Don't you love that they helped each other with wardrobe? I certainly do.
Hey, remember this?
Well, we're off tomorrow morning to the great Mainland. On the list of places we'll visit: Bergerac, France, Geneva, Switzerland, Vaduz, Lichtenstein, Innsbruck, Austria, Lake Konstance, Neuschwanstein Castle, Heidelburg, and Dusseldorf, Germany. Don't mind if I do.
Is this true? Do we all have soul mates that we need to chase around until we find them? I mean, really. Really? Aren't there a pretty vast number of people that will suffice?
Am I making concessions (did I just write, "suffice"?)?
Am I so totally enamoured with the thought that love doesn't really need to exist in that fairy tale way, that I'm forgetting how fabulous it feels to be one half of a whole? It's just so damaging and empty when you don't find him.
What happens then? Are we empty shells of the person we're supposed to be? I sincerely don't feel like an empty shell. I feel like a cornucopia which flowith over. That's right. Flowith.So take that, Greek mythology.
Before the vacation photos start to be taken, let's rewind a bit back to Monday afternoon. We left school on this loooong journey (four hours there and six back [getting out of Manchester proper took over an hour]...yikes) at 1:30 pm. Manchester United, who play at Old Trafford, were playing Fulham at 8. That gave us just enough time to drive halfway there, stop at KFC (because it was all the children could talk about), get us a laaaaarge coffee (I love that Starbucks is at every service station in England. Yessir!), and get up to the grounds. Yup, it was a long day, but with views like this outside the window...
who could complain? This is England.
The buzz on the bus was ripe once we pulled up to the town where the stadium is located. I snapped a few pics of what was outside...
...and just about fell in love with the kitsch that surrounded the place.
Our coach (English for "bus") and about fifty or a hundred (or a thousand? You'll see soon that my idea of estimation went right out the window Monday night) others parked about a kilometre from the stadium.
We walked to the monstrosity that is Old Trafford...
Maybe this isn't a big deal for you because you've been in the presence of 75,570 people before. Or maybe you're really good at estimating what 75,570 people looks like. I have not found myself in either of those positions ever in life. I was in complete awe of the amount of people, the control exercised by this immense crowd, and the sheer sportsmanship so many people showed. Sure, they booed when the opposing team substituted a player for another and they chanted, "B*stard!" at the other team, but other than that, they were super wicked sports fans.
The merchandise was flowing...
...and the first and only goal scored in the game brought every single person in that crowd of 75,570 to his or her feet. Cool right?
Aleisha and I thought it was pretty cool.
So there you have it...Lexi at a soccer game football match. Didn't think I'd see the day :)
I'm going to see Manchester United play Fulham tomorrow night at 8pm. We leave school super early, ride on a big bus with far too many children, if you ask me, and go watch a soccer football game outside.
Hmm...Aleisha is super psyched to be doing this and I think that many people would jump at it if given the chance. I'm down...I'll take it. I promise you and myself that I'll take many a picture. Apparently we're sitting on the 20th row from the field. Sounds promising, non?
Ever since Laura and I talked at length about it on Wednesday, I've been thinking about Real Life. Is this a fragment of life I'm experiencing before I get back home to what is real? Or is this the real thing? Am I here, now, so I'm living MY life: my authentic life?
I'll revert back to last year when Dani and Jocelyn said it so regularly that it became a tenet, a motto, THE motto: "This is my real life." They'd say it when they saw a red phone booth that looked just like the ones in the movies; when they saw the Eiffel Tower in Paris; when they looked up (at?) and kissed the Blarney Stone; when they looked around at the hooligans we teach and realized this was their job. It became the thing to say, and thus it became the thing to actually feel. This IS my real life.
