okay, okay, I promise I’ll dump her tonight, soon as I get in from the gym,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

And they launch into a pretty hot kiss, all tongues and spit like a good California porn movie or a perfume ad.

8:40

The guidebooks all gave Windows on the World glowing reviews. Here at the top of the Tour Montparnasse on a September morning in 2002, I leaf through them. A year after the tragedy, they take on a strange resonance. For example, the Michelin Green Guide 2000 writes:

Windows on the World, One World Trade Center (107th floor). This elegant restaurant bar boasts the most stunning panoramic views of New York. Since the infamous bombing attempt in 1993, considerable renovation has allowed it to reinvent itself with a sumptuous new interior.

The World Trade Center was a target; something even the guidebooks realized. It was no secret. On February 26, 1993, at 12:18 PM, a bomb in a pickup truck in the parking lot exploded. The basement of the World Trade Center collapsed. A deep crater, six dead and a thousand injured. The towers were refurbished and reopened within a month.

Frommer’s Guide 2000 is more effusive:

Windows on the World (West St between Liberty and Vesey). Main $25-35; Sunset menu (before 6 PM) $35; Brunch $32.50. Cards: VISA. Subway: C, E, World Trade Center. Valet parking on West Street, $18. The interiors are sober but pleasing. In any case, they are of little importance as, just outside the “Windows” all of New York is unfurled! The restaurant offers unassailable views of the city. And with Michael Lomonaco, former chef at Club 21, now at the helm, the Modern American cuisine is second to none. The cellar, too, is full to bursting. The sommelier is happy to point you in the right direction, whether you are a connoisseur or simply an amateur looking to perfectly complement your Char-grilled cutlets or Homard de Maine, two of Lomonaco’s specialties.

In a magazine article, I read that two inseparable brothers worked side by side cleaning shellfish in the kitchens. Two Muslims.

What we know now leads us to look for portents everywhere; it’s a foolish exercise which gives a restaurant review written in 2000 a prophetic significance. If we pick apart the second review word by word, the text reads like something out of Nostradamus. “Just outside the ‘Windows’“? An oncoming plane. “Unassailable views”? On the contrary, they were all too assailable. “The cellar, too, is full to bursting”? Absolutely: it will soon have 600,000 tons of rubble piled on top of it. “The sommelier is happy to point you in the right direction”? Like an air-traffic controller. “Char-grilled cutlets”? Soon to be charred at 1,500 degrees. “Homard de Maine,” you mean Omar the Mullah? I know, it’s not funny, you don’t joke about death. I’m sorry, it’s a form of self-defense: I write these jokes at the top of a tower in Paris, flicking through pages and pages of reviews for a sister site that no longer exists. It’s impossible not to see portents everywhere, coded messages from the past. The past is now the only place where you can find Windows on the World. This unique restaurant where you could enjoy haute cuisine at the top of the world; where you had to reserve a table to take your mistress to admire the view so you could leer into her low-cut blouse as she leaned down to check she had condoms in her handbag, this magnificent place, unique, unscathed, this place is called the past.

The Hachette Guide 2000 commented, oblivious to the cruel irony that the remark would one day have:

The restaurant operates as a sort of private club at lunchtime, but for a small consideration, will admit you even if you are not a member.

Sic.

The paradox of the Twin Towers is that it was an ultramodern complex in the oldest neighborhood in New York at the southernmost tip of Manhattan island: New Amsterdam. Now, the New York landscape has once more become as it was when Holden Caulfield ran away. The destruction of the Twin Towers takes the city back to 1965, the year in which I was born. It’s strange to realize that I am exactly as old as the World Trade Center. This is the Manhattan in which Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which takes place in 1949. Do you know where the title of The Catcher in the Rye comes from?

