The New World

At the start of a new and terrifying century, it seems everyone's priorities have changed.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11. A GLORIOUS blue-sky morning. The air is so clear and crisp you feel you could almost see all the way to L.A. or London. At Talk's offices--an old piano factory in Chelsea, two miles north of the swanky financial district--we're all at work early to close the November issue. An editorial assistant rushes into the art department, where we are choosing photographs: "Can you believe it? A plane has flown straight into the World Trade Center!"

We crowd into the elevator and hurry to the corner of 20th Street and Sixth Avenue, which offers a straight-on view of the Twin Towers, downtown. This morning the clarity of the air provides to our astounded eyes a giant smoking rip across the face of the north tower. Some awful accident? A crowd starts to build, young downtowners heading for work with their brown bags of coffee and bagels.

We are still frozen in incredulity when the second jetliner knifes through the south tower. Collective disbelief turns to fear. A woman in jogging clothes starts to cry. Two hotshots who have been offering surefooted disaster opinions grow suddenly quiet. This isn't, after all, going to be a tabloid drama we can understand about crazy pilot error and dramatic rooftop rescues. Something incomprehensible is happening, something terribly wrong. The trunk of a car is open, with a boombox radio inside it. The driver turns up the volume. Everyone clusters around to hear fragments of news that only feed the rising panic. And then the unthinkable happens. The south tower buckles, drops in slow motion, vanishes. Then the north tower. Suddenly we are all holding hands and sobbing. "My children!" yells a previously buttoned-up young woman in a business suit. "I've got to get home!"

Absurdly, when calamity hit, the glossy magazine world had been in the full froth of fashion week. The night before, I had been sitting in the front row of the very chic designer Marc Jacobs's show, next to the debonair custard quiff of Donald Trump. Monica Lewinsky was in the row behind, rabbiting on about her new purse collection. Throughout we were shadowed by the impenetrable bulk of Trump's bodyguard. "Guarding us from what?" I asked merrily. "From crazies," Trump said. "Look, I was in a bar once and a guy suddenly comes over and starts shouting, 'I'm going to break your fucking face!' Now, in a situation like this, an intelligent guy, a guy like your husband, Tina, is not what I need. I need Keith here. Know what he did with that crazy guy? He broke his wrist like a twig."

The pictures from the Marc Jacobs show are from a vanished world now, and no one wants to look at them. We disperse to call our loved ones, collect our children from school, grieve each in our own way in the creeping hush of sadness that sweeps over every street in the city.

As the hours pass, another New York replaces the fabled capital of style. The Michael Jackson concert? That took place in another century. Firemen are our idols now. We love them with an almost shaming intensity. We love Rudolph Giuliani, too. His heroic example, I hope, puts into perspective the late-20th-century media hysteria about the relevance of a public servant's private life. This abrasive and often unsympathetic man has become the best kind of father to us all. As for the glossy world, the gadflies of fashion are out giving blood. At Talk staffers have turned the office kitchen into a pasta and red sauce factory for the volunteers.

Everyone's priorities have changed. Talk's creative director David Lipman, who had been focused on the renovation of his Murray Street apartment, two blocks from the Twin Towers, doesn't miss a beat when he hears that he may never live in it again. He treks through the downtown dust to recover his family's passports and pictures and finds an old woman who has refused to leave the endangered building. He carries her down the six flights and goes back for her dog and two cats. Madison Avenue legend and bighearted Talk consultant George Lois is incommunicado until the next day, when he sends a poignant fax: "I have joined the thousands of people in their futile effort searching the hospitals for their relatives and friends. Dick Lynch, well known as a great NewYork Giant cornerback, my best pal, lost his son, obviously trapped high in the north tower. Everyone is unable and unwilling to give up hope, but it is heart-wrenching to be in the midst of their suffering."

In the crisis center at Chelsea Piers I am moved to see the familiar open face of Sao, a telephone engineer I know, also looking for his son, who had a staff job servicing phones in the north tower. His big shoulders sag as he sits across the desk from a volunteer with a list that has nothing to tell him. A newsman asks him if he thinks they should now rebuild the Twin Towers. "I don't give a damn," he says fiercely. "I just want my kid back." That night in our apartment in midtown I hold my own daughter close. It is just the two of us here, with my son away at school and my husband on Long Island. In the small hours she is frightened and climbs into my bed. "It's that funny smell," she keeps saying. "What is it? What is it?" The wind has changed. I don't tell her it is the smell of death.

SUBLIMINALLY, PERHAPS, WE HAD all for a while been expecting some form of apocalypse. The turn of the century always begins late. The l9th started in 1815 with the battle of Waterloo, the 20th in 1914 with the shot at Sarajevo. Y2K turned out to be a missed catharsis, We were invulnerable, weren't we?

But there was unease, too. For close to two years one could feel an almost restless search for a reckoning. The dotcom collapse was the first harbinger of chaos--to those left out of the millionaire club's long fiesta, it felt weirdly biblical and just. Then the butterfly ballots in Florida. And now that the Armageddon has taken shape, we see that evil is borne on wings that are surprisingly low-tech. It was not a virus in the reservoir that hurt us, nor paralyzing digital mayhem, but knives and box cutters, a flight attendant with her hands tied, a fake pilot from a flight school in Florida.

I join a food run to the epicenter of the violence, to ground zero, sponsored by Drew Nieporent of the Tribeca Grill, Robert De Niro, and Talk's partner, Miramax Films. The Grill has been working round the clock under Nieporent's direction, delivering salami and mozzarella sandwiches and short ribs to exhausted rescue workers. Martin Shapiro, the restaurant's general manager, says the hardest thing was getting the food to the site, until Nieporent pulled a few strings and got a police escort to assist them. Shapiro and his waiters, waitresses, and busboys are as tireless as the firemen they serve.

The blue skies have gone now. It's cold, gray, and raining hard as we carry our comforting cargo further and further into hell. The reality of ground zero is utterly overwhelming, even after all the TV footage: the amphitheater of blown-out windows, the mud, the emblems of strength and power denuded of meaning, the glimpse of a fire truck still buried in debris after the extrication of its six dead heroes. A crane hoists the orange remnants of an overpass from the chaos, and for a moment it hangs in the air like a surreal iron crucifix. Then I feel we're in a heartwarming World War II movie as an open truck bounces through the rubble, packed with steam fitters in purple rain ponchos defiantly waving flags. But there is no need for nostalgic references. All the emergency workers and the firemen and the cops are the new claimants to the title of the greatest generation."

I notice a marble column standing in the food hall where exhausted firemen and volunteers can grab a bite to eat. We are in the lobby of building three of the windowless World Financial Center. The column was the signpost pointing visitors to the location of the blue chip companies that used to thrive there. Whether or not those companies return, I hope they leave the column where it is. The great names on their corporate plaques are now a strangely evocative memorial of the innocent, bustling past.

On Sunday we go as a family to our church in Westhampton. We've been part of the congregation since we arrived from London, and our children were christened by its rector as new Americans. It is hard to live now with the reality that the openness, freedom, and generosity of the country that welcomed us and has welcomed so many could be betrayed in this way. The packed church sings "America the Beautiful" with tears in every eye, and for the first time the words become my anthem, too.

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