Mallory's Camera

My pal Aimee is what Malcolm Gladwell calls “a Connector.”

Thus, when Aimee texted, So…do you have dinner plans tonight? Dr. Felix DeVos (not his real name) from London is spending today at the FDR Library and house. He doesn’t have a dinner date, and I suggested getting a res at the Culinary and inviting you. He’s currently on a book tour…, I thought, “What the hell.”

###

As it turned out, Felix and Aimee have never spent any time together in person. They’d met on a dating app.

This is the way I met Aimee, in fact: Although my OKStupid profile gave no indication whatsoever that I like girls, she was bi-curious and decided I would be the perfect person to give her a guided tour of the Temple of Sapphic Delights.

Now! I’ll meet anyone on the planet once: Nazis, serial killers, wanna-be Lesbians—makes no difference. I’m very curious about what makes people tick. Which is something that can only be done while you’re watching what happens in the holes of a real-time conversation.

So, I drove out to Aimee’s 19th century farmhouse in Hudson for an afternoon, and she served me high tea.

It’s strange: With men, I don’t have a type. My male lovers have run the gamut. I’ve had some outstandingly unattractive male lovers in my time, and it hasn’t mattered one bit. Some truly insane male lovers, too.

But with women, I have a very specific type, and that type conforms to very conventional standards of beauty.

I think this is because I grew up in an era that objectified women’s looks practically more than any other era in history. Why would men be the only ones affected by that type of operant conditioning?

At any rate, Aimee was not my type. I could imagine kissing her. But only if she were a billionairess and I’d witnessed the signing of that codicil to her will that left me five million dollars. And she was suicidal.

###

I liked Aimee, though. She was very Brit, very gracious, made excellent light conversation. And it turned out we travel in the same wobbly social circle, know some of the same people.

Plus, Aimee’s house was beyond fabulous. She’d managed to transform this lackluster rural farmhouse into something quite magical. Aimee has a genius for interior décor, and she sews and cooks like a dream. The good fairy who endows talents in the household arts boycotted my christening, so when I meet people with this particular skillset, I’m always wildly impressed.

We became friends.

While she was living in Hudson, she gave lots of parties, many of which I attended.

Now she lives in Vermont.

I’ll be visiting her the first week in October. Turns out she’s the only person who had the slightest interest in accompanying me on a road trip to see the Bread & Puppets Theater puppets again. Noel bailed. (No surprises there!)

###

Here is this morning’s debriefing session:

Aimee: So was there enough to make a compelling two person movie?

Me: Well. I would be well beneath the title credits in that movie. 😄 He DID tell me you & he "met" on a dating app. So, I figured I was doing reconnaissance for YOU. 😄

I liked him! He is very, very bright. And an amusing conversationalist (if a bit more suited to telling stories to an audience than engaging in intimate one-to-ones.) If even a third of the stories he told me were true, he's had a VERY interesting life.

Beneath that exterior, there's a certain... boyishness? LOST boyishness.

He is not terribly into his body. Overweight (though who isn't?) but still wearing a suit that may have fitted him well 20 lbs ago. That, by the way, shouldn't be a deterrent: One of the best lovers I ever had (at least from a technical standpoint) was borderline obese, and I still had 12 orgasms every clinch! 😄 In fact, Felix reminded me of this guy a little.

I'd say, "Go for it!" when you're in London. If nothing else, you'd have an incredibly entertaining afternoon at the British Museum before your sojourn in the bedroom. 😄

One thing that was interesting: We were definitely flirting in a mild, playful way. I think he realized I was older than he is—he's 39—but I don't think he knew HOW much older. I couldn't tell whether this was because (a) he has a kink for older women, (b) he likes whom he likes & isn't guided by convention in that one, or (c) he is unobservant about other people and missed the telling cues.

But as I say, I liked him! He is definitely someone I would spend an afternoon at the British Museum with!

Aimee: None of this surprises me- and yes, his kink is older women!

Me: 😄

Aimee: He told me that he had an astounding intellect- and in a later convo that you and I would be gossiping about him. I noted he should have added “and ego” to his intellect qualifier- and that we had other men in common about whom we might gossip…

Me: He is VERY smart. A playful intellect. The best kind. 😄 He has my stamp of approval. 😄

Aimee: He found you to be a “delightfully engaging dinner companion” I’m glad you liked him.

Me: Yes. We had a delightful time.

Aimee: And thanked me graciously for the suggestion.

Me: Excellent manners. Go for it. 😄

Aimee: Lolololol. Is he short as well as portly? Intellect and manners notwithstanding .. I’m killing myself laughing over raspberry jam-making here

Me: 😄 He's my height. 5'10" or so. Portly is a good description.

Aimee: But I do like me a boffin. Both literally and figuratively.

Me: He is a TOTAL boffin! 😄 I can't imagine anything more boffin-like than someone who gets excited over SECRET CLUBS! 😄

Aimee: I haven’t told him that I belonged to one in London in the 70s yet..

Me: Ohhhh. Save that for London! Preferably when you're naked. His erection will go from half-mast to "Attention, ma'am!" 😄

Aimee: Oh dear.. not a chance, I think. And I’d hope he’s too young for half-mast..

Me: You're opting out?

Aimee: I’m going to meet him, I expect- but not much else. I don’t have the head space for one-and-done pro tem- or long distance.

Me: Ah. Yes. London IS a long way from Vermont. But you go to London—what? Once a year? And it sounds as though Felix visits the States once a year. Relationships have been built on less.