It comes from a Robert Burns poem: “Gin a body meet a body coming thro’ the rye.” Holden Caulfield (the narrator) mishears the poem: he believes it runs “if a body catch a body coming through the rye”. He decides he is “the catcher in the rye.” This is what he would most like to do in life. On page 179, he explains his vocation to his little sister, Phoebe. He imagines himself running through the fields of rye trying to save thousands of kids. This would be his ideal profession. Darting around the field of rye, catching all the children running along the clifftop, clusters of innocent hearts tumbling into the void. Their carefree laughter whipped away on the breeze. Running through the rye in the sunshine. “Ev’rybody knows when little children play / They need a sunny day to grow straight and tall” (“The Windows of the World”). The most perfect of all possible destinies: catching them before they fall. I too would like to be the catcher.

The Catcher in the Windows.

8:41

I pretend to sneer at the people at the nearby tables. It’s one of my favorite games when the kids are getting on my nerves. Look at this bunch of nonentities: they’re forgetting they’re descended from Dutch, Irish, German, Italian, French, English, and Spanish settlers who came across the Atlantic three or four centuries ago. Well Yee Ha! I hit the big time! I’ve got a house on Long Island, two rosy-cheeked kids who say “shoot” instead of “shit”! I’m not some hick off the boat anymore. Soft expensive sheets, soft expensive TP, soft expensive flower-print curtains, and enough domestic appliances to make my wife with her lacquered hair drool. The American dream: American Beauty. Sometimes I think the movie’s hero, Lester Burnham, is me. The cynical, phlegmatic guy bored shitless with his perfect family is “so me” a couple of years ago. Carthew Yorston walked out on his life from one day to the next. Actually, I arranged to have myself kicked out of my own house: I’m not sure if it was cowardice or respect for Mary. In the film, his wife wants to kill him but in the end he’s murdered by his homophobic ex-army neighbor. Let’s just say that for the moment, at least, I’m doing better than Lester. But, Jesus, I jerked off so much in the shower. And then there’s that brilliant phrase in the voice-over: “In a year, I’ll be dead, but in a way, I am dead already.” We have a lot in common, Lester Burnham and me.

Before long, I hope, my sons will be introducing me to their girlfriends. Uh-oh, I’m not too sure I’ll be able to resist hitting on them like some dirty old man. I wonder what Jerry and David Yorston will do when they grow up. Will they be successful artists, rock stars, Hollywood actors, TV presenters? Maybe industrialists, bankers, ruthless businessmen? As a father, I hope they choose the second option, but as an American, I can’t help but fantasize about the first. And, in reality, they’re most likely to end up realtors like their father. Forty years from now when I’m incontinent and bedridden in Fort Lauderdale they’ll be changing my diapers. I’ll eat dry crackers and fritter away their inheritance in some Florida gulag! It’ll be great: I’ll have my groceries delivered, order food online and some hooker who looks like Farrah Fawcett in Charlie’s Angels will suck my cock and smile. I love this country. Oh, yes, I forgot: I’ll play golf, if I can still walk. Jerry and David will caddy for me.

Looking down through the telescope I can see a white cube: the piazza where minuscule restaurant employees are putting chairs out on the terraces for people to lunch in the midday sunshine. I assume ice-cream sellers are putting out their blackboards, and hot-dog and pretzel vendors are setting up their carts round the WTC Plaza. That tiny cube? A stage for open-air rock concerts. That metal ball? A bronze globe sculpted by Fritz Koenig. There’s a bunch of hideous contemporary sculptures: mountains of tangled, stacked, warped metal girders. I have no idea what the artists were trying to say. It’s Indian summer; I hum “Autumn in New York.”

Autumn in New York

Why does it seem so invitiiiing?

Glittering crowwwds and shimmering clouuuds

In canyons of steeeel

Autuuuum in Neeeew Yorrk

Is often mingled wiiith pain

Dreaaamers with empty haaands

May sigh for exoootic lands…

Oscar Peterson on piano; Louis Armstrong on trumpet; vocals by Ella Fitzgerald.

