Gotham Diary:
Playing in the Traffic
When? When was the last time I went to a movie on Friday? I don’t remember. But I went today. I saw True Grit, across the street. It’s a big beautiful movie, grander (visually) than any other Coen Brothers movie that I’ve seen (and I’ve seen ’em all, with the exception of No Country For Old Men). Hailee Steinfeld, who just turned fourteen, is amazingly composed and convincingly old-fashioned. In fact, the movie captures the pioneer rigor that inspired women to avoid anything like a casual speaking manner, but Ms Steinfeld’s air of knowing how she is going to finish every sentence before she begins to speak it is one of the movie’s great strengths. She brings all the gravitas that her costar, Jeff Bridges, always leaves behind in his trailer. The interesting thing about Matt Damon’s appearance in the film is that he plays the part of a supporting actor extraordinarily well. Anybody else, and you’d be saying, “How nice to see this gifted actor in a meaty role. Maybe now he’ll be famous.” Josh Brolin is extremely interesting, too, but I don’t think that anybody’s going to be saying similar things about his performance. The part is not quite big enough for that kind of praise, and Mr Brolin is such a convincing bad guy – a modern-day narcissist in long underwear — that you just can’t wish him well.
Then I came home. Usually, after a movie, I go somewhere for lunch, but today was unusual: I was going to meet a friend from my undergraduate days at Notre Dame, whom I hadn’t seen since, in the middle of the afternoon, and I had no appetite. I stopped in for a demi-baguette at the Food Emporium, thinking that I’d make myself a hero and eat a bit of it, saving the rest, but the only loaf that they had, which I bought, turned out to be whole wheat. I might eat whole wheat bread by itself, but never, ever in a sandwich. So I freshened up a bit and got ready to head out. Then I received a very nice email.
I’d love to say more about it, but it seems that do so would be clumsily indiscreet. I wrote to someone who is related to someone whose letters I’ve been reading. Acute readers will have no trouble figuring out whom I talking about when I say that, when you Google this gentleman (the relative, not the letter-writer), you get a lot of returns that have nothing to do with him at all, in which his name is interrupted by a semicolon, because his father, who was a well-known midcentury author (but not the writer of the letters that I’ve been reading) wrote a book about one of the best-known of all American writers. So much for clues.
I wrote because I was dying to know more about my letter-writer — actually dying, it felt. The book in which the letters appeared said nothing about the writer, which galled me. So I wrote to the writer’s relative, and the writer’s relative wrote back to me, and it was both very sweet and deliriously futuristic, because that’s the world that we live in now and I sometimes can’t believe it: Like what you’re reading? Google! The best part: it turns out that the relative and I share a great love of the music of Emmanuel Chabrier. How wonderful is that? You write to someone about somebody else and find out that you have this great common interest with the someone! That said, I’d spent the morning anxiously worrying that I’d never hear back, or that the response would be unpleasant. When you write to someone whom you don’t know, and who of course doesn’t know you, you open yourself up to vastnesses of feeling foolish.
As I didn’t, in the event, feel foolish, I whistled my way out the door and set out for the border between Chelsea and Herald Square, where my classmate was staying. I got there first by minutes, feeling the whole time that I had ventured on foreign travel. My friend would be astonished when I told him that I never left Manhattan Island during the whole of 2009; the truth is that, aside from unadventurous forays to MTC’s theatres and Carnegie Hall, I spend no time whatsoever on the West Side of the island. It might as well be in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, and it felt like that rather when the time came to head home. It was dark; it was rush hour. There were so many people on the sidewalk, and I had no clear idea of where the subway stairs would be. It was not unpleasant; I didn’t come away thinking, let’s not do that again anytime soon. But it was foreign. In a city so densely packed with millions of people, it is possible to travel far in the space of a few miles.
It was very, very good to see my old friend, who is, very simply, a special person. I thought so when we were in school and I think so today. He’s warm, deliberate, richly intelligent, sweet, and utterly unaffected. I always felt like a pompous ass in comparison. I was a pompous ass absolutely, but I felt it most when Philip was around; and yet I could never hold that unpleasantness against him. This afternoon, I felt like something of a luftmensh when it came time to explain what I do with my life to Philip’s lovely wife and lovely daughter, but I’m glad to have met them, and I look forward to seeing Philip again very soon, because it is grounding to spend time in his company.
I hasten to add that Philip and I didn’t keep up after college, that it was a note from him, triggered by something that he’d run into on the Internet a few years ago (this was before Facebook, I think, but perhaps I’m wrong), that brought us together again. Just as it brings me to you.