Aimee: I’ve not been to London since just before Covid. There would have to be a lot more than anything I’ve seen so far to interest me. I actually met another historian this spring. Also brilliant and portly.

Me: And...? 😄

Aimee: He’s the [Easily traceable details redacted here.] He was insistently pushy when I declined and way too sexually active for my liking..

Me: Ick!

Aimee: And met me with a sexual opening comment that I found off-putting. I had the same kind of thoughts about him, just not being aware, and then thought, Nah. No thanks.

Me: Hmmmm. I don't think Felix is "unaware." But I think one would have to do something out of the ordinary to activate his awareness that you are a real human being who thinks and feels. He is solipsistic in that way lonely, imaginative children are solipsistic.

Aimee: As opposed to narcissistic? How interesting.

Me: Yeah. I wouldn't call Felix "narcissistic," either. Felix's mother (from what I gather—and I don't know how much of the story is true: Felix DID strike me as someone who never lets the truth stand in the way of a good creation myth) dragged Felix all around the globe at a very young age. Think "Hideous Kinky" if you're familiar with either the novel or the film. Felix talked about it as though it were a wonderful rollicking adventure. I doubt that it was. That's not narcissism. That's solipsism.

I worked.

But I didn’t work hard enough because I was nowhere near where I wanted to be by the time it was time to toddle off to Rhinebeck to meet up with Kimberly.

###

As a sidebar, I’ll note that working is getting harder and harder!

I don’t want to work—assuming I ever did want to want to work, which, of course, I didn’t, being the laziest person on the planet.

It’s time for the Universe to support retablo-making, novel-writing, and gardening by vouchsafing me some huge sum of money—but, of course, you can’t ask for the money directly because of that Monkey’s Paw clause that attends all such requests. Like if you say you want to magically lose 30 pounds, you’ll get cancer! If you say you want a million dollars, your favorite person in the world will get hit by a speeding Tesla, and the million bucks will be the settlement.

Etcetera.

The only safe conversation to have with the Universe is Inshallah.



Kimberly had a rough winter.

I mean, we all did, but I think Kimberly’s was rougher than mine.

She broke her foot! I know so many people who’ve broken their feet within the last cluster of months that I’m wondering whether it isn’t some unresearched side effect of Covid.

She got so freaked out about Covid that she spent three months holed up inside her fabulous Woodstock house without venturing outside once or seeing one other human soul. Got all her food and necessities via Instacart.

She had panic attacks.

She stopped sleeping.

She briefly went on Trazadone.

###

The most interesting part of my conversation with Kimberly, though, happened while we were discussing our romantic lives.

“Forgive me if I’m presuming, but I always get the impression that you consider that part of your life to be over,” she said to me.

“Well, never say never,” I replied.

But I was thinking of that conversation I’d had with Neighbor Ed’s friend Reed. Couple a weeks back. Reed is reasonably attractive. Eligible, I guess. (Is that why Neighbor Ed introduced us?). We were talking about dating. In the abstract.

“Don’t you get lonely?” Reed asked me.

“Sometimes,” I said. “But less often than you might think.”

“But what about sex?”

“What about it?” I asked.

“Well, I mean…”

“I have lots of vibrators,” I said. “And other sex toys.”

Reed’s eyes bugged out. “But, but, I mean—”

“And I know what I like,” I continued explaining helpfully. “No learning curve necessary.”

Kimberly thought this conversation was hilarious!

“Actually, the last person to whom I was attracted in a romantic sense was a woman,” I told Kimberly.

And told her the story of Aimee’s Christmas party.

Aimee and I have become much better friends since then; I have genuine affection for her now. But at the time she was something of a caricature to me, and all the other guests were caricatures, too—except for BB with whom I’d come because I Don’t Drive in the Winter.

Happens I am excellent at talking to strangers even when they’re weird cardboard cutouts plus the food was out of this world—Aimee is an amazing chef and an amazing decorator, too—the 19th century farmhouse was done up like a Dickens Christmas carnival.

Eventually, I found myself on a couch talking to a woman with long black hair—

And a miracle happened.

We had a real conversation.

She was not beautiful but she was very intense, soignée, sophisticated, knowledgeable. She laughed at all of my jokes. And made a point of telling me she'd been married to a woman.

“Wait a minute,” Kimberly interrupted. “Was this Abbe?”

“Of course, it was Abbe,” I said. “Do you know her?”

“Not exactly,” said Kimberly. “She’s the best friend of Jordan, my best friend from college. He talks about her a lot. Small world, huh?”

“And they tell us it’s an expanding universe!” I said.

###

Abbe gave me her card.

I did try texting her once, but I think maybe it was a work number not set up for texts.

For a month afterwards, Aimee kept trying to set up dates where I could meet up again with Abbe—

Abbe and I would like you to come for tea at her house in Woodstock. Abbe was wondering if you’d like to come to this art opening in Hudson—

But like I say, I Don’t Drive in the Winter.

And eventually, it was spring again, and I forgot all about Abbe.

“Maybe you should date Abbe,” I said to Kimberly. “You date women, don’t you?”

“Sometimes.”

“And you both live in Woodstock! You wouldn’t even have to drive too far!”

###

At home, L was facing some domestic crisis having to do with the refrigerator’s icemaker. The floor was covered with sodden towels. And L looked like she was going to cry.

“I know what you need!” I said. And whisked her away in my car to the Vanderbilt Park where we contemplated the faraway Catskills and I shared the Best Chocolates in the World with her.

