New York City, August 17, 2015

★★★ Again the haze leached up from the horizon. A gray-haired man in a polo shirt and a young woman in a bikini occupied identical chairs on opposite sides of some superstructure on the newly opened tower’s roofdeck, in shade and sun respectively. People forked up lunches while sitting on benches in the forecourt plaza. White things were blinding. Clouds closed over Fifth Avenue in the afternoon. A drip might have fallen from them; under a scaffold something was clearly dripping, though why exactly was obscure. Led by the brightening Empire State, the landscape turned sunny again. By evening the sky had gone back to blue. The air was restoratively warm; the gaze up and down the avenue passed through tinted sheer curtains. The movie theater was right there, but the air conditioning spilling out the door made it too forbidding to go inside.