It rained in New York all afternoon, a light persistent rain that gave the avenues a varnished look, as though the city had been polished for an occasion. The thermometer held at 9°C, and a fine mist softened the upper stories of the buildings, so that the Plaza and the Sherry-Netherland appeared, from Fifth Avenue, like watercolours half-finished. It was, in short, exactly the weather one would have chosen, had one wished to receive royalty without too much glare.
For a King, it must be said, was in residence. Charles, accompanied by his Queen, had laid his bouquet at the memorial on the site of those vanished towers downtown, and pledged, with the careful solemnity to which diplomacy is now reduced, his nation's enduring solidarity with the bereaved. One had only to see the photographs to admire the choreography. The wreath was symmetrical; the rain, considerate; the silence, audible. In another century such pieties had been performed by ambassadors, and the King stayed home to hunt. But the age has rearranged its uses for monarchs as it has for everything else, and a Sovereign now travels, as a debutante used to, principally to be seen.
The truly interesting business, as the truly interesting business always is, was conducted in the rooms beyond. The German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, had at last lost patience with the President of the United States – or rather, Mr Trump had at last lost patience with him, which in Washington amounts to the same disgrace. Mr Merz had spent the better part of a year attending to Mr Trump's vanity with the assiduity of a young wife arranging her husband's collection of porcelain; one rough season of the Iran war, and the porcelain was on the floor. By way of postscript, the President now mused that perhaps the American garrison in Germany might be reduced. In any drawing-room of competent hostesses this would have been understood at once. There is no grammar so brutal as the grammar of withdrawn favour.
The Iran question itself proceeded on its own terms. The price of crude oil had risen on rumour, above one hundred and twenty dollars in one report, to a three-week peak of one hundred and nine on the New York market, and rumour, as everyone present agreed, was the more reliable currency. The Strait of Hormuz had been closed in fact and was being closed again in narrative; humanitarian corridors were demanded for the very lanes the war had darkened; in Tehran a rally exhorted Mr Trump to desist. He, in turn, exhorted Tehran to "give up." Each of these performances was sincere, in the sense that all performances are sincere when the performer cannot afford to drop the mask.
The conversation drifted, as it always does, to crime. The United States Department of Justice had charged the governor of Sinaloa, together with nine other officials of varying respectability, with a yearslong arrangement of mutual convenience with the cartel of the same name. It is a peculiarity of our hemisphere that the word "governor" can be made to mean both a man elected to oppose a thing and a man paid by the thing to permit it. One was not surprised. One was only surprised, year after year, that anyone else still was.
Still, the evening produced its little marvels. The former Director of the Federal Bureau, Mr Comey, had surrendered to the authorities for the alleged crime of having posted, the previous year, a photograph of a seashell. Prosecutors discerned in the seashell a coded incitement to violence against the President. There is, one supposes, a charm in this: an entire jurisprudence of coastal molluscs. One generation reads its scandals in fans and gloves, the next in semaphore, and ours, evidently, in beachcombing. One wondered whether Whistler, had he lived, would have been indicted for the cabbage-roses upon his teacups.
By way of Paris, it was reported that French universities were enjoying a brisk migration of foreign applicants who had chosen Sciences Po over the Ivy League, citing visas, citing safety, citing the more decorous kinds of academic freedom. New York had once received such migrations, when Vienna and Berlin grew unsightly; it was only equitable, in the long ledger of cities, that the favour be returned. A Republic which had prided itself, within recent memory, on being the world's seminary now found itself, rather suddenly, the world's cautionary example. The cleverest hostesses had begun, accordingly, to season their dinners with French.
And lest the European powers feel slighted by all this American interest, from Moscow came the singular disclosure that the forthcoming Victory Day parade in Red Square would proceed without tanks. The tanks, one understood, were elsewhere. Mr Putin had meanwhile telephoned Mr Trump to propose a ceasefire, a brief one, calibrated to coincide with the holiday, and Mr Trump had agreed in principle, principle being the only commodity in which the two gentlemen transact at par. The parade would thus celebrate a victory of eighty-one years ago by means of marchers without their machines, while the present war ground on for the cameras of neither.
Outside, the rain had not lifted. It struck the awnings and gathered in the brims of umbrellas, and the men leaving the houses of the Sixties paused on the pavement to remark how seasonable the weather had been. None of them spoke of what had been said upstairs. That, of course, had been the purpose of going.
It is a quality of the present age, as it was of the age in which I lived, that its calamities are addressed in the syntax of dinner. The orders of magnitude differ; the manners do not. A monarch lays a wreath; a chancellor swallows an insult; a governor is named in an indictment; oil rises three dollars on the rumour of a closed strait. Between these items, the city goes on lighting its lamps and ironing its tablecloths, persuaded (as cities have always been persuaded) that to pretend a thing is normal is the first step toward its becoming so.
I should not, on the whole, advise the method.
