The Subway Stops at Bryant Park Read online

  The

  Subway

  Stops at

  Bryant

  Park

  N. West Moss

  Stories

  Leapfrog Press

  Fredonia, New York

  The Subway Stops at Bryant Park © 2017 by N. West Moss

  All rights reserved under International and

  Pan-American Copyright Conventions

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a data base or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Published in 2017 in the United States by

  Leapfrog Press LLC

  PO Box 505

  Fredonia, NY 14063

  www.leapfrogpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed in the United States by

  Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

  St. Paul, Minnesota 55114

  www.cbsd.com

  Author photo courtesy of Mahmoud Sami

  Illustrations from photographs by N. West Moss

  New York City Transit Authority token illustration by Laura Oakes

  First Edition

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Moss, N. West, author.

  Title: The subway stops at Bryant Park / N. West Moss.

  Description: First edition. | Fredonia, NY : Leapfrog Press, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017010653 (print) | LCCN 2016054399 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781935248910 (paperback) | ISBN 9781935248927 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: City dwellers--Fiction. | City and town life--Fiction. |

  Urban parks--Fiction. | Bryant Park (New York, N.Y.)--Fiction. | New York

  (N.Y.)--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). |

  FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Urban Life. | FICTION / Cultural Heritage.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.O77967 A6 2017 (ebook) | LCC PS3613.O77967 (print)

  | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010653

  To my mother –

  a fine artist and close friend

  who has flung her arms wide to my writing for a lifetime;

  and

  To my father –

  who bought me a typewriter for my 9th birthday,

  and then begged me to stop typing so everyone could sleep.

  Introduction

  Just as Fitzgerald focused his writing on the Northeast (which he adopted in prep school), and Salinger focused on his native New York City, N. West Moss has further zoomed in on Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan. More than simply a setting, the park serves as a vivid character in her contemplative short story collection, The Subway Stops at Bryant Park.

  As the Bryant Park Corporation fixed the numerous problems visiting the park over the years—violence, poor maintenance, the crumbling bones of its infrastructure—my father aimed to make the park into Manhattan’s town square, central to the lives of those who lived, worked, and commuted through and around it. He’s proud of books like this one by West, whose fascinating short stories capture the importance of the park in the lives of its neighbors.

  West and her father Lloyd Moss, an important part of New York City’s cultural life for decades in his role as a classical music host for WQXR, spent many hours together in Bryant Park over the years. West’s collection is especially vibrant to us, as a father and daughter to whom the park has played a similar role.

  Bryant Park has left an indelible mark on my father and me, just as it has on West’s writing, trickling into her graceful phrases. Reading these stories, one can almost envision the soft greenery and pastel flower beds against the sharp backdrop of the buildings of midtown Manhattan.

  We hope you will bring your copy to Bryant Park, drag a chair underneath the shade of the London plane trees, and lose yourself in the stories. West’s words recognize the soil and take root, and you can watch her stories blossom in front of you.

  Dan Biederman Brooke Biederman

  Exec. Director & Founder Author

  Bryant Park Corporation

  Contents

  Introduction

  Contents

  Omeer’s Mangoes

  Sky View Haven

  Milagro

  Beautiful Mom

  Lucky Cat

  Dubonnet

  Spring Peepers

  Dad Died

  Patience and Fortitude

  Next Time

  The Absence of Sound

  Acknowledgements

  Publishing Credits

  The Author

  Omeer’s Mangoes

  In the decades that Omeer had lived and worked across from Bryant Park, everything had changed for them both, for the park and for him. Omeer had married and had a son, and the marriage had devolved from love to disappointment to peace, finally settling into something that could be described most charitably as a kind of permanent calm. And the park. Well.

  It had always been called Bryant Park, but when Omeer first arrived in New York City, the park was dangerous, avoided. His first New York friend, Angelo, who had been hired to polish the brass in the lobby of Omeer’s building, told him that some people called it Needle Park. Angelo was wise, and waved his filter-less cigarette knowingly at homeless people sleeping in the park. “He lives there.” He pointed with the burning end of his cigarette. “He washes in the fountain and uses the bushes as a toilet. You can smell it from here. And some of them push needles in their arms and when they nod off, the needles fall on the ground. It’s a park that grows needles, see?” He laughed, two plumes of smoke pouring from his nostrils like a dragon.

  Omeer, a doorman in a building that looked out on the park, watched from across the street as the prostitutes in stretchy, sparkling dresses came at night and walked on high heels up behind the hedges. It was a dark place in those years, a wasteland.