It's strange to explain it to someone else, even to myself, when I continuously feel that I need to be back in Toronto to have some semblance of normalcy. But isn't this just as valid a life, just as real a life as any I could have there? I think I was caught up in the notion that because I could never "have a life" here (because I'd prefer to start one at home with my friends and family close by), that life could never really begin. But what does "having a life" really mean? Kids? I guess so. But what if I don't have kids? Gasp at the thought ;)
I guess what I'm getting at is that despite the fact that I might not have been able to articulate it before now, life is where you are living it. Life is where I am living it. Cool. Thanks for stirring up thoughts and Friday-night conversations, Laura!
The weather in London was be-eau-ti-ful today. Frank and I went into the city to see this remarkable photography exhibit on display at Art Sensus near Victoria Station, tucked behind on this gorgeous side street. What a great little place. It just happens to be on the floor above Tom Ford's office. THE Tom Ford. What?! Super cool. Top it all off with a new pair of Clark's shoes, two huge Starbucks coffees, and a detour that took us through the beautiful, park-loving, child-friendly, breast-feeding on a train part of London. It's a pleasure to see the city in a different light.
Anyway, here is some information about Eve Arnold, who became famous later on in her life (think 50's and 60's) and only recently passed away after taking some amazing photographs. Take a peek...
I stupidly didn't bring my camera because I hate being so bogged down when in a gallery (troubles and strife of an Adult Camera owner...sheesh!) and missed the chance to snap some really remarkable images: faded signs, beautiful buildings, a foursome on vacation in England, touring in shockingly striped tights. Twas a nice day out.
Today was a fabulous day. We had a fun time last night,
(that's Seth's Fun Face)
making pizzas (I had to go next door to borrow a cookie sheet because we didn't have one [Aleisha's idea was to make a huge pizza]. So off I went, to talk to the neighbour-man I've never talked to in life to ask him a favour. How very old world of me. I knocked on the door and he answered, decked out in a green t-shirt [I wonder if he knew he was dressed for the holiday?], looking quite perplexed to see me at his doorstep. When I asked for a cookie sheet, he looked even more perplexed [because somehow that was possible], until, after repeating after me three times, he finally corrected me: "A BAKING sheet." [I think he wanted to follow that up with, "Idiot".] It was good sharing. I should have brought him some fruits of our labour, but we weren't in a sharing mood once we tasted this bad boy...)
drinking wine
eating ribs...
(and telling stories about ribs long after they had been picked clean)
The Food portion of SELF is certainly being fulfilled, but so is the Love...
Thankfully, it was a sunny, sunny day today. The kind of day you can hang your washing out in...it never quite dries in ten degree weather, but the smell of line-nearly-dried towels is wicked awesome.
I need a new pair of running shoes because I've worn a full-on hole in the back of my Saucony's, so I ran to Crayford and back. It was sort of embarrassing to be sweating like a criminal in the store, but what choice does a gal have? Sometimes not having a car sucks, but drivers here are mad, so perhaps it's best that I stay on foot. The 8km round trip was pretty radical for the gams :) Anyway, they didn't have the shoes I wanted, but I ordered this pair:
They should arrive in a few days. I've not tried Nikes since I was in high school, aside from a few kicking around pairs (gosh, remember that prototype yellow pair I had for a bit? They came in Small, Medium, and Large only. They were cool), so I'm curious how they'll perform. I did a lot of research about the fact that I supinate (thank God for the internet) and this shoe was Nike's second recommendation. Cool.
Anyway, two more weeks left of school until the Big Trip to France and Germany begins. Euro-life is cool. Hope your weekend has been a smash!
Well, the Lexi-Funk is officially over. I'm out of my proverbial rut and back into a much happier place. It could have been the weather, it could have been the poor behaviour at school, it could have been a lot of things...but the cloud has lifted.
I get up in the mornings (most of them anyway) at 5:45 with an actual desire to run. This comes as a shock to me every single day, since there was a time when someone questioned why I was training for the Around the Bay, for it seemed I loathed running. Every time it was time to hit pavement, I would sigh, "I'm going for a run" in a forlorn tone, sad eyes peering out from under my balaclava (it was winter in London, after all). Times they have a-changed, however. Spring is here, the weather is fiiiiine, and so am I.
