Beauty Spot.(Brief Article)

It was 6:00 in the evening on Fifth Avenue where St. Patrick's Cathedral and Rockefeller Center glare at each other over the rush like Scylla and Charybdis -- one of the worst times and places to hail a cab. Unless a cab disgorges at your feet, you must hope that an off- duty hack heading to Brooklyn will pick you up for some extra change on his way home. Two of us caught such a cabbie's eye, and since our destinations were only blocks apart, we shared the ride.

Since she was 30, she unflipped her cell and called another young woman to ask when X would set the date to marry his fiancee, to insist that Y was only a friend, and to wonder whether Tina Brown would work for Rolling Stone. Old and invisible, I stared out the window at the metal scarab beetles surging around us, and had the final indignity, when I gave her my fare on getting out first, to be sweetly waved off, and told to give it to the next homeless man I met, "to keep the karma flowing."

But the trip was useful, for I became conscious of something I must have been sensing, through the daily sleep of inattention: the "new laugh." Next day I overheard it on the sidewalk. Now it is my friend. You could call it metallic, but it also sounds like a comb rasping against wax paper, only louder. My working hypothesis is that it was created in bars: not the bar of, say, the Century Association, but the bars that hold one hundred young people, grabbing the gin drinks with both hands, and blowing off decibels. In such an atmosphere, a normal laugh would be inaudible, so young women have developed the "new laugh" to make their amusement register. So it joins the "cry of recognition" -- aaaaiiii! -- which I first heard about 15 years ago.

Both the "new laugh" and the "cry of recognition" convey information, but they are obnoxious, so it is unfortunate that young women feel they must emit them. I will let women comment on such masculine offenses as goatees and puking. Young women are one of the treasures of the city, and now, in our war against the harem keepers, even an issue of geopolitical magnitude, so I will concentrate on them.

A more arresting way of conveying information is the midriff slice. This is the gap between the shirt or blouse, and the skirt or pants. Now that spring has returned to the Northern Hemisphere the midriff slice shines on every sidewalk, but it was there all winter long, waiting to be uncovered as soon as coats were removed. Drafts could not stop it. The models and would-be models of course show it: the six- foot-tall girls with necks like stalks and heads like delicately balanced wild orchids. But so does the iron-pumper in my gym, with the dragon-head tattoo on her right shoulder, and the dragon body scaling down her well-biceped arm. The prosperous young woman with ...