I really must make an appointment to have a vasectomy. In the beginning, with Candace, everything was perfect. I met her on the Internet (on www.match.com). These days Internet dates are dime a dozen. Match.com has eight million members worldwide. If you’re visiting a foreign city, you set up a couple of dates before you arrive, it’s as easy as booking a hotel room. After dinner on our first date, I invited her up to my room for a drink so we could chat some more, and normally, that’s where she should have turned me down, because that’s the rule: never fuck on a first date. You know what she did? She looked me right in the eye and said: “If I’m coming up, it won’t be to chat.” Wow. Together, we went too far too fast: X-rated movies, a few sex toys. It was all too much. Ever since, the sex has been good, but a bit healthier. Like a merger between two lonely egomaniacs, we use each other’s bodies to get off and sometimes I think both of us are forcing ourselves. Hmm. She’s probably cheating on me. These days couples cheat on each other earlier and earlier.

8:42

I’ve got a problem: I don’t remember my childhood.

The only thing I remember is that being middle class doesn’t buy you happiness.

Darkness; everything is dark. My alarm clock goes off, it’s eight o’clock, I’m late, I’m thirteen years old, I slip on my brown Kickers, pick up my huge army surplus bag full of Stypens, correction pens, textbooks as heavy as they are fucking boring, Mom is already up heating some milk, my brother and I slurp it noisily, bitching because there’s skin on the milk, before taking the elevator down into this dark winter morning in 1978. The Lycée Louis-le-Grand is miles away. It’s on the Rue Coëtlogon, 75006 Paris. I’m dying of cold and boredom. I stuff my hands in my ugly loden coat. I wrap myself up in my itchy yellow scarf. I know it’s going to rain and I’ve missed the 84. What I don’t know is that this whole thing is absurd, that none of this will ever come in useful. Neither do I know that this dismal dawn is the only morning in my whole childhood that I will later remember. I don’t even know why I’m sad—maybe because I haven’t got the balls to cut math class. Charles decides to wait for the bus and I decide to walk to school, past the Jardin du Luxembourg, along the Rue de Vaugirard where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived from April to August 1928 (at the corner of the Rue Bonaparte), but I didn’t know that then. I still live nearby; from my balcony I can see kids with the school-bags rushing to school, spewing plumes of cold breath: tiny hunchbacked dragons running along the sidewalk, avoiding the cracks. They watch their feet, careful not to step on the gaps between the paving stones like they’re walking through a minefield. Bleak is the adjective that best sums up my life back then. BLEAK as an icy morning. At that moment, I’m convinced nothing interesting will ever happen to me. I’m ugly, skinny, I feel completely alone and the sky buckets down on me. I stand, soaked to the skin, in front of the Senate which is as gray as my shitty school: everything about school fucks me off: the walls, the teachers, the pupils. I hold my breath; things are awful, everything’s awful, why is everything so awful? Because I’m ordinary, because I’m thirteen, because I’ve got a chin like a gumboot, because I’m scrawny. If I’m going to be this scrawny I might as well be dead. A bus comes and I hesitate, I really hesitate, I almost threw myself under the bus that day. It’s the 84 overtaking me with Charles inside. The big wheels splatter the bottoms of my stupid pleated pants (beige corduroy with turnups that are way too big). I walk toward normality. I walk, wheezing, across the black ice. No girl will ever love me, and I can see their point, I don’t blame you, mesdemoiselles, I can see your point: even I don’t love me. I’m late: Madame Minois, my math teacher, will roll her eyes to heaven and spit. The cretins in my class will heave a sigh just to make themselves look good. Rain will stream down the window-panes of a classroom which reeks of despair (despair, I now know, smells of chalk dust). Why am I complaining when there’s nothing wrong with me? I haven’t been raped, beaten, abandoned, drugged. Just divorced parents who are excessively kind to me like every kid in my class. I’m traumatized by my lack of trauma. That morning, I choose to live. I walk through the school gates like walking into a lion’s den. The building has a black mouth, its windows are yellow eyes. It swallows me in order to feed on me. I’m completely submissive. I agree to become what they make of me. I come face to face with my adolescent spinelessness.

From the top of the Tour Montparnasse I can, if I try, make out the School of my Wasted Youth. I still live in this neighborhood where I suffered so much. I do not leave this place which made me who I am. I never rebelled. I never even moved house. From my house, to get to my job at Flammarion, I walk down the same Rue de Vaugirard as the little boy whose ears and hands were frozen. I spew the same plumes of cold breath. I still do not walk on the cracks. I never escaped that morning.