“The Catskills will be there long after your refrigerator is fixed,” I told her helpfully.

###

Then I did more work but not enough work.

Texted RTT about the Ithaca visit plans: Before I make any hotel reservations, I want to make absolutely sure that none of your girlfriends are planning a birthday party—

Come up ASAP, he texted back. Can’t you come up tomorrow?

Turns out that Jason, brother of Justin, is having a major mental breakdown. RTT texted me lots of screenshots of conversations with Jason and conversations with Meryl, a former dean at RTT's high school, who is like the Sane Adult who’s been den mother to these deeply, deeply troubled kids for well over a decade now.

Jason has been voluntarily going to the hospital for this stuff for a couple of months. They keep discharging him—I’m guessing over payment and insurance issues.

The American healthcare system at work!

I hung out with him yesterday just trying to encourage him to get sober because this keeps happening when he gets really messed up and that it’s breaking everyone’s hearts and he wound up getting upset and leaving, RTT texted.

He’s self-medicating, I said to RTT.

Jason’s story is a fascinating narrative all on its own but I don’t have time to write it if I’m gonna finish the two remunerative work projects on my plate and get out the door at the crack of dawn tomorrow.

Suffice it to say, I need to get RTT to pay more attention to the stewardess spiel at the beginning of every plane trip: Secure your own mask first before assisting others.

I used to babysit the film director Nicole Holofcener.

My mother was the production secretary on Take the Money and Run, which Charles Joffe—Holofcener’s soon-to-be stepfather—was producing. So she loaned me out to Nicole and Suzanne’s mother as a child minder. Never mind that I wasn’t all that much older than they were.

I don’t remember much about Nicole and Suzanne except that they had what to me were exotic and mysterious first names—so French!—and that they didn’t complain too much when I took them on forced marches through Riverside Park from 72nd Street to Grant’s Tomb, which was one of the routes my best friend Roberta and I took every weekend as we spun our never-ending, baroque tales of matricide and revenge.

I started watching Holofcener’s movies because of that babysitting connection.

I continued watching Holofcener’s movies, though, because they’re exactly the type of movie that appeals to me. They’re essentially plotless; they’re character-driven; and they’re filled with scenes where women actually relate to one another and the world around them without filtering those relationships through their relationships to men.

###

I don’t know how I managed to miss Lovely and Amazing when it first came out.

But I remedied that gap in my Holofcener completism last night.

I loved the movie for many, many reasons, but particularly for this one scene:

Elizabeth (Emily Mortimer), a beautiful actress who’s immensely insecure about her looks, finally sleeps with the Big Movie Star.

After they have sex, she says, “Will you do something for me?”

And he says, “Sure.”

And she says, “I want you to tell me everything that’s wrong with me physically.”



And she hops out of bed and stands there naked staring at him while he goes down the list. He starts out reluctantly but gains momentum as more and more imperfections occur to him: Nice hips but bush needs a trim, slightly bow-legged, breasts aren’t the same size, needs some dental work—

When the Big Movie Star misses Elizabeth’s arms—she obsesses that they’re flabby—she obligingly points them out to him.

This scene is just so fucking amazing and brave!!!!!!

This is absolutely the way that most women relate to their bodies. This is the power we give men over us: We let them critique us. We let their critiques matter more than the truth.

Anyway, I was totally blown away by this scene and this movie.

I have no idea why Holofcener isn’t up there in the very top echelon of American filmmakers.

###

Also, I am flirting with a guy who turns out to be an index entry in every Barack Obama bio ever written and who, moreover, is a great writer, loves to travel, and likes the same middlingly obscure science fiction novels I do—Jennifer Government, anybody? He’s in Mexico till the beginning of December, which means I can put off meeting him in the flesh. Whew! But, of course, we’ve been messaging intensely, which means my attention span has gotten even shorter than it usually is. ‘Cause you know: What if this is True LUV, and we get married, and then I win a $2 billion Lotto payoff and use my earnings to subsidize science and discover the secret to eternal youth?

What that means is that I was quite unable to do any work at all on the Work-in-Progress yesterday and so wasted the entire day poring through photographs of Olde New York in the 1930s, the 1940s, and the 1950s, which I told myself was perfectly legitimate ‘cause that’s when most of the Work-in-Progress takes place.

This photo was my favorite:



Palisades Amusement Park!

I always wanted to go to Palisades Amusement Park!

But I never got to.

I ended up having a fabulous time with Batchelor #3 although it wasn’t the kind of first date where Mary Martin is on autocroon in the background softly singing Getting to Know You.

Batchelor # 3 turns out to be quite the talented crowd punker.

Thus, he proceeded to get roughly half the diners at Le Petit Bistro in on the first date.

“So, how did you two meet anyway?” asked Richard and Ronald, the charming couple seated to my right, almost in chorus. They were once real estate developers in New York City; in retirement, they bought a mansion in Rhinebeck and opened a liquor store. (It’s the same liquor store where the feral Astors from Rokeby hang out.)

“Oh, on one of those stupid Internet dating sites,” I said.

“No, no, no,” said Batchelor #3. “She’s embarrassed. I’ll tell you the true story. One day, I was looking for a book. A particular book. So I went over to Bryant Park and the library—Do you happen to know the names of those marble lions?”

“Patience!” said Richard.

“Charity?” asked Ronald.

“Fortitude!” said I.

