So I’m there with my camera lining up my shot, and Jane is standing next to me, the two of us crammed in at the front of the crowd and watching with bated breath. I check my watch, “Ten o’clock,” I says, “any second now.” I look over at her, with a big stupid smile on my face. She smiles back at me, and I swear my heart’s going to beat right out of my chest.
The whole skyscraper lights up like a golden beacon, big and dazzling and spectacular like the Big Apple itself. Even the Roman Emperors ain’t had nothing like this. The searchlights on the spire shine down on us like a beam from heaven, and I take my shot—I take several shots. I lower my camera, and Jane and I watch it with stars in our eyes. “We’re the kings of the world, doll,” I tell her, “and now everyone and their mother knows it.”
Jane jumps up and down with a huge grin on her face, and she says, “Oh, Rory, it’s the most beautiful thing I ever seen.” And I look at her, her dark curly hair and candy red lipstick and rosy cheeks, and I tell her, I says, “it ain’t nothin’ compared to you, doll.” She blushes, and between giggling she says, “you’re such a charmer.”
When we make it into the lobby, Jane blows her wig, and so do I. And we stand there staring up at the glittering golden inlays and polished marble and star-shaped chandeliers, our mouths hanging open like a couple of bozos. I see the mural at the other end of the lobby, and I point to it and I tell Jane, “I want to see it up close.” She says “I want to see it too,” and we push our way through the crowds to get there. I take my pictures for the Times, then Jane walks up to it and touches it, running her fingers over the embossed surface. I snap a candid picture of her next to it, not for the paper, just for the memory. When she realizes I’m taking photos of her, she turns and smiles, her pearly whites reflecting the glow of the incandescent lanterns.
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When she returns, she says, “Rory, if it wasn’t for you, I woulda never seen this place on the opening day.” She looks up at me, and her aquamarine eyes capture me and take my breath away. I take off my hat and put it over my chest, and I look at Jane and I pour my heart out to her. “I’m dizzy with ya, doll,” I says. “Head over heels, obsessed I tell ya.”
She blushes again, and her face glows brighter than the Empire State Building itself, and I feel like the richest man in the world when she says to me, “how would you feel if I told you I felt the same,” and I tell her, I says, “I’d be over the moon.” And then she grabs me and kisses me, right in the middle of the lobby. I feel like I’m on the silver screen, and for a moment I think I’m going to hear the crowd in the lobby burst into applause. But this is New York, and any old New Yorker ain’t never gonna care about some nobody newsie and his sweetheart. We’re all too busy reaching for the sky, see. And today, we made it. All it takes is one elevator ride to shoot you up into the stars.