by Ethan Seavey
It’s halfway through the month of December and New York is filled with pine boughs and small yellow bells and horse-drawn carriages and scarves. We are seated on the edge of the fountain in Washington Square Park, though this time of year the water has been shut off. A group of five skateboarders are practicing jumps in the large basin. We just bought a pre-rolled joint from one of the stands in the park, of which there are many. But we only buy from one of them. Weed is legal in the city now, but it’s not legally sold, so it can be questionable, and you never want “questionable” when you’re prone to paranoia. We trust the woman who runs this stand, though, because we know where she buys it and she has a rainbow flag on the front of her table.
So we sit queerly on the edge of a queer fountain smoking some queer weed. We talk about something, I don’t know, maybe how Halloween is a gay holiday but Christmas is a straight one and we have fatigue. A New York Christmas is not one of comfort or much joy. Starting in November, there’s a pressure in the air that pushes you to believe you need to do a long checklist of items. You need to see Rockefeller Center, you need to go to this small pop-up and that department store extravaganza. You need to go to the holiday markets at Union Square, where people shuffle by long lines of other people waiting to shop at little stands, and the ones at Bryant Park, which you never see because Union Square was such a nightmare. A New York Christmas is hearing tinny bells played on speakers for weeks and drunk Santas racing from bar to bar. A New York Christmas is one where you can only find silence and darkness when you’re tucked away into your tiny apartment.
Certainly there is magic in the season as well and I am rarely as gleeful as when I have a quiet Christmas moment with friends. But it is finals week and I can’t see past a devastating head cold.
A young woman walks up to us, and as soon as she speaks, we can tell she’s French. We prepare to mention this fact to one another after the conversation is over, because we had both spent the previous year living in France. She has long brown hair and a small face. She carries large bags. She asks us if we had a lighter. Of course we have a lighter because we needed it to light up the joint, so we give it to her. She thanks us both once. She bends over, putting her light-colored pants onto the dusty cement. She rummages through a large backpack. My friend tries to get my attention so that we can connect over the fact that she is French! but I avoid their eye contact because the French woman is already looking back up at us with an awkward smile. The cigarette is lit. She gave us back the lighter without a second thank-you. She walked off, hugging the edge of the fountain.
My friend is talking about the woman’s Frenchness, her long dark hair, her accent, her brand-new pack of cigarettes. I am focused on watching her navigate this unfamiliar city. Her large bags and her lack of a lighter imply that she’s visiting. As a cold wind fills our coats, she pauses and shudders. Perhaps the fingers of her right hand are a little warmer from the small fire at the end of the paper.
She moves towards the fountain, but she is stopped by old man with tattered and battered and rattered clothing. I cannot hear what they say but she hands him the lit cigarette. She looks around. She sits down on the fountain, five feet away, sans lighter, sans lit cigarette, sans smoke.
I expect her to walk back over to us and ask for the lighter again. She never does. She doesn’t ask anyone else, either. I suppose that if I were in a city by myself that I would find the courage to ask one person for a lighter, and that if I gave away my lit joint, I would ask someone else. The simple social anxiety of asking the same person for the same lighter is enough to keep me at bay. But to not ask for another? To sit without cigarette when you’re French and craving nicotine but not so desperately that you can’t enjoy a still moment without a smoke. My friend says that is what makes her the most French, that smoking in France is not an addiction but a moment of mindfulness and of mental rest, and that it is not absolutely essential to have a lit cigarette to take a smoke break. The French woman can be still and observe while in direct contradiction to her original intentions. I think my friend is wrong. The French woman is not in France so her smoke break is just an addiction again. She is anxious and alone and that is very American. She had hoped to smoke a cigarette to calm down but she was too kind to tell the man that she had no other way of lighting a cigarette and too kind to find another way. So she sits and anxiously watches the skaters. She waits, for something, and waiting is very American because the French just show up late.
All of these are fine enough thoughts to think. I smash the ashen butt on the concrete. There was sun in this spot five minutes ago, no? Yes, there was, but now it has moved behind that big orange building. Are you cold? No, but I’m not wearing a thin coat like yours. It’s not that thin, but every time the wind picks up I feel the cold bursting out of my skin like little pins. Do you want to borrow a scarf so we can go to the holiday markets at Union Square? Yeah, I’m cold, let’s go back to your place. Okay.