Roth

It hadn’t immediately dawned on me that I was supposed to leave the room. Moreover, I didn’t want to. And so, I edged my way over to remember myself to a former professor of mine who was standing beside the dais.

As I drew closer, I could now see there was an implicit cut-off between lit. spectator and lit. insider. The boundary started somewhere past Roth, near to Ben Taylor, and went to the space just beyond the fringes of Zadie Smith’s scarf. My status was now being tested from outside the halo’s radius by an official woman, unofficially dressed but gimlet-eyed, whose countenance suggested that I could go no farther.

“He’s not signing anything or taking any pictures,” she said nervously.

The explanation about my professor held enough merit for her to let me pass and so I did. She back-pedaled to apologize a little, explaining that it was her job and she was reluctant about it. The circle around Roth was small and dense and accomplished; there was Nathan Englander, there was Edith Grossman, and for a moment I supposed I could have gone over the say something to him but having already spent my life’s one allotted uncomfortable encounter with him years before, I didn’t want to push anything.

Pleasantries exchanged, the VIPs made their way upstairs to an after-party and I thought to myself: Fuck, if only I had been in the slightest way more professionally diligent, more socially relentless, I might have had the salt to make it up those stairs. Instead I trudged downstairs and lingered for a small bit more in the bookstore below, finding nothing to buy to further keepsake the night--beyond the paper program, a white Press wristband, and of course, the memory of Roth reading for some fifty minutes (an entire chapter of Patrimony, an older and unexpected selection).

His voice was still firm and incisive despite the occasional booming of trucks barreling west down East 47th Street. There was a red curtain behind him and a white handkerchief in his pocket, which he produced a few times to wipe his nose during the reading. I knew right away that I would always remember how the voices dissolved when he, led by his panel of acolytes, stepped out of the elevator into the small, stuffy room and an uncommanded silence (the night’s original implicit force) overtook the waiting crowd.

I finally made it outside where I stood by the building waiting for nothing, inexplicably uneasy about leaving. I wondered what was being discussed upstairs at the after-party. I watched a waitress from the restaurant next door step outside on a smoke break and I saw the cherry of her cigarette glow and fade while she stood under the scaffolding, avoiding the light drizzle that had started to fall on the February night. Across the street, a crowd of smokers had gathered outside of Connolly’s Pub and the adjacent McDonald’s still had a few late come-and-goers.

I walked east looking for a diner, passing the luxury stores on the way to 5th Avenue. I passed the Scribner’s Publishers Building (of Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Fitzgerald) and the foot traffic grew, half of them dodging the rain, the others not acknowledging it. I hadn’t felt moved like this in a while and I didn’t want to talk to anybody. When you live in a city like New York, after long enough, you cease to be moved to things. A stockpile of antibodies grows to combat surprises, and each chance thing you encounter gets filed away, small notations of understanding. Tonight I was patently not immune to surprises. I didn't want it to go away.

I kept walking. It was 43 degrees outside, a neon script in the lobby of NewsCorp building blinked among news of the Libyan dead and the Wisconsin protests. I walked past the row of town cars waiting to drive the late-working Barclay's boys home and passed, without temptation, Rockefeller Center and its ice skaters. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to go home, but I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I guess I wanted to grab a bite and sit at a table by a window and stare up into midtown, I wanted to see a Broadway actress having an after-show dinner with her family. I wanted to overhear to two slender women go on about their diets minutes before ordering dessert, I wanted to watch the couples on dates navigate the divide between self-preservation and umbrella decorum. I wanted to listen to an old man hum old show tunes into his coffee. I stopped inside a French brasserie for a burger and a beer and I got all that I wanted.