New Year's Eve

Richard
New Year’s Eve
Westin Hotel, December 31, 2008

It’s 1984, and I’m in New York City, and Alex, a friend of Suzanne’s, invites us to the top of the Paramount Building on Times Square. It’s where he practices entertainment law. The windows are thrown open and we gaze down on a million people below, huddled in the frigid air inside police barriers. You need passes to get in, and like VIPs we’ve been escorted by a policeman through the crowd.

The music swings, the food is opulent and abundant, and looking down at the people below I remember The Third Man, the scene when Orson Wells is on the ferris wheel and he says to Joseph Cotton, “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”

Which character am I, and how have I arrived here? Here’s the sort of New Year’s celebration I remember as a kid. It’s 1955, and I am five and allowed to stay up late to watch the White Heather Club on the BBC. On the show dour Scottish people dance in formation to wailing bag-pipes and an announcer in kilt explains the traditions of Hogmanay, including the practice of “first footings” when a friend beats everyone else across your threshold with the gift of a herring. My dad leaves the house inexplicably and returns with a lump of coal. He and Mum top off the evening with a small glass of Ruby Sherry, and then we all go to bed.

Alex is handsome and generous, and he wants to impress me. Later, he will have an affair with a woman who has desired me, another friend of Suzanne’s whom I will decline, although she is beautiful and sexy the way New York feels to me. People jam the party, and Alex says to a small group of us, “Come on. Let’s go to the clock.” And we take the elevator up a few more floors and climb a stairway, Alex leading, egging us on and looking back over his shoulder with a daring sneer. It’s a few minutes before midnight, and we proceed in darkness along a mesh gang-way toward the giant clock, and the wind catches the roar of the crowd and sweeps it to where we stand in the freezing currents. It sounds like the ocean, and I lean over the railing as if on a bowsprit, feeling dizzy and elated, trapped and invincible.

I write this story in the Westin Hotel near where we live in Scottsdale. It’s New Year’s Eve, 2008, and Laurie wants to celebrate with strangers. We’re working on our prompts as revelers anticipate midnight’s arrival. Michael Buble croons “Just the way you look tonight” on the sound system, and a few feet from where we sit on arm chairs a couple with fixed smiles, hired to infuse an atmosphere of romance into the proceedings, are twirling with the carved moves of contestants on Dancing wth the Stars. Overweight men in their sixties wear tuxedos with plaid cummerbunds and patent leather shoes. The women on their arms, unsteady and self-conscious in stilettos, totter along in sparkling gowns. My sexy New Yorker and I are amused to find we’ve stumbled into a future that looks like the past, not quite the cheerless formality of my Scottish/English family party, more like the New Year’s Eve episode of Mad Men. It’s the time travel strangeness I recognize as myself, and looking across at Laurie who is writing, I feel our practice together connects me to this time and place.