LIST OF MELANCHOLY
– the pigeon couple on the parapet outside, one dying, the other standing helplessly by
– continuous cloud cover
– the penny-pinching English, who wouldn’t give Bee her art deco lamp
– artist-in-residence posts
– phonebooks
– the word, “churlish”—Bee had giggled when I said it might be churlish of me to refuse Chevron High’s invitation
– people who attempt to dissuade other people from using words like “churlish”
– balloon animals
– self-conscious ten-year-olds
– accordions
– crapholes of the famous (Bee had given me a coffee-table book for Christmas)
– whale eyes, cow eyes, elephant eyes
– Velcro
– returning to work after a period of intense inactivity
Living in New York you cannot fail to notice millions of people heading godknowswhere, and this cannot fail to fill you with melancholy. They eat, they sleep, they shit, they stink, they speak. Some speak only to themselves, and I was getting like that too. It was time to go back to work.
The girls in the office made a big fuss of me and my limp and my cane, and cooed over all my other assorted ailments too—I spared them the burned tongue but owned up to the sore thumb. Cheryl, our trainee nurse, said just thinking about my thumb injury made her feel faint. Some nurse! (In her defense, her professionalism was compromised by infatuation: she had a wholly unrequited crush on me.) Soon it felt like I hadn’t been away for a month at all, like I hadn’t been away for a moment. The receptionists, Jean and Cathy, saw me as a welcome depository for all the office gossip they’d been stewing over alone, and kept rushing into my office every ten minutes with a new ice pack and tidbit of news, keen to get me up to speed on my colleagues’ every bout of public drunkenness, their displays of impatience, the sniping, the griping, the fits of crying, the secretiveness. . . One intern had seen about ten patients in a row with his fly open, but it seemed to have been a genuine mistake, not a sign of some poignant aberration. Jean told me which patients had croaked, either before or after treatment; Cathy, that a sweet doorman had died in my absence, shot dead near his home trying to stop a fight; a fund had been set up for his wife and kids. Some workman had slipped on the newly waxed floor by the elevator, surfed on his stomach down the hallway and broken his nose, but he’d been offered a free nose-job to stop him suing.
All the stuff of office life. If it weren’t for the adoring Cheryl though, I might never have heard about the antics of Jed Stockton, MD, a preppy junior doctor who’d not only participated in a weekend of tag-teaming with a bunch of fellow med students, but filmed the whole episode on his cell phone, and was now offering to show it around the office to anyone who’d look. I asked Stockton to come into my office—but not in order to check out his directorial debut.
“How you doing, Harrison?”
“Who was the girl involved, Jed, may I ask?”
“You heard, huh?” He seemed pretty pleased with himself. “She’s a nurse. You know what they’re like. She doesn’t mind, she likes it! We’re always going over to her place when there’s nothing else happening. She’s keen. Well, you know, keen on me, and if she wants me, she’s got to put up with my crowd. That’s the deal.”
“Refer to the manual, Jed,” I suggested, when he finally shut up. “This isn’t how doctors are supposed to behave.” He seemed truly perplexed: never had his camera work been received with so little enthusiasm. “Jed, I’m afraid you’ll have to take your questionable bedside manner elsewhere. I’m letting you go.”
Sure, there were plenty of ties hung on the doorknob when I was a med student, the stuff you do to prove you’re a red-blooded American male. And cadaver fun of course—finding body parts in your bed or your beer. But we did draw the line at gang rape. I even got over my little propofol habit pretty fast—I didn’t need Michael Jackson to die of it to know I had to stop (or did he die of plastic surgery?): I got tired of waking up not knowing who or where I was (and I was priapic enough, I felt, without any help from “milk of amnesia”). Martinis, Bloody Marys and sleep became my chosen forms of oblivion from then on.
None of us was particularly focused on chivalry at the time. Until Rosemary, my first love, my policy had been to dump (or be dumped) before anything got too serious (a strategy, come to think of it, that I immediately resumed, post-Rosemary). Three weeks was my standard contract, two months tops, sooner if there was any sign of sexual waning in either party. I developed a fine technique for keeping women at bay: always imply there’s something much more important than them going on, even if it’s just gloating over your mechanical pencils or attending yet another HMO meeting. What matters is that you Keep the Supremacy.
I had no trouble finding women (everybody likes a doctor), and I don’t think I ever hurt anyone—though I feel some chagrin over the girl I dropped because her mother got cancer (after I’d badgered the kid for months to go out with me and screwed her silly several times). A real operator.
But everything changed when I met Rosemary. She had the most beautiful curvy shape but didn’t know it: the girls all hated their bodies according to the requirements of our era (self-doubt from which my profession has infinitely benefited). Rosemary came over one night for a party my roommates were throwing and she never left. We talked and walked and ate and slept with each other for the next three years. This was the first time the whole male–female combo made sense to me. Sex had a purpose at last: pleasing Rosemary! I relished her softness, her smoothness, her curves, her verticals and horizontals. She made sense of New York for me, its verticals and horizontals, its highs and lows. Everything suddenly became sensual, the heat on the street, birds, shade, rain, reflections, strange liquors: for some reason, Rosemary and I took to ordering side-cars (the first to do so since the 1940s).
The essence of a thing runs through it: tomato leaves smell of tomato, coriander seeds smell of cilantro. Every mouse smells of mouse, every house of house. What I loved about Rosemary was her smell—not a rosemary smell, though that would have been apt. No, she was no plant, she was my honey. And yet—those eggs of hers! Rosemary had an obsession with eggs, real or fake, eggs of all shapes and sizes: ceramic eggs, china eggs, glass eggs, marble, wooden, paper, plastic, gold or silver eggs, eggs with scenic views inside, tiny eggs, enormous eggs, eggs that wouldn’t open, eggs that wouldn’t shut, furry eggs, flowery eggs, feathery eggs, eggs in glass cases, voodoo eggs, comical eggs with flashing lights and steam coming out, a big cloth egg she liked to take to bed with her, egg earrings, egg mobiles, egg-shaped place mats, egg-shaped egg timers! She collected every picture of an egg she could find. She even had a large ornamental egg covered in opals and rubies, and I tolerated it. But, really, what is the point of a jewel-encrusted egg?