“Patience and fortitude. Two things you gotta have in the real estate biz. So, I went up to the librarian and asked, ‘Excuse me, but what shelf is Fifty Shades of Grey catalogued on. And she gives me the Dewey Decimal Number and I set off. But when I get to the shelf, there’s this woman there, and we reach for the book at exactly the same moment—“

“That’s not true,” I said. “I’m a writer. I would never read Fifty Shades of Grey—“

“See? What did I tell you? She’s embarrassed.”

“The book was 120 Days of Sodom,” I said. “Or wait! Maybe it was Missionary Impossible. Or Big Trouble in Little Vagina.”

Richard and Ronald thought our act was hilarious.

Batchelor #3 silently mouthed I like you over the exquisitely seared scallops.

I pretended not to be able to read lips.

Anyway, the evening went on like this. He even got the restaurant to vote on whether we should go out on a second date—the Yeses slightly outnumbered the Nos.

Batchelor #3 would be a lot of fun to hang out with in Las Vegas.

The problem is that I can only go 48 hours in Las Vegas without lapsing into that state of intense angst that Marybeth and I used to code-name hollow mirror.

That first 48 hours, though! That would be tons and tons of fun!

I did like him. Under the walrus mustache and the Panama hat and the bulk of that impending 70th year, I could see a skinny Italian Brooklyn kid doing his first real estate deal: He’d pay $5,000 and not a penny more for that crackhouse on Myrtle Avenue. He’d slap a coat of paint on it, throw another layer of linoleum over the rotting floor and presto! One year later, he’d flip it for $15 K.

It takes brains to make money from nothing. And patience. And fortitude. And an openness to risk-taking that translates into brashness and swagger in the interpersonal sphere.

I’ve never been able to make serious money in my life. Even at those times when my nose was practically slammed into the opportunity.

“Hey! Like my mother always told me,” he said, laughing and shrugging over the oysters. “All they can say is No, right?”

Anyway, I’m fairly sure he’ll ask me out again.

He’d probably be great for a casual relationship. He would take me out to expensive places and parties with tons and tons of people, and I would never have to reveal a single thing about my inner life to him: He simply would not be interested.

###

One other thing happened yesterday.

I was at the supermarket. The woman behind me at the checkout stand had a little boy in one of those shopping carts that’s modeled to look like a car. He was a very imaginative and rambunctious little boy. He made Zoom! Zoom! noises with his eyes all lit up.

The cashier and I watched him together, laughing.

“I love to watch little kids,” the cashier said. “Don’t got none of my own to watch, so I watch them here.”

“You don’t have kids?” I asked.

“Oh, I got one,” she said. “But we don’t talk. I made too many mistakes.”

“Everybody makes mistakes,” I said. “You did the best you did under circumstances that were far from ideal. Be gentle with yourself.”

“He don’t see it that way,” she whispered.

“Be gentle with yourself,” I repeated.

And I looked over at her and saw that two big tears were seeping from her eyes.

I felt awful.

I can’t even buy cat food without making cashiers cry!

Little Megan and I went to see Christopher Robin. What’s not to LUV about a movie whose message is, You should spend more time hanging out with talking stuffed animals?

Earlier in the kitchen, Megan made the mistake of asking me about my novel, so I launched into a 25-minute diatribe about June Miller, the tragic love affair with a Hassid I’d invented for her after Henry Miller leaves her for Anais Nin, her subsequent nervous breakdown. I am currently working on the section where June is institutionalized at Bellevue and subjected to electric shock treatments.

I’ve been working on the Bellevue section for many weeks, now. It’s hard to write.

“See, people don’t actually read that kind of stuff,” I said. “Screaming protagonists strapped to gurneys. That’s exactly the kind of stuff that readers skim. So, why bother writing it? The challenge to the writer then becomes: How do you convey the horror and intensity of an experience without inundating your potential reader with reams and reams of horrific description that they will merely skip over?”

“Right,” Megan said.

Were her eyes glazing over?

I really wasn’t paying attention.

Because whenever anyone asks me about my work, I immediately start practicing for my Fresh Air interview with Terri Gross.

“How did the idea for this novel come to you?” Terri will ask.

“Well, Terri, as you know,” I will say, “Henry Miller was a seminal figure in 20th century literature. Undeservedly so, in my opinion. As a feminist, I’ve become increasingly interested in the ways that male authors conscripted the experience of the women closest to them—plagiarized them in fact—“

I interrupted the interview to ask Megan, “You know who Henry Miller is, right?”

“Haven’t got a clue,” said Megan.

“Anais Nin?”

Megan made a sad mouse face and shook her head.

The lone and level sands stretch far away, thought I to myself.

Anyway, I can feel myself revving up into a generative phase. Kind of analogous to the way bipolars feel at the beginning of a manic episode, I imagine. The Universe is talking to me! There are signposts in the sky! I can’t go five minutes without whipping out my little notebook and writing up some dazzling new thought, For Henry, facts were merely a point of departure. Not the truth, but a way of searching for the truth.

###

In other news, my Big Date with Batchelor #3 is tomorrow night.

I’m not looking forward to it.

We had a few pleasant phone calls, and then he started texting me every single morning with pictures of flowers.

A bit much.

I mean, it presumes a degree of intimacy. And we haven’t met. And he isn’t really tracking the things I say to him in those phone conversations—

“So, those young men on either side of you in that photo?” he asks for the third time. “Those are your sons?”

“Uh huh—“

“Ha, ha. I like the way you say, I’m the one in the middle.”

For the third time.

