had been flipped to a different side of myself.
Jacqueline Roux could laugh without losing her train of thought. No, she said, despite what you say your Central Park is different from any other park I have walked through in my life. Why do I feel that? Because it is so organized, so planned? A geometrical construction with such rigid borders—a cathedral of nature. No, I’m not sure. Do you know there are places in the park where I have had an awful feeling? Just for a moment or two yesterday in the late afternoon with its shadows, and the tall buildings surrounding on every side—nearby, and in the distance—I had the illusion that the park was too low!
Too low?
Yes, right where I was standing and everywhere I looked! It had rained and the grass was wet after the rain, and I for a moment recognized what I had not before seen, that the Central Park was sunken at the bottom of the city. And with its ponds and pools and lakes as if, you know, it is slowly sinking? That was my awful feeling. As if this is a sunken park, a sunken cathedral of nature inside a risen city.
How she could go on! Yet I was enchanted by the intensity of her conversation—so poetic, so philosophical, so French, for all I knew. But at the same time it was all too fanciful for me. Good Lord—to look for the meaning of Central Park? It was always across the street when I opened my door—something there, something fixed and unchanging and requiring no interpretation. I told her that. But in reacting to her idea I was yoked into an opinion of my own that was certainly a degree up from my nonthinking life.
I am relieved you know you suffered an illusion, I said.
It is too crazy, I grant you. I go back to my first impression—the design, made by artisans with picks and shovels, and so my thought is everyone’s first thought—it is simply a work of art constructed from nature. Well that may have been only the intention of the designers.
Only the intention? I said. Is that not enough?
But to me it suggests what they may not have intended—a foretelling—this sequestered square of nature created for the time coming of the end of nature.
They built this park in the nineteenth century, I said. Before the city was there to surround it. Nature was everywhere, who would have thought about it coming to an end?
Nobody, she said. I have been shown the underground silos in South Dakota where the missiles wait and twenty-four hours a day the military sit at their consoles ready to turn the key in the box. The people who made this park didn’t think about that either.
AND SO WE CHATTED away at what I realized was a level normal to her. How remarkable to be sitting there, as if at a sidewalk café in Paris, in conversation with a Frenchwoman with an alluring smoky voice. It was no small matter to me that she deemed me worthy of her thoughts. I said: You are looking for the secret. I don’t think you have it yet.
Maybe not, she said.
I was glad she wasn’t trying out her ideas on Langley—he wouldn’t have had the patience, he might even have been rude. But I loved hearing her talk, never mind that she had bizarre theories—Central Park was sinking, shutters were un-American—her passionate engagement with her ideas was a revelation to me. Jacqueline Roux had been all over the world. She was a published writer. I imagined how thrilling it must be living such a life, going around the world and making up things about it.
AND THEN IT was time to go.
Are you walking back? she said. I will walk with you.
We left the park and crossed Fifth Avenue, her arm in mine. In front of the house, I felt emboldened. Would you like to see the inside? I said. It is an attraction greater even than the Empire State Building.
Ah no, merci, I have appointments. But sometime, yes.
I said, Just let me get an idea of you. May I?
She had thick wavy hair cut short. A broad forehead, rounded cheekbones, a straight nose. A slight fullness under the chin. She wore glasses with wire frames. She wore no makeup. I did not think I should touch the lips.
I asked her if she was married.
No more, she said. It made no sense.
Children?
I have a son in Paris. In secondary school.