Tainted Love

New York cast a spell on me

Whenever I’m in New York now I have trouble believing I ever lived here and took all its challenges in stride. I lived in Manhattan for almost twenty years. During that time, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. My friends and I would joke about it cruelly, saying things like, “Where else are we going to live? Boston?” as if the idea of living in a more ordinary city, even one as arguably distinguished as Boston, was so absurd that it made a good punchline.

Photo by Clay LeConey on Unsplash

No matter how much you love living in New York, you have to admit that there is an element of Stockholm Syndrome at play. The demands it makes on you are so extreme, and yet very quickly you identify them as virtues. I remember when I got here in 1986, I noticed the efflorescence of scaffolding everywhere. In my neighborhood, many of the prettiest buildings were surrounded by filthy gray scaffolding, a sort of ectoskeleton that bloomed with graffiti, flyers, and the occasional weedy plant. It is usually erected because the building’s exterior needs maintenance, and it protects passersby from chunks of building raining down on their heads, so it does serve an important role. But in typical New Yorker form, I began to see it not just as a functional eyesore but something actually beneficial, even auspicious: It provided shelter from rain and snow, so that when I trudged from my apartment to the grocery store, I could stay dry, tenderly shielded by the towering scaffolding. A visitor to New York might shake a fist at it but we New Yorkers knew that scaffolding was a good thing. Or so we convinced ourselves, because being in New York has a narcotic effect on you, and you start seeing even its warts as beauty marks.

Living in New York is as close as I’ve gotten to joining a cult. I mean that not as a criticism but by way of explaining the feeling I had when I lived here: The rest of the world was confusing, pale, disappointing. Only New York made sense. All of its liabilities registered as assets. It was deafeningly noisy: Evidence of vitality. It cost a fortune: Proof that it was desirable. There was graffiti everywhere: New Yorkers were creative, expressive, irrepressible! You were never alone: You were never alone!

I loved living in New York and would never have left except I fell in love with someone who lived in Boston and had to stay there for work. (All my cruel jokes about Boston were finally coming back to haunt me.) I loved New York so much that I continued living here for two years after we got married. Then one day being in a commuter marriage seemed ridiculous, and I dragged myself to Boston, a wrenching dislocation. And you know what? I survived. I was deprogrammed fast, newly in love with having a car at my ready disposal, and greenery all around me, and a modicum of peace and quiet. This isn’t to say that other cities don’t require accommodation. I live in Los Angeles now, and there’s plenty I choose to tolerate in exchange for what I love about it. But that time in New York was the deepest relationship I’ve ever had with a place; I began to look at New York like a first marriage, sexy and hot but a little bit abusive, hard to explain but easy to justify.

SHOW NOTES

—We stayed in the Garment District on our New York trip, and I’m sorry to say there was barely a garment in sight. I used to love wandering through the neighborhood, dodging men pushing overloaded racks of dresses and gazing at storefronts of blouses and scarves. These days, most of those garment businesses are gone, and in their place a thousand hotels have blossomed. My block alone had six hotels (!!!). Saddest of all, I discovered that M&J Trimming, the iconic button-and-lace supplier, is going out of business. It makes perfect sense, since the industry they sold to is gone, but it is a piece of old New York that I’ll miss. It was the sort of place where you could find literally any shape or color or size of button and type of lace and tassel; it was encyclopedic. I bought an iron-on embroidered dragon patch that was 50% off, as a way of saying goodbye.

—Muji used to have a big store in Los Angeles but during Covid, it closed, so we were excited to dip into the one on Fifth Avenue. I love Muji. It makes me want little clear plastic objects like no other retailer on earth, and when I get these little clear plastic objects home I can’t figure out what to use them for or why I bought them, and yet I am still strangely happy about it. Also, they have great clothes that are sort of Uniqlo-adjacent. I’m obsessed with their snap-front cardigans, which look exactly like the iconic Agnés B snap-front cardigans but cost way, way less. Highly recommend.

—We saw Stereophonic.

—I finally finished The Covenant of Water, and my timing couldn’t have been better, because the next day, a group of friends invited me to join them on a trip to India in December, and I said yes. Yes!! We’re actually not going to South India, where the book is set, but I’m very much in an India frame of mind, so I’m incredibly excited.

—Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I hope you get the wishbone. XxxSusan