The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez

Author:Sigrid Nunez [Nunez, Sigrid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

Violet was right (Violet was usually right): it wasn’t hard for Vetch and me to avoid each other. We had our separate rooms with—mercifully—our own baths; we had our different routines. I got up early, he got up late, by which time I’d already be gone. With the milder weather I stayed out longer and longer, venturing farther and farther, stopping in parks along the way. Though I never took my phone with me, I always brought something to read.

In recollection it seems less memory than dream, how transformed the stricken city was. For years I’d been disheartened by its growing defacement: the brutal high-rises, the piled-up trash and hellish din, the garish advertising no matter where you looked.

In the city I was never free, said a man who became a hermit. In the city there is always someone in your way. Twenty years of cave dwelling had brought contentment, he said. (About the sow who was his sole companion, he told a reporter: I love her, and she listens to me.)

Now I couldn’t help feeling guilty about the pleasure I took in the lifeless streets. To be the only pedestrian, block after block, to have an acre of Central Park to yourself. (And oh, the red-tailed hawks, the bald eagle landing almost at your feet.) If in the past I’d often found myself wishing to be elsewhere, grateful for any reason that took me temporarily away from New York, once the pandemic began I had no wish to leave. I didn’t share the widespread resentment toward those who’d fled to their country homes, but I understood the common fantasy that the many now gone—along with the millions of missing tourists—would not return.

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