My knee still hurts, but I ice it all the time, hoping I won't have to do that forever. Today I'm finding places to stay in the cross-borders trip in April. Awesome! Have a great St. Patrick's Day ;)
After reading this amazing recipe for a Tower of Power, I knew we'd have to spend Sunday night mowing down on it. Since we had so much to talk about with regards to ...
...it was a good thing we were sufficiently fed.
I spent the morning marking, looking out into the sunny day...
...the afternoon running so as to actually enjoy it...
...and the rest of the day dusting and cleaning and cooking.
When I got to Kathleen's house, Aleisha was well on her way into baking the cake you'll see later, while I got started on homemade ricotta cheese. I started with this recipe and try as I may, I could not get the mixture to curdle. It was only after someone pointed out that I was using a "dairy alternative" (ew!) that I realized it would never curdle. Thicken it did and the resultant "cheese product" wasn't bad, but it certainly wasn't good either. I'll try again another time.
Watching the cake being decorated might have been the piece de resistance...
...because it was gorgeous...
...but I think booking this amazing two-week trip probably, pardon the pun, took the cake.
(and what's a trip planning event without some wine, a creepy doll...
This sad, sad song is from the movie, Beginners. Loved it because I could watch it over what turned into four weeks and it never really lost meaning. Mom, you'd love it.
I love the quote from the Velveteen Rabbit used as a metaphor to explain coming out...it really did make me cry.
"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
I feel this way about so many things. I had a conversation last night with Jamie about moving on (or trying to and not being able to) and how that sometimes feels awful. Eventually though, you move on. From everything. And you become.
This weekend has been low-key. The lowest of the keys. I've stayed in, watched movies, and eaten really healthy food. I'm feeling so run down still though...I think I need some Sunday night trip planning! Whoot Whoot.
Here was an inner thought I had today...
I was standing in my kitchen, looking out onto the street where I live, when a strange thought crossed my mind.I realized that everything I was doing at this exact moment: marking papers, stressing out about getting everything done that “needs to be done this weekend”, wondering about my students…I started to wonder if at this time next year any of it would matter.There is so much living that we do when we live abroad: shopping, cleaning, cooking, changing, working…all these fundamental-for-regular-life things that seem to matter at the time, since NOT doing them would mean NOT living a regular life.But will any of it matter in a short period of time?
Then I started to wonder if my life was a sequence of events that wouldn’t matter in a year’s time.Is this normal?Is this okay?Is this how I’m supposed to feel?Because I know a lot of people who do things on the daily that actually do matter in a year.And though there are instances where that’s happened (and I know that a culmination of these small events usually do mean big changes happen), most of the instances in my life have had inconsequential…consequences.
I’m not questioning if I matter, because that hardly matters.I’m just wondering if the things I do make any difference at all, momentarily speaking.And is it okay if they don’t?And is it okay that I still take them really seriously even if they don’t matter?
Yesterday I picked up kefir from the health food store, because The Mother Hen told me that THIS particular blend of probiotic is best.I was a week late getting there and though I knew I’d have to down that kefir far too quickly for my own taste, I still went and picked it up.Why?So the health food store-owner wouldn’t be out £4.50.Yup.This is what I think about.These are the inconsequential moments that won’t matter.
But here is the neat part: they’ll matter to me.And I guess that’s what matters.I won’t remember the Sundays I sat on the floor marking papers, but perhaps I’ll remember the clever answers the kids gave and the smiles on their faces when I returned their marked work.Maybe.Then again, maybe none of it will matter in a year.
A year is a long time.
So there you have it...I'm feeling a bit off. I'm sure that now that the children have grown a bit more accustomed to the warmer weather, they'll stop being so ass-y and start being more human-like, so I can start enjoying my job again. Until then, however, I'm planning outfits for the Germany trip.
Yippee. I'll tell ya what...tonight I'll take some pictures with the Adult Camera and post them. That way, you can see all the planning magic for yourself (and I can document what planning a trip in a group of four completely opinionated, perhaps un-wavering friends looks like).
