Gopnik - At the strangers gate: arrivals in New York

O n the morning I was to be married in New York, I went to a bookstore, as I always did in moments of crisis or blissuntil all the bookstores closed and you had to seek some comfort or inspiration somewhere in the ether, like a monk. There I found what I hoped would serve as an epigraph for our approaching wedding. It was from the eighteenth-century Japanese poet Issa, the most humorous and tender of haiku makers, and it ran simply:

The world of dew is

a world of dew,

but even so

I grasped it at once, or thought I did, in all its pregnant simplicity, its simple bow and implicit enormity. Life passes, and its difficult, but within it, pleasures and epiphanies ariseyou marry the prettiest girl youve ever met in the greatest city on earth. Dont kid yourselfbut maybe you can kid yourself a bit. (Years later, when I was writing Talk of the Town for The New Yorker, I would interview one of The Andrews Sisters about Bing Crosby: You couldnt kid him a lot, she said warily. But you could kid him a little. It depended on the angle that he wore his hat. Life, it occurred to me, is like Bing Crosby, its moods indicated by the pressures of the time, like that hat. That morning, the hat was on at just the right angle.)

Years later still, when she was pregnant, Martha, the girl I married that morning, made me promise not to go to a bookstore while she was in labor. As it happened, the labor was drawn out, and, wanting to avoid an argument with the obnoxious obstetrician, I took a break during hour six, and did end up in a bookstore around the corner from the hospital. It was a good move. Martha was so panicked by my absencewith the constant noise of ambulances arriving at the emergency entrance nearby, she easily imagined some tragic-karmic accidentthat she dilated. I arrived just in time for the birth of our son, and carrying a wonderful copy of Santayanas The Sense of Beauty, which, I swear, I really did intend to read aloud to her, if things had gone on any longer.

But that, as I said, was years lateractually, only a few, as older people reckon these things, but at the time, what would stretch to a decade seemed a lifetime. It was a lifetime.

When I say married in New York I know that it might sound rather like top hats and morning coats and a ceremony at St. Thomas Episcopal. In fact, on a bleak December day, we would take the 5 train to City Hall, with a license and blood test results in hand, and submit to a minute-and-a-half-long ceremony administered by an official who looked a bit like Don Ameche in his guise as host of International Circus from my childhood. And so, after approximately forty-five further seconds of obligation and vows, we took the subway back to the nine-by-eleven basement room where we were beginning our life, a place that we had dubbed the Blue Room, in honor of an old Rodgers & Hart song that I was insane enough to remember, and that Martha was insane enough to accept as a guide to living. The song was about a couple who choose a blue room, a single studio where they can start their life: Not like a ballroom, / A small room, / A hall room Away from everyone else, in the smallest studio in Manhattan, they were happy.

The subway trip downtown was, in a way, only an extension of a trip south we had begun a few months before in Canada, getting on a bus marked New York City, like something out of a 1940s musical. My father saw us off. Fathers are supposed to give advice to young men and women leaving the provinces for the metropolis. DArtagnans father in The Three Musketeers tells him to fight duels with everyone once he gets to Parissensible advice for a guy with a sword who knows how to use it. When Sky Mastersonyou know, the hero of Guys and Dollsleaves Colorado for New York, his father tells him that if a guy in the big city shows you a brand-new deck of cards, seal unbroken, and wants to bet that when he opens it the jack of hearts will leap out and squirt cider in your ear, dont take that bet: the jack will leap out and start to squirt. That is to say, in the big city, nobody makes an apparently crazy bet if the deck isnt already gaffed. (This is, of course, a corollary to the famous advice that if youre sitting at a card table and cant figure out who the sucker is, youre the sucker.)