My Bench

April 29, 2009

I have a special bench, a place I like to go to reflect on a decision, talk with a friend or simply catch my breath. But the thing about growing up and living in New York City is that my special bench is probably a million other people’s special bench. Well, maybe only a hundred thousand other people’s special bench. But you know the scene in the movie Enchanted when Prince Edward is looking for Giselle and he climbs on a fountain with a golden chariot perched above? My bench makes a cameo in that scene. My bench is in Columbus Circle at the southwestern entrance to Central Park, right beneath the golden chariot. You may even be able to picture it yourself.

The bench is part of a monument to the to the Americans who died aboard the Battleship Maine, sunk in 1898 and catalyzing the Spanish-American War. (“Remember the Maine!” might sound familiar from high school history class.) It might seem odd that a place trafficked by thousands of people everyday and located at the heart of New York’s tourist stream can seem special, even sacred to me. But on a spectacular spring day when New York City is dusted with the fallen petals of cherry blossom trees and the sun bounces off the glass panes of the buildings, my bench offers an unparalleled view of my beloved city. For those like me who find fulfillment in the energy bolting through a teeming crowd, it offers a strange sort of peace that there -- at the crossroads of Midtown and Uptown, Central Park and the concrete streets, and the East and West Sides -- quiets with its harmony, as if at the pinpoint center of the world.

But I don’t love my bench because it’s an idyllic retreat. In my earliest memory of my bench, I’m sitting on it beside my mother, my feet dangling because I am only six years old. My mother is breathing heavily beside me, and not from the brief walk from our Lincoln Center apartment. Agitated, she places her head in her hands.

Columbus Circle was entirely different when I was six. Where the Time Warner Center and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel now stand was a limestone rectangle perhaps one day in the 1970s intended as an example of Brutalism architecture. I can’t remember if the building had any windows -- I seem to think it didn’t -- but with my six year old eyes I rarely looked up to study it. What I do remember is that the building was usually locked up tight, a wall of big black doors with no handles like the back door to a warehouse in a meatpacking district. It seemed impenetrable, mysterious, and generally an eyesore. And then, maybe two or three times a year, the building would throw open its doors to host a boat or car show and my dad would take me on a Sunday afternoon to witness the eerie transformation. But the Friday night after the boats and cars and people left, the bus to the Rikers Island penitentiary would resume its custom of pulling up to the curb where women and children, congregated against the shut black doors, would line up to take the ride to their husbands, brothers, sons, fathers.

The fountain in the middle of the traffic circle had scaffolding on it the entire time I was growing up in the neighborhood. Something about how they could never get the pipes to work right. But these days, looking out over the fountain from the Jazz at Lincoln Center wall of glass five stories above, the fountain looks like something from the glory days of Versailles. Tulips bloom around the base, Columbus atop his column is lit like a lighthouse beacon, and three elegant bridges traffic couples arm-in-arm as they walk over the fountain’s bubbling pool. The transformation, to someone who remembers the Rikers Island crowd, is breathtaking.

But when I was six and sitting on the bench with my agitated mother, there were no lovebird couples or jazz fans or shoppers scurrying by with their Coach shopping bags. We were sitting there because my mom and dad had just had a fight. It was nighttime. Or maybe I just remember it that way cause it’s a dark memory. As an only child in a two bedroom apartment, I was rarely spared my parents’ heated words. I once hid behind my bed with a cousin who was visiting and who put her arm around me, but their arguments never made me feel resentful or cheated of a happy childhood. On this particular night, there had been some yelling about how much time my mom spent on the phone or how my dad had criticized her singing or something or other and she grabbed my hand and a coat and walked out the door. We walked fast, arriving at the bench within minutes. I don’t think the bench meant anything special to my mom -- it was just a place to catch her breath -- and soon we resumed our walk down Central Park South where I most likely tried to jump from one hexagonal flagstone to another.

I didn’t set out to make it my special bench. Even as a teenager, it was just a place to rest between coming and going. My high school piano teacher lived just a few blocks beyond the bench, across the street from Carnegie Hall. On a pleasant afternoon I’d sit for a minute, maybe in an effort to be a few minutes late so we wouldn’t have time to get to the pieces I hadn’t practiced. At that time my lessons with Madame Bouboulidi could extend two to three hours, so more likely I stopped to gear up for my marathon with the Greek.

In tenth grade, I got my first job: demonstrating a board game in FAO Schwarz. I again walked past my bench on my way from my house over to Fifth Avenue. At the midway point between the store and my house, it was lovely to be able to take a load off my feet after standing at the top of the store’s escalator shouting “Think-It Link-It! Try the game here!” the whole afternoon.