My first patient on Groundhog Day was an egg-shaped woman. Or maybe she was groundhog-shaped. She was some kind of egg and groundhog hybrid, so fat it was impossible to detect any expression in her face.
“My little boy’s about to start school,” she told me, “and I’m worried he’ll be bullied.”
“Why would that be?”
“Because I’m fat,” she said flatly.
She was fat, but her reasoning seemed thin. I sensed there was more to this maternal concern than met the eye and, sure enough, when I examined her, I found badly healed burn scars that must have been causing her great discomfort. She’d put on all this weight since the burning incident, so the stretched skin was pulling at the scars and irritating them. After she got dressed, I sat her down and asked about the scarring. Without much hesitation, as if bursting to admit it all, as if all that fat was just layer on layer of smothered trauma and protest, she told me the ghastly thing that had happened to her. She’d been married to a guy who continually raped her, sometimes at gunpoint. When she became pregnant, he flipped completely and doused her with kerosene while she slept, setting the bed alight. Nice guy. Her little boy was born unharmed, but she was badly burned. And when she started divorce proceedings against her husband, the lawyer tried to rape her too!
So the whole thing about the kid, her anticipation of his being bullied, was really a side issue—the woman was sick of being mistreated herself. She needed a full-time shrink! Not my field. My training only equipped me to alleviate her physical symptoms. In recognition of what she’d been through, I offered to fix her scars for free. (My colleagues would grouse about it, but so what? I too could be compassionate.) But she didn’t care about the scars, she said, she was only interested in protecting her boy from ostracism. Reluctantly, I then suggested a gastric band (not something I could do but I could find a friend who would, and I’d gladly pay)—but she objected to this too.
“There isn’t time. He starts kindergarten in March.”
Lipo was what she wanted and lipo was what she insisted on getting. This too was outside my province. My patients are rich, and the rich are rarely fat these days. The poor are fat, and the middle classes are the ones you see jogging everywhere: the thinwardly mobile. But I gave her the name of a lipo guy and told her to come back afterward and we’d see to those scars. She said she’d think about it. Then, with the assistance of my cane (which Cheryl found so sexy), I limped out to the foyer with the woman to prevent any chance of her being bullied, mistreated or ostracized on her way out.
I’d forgotten the dreariness of our waiting room, despite our marketing advisor Andy’s extensive efforts to de-medicalize it. What we needed to establish, he’d informed us before the revamp, was a calm, clean, cozy atmosphere, so that as soon as they stepped inside the door, our prospective clients would get the feeling that plastic surgery’s no big deal. “It’s not like buying a house, or a car!” he said. “You’ve got to make it. . . fun. It could all be fun!” So the place had been done up to look like a kind of luxury holistic therapy center or relaxation and meditation spa, with minor elective procedures on offer—rather than the sadomasochistic, money-grubbing, life-endangering torture chamber it really was. Under Andy’s direction, an interior decor consultant installed thick creamy carpets to break any shaky patient’s fall (and muffle the whimpers), and indirect lighting that glowed kindly on post-operative abnormalities (as kindly as energy-saving bulbs can glow). We were also advised to position fresh flowers everywhere to mask the smell of piss and pus and disinfectant. Casual attire was the agreed look; no suits, no ties, no white coats, just a loose shirt and jeans, even a baseball cap. We all looked like we were on vacation, or still children! In fact, everything was done to alleviate fear except sparing people painful, invasive surgery. We even had classical music piped into the waiting room so the old trouts could listen to the “Trout Quintet.”
Today it was “Heiliger Dankgesang” though, the piece Beethoven wrote in response to a terrifying illness of his own (one of my choices), but the irony was lost on this crowd. Even if they’d wanted to, nobody could’ve heard the violins over the incredible din being produced by one family—various children, parents and a grandma. The main source of boisterousness was a little girl of about two and a half, who was racing around the room talking to herself. One of her arms was in a cast, but it didn’t stop her being feverishly active. The adults seemed united in trying to ignore her—but why didn’t one of them take this itchy kid out to a playground or something? They couldn’t all need cosmetic surgery.
The child was in a world of her own and her restlessness was troubling. It was maniacal. I watched as she approached the decorative column in the middle of the waiting room that our designer had persuaded us looked “Grecian” (though it seemed straight out of Star Trek—when they beam themselves onto some planet that looks beatific but proves to be an illusion, really just hot rocks and craters). The kid was no aesthete: she embraced this stupid plaster pillar passionately and started humping, grinding her hips against it in mock-ecstasy. She was doing a very professional-looking pole dance in our waiting room! She knew all the moves. Somehow, I didn’t think this was the kind of “fun” Andy had in mind.
The child kept looking behind her for approval—not from everybody, just her dad—she was looking his way the whole time she pumped and twirled. I caught the guy’s eye and could see it all immediately: he had made this tiny kid watch porn and act it out for him at home. He was the one who’d taught her this stuff. He looked guilty as hell, pretending not to notice what she was up to. You could tell this wasn’t his customary stance, since the kid seemed so surprised by his indifference to her porno efforts. She was obviously used to getting more of a rise out of him than this. And what was with the broken arm? Had he done that to her too perhaps, when she refused to play the game?
The next time I caught his eye, he’d governed his shame and stared back at me with defiance. I retreated to my office, shaking. I tried to calm myself by thinking of Bubbles. What was she doing right now? Probably sleeping on the window seat in the sun, dreaming of the bad old days with Styrofoam Santa, incarcerated in her bike igloo. I had tried to make up for all that by keeping her warm and well fed ever since, giving her a life of coziness and Fancy Feast (a life I kind of envied right now).
My reverie was interrupted by Cheryl bringing in my next patient, the pole-dancer’s mother, who sat down and didn’t say anything. This happens a lot. Patients seem to expect me to point out to them what their particular eyesore is: they’ve worried about it so much that, by the time they come see someone, they think it’s obvious (even if it’s penile dysfunction!).
“Well, what can I do for you today?” I prodded.
