In 2005 I had a part-time job in midtown, and I would walk two long blocks across 55th St. from the subway to this office building (mechanically reaching into my bag for my ID card/barcode, without breaking my stride, as it came into view). There was little to recommend this stretch of parking garages, restaurants, delis. A whimsical umbrella shop. A second story window that one day in the middle of February lit up with a daffodil-yellow frock—the atelier of, I think, Comme des Garçons. A couple of famous hotels I would never enter. Antique stores with Meissen figurines and enormous dynastic urns.

My brief and uninspiring journey would end, as I say, with the hand plunging into the purse, retrieving the photo ID; struggling momentarily against the revolving door, which ground forward at last to admit me; flashing the card at the conscierge who would then activate the second set of frosted glass doors; listening to my own footsteps echo as I crossed into the second lobby. There in the brushed bronze sanctum as I waited for the elevator I could brood momentarily on the John Chamberlain sculpture whose presence there seemed to mock my useless knowledge of Black Mountain College.

One day as I was stalled on the sidewalk by a delivery truck backing up into a garage, I saw the strangest object: a round mirror on a long handle, something like a dental speculum crossed with a golf club, with which postnineeleven security staff were inspecting the undercarriage of the truck. New York, honeycombed with spaces forbidden entry; New York, a labyrinth of invisibility to which each of us is handed only a few access codes to select passages; would that I could have had one of those mirrors to inspect the dark floating spaces that hid so many Chamberlains, only occasionally yielding up for public view the spectacle of a pieced couture dress.