Monday, March 16th1 The last customer at a]acksrm Heights restaurant hefare citywide closures took effect.
prudence: we arc trying to save the
lives, above all, of the most vulnera-
ble. But, of course, the plague-in-prog-
ress may progress despite it all.
"Love in the Time of Cholera" is
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's great
novel of another plague time-with
cholera, we're told, referring to both
the name of the terrible disease and
the condition of being col&U:o, angry
and impassioned. Love in the time of
coronavirus was bound to happen-
in crisis and despair is born desire-
and it already has. Kids forced to leave
college and return home to the city
talked about long-sought last-minute
assignations on the night before the
general expulsion.
Sometirne6 desire in anxiety can be
more delicate. In Grand Central Ter-
minal, what some call .. the tile tele-
phone" -the whispering gallery in
front of the Oyster Bar,underthe beau-
tiful basketweave of arches-has never
been so clear. The noise of the station
is usually so intense that the tiled ceil-
ing turns mute.Now, for the first time
in forever, the abatement in the roar
and press of people allows couples'
murmured endearments, spoken into
one comer, to race up through the solid
Guastavino tile and carry all the way
over to the diagonally facing corner.
A pair of young friends encoun-
tered there that Friday weren't out-
of-towners; this was Kyle and Leah,
and they're New Yorkers through and
through, who decided that this was
the moment, finally, to really see
Grand Central. The appetite for the
joys of structured sightseeing is in-
domitable. Another young woman,
Amaya-visiting from Durham,
North Carolina, and crushed. to find
the city so inhospitable-stood in the
comer, smiling and singing to a mend
on the other side.
But it was on Saturday, when the
skywas blue and the temperature hov-
ered in the fifties, that the irresistible
wge to find pleasure brought out Hoc.ks
of young people to various outdoor
spaces. "I've noticed that a lot of peo-
ple my age are headed to Prospect
Park and are taking advantage of abeautiful day, a large space where they
can mingle, n a thirty-one-year-old
woman said, early on Saturday after-
noon. "They sort of keep social dis-
tance, but also connect." Many photo-
graphs, shared widdy on social media,
seemed to show the mil1ennials loung-
ing thoughtlessly close, prompting a
Twitter uproar.
The uproar did seem to reflect a
determination on the part of young
people in New York to go on living
like young people in New York. "Last
night I went out to a restaurant," the
same woman said. "And the wait was
half an hour. So we went to a differ-
ent restaurant, and at that one, when
the waitress was bringing out drinks,
she got confused about where to go,
since they had just changed their seat-
ing-I think to have more space be-
tween tables. "
Like life-hardened Sam Rivera,
these younger New Yorkers have
touching if perhaps worrying faith
in their own invulnerability. "I don't
think people in my cohort are that
terrified," the woman went on. "Most