Love Me by Garrison Keillor Page B

rowboats, the Sheep Meadow, a thousand courtly loafers in the Monet sunshine, and an asphalt rink where roller skaters glided slowly round and round in celestial formations, and up ahead the great wall of hotels and apartment edifices shines along Central Park South. It shone for my countryman Scott Fitzgerald in 1920. It shines for me.
    It was 76 degrees in the park at 3:08 P.M., said the sign at Columbus Circle. I half-expected some New Yorker to yell, “Hey! You with the hair! You’re from Minnesota!” as if I were Blimpy the Human Pincushion or Koko the Dog-Faced Boy, but nobody did.
    The Bel Noir on Central Park West is twelve stories high with twin towers atop that. The key to 12A was in an envelope at the front desk. The doorman pointed me toward the elevator beside a mural of a procession of pilgrims crossing a long arched bridge to the Golden City. I rode up with a nervous man and a young woman in dark glasses holding a Bonwit Teller bag and a mournful dog. He looked chastened, as if he’d been caught trying to escape and was waiting for his next chance.
    The apartment had a sizable terrace looking out over the rooftops, what the agent referred to as a “Parisian view.” The former owner, a guy gone off to Washington to help the Reagan administration stick it to working people, had left his junk out there: busted chairs, boxes of flotsam, curtain rods, crockery—but when I opened the door from the big sun-filled living room and stepped out onto the terrace, a high plateau in the canyons, I felt happy. Enlarged. Ennobled. I don’t need a divorce, just enlargement. To know I could put on a clean shirt and go to a show, and then not go. To have the Statue of Liberty nearby and never see it. To hear the crowd not far away and join it or not join it. This is what I always wanted. The big city life. Home of fabulous restaurants and their proximity makes it all the more luxurious to order shrimp in garlic sauce to be delivered and eat it on the terrace and look at New York.
    The apartment was disgusting. No attempt to clean your filth for the next person. Typical of Republicans. But there was a sweet little kitchen like a Pullman galley with stainless steel cupboards and a stainless steel fridge with double glass doors—which thrilled me, echoes of the Silver Zephyr train to Chicago—and a tiny bedroom off the kitchen and a pantry. A long dining room with a hanging lamp at one end and a wall of solid bookshelves. (What would Republicans do with bookshelves? Display their golf trophies?) A southwest-facing living room with fireplace. A guest room, small, dim, facing the airshaft (realtors call it the courtyard). No sense encouraging your guests to put down roots. The master bedroom with bath attached, a green-tiled shower stall and six shower heads to douse you on all sides. And the terrace.
    I loved my terrace through sickness and health, in riches and poverty. A magnificent terrace with a windbreak of spruce trees and birches in big cedar planters, and boxes of tall swamp grass, and even on winter days it smelled of the North Woods. Planes flew high overhead, following the Hudson south, descending to make the turn over Staten Island and come in across Brooklyn on their approach into LaGuardia. Every time I flew back to the city, I tried to sit on the left side so I could look down from the sky and see my terrace. On calm sunny days, it felt like Palm Beach. At night, the Pleiades hung overhead and the moon, and the terrace seemed suspended from the heavens. When storms struck, you felt the full force of the wind; the trees bent, the awning flapped. At night when I led my guests out to the terrace, no matter who they were, Minnesota tourists or old West Siders, jaded rich or impressionable youth, they always stopped and took a deep breath. It was like stepping out on the deck of a ship anchored in a harbor of high promontories of lighted facades, the apartments of other cliff dwellers all around, a tableau of