She shrugged.
“Is there something specific you came to see me about?”
“Well, look at them!”
“Um, at. . . what?” I asked.
She indicated her breasts. I waited. It really wasn’t my job to preemptively decide what the patient’s particular area of self-doubt was. Finally, she gathered herself and said, “They’re too big. My husband said so.” (Of course they’re too big for him, lady—the guy likes little girls!)
I dutifully did some measurements of her small, symmetrical breasts, as if studying the problem from a medical point of view, then announced authoritatively, “Your breasts are not too large. They’re perfectly in proportion to your body. Now, if they were causing you back pain, or—”
“My husband wants me to get something done,” she replied dully.
“No ethical practitioner would advise surgery under these circumstances,” I told her. This wasn’t strictly true. I did unnecessary boob-jobs all the time! Changing already acceptable breasts into breasts that were equally acceptable, but slightly different, was my forte. Nonetheless, I tried to weed out the ones who were just doing it because they hated themselves.
Now she seemed on the verge of tears, and gestured dismissively at her chest. “But I can’t. . . keep. . . looking at these things!” I offered her a Kleenex and let her cry. With that husband, she was entitled to it. Then she asked again, “But couldn’t you do something?”
I stuck to my guns about the surgery but finally asked, “Have you considered therapy?” Adding, “For your husband.”
She looked blank. “Oh, he doesn’t have time for that. . . ” (Don’t be so sure, you dope—he has time to train his own kid to be a geisha girl!)
I told her I’d need to consult one of my colleagues about her case, and got her to go back to the waiting room. The truth was, most of my colleagues would happily take on this breast reduction. Hell, they’d do a female circumcision on their own mothers if they were paid enough. Bit heavy on the scalpels, light on the scruples, I sometimes felt. I didn’t consult any of them. I went straight to the receptionists’ private office instead and told Cathy to call the cops. Cheryl got all excited.
“Why? Why?!”
“Don’t ask,” I told her, feeling that if I went into the whole thing right then, I might throw up. “Just get them over here and keep that family in the waiting room until they come.”
I limped back to my office, wishing I had a bucket of cold water to pour over my head. Boy, great to be back! But my next patient made me feel better—a young woman in a miniskirt and spaghetti-strap top, who strode in and started joking around.
“Nice office,” she remarked. “See you’re keeping the flower thing going in here.”
“Flowers!?”
I swiveled my chair around and found that somebody (Cheryl?) had shoved a whole basin-load of tiger lilies on the window sill behind me. I hadn’t even noticed before, but now the perfumed stink of them was dizzying. I turned back to the girl with a look of perplexity and she laughed. But what could her problem be, I wondered. She looked confident enough, though I thought she must be cold. Why do women have to display so much bare flesh these days, as if advertising constant sexual availability?
“When I was a kid,” I told her, “we dressed up to go to the doctor. Now it’s like everybody’s off to the beach—in midwinter!”
“You sound like my dad. I do have a coat, you know.”
“And a very healthy metabolism, I guess.”
“What about you? You’re wearing sneakers! Call yourself a doctor in that getup?”
“You win.” I liked her. Sassy patients are the best. “Anyway, what can I do for you today?”
She slowly pulled up a portion of her minuscule top, to reveal a long straight scar cut diagonally across her middle. How could a girl this savvy and sophisticated have gotten herself knifed?
“Yeah,” she said, in response to my questioning look. “My very dumped boyfriend did it to me.”
“Why? I mean, how did it happen?”
“I stayed out too late, or didn’t fold his newspaper right. I don’t even remember. The guy was impossible. The trouble is, I can’t wear half my clothes anymore. I can’t let people see this! So I, uh, wondered if there’s something you could do about it. Can you hide it or something?”
What is it with women? Pole dancing at two, and by twenty they’re running around half-naked getting stabbed. And now, she was at a great social disadvantage, since more and more surface area has to be provided, blemish-free, for public view. Even the midriff, always a tricky area, is now subject to scrutiny. It took all the plastic surgeons of Manhattan to keep up with the midriff demand: muffin-top lipos were selling like hot cakes, and this poor kid’s social life might dry up if I didn’t disguise her scar.
Cheryl burst in as planned.
“Cheryl,” I said sternly. “Don’t just barge in when I’m with a patient.” What a ham. This was a well-rehearsed routine of ours, designed to make the patient feel more important. Except, this time it was for real: the police had arrived. So I booked Miss Back Talk in for a pre-surgery checkup and joined the cops, who looked none too thrilled by their nebulous task. They were already skeptical about finding any evidence, and probably despised me for making them fill out forms. But they took a statement from me at least, and talked briefly to the dad in an empty consulting room. He gave me the gimlet eye as he left with them for further questioning at the station, with his family trailing along behind. I wondered if anything would come of it. But so what if they couldn’t prove anything? At least the guy had had a scare.
As a result of my firing Jed, calling in the cops, and using a cane, Cheryl’s crush had now taken on a note of fawning. I teased her a bit, saying, “Ah well, Cheryl, not everything can be cured with a nip and a tuck, you know. Sometimes we have to call in the big guns.” Then, in a cloud of glory, left for my lunch with M. Z. Fortune, my corpsing advisor. I’d never been so thrilled to escape the office.
In the taxi, my thoughts drifted back to Rosemary. I hadn’t known what I was doing. I ignored all the bad omens, persevering against the odds (and the eggs) in service to my hare-like lust, blithely copping a feel in front of the German Expressionist paintings she took me to see, or horsing around under hailstorms at the beach in Montauk, where Rosemary’s troubled parents had a summer place. I’d been impressed that Rosemary played the cello, until I realized she wasn’t just out of tune but couldn’t count to save her life. The poor girl had no sense of rhythm at all! She could sort of disguise her difficulties when playing Bach solo cello suites, since she was on her own with them (though she played them like exercises—no sign of any exquisite melancholy). But you have to be able to count if you want to play Beethoven and Brahms cello sonatas: I would try to accompany her on the piano but she’d always come in too early or too late and then bust out crying.
