Last week, Maya and I went to see “The Gates.”

We took the subway, using a time-tested meet-up trick: I sat in the front car of the F train and, at Maya’s stop (York Street), poked my head out the door to the platform where she, knowing I would be in the front car, stood waiting to hop in.

The trick always works, but you’re always a bit surprised and exhilarated by it.

“Hi!” Maya exclaimed, breaking the subway car’s complete silence and reaching for a hug to greet me. “Perfect timing! This was the first train I saw!”

“Hooray!” I said, and meant it. Had Maya not been there, I would have had to get out of the train and wait on yet another subway platform; as it was, I’d spent at least five minutes – which of course felt more like 15 – waiting on my own Bergen Street platform.

Our fellow riders looked up from their papers to see what was going on; people are only accustomed to teenagers and spare-change seekers exclaiming things on subways. Once they saw it was just two white girls saying hello their glances quickly averted.

Since the F is so darn slow, we decided to switch to the A at West 4th Street.

“I forgot how ugly this station is,” I said, as we stood waiting on the platform.

“I know,” Maya nodded. “It’s second only to Times Square.”

Eventually, we made it up to 59th Street.

“Have you been in there yet?” I said, gesturing to the Time Warner Center with my chin.

“No,” Maya shook her head. “What’s it like?”

I’d been only once, the month it opened, when I’d been in Midtown for work.

“Michigan Avenue,” I said, and Maya shuddered.

I laughed, which I could do; we were here to see art, the kind of thing that, growing up in suburbia on a steady diet of Woody Allen movies, I thought you did every day if you were a New Yorker. Now I live in Brooklyn and have yet to set foot in the new $20-a-ticket MoMA. But I also have a quintessential New York attitude about it: I’ll get around to it eventually.

But “The Gates” were free – and fleeting – so here I was. It was an unseasonably warm afternoon, and it seemed as if Mother Nature had ordered it up just so the city could appreciate the installation.

“Can I admit something really stupid to you?” Maya asked as we approached the park’s entrance.

“Fire away.”

“Until, like, two days ago, I thought Bill Gates funded this.You know – because it’s ‘The Gates.'”

I had to laugh.

“I know, I know. I’m an idiot,” she said, pulling a face. “But someone at a party made a joke about it, and I took it seriously.”

This kind of gullibility was classic Maya, but I nodded and said, “Hey, it could happen to anybody.”

Soon enough, we were strolling the park amid the saffron-colored fabric.

You’d probably think that Maya was the ideal person to go and see large-scale installation art with – after all, her sculptures were, if not installation art, at least installation art-like. But you’d be wrong. I’ve gone to art exhibits with Maya before, and she always has a similar non-reaction. She looks around very intently and tends to mutter a one word assessment/mantra, as if transported to some other state of consciousness.

So it was little wonder that her reaction to “The Gates” was to look around entranced and, every so often, say “wonderful.”

Clearly, we wouldn’t be having the typical “is-this-or-isn’t-this-art?” discussion – which was fine with me. Instead, I had plenty of time and mental space to ponder the ramifications of the installation, which really meant pondering Central Park and how much I miss living near it.

Our last Manhattan apartment was a half block away from the park. I walked on these paths every day. I’d heard people say how “The Gates” made them see the park with fresh eyes, and speak – really poetically, in fact – about how the exhibit made them appreciate the little things about Central Park they were always too busy, or too busy pretending to be too busy, to think about. They’d say how, as New Yorkers, we walk around with blinders on, and how all this bright orange fabric made them take those blinders off.

For me, “The Gates” made me miss living in Manhattan.

Yes, we have Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and yes, people do really get into it – it’s the people’s park and all that. I wish I could become a big booster too, but my walk through “The Gates” taught me something else: I can say what I want about the mall-ification of the Upper West Side, but in a certain sense, I’m still hung up on my old boyfriend. I still love Central Park. And I can say what I want about Brooklyn still being “the city,” but taking a 45-minute subway ride to visit this old boyfriend kind of defeats the purpose. It meant I wasn’t the New Yorker I thought I’d become watching those Woody Allen movies. I was bridge and tunnel.

Just as I was coming to this bleak realization, Maya said something other than “wonderful.” “Did you know they’re turning the Plaza into condos?” she asked. It was seemingly out of nowhere, but really it wasn’t.

“Yeah,” I said. “I heard that.” She let out an audible sigh. “I guess I’ll never be Eloise.