Heart of the City (28 page)

PATROLMAN MARCEL Sim drew the Times Square detail again tonight, and that suited him fine.

The swarms of tourists. The street peddlers. The barkers and scalpers. The hopheads and homeless. The panhandlers, pick-pockets, and purse snatchers. And, inevitably, what the guys in blue called “holster sniffers.” The men who buddied up to you with questions like, “Hey, what’s it like to be a cop in New
York
?” or “What kind of heat you guys pack?” The women who asked, “Is your job dangerous?” and wanted to throw their arms around your shoulders and have pictures taken.

Times Square sometimes felt like the floodlit vortex for all of New York’s explosive energy. To work foot patrol here, you had to have spring-loaded reflexes and eyes in the back of your head.

Marcel seemed to so revel in the whirlpool of humanity that his partners, laconic sorts, would sic tourists on him. If some family from Wisconsin wanted directions to the subway or the Olive Garden or
Aida
, the other cops would thrust their chins toward Marcel and say, “Ask him.” Disoriented tourists were just one more blip in a gigantic video game. If Marcel could handle them along with all his other duties, that made him a better cop, not a softer one, no matter what the guys thought.

He had been an adrenaline junkie—“an envelope pusher,” as he liked to put it—ever since he was a kid on Long Island. When those sirens at the Elmont firehouse would go off, Marcel, just ten years old, would fly out the front door and chase his neighbor—a volunteer fireman who’d been dating Marcel’s older sister—as the man hoofed it to the station. Marcel would run and run, until the fireman lost him over the hill. Shuffling back home, gasping, Marcel dreamed about the day those sirens would call for him.

Marcel—thirty-six now—had been working twelve-hour shifts for months, and tonight was no exception. In the months since the attacks, the New York Police Department had a lot of the force working overtime, particularly at landmarks like Times Square. The city’s Joint Terrorism Task Force wanted an “omnipresence” of uniforms in places seen as attractive terrorist targets. But as big as the NYPD was, it didn’t have enough bodies to cover the city’s every square inch. So the uniformed officers in Times Square kept on the move, shifting from one location to the next to foster an illusion of ubiquity.

IT WAS just after 5 p.m. on a sweltering July day. Robin, wiped out after her day of man-on-the-street interviews, collapsed on the couch in the lobby of the Milford Plaza hotel, near Times
Square. Her professors in the architecture program at North Dakota State University had warned her she was taking on too much. A 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero was an ambitious thesis topic for a master’s student to take on, at least in part because of her distance from Manhattan. They asked her to consider scaling back. One classmate, for instance, was designing a lakeside resort; others a concert hall or an ideal American home.

But Robin was insistent. She wanted to conceive of a monument at Ground Zero that would help bring closure. She wanted to design something that gave physical form to Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief and offered visitors a global look at the ravages of terrorism.

When the towers fell, Robin, who ran track in college, had been giving a client a fitness test at a gym in Fargo, where she worked part-time to help pay for school. Images of the burning buildings appeared on every TV screen, and the gym fell silent. She had never been to New York. She knew none of the victims. But the attacks felt intensely personal. She suspected that many other Americans, regardless of their proximity to the city, felt the same way.

Perhaps because of her athletic build, or maybe just some inborn temperament, she had often found herself in the role of protector. When someone picked on her twin sister or her brother with juvenile diabetes, she made a point of telling the person to back off. It wasn’t long before she had a reputation. In second grade, she overheard a group of boys talking about beating up a girl in her class. When one of the boys said, “I think she’s a friend of Robin’s,” the others suddenly lost their nerve. What gnawed at Robin about the perpetrators of 9/11 was that anyone could, for any reason, see the murder of innocents as justifiable.

“Are you okay, Robin?” someone asked, shaking her out of her torpor.

It was Charlotte, a fellow architecture student at North Dakota State. Charlotte, along with two other friends, Nancy and her brother Jim, had accompanied Robin on the seven-day trip to New York. Though they would split up during the day—Robin to
work, the others to sightsee—they would regroup in the hotel in the evenings before dinner.

Robin smiled and got up off the couch. “Why, what’s the matter? Do I look funny?”

“You look like you should drink something.”

“A glass of water would be nice. It’s so hot.”

“I mean like a margarita,” Charlotte said, and Robin laughed.

“New Yorkers are supernice, Charlotte. They’re not the toughies people think they are.”

“So what’s the matter?”

“It’s just super hard for some of them to talk about what happened. This one guy even started crying. I felt so bad.”

“Well, when Jim and Nancy get here, let’s go out and relax a little. Get something to eat and drink.”

“You betcha, Charlotte. I guess that sounds good.”

“You need a break, Robin. You work way too hard.”

After showers and a change of clothes, the four friends walked north on Eighth Avenue, then east on West Forty-sixth Street, until they were inside the human pinball machine of Times Square. Giant video screens overhead splashed with ads for the World Wrestling Federation, Calvin Klein, and Destiny’s Child.

“It’s kind of like Christmas, ya know?” Robin said.

Jim rolled his eyes. “It’s July, Robin.”

“No, I get it,” Nancy said.

“Right?” Robin said. “Like just after you wake up, before you go downstairs to unwrap presents. You know something great is inside, but you also have to wait to open it, ya know, so it stays a surprise.”

