Visiting Manhattan

Of course I’d been to Manhattan with you a bunch of times — to see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade or the Christmas show at Rockefeller Center — but I felt like I was seeing it for the first time that day with Evan. Always, with you, there’d been some point to our visit, some destination that we had to get to or get from in a specified timeframe. With Evan there was no point to being in the city, other than the fact that it was the place where he felt most himself and most alive. We weren’t here to see or do anything in particular. We were just here to be, to soak in the city like sponges.
As a result, we walked everywhere that day, from Penn Station to Battery Park and the Statue of Liberty. Evan was convinced that the only thing riding the subway had to show you was human misery, the very thing we were trying to escape from in our lives in the suburbs, and paying the high fares to take a taxi was strictly out of the question. So we did it all on foot, every inch of it. There were times when I thought I was going to collapse or that my feet were going to turn to bloody stumps, but Evan never complained or tired once. He was always two steps out ahead of me like the Energizer Bunny, pulling on my arm while pointing out some new and glorious wonderment that I simply had to see.
And what was Evan’s definition of wonderment? A Peruvian family playing their pan flutes on the sidewalk outside Madison Square Garden. A woman in a business suit walking along Fifth Avenue, recounting intimate details from her personal life into her cell phone as though no one else could hear. Old men playing bocce in the park. The jugglers and clowns who performed their elaborate routines in Washington Square for nothing more than a little applause and some pocket change.
No Empire State Building or Wall Street Stock Exchange; this was his city of wonders, the people and the life of the streets. The pushing and the noise and the smells; all the things that were most common, that most people tried to avoid, these were the things that brought him the most happiness. Every time you turned a corner, there was something new and marvelous to see. He was like a child on Christmas morning. You could see it in his face.
That day also marked my first experience cruising with Evan since, regardless of what he was doing, he constantly had his eye out for beautiful men. This took some getting used to. Life on the field hockey team really hadn’t prepared me for the finer points of male watching. But as the day went on, I became better at spotting the specimens he was bound to find attractive.