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My husband sends me odd things in the mail,
Even though he is not my husband any more.
Every one should have a husband,
Just one.
Lovers galore.
June 22, 2003
On Sundays, the day off, when I wake up to take the first pee I also stagger to the kitchen and make a loaf of brown bread. I can do it fast and semi-somnambulent. I put it in the oven and set the alarm clock for 45 minutes hence. The alarm goes off and the smell of baking bread has permeated the apartment and for a second time I can lie there for a moment savoring the prospect of the day off and the satisfaction that I have managed to complete the baking of the bread. I take it out of the oven, tap its bottom— even though I know it’s cooked from its distinctive smell—and wrap it in a linen tea towel and then put it on a baking rack. And I go back to bed for a second delicious time. And I dream. We wake up late and we have both had the same dream. That we are living in the spare room of our friends in Los Angeles, that we have lost everything and are starting over again. It wasn’t a bad dream, not for me. I can’t imagine not being ready to start all over again, it’s the magic potion in my kit. We sit down to brown bread, butter, jam and excellent coffee. I hope we can always do this.
June 15, 2003
Now that smoking is as deliciously illicit as it was in boarding school I have taken it up again after fifteen years. One a day. It was always the only vice I could control. Besides, it makes for the best restaurant break. I’m in the bathroom stalls again, I’m behind the bicycle shed, I’ve found something I can join. I’m standing with the bar back on the street, his brother is getting out of the big house after 41/2 years, the same age as his son. The bar back says he’s never going back to the big house; he has five jobs. He is surprisingly small for his physical strength and volume of character. His arms and face are cut up but his skin color makes the scar tissue a cappuccino color, not the pink pig color of my own scars. When I am close to him I find myself examining his skin and his profile and thinking of Velazquez, one of the more handsome subjects, perhaps with a ruffled collar. A beautiful woman sits at the bar and he says to the bar tender, “I’d fuck her like she stole something.” I’m not quite sure what he means but I relish the idea.
June 14, 2003
We were late, which is normal with us. On this particular evening we are late in Paris. I become quiet and angry and he becomes distant. I will sit in the cab and knit with my irritation on my lap and he will remove himself. Later he will manifest some form of anger himself, which further irritates me as it is usually him who makes us late. We are standing outside the hotel waiting for our cab to take us to a gastronomic dinner which will be overpriced and disappointing. We will sit in the airless dining room with layers of tablecloths draped on the lower half of our bodies, which further increases the sensation of being tortured as an endless parade of dishes that seem to have been concocted for some sort of fine dining baby food company come to the table in furious succession. The late evening is churning its light into dark. It happens later here in spring and summer. I miss this about European summers. I like to remind myself how much further north we are. Outside the hotel as we wait an American couple walk down the middle of the street hand in hand. They are the age of recent grandparents, still handsome and brown with the tans of an early spring spent traveling in Europe.
“You were the strong one.”
I overhear him say this to her as I am suppressing the urge to run away from my mate and an evening of fine dining. Her posture is memorable. She is tall and straight and her yellow dress accentuates the strength and vertical line of her back. It is perfectly obvious that she is the strong one. But what in particular was she strong about, what in their life together required the most strength? I don’t want another ten course tasting menu, I want a saucisson sandwich with un peu du beurre and an Affligem. Was she strong about his philandering, about illness, about money or the lack of it, about a child lost or gone astray, about there not being children? There was comfort in his remark, not just in the compliment, but in the suggestion that this part of their life was over. That now they were walking down the rue Saint Benoit hand in hand on a late spring evening and she was wearing a yellow dress that was not beautiful but that flattered her tan and her bones that were not ravaged by osteoporosis.
When we escape from our gastronomic inquisition our fury with each other will have dissipated into relief. We don’t have to eat any more and the air is cool as we walk down the bright acid glare of the Champs Elysees.
May 7, 2003
Things that strike me, repeatedly, during the workaday routine of restaurant life:
The sign on the inside of the walk in refrigerator door: “You are not locked in.” Brief instructions follow as how one should push open the door.
A comment that repeats itself in my memory, made by a fellow restaurant worker years ago regarding the dining public, please imagine it said with a strong Spanish accent: “Why do they come in here with their hate faces?”
The percussion of the ice machine heard when one is closing and all other sounds are dimmed, a ghostly urban iceberg working its way into existance.
After the hump of evening service diminishes I retreat downstairs to my office in order to try and tackle the following days office work in some vague optimism that this might make that tomorrow simpler and longer in leisure. Beside me the micros computer dials credit card approvals, the valiant sound of dial and connect, the beeping scale and fuzz of a computer buying dinner for a body upstairs. A sound, one hopes, that heralds the happy conclusion to another meal in another maw. I like that the computer is completing a night task upstairs while I am already with the next day.