5

The building was round. If not actually round, at least semi-circular. On discreet balconies, there were summer chairs and patio tables. I stared at the building in disbelief. Round! There had been nothing round in New York except the aquarium. The effect was slightly apparitional. Suddenly I realized I could not remember what had been on that corner before the round building was there. A policeman was stomping in the cold. He was standing beside a parking meter. As I approached the policeman, I realized he was very young. The buildings were now round and the policeman was very young.

“What is that thing?” I said to the policeman.

He looked up at the building.

He was really very young and he was cold and his hands were mittened.

“Looks like a jail, doesn’t it?” the policeman said.

I wasn’t sure what it looked like. It was simply an incredible something.

“What was there before? I can’t remember.”

“Tell you the truth,” the young policeman said, “I can’t remember myself. Some kinda building.”

Yes: some kinda building. Bank, or whorehouse, or athletic club. Historic or not. It didn’t matter and I couldn’t remember and the young policeman couldn’t either.

I walked down to what had been Sixth Avenue and was now the Avenue of the Americas. I’d walk slowly, I thought, and I would let the city come at me slowly. But New York does not come at you slowly. It isn’t a landscape. It comes at you simultaneously. It is constantly existing at the periphery of your sight. You are almost always seeing at the very edge of what you see something else that you are still not seeing. I had always known this even when it was a different city and I had lived in it and was now trying to live in it again. An enormous excavation gaped in the crosstown street. A municipal disembowelment. There were huge encrusted iron pipes buried in the clay and rock under the street. Some of the pipes were padded at their joints. Down in the earth among the intestinal metal were men in dull silver tin hats with tool belts strapped to their waists. The traffic was hopeless. I went into a delicatessen for breakfast. I had not walked far and yet I felt tired. My wife had always kept a red bottle of special vitamins in the medicine cabinet. My wife. The medicine cabinet. It was a delicatessen I knew. It had been owned by a man named Max Gitlitz who had owned a delicatessen in the North Bronx when I had lived in Woodlawn. I did not see Max at the cash register. I had thought that even after ten years I would walk in and I would find Max Gitlitz at the cash register. I sat down. In red blazers, two men came into the delicatessen. Stitched on the blazers, I read: Vas you efer in Zinzinatti? I looked at the counter. Flat sides of corned beef lay on beds of parsley. A trussed roast chicken. Jars of stuffed olives. A roast beef settled among bright pimientoes. Knockwurst in strings. Pans of pickled tomatoes. Suspended salamis. I saw small green Spanish melons on a shelf. Twigs of green leaves had been placed between the melons. The waiter came. He was a recognizable waiter. I asked him about Max.