Autumn comes and the days all start late

All at once one October morning you wake up and the light’s different, angled through the open window which, all night long, eyes closed and mouth ajar, you faced, a bit of breeze come through to flutter the curtains. It’s fall in New York, and it’s as if a crew of window-washers threw a bucket of sudsy water on the city and then squeegeed it clean. A film’s gone, hot August haze burned off, and everyone’s friendlier, more calm, not sunblind and sweat-soaked, sticky.

It’s one of the city’s two annual periods of transition, spring and fall. Summer and winter are static, owning the days and weeks with unquestioned authority—but spring and fall are interregnums, chinks in the armor, breakdowns in the system that summer- and winterly holds total sway.

Today, the twentieth, ten days later, is a gray day; now we should be sweating through shirts, the city reeking of garbage and last-gasp sex, hail-mary flirting, the end of a season; a sort of madness like in Sam’s summer, with which you empathize—but no, you’re wearing a sweater and so’s the carved-blonde beauty sitting across from you, her front to the window and her back to you, in profile.