Peter and I were at the stoplight on Broadway and Bleecker licking gelato cones and waiting to go back to the office. I was talking, and he was staring at a point about two inches above my eyes.
    “Do I have gelato in my hair?” I said. I still eat icecream much as I did thirty years ago, but usually I smear it only on my nose and chin.
    “No, but I just noticed you have all this…grey hair,” he said, plucking at strands. “Wow. Big chunks of it, here and here. In fact it’s white, not grey. I’d never seen it before.” We share a sunny cubicle twelve hours a day. “I like it,” he added carefully.

Sometimes, when we’re idle, my sweetheart puts a finger on the tip of my nose and moves it around, lengthening it and testing different angles. I have a ski-jump nose that was installed crookedly, and he has an art director’s eye. He looks pleased with himself when he comes up with a perfect nose for me, though it is hard to gauge with his finger in the way. In return I sometimes stretch his forehead smooth and try to imagine him twenty years ago.

I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who silently tweaks other faces. John Kerry is painful to watch because I can’t work out which PhotoShop tools I need to unclench his face. Would it help to take the sadness out of the eyebrows? How many inches should I sand off that jaw? Since I don’t have a vote in this country, the Issues matter less than my private game of Mr. Potatohead. Jenna Bush, whose thick neck and chimp’s features morph disturbingly into her father and grandmother, is another bothersome project these days.

My friends and I are at the age where we see first hints of the faces we deserve, and I search their features for changes to look for in myself. Grey hair, latent jowls, crows’ feet, smile lines, and knit brows: this where the stories start.

It’s a fine sight to see Brooklyn dancing to Congolese music under a pink sky. The Prospect Park bandshell is right under the JFK flight path, and at every one of these free summer concerts I wonder why anyone would ever want to fly away from here.

On stage the announcer shouts a call and response.
    “What’s the national dance of Argentina?”
    “Tango,” someone yells.
    “Congo word! National dance of Brazil?”
    “Samba!”
    “Congo word! National dance of Cuba?”
    “Rhumba!”
    “Congo! Word!
    “National dance of Brooklyn?”
We are stumped.
    “Funk! Congo word!“ He is beaming and sweating. “This is what Congo has given the world!”

Kanda Bongo Man comes on stage, a short, fat man in a pearly suit and boater. The backing dancers, wearing hot pink, are ripe and loose. We have just watched a Guyanese mask-wearing effigy dance wildly on stilts, then bend backwards to the floor until he lay like a scarecrow. Then he planted the stilts on the ground again, and made a great show—would he fall?—of arching back up. Those stilts were taller than a man, and the creature brought us to our feet, too.

Now the audience is standing, clapping, and dancing to Kanda Bongo Man’s music. Lesbian matrons in Bermuda shorts are jerky and abandoned, and their clumsy joy is catching. Beautiful men with dreadlocks shimmy. Plainer men bob their heads, and blocky Guatemalan toddlers march to the beat. Even the Irish girl who dances only at weddings, and then only when the father of the bride asks, dances here. Up on stage, a pair of African hips makes me blush like a virgin seeing Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show—so that’s what this dancing thing is all about.

    “Keep it great—pay three bucks at the gate” say the signs for the Celebrate Brooklyn festival. Those three-dollar nights have been a great delight this season. I’ve seen Mexican rappers—”Mexico represenTANdo!”—and the Mark Morris Dance Company. I’ve heard the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra play Appalachian Spring, and Barry Bostwick murder a brogue as an emigrant coming through Ellis Island. I missed my beloved Loser’s Lounge crew covering Bond songs before a screening of Thunderball, and I didn’t get to see the Alloy Orchestra accompany a Buster Keaton movie. I missed They Might Be Giants, pet band of the This American Life radio show, and saw only the soundcheck for the Neil Young Tribute on Canada Day. But I saw plenty more, and I slurped Bud next to interesting people. A furniture designer from Red Hook. A member of the Federation of Black Cowboys, who stables his horse nearby. A pair of bicycle activists, who later valet-parked my bike at another free movie under the Brooklyn Bridge.