She had no notion of time. Very late for assignations too. In the end, I suspect the late and the punctual will never really hit it off. Opposites attract, sure, and couples sometimes compensate for each other’s deficiencies, but a few similarities come in handy too. The tidy and the messy just grate on each other’s nerves until one of them dies. You need at least some agreement on vital issues, like a shared interest in wine, and how much of it to drink a night, or beach versus museum vacations, or what time to go to bed. And punctuality. (I also insist that my girlfriends share my nostalgia for the labels on Epicure cans, those polished, inedible-looking fruits set against a black background: exquisite melancholy! The images may look unappetizing, but Epicure cans have seen humanity through many tough times.)
Rosemary’s mom was an alcoholic; it was the dad I was fascinated by. For a man whose wife spent half the year in the Betty Ford Clinic, he seemed remarkably affable, and very welcoming towards me. In response, I exhausted myself trying to show him what a good guy I was. I worked hard as a start-up surgeon more for Rosemary’s father’s benefit than my own or Rosemary’s. I tried to please her; I tried to please him. Somehow it wasn’t enough to impress a girl, I wanted to impress a man too! Then, just when I had her dad where I wanted him, coming at me with the cigars and the bonhomie, Rosemary with her usual lack of timing turned against me (maybe that was why she turned against me?). I knew something was up when I was relegated to a position lower than an egg.
But it was the loss of that family that really hurt. Even the mom had an appealing side, or so I told myself. I was all ready to start cashing in on security, stability, fidelity, coziness, a place in this family (a place in Montauk too), a million fried-clam dinners, my wines chosen for me by a real connoisseur, a whole plausible future of efficient Thanksgivings and Christmases in the bosom of a family whose traumas seemed less excruciating than my own. . . and it was all snatched away. Kaput! No more clams and climaxes, no more canoodling in the dunes with my colleen, or meditative strolls on the beach with the sozzled ma. No zone of warmth. . .
These ruminations were forcibly interrupted when the cab in front of mine stopped so suddenly we rammed right into it. The drivers jumped out to wrangle. I was irritably extracting myself and my coat and hat and briefcase from the back when someone came up behind me and stole my cane! I turned around and saw a broad running up Broadway, waving my cane in the air, yelling something like, “You bastard, you come back here!” at some guy disappearing into the crowds of Union Square. I lumbered after her, making slow progress due to the wintry terrain and my faulty ankle. But she wasn’t that fast herself. I caught up, and then she turned on me!
“Are you following me?” she asked.
“Well, yes! Yes, I am.”
“What the hell for?” She sure was steamed about something.
“That,” I said, pointing at the cane in her hand.
She looked at the thing as if seeing it for the first time, and without ado dropped it on the ground, leaving me to make a clumsy dash for it before it rolled into unscooped poop.
“Jeez,” I couldn’t help remarking.
“What’s with the limp?” she asked.
“The limp’s why I need the cane!”
We looked fiercely at each other for a second—and then we recognized each other. She was wearing a different kind of coat, a gray one this time, and no Eskimo hood, but it was the gal who saved my ass on Christmas Eve.
“It’s you!” she observed.
“Hey, you saved my life on Christmas Eve!” I said. And remembering that I had never thanked her, I started babbling, “I guess I really should have thanked you. . . but I had no way of getting in touch.”
“It was nothing,” she said. “I mean, what I did was nothing, not that your life is nothing. . . ” She was blushing, quite becomingly. We started walking to our respective cabs. “That was John, my ex,” she said, nodding back toward Union Square. “His mother wears army boots.”
So, not a crackpot in the Gertrude sense maybe, but a crackpot nonetheless. I thought this might be all the explanation I needed, we could say our friendly farewells and scoot. But she was determined to fill me in on why she’d sprung from her taxi like that when she caught sight of this John character on the street—leading to our collision. It was all John’s fault too that she’d run off with my cane.
“You realize you almost caused whiplash in the guy you just saved a month ago?” I asked mildly.
“I had to get hold of him.”
“Still gone on him, huh?” Though she wasn’t my type, I kind of liked the look of her: strong bone structure, nice lips, tender brown eyes, and a mop of brown curls peeking out of her hat. A curious mixture of the erratic and erotic. She stopped dead. I was scared she was going to hit me!
“Gone on him? You gotta be kidding. The guy’s a criminal! He stole my quilt.”
“Your. . . uh, what?”
Our drivers had settled their differences and were now honking at us. But before ducking into her taxi, the crazy dame shook my hand, with a notably firm grip, and said, “I’m Mimi.”
“I’m just me,” I clowned.
And she was gone, whisked away down Broadway in a cloud of snow and steam. I exhaled my own cloud. As kids, Bee and I pretended to be sophisticates smoking cigarettes in weather like this, waving our twigs around as if brandishing cigarette holders. (Who uses cigarette holders anymore? Who even smokes?) I watched the steam rise from my mouth and suddenly had a sensation of utter happiness.
There was an old soldier
Who had a wooden leg,
Had no tobacky
But tobacky he could beg.
There was a little duck
And he had a wooden leg,
Cutest little duck
That ever laid an egg!
The skin on his tummy
Was as tight as a drum:
Every time he took a step,
A rum-a-dum-dum!
Despite the car crash, I was right on time when I got to Kelley & Ping, and bounded up the steps, my bad ankle temporarily cured, perhaps by the cold. I went to the counter and got a big bowl of duck and noodle soup, and sat down at a little wooden table to await M. Z. Fortune, whose book I had obediently bought and attempted to read. It sure wasn’t Dickens, but it wasn’t as turgid as Hobbes either, or an electrical appliance manual. In fact it was pretty snappy, with touches of humor, and covered every kind of oral presentation, from small, difficult business meetings to weddings and after-dinner speeches. It was all laid out for you, clearly and succinctly—the style of delivery the author recommended for a speech. But the more I’d read about manipulating the audience with your tone of voice or timbre (“as lumberjacks would say”), and swaying people with your authority and your credibility, your jokes and your anecdotes, your charm and charisma (just being a doctor apparently wasn’t going to swing it), the more I quailed. To impress an audience, I had to project a friendly, folksy (but not too folksy), brave, down-to-earth, and expressive demeanor (rather than just my usual nauseous one), and make expert use of “benchmarking”, “hooks”, “nutshell endings”, and “limited-opportunity windows”. What’s more, according to M. Z. Fortune, a speech should break down into chunks, with no more than three ideas per chunk, and no more than three chunks per speech. Nine ideas? I didn’t have one!
