Everyone is Watching (6 page)

Next, Robert Moses tackles Central Park. He brings in heavy machinery and a large workforce. He brings in lights and generators. Workers work in shifts, twenty-four hours a day
until the grass has been sown and the flowers are blooming. He installs more playgrounds with play equipment for children and benches where their mothers can sit and talk. He puts in bathroom
facilities and diaper-changing rooms and special ramps for baby carriages. He cleans out the shanty town that surrounds the menagerie. He pulls down the menagerie and builds a zoo. He cleans up the
reservoir. He carves out pathways that stretch in all directions. He seeds ball fields. He provides spaces where the public can move. He refurbishes the castle. He plants trees to line the mall and
he cleans up the fountains, scrubs lichen and moss off the benches. He allows only the best concession stands to sell ice creams and hot dogs and pretzels there. New gates are fixed, erected and
painted. The sidewalks surrounding the park are tidied and cleaned and replaced where broken. A permanent workforce is established to maintain the park. The workers water the grass.
Keep off
the Grass
signs are erected. The Ramble is tidied. The shrubberies and trees are cut back. The paths are swept clean. The bridge over the boating lake is painted brilliant white.

The sun has fallen behind the mountains. When the porter comes in to turn up the lights, Bucke turns them down. Walt is sleeping. He is lying across the seats, his hat on his
chest, his overcoat pulled over his heavy frame, which the seat does not comfortably hold. He could be mistaken for a travelling man. Bucke knows he has visited many places.

Walt is dreaming about the great World’s Fair that came to New York in 1853. It is a glittering palace made of glass, and through its walls he can see the people of the
city. He stands on the edge of Reservoir Square to admire it. The tower beside it is three hundred and fifteen feet high. From the summit of that tower Manhattan, Queens, New Jersey and Brooklyn
can be seen.

Walt searches for the American exhibit. He thinks of the poetry he has been writing and how America is contained within that too. Here is the country shown through the objects created by its own
citizens. They have brought their livelihoods to New York to be displayed. Everything laid out in front of him was made in America. Spread out before him on the tables are surgical instruments,
chronometers, clocks, telescopes, philosophical instruments and products resulting from their use – a telescope, a portable illuminator, an electromagnetic telegraph battery, barometers,
thermometers and glass hydrometers, instruments dismantled and presented, daguerreotypes: portraits of men, women and children, framed and displayed behind glass.

On other tables he sees examples of different types of cotton in various forms – handkerchiefs, tablecloths, cotton lines for drift nets, wool, silk, velvet, furs and leather –
materials made directly from nature. There is a working model of a steamboat. He looks at an exhibit of stationery and bookbinding, embossed show cards, India-rubber ink erasers, specimens of
writing inks, prayer books, Bibles, writing paper; he knows these items well. New mechanisms for carpenters, machinists, manufacturers and the product of their labours: church bells, steamboat
bells, umbrella and parasol stands, tea sets, pottery, tools for dentists, gold pens, glass, twisted tobacco pipes, and a pianoforte.

He passes an exhibition of rocks and minerals taken from across America. Stones cleaved in two glitter and shine. The public pick them up to feel their weight. He moves past them all.

He finds what he is looking for,
Christ and His Apostles
, the white plaster figure of Christ with his head solemnly bowed, the twelve apostles his audience. Walt looks from statue to
statue. He is very small and they are very large. He wonders what these statues could possibly mean in a world that is capable of producing all the other items on display. Are these statues so
large because we wouldn’t know the subjects otherwise? If Christ exists then he is our size and walks amongst us. He mustn’t be set aside to admire.

Walt joins a gathering crowd. People are watching a demonstration by a man on a platform that has been hoisted into the air. The man is holding up a pair of shears and he cuts the rope that
secures the platform on which he is standing. The crowd gasps but the platform holds firm. The crowd applauds and cheers.

What will happen in the future now that elevators exist? Bodies pushed into a box and raised high. It will change the landscape of the city. The city will grow vertically. When people are close
enough to touch the heavens will they feel closer to God?