Then there’s all that goddam prep for a date. Manicure! Hair coloring! Should I buy a new outfit—white sweater, long black skirt, flashy belt—or should I attempt to resurrect a dress from the depths of the closet where it’s no doubt become covered in fur from my recently deceased cat?

Oh, well. At least I’ll get a free meal at Le Petit Bistro out of it.

Dreamed I was leaving for Paris. Or maybe I was already in Paris. And two of my cats were missing! And they were my favorite cats in the world, so how could I have taken my eyes off them for a single second let alone for the length of time it would take them to go missing? I was distraught—so distraught I could hardly enjoy being in Paris or leaving for Paris.

There was a box of documents in the ancient, airy apartment in which I was staying, and if only I could track that box down, I would find the cats. Only, of course, I couldn’t find the box. Or the cats!

There were numerous adventures involving tunnels decorated with ancient mosaics and strange little parks that were outcroppings on rocky hills, but who could enjoy them? Because the cats!

Finally, I spotted one of the cats at an immense distance and called to it. It heard me, and came running toward me. Except as it trotted closer, I saw its face was frozen into a hideous rictus. This is not my beautiful cat! I thought. (Thank you, David Byrne.) And I panicked. And woke up.

(After I woke up, I recognized the rictus on the cat’s face was the famous Cheshire smile from Alice in Wonderland, which is not a hideous image at all.)

###

I got bored earning $$$$, so I screwed around some on the Idiot Internet Dating Site.

Three human beings with penises wrote to me!

Well. The penises are an article of faith. For all I know, the Putin-bots were toying with me.

Penis-totin’ Presumptive Human #1 is 43 years old and just luvs older women!

“Why?” I asked.

This flustered him a little.

“Well,” he said. “I think grey hair and a few facial wrinkles are really sexy!”

Oh, if only all it were was grey hair and a few facial wrinkles, leetle Putin-bot!

BUZZ-ZZ-ZZ!

Pass.

Penis-totin’ Presumptive Human #2 was married to someone who had some sort of debilitating disease that wasn’t going to kill her but that had killed her libido. Their marriage is gonna last forever because they love each other so truly, madly, deeply, but she had given him permission to see other women because a man has needs.

“What do you think the other woman is gonna get out of that?” I asked.

“My passionate, fully present approach, which comes quite naturally but is apparently sorely lacking in many of my peers,” he answered.

BUZZ-ZZ-ZZ!

Pass.

Penis-totin’ Presumptive Human #3 was a Brooklyn boy who likes to get straight to the punch.

“Here’s my number. Call me,” he said.

So, I did.

And we actually had a very pleasant conversation. That lasted for about an hour.

“Go ahead. Ask me anything,” he said.

“Okay," I said. "Well. At present, I have 15 fully-formed and exceptionally beautiful cucumbers sitting in my refrigerator. It has gotten to the point where everyone I know is avoiding me because they know the next words out of my mouth after Hi, how are you? will be Wouldn’t you like some cucumbers? What should I do with them?”

“Make soup!” he said. “A nice cold cucumber yogurt soup! Garnished with lots of mint. Don’t use a food processor! Grate the cucumbers with a cheese grater. Throw in a little bit of garlic, a sprinkle of salt.”

Ohhhh! Sounds perfect.

Then we started talking about Brooklyn neighborhoods. Bayridge, Canarsie, Bensonhurst. Coney Island.

He started telling me about a photograph he’d taken when he was 17 or so. An old man looking for some warmth. In Coney Island. In March.

“I framed it, and no matter where I live, it’s always hanging on my wall. Do you get down to the City ever?”

“Oh, every month or so,” I said. “I belong to the Met and to the Brooklyn Museum. I love museums, so I like to check them out—“

“Oh, hey! Me, too. Also, I belong to—“

And the phone line got garbled.

“What? I can’t hear you.”

More garble.

Finally the words separated themselves out into sense: “The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.”

“The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens?” I cried. “Why, that’s one of my favorite places on the planet!”

Which is true.

After we got off the phone, he texted me the photo he’d taken of the old man at Coney Island. I liked it! I ran it through Google images: Nope, he hadn’t “borrowed” it from somewhere. Who knows? Maybe he really did take it.

Anyway, I’m sure we will talk again.

###

In other news, the heat wave is back with a vengeance. By 10am yesterday, it was 95°. (Ninety-five degrees!) I had to go out to the garden anyway; a thunderstorm the day before had knocked out all my tomato cages.

My tomato plants are practically breaking under the weight of all those green tomatoes. One day, those green tomatoes may ripen. May! But not if they are all dragging on the ground. So I had to do a small engineering project: re-erect all those cages (not as easy as it sounds) and put in stakes! That took about an hour. The sweat was pouring off me. Literally, I looked as though I had just walked into a shower with all my clothes on.

Here’s a fun thing: I’d planted a watermelon vine. God knows why. All the watermelons you would ever want to eat are right there at Buy & Cry.

The watermelon vine is doing spectacularly! See? That’s a baby watermelon just under the shadowy hat in what amounts to a kind of sinister self-portrait:



Then there was the Trump/Putin powwow. Did not quite know what to make of that.

On the one hand, I loathe Trump. Dapper Donnie and schmoozy Vlad holding hands and cooing for the microphones. (I caught a bit of the joint press conference on the radio. I was driving; I needed the distraction.) Sure seemed like Putin was playing Trump, an impression confirmed by reading the transcript.