“Every speech, like every dog, has its head, middle, and tail.” Where was the rest of the dog, I wondered—and what do you do if your dog of a speech lifts its back leg in the middle of your peroration? Another piece of M. Z. Fortune wisdom was, “Take fresh breaths whenever opportunity allows.” This was something I felt I’d been doing all my life without being told. After reading his book, I dreamt my speech was a hot dog that I had to eat in three bites: chomp, swallow, breathe, chomp, swallow, breathe, chomp, swallow, breathe—I thought I was going to choke! (When I told Bee this, she said she’d seen me eat a hot dog in two bites.)
M. Z. Fortune would have his hands full getting a speech out of me. But before I had a chance to look around for him, Mimi appeared again! My shadow, my familiar, my very own New York nut-job, clutching her own bowl of soup on a tray. Who was following whom? And without asking, she sat down at my table and started ripping her clothes off, her coat anyway, which she dumped on the only other available chair. Where was old Fortune going to sit?
“What’d you get?” was her only remark, as she peered into my soup.
“Duck and noodle.”
“Oh, I got duck.”
“Well, that’s great,” I said. “But, uh, actually, I’m meeting someone. . . ”
“So’m I,” she answered, unfazed. “A client.”
What was she, a hooker? She seemed too sweaty to be a hooker—she kept mopping her brow.
“So, as I was saying, John—” she began, as if our conversation on Broadway had never been interrupted by separate cabs and a total change of location.
“What?”
“The guy who stole my quilt. We were only together a few weeks! And then when we call it quits, he asks for the keys to my apartment, like he just wants to pick up his stuff, and then he makes off with Aunt Phoebe’s quilt. Some lover-boy!”
“I thought it was your quilt.”
“She gave it to me.”
“Ah, hmmm, family heirloom. . . ” The chick was demonic, even by Manhattan standards. A Baba Yaga from the Bronx who could supernaturally command Christmas Eve traffic, steal canes, threaten lover-boys, and turn up wherever I went! I needed a quiet life. . .
“And when I called him up about it, he said he’d sold it! Can you believe that?”
“Sold it? To whom?” I asked, actually sort of astonished that such depravity could revolve around bedcovers.
“The museum of annoying folksiness. You know, uptown.”
“They bought your blanket?”
“It’s not a blanket, it’s a quilt. Slave art. Slave labor! You know how hard it is to make one of those things?”
“Uh, no. Not really.”
“It’s hard work. Very intensive. Subversive too,” she went on, “turning old bits of crap into something fancy. Rags and rage, that’s what quilts are made of!” To emphasize the point, Mimi bit a peapod in half that she’d found in her soup.
“Sounds like a new name for the Sanitation Department,” I ventured. “Rags and Rage. You know, those 3 a.m. guys.”
“It was the last one she made before she went berserk!”
“Who went berserk?”
“My Aunt Phoebe. From all that stitching and bitching. That’s what did it. See, she belonged to this quilting bee.” Mimi ate some more soup. “They sold her down the river. Called the cops when she started putting cat shit in the quilt stuffing. The creeps had her locked up!” (Bellevue. So it ran in the family.)
“Not very comforting though, is it, a comforter full of cat shit?” I remarked.
“It’s not a ‘comforter’! Anyway, Aunt Phoebe had finished my quilt before she hit her cat shit phase.”
“Well, that’s all pretty, pretty amazing, but I, uh, have to. . . ” I suddenly remembered I was supposed to display M. Z. Fortune’s book prominently on the table so he’d find me. I fished around in my briefcase and then attempted to position The People’s Guide to Presentations against the wall between our two bowls. Mimi immediately snatched it and started flicking through it in a bored sort of way and getting soup on it!
“Hey!” I protested.
“Okay title. Not sure about the cover. Good story?”
“Could you just put that back over here like a good girl, so the guy I’m meeting will see it when he comes in?”
“What guy? Oh, the guy.”
“And no, there’s no ‘story.’?”
“Subplot then, if it hasn’t got room for a whole plot?”
“No subplot either,” I said, increasingly concerned about how I would handle M. Z. Fortune’s arrival. Move to another table, I guess.
“You seem to like this book a lot, huh?” she continued.
“It’s okay. A bit too much jargon,” I said, lowering my voice in case M. Z. Fortune was in the vicinity.
Taking this as an invitation for a conspiratorial confab, Mimi leaned forward and whispered, “Yeah? Like what?”
“Well, things like ‘hooks’ and ‘benchmarks’ and ‘limited-opportunity windows,’?” I feebly replied. “To tell you the truth, I don’t really know what he’s talking about.”
“Hmmm. Must be some good bits though,” she said.
“Yeah, well, it’s funny when he tells you not to jingle your keys and your change in your pockets as you speak, and you’re not supposed to give a speech while unconsciously covering your groin with your hands. That’s the fig-leaf position. It distracts the audience, apparently.”
“So you want to give a speech, huh?”
“I don’t want to, I have to. At my old school. They asked me to do the graduation speech this year.”
“What’s it going to be about?”
Thinking up something on the spot, I answered, “‘How I Hated School.’”
“You’re going back to your old school to talk about how you hated school?!”
“Yup.”
“Great! I hated school too,” she declared, and absent-mindedly pocketed the book.
“Hey! You’re not going to steal that too, are you?” I asked. “First my cane, now—”
“I can’t steal it. It’s mine.”
“What!?”
She leaned forward again and whispered, “I wrote it,” before turning a deep pink once more. “So I guess you’re my client!”
“Huh?” Wait a minute. This was the person I’d enlisted to help me calm down about giving a speech? This whirling dervish? With the blushes, with the blankets, with the boyfriends. . .
“You’re Harrison Hanafan, right?”
“You’re M. Z. Fortune?”