Walt dreams of the prison ships moored off the Brooklyn shore during the Revolutionary War. Prisoners are kept below deck. The only light to penetrate shines through the iron
grate above their heads. Men rely on the whims of unsympathetic guards. Men sit in the dark and await their deaths. This stinking hole has become their whole world. The prisoners are dying of
disease or are killed for insurrection. Their bodies wash up on the Brooklyn shore. When the weather is rough, the sand blows away, revealing a pile of bones buried beneath. The people of Brooklyn
are outraged when they find them. They demand a proper burial site. They demand a memorial. God will not find these men if they remain buried here. There is a great parade in the men’s
honour. The men are buried deep in sanctified ground. Life grows from them. Blades of grass.

I have been dreaming, Walt says.

Bucke covers him again with his overcoat and strokes his aged cheek; it is dry and warm. He traces the lines in Walt’s skin and thinks of the layers of age visible in rock. Walt closes his
eyes. Bucke turns down the lamp. He imagines Walt standing on the Long Island shore when he was young. Walt’s breath is like the breaking ocean tide. All things are the same, his breath, the
movement of the train as it passes across America, the tide of an ocean a thousand miles away. This is what Walt meant by his description of Brooklyn Bridge. It is no great revelation to see how
things are connected. Bucke is able to visualize the bridge because Walt has described it, and now he is joined to Walt through this image. It is a connection that will survive all time and
distance. Bucke closes his eyes and thinks of the bridge. The breeze coming in through the open train window is now the wind coming off the East River as he stands halfway to Manhattan, halfway to
Brooklyn.

Before Jones Beach, before Robert Moses, a father packs his family into a car and sets off.

It’s bumper to bumper all the way. An hour in and they’ve not even made their way out of Brooklyn. The father looks over at the car beside them and sees kids crying
in the back seat and Grandma overheating. His wife is silent. The kids are starting to complain that they’re hungry. He tells them to eat whatever they want. He’ll get more food later,
he says, when they arrive at the beach.

They crawl through Long Island towns. At last he sees the entrance to a beach, but there is nowhere to park along the bank. A uniformed guard waves the cars on.

The father calls out the window, What’s the problem?

The beach is full. Please move along.

As they drive further east he looks at the ocean. Miles out to sea and nothing is there. The father can imagine the cool water and the gentle breaking waves against his body.
Lying there, floating in the water, looking up at the blue sky above him, diving deep below the surface, moving his body to its extreme, his family watching from the beach.

Another forty minutes and they’ve made it to a fishing village with signs to another beach, but as he swings the car into the entrance a guard steps into the road and
holds up a hand.

There’s no room. Please move along.

The road has become a dusty trail. The father has to roll up the windows to stop the dust getting in. But it’s too hot to have the windows closed so he rolls them back
down.

At the remote tip of Long Island, the father scans the banks until he sees the entrance to a beach where the gate is open and the land beyond is clear.

At last, he says.

But as he turns the car into the entrance a man emerges from the bank and commands him to stop.

This is private land, he says. Please turn your car around. There are public beaches to the west, sir.

They’re all full.

This is not a public beach. Please move along.

But this beach is empty!

Please turn your vehicle around.

He does what he is told.

He drives back the way they came, through the towns.

His wife wakes up and looks at the ocean that is now on the other side of the car but she does not ask him to explain. The kids stare out the window at the fields and the woodland.

Don’t worry, kids. I know where we can go, he says.

The father pulls the car over before the Brooklyn Bridge approach. He orders his family to get out. They cross Fulton Street and walk towards the East River where tankers and
sailboats are passing on the water and traffic rumbles over the bridge. They walk towards the palisades. He climbs over the barrier and onto the sand. He kicks the dirty cans to the side of the
beach. He takes off his shoes and socks. He walks towards the grimy water. He looks back at his family. They are watching him in silence. He steps into the river. The water is cold. The oil-slicked
surface of the water encircles his ankles. His family doesn’t follow him in. They don’t move from their position on the wall.