These are my neighbors. Keep the Hamptons. I’ll take Brooklyn in the summer.

TV execs as coyotes: in Gana la Verde, a new reality show, immigrants jump off fast-moving trucks and eat worm burritos for the chance of help from a top Green Card lawyer. Which is not far from what some of us do to get here in the first place.

In my own mind, I more or less reared my two sisters, who are six and eight years younger than me. It may say something for the trauma this caused that neither remembers the hours I spent changing their nappies, plaiting their wispy hair, and reading stories.

The one recollection I’ve been able to pull out of them is of a game I invented called Drunken Hanleys. When they were very small, this was far and away their favourite game. I would stand at the bottom of the double bed and play a scandalized biddy chatting to a neighbour:
   “Well, I met those two Hanleys last week and do you know what I’m going to tell you? The minute I saw them walking down the street, I knew straight away by the looks of them…”
Claire and Caroline would stagger down the bed towards me, giggling and hiccuping. Claire usually managed a few belches.
   “You’re not going to believe me, now, but they were drunk out of their minds! Could barely even stand up! They were stocious, I tell you…”

When they reached the end I’d give them a shove each, knocking them off their feet so that they bounced and shrieked while I continued the tale of outrage.
“So I says, hello, how are you, and they just fell right over onto their bottoms! I couldn’t believe it! Drunk as skunks, the pair of them. And the young one with her bottle of whiskey…”

Up they got, weaving dramatically and swigging milk. At that age, Caroline was still unsteady on the floor, and on a soft mattress she made a marvellously convincing drunk. As for the story, it could go on for hours. I had listened to plenty of gossip by the age of eleven.

I also considered myself an outstanding child psychologist, and carried out several experiments on the girls. In particular, I had solved the problem of getting Claire to sleep. We shared a bed, and at bedtime she acted her age—three. This was tedious, because I wanted to read my Enid Blytons. These English boarding school tales were very instructive, and I preferred to think about Midnight Feasts and Mamzelle the French teacher and lacrosse, whatever that was, than the immature blither that passed for conversation with Claire.

So I started to whisper stories of monsters and bogeymen and ghosts. Certain monsters spent their time looking for small girls. When they found them, they liked to pop out their eyeballs to play marbles with, and in the eyesockets they left spoonfuls of soggy cornflakes. Other were crying specialists. Snotty noses were a key ingredient in monster bubble bath, and they found crying children a particularly good source. If they smelled your tears from fifty miles away, they were liable to come and steal you—or maybe just your nose. The bogey man lived in the coal hole out the back, and lived on tea and toes. At night he crept around bedrooms, sooty enough to hide in the dark, and bit off people’s big toes with his green teeth. Then when you stepped out of bed in the morning you fell over with no toes to hold you up.

The only way she would be safe, I explained night after night, was to put her head under the blankets and lie very still. They were mean, but they were also relatively stupid and most were inexperienced child hunters. If they didn’t know she was there, they couldn’t get her. This sent her to sleep—rigid with fear, but asleep. Or at least, quiet enough not to bother me, which was the main requirement. I did wonder vaguely if she could breathe.

After a week or so I had refined the experiment enough that she fell asleep almost immediately, in a kind of panic-triggered narcolepsy, I suppose. I was so pleased with these results that I told my mother all about it on the way home from school, thinking that she could learn a few things from my approach. The next night, I got my own bedroom.

Recently, I started to worry about the effect this had on Claire, who now has her own pair of toddlers to warp. On her last visit I brought it up very casually over a glass of wine. Did she remember, I asked, that I used to tell her stories to send her to sleep when we shared a bedroom?
   “When did we share a bedroom?” she asked.

I kept going. Did she have no memory at all of these stories, which might have been a little scary? She insisted that she did not.

I made one last try. Did she not remember having to pull the blankets over her head and lie very still so that the evil, savage, smelly bogey man wouldn’t get her and eat her up?