On the other hand, America’s intelligence community is part of the Deep State. And the Deep State is not your friend, no matter how much you hate and despise President Spanky. The Deep State in general and America’s intelligence community in particular has its own agenda, which President Spanky’s campaign rhetoric—insofar as you could believe any of it—promised to eradicate and bring down. Remember! The primary function of any organization is to perpetuate itself!

So, it is completely within the realms of possibility—to me, at any rate—that America’s intelligence community is prevaricating, bound and determined to destroy President Spanky by every means possible.

What’s next? A military coup?

I mean, like it or not, no matter what your thoughts are about the electoral college, the guy was elected.

I feel kinda like a mammal as the thud of dinosaurs’ footfalls thunder around me.

Scurry away, little mammal! Scurry! Sooner or later, the asteroid will come and wipe these lumbering monsters off the planet! You may survive! But only if you scurry.

I was at CIA buying treats to bring to BB’s house when I heard someone say, “Patrizia? Patrizia!”

I turned around.

A woman in chef’s whites was staring at me. Dark blonde hair, dark blue eyes, round face.

“You don’t recognize me, do you?” the woman said.

“I don’t.”

“It’s Hala.”

OhmyGAWD.

Hala!

Hala was my old boss at Time Inc! My absolutely favorite boss throughout the entire course of my career! Every four weeks, she would call me into her office: “I don’t think you’re spending enough money. I’m going to increase your budget by [your high figure inflated to its 2018 equivalent goes here.]”

“I guess I must look older, huh?” she laughed.

“No, no, no! It’s just – you know. Last time I saw you, you were in heels, a suit and makeup. The dress-for-success look!”

“Well, you look just the same!”

Which, of course, isn’t true.

She didn’t look all that much older, actually. She looked... rounder. It suited her. Back in the days when Time/Warner was an enormous media empire, she’d always had that gaunt and haunted look.

We chattered like monkeys for a few minutes: I was off to a Jeff Beals meeting; she had a class. We exchanged phone numbers, and made a date to go lay flowers together on Teilhard de Chardin’s grave next Monday.

“Did you know Teilhard is buried here?” I asked.

“Oh, my God, no!” said Hala. “Teilhard de Chardin changed my life!”

Mine, too.

Who knew?

###



In the afternoon, I drove off to the Catskills to tour BB’s garden, which is huge and impressive though all the seedlings are still under straw, so there wasn’t much to photograph. Instead, I took a picture of BB posing with his spanking new Jeff Beals, Democrat for Congress sign.

BB and I had a wonderful talk as we almost always do. Part of what we talked about was writers who channel their characters. Meaning: writers who get so far inside the heads of their protagonists that they effectively become their protagonists for the duration of the writing process.

It’s kind of a dangerous way to write because you can sink too far inside a character’s head. But unless you’re content only writing autobiographical stuff, you kind of have to do it to some extent. It’s the only way to loan verisimilitude to characters who are not you.

“Give me some examples of what you’re talking about here,” BB said.

“Well, I guess Flaubert would be the most famous example. Madame Bovary, c’est moi. What do you think he meant?”

“Probably the same thing Louis XIV meant when he said Apres moi, le deluge,” Brian said.

I laughed. “Not quite.”

D.H. Lawrence channeled his characters; F. Scott Fitzgerald did not. Vladimir Nabokov channeled his characters, which is why Humbert Humbert remains an oddly sympathetic character despite his pedophilia. Of course, Nabokov would have denied this. Nabokov always characterized himself as a disaffected stylist.



I was so invigorated by this conversation that when I came home, I rewatched Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, which I hadn’t seen in many, many years. The film stands up remarkably well for a movie that’s nearly 60 years old. Lolita is a very funny novel; Kubrick’s film can’t preserve that humor since so much of it was based on language play, but he introduces a different type of humor that springs from cinematic tropes, so in a way, the humor is equivalent.

I’d forgotten how brilliant and funny Peter Sellers was.

###

I am covered with insect bites from gardening. I am feeling a little bit melancholy as I always do when one of these OKStupid scenarios doesn’t work out. It’s always disturbing to me to be forced to contemplate my yearning for deep connection. I would much prefer it if I didn't have a yearning for deep connection.

Today’s headlines were all about Roseanne Barr; her remark about Valerie Jarrett; and her dizzying plunge from the top.

The remark was odious and unforgivable.

On the other hand… Roseanne has always functioned as a court jester, a kind of Crazy Jane in the true W.B. Yeats sense:

For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.

The deal is that court jesters are always the manifestation of the collective id. They say the unsayable! Note to Disney and ABC: One ought never to make a court jester an executive producer.

Just in case it isn’t clear: The observations above should not be construed as any kind of defense of Roseanne.

Because they’re not.

###

Else?

Lunch at American Bounty was oodles of fun. We made sure to be put in Benito’s section. He was very nervous:



Food porn







That thing on the salad is a duck’s egg, which I’d never had before and didn’t like very much.

That thing that looks like a hamburger bun on the dessert plate is a carmelized apple, which is all the angels ever eat.

Afterwards, I did a wee bit of gardening: The marigold border, so effective for keeping my basil bug-free, doesn’t seem to be doing a damn thing for my cucumbers. Then I went tromping off to canvass for my chosen champion in the upcoming Democratic primary. He will almost certainly lose because (1) no money and (2) volunteer staff is all Millennials who don’t have a clue how to talk to the affluent (however progressive) Boomers who comprise nearly 50% of the voters in New York’s 19th Congressional district.