Why I’d assumed M. Z. Fortune was a man I don’t know, but I had. I even had a firm image of him in my head, and he didn’t look anything like Mimi (didn’t have her bone structure).
“That’s not my real name, ya know,” she was saying. “I took it for professional reasons. The M’s real though: that’s for Mimi.”
“What’s the Z for?” I asked, trying to recover my equanimity. “Zsa Zsa?”
“Nada. Business people just expect to see a middle initial. It makes ’em feel safe.”
“Well, how about the Fortune?”
“Yeah, that’s what I say! ‘Fortune’ is there to help me make one. You know, like Johnny Cash. Or Neil Diamond, and Goldie Hawn. Goldman Sachs. State your claim in your name, that’s my motto. It doesn’t hurt to remind people you want money!”
“I’ve met some pretty destitute Goldbergs in my time,” I argued. “And Adrienne Rich isn’t rich. . . I don’t think.”
“Bet she wants to be though,” Mimi said, chomping on a piece of duck. “Anyway, can’t hurt.”
I noodled around in my noodles, wondering what I was getting myself into. Yet, at the same time, I had a feeling this Mimi person would make a fine public-speaking coach: she was so weird and unpredictable, she’d make giving a speech seem a breeze!
“Maybe you should aim higher,” I told her, “call yourself Fort Knox, or Priceless Gems. Cadillac Chevrolet. . . Unmarked Fifties. . .”
“Yeah, I like that one. President Unmarked Fifties, ladies and gentlemen.”
“But what about my name? Too much alliteration, right? And no outright begging.”
“What, Harrison Hanafan? I love your name! That’s why I agreed to meet you! I don’t usually teach people privately. My work’s mostly seminars.” She added with a tinge of gloom, “I help businessmen.”
“Tough crowd?”
“You wanna live in New York, you gotta do something for assholes,” she said.
I nodded. “My work’s pretty reliant on assholes too.”
Then Mimi grabbed my arm and said, “Hey, do me a favor, will ya? It wouldn’t take very long. . . ”
I didn’t know what to say. This woman had after all saved me from an inglorious fate on Christmas Eve. I owed her! And I liked the feel of her hand on my arm.
“See, I’ve gotta find my quilt,” she pleaded, “at the museum, and I don’t want to go alone!”
Ingratitude was not mentioned (this wasn’t Gertrude I was dealing with) but without much further coaxing I canceled my appointments and soon we were in a taxi (the first we ever shared), and there was something about the pull of the meal and the wheels and the woman, or maybe just the combo of taxi upholstery and afternoon off, that made it feel like a date. You hit that taxi interior, tucked into your own cozy little nest back there, and it’s Pavlovian: a kiss seemed imminent.
But we’d already reached the museum. First we trailed through the Tinware Room.
“I guess I should’ve been saving up my tinfoil,” I said to Mimi. “I’d probably have enough for a sundial by now. Or a commemorative tea set.”
“Or a magic, healing nose,” she said, studying some fine Mexican examples of legs, arms and organs cut out of flat pieces of tin.
The Weathercock Room was full of long-immobilized, formerly revolving emblems in wood and metal—some political, some ironic, some abstract, some figurative, some painfully fragmentary and weatherworn.
“Look at that mermaid!” Mimi called out, dragging me over to a double entendre weather vane from Nantucket, that featured a demure clothed lady on one side and a bare-breasted mermaid on the other. Mimi had instantly detected the best thing in the room.
“You can just imagine a crowd of sexually frustrated whalers standing below, hoping the wind will turn.”
The Painted Furniture Rooms I liked, because the black or green or red chairs, decorated with little paintings of fruit, flowers, tall ships, birds’ nests, horses frolicking, and a lot of miniature Jefferson Monticellos, reminded me of Epicure can labels.
“Do you like Epicure cans?” I ventured to ask Mimi, but got no answer. She’d already charged into the Old Washboard Room, which appeared to be a chilling tribute to housework. Propped up like gravestones stood dozens of riveted slabs—on which a million graying cotton shirts must once have been energetically rubbed, slapped, and squeezed. It gave me the heebie-jeebies.
“Boy, how wouldja like to have to do that every day?” Mimi exclaimed.
“Mimi, I don’t even grate my own cheese,” I said. “Or, not without some kind of calamity.”
The Rag Rug Room was next, and to my horror Mimi wanted to walk on them.
“Uh, I don’t think you should take your shoes off—”
“But it’s the greatest thing, walking in bare feet on rag rugs. They don’t look that nice, but they feel sooo goooood. . . ” A guard approached, and steered us sternly into the Washington D. C. Handmade Souvenir Room. There we saw about a billion White Houses made out of stamps and bottle tops, Lincoln Memorials done in popsicle sticks, and pencil holders adorned with brutish impressions of Capitol Hill.
“There seem to be no depths to which patriotism won’t aspire,” I mused, but Mimi seemed oddly enchanted by a group portrait of Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and what looked like Barry Goldwater, painted on a thimble. I felt strangely humbled by her ability to appreciate its well-meant shabbiness.
The Moccasin and Tomahawk Rooms were kept reverentially dark, out of respect for genocide. We almost tripped over each other trying to get out of there into the Slave Doll Room, which was full of rotten-looking dolls, literally rotting away before our eyes. One display case was stuffed full of antique doll limbs.
“I don’t know about dolls,” I said. “They kind of give me the creeps.”
“Me too,” Mimi said, to my relief.
“But why do girls like them?”
“They need somebody who can’t fight back.”
“Is that why they like riding horses too?”
“Nah, that’s just about power and speed. Nothing can stop you when you’re on a horse.”
“My sister had an imaginary one.”
“So did I! Clark Gable.”
“Hers was Hollenius.”
We took a spin around the Spinning Wheel Room.
“Okay, I can see that these things were state-of-the-art technology at some point,” I said. “But do they have to be turned into totemic objects and plopped in the window of every cake shop in New York? ‘Here’s your popover, sir—need anything spun with that?’”
Mimi smiled. “The idea of women spinning from dawn to dusk gives people an appetite.”
