美国情人

“Meadow DeRiggi lived exactly how a young woman should live who wants to spend her youth well. She did everything and nothing and spent time like I always mean to: purposefully. She sang with the band and knew everyone and didn’t owe anyone anything. And couldn’t pay up, even if she did. Her beauty was that rare kind that made you want to look more like yourself and not like her. Being around Meadow was like being in New York City. It made you want to find life, not hide from it.

I remember looking across the river at the unblinking lights of Manhattan buildings, wondering who lived there. I just wanted to enter those spaces and crawl up on the floor and go to sleep. I was part of it now. On the fifth floor, in a temporary commercial apartment. There was our castle, our fortress. But outside the windows, I could hear the hot sound of jackhammers taking the city apart. In New York, neighborhoods change as quickly as the weather. Or maybe it’s the other way around. But I couldn’t warn Meadow. By the time I noticed it, it was already too late.

The very things that had worked so well for Meadow, up until then had started turning and fading. She had no other skills, no other way of dealing with the world. In one instant her behaviors turned from charming to borderline hysteric. People could feel her failure coming. She smelled of something rotten. Her youth had died and she was dragging around the decaying carcass.

It was clear that the thing that Meadow wanted most in the world, the thing that she wanted to define her, to give her a place to put her time and talents, her everything – the restaurant (It would have big heavy tables and chairs. It would feel like the home everyone wishes they had been raised in. No one who comes there will want to take out their cellphones because it won’t feel that way. It would be like taking your cellphone out in the woods. Totally wrong. It will always feel like fall inside, even on hot summer nights with all the windows open. Loaves of bread that people tear off pieces. It would be the kind of place where at 2:00 am the chef and the waitstaff would come out and eat something simple they had fixed themselves with the remaining guests and open a bottle of good wine. And if she ever had kids, they would walk there after school and do their homework in a corner table.) – it was clear that it would never happen. The most surprising thing was that Meadow was actually surprised by it. She could see the whole world with painful accuracy but couldn’t see herself or her fate.

I am so impressed by her and so worried for her at the same time. She seemed so cool, so totally amazing, I didn’t think it would be possible to hurt her.

She thinks she’s sick, and she doesn’t know if her ailment has a name. It’s just her sitting and staring at the Internet or the television for long periods of time interspersed by trying to not do that and then lying about what she’s been doing. Then she’ll get so excited about something that the excitement overwhelms her and she can’t sleep or do anything. And she is just in love with everything but can’t figure out how to make herself work in the world.

It will be hard for me not to look at New York and think of her somewhere in it.

Meadow had made rich fat women less fat and rich stupid kids less stupid and lame rich men less lame. And she wanted so badly to be on the other side – to be fat and stupid and lame and rich. But what she couldn’t see most of all, more than she couldn’t see that she was never going to get the restaurant, was that those people were nothing compared to her. They were matches to her bonfire.

She was the last cowboy, all romance and failure.

The world was changing, and her kind didn’t have anywhere to go. Being a beacon of hope for lesser people is a lonely business.”