There is nothing like battling for lost causes in 90° heat to make one grouchy.

In the evening I watched a BBC miniseries on Lord Byron. I’m kind of an expert on Lord Byron on account of back in my teenage days, while all my coevals were swooning over Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney, I was making my way through every extant biography of Lord B – including the very excellent 3-volume biography by Leslie Marchand, which can no longer be found in any public library.

As usual in my fixations on literary figures, it’s not the work that attracts me but the life. Not a fan of Byron’s poetry! Nope, nope. Parts of Don Juan are not bad, and that’s the best that can be said of it.

His letters, though, are extraordinary. I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone, he wrote. And – but I can’t remember the exact quote, so I’m paraphrasing – Why does God bother to make us die at all if the point is eternal life?

Surprisingly, the BBC miniseries gets a lot of things right. And Jonny Lee Miller makes a believable Lord B.

When it was through, I hopped onto eBay, and whaddiya know! The Marchand bio is up for auction at an incredibly low opening bid! Nobody else on the planet could possibly want it.

###

The prospective swain pissed me off by wanting to collaborate on my novel.

I thought this was awfully presumptuous.

It's disturbing to me that I found this far more off-putting than his crypto-racist sentiments.

Maybe I need a stint at a reeducation camp. Or somethin’.

Woke up yesterday feeling just plain ill.

I’ve been a baaaaad girl. I have not been using the elliptical bike. And it’s been too cold to go outside.

This means that my body isn’t tired enough to make it through the night without waking up around one in the morning. Whereupon I watch bad movies, think black thoughts, and drink myself back to sleep. It’s like there’s a ledge you have to slip off to be unconscious, and getting buzzed rolls you closer to that edge.

I don’t drink huge quantities.

Night before last I drank one airplane mini of rum in a glass of ginger ale.

I’ve certainly drunk a lot more than that when I’m fully awake without ill effects.

But when I drink in the middle of the night, I almost always wake up feeling, I guess, hung over.

So it was yesterday.

###

Since I wasn’t good for anything that required any sort of effort, I surrendered myself entirely to multiple episodes of Babylon Berlin back-to-back. Talk about your total immersion! Such an interesting pocket of time, the Weimar Republic. Fourteen years when all the permissions were set to, Yes-s-s-s-s-ssss, and that “yes” was the sound of snakes rising to strike.

Around 5pm, I heard by name being called.

Frank the handyman.

Faithful readers may recall that I flirted a bit with Frank the handyman last year. He’s been here for the last 10 days remodeling L’s bathroom, and he was one of the consultants I called upon with my wooden box dilemma.

I trotted out from the Patriziatorium toward the sound of his voice.

“Would you like to have dinner this evening?” he asked.

Linda was smiling. The TV was on. Some kind of Oscar precast bullshit. I attended the Oscars two years in a row as a People Magazine reporter. 1997 and 1998. A lowly ranked courtier in the Great Mirrored Hall of Gossip, true, but still – I was all in. So my 180° spin here represents a true phase change. These days, I hate Hollywood: It’s an assembly line industry subordinate to the dictates of capital but without the balls to give out awards to any movie that actually makes money.

“Is Linda coming too?” I asked.

“Of course!” Frank said.

“Well, sure,” I said.

“Of course, you know, he only invited me so he could snag you,” Linda remarked on the drive over.

“You think?” I said.

Linda snorted and laughed.

###

Frank lives in Pleasant Valley, deep in the countryside. What was once a Quaker settlement. (Once upon a time, Dutchess County had the largest American Quaker community outside Philadelphia.) Seemingly every other house is an 18th century stone saltbox that used to be a stop on the local line of the Underground Railroad.

Frank doesn’t live in one of those houses. His house is one of those 50-year-old split ranch-houses that looks small on the outside but is vast on the inside.

He’s into gardening – I liked that. Beautiful magnolia trees, buds at that pussy willow stage. Tulips just coming up in their beds. (Poor tulips! Back-to-back killer storms are forecast for later this week.) In the summer he maintains a 50-foot vegetable garden.

The upstairs rooms in his house had that unused feel of a place whose sole inhabitant mostly hung out downstairs in the man-cave with the 64-inch HD television and the wood stove.

We ate in the upstairs dining room.

He’d done a roast in a crock pot with veggies and potatoes.

Conversation got lively after the first glass of wine.

He was telling us about a woman to whom he used to rent out his downstairs.

A perfectly lovely woman except his daughters didn’t like her.

(He’d been a single father; his wife fled the scene under mysterious circumstances, Linda told me on the drive over: “He told her, ‘You don’t like it here? Fine. Leave.’ And he bought out her share of the house.”)

“But Katherine“ – the younger daughter – “said, ‘Either she goes or I go, so –“ Frank shrugged and laughed. “She went.”

Ah! So more than a woman to whom he used to rent out his downstairs.

Both daughters’ bedrooms have been preserved intact, shrines to their girlhoods and adolescences, even though the daughters are long grown, have families of their own, and are living 100 miles away in Long Island.

“But don’t you get lonely living here all by yourself?” asked Linda whose penchant for asking potentially incendiary questions rivals my own.

“What’s to get lonely?” Frank asked. “I work all day. If I get lonely, I drive to the city and find a massage place with a happy ending.”

This was the second glass of wine talking.

He immediately blushed beet red.

But I thought it was pretty hilarious. I don’t mind sex as a commodity reduced to transactional elements so long as it’s clear, the terms of the contract are up front, and everybody gets what they negotiated for.