“The customers should have to spin a few yards of yarn before they get their food.”
“Or knit something.”
“Oh, no knitting, please!” I shuddered, thinking of Gertrude’s woolen creations.
On to the Butter Press and Butter Churn Room: it really stank in there. Just as much as you’d expect, only more so. What was happening to me? I used to be a reasonably useful member of society. Just that morning, I’d performed several creditable functions and now here I was, examining butter molds!
At last we reached the Quilt Room, a darkened, spotlit cathedral to quilts. Some were laid invitingly on fake beds (well roped off—to deter itinerant sleepers), others hung from the ceiling, or against the walls; and each was individually lit and labeled as if it were a quattrocento masterpiece. I trudged around, unimpressed, but Mimi seemed to be in her element, zigzagging all over the place to look at each one. She obviously knew a lot about these things, even without reading the labels—when she did read them, they only seemed to incense her.
“Look at this one!” she fumed. “‘Stitched with love’! Quilts are stitched with loathing. That’s what’s good about ’em!”
“You’re sticking with your ‘rags and rage’ theory, huh?” I just couldn’t see the rebelliousness of bedspreads. Nor could I be convinced that they were significant works of art. After (reluctantly) studying an ornate quilted tableau of historic events, I said to Mimi, “It’s not Leonardo though, is it?”
“Yes it is!” she replied.
“It’s not Van Go—”
“Yes it is.”
And, standing before a red-and-black Amish number, “It ain’t Rothko.”
Mimi had had about enough of this. “Look at that Crazy Quilt,” she said, drawing me over to a jazzy-looking blast of color. “That’s abstract, that’s modern. . .” I did like “Crazy Quilts” a bit better than the rest of these bedspreads. They were like Cubist collages, and at least tried to break up the monotony of all that obsessive repetition. But chintzy or minimalist, innovative or traditional, revolutionary or docile, slavish or self-indulgent, quilts all seemed a little crazy to me. Why waste so much time sewing cloth together, for chrissake? Stitch, stitch, stitch! It’s got to be a major cause of arthritis. I wasn’t too happy about the thought of all those Bellevue cases either, armed with needles, every loop a noose in their minds for some worthless jilter, some Casanova, cad, scoundrel, some nebbish, some nudnik, some no-goodnik who done ’em wrong. All this taut, fraught cloth—no wonder we have castration complexes!
“What is it with women and cloth?” I murmured. “Do they have to pull the threads so tight?”
“Thrift,” answered Mimi. “Women are always broke.”
“That doesn’t explain the pillow fights.”
I was deep in unhappy contemplation of an ancient quilt dominated by a goofy central rose design made up of at least one million zillion petals—sheesh!—when I heard a commotion going on in some dark corner of the room.
“Step back from the quilt, ma’am,” said the same guard who’d shown us out of the Rag Rug Room. I went over and there was Mimi standing behind the museum rope, clinging onto a truly beautiful quilt. Her aunt’s, I assumed. The design was abstract and geometrical, with a pattern of thin diamonds of intense color, set against a black background (not wholly unlike the colors of Epicure cans!).
The Firefly Quilt
Circa 1960
The Bronx
The brighter diamond shapes seemed to twinkle on and off like fireflies. But that didn’t excuse Mimi’s attempt to tear it off the wall! The quilt wouldn’t budge, but Mimi fell awkwardly over the rope—and into my arms.
“Thanks!” she said, looking up at me, her face glistening madly. Still, there was something luscious about her in that pose.
We were now escorted down into the bowels of the museum, in order to be reprimanded. As we waited for the elevator, Mimi whispered, “I need you to do something for me.”
“Huh?! What now?” I asked, a little ungraciously.
“Just act like you’re my lawyer.”
“Like I’m. . . what?! I’m a doctor, Mimi, not a lawyer. Doctors are better than lawyers. Lawyers take your money and don’t even give you an ointment.”
“You won’t have to say much,” she coaxed. “Don’t forget you owe me. Madison Avenue, Christmas Eve. . . ”
“What, were you busy or something? Did I hold you up? I already said thank you!”
“Think of it as your first lesson in public speaking.”
“Public sneaking, you mean.”
After a few walkie-talkie confabs, the guard delivered us into the care of a long-legged arts-and-crafts PhD student, who led us disdainfully through corridors stacked full of folksy clutter: piles of old newspapers, scary bassinets, bashed enamelware, rusty pots and pans. . . probably a few crapholes of the famous too.
“Whewee!” I said under my breath. “Time for a garage sale.”
“Focus!” ordered Mimi.
“You focus!”
Any minute now I was going to start laughing. To steady myself, I told myself this was my big 007 moment. The glamorous PhD student’s froideur somehow seemed to demand James Bond suavity in return. But first Mimi and I had to sit in what looked like a couple of old baskets, in a dingy waiting area outside the Director’s office, where one plucky little plant was perversely striving to survive. I was beginning to think it might be a faux plant made by nineteenth-century craftsmen in Arkansas, as light relief in between wrestling those hopeless basket chairs into being—when we were ushered in to see the Director. I was all ready for Donald Pleasence, complete with the white cat clawing its way up his lapel (you can tell Donald doesn’t like that cat—his suit’s been ruined by it). But I was wrong again: another gender switch! The Director was a woman. Is everybody a woman these days? They sure get around.
This one, I immediately detected, was a Manhattan art-world person in the Gertrude tradition. In fact I might even have met her at one of Gertrude’s Dohnányi parties. The woman had never whittled anything in her life and clearly had no time for us because we’d never whittled anything either. After a few unpleasant pleasantries, Leggy whispered something in her ear—but before the Director started interrogating us, Mimi took charge.
“We’ve come for the Firefly Quilt,” she announced to my surprise.
“Yes, I see,” the Director replied. “Would you prefer a slide of it, or do you need a digital reproduction?” She really was not on the ball.
“Reproduction?!” Mimi turned red with fury. I thought I’d better intervene.
“Excuse me,” I said.
“And you are. . . ?”
“Hanafan. Harrison Hanafan. Ms. Fortune’s attorney.” The Director seemed to soften, either awed by my shaky Bond act, or by the idea of lawyers. “We would like to discuss your recent acquisition of the Firefly Quilt,” I continued.
