rainy day cat
Tuesday 12 June 2007 | someone left a cookie
So leaden I can hardly hold up my widdle head. It rains and rains, in cold silver sheets. I drive slumped over to my appointment with the DBT (four more left), looking through the steering wheel rather than over the top of it. I can barely be bothered to care that the Brujo’s ex will likely take any revelations of my mental interestingness as triumphant proof that I am the biggest mistake he’s ever made in his life. Instead I worry about Fiona the black Lab, who declined to chase the tennis ball yesterday; and for some reason I think repeatedly of the Film Critic, of how richly and liquidly in love with him I was, how filled with adulterous caramel and cinnamon; and with what evident relief he ditched me, eyes averted, in the DeVargas parking lot after the late show of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
It’s almost a year now since Maman died. The interim has brought a new cat, new meds and twenty extra pounds. I’m putting things in boxes and sealing them with tape and wishing I could call her and wondering where I’ll be after another year.
But! I received a charming note in the mail today, from a real live novelist:
Ms. See, you see, recommends in her book Making A Literary Life that one write “charming notes” to authors and artists one admires—not for any gain other than to feel connected to the larger literary community, and to express gratitude for work that has inspired and encouraged. I don’t manage to do this five days a week, as she suggests, but I’ve written a few, and thought it only appropriate that the first one I wrote should go to her, thanking her for her novel Golden Days, which (along with a book of poems by Norman Dubie), kept me occupied during the second of my three psychiatric time-outs from polite society. I didn’t know why there were so many remaindered copies of Golden Days hanging around this particular mental institution but I reckoned they had enough so I helped myself to one when I left. (I just packed it today, as a matter of fact, in the Reed’s Ginger Beer box now marked, loudly, AMERICAN NOVEL.) So I wrote her about it, and she wrote me back! I don’t know whether my note made hers, but hers did literally make my day. (All thanks to Ms. Z, for pressing her copy of this book upon me year before last in the purgatorial heat of South Texas.
All I want to do is eat chocolate-chip Bunny Grahams, lie in bed, listen to it rain and read Pierre, my newest antiquated novel obsession, a thoughtful gift from the Librarian (also about a year ago). It’s Melville’s seventh novel, and his first non-nautical one, published in 1852 and exceedingly hysterical and strange. I started reading it immediately but, incredulous at its over-the-top extravagance, wanted to talk to the Librarian about it and couldn’t, so abandoned it in dismay. Sample paragraphs:
At this moment, Lucy just upon the point of her departure, was hovering near the door; the setting sun, streaming through the window, bathed her whole form in golden loveliness and light; that wonderful, and most vivid transparency of her clear Welsh complexion, now fairly glowed like rosy snow. Her flowing, white, blue-ribboned dress, fleecily invested her. [!] Pierre almost thought that she could only depart the house by floating out the open window, instead of actually stepping from the door. All her aspect to him, was at that moment touched with an indescribable [but let Melville try] gayety [sic], buoyancy, fragility, and an unearthly evanescence.
Youth is no philosopher. Not into young Pierre’s heart did there then come the thought, that as the glory of the rose endures but for a day, so the full bloom of girlish airiness and bewitchingness, passes from the earth almost as soon; as jealously absorbed by those frugal elements, which again incorporate that translated girlish bloom, into the first expanding flower-bud. Not into young Pierre, did there then steal that thought of utmost sadness; pondering on the inevitable evanescence of all earthly loveliness; which makes the sweetest things of life only food for ever-devouring and omnivorous melancholy. Pierre’s thought was different from this, and yet somehow akin to it.
This to be my wife? I that but the other day weighed an hundred and fifty pounds of solid avoirdupois;—I to wed this heavenly fleece? Methinks one husbandly embrace would break her airy zone, and she exhale upward to that heaven whence she hath hither come, condensed to mortal sight. It can not be; I am of heavy earth, and she of airy light. By heaven, but marriage is an impious thing!
Et cetera.
Mandarin just called from the Dulles shuttle in DC, wondering where she should leave the Orange Line to find her hotel. Of course my DSL is down so I couldn’t look up a Metro map for her. But the Hyatt is near the Mall so I advised her just to ask nice elderly black ladies where to, as it were, get off.
It’s also been about a year since I last saw the Parisienne, who’d come to New Mexico to visit a better friend than I have been; she’s called since then probably a dozen, two dozen times, emailed as often. But it was such a disastrous visit. She chewed me out for being late to pick her up (admittedly with good reason, because we were late) and lectured the patient Brujo unpardonably on American literature during the entire drive back to Santa Fe (this was on the same day as the annual cactus and succulent show in Albuquerque; later that night, the Brujo remarked wistfully, “All day long, people have been telling me things I already know”), ignoring me so forcefully that I wound up cued out of my mind and calling the DBT from the back seat of the Honda on my cellphone—which only irritated her further. We dropped off the Brujo, bickered horribly for another hour or two, and were late to the art show where, at the end of the evening, the Parisienne announced that she wanted to kiss me. I felt ill with deceit; all this the result of the single booty call I made to her right after the Monk jettissoned me (again in the DeVargas parking lot, after North Country….God, I hate that parking lot).
Why did I write all that? I don’t know why. Only that I must, must write the Parisienne an email before I leave town. Without apologizing or defending my year-long silence. Just passing on my new address (because she wants to mail me something—what, a lemon stuck full of black pins? rotting fish? mouldering cheese?) and offering a brief summary of my year, asking how she is; keeping it simple, sweetheart. “Get it over with. This isn’t one you want to pack up and move with you, believe me,” urges the DBT sagely. She also reminded me that I don’t have to share our new phone number with everyone, which realization flooded me with startled relief. You mean you don’t have to walk in the door and cringe before the red-blinking answering machine, wondering which disgruntled friend is leaving angry messages now? Do you get to live like that?!
Beloved little mountain town, filled with ghosts and pasts. Scenes of former crimes and punishments. Both of the Brujo’s ex-wives; houses we shared with once-partners and spouses; places of work that rejected us; airports and parking lots where lovers fled, skid marks and tire treads over still-beating hearts. Even suffused in lethargy and sadness, I can’t pack the boxes fast enough. Stick a fork in me, baby, ’cause I am bloody done.
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