The Mentor

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New York is Emma’s obsession. And so when she gets off work she decides to walk back to the YMCA on West Twenty-third Street where, since her arrival in the city a month earlier, she’s been living in a dingy little room that smells faintly of mildew.

She walks across Fifty-fourth Street to Seventh Avenue and turns south-up ahead she can see Times Square’s neon bazaar beckoning like a fun house barker. It’s a warm, cloudy evening; the sky is low and a darkening gray; the humid air seems to leach the smells out of the city: food, humanity, concrete, a heady, seductive brew laced with a trace of the sea. Emma thought she knew everything about New York, but the smells surprise and tantalize her.

She’s read everyone from Edith Wharton to Tom Wolfe, and weekly visits to her local library to pore over the latest issues of the New York Times and the New Yorker were one of her childhood’s few comforting rituals.]

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