  But none of it upset Omeer, who as a young man was full of hope, all forward momentum and open arms. New York City, even the park with the dirty condoms and sad women, thrilled him. He had a job and a uniform too, brown with brass buttons, and his tenants did not sleep in the park. His tenants back then were celebrities and artists, nice people who brought him coffee in the morning and seemed embarrassed to have the door held open for them day after day. The building, his building, was beautiful, so elegant with its wide marble staircase and brass elevator doors, polished every month by Angelo and his father. It did not matter that Needle Park was across the street. Omeer’s building was an oasis of kindness and beauty that shamed the park, not the other way around.

  The people in the building in those early decades were like Omeer’s family. He knew which one was expecting a grandchild, which one was contemplating divorce. One tenant was a radio personality, another was an artist who always had paint in his hair, and one wrote music for the movies. Imagine that! They thanked him constantly and gave him tips at Christmas.

  Omeer used to stand on the top step of the stoop at dawn and watch the park for rats beneath the boxwoods. He knew they were boxwoods because he had asked Mrs. Dennis from the 12th floor. She had been so beautiful then, too, a model for Clairol; her blond hair and face had been so swee
t and pretty that Omeer turned away when she said hello. The Dennises were older than Omeer, and he thought of them with respect, as the stars who would play his parents in the movie version of his life, which would be set in New York City, not Iran, where he had been born.

  Omeer’s real father had once been a businessman, before they all left Iran and scattered. At first Omeer told him the truth about his work, about the building, the uniform, the clusters of grapes carved above the doorways in the lobby. His father seemed proud, thought it was a good beginning for his son. Omeer imagined his father telling his friends in England, where he had settled, that his son lived in New York City, that his son was a doorman who wore a uniform with polished brass buttons. His father offered Omeer advice on the phone the first Thursday of every month, about saving money and meeting Iranian girls in New York.

  After Omeer’s mother died, and it became clear that his father would never come to America, not even to visit, Omeer began to lie to him. His father wanted more for him than a doorman job, which had been fine for a few years, but was no longer enough. When Omeer told him he was looking for a new job, his father said, “Good man! You must always strive to better yourself,” and Omeer remembered then how nice it was to be far away from his father’s knack for success.

  Omeer made up stories that his father could share with friends over cards, but Omeer’s honest heart made him an unimaginative and nervous liar. He fabricated interviews he was going on, and outfits the interviewers wore, and because he wanted his father to think kindly of America, Omeer said that some of the interviewers expressed interest in Iran, and one even asked about Omeer’s father, supposedly, which of course no one would ever have done.

  This false interview period stretched to months, and in an attempt to keep the stories interesting, Omeer moved the interviews to restaurants, although Omeer had never eaten in a restaurant, other than the pizza place on the corner. He described one interview for his father, saying, “I ordered a steak and it came with three different kinds of potatoes and a bowl of apricots for dessert.” He hesitated. “And pots of tea. Pots of hot, sweet tea.” This was how Omeer thought someone in England by way of Iran might picture an American meal, different in the potatoes, but similar in the apricots and pots of tea.

  He saved his money, ironing his own shirts, making cheese sandwiches in his tiny kitchen and eating them standing up with the TV on. He wanted a family, he told his father, and himself. Yes, he would love to have enough money one day to have a wife.

  Finally, Omeer felt he had to tell his father that he had gotten a new job from all of these interviews he had gone on. He couldn’t pretend to go on interviews forever, so he said that he had been hired at a bank, even though Omeer knew nothing about finance or banks or what kind of job he’d even get in one. Angelo said, “Tell him it’s in public relations. Everyone works in public relations. Call it PR,” which Omeer’s father seemed to understand, even if Omeer did not. That was early still, in his first decade in New York, when Omeer made it a habit to sweep the sidewalk in front of the building very early, before his tenants even woke up, without even being asked.

  It was after Omeer became a make-believe public relations agent at a bank that the park across the street began to change in earnest. It got roped off with police tape, and in rumbled cranes and dump trucks, dumpsters and jackhammers. Omeer and Angelo kept track of the tearing down and the carting away and then watched as the park was rebuilt. For four entire years the park was a noisy mess. Omeer and the other doormen swept and mopped every day to keep the dust from polluting their marble lobby.

  Omeer read about the renovations in the paper. They were planning on lowering the park to ground level. Astonishing. Impossible. The papers said it was dangerous to have a park up higher than the street, because good people were too scared to go in. “If it’s not at eye level,” Angelo explained to him, “the police can’t look in. It’s like a secret world where all sorts of things can happen. You don’t want to know.” Angelo shook his head, took off his work hat and rubbed his hands through his hair to show how upsetting it was in there.