“
Whatever
, you two,” Jim said. “So, we gonna eat?”

They saw signs for McDonald’s and Jamba Juice. “There’s a T.G.I. Friday’s over there,” Nancy said, pointing up Broadway. “The one in Fargo’s pretty good.”

“I don’t know, it seems like a lot of tourists would go there,” Robin said. “I want real New York. Like a place locals go.”

“And so you’re just going to stop some random local and ask for a recommendation?” Nancy said. “That’s not supersafe, ya know.”

Robin turned and saw a group of police officers at the corner. “We’ll ask them. They probably live here.”

“Don’t you think they might, like, be busy?” Charlotte said.

But Robin was already striding toward them, and her friends, shrugging, fell in line behind her.

“Hi, good evening, officers,” Robin said brightly. She was surprised when the officers didn’t immediately turn around.

“Oh, hi,” she repeated, with a little wave this time, to get their attention. “We were wondering if you guys knew any good restaurants, ya know, like where the locals go.”

There were four officers, and an older, craggy-looking one, pivoted on his heel and gave her a dubious once-over. “Sim,” he growled out of the side of his mouth. Then, turning to Robin, he said, “He’ll help ya.”

A younger man stepped forward with a wry smile and tucked his cap under his arm. He had a buzz cut and a muscular build, with blue-gray eyes and a strong chin. “What are you, from Brooklyn?” He threw a look over his shoulder and winked at his partners, who erupted in low chuckles.

“No, actually, I’m from Moorhead,” Robin said.

“That’s near Greenpoint, right?” the officer said, to more laughter from the other cops.

“No. I don’t know. I don’t think so,” Robin said earnestly. “It’s in Minnesota. The state. Have you ever been?”

“Nah, I’m a New Yorkah,” he said. “Closest to the Midwest I’ve been is Land O’Lakes.”

“Oh, yeah? Where is that?”

“In my supermarket. Butter aisle. I enjoy it on my toast.”

Robin wasn’t sure of what to make of his style of conversation. She’d always thought of cops as Officer Friendly. Back in Moorhead, the police even ran a summer camp. Robin went for five summers, from ages eight to twelve; the nice policemen took the
kids to picnics, movies, and swimming pools. This New York police officer had a different, well, attitude. Still, he was an officer. Out of respect for the law she decided to take his words at face value.

“I don’t eat butter,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s fattening. I eat margarine.”

More guffaws from the other officers, who seemed to hear everything, even though they were almost facing the other way.

A store alarm sounded somewhere, and one of the cops was shouting at someone to back away from the store window.

“So what’s it like being a cop in New York?” Nancy asked.

“Like anything else. Bad days. Worse days.” He was ruggedly built, but there was a softness under his eyes Robin found disarming. She watched as he gave a guarded glance over his shoulder at a group of teenage boys in tank tops who had begun shadowboxing.

“So what was it you folks needed?”

Robin explained their search for real New York restaurants. The officer ticked off a short list: O’Lunney’s Times Square Pub, The Pig ’n’ Whistle, or, if they got on a subway, McSorley’s.

There was a shirt pin above his badge—the letters “WTC” in white on a black background. World Trade Center, Robin thought. In newspaper stories she’d read in preparation for her trip, the cops came across as some of the day’s biggest heroes. Were these police officers there? For a split second she thought of asking, of telling them about her thesis. But something about the moment wasn’t right. After her experiences earlier in the day, she didn’t know if she could take upsetting anyone else.

“Thanks a bunch for the recommendations, officer,” she said, smiling.

“Enjoy,” he said, smiling back and putting the cap back on his head. “Don’t drink too much, all right?”

“Oh, we don’t drink.” Robin wanted him to know that they were responsible. “Not too much, anyways.”

AROUND THE corner, at a table at the Pig ’n’ Whistle, Robin was radiant. The exhaustion from earlier in the day was gone. All she’d gotten were restaurant tips, but she felt as though talking to those police officers was a kind of baptism in the real New York. “You see what I mean, with those officers?” she said.

“They were nice, dontcha know,” Nancy said. “At least the one guy was.”

“Yeah, I can’t believe he took all that time to talk to us. That was so nice.”

“Don’t you think they were laughing at us a little, too?” Charlotte asked.

“I don’t think so,” Robin said. “If only we’d taken a photo.”

“I know.”

After dinner, they went to a bar next door and talked about their plans for the trip’s remaining three days. Charlotte wanted to see more museums. Jim and Nancy said they wanted to go to the top of the Empire State Building.

“Take a day off, Robin,” Charlotte said.

Robin shook her head. “Too much work.” She had been to the city zoning office to study setback restrictions, and had gotten a walking tour of Lower Manhattan from a North Dakota State architecture alumnus. But there was more to do: visiting the city’s Department of Buildings, interviewing more New Yorkers in the street, videotaping other landmarks in Lower Manhattan.

“You gotta take a break,” Nancy said.

Robin took a sip of beer. “Isn’t that what we’re doing now?”

By the time they left the bar, night had settled over the city.

“Now’s when you really want to see Times Square,” Jim said. “When the sky is totally dark like this, the lights jump right out at you. Talk about Christmas.”

Robin was still aglow from talking to those NYPD officers earlier. “Jim, that’s such a good idea.”