She stared at me.

To this day, she said, she cannot fall asleep unless the duvet is drawn over her head and she is perfectly still. If her face is exposed, she feels panicked. She had never known why. She is twenty-six years old, and her boyfriend insists she’s a freak.

Since I left Ireland I’d worried that I was running low on guilt. But it looks like I’m good for a few years yet.

The south side of the Manhattan Bridge frames a New York ready for her close-up. Liberty stands behind the Brooklyn Bridge, which swoops into the steel-and-glass asparagus patch of Wall Street. In the evening the sun drops behind the Brooklyn Bridge, the skyscrapers light up, and the moon rises over Sunset Park. It makes rent here feel like a bargain.

But since I last biked a month ago, they’ve moved the cycle path to the other side of the bridge. The pedestrians now have the south side to themselves, while the bikers have to spiral into a metal cage on the north. It overlooks the skeeviest part of the Lower East Side, a few housing projects, a suburban-sized PathMark drugstore, and the FDR Drive. No more Liberty, no more skyline, no more sunsets. Even my beloved Brooklyn looks like Queens from here.

It looks, in fact, startlingly like what you see from the 59th Street Bridge bike path. Same eerie emptiness, same metal cage. That view belongs to the loneliest period in my life, so much so that I hope never to cross the 59th Street Bridge again.

Almost three years ago, I moved out of what the paperwork later called the Marital Residence and moved in with my sister in Queens. I still worked for the company that my husband had founded. It was deep in the New York recession. He was begging for crumbs of investment, and the company was bet on a project that had been assigned to me. Somehow, this came to mean that we couldn’t tell anyone that we had split up. It would hurt funding. It would hurt the company. We ourselves were already hurt beyond repair, and so we acted our parts for six months, pretending that no one else noticed. We were ghosts. Every night, I circled the block to avoid being seen going north instead of south.

He got the funding. I finished the project. At a staff meeting, he made a short, kind speech thanking me for my contribution, and then I left.

The company survived. Few others from that time did. Its existence today is due to nothing more than the will of the modern Gatsby I married.

On Monday I heard that shareholder documents were making the rounds for signature. It wasn’t a surprise; at dinner the week before my husband had told me he was reviewing buyout offers. I sent him an instant message on a pretext. (Tentatively. These pings are always tentative now, since he is always busy.) He told me the deal would go through that night, and we chatted for a while. I knew how hard he fought for this business, and here was cash-money proof that he’d saved it. I didn’t tell him that I already knew about the deal. It felt shameful, somehow, to have heard third-hand, through such a throw-away medium, the price of our only offspring. I didn’t want him to know that.

And oh, such a motley crew of guests I’ve had these past few nights, biking home with this bleak, familiar view. I don’t fully understand why, but they are still arriving. Tears for the last five years, and for the months of skulking to Queens. More tears for the partial vindication of his dreams. Pride, resentment, fury, sadness, bittersweet pangs. I see him with his young business partner at the whiteboard in our tiny living room, and wish we were back there, and wish we’d never been there.

It’s muggy August in New York. Today it’ll get to 87 degrees outside, but in the office I’m wearing jeans, socks, boots, a long-sleeved shirt, and an alpaca poncho. I still have goosebumps. My co-workers are bundling up in fleecy sweatshirts.Every half-hour or so, I stick my torso out the window to get warm enough to keep typing.

American air-conditioning makes me crazy. You have to pack a blankie to go to a summer movie. Subway cars are like meat lockers. Stores pump cold air out onto Broadway, just because they can. In America, we have mastered nature, and every individual has the god-given right to freeze his ass off all summer long.

And we tell China the planet can’t afford for them to have cars?

After months of bike commuting, I’ve fallen off the wagon.

These things creep up on you. My bike was stolen. The tire of the replacement was slashed. I moved to Prospect Heights, which is well-named: after twelve hours at the office, the climb up Flatbush Avenue feels like a stage in the Pyrenees. Back in Carroll Gardens I could beat the chicken-bus F train to work if I pedalled hard. But up in these Heights, we have the B and the Q, sleek bullet trains that get to Manhattan in fifteen minutes. My good intentions wobble when the choice is forty minutes on the bike.