  When Angelo’s father retired, Angelo was put in charge of the family business, polishing the elevator doors, the brass bannisters that looped up the grand marble staircase, the handles on the front doors. He and Omeer stood outside so that Angelo could smoke, and later, after Angelo left, Omeer would sweep up the filter-less cigarette butts and matches he’d left on the ground.

  Omeer read to Angelo from the newspaper about the park, while Angelo commented. “People hide in the park,” said Angelo.

  “Right,” said Omeer, “the addicts and the hookers.” He tried to sound disdainful, but it didn’t work and he was embarrassed that he had said the word hooker out loud. Angelo had disdain for specific things: for sloppy carpentry, and for people who ate pizza while they walked down the street, but Omeer couldn’t muster genuine disdain. It simply was not in his nature, although he tried.

  When the construction was finally done and the dust was hosed off of the block, when the park had been successfully lowered, Omeer called it a work of art. “It’s magnificent,” he would murmur to his tenants as he held the front door for them and swept his hand across the vista, the marble handrails, the full flowerbeds. He realized he was bragging as though the park were his, and he blushed over and over again, but he couldn’t stop paying compliments to it.

  Men in green jumpsuits came next and put in more plants, thousands of them along with full-grown London plane trees. Stonemasons came too and fixed the paths and stone walls. Old statues were polished and new statues went in. Now, years later, gardeners were in the park every day in the spring and summer, and even into the fall, planting begonias and digging up daffodils that had just finished blooming, slipping hoses into each pot of flowers until the water ran over the top and soaked the slate beneath. There was a man in a green uniform whom Omeer knew by sight. He walked all day long pushing a garbage can on wheels. If someone let a napkin fall to the ground, the man was there, seconds later, to put it in his pail. If a leaf fell from a tree, he caught it.

  The park became a testament to progress, to how things got steadily better over time, about humanity, like the opposite of entropy, where he had read that things naturally fall apart. It made Omeer tremendously hopeful, about the park, about his life. What they had done to the park was a triumph over entropy. He said that to Angelo, who shrugged.

  Omeer got married the year the restaurant went into the park. What a shock it had been to his tenants to learn that there would be a place to have lunch and dinner right there, steps from their front door, butting up against the back of the New York Public Library. Mrs. Dennis from the 12th floor said, “It’s like living at Versailles,” which Omeer had heard of. It made everyone in the building stand up a little straighter to have a park so lovely.

  On Thursday nights the restaurant hosted a singles’ night where skinny men and women in their tight business clothes came in waves. Omeer could see them through the glass of the front door, laughing with their mouths wide open, leaning in to one another, talking into their phones when their dates went to the rest room. Always busy, always important.

  He walked over and studied the menu that hung in the window, and saw a bottle of wine for sale for $47. He felt rich just seeing that, proud that they thought so highly of themselves. The neighborhood had become as special as Omeer’s beautiful marble-and-brass building, as if the building had finally succeeded in making the park behave.

  He cut out newspaper articles about the park and sent them to his father, telling him that he went to the restaurant there for business lunches, that the bank let him put it on his expense account. He wished he hadn’t lied to his father about being a banker, because he wanted to tell him how he had just been promoted to superintendent of the building, a big step up. His father would probably have been proud, would have congratulated him. When he got the promotion, Omeer had his doorman unif
orm cleaned professionally. He hung it in its dry-cleaning bag in the back of his closet in case he ever needed it again.

  Omeer’s wife was American, with enough Persian blood in her family history for him to consider her essentially Iranian. She was younger than he was, and shy when they first met. She moved into his apartment with him, the little one bedroom he had bought on the top floor when prices had been dirt-cheap. She bought paint the color of bricks and pomegranates and painted the walls. She put out a vase of fake flowers that looked real. To Omeer, she had the eye of an artist. He encouraged her in all of her early tentativeness. He took her to the park on his day off and showed her the menu hanging in the restaurant window, pointed at the $47 bottle of wine listed there, and they turned to each other and made shocked faces.

  One day, a carousel appeared in the park, and reporters wrote stories about it, which Omeer cut out. But by then, his father had died and Omeer put the clippings from the newspapers in the bottom of his sock drawer with a heavy heart. It was the same year that his wife, grown less shy by this time, gave birth to their son. Progress, as it always had for Omeer, outweighed the setbacks. He had a son now. He had a family of his own.

  And then, soon after that, at no particular moment, without being definite or clear, at a time seen only in retrospect as a moment, a year later or maybe two or three after the birth of his son, the pendulum of Omeer’s life which had been swinging steadily forward along with the good fortune of Bryant Park, halted, stuttered, and began, ever so slowly, to swing backwards, as every life does eventually. As his up-hill resolved itself eventually into a downslope, the pendulum of the park continued its seemingly unstoppable upward trajectory.