A Last Stop in New York

I had a very long stop-over in London, waiting for the plane that would deposit me in New York. I had sliced three days off my time in Europe to see two people in the Big Apple, my charming correspondent Leslee Sumner, who contributed an article to my last issue, and my aunt in Queens. Because I was to spend several hours sitting around at Heathrow, I took advantage of the time to cruise the duty-free shopping mall and settle into an airport cafe to write about my last days in Berlin. Those days were without moments for reflection or writing, given over entirely to visiting with friends, last-minute adventures on the underground, and one errand by car to a perfume-maker in West Berlin who I asked to reproduce my long-adored, and only perfume, di Borghese, now no longer made, with Horst and Konstanze. On my last night in town, Konstanze had invited all the people who had been guests at my house in San Francisco, more than a dozen friends, and we stayed up all night remembering all the funny things we had experienced together across the world.

In the airport cafe, the words raced across the pages of my antediluvian notebook. A laptop would have been grand, if heavier than a real camera, but I grew up writing with paper and pen and still do it with a certain proficiency. When I had written of the last minutes at the airport in Berlin that morning, I looked up at the clock, and realized that I had missed my plane. My arrival in New York was much delayed.

My intriguing association with Miss Leslee was born of our mutual love of Proust, but became much more personal as we learned about each other through our frequent email connection. By the time I had rung her doorbell, two hours later than planned, and saw her for the first time, I felt as though I'd known her for years. She and her gracious husband, Brian, made me feel once again at home, and we almost immediately went out for a drink at a local bistro to toast our meeting, in person, at last.

The next day we walked out into the vibrating streets of Manhattan, beginning with a long stretch through Central Park and a foray along Amsterdam Avenue, a substitution for no stop in Amsterdam during this European tour. Ever since my first sight of the city of Vermeer I have gravitated there, in love with the visual charm of the place, and the anything-goes attitude of its more than civilized population.

Having visited New York many times in the last few years, I had no demands of tourism to color the day, and the millions of pieces of art I had seen in Berlin made museum stops of secondary interest for once. We did go to Soho to see the Basquiat show at a gallery and have a look around at other charming things, but mostly our peregrinations were based on three of our mutual interests: gourmet establishments, public bathrooms, and then I took her to see , the street of shoe stores, East 8th Street, where I must go every time I am in New York. Leslee and I share the Imelda Marcos fetish, and are both horrified by this season's offerings of hideous footwear. This was the first time I had been to New York without coming home with new shoes; but, when the fashions turn to the feminine again, I have left Lesleer with a regular destination for her own schedule.

By early evening, we had made it back to Leslee's to prepare for the evening's outing, a meeting with her friend David, yet another Proust fan, a dinner out and further cocktails at the Algonquin, the perfect spot for a literary chinwag. As she prepared the cheeses, olives, bread (from the splendid Gourmet Garage in Soho) and cocktails of Lillet with a blood navel orange wedge (Balducchi's), I watched a Proust documentary made by Wolfe/Carter productions for South Carolina Educational TV, "Marcel Proust: A Writer's Life."

This well-done documentary features an actor, a lovely, wan creature who appears hovering behind lace curtains, writing in bed and in similarly unconversational moments. I was mildly troubled by his moustache, one side of which seemed to hover slightly above the other, and he did not look gay enough or sufficiently "oriental" in his beauty. I much preferred the actors in "102 Boulevard Haussmann" or "Celeste", but was still moved. How sad to be reminded that our friend Marcel had spent so much of his life in seclusion and a deep sense of loss.

When David arrived, the conversation turned frequently to our shared literary obsession. Every so often one of us would turn to Brian and apologise, since he has not yet read Proust. This is, of course, what he was expecting in our company and perhaps our enthusiastic words might have hastened the potentially inevitable: surely, some day, Brian will surely find himself reading Proust. Perhaps some day, Miss Leslee will have written a novel, and be on a book tour, leaving Brian at home with Remembrance...

When we discussed places to go for dinner,I requested that we go for Chino-Latino, one of the few kinds of restaurants we don't have yet in San Francisco. After we had dined on half-Latin, half-Chinese fare, we made our way to the Algonqin Hotel.

The Algonquin seems to have remained the same since Dorothy Parker called it home and the brilliant New Yorker writers gathered at the Round Table, except for the fact that you can no longer smoke anywhere except in the bar. What would Dorothy have said about this? The bar itself, with gleaming wood so dark it seemed colored by decades of intelligent conversation, turned out to be most inviting.After a round of cocktails and merry conversation, my host and hostess took me to the wilds of Queens in search of my aunt's house. Leslee and I kept dozing and every time I looked over at Brian behind the wheel, his eyes were pried open like the protagonist of Clockwork Orange under therapy.

I did not mention Proust for 48 hours in Queens. Returning to San Francisco, arriving near midnight, I was met at the airport by two members of the original Marcel Proust Support Group, my wonderful friends Miss Harley and Miss Dawn. They took me immediately for the one thing I missed so very much in Europe, a great burrito, but there was so much to say and so little time to chew.

P Segal