September 23, 2002
More Park Life
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Badly dressed men play chess in Bryant Park. Between the chess and the relax-fit jeans, the savvy observer will realize that they have been single for many years. Your narrator sits with them and watches the game. One of the players is a tall black man with slacks too short for him, argyle socks, and scuffed white tennis shoes. He is an aggressive player but he tends to get his knights pinned on the edges. His cell phone is on the table next to the clock, but it does not ring. His opponent is a nervous Korean man who chain-smokes Marlboro Reds and scratches at his arms while he waits to move. He is a better player than the tall man, and he wins with impressive checkmates in the middle game.
Three young boys join the table and lean over the board. They whisper to one another about the possible moves of each piece. One of them has a plastic Pokemon toy that he runs up and down the columns of an empty chessboard. "He can move anywhere - he can move like a knight and a queen, and he can hop over his enemies to kill them." "That," the smoker mumbles, "is only because he is young." The man who watches over the boards and rents the pieces comes over and tells the players that the day is almost over: this is our last game. Everyone's spirits sink. The phone doesn’t ring, there's nowhere to go. "Do you want to go down to the chess club?" The Korean man asks. But nobody moves, they just slow down their game and savor every move. When the pieces are taken away the men sit around the table and watch the passersby. Some of them drift off, some sip from water bottles, some pull out their own boards. "What's going on in there?" the tall man asks, pointing to a massive white tent in the middle of the park. "I don’t know," says the other. "You can hear music though." And that is all anyone says for a long time. When the doors to the tent open the guests from the fashion show spill out into the park -- photographers run off to the subway, journalists laugh and head back to the office, then, after this first wave, beautiful models float out into the dying light like fireflies. They sit at green plastic tables, smoking and laughing, their arms long at their sides, their jeans low on their hips. The chessmen decide to hang around just a little bit longer today.
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