I had never noticed how dirty the bench is until I sat down recently one bright morning with my two small children. They immediately started digging in the gravel beneath, carrying bits of stone and dirt to the fountain a few feet away. A closer look made me wonder what part of the bench was worn limestone and what was dried bird poop.

Maybe the filth of a New York City outdoor bench was one reason my dad was hesitant to sit down with me last year when I invited him to join me there. We had come out of the Whole Foods in the basement of the Time Warner Center laden with plump strawberries, yogurt, and fresh squeezed orange juice. I had flown down from Boston without my kids to join him at the opera the night before, and we had stayed in his suite at the Trump International Hotel, the 17th floor overlooking the park, the first address on Central Park West.

“Oh come on!” I teased as he made motions to return to the hotel with our food. “How can you eat inside on a day like today?” It was a glorious day. I had already run the three miles around the Central Park loop that morning, but my desire to soak in a spectacular spring day was insatiable. “Let’s have a picnic on this bench.”

I led him to my special bench and made a show of brushing it off with a take-out napkin because, as always, my dad was dressed in a suit. As he sat, I realized that, like Cecil Vyse observes of himself in E. M. Forster’s “A Room With A View”, I always pictured my father indoors. There was something awkward about his perch at the edge of the limestone slab, the eruption of blooming trees behind him, the gravel scratching his wingtip shoes. I felt a little pang of guilt at making him eat strawberries with his fingers, away from the plates and forks of the Trump’s well-equipped kitchen.

We didn’t talk about anything earth shattering. A comment about the weather, observations about the opera we had seen the night before. The conversation most likely turned to how different Columbus Circle is now from what it used to be, how there was scaffolding around the fountain for all those years, and how an entire block that sat empty for fifteen years was recently developed into the most expensive building in New York City: Robert Stern’s 15 Central Park West, the Trump’s next door neighbor. Aside from opera, the Upper West Side of Manhattan was my father’s great love. Although perhaps not as comfortable with the city’s public seating options, my dad shared with me a near obsession with the comings and goings of the neighborhood’s restaurants, stores, and theaters. In a relationship starved for easy connections and light chatter, we could always find common ground when ruminating on the fate of Melissa’s Deli or the new clothing boutique that moved in where our favorite Chinese restaurant used to be.

And so, when my husband and kids and I moved back to New York last summer after being away from the city for fifteen years, it would have seemed natural for us to move to the beloved neighborhood, near my bench. But I was scared. Scared of nostalgia, scared of tethering my new family to the places of my childhood, scared I would always be trying to get back those piano lessons, the joys of my first job, even the sorrows of my parents’ fights. I guess most adults have these reservations when moving back to their home towns, but when that home town is Manhattan it’s probably harder to understand. It seems so grand, so big. How could Manhattan, even the Upper West Side be stifling? But my neighborhood was, to me, just as small as any midwestern town or tony suburb and I thought a clean break would be best for my family.

And then there was my dad. Unable to afford an apartment that he felt was worthy of his library and Victorian watercolor collection, he lived in San Francisco and visited New York once a month, checking into the same suite at the Trump each time. While we were living in Boston, he would often hire a car and driver to take him up the coast where he would check into The Charles Hotel in Harvard Square. Having my father on my doorstep demanding uninterrupted, one-on-one visits -- as in, “I didn’t feel like we had a very good visit today,” or “I think that will give us enough time for a good visit” -- stressed me out entirely. We had already been neighbors with him in San Francisco for seven years before moving to Boston -- which we did in part to escape his obsessive love -- and while rationalizing my reasons in terms of nostalgia and wanting a clean break, I really just wanted to avoid the too-frequent visits.

So my husband and I chose Brooklyn. Park Slope: a full hour’s subway ride from Columbus Circle where the station lets out a mere fifty feet from my bench. But I got the comeuppance that so frequently follows those who act in fear: six weeks after establishing ourselves in Park Slope, my father died after a sudden decline from melanoma.

Now, almost a year later in my self-exile from Manhattan, Columbus Circle and my bench, I yearn for my dad, his suits, his observations about the neighborhood and yes, even his visits. I sat on my bench tonight, pausing there by myself in the twilight of a balmy spring day while I remembered that other spring day last year when we shared strawberries. Tonight, the commuters rushed into the subway, runners huffed as they slowed to a walk exiting the park, and tourists haggled with the horse carriage drivers. It was a New York moment my dad would have loved, although he would have loved it even more sitting in an armchair on the 17th floor of the nearby hotel. Still, taking the train in from Brooklyn to enjoy that moment was a gift I thought he would appreciate: he would have been 68 today. Happy birthday Dad.