A Hudson River Parks Story

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There are evenings when my daily confinement in an office building, and my subsequent nightly confinement to a Brooklyn apartment appear to me to be too sad a fact of life, and especially mine. In Cairo, my default is to call friends, and will more often than not end up looking at the lights of the city and its many mosques from the height and untouched darkness of the Mokattam Hills.

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When we get there at sundown, the shadows obscure the garbage littering the drop to Cairo, and the darkness overtakes everything. For a few hours we sit in each other's company, drinking sweet tea, listening to opportunistic lutists who hustle the area's patrons. They know of the romanticism that will envelop us and make us want live music from artists dimly seen, whose talents will appear as disproportionate as the light emanating from the tiny bulbs so far below us. It is off of this predictable sentimentality that they make their living. For those hours we live in a clean, clear, and timeless Cairo, somehow and against all reason improved by the twinge of loneliness inspired by any truly black night.

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But all of this is a retelling of a Cairo in which I no longer live, and whose nostalgic memories are larger than life could ever hope to be. But perhaps that is my cynicism speaking.

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Now that I live in a place called New York, I count my blessings of working in the West Village, and walk to a pier around 10th Street, on West Street. The pleasures to be had there are simple. The view: a none-too-impressive view of the Hoboken skyline; a speck that is, upon squinting, ill-rewarded inspection, the Statue of Liberty. I go mostly for the air. The smell: that confusingly sea-like brininess that hold no memory for me, but brings pleasure nonetheless. For impersonal company, lest one feel alone in the world: there are usually runners around, a few of the homeless, and gay men on migratory rounds from Chelsea, looking sun-kissed no matter the season.

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I walked over there today, catching up with a friend over the phone on my way. As I walked to the rounded end of the pier, I looked to my left in the direction where Lady Liberty stood to be gawked at. I saw, on the water between her and I, a kayaker, braving water that looked choppy from the September wind, and that was made further choppy by the motorized boat moving alongside him, transporting something or another from one shore to the other.

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Today there was music, and as I got to the end, I saw couples dancing underneath a tent-pole studded with lighting, and the speakers from which the music issued. This was not a usual sight, and I sat down to watch. My friend complained that she could not hear me very well over the music, and I surprised myself by suggesting we speak later, rather than moving away. We hung up, and I settled in to watch complete and (for the most part) completely untalented strangers dance.

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A tin can underneath the tent-pole announced the donation imperative, stating simply: "tango".

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The idea I had of tango came completely from the movies. I expected brisk, exacting movements, a controlled passion, a tossing of the head that would look strange in any other context, dips and tricks and some violence. But this was nothing like that. These were amateurs. Hobbyists. People who tango on Wednesday nights, and put a couple of dollars into a tin can at the end of their evening.

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As I stayed longer, the sky darkened, and more and more people arrived. The majority of these were not couples, but arrived, for the most part, alone. Alone and on foot, on collapsible bikes, on skateboards, in cars from New Jersey across the water. Alone and in shorts, tank tops, flowy evening dresses, sparkly scarves, flip flops, rubber shoes with the Nike swoosh iridescent and lime green on their sides.

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I thought to leave after the first hour. I was not warm enough to be comfortable, and the mosquitoes had taken a liking to my face. I, for some reason, had gotten my notebook out and was writing things (mostly this) down, not knowing what, if anything, my point was in doing so. My commute was still fully ahead of me, and it was already 9 pm. But the same thing that has in the past kept me out in the Mokattam Hills until indecent hours, kept me there until impractical hours. In the same way that the bumpy car ride down the mountain would take me back to a Cairo far from beautiful without some distance and some darkness, I knew that a subway ride would break the spell the night had woven around me, and that my words would be too much mitigated by the person I am under florescent lights, and that they would sound flat as I wrote them. I stayed for a little longer with my uncharacteristic self, and wrote at leisure about what was happening as it happened.

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I was there for a total of about three hours, my attention divided between many persons of note for one reason or another. There were the badly dressed ones (cargo pants, heeled leather shoes, flowery prints), the overdressed ones, and the sartorialists who'd gotten everything just right. There were the very old, the very young, and the in-betweens whose day jobs I wondered about. There were the notable exceptions: under-represented races and ethnicities, non-NYC residents who'd come all the way in from _____. But there was one woman in particular who caught my attention, and held it.

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I watched her for a while, for she was a striking figure in more ways than one. She was old, and very thin, and had too much makeup on, in garish colors. She was in a tank top that exposed the side of a breast shrunken and sagging from the dual influences of age, and her emaciation. Everything she had on was some shade of pastel; a light blue tank top, pink slip-on shoes, grey, frizzy hair.

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I'd noticed her earlier not because of this unflattering description, but for what I'd thought was spunkiness. She'd danced earlier with one man who'd biked over with his partner, and appeared surprised to see the dancers, but wanted to join them. He'd taken her up, leaving his boyfriend guarding the basketed bikes, and lead her strongly and at a pace clearly beyond her own level of comfort. She'd stopped him mid-step, crowed to "LEAD GENTLY!", and they tangoed.

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He left soon after, this dance session after all being impromptu on his part. She danced on the edge of the circle made by the coupled dancers in her group. Her eyes were closed, her arms outstretched around a partner she imagined with every step. She needed nobody, her body seemed to say, and was in and of herself, content.

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These dancers had a language peculiar to themselves, nonverbal and completely related to the music. They laughed in unison when their songs ended with an overly typical flourish, as if to say, we can enjoy this with both irony and joy in equal measure. They coupled and uncoupled with little awkwardness, these strangers of varying heights and hefts. Talented and un-, some graceful, some too deliberate, some in red ankle socks and heels, some balding, some beautiful. She kept separate from them all, and seemed, in her concentration, to be oblivious to the world around her.

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Later, she came over to a woman resting next to me, and finally spoke within my hearing. "Nobody will dance with me!" she squawked. "The people who're good don't want to dance with anybody who isn't, and everyone else isn't good enough to dance with. I wanna learn, but nobody wants to dance with me!"

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Her list of complaints was long and varied, and with it she destroyed every one of my conceptions of her, leaving me finally stripped of all that I'd wanted to see, feeling bereft having only what was.

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Eventually, the organizer noticed her sitting off to the side, with her knees pulled up to her chest and her hands hugging them closer to her. He went over to her, unwound her from her compactness, and took her up, looking both bored and overly smug at his own generosity. I watched her for a few more minutes, as I finished writing, and wondered whether there would ever be a time when I stopped noticing lonely people.

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