Also, when you hear talk of an ex getting married (not just happy, but actually married), how do you feel?
Relieved? Elated? Like someone just punched you in the gut? Saddened beyond all recognition? Nothing?
How many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and and ten— Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again— If your feet are nimble and light You can get there by candlelight.
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.
Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am talking about myself I am talking here about New York. That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room air conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was. All I could do during those years was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.
---
In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will see that as we go along. Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street. But most particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.
I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting a friend who complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a party where there would be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, “new faces.” He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. “New faces,” he said finally, “don’t tell me about new faces.” It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised “new faces,” there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men. I laughed with him, but the first snow had just begun to fall and the big Christmas trees glittered yellow and white as far as I could see up Park Avenue and I had a new dress and it would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story.
It would be a long while because, quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. I was making only $65 or $70 then a week then (“Put yourself in Hattie Carnegie’s hands,” I was advised without the slightest trace of irony by an editor of the magazine for which I worked), so little money that some weeks I had to charge food at Bloomingdale’s gourmet shop in order to eat, a fact which went unmentioned in the letters I wrote to California. I never told my father that I needed money because then he would have sent it, and I would never know if I could do it by myself. At that time making a living seemed a game to me, with arbitrary but quite inflexible rules. And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name “Debbi Lynn” or I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of would matter.
Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about. I could go to a party and meet someone who called himself Mr. Emotional Appeal and ran The Emotional Appeal Institute or Tina Onassis Blandford or a Florida cracker who was then a regular on what the called “the Big C,” the Southampton-El Morocco circuit (“I’m well connected on the Big C, honey,” he would tell me over collard greens on his vast borrowed terrace), or the widow of the celery king of the Harlem market or a piano salesman from Bonne Terre, Missouri, or someone who had already made and list two fortunes in Midland, Texas. I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of them would count.
You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was most comfortable with the company of Southerners. They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever they belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California. Someone who lives with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar. Christmas, for example, was a difficult season. Other people could take it in stride, going to Stowe or going abroad or going for the day to their mothers’ places in Connecticut; those of us who believed that we lived somewhere else would spend it making and canceling airline reservations, waiting for weatherbound flights as if for the last plane out of Lisbon in 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of us who were left, with oranges and mementos and smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering close, colonials in a far country.
Which is precisely what we were. I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live. But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.
All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and ever procrastination, every word, all of it.
---
That is what it was all about, wasn’t it? Promises? Now when New York comes back to me it comes in hallucinatory flashes, so clinically detailed that I sometimes wish that memory would effect the distortion with which it is commonly credited. For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a perfume called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L’Air du Temps, and now the slightest trace of either can short-circuit my connections for the rest of the day. Nor can I smell Henri Bendel jasmine soap without falling back into the past, or the particular mixture of spices used for boiling crabs. There were barrels of crab boil in a Czech place in the Eighties where I once shopped. Smells, of course, are notorious memory stimuli, but there are other things which affect me the same way. Blue-and-white striped sheets. Vermouth cassis. Some faded nightgowns which were new in 1959 or 1960, and some chiffon scarves I bought about the same time.
I suppose that a lot of us who have been very young in New York have the same scenes in our home screens. I remember sitting in a lot of apartments with a slight headache about five o’clock in the morning. I had a friend who could not sleep, and he knew a few other people who had the same trouble, and we would watch the sky lighten and have a last drink with no ice and then go home in the early morning, when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained in the night? we never knew) and the few cruising taxis still had their headlights on and the only color was the red and green of traffic signals. The White Rose bars opened very early in the morning; I recall waiting in one of them to watch an astronaut go into space, waiting so long that at the moment it actually happened I had my eyes not on the television screen but on a cockroach on the tile floor. I liked the bleak branches above Washington Square at dawn, and the monochromatic flatness of Second Avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and empty in their perspective.
