Between Fifty-Ninth Street and the Williamsburg Bridge, the Empire and the Chrysler trip shyly through the surf. We can see New Yorkers, tumbling out of their taxicabs and buses, staring up at the sunset reflecting in our doll’s eyes.
The Empire has an awkward heart-shaped light appended to his skull, which Valorous and I do some snickering over. The Chrysler glitters in her dignified silver spangles. Her windows shimmy.
As the pedestrians of three boroughs watch, the two tallest buildings in New York City press against one another, window to window, and waltz in ankle-deep water.
I look over at the Empire’s windows, where I can see a girl standing, quite close now, and looking back at me.
“Victor,” I say.
“Yes?” he replies. He’s eating vichyssoise beside a green-gilled tycoon, and the boxer Gene Tunney is opposite him smoking a cigar. I press a cool cloth to the tycoon’s temples, and accept the fighter’s offer of a Montecristo.
“Do you see that doll?” I ask them.
“I do, yes,” Victor replies, and Tunney nods. “There’s a definite dolly bird over there,” he says.
The girl in the left eye of the Empire State, a good thirty feet above where we sit, is wearing red sequins, and a magnolia in her hair. She sidles up to the microphone. One of her backup boys has a horn, and I hear him start to play.
Our buildings sway, tight against each other, as the band in the Empire’s eye plays “In the Still of the Night.”
I watch her, that doll, that dazzling doll, as the Chrysler and the Empire kiss for the first time, at 9:16 P.M. I watch her for hours as the Chrysler blushes and the Empire whispers, as the Chrysler coos and the Empire laughs.
The riverboats circle in shock, as, at 11:34 P.M., the two at last walk south toward the harbor, stepping over bridges into deeper water, her eagle ornaments laced together with his girders. The Chrysler steps delicately over the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island, and he leans down and plucks it up for her. We watch it pass our windows as she inhales its electric fragrance.
“Only one way to get to her,” Valorous tells me, passing me a rope made of tablecloths. All the waitstaff of the Cloud Club nod at me.
“You’re a champ,” I tell them. “You’re all champs.”
“I am too,” says Tunney, drunk as a knockout punch. He’s sitting in a heap of roses and negligees, eating bonbons.
The doll sings only to me as I climb up through the tiny ladders and trapdoors to the eighty-third, where the temperature drops below ice-cream Cupid. I inch out the window and onto the ledge, my rope gathered in my arms. As the Chrysler lays her gleaming cheek against the Empire’s shoulder, as he runs his hand up her beaded knee, as the two tallest buildings in New York City begin to make love in the Atlantic, I fling my rope across the divide, and the doll in the Empire’s eye ties it to her grand piano.
At 11:57 P.M., I walk out across the tightrope, and at 12:00 A.M., I hold her in my arms.
I’m still hearing the applause from the Cloud Club, all of them raising their coupes to the windows, their bourbons and their soup spoons, as, through the Chrysler’s eye, I see the boxer plant his lips on Valorous Victor. Out the windows of the Empire State, the Cyclone wraps herself up in the Brooklyn Bridge. The Staten Island Ferry rises up and dances for Lady Liberty.
At 12:16 A.M., the Chrysler and the Empire call down the lightning into their spires, and all of us, dolls and guys, waiters and chanteuses, buildings and citizens, kiss like fools in the icy ocean off the amusement park, in the pale orange dark of New York City.
Copyright (C) 2014 by Maria Dahvana Headley
Art copyright (C) 2014 by Lars Leetaru