And it did loosen the conversation up considerably since thereafter “happy ending” became the buzz word of the night, repeated endlessly in many contexts and always to much hilarity.

We were all very jolly when we said good night.

###

I wouldn’t say I’m not interested in Frank.

What I would say is I’m not interested in anyone.

He doesn’t read except for back issues of Money Magazine (which he subscribes to.) That would be a major issue for me. Whatever would we talk about after the happy ending?

On the other hand, he comes from Malta. Wants to go back to Europe and spend six months living and traveling there. I think he’d be an awful lot of fun as a traveling companion.

Anyway, any time I want to pull the line in, there’s a fish on it.

Dreamed about Robert DeNiro. Robert DeNiro!

Can’t remember how we bumbled into each other, but there he was following me around. And I, of course, was very nervous: He’s a Big Celebrity! How do I retain his interest? Etc.

I took him to a kind of… camp that I liked very much. Or maybe it was a resort? And was nattering on and on about something (as I like to do.) And I said, I am probably boring you, not thinking that I was, of course, since I am so endlessly fascinating and multidimensional.

Well, he said. You are a little.

And then he started talking about how awful it was to walk down the street and be recognized.

So then I went into this frenzy of How do I keep this Big Celebrity entertained?

And then he disappeared!

And I was talking to a pal and my phone rang. I picked it up. And it was this medley of strange songs and sound clips sent by Robert DiNiro thanking me for the two days we’d spent together.

(This is actually more than most celebrities would do. Long ago and oh, so far away, I was picked up by Dustin Hoffman for two days. No, no, no – it was not sexual: I’d written something that he’d run across and liked, so he decided to focus the laser-like beam of Bestest Celebrity Friendship upon me. He wanted me to write a script! He wanted to star in it! For 48 hours, there was this unending stream of attention from him. And then, bam! he dropped me. It was kind of like my whole world deflated. For a couple of months thereafter, my world went grey. Such is the power of celebrity and maya.)

###

I kinda think the dream was somehow related to a brief texting session I’d had with a presumptive suitor earlier that evening.

My profile is still up there on the online dating site, even though I have never had the slightest bit of luck with the online dating site. Well. Not altogether true: I met BB there, and BB is a good, good friend.

But I’ve never managed to have a romantic relationship with anyone I’ve met through the online dating site.

I’m sure this is entirely on me. For me, romantic attraction springs from context. The person has to have some kind of… narrative. I can’t do the three-dates-and-bonk thing. There has to be some kind of storyline. Like there are LJ people I would bonk because I've read their LJs, and it wouldn't matter what they looked like.

I get tons of responses on the online dating site, in large part because I am extremely photogenic. Even into my dotage with this (ugh!) slackening chin, it’s almost impossible for me to take a bad photograph. I suspect I myself don’t look half as good as my photographs look.

Most of the replies begin, Hi beautiful! Or, You have such a beautiful smile!

Those I just delete.

This presumptive suitor’s reply began, I’ve read your profile and your question replies, and you have a great sense of humor.

Oh! Okay! I thought. Possibly promising.

Plus he was a retired English professor!

I wrote him back: I’ll tell you in advance that I haven’t had very much luck with this way of meeting people.

He wanted to know why.

I elaborated.

I don’t really understand what context has to do with physical attraction, he wrote back.

Well, if it were really just a matter of physical attraction, I thought, I’d be saving up my pennies to visit a brothel populated entirely by attractive blondes of both genders in their 30s. Thirty being my favorite age range, and blondes being my fetish.

But naturally, I could not tell him this.

I’m not sexually attracted to people my own age on a strictly physical basis.

I can be sexually attracted to people my own age if something abut their personalities pings me.

But that takes time.

Anyway, he persuaded me to text with him on the subject.

And he opened the text with, You’re incredibly sexy! Did you know that?

You know, if you’d written that to me, I never would have replied to your message, I texted.

He purported to be quite shocked at this.

The subsequent exchange was not unduly negative but relatively brief.

He thought we should meet since that was the only way we could determine whether we might like each other.

I said I didn’t know enough about him to want to meet.

Well, you’re not going to learn anything about me from what I write, he said. I’m telling you I’m an English professor. But you don’t know I’m an English professor.

That’s true, I said. You could be an auto mechanic who’s read Howards End.

He told me I was incredibly naïve.

I thought, Well, one thing I’m definitely not is naïve.

We ended on a cordial note, and no, I don’t want to meet him: That’s two hours of my life plus driving time I’d never get back.

But the whole exchange left me feeling a little bit limp and grey.

###

Ben texted me a lot while I was in California. He was particularly interested in whether any possessions of his were in the storage unit! You asshole, I thought. Did you give me one cent when I was struggling to hold on to that stuff in the storage unit? You did not. I’d burn your stuff before I’d give it back to you.

Subsequently, as I was going through that vast trove of photographs, I tore up every single photograph of Ben.

I kept the ones where he was posing with Robin. But tore up all the ones of him solo.

It felt very liberating.

Towards the end of the sorting process, I came across a letter he’d written me after he’d crashed my van into a municipal bus and drove off without waiting for the police. Ten pages! Melodramatic shit. You deserve so much better than me! he'd written. So true! I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to kill myself or run away to join the circus.

Whyever did I stay with that man for 17 years? I wondered.

I suppose because Ben was immensely talented at creating narratives. I mean running away to join the circus!

You live, and you learn.