Dear Diary: Blue!
Can you believe it? I forgot my camera this morning, and got all the way up the Cloisters before I realized that I’d left it at home. Happily, my companion, Jean Ruaud, one of the finest photographers in the world and certainly the best one that I know personally, chivalrously took a picture of my favorite Cloisters-area view, and sent it to me this evening for me to use here, which I shall do on Saturday morning. It’s certainly better than any picture that I’ve ever taken.
It was, as every New Yorker knows, the perfect day for a trip to the Cloisters. The cool, clear air and the sunny blue sky combined with Spring timing to make Fort Tryon Park look better than an opera set. For Jean, I think, the great pleasure of visiting the museum was the frisson of looking over a collection of richly medieval (and mostly French!) objects while standing solidly on Manhattan Island. I did not feel for a moment that politeness prevented him from dismissing the confection of 1938 that the Cloisters actually is as an enormous fraud. His pleasure in learning that a stained glass panel came from a town not far from his birthplace in Touraine seemed undimmed by any desire to repatriate it.
Jean and I met at Deluxe, the jolly college-town eatery near Columbia University, on Broadway at 113th Street. It was only on the subway that I’d had misgivings — wasn’t graduation due to take place about now? Indeed it was, and we should never have gotten a table if I hadn’t thought to meet at twelve-thirty instead of at one. Of course I saw the crowns on the blue robes, when they began showing up, but because the only graduates wearing them were women, I asked the waiter if Barnard were commencing. Columbia men must tear off their robes the minute the ceremony is over, because not a single male could be spotted in costume. As if to prove my point, all the likely-looking young men were carrying shopping bags.
At the table next to ours, a young woman sat with a middle-aged man, almost certainly her father. Their talk was desultory, and they seemed happy to eavesdrop on our bilingual-esque conversation. At one point, however, the young woman exhaled, with a throaty world-weariness worthy of the great Tallulah Bankhead, “Why can’t it be my graduation?” Her tone was pitched at a tone of perfect ambiguity, so that it was impossible to tell whether someone else’s graduating or her own not doing so was what bothered her. If I had to bet money, I’d say that an offstage sibling was involved.
The ride uptown was uneventful. The elevator at 168th Street (changing from the 1 to the A) was packed; the elevator to the street at 190th Street was almost empty, but for a few tourists and two spot waiters for a parks fundraiser (Bette Midler’s Restoration Project?) at the New Leaf Café. I took Jean on the scenic route to the Cloisters, with Hudson views and lots of flowers and lots of steps and the lookout beneath the flagstaff from which you can see the Throg’s Neck Bridge. As we were climbing down from the lookout, I noticed two young young men occupying the steps that it would have been most convenient to take. Well, one of them was huddling there. The other one couldn’t keep himself from gripping railings and hurdling over them like some sort of cowboy — or parkoureur, as I guess the word would be now. The huddler turned out to be a photographer. Worried about crossing his shot, I asked if we might pass. He seemed surprised by the question.
“Of course,” he said, his eyes opened wide. “We’re just teenagers.“
I shrugged. “You’re forgiven.”