It doesn’t help that a few weeks ago my company moved to an office in glamorous NoLiTa, where the air-conditioning is as ostentatiously wasteful as a Pacific Islanders’ feast, and where you can’t bring a twenty-five dollar bike up in the elevator. You’re can’t even look like that kind of thing might occur to you. Instead we wear our winter clothes in August and zip around the loft on Razor scooters, partying like it’s 1999.

Then there was the Metrocard. I signed up to have the cost of a monthly Metrocard deducted from my paycheck, tax-free. Once that little plastic card was in my wallet, I felt as compelled to travel as the Pope. Even though I understand the economics of sunk costs, every bike ride felt like it cost me money.

So for a whole month I became a Q Train junkie, docile as every other straphanger. I liked it. I’d scribble in my notebook, or catch an extra hour a day of reading. I liked not having helmet hair and smeared mascara. I put on a few pounds as bike gristle melted back into belly fat. In the mornings, I’d listen to John Turturro.

I’ve been riding the subway with John Turturro since I moved to New York. He is my constant. When I lived in midtown he showed up twice on the E and once on the B. Once, in Carroll Gardens, I rode the F Train pressed up against his guayabera shirt. But in Prospect Heights our relationship has deepened. Every morning I get to the Seventh Avenue station at 9.27. (We are internet slackers—it’s 1999, remember?) Every morning, John Turturro is there. I live in the kind of neighborhood John Turturro would live in, and that makes me happier than a penthouse in the Dakota Building.

John Turturro commutes with a man and a woman who might be from his production company. He never sits down, even when there are seats. His companions are much shorter than he is, and they are clearly bananas number two and three. They don’t say much, but John talks plenty.

He looks good. Forty-five suits most men better than twenty-five, I think, especially the gawky ones. He’s very tall and lean, and that frizzy trapezoid of hair he used to have is now cropped and graying nicely. He still rabbits on, though, like a guy who hasn’t realized he turned out well. Or like a Brooklynite.

I look at my book and listen to him talking about some production snarl. I picture him as Barton Fink, so wrapped up in his own Talent that he does’t realize that John Goodman is more of a monster than his pompous little screenwriter could ever dream up. Same voice. I see him kneeling and begging for his life in Miller’s Crossing, so that you despise and pity him all at once. Same Brooklyn whine. Or as a hapless murdering fuckwit in Fargo. Or tossing pizza dough in a neighborhood just like Prospect Heights, as Pino in Do The Right Thing. Or in Redford’s Quiz Show, where his Queens character was so outer-boroughs that he made my fillings ache. Turturro is always memorable. It’s a surprise to see, after all that cowering onscreen, that he’s well over six feet tall and growing into his looks. How strange to become a success by playing jumpy failures.

His subway monologues are mostly about some production he’s doing. Sometimes, though, he talks about his diet and exercise regime. We all have this private fascination with our own bodies, but we don’t always get to hear the exterior monologue from a movie star—even a Brooklyn movie star. He can keep it up from Seventh Avenue to Canal Street. The kind of food he eats—not Atkins, not low cawbs, but lower cawbs. How he feels on the third set of reps, now that the trainer is making him slow it down. His cardio routine. What his nutritionist says. I love listening to this familiar voice riffing on his own little world. It’s pure Barton Fink.

But it can’t last. I can’t sit like a slug while John talks about reps, and I don’t hold with gyms. On Saturday, I took Benny’s bike down to Fifth Avenue Bikes in Park Slope, to get my slashed tire fixed and to flirt with Felix, the Puerto Rican sales guy. Back in my rich days, I’d bought three new bikes there, mostly because Felix loves his job. His guys patched up my jalopy without a murmur about the rusty wheels. My Metrocard runs out tomorrow, and I’m back in the saddle again.