regarded with suspicion and contempt. I wanted to learn how to become a New Yorker. I wanted to become an artist, too, though I struggled with what kind of artist I should be. In school I had made a series of self-portraits in oil, sometimes channeling Romaine Brooks to envision myself as a wan dandy, other times painting myself as two green figures, one man and one woman, with a sense of some unresolved relationship. Often I affixed a color copy of one painting to a different blank canvas so it looked like another real, and identical painting. I had also been constructing installations using the hair of strangers, writing monologues, and training as an opera singer. Was I setting my sights on becoming a human Gesamtkunstwerk?As pressing as my aesthetic questions may have been, today there were unavoidable matters of survival on my mind as well, and I was beginning to feel increasingly desperate. For groceries, I could afford only eggs and ninety-nine cent loaves of white bread. To make life a touch grimmer, a junkie had just ransacked my apartment under the J train, after removing the door with power tools, and I’d had to take a day off of work to clean up the mess. So under the auspices of selling audio guides, I began trying to establish connections and make friends in the hope that someone would recognize my—well, whatever was good about me—and would, in turn, impart some great cosmic knowledge to me, or at least hook me up with a slightly higher-paying job. First, I tried to imbue “We have audio guides available at the box office,” with élan! I tried to invest it with pathos, even, drawing on my operatic training. The body is the instrument, I’d repeat silently, taking a deep breath. This delivery soon proved ineffective and unbecoming. So I then decided to adopt a more detached approach, adding a dash of irony to my tone in order to represent the public’s doubt about the product and give myself credibility. Now, when some grumpy patron spat, “I never do the audio,” I took to lowering my chin to diabolically whisper, “Neither do I.” And all the while, bookmark to bookmark, I was waiting, like a cannibal for an anthropologist, to be discovered.
One brisk and sunny November morning I was sent out to bookmark the line. I pursed my lips and blew visible breath as though it were smoke. Ah, to be young in every decade and not just this one! I waved to the hot dog vendor and the woman who sold faux African masks on the sidewalk and began making my way down the line. Then I saw him, a dignified older man. He was wearing tweed, sporting a neatly trimmed white beard, and his cheeks were round and rosy like polished holiday apples. He reminded me of Santa Claus, but more clean-cut and tastefully dressed. As he inhaled, his chest expanded, bulging out of his jacket like the swelling breast of a large bird. A big metropolitan rooster, he announced the morning into his cell phone. “Why, yes, it’s just beautiful here in New York.” His voice was deep and clear and his enunciation was as crisp as the air.
I was gripped by an uncanny sense that I should know this man. He brimmed with intelligence and warmth. He might be a famous radio announcer, literary critic, or host a program on PBS. Walking over to him, I toned down my spiel. “We have audio guides available at the box office,” I said with gentle assurance, as though I were a kind nurse informing some husband that his wife was in good condition after a kidney transplant.
“Why, thank you,” he replied, appearing genuinely grateful. Our eyes met briefly. I smiled and moved down the line.
Twenty minutes later, as I crossed the rotunda to retrieve more bookmarks, I heard a low voice behind me. “You convinced me,” it said. I turned around to see the Santa-man grinning benevolently with a pair of headphones around his neck. He raised the audio device into the air, as though to toast me.
“It must have been my pitch …”
“It was pure poetry.” With that, the Santa-man disappeared into the exhibit. He had seen something in me.
“Returns!” came another, markedly less mellifluous, voice. I turned to see Shira. She was pointing, like the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-come, across the rotunda toward the area where we collect units from people exiting the exhibit. I remained at this station for the next hour, facing an onslaught of tangled audio guides. I couldn’t collect them fast enough. The cords of one family’s audio guides had woven themselves together into a Gordian knot. A father, son, and daughter were entangled and when I tried to help I got tangled up too. As I struggled to free us all, I felt a hand slip something into my back pocket. The Santa-man’s voice came whispering from behind.
“I’m going to a party this evening. The address is on my card. Oh, and no need to change—just come in your work clothes.”
At 6 p.m. I defied the Santa-man and took the hour-long train ride back to Brooklyn to change, since I did not want to wear my little audio apron and dingy blue button-up shirt to my first fancy New York party. I put on a black sweater and the shiny black pants I had bought for my job interview. I’d pragmatically left the tag on, tucking it inside where it had scraped my right buttock. Boldly, I now tore the tag off. I massaged some Chap-Stick on my scuffed shoes and ran out the door.
By the time I stepped off the train in the East Fifties, the air had become unseasonably balmy. The card the Santa-man gave me just had a name on it, with no title, as though he were his own title. I kept glancing down at his cursive numbers as I scanned street addresses in search of the building. I eventually spotted Santa waiting in the entrance to a high-rise. “Hello, friend!” He waved and beckoned me. I glanced back at the card. Frank. Santa’s name is Frank. I followed Frank past the doorman, who smiled and nodded.
We got into the elevator. “My friend is the Omani ambassador to the United States,” Frank said. “Now when we get up there,” he continued, pressing button “42” with his chubby thumb, “I’m just going to introduce you as the son of a business associate of mine—sound good?”
“OK,” I said. As the mirrored doors pulled shut, I watched myself agree to this proposition before contemplating it. Why would Santa…? I reasoned that the ambassadors might be puzzled if Frank were to tell them the real story of how we became acquainted—they wouldn’t understand that startling yet warm sense of recognition that struck both of us—and how could they? It’s such a rare and inexplicable experience between strangers. And what business does an audio guide salesperson have at a United Nations cocktail hour?
Frank led me into an enormous room full of well-dressed people. Swarms of servants attired in classic maid and butler uniforms moved about in zigzags, passing out plates of food and snatching up empty ones. “Oman is known for their silver work,” Frank remarked as I viewed my distorted reflection in the goblets, platters, ornaments, and weapons that filled cabinets around the room.
“Hey! Didn’t I meet you at the last one of these things?” a woman in a dashiki asked me, wagging her finger at me and grinning.
“Of course you did!” Frank answered quickly, just as I was opening my mouth. She sees me as belonging, I thought, pleased.
Frank guided me to another part of the room, then took me on a tour of the apartment, while continuing to give me tidbits about the culture of Oman.
The host, a small dapper man, introduced himself to me.
“Welcome to our end-of-Ramadan feast,” he said, wiping a crumb from his black moustache with a cocktail napkin.
“The feast after the fast,” Frank added, whisking me away from the ambassador. I felt a pang of guilt for being admitted to the feast without suffering the fast. “Now come with me,” Frank said softly, “I want to show you something really beautiful.” I followed Frank to a second elevator, the likes of which I’d never seen, as it was an elevator actually inside the apartment. The elevator took us up, past the servant quarters, to the top floor, where Frank and I stepped out into an enormous
