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August 21, 2001
One of the advantages of being abandoned by your spouse in a steaming parked van is that you are forced to take in your environment. He had gone into the Rite Aid on Clinton and Grand streets to redeem coupons for an $11.99 three pack of Mach III razors. There’s something about the mere sight of shopping coupons that elicits emotions that I’m not proud of, disdain, impatience, anxiety. Nevertheless, we both have bits we like to shave, him since he shed his beard, me since I can no longer take the rantings of the Eastern European waxing women (my last regular just exiled her teenage son back to Roumania for being insolent to her; just think what she could do with a tub of hot wax). So I was secretly delighted that he was buying fresh razors. The light was leaving the sky and I noticed the Empire State building from a new angle. I am proprietary about the Empire State Building having worked on the 27th floor for close to ten years. It was a terrible place to work. But if you look up towards the top at a certain hour of the day, to the viewing platform—even from the distance of Grand Street—you can see the light bursts of tourist’s cameras flashing into the late summer twilight air. They were out of Mach III razors and the offer ends tonight. The cashier issued him with a “rain check coupon” so he could come back and get the $11.99 deal at a later date. Now I would never have thought to ask.
August 19, 2001
I’ve always liked that bit near the start of “The Sheltering Sky:”
“Port said: ‘I had a strange dream yesterday. I’ve been trying to remember it, and just this minute I did.’
‘No!’ cried Kit with force. ‘Dreams are so dull! Please!’
‘You don’t want to hear it!’ he laughed. ‘But I’m going to tell you anyway.’ The last was said with a certain ferocity which on the surface appeared feigned, but as Kit looked at him she felt that on the contrary he actually was dissimulating the violence he felt. She did not say the withering things that were on the tip of her tongue.
‘I’ll be quick about it,’ he smiled. ‘I know you’re doing me a favor by listening, but I can’t remember it just thinking about it...’
Kit closed her eyes unhappily.
‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded.
‘I think it’s extremely thoughtless and egotistical of you to insist this way when you know how boring it is for us.’”
The scene ends in tears, Kit’s. I’ve always been on Kit’s side in this matter. Nevertheless, I liked this one that I had last night, and it’s far from the grand, sad premonition of Port’s dream about starting life over again but not being able to. Mine was just a sex/guilt/bureaucracy dream.
I am leaving my sweet but dull cousin off at JFK. I have brought a huge duffel bag even though I am going nowhere. There’s a smattering of Nelsons in the departure lounge. My cousin leaves. A tall handsome Australian approaches, dressed in motorcycle gear but not the smelly leather of Mad Max. He is wearing the latest Balenciaga for fall, a sort of recherché, lightweight version of the real thing. We start to talk and somebody steals my bag. The loss is ameliorated by the opportunity to get on the back of Mod Max’s bike. We disappear for a few days. Eventually he has to leave as all sexual knights do, the quest is ongoing. Now I am concerned about my bag. Apart from the $500 cash, it contained all of my most precious belongings. I go to the lost property people, an army of faceless, green-uniformed women. Yes they have my bag. Some stuff may be gone but most appears to be still there. No I can’t have it. I can look at it but I can never retrieve it. I threaten them with the law. But this is the law.
August 18, 2001
It’s so reassuring to be reassured. One of the most reassuring things one can do on a Friday summer night in Manhattan, when you have been left behind on the island with all the others who haven’t gone to places with more verdure or ocean or both, is to take yourself to the back of the Corner Bistro and have a burger with fries. It was soothing after an evening that seemed to be intent on presenting Manhattan in horror mode. A homeless man wheeling his supermarket trolley, suitcase to his life, had something hanging over his shoulder or hugging his neck. As I looked again it appeared to be a child, the legs dangling down his chest, the head facing downward over his shoulder. Or was it a chimpanzee dressed in a baseball outfit? Whatever it was it was not living. The teenage girls at the front of the bus, all three with cell phones and braces, are staring too. As the bus slows for a stop I can look again: perhaps he has fashioned this dead humanoid leech out of stuffed items of clothing.
The beautiful one-legged woman in the shower at the gym, fresh from the pool, lopsided mermaid.
The homeless man begging through a cab window with a hand that has had all of its digits ripped off.
And I can go and have a burger and be reassured? Shameful but true.
Perhaps the sweetest thing
You may encounter
On a New York street
Is a pigeon toed girl,
Head angle poised,
Walking Alone,
Laughing.
August 13, 2001
Mid-August fall is its own season. Through the heat today there was something autumnal in the air. You could be convinced that the phenomenon of the American summer, so neatly folded between Memorial and Labor Day, was coming to an early close.
A visit to the dentist. I’m in the chair waiting for numbness after the needle, looking out of the window at the premonition of fall and listening to the dialogue of an old black and white movie on the recently installed TV, which I can’t see from my seat. Do voices still sound like that? I think not. Have voices changed or did the sound recording then make them sound creamier, layered, like cake?
The dentist has disappeared, his assistant had come in to tell him that a patient was in the waiting room with an emergency.
“She wants you to take out all her teeth.”
“Is she in pain,” he asks.
“No, but she’s crying.”
Coming from the waiting room is the persistent howl of a woman, a cry that rises and falls but refuses to wane. This, coupled with the strangely racy dialogue of the old movie, is creating a ball of hysterical laughter that rises through me. The dentist returns to tell me that the woman, who is 93, may be demented but she knows exactly what she wants: She wants her teeth out. His assistant joins him and the task of reupholstering my rotten teeth begins. He drills, she holds the suction pipe, I try to make accommodating spaces for their instruments. There is an element of mirth in the room not usually associated with dental procedures. By now the woman has gone, she will return tomorrow to have her teeth extracted. The three of us gathered around the drill can barely contain our embarrassed glee: the terrible weeping has ceased, we are not 93, we are not having our teeth pulled.