It is relatively hard to fight at six-thirty or seven in the morning, without any sleep, which was perhaps one reason why we stayed up all night, and it seemed to me a pleasant time of day. The windows were shuttered in that apartment in the Nineties and I could sleep for a few hours and then go to work. I could work the on two or three hours’ sleep and a container of coffee from Chock Full O’ Nuts. I liked going to work, liked the soothing and satisfactory rhythm of getting out a magazine, liked the orderly progression of four-color closings and two-color closings and black-and-white closings and then The Product, no abstraction but something which looked effortlessly glossy and could be picked up on a newsstand and weighed in the hand. I liked all the minutiae of proofs and layouts, liked working late on the nights the magazines went to press, sitting and reading Variety and waiting for the copy desk to call. From my office, I could look across town to the weather signal on the Mutual of New York Building and the lights that alternately spelled TIME and LIFE above Rockeffeler Plaza; that pleased me obscurely, and so did walking uptown in the mauve eight o’clocks of early summer evenings and looking at things, Lowestoft tureens in Fifty-seventh Street windows, people in evening clothes trying to get taxis, the trees just coming into full leaf, the lambent air, all the sweet promises of money and summer.
Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing. I liked walking, from the East River over to the Hudson and back on brisk days, down around the Village on warm days. A friend would leave me the key to her apartment in the West Village when she was out of town, and sometimes I would just move down there, because by that time the telephone was beginning to bother me (the canker, you see, was already in the rose) and not many people had that number. I remember one day when someone who did have the West Village number came to pick me up for lunch there, and we both had hangovers, and I cut my finger opening him a beer and burst into tears, and we walked to a Spanish restaurant and drank bloody Marys and gazpacho until we felt better. I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.
And even that late in the game I still liked going to parties, all parties, bad parties, Saturday-afternoon parties given by recently married couples who lived in Stuyvesant Town, West Side parties given by unpublished or failed writers who served cheap red wine and talked about going to Guatalajara, Village parties where all the guests worked for advertising agencies and voted for Reform Democrats, press parties at Sardi’s, the worst kind of parties. You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.
---
I could not tell you when I began to understand that. All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. I could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone complaining of his wife’s inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to Connecticut. I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received from their publishers, about plays which were having second-act trouble in Philadelphia, or about people I would like very much if only I would come out and meet them. I had already met them, always. There were certain parts of the city which I had to avoid. I could not bear upper Madison Avenue on weekday mornings (this was a particularly inconvenient aversion, since I then lived just fifty or sixty feet east of Madison), because I would see women walking Yorkshire terriers and shopping at Gristede’s, and some Veblenesque gorge would rise in my throat. I could not go to Times Square in the afternoon, or to the New York Public Library for any reason whatsoever. One day I could not go into a Schrafft’s; the next it would be the Bonwit Teller.
I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, I cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor, he said only that I seemed to be depressed, and that I should see a “specialist.” He wrote down a psychiatrist’s name and address for me, but I did not go.
Instead I got married, which as it turned out was a very good thing to do but badly timed, since I still could not walk on upper Madison Avenue in the mornings and still could not talk to people and still cried in Chinese laundries. I had never before understood what “despair” meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year. Of course I could not work. I could not even get dinner with any degree of certainty, and I would sit in the apartment on Seventy-fifth Street paralyzed until my husband would call from his office and say gently that I did not have to get dinner, that I could meet him at Michael’s Pub or at Toots Shor’s or at Sardi’s East. And then one morning in April (we had been married in January) he called and told me that he wanted to get out of New York for a while, that he would take a six-month leave of absence, that we would go somewhere.
It was three years ago he told me that, and we have lived in Los Angeles since. Many of the people we knew in New York think this a curious aberration, and in fact tell us so. There is no possible, no adequate answer to that, and so we give certain stock answers, the answers everyone gives. I talk about how difficult it would be for us to “afford” to live in New York right now, about how much “space” we need, All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore. The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles “the Coast,” but they seem a long time ago.
