New York City

New York City appears first as a place made intimate at a distance: Mindy writes from there to the narrator, and their exchange leads to her trip to Los Angeles. Later, the narrator travels to New York City for a poetry reading, encountering the city through oppressive heat, relentless traffic, a stay at the Chelsea Hotel, and a performance at St. Mark’s Church. The location thus links private correspondence and romantic expectation with the itinerant, public side of his literary life.

Correspondence and Distance

The narrator begins receiving letters from Mindy, a 25-year-old woman in New York City who has read a couple of his books. He values her letters partly because she seldom discusses writing, except to say she is not a writer; instead, she writes about life in general, and men and sex in particular. Her longhand is described as stable, sensible, and humorous. The exchange offers a form of communication that feels more expressive than ordinary conversation, and the narrator says he is always glad to find one of her letters in his mailbox.

Mindy sends photographs, which the narrator qualifies as beautiful only if they are faithful representations. After several more weeks of correspondence, she mentions an upcoming two-week vacation. The narrator suggests that she fly out to visit him, and she agrees. Their letters give way to telephone calls, followed by the practical arrangement of her arrival at Los Angeles International Airport. New York City is therefore established not through a visit by the narrator at first, but as the distant home from which Mindy enters his life through writing, images, and calls.

The Expected Arrival

While waiting at the airport for Mindy, the narrator becomes anxious about the gap between photographs and the person who will arrive. He describes nervousness and doubts whether he wants her to come, even though she has travelled from New York City to meet him. His thoughts widen from this particular arrival to his recurring pursuit of new affairs: they bring excitement, but also the work of beginnings, and he expects people’s flaws and difficulties to emerge over time. As relationships continue, he imagines that he will matter less to them and they less to him.

The airport wait also brings his fear of aging and death into the foreground. He wonders whether his attraction to younger women is an attempt to avoid feeling old or to push death further away. This reflection complicates the romantic promise attached to Mindy’s journey: the new relationship offers excitement, but the narrator sees it against a pattern of brief beginnings and his own unease about time. New York City, in this episode, signifies both the distance Mindy crosses and the uncertainty that remains even after she arrives.

A Working Visit

Later, the narrator says that he is going to New York City for a poetry reading. The tickets were sent two weeks earlier, and he is to receive a percentage of the proceeds from the event. The trip presents the city as a professional destination as well as a place associated with personal correspondence. On arrival, a poet and taxi driver named Gary Benson meets the visitors. It is nearly 110 degrees, and Benson drives them from the airport in his car while explaining why owning a car in New York City is almost pointless and why the city has so many cabs.

The narrator observes drivers packed closely together, each pressing on without yielding. He interprets the traffic’s lack of courtesy as a condition of the city: giving way could create a jam or a more serious disturbance. The scene turns congestion into a model of urban life, where movement continues because nobody gives an inch. The narrator finds this spectacle marvelous, while noting that the drivers seem resigned rather than angry. His account joins a concrete arrival journey to a broader impression of New York City as dense, unsparing, and governed by the pressure of keeping traffic moving.

Hotel and Reading

Gary drives the group to the Chelsea Hotel, where they unload and go inside. The narrator remarks that the hotel is not much, and suggests that this may be part of its charm. A companion named Marshall takes the visitors to the desk and gives the narrator a room key; Gary departs with plans to see them at the reading and again the following day. The hotel serves as a practical base for the visit, linking arrival in the city to the scheduled performance.

The reading takes place at St. Mark’s Church on a hot night. Beforehand, the narrator sits with Tammie in the room used as a dressing room, where she combs her hair before a full-length mirror. Marshall takes the narrator into the burial ground behind the church and shows him the inscriptions on the small cement tombstones. Readings regularly make him tense and unhappy, and he says he almost always vomits; on this occasion he vomits on one of the graves. Marshall identifies the grave as Peter Stuyvesant’s. The narrator returns to the dressing room, where Tammie is still looking at herself in the mirror and adjusting her hair. The performance’s setting places literary display beside a burial ground, while the narrator’s recurring anxiety makes the public reading an ordeal as well as paid work.

The City’s Double Role

The two New York City episodes have different immediate purposes: Mindy’s letters lead to a visit from the city, while the later journey takes the narrator there for a reading with a share of the gate. Together, they connect the private and public dimensions of his life without making either one secure. Correspondence can feel more open than conversation, yet the narrator remains doubtful when the anticipated meeting becomes real; literary work brings him across the country, yet the reading is accompanied by intense anxiety.

The city is rendered through concrete thresholds and settings rather than a sustained portrait: letters sent from New York, an airport arrival, the drive through compressed traffic, a room at the Chelsea Hotel, and the church and graveyard adjoining the reading. These places frame movement between distance and contact, travel and performance. New York City’s significance lies in this dual function—as the source of a relationship begun on paper and as a demanding destination where the narrator’s work becomes public.