8:43

My childhood takes place in the verdant paradise of a fashionable suburb of Austin, Texas. A house that looks just like the neighbors’, a garden where we drink from the fountain, an open-top Chevy driving toward the desert. Through the window, a sofa and the faces of two children reflected in a TV, and at this time of the day it’s the same all over town, all over the country. My parents try their best to live life like a Technicolor movie: they hold cocktail parties at which the mothers compare notes on interior decoration. Every year, we consume an average of four tons of crude oil. High school? Nothing but spotty white kids in baseball caps listening to Grateful Dead and squashing beer cans against their foreheads. Nothing too serious. Sunshine, coffee bars, football tryouts, cheerleaders with big tits who say “I mean” and “like” in every sentence. Everything about my adolescence is squeaky-clean: lap-dancing bars don’t exist yet and motels are R-rated. I eat lunch on the grass, play tennis, read comics in the hammock. Ice cubes go “clink-clink” in my father’s glass of Scotch. Every week there are a couple of executions in my state. My childhood unfolds on a lawn. Don’t get me wrong: we’re not talking Little House on the Prairie, more Little Bungalow in the Suburbs. I wear braces on my teeth, take my wooden Dunlop tennis racket and play air guitar in front of the mirror with the radio full blast. I spend my vacations at summer camp, I go river rafting in dinghies, hone my serve, win at water polo, discover masturbation thanks to Hustler. All the Lolitas are in love with Cat Stevens but since he’s not around they lose their cherries to the tennis coach. My greatest trauma is the film King Kong (the 1933 version): my folks had gone out and my sister and I secretly watched it in their bedroom despite our babysitter’s injunction. The black-and-white image of this enormous gorilla scaling the Empire State Building, snatching military planes out of the sky is my worst childhood memory. They did a remake in color in the seventies which uses the World Trade Center. Any minute now I expect to see a huge gorilla scaling the towers—believe it or not I’ve got goose bumps right now, I can’t stop thinking about it.

You can thumb through my life in high school yearbooks. I thought it was happy at the time but thinking back on it, it depresses me. Maybe because I’m scared that it’s over, scared because I left my family to make a killing in real estate. I became successful the day I realized a very simple thing: you don’t make money on big properties, you make it on little ones (because you sell more of them). Middle-class families read the same magazines as rich ones: everyone wants that apartment in Wallpaper, or a loft just like Lenny Kravitz’s! So I did a deal with a credit union who agreed to lend me a couple of million dollars over thirty years, then I found a bunch of old cattle warehouses in an old cowboy section of Austin and transformed them into artists’ studios for idiots. My genius was my ability to convince couples who came to me that their loft was unique when in fact I was shifting thirty a year. That’s how I climbed the greasy pole at the agency, stole the job of the guy who hired me, then set up my own company, “Austin Maxi Real Estate.” Three point five million, soon be four. Hardly Donald Trump but it’s enough to take the long view. Like my dad used to say: “The first million is the hardest, after that the rest just follow!” Jerry and David are financially comfortable though they don’t realize that yet because I always play the part of an aristocrat on his uppers in front of Mary so she doesn’t force me to quadruple the alimony. Strangely, money is the reason I left her: I couldn’t keep going home when I had all that dough burning a hole in my pocket. What was the point of earning all that money if I was going to be stuck with the same woman every night? I wanted to be the antithesis of George Babbitt, that dumb schmuck incapable of escaping his family and his town…

“Gimme the camera,” says David.

“No, it’s mine,” says Jerry.

“You don’t know how to take photos,” says David.

“You don’t either,” says Jerry.

“You didn’t even set the flash,” says David.

“You don’t have to when it’s bright,” says Jerry.

“An’ you didn’t set the speed,” says David.

“Who cares, it’s only a disposable,” says Jerry.

“Take one of the Statue of Liberty,” says David.

“Already took one,” says Jerry.

“Last time they were all blurry,” says David.

“Shut up,” says Jerry.