Robert Mapplethorpe tells the man to look left, look right. The man won’t smile unless Robert tells him to smile. Robert catches a view of New York through the window.
Whether or not it can be seen in the photograph, this is where his subject has come from, from the streets of New York.

There was once a man named Robert Opel who lived in San Francisco. Imagine it: the Golden Gate Bridge, sunshine, hills, streetcars moving up and down the roads, easy afternoons
in the Californian sun, the Castro, store doors sprung open, a cool ocean breeze, the occasional vehicle ambling. Imagine being this far away from New York. Everyone says this man is Robert
Mapplethorpe’s doppelgänger – a controversial artist prone to naked stunts and famous for riling up polite society. He has a female partner who writes poetry – another Patti
Smith, people say. This Robert dies very young. He is murdered, shot down in his own gallery. They say it was a robbery, but, you know, what kind of gallery keeps cash on the premises? Robert
Mapplethorpe would never be caught up in anything like that. He has a knack for slipping out of places before there is trouble.

At an art exhibition in Midtown, Robert looks at mannequins displaying cancerous tumours. The tumours in some cases are very large. His own shadow is cast across the floor in
between the models, in between disease. The beauty of New York is that when you turn around there is always something worse to see.

He walks out onto 42nd Street and everything is the same, tumours all around him, people, disease, and the opposite: physical perfection, the human body, perfect fomations, the casual stroll of
a figure, the running of a body across the street, skin as smooth as marble, faces like glass, the demarcation of muscle in an upper arm, a neck, a frown, the extended line of a pointed hand and
finger, an arm reaching up. The body is an architectural structure with an external form holding everything in.

A few weeks ago Edmund received an email from a fan named T asking if the two of them could meet. T is an actor in his thirties.
You should meet me, I’m cute
,
the email said. Edmund quickly responded.

Now Edmund is waiting for a reply from T. He is tired of pretending he doesn’t care. He wonders if T is one of the men he is passing in the street. It could be him, or him, or him, he
thinks.

The traffic along Eighth Avenue is a gushing river. Edmund White feels the thunder and rattle of trucks, the stifling sun, suppressed beneath awnings under which he is passing, pausing, tired
out by the merciless crowd. He turns down 34th Street, looks into a hole cut into the road, an intricate web of pipelines and cables bathed in artificial orange light. He cannot see where the
cables reach; the hole is too deep. Workmen pass buckets up and deposit their contents into a dumpster. The dumpster seems too close to the edge of the jagged hole.

Edmund turns north up Fashion Avenue, pausing to look into a bead-store window. He looks at the buttons, ribbons and bows, mannequins, and fabrics trimmed with lace. He crosses the avenue. A
70% Off Closing Down
sale sign has faded yellow. The window shows a row of ugly mannequins displaying prices, divas from the seventies, dressed in sequined evening gowns and crooked wigs.
They stare out at Edmund. He walks into the shade of 40th Street, past the parking garages and garbage depots, crosses Broadway. The traffic is one continuous boom. Something inside of him is
expanding. The people who pass him create small gusts of air. The traffic moves, caught ahead, moving on. Heat, miserable, folded in layers, he is connected, spiked through, pinned down, trailing
threads, losing time – it spills – building up, how long, hours? Years? Decades? He is incredibly hungry. The snack carts wilt in the shade. Dirty yellow sun umbrellas, rain umbrellas,
advertising signs. He looks ahead at the space of Sixth Avenue. There is the entrance to Bryant Park. A truck accelerates, revealing an oasis of green.

The fountain gushes. Busy people walk clutching coffee cups, confident, wealthy, healthy, lie stretched on fold-out chairs, sit lined up in the sun, legs in the sun, feet up on
a wall – work break, lunch break – busy – business dates, lunch dates, salad bowls scraped with plastic forks, cans of soda emptied and crushed. Legs pushed up against the
roped-off lawn. Don’t step on it, now. Do not step one foot upon the grass. There are the stop-start honks of traffic on the avenue. Buses hush to a pause. Babies scream in off-road
strollers. Edmund struggles through them all.