In Soho, he walked by a woman posing for a photo on a corner in front of an empty storefront, holding a tray full of iced coffees, sunglasses on her head. She kept readjusting her leg so that the slit in her jersey skirt would fall open just enough to reveal the continuous surface of her waxy thigh. She did this again and again, such that it strung into a little dance. Her smile was really big, like she really loved coffee and unoccupied corner real estate.
It was because of this woman that he ended up in a line in the yucky brown late morning. Realising his own need for caffeine, he had read the logo on the cups. He put the name into Google Maps. Less busy than usual. He navigated the few short blocks to the cafe.
At a certain point, people are no longer circulating because they need to, or are required to in order to exchange their labour for capital (Company Man). At a certain point, circulation is worse than a luxury – it is not for the leisure class only – becoming an imperative and an addiction. Shuffling about the city, trying things out. Not just an addiction but a moral good, he thought.
It wasn’t clear to him whether the speed of this circulation mattered.
Loitering was certainly en vogue. People appeared to relish their time in public space, though not as part of a public – more just placing themselves, sacks of flesh that they were, on the pavement. But always keep it moving, however fast or however slow, as long as you do not stay. A world without passions, then, is the ideal.
The cafe was also a restaurant. He noticed that the food at places like this never tasted like anything. It had a lot of texture, and the colours complemented one another, and the serving size crept up toward something uncomfortably large.
The serving size signalled to him that something was a little different, a little wrong, even. He’d seen clips of the food here, and he knew that people liked it when the cheese stretched out, gooey for a long time. He thought that maybe he’d read, or heard from his mother, that such sustained gooeyness betrayed some untoward amount of processing. The kind of stuff “you don’t even wanna know”.
The kind of stuff people like his mother lorded over others because they knew it, supposedly innately, due to – in his mother’s case – a rural-suburban upbringing in the ‘horse country’ of whatever region. As though his city-dwelling was a flaw of his, not an accident of birth or an intentional decision on her part. And as though, in the city, he could not educate himself about cheese, or distinguish without much effort between the Kraft-y gooey varieties and those that were more farm-fresh.
His mother’s insistence on the rarity of this sort of knowledge – other manifestations, oblique but assuredly springing from the same well of haughtiness, included but were not limited to: having a sun hat and wearing it to walk the dog, letting her grey hairs grow out, and being aware of the humidity level on a given day – always seemed to be a cipher for some greater disdain she had for someone who was not him, but whom he could easily come to represent with just the wrong suggestion, dinner reservation, or choice of Manhattan block to walk down.
Never mind his own qualms about his own choices, which every day grew and grew – at this stage a malignant array of possible options, few of which he’d ever pulled the trigger on for fear of choosing wrong. The Turtle Bay sandwich he’d almost stopped for five, maybe six times on his way home from therapy on Wednesdays. A bottle of wine, too expensive and too cheap to bring to a friend’s house. Let alone his mother’s. The very authentic Greek restaurant that his ex always wanted to try, which they never did because they broke up before the months-out reservation, and which he now stayed away from for equal parts fear of a long line of people of indeterminate age who might accidentally capture him in their documentation of said line, and the subsequent fear that, in the worst version of this fantasy, not only do his friends see that he waited in this line – harmless enough – but that his ex may as well. And he could not let her have that. No, he could not.
He had stood in line today, though. The yucky brown sky with the heavy breeze on it spat pollen at him as he waited on Elizabeth Street, in line for this coffee for which he had no feelings of partiality except that it was on his way to his coffee meeting. Having not yet shaken off his slow morning, he needed a lonely precursor to the social beverage that was on his schedule.
He knew that he would have to talk about himself, an introductory gloss on his experience (growing up in the city, travelling, staying home for a year, going back outside, being a man, eating this food, walking over). He knew that he didn’t have anything to say about experience, about his experience. Experience was a needy word, he thought. He was unsure of whether the texture of his life was amounting to experience. The texture of his life was unforgivingly smooth. It represented itself to him as a rubber band ball, melted onto itself with nothing at its centre, held together only by gummy matter of lost distinction.
It did not depress him in the way he imagined the (also unforgivingly smooth) day-to-day of a company man in his prime some 70 years ago would have. The commuter train, the elevator guy, the same newspaper man, day in, day out. He thought of that Minelli film, The Crowd, which he’d watched a trailer for. Everyone blank and white, grey really, large set pieces holding them together instead of their own gumminess.
His monotony was vibrant and excessive. Rather, the monotony. He could not claim it as his. It seemed to just be happening all around, with or without his participation. Sometimes it seemed maliciously indifferent to him.
Everywhere, people joyously experiencing – or seeming to. Everywhere, people tailor-made, traipsing through spaces washed of detail. No idiosyncrasies here, only continuities made up of proclaimed but minute differences. Qualities all uniform, frontage papered over with matching discourse. People tailor-made to sop this up while basking in their own particularity, in the peace of having somehow rendered oneself fully intelligible, both to the self and to the other. Become plasma slipping down the subway steps, pooling on the seat, dripping into your bed at the day’s end, waking up again to do all that is asked of you, the gruelling maintenance of clarity and denial of the mysterious.
The line moved forward and he took his place in the shade.
