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don’t you take
her
to Italy, but she doesn’t want to provoke a fight.
    â€œAnd for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
    Colby waves his arm to signify all those transgressions for which an apology might be in order. Starshine pecks him on the cheek and turns quickly on her heels, refusing to hear whatever words he is calling after her. She is in bright spirits again, and her morning has no room for apologies or regrets. Her lover will spend the rest of his day replaying their breakfast, supplying extra dialogue and second-guessing their parting, but she will not. She will return home, look up the address of the credit union’s central office, deposit her cactus on the window ledge, and place her flower in water. No, she won’t even do that. Starshine pins the red rose under the windshield wiper of a random parked car and smiles at her handiwork. It all seems so easy.
NEW AMSTERDAM
    They expect to see Dutch New York, the city of Diedrich Knickerbocher and Peter Minuit, but they are sure to be disappointed. Their imperial seat has been swept away by time and progress, its yellow-brick mansions razed by fire, its tidy cow paths bloated to great boulevards. The shimmering monoliths of Big Coal and Big Oil and Gargantuan Capital have swallowed the foundations of the Fort Amsterdam settlement, its vistas, its contours, even its very soil, burying the vestiges in the bottomlands of steel-framed canyons. Landfill scooped from Midtown’s hills has honed the waterfront to perfect symmetry. All that remains from forty years of Dutch rule are a handful of incongruous place names: Wall Street, where a frontier fence once stood; Bridge Street, to mark the shoals of a thwarted creek; Bowery; Old Slip; Gouverneur Lane; the unlikely Bowling Green at the mouth of Broadway. These Dutch emissaries have come a long way to discover that they should have vacationed in Pretoria or Jakarta or Paramaribo, that they really don’t matter in Gotham, that they never really mattered. That New York can get along fine without them.
    Larry primes his audience with atmosphere, background, trivia. He blends history and legend, hot yarn and cold fact, pulling every last trick from his tour guide’s magic sleeve, serving up a smorgasbord of myths supplied by his employer and distortions culled from memory and outright lies fabricated for the occasion. He wants to impress the dimpled teenage godsend reclining in the fifth row; hermomentary pleasure is the breadth and depth of his constituency. As Big Louise pummels the accelerator into the floorboards, plummeting the coach down Riverside Drive with the full force of her ample weight, Larry sermonizes on the age of the harbor, on its span, on its bridges, Verrazano and Hudson, Colonel Roebling and Robert Moses, before detouring into an anecdote about wampum-dealer Frederick Phillipse’s love for an Indian princess. The Dutch tourists listen with polite deference. Big Louise grits her teeth as she tears through potholes and amber stoplights. The girl in row five fidgets, stifles a yawn with her hand, and leans forward in her seat to meet Larry’s stare. He speaks faster, describing the moonlit night of the couple’s final meeting, painting a pastoral, even romantic, portrait of seventeenth-century New Amsterdam. There are mighty patrons, noble Wappingers, spiteful Portuguese slavers. He is making it up as he goes. The bus picks up speed, lurching, its skeleton rattling; Big Louise jolts over manholes, cuts off taxis, moaning and cursing under her breath; the Dutch girl smiles, bathes Larry with a flush of attention, maybe even a spark of interest, her long hair shimmering in a panel of light. This is his moment. But suddenly, with all the advance warning of a boiler explosion, long after Larry’s charges have abandoned courtesy for a view of the downtown skyline or the Jersey coast, precisely at the moment of climax, of passion, of bloodshed, when it has become