Through my three inches of aeroplane glass, New York appeared like a flat disk of shining light, or like an enormous UFO, hovering between the blackness of the night sky and the blackness of the North Atlantic, much brighter than candle-lit London and without a wisp of cloud in sight.
I had taken my time getting here. The United States was to be my forty-second country. Up until now I had always viewed America with that particular cynicism we backpackers reserve for destinations such as Ibiza or Kuta or, God help us, Disneyland. After all, I used to predicate, what has America got to offer that I cannot see in a hundred different places? Now that I was about to enter the land of McDonald's and Coca-Cola, I felt thrilled despite myself. Honestly, sometimes I feel like a dog and its leash. Show me my passport and I just want to wag my tail and bark at you.
The following morning dawned cold and bright, sunglasses and ear-muffler weather. I showered, dressed and went down to reception. While waiting in line I noticed that the floppy-haired guy in front of me was paying his bill with a NatWest card. I asked him if he knew a good place to eat and he recommended the Venus Café at Eighth and Twenty-Third. I thanked him, paid for my room, and walked two blocks to 23rd Street West. One of the elegant things about Manhattan, I was to find, is the logic of its layout. 'All straight up and down like Fifth Avenue. All the cross streets numbered and big honest labels on everything,' as Edith Wharton wrote in The Age of Innocence.
The Venus Café was a twenty-four hour diner run by an Italian family. It had posters of Aegean Islands on the walls, classic 1950's furniture and a charming three foot high plaster statue of the Venus de Milo standing at the entrance. Now, I thought with a warm fuzzy feeling, I have arrived in America.
I slid into an empty booth and an Italian waitress materialised at my side, notebook in hand, pencil poised.
"Hiya dooin? Jew wanna cawfy?"
"Yes, please." I smiled. "What coffees do you have?" She looked at me like I just came from another planet.
"American cawfy!" She answered, enunciating her words. "We have American cawfy."
Of course, how stupid of me. I ordered an American coffee and the Special Breakfast. For the benefit of those who come from other planets, American coffee is watered down filter coffee and you could feed the Ethiopian football team with a Special.
Outside the diner an icy breeze was blowing down Eighth Avenue bending the backs of Friday morning commuters. I bought a metro card and caught the A-train to High Street, one stop off the island, and then walked back to Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge. This was a perfect way to begin my sight seeing. At ten o'clock rush hour was breathing it's last, and the sun hung above my left shoulder and lit up one of the most spectacular cityscapes on the planet.
Manhattan, I was discovering, has an Alice in Wonderland quality to it. Like walking around in a dream where you recognise your surroundings, but can't remember the rules. Every time I walked round another corner I would remember a scene from this movie or that television program: NYPD Blue, Friends, Seinfeld and others. Every establishing shot from a decade spent in front of a television. It was beginning to feel as if I had misspent my teens in someone else's city.
Brooklyn Bridge was a hard act to follow, but New York delivered in bunches. I spent the next two days wandering around with my head in the air and my jaw on the floor. I took the Staten Island Ferry past the Statue of Liberty. I strolled around Greenwich Village and went on a tour of the New York Stock Exchange. I queued for two hours to see the view from the top of the Empire State Building and watched the polio clock in the United Nations. I ate 'hut dawgs' for lunch, pizzas for dinner and drank skinny lattes in half a dozen coffee shops. These ubiquitous islands of downtown calm with their diluted jazz and chill-dude atmospheres became the bookmarks, or the pause plays in my frantic attempts to see everything in three days.
This was a city in the grip of Christmas. Christmas tree vendors and Salvation Army bell-ringers vied to bring good cheer to the pavements. Fairy lights framed shop windows and carols spilled out of open doorways. New Yorkers were feeling good about themselves. There was a bounce to their steps that went deeper than Jingle Bells. They had recently elected Hillary Clinton as their first woman Senator and had, in Rudolph Giuliani, a phenomenally successful mayor. City crime statistics were down, as were taxes and unemployment and the Yankees had just won their 26th World Series.
On Sunday morning I slept in and had a late breakfast of pancakes and maple syrup in the Venus. After breakfast I took the subway Uptown to 86th Street and like John Phillips, went 'for a walk on a winter's day.' It was another perfect morning with piercing sunlight and clear blue skies criss-crossed by aeroplane exhausts, like giants doodling in the stratosphere.
Central Park was not as I had expected; the trees were bare and grey, their lifeless branches revealing rather than concealing the surrounding apartment buildings, and the grass was faded and brown. Despite the cold the park was full of joggers all running this way and that with puffs of vapour, as from a steam engine, shooting from their mouths.
Later that afternoon I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and joined a tour of the highlights. Similar to the British Museum, the Metropolitan is only able to display a small sample of its total archive. Even so it would take days to see everything. The Trustees very cleverly allow the guides to choose their own highlights which not only ensures that you get a different tour with different guides, but also that your guide is inclined to be passionate about his or her choices. And passion in my experience, whether for a person or anything else, is invariably infectious. Our guide, Marianne, chose the Chinese garden, Louis Tiffany's stained glass, the Egyptian Temple of Dendur, and Velazquez's Juan de Pareja. She brought all of these items to life with her engaging commentary and her description of the relationship between Velazquez and his trusted manservant will remain with me for some time.
By the time our tour finished the winter sun had slipped behind the buildings on the far side of Central Park and I still had two more things I wished to do. I took a bus to 55th Street and went to Carnegie's Deli, possibly the most famous eatery in Manhattan. The Deli had far too many tables (I have more elbowroom on the Central Line) and the waitresses behaved as staff do when they don't care whether you come back or not. I ordered one of Carnegie's ironically named sandwiches. When it came it was a leaning tower of raw meat with a triangle of bread perched on top and a foot-long toothpick stuck through the middle to keep it all from toppling over.
After dinner I walked down Broadway to Times Square and spent half an hour trying to capture this neon zoo on film. Then I wandered reluctantly back to my 'funky cheap hotel' by way of Fifth Avenue, absorbing the sights and sounds along the way.
As my aeroplane climbed and banked steeply over suburbia the following morning, and its smaller digital version carried out a handbrake turn on the screen in front of me, I stared down at the receding city and tried to fathom what had changed. What had I discovered about New York that had so changed my perception of it? It wasn't any one thing. New Yorkers had spoken and behaved as they do in the movies. From the cops to the yellow taxicabs to the "walk-don't walk" traffic lights; everything had looked pretty much as I had expected it to. This in itself, I decided, must be its attraction. New York fits like a pair of old jeans.
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