The Keeping Society

Today, from a sidewalk book vendor, I bought a used copy of Edie to replace the copy my friend never returned to me. I found this ticket stub inside of it. 

I found an eligible provider within walking distance of my apartment. I called her. She answered. She said, “Can you be here in an hour?” In the middle of our session, her doorbell rang. It was a girl in her late teens. I heard the therapist whispering with her in the foyer. When the therapist returned, she told me that she’d forgotten she’d scheduled an appointment with the girl during my time slot. “But that was weeks ago,” she said, as if it were the girl’s fault for booking so early.

This ghost and I had a not so great relationship, though arguably I got along with her better than did the others at the art colony. If pressed to say a little bit about the ghost and her issues, I’d wager she had a problem with children. Maybe her objections were aesthetic—she simply disliked them and found boring people who had them. Or maybe (given she was a ghost, and clearly an unhappy one) her children had died before she did and she still, understandably, hundreds of years later, wasn’t over it.

I asked the man who should be dead about Polke’s supposed unfunniness.  As Primo Levi said of Germans, “They love order, systems, bureaucracy; even more, although rough and irascible blockheads, they cherish an infantile delight in glittering, many-colored objects.” The man who should be dead conceded—maybe, in that sense, Polke might be considered funny. He knew a lot of famous people, this man, because his family had run a hotel in the alps. Picasso had stayed there, too. The German artist asked, Was Picasso funny? No, said the man, Picasso was a ladies’ man. He was not funny. 

The kids are asleep and my husband and I are in bed watching YouTube videos of gurus. We watched Werner Erhard, founder of est, interviewed on The Tonight Show by John Denver. We marveled at how we were able to do this. Here we are in Rome in 2013, watching a video of Werner Erhard and John Denver from 1973! Meanwhile, the TV in our hotel room doesn’t get more than two channels. All the news is from today. This seemed so limited, suddenly, such a narrow notion of news. 

We’d just started dating; we’d been drinking gin. We decided to run home. Literally, to run. Through Tribeca and over the Brooklyn Bridge. This was not exercise; this was not “running” as in marathons. This was the kind of running people did in The Sound of Music, over fields and singing. He would have been the love of my life had I lost him. I did not, and he was not. 

I am not saying I am not the crazy person here. I am saying I am the adult. I can throw up my hands and claim powerlessness. As an adult, this powerlessness has serious power.

I have decided, as previously stated, to draw the tap handle each morning even though I do not draw (unless I’m hanging out with children). I’ve never seen a still life of spice jars or a sunset or a person and thought, I want to draw that. My capturing impulses are not visual. In the past, if I wanted to capture an object, I owned it.   

It’s total gone-ness looming, I returned to the sidewalk to ask the tree crew if they could give us a round of the trunk. “So my children can count the rings,” I said. “They’re just so broken up over the loss of our tree.” My children didn’t give a shit about the tree and its rings. But I figured the crew would be more willing to override whatever rules the city had about handing out tree parts to civilians if they believed the solace and education of children were involved.

I pulled this Paul Bowles story collection out to loan it and found these Casablanca-JFK stubs inside.  The story is I came up out of the subway and saw the first plane hit the tower on 9/11.  And then the second plane.  I started walking back uptown and all these people had come up out of the subway.  They were standing in these huge queues at the bus stops.  I wanted to yell at them, “You have to start walking!  The bus isn’t coming!"   I was devastated like a lot of other people.  That fall I felt so alone.  Three months later a very dear friend called from Burlington VT and said, "I’m going to Morocco in January and I think you should come with me."  And I said, "Yes. I think I should go."  Friends gave me the Bowles stories as a Bon Voyage present.  I must have been reading it on the way back to New York.  (As told to Mike Haller)

Found in my raincoat pocket: two (excellently grippy) Japanese bobby pins & a peculiar telephone cord hair tie, both things very much so in vogue the summer I lived in Hong Kong, which is when I last sported the jacket.

these will be going into them tonight

I buy not what I want, but what I can afford.

From the pocket of the windbreaker I wore while I was a little ill during a safari in Kenya.

If I’d known she was wearing a raincoat, or that she was tall or short, I could have narrowed her down; I could have, less molestingly, better sorted her from these other strangers. But I could not find her. A face, I thought to myself with some satisfaction, is not the best way to identify a person.

His girlfriend prior to me—she’d grown up in Manhattan—had been dating “the Preppie Killer” Robert Chambers. I continued to sleep with this guy I didn’t love because he made me feel I was part of a world I desperately, at the time, wished to be a part of. 

I had never spent close to this amount of money on an article of clothing; this made me panic, and then become deranged. I wrote the online seller many deranged e-mails. Why should the boots become worthless because of a two-dollar box?