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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.
I don’t know who you are but
The man who dines
At the prince’s restaurant.
But I remember an evening when we sat on
13th street and planned our demise,
not yet arrived—
and now it is too late
For anything except a mildly untimely death.
So dissimilar
And yet we had both been children
Convinced of death.
In Sanfranciso I swam laps convinced
I would survive alone—
Waiting for you.
Your date unused to high living.
Drunk I could dance because
I forgot the legion of things I couldn’t do.
Sometimes the only reminder of that landfill of time
Is the viscous fury that over takes
And bad behaviour reassures me of its remainder,
Storehoused like defunkt technology
Precious and useless
Had it’s uses
March 27, 2003
jesus, do you every think to yourself, jesus, I'm a complete fucking lunatic, jesus
and you don't even believe in jesus
March 22, 2003
I have been saved from war. They started bombing Iraq and Cordelia came to stay. Cordelia is eleven. Don’t think me some Sapphic Humbert Humbert—though we did visit the Butterfly Conservatory at the Natural History Museum —but pre-teen and teenage girls have lately reassured me about the future of our race. I have a certain sympathy for Brian Mitchell and his wife regarding their abduction of Elizabeth Smart. This misguided and wretched pair, however despicable, do seem to have had some sense that this golden creature was an antidote to what they had become, freshness in the face of a life desiccated. I have absolutely no idea what is going on in Iraq and have been studiously avoiding all media. I’m more interested in what is going on in Cordelia’s burgeoning world. (See the work of Marlene McCarty who has articulated all this and more so wonderfully in her drawings.) Cordelia has not yet put away childish things, she is as interested in stuffed toy animals at F.A.O. Schwartz as she is in knock off Prada bags on Canal Street, she likes the Beatles and Nelly as much as she does Henry Mancini and Jerry Lee Lewis. Let’s not “refine” our tastes, not put away childish things, resist specialising and selectivity, let’s broadband the world in an effort to circumnavigate the bear trap of the aging brain. She likes to make things as much as she does to shop for them. Her receptivity brought me back to boarding school and to classrooms where girls would capsize a room during prep by rushing to the windows in order to look out at a sunset. Adolescence was not a misery in my memory, it was a beautiful excruciation that I have been trying to recapture ever since. The company of young women reminds me of those precious nerves that grow up raw, wild, and function as the wide open transmitters of the world during these years. In the hot, damp, atmosphere of the butterfly conservatory, faintly scented with urine, I am surrounded by children of all ages and by butterflies. I find myself watching the children’s wonder more than the colours and shapes of the butterflies. We are re-told the familiar and fantastic lifecycle of these creatures, how they hatch from an egg, feed and fatten themselves as caterpillars to carry themselves through the rest of their metamorphosis, how they become pupae and break down their tissue and reorganize their whole beings to emerge as butterflies that live brief lives in order to mate and reproduce. We scrutinize the pupae in the hope that one will burst open, we are informed that it is a surprisingly sudden event and rare to witness, although we have just missed the hatching of a huge furry moth that hangs from the incubating case, trembling and raw but relieved. The green pupae fidget in their skins on the racks that they hang from. Maybe I can learn to clean my fuggy conduits and recapture some of that shining vitality from the company of Cordelia and her contemporaries.