“I believe we acquired the Firefly only about a week ago,” she proudly began. “It’s a fine example of quilt-making of the period, with finer materials than is customary. It shows an astonishing awareness of quilting traditions, Amish and Ohio influences in particular—”
“Madam,” I broke in. “We are not concerned right now with the item’s place in history. We have a more urgent purpose: to restore it to its rightful owner. The article in question was never knowingly sold by my client, to whom it belonged. It is stolen property. Did you establish the quilt’s provenance before you bought it, may I ask?”
Flustered, the Director replied, “Well. . . the man said his aunt made it! Quilt provenances are notoriously difficult to. . . I think he said her name was Sophia—”
“It’s Phoebe, and she was my aunt,” Mimi broke in. “Not his!”
“I can assure you,” said the Director to me, as if she only wanted to deal directly with Bond, “we bought the quilt from the bona fide owner. I have the paperwork here. . . somewhere. . . ” She now glanced anxiously at Leggy, and began to shift piles of papers around on a desk that was beyond folksy: it was chaos! Leggy raised a leggy eyebrow and went over to assist her, but you could tell they were never going to come up with any document relating to the quilt; not fast anyway.
I barged in. “What you’ve got there, madam, is a hot quilt.”
The Director and Leggy looked at each other, then stepped outside the room to confer. This was a moment of great danger for us—because of the temptation to guffaw. Mimi and I studiously avoided eye contact. The two women came back, with an offer.
“We have decided that in fairness, subject of course to official clearance. . . we should consider selling you the quilt,” said the Director stiffly, fearful of admitting (to a lawyer) any failure in the museum’s procedures. “We will only require you to meet the price the museum paid for it.” Success!
“How much?” asked Mimi, suspiciously.
“Twenty-five,” answered Leggy.
“Twenty-five dollars?! Trust John to sell it for—”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” Leggy corrected, the eyebrow rising ominously again before she and the Director shared a classic Laurel and Hardy nod of mutual approbation.
Next thing I knew, we were in the museum shop, where a reddened Mimi bought ten bucks’ worth of postcards, her mouth a tiny dot of fury. To cool us both down, I took her to MoMA to see Matisse: to MoMA with MiMI! She studied one of his odalisques for some time before saying, “Was that Sherlock Holmes you were trying for in there?”
“Sherlock Holmes!? I’m wounded. That, Mimi, was my best James Bond impression! I thought I’d never get a chance to use it.”
Then we did crack up.
We went back to her place in Grove Street afterwards, to her cramped kitchen with its view of a brick wall opposite. Mimi fixed us huge Scotch and sodas and we sat at her bashed-up kitchen table, talking shyly about things. I think profiteroles came up, and their (debatable) relation to vol-au-vents. After a while she said she had to go have a shower, and left me sitting there all alone, making whirly patterns on the table with my wet glass. When I got tired of that, I wandered around the apartment, a funky little place with an unexpected sunken living room that must have seemed the hottest thing in about 1964. The bedroom was surprisingly spacious. It seemed dark and calm in there. Hours passed, or so it felt. “Mimi?” I called out, but she couldn’t hear me over the sound of running water. I went back to the kitchen and poured myself another whiskey and wandered with it into the bathroom.
There was Mimi, in a towel, reaching up for something, one breast exposed. She looked just like Delacroix’s Liberty leading the people! A brave, sturdy dame with freedom on the brain—bayonet rifle in one hand (or, in Mimi’s case, a damp towel), French flag in the other (comb), a load of dead supporters or enemies at her heels (pile of discarded clothing), and one big foot peeking out like the Statue of Liberty’s (minus the questionable sandal). If I didn’t shave, I could have been the Abe Lincoln lookalike, standing protectively by with a gun my own (glass of whiskey). There was none of the fragility of Gertrude about this gal. Nor were those the delicate flower-sewing hands of Puccini’s Mimì. This Mimi was no vulnerable waif or stray, no flower-girl. In fact, she wasn’t my type.
It was really that bathroom of hers I first fell in love with! The one thing my apartment lacked, a great old-fashioned New York bathroom with white hexagonal floor tiles, squared black towel rails, black-and-white tiling around the walls, a white china toilet-paper recess, and that great wide square sink with its mammoth X-shaped faucets. Mimi had it all!
She’d now gone into the bedroom, and I thought I heard her say, “Why don’t you kiss me?” This request seemed highly unlikely, so I went back into the kitchen, but there were too many circles in there. A few fireflies too. So I went to join Mimi instead, walked right up to her in her towel in her dark bedroom and her miasma of mayhem, and suddenly thought, I must kiss this woman before one of us dies.
Our four lips met, like the four corners of the earth, the four elements, a foregone conclusion. I didn’t see stars but there were skyscrapers and my mother’s raspberry jam and bulldozers and dachshunds. Some Matisse odalisques too, and cops, news flashes of politicians and flood victims, a quilt or two, Schubert, a Grecian pillar. . . and Gertrude. Yes, some lingering guilt toward Gertrude tried to throw me—misplaced, an error, a reflex, a shield against the unknown, the last refuge of the unadventurous. I pushed it aside. I think I saw tall pines waving against an evening sky, baskets, some chair I used to own: I ricocheted off all these obstacles in search of Mimi. Her towel slipped down, which distracted me, and I suddenly wondered if I might have jumped the gun, forced myself on her, offended in some way. Maybe she hadn’t suggested kissing at all, only said something like, “Where’s the Kleenex?”
She smiled though, that smile that always got me, and all my hesitancy dissolved: I wanted to kiss her whole being, every kooky thing she’d ever done, every thought in her crazy head. I had to be near that womanly softness of her, to hell with the exact qualities of her body that I was overtrained in noticing. Jumping hurdles of my own prejudices—too tall, too big, too old, too bold?—I kissed her hot temple, her hot temper, her neck, her hair, her warmth, her alienness. I wanted to know her everything. I ran my thumb down her unfamiliar belly until she moaned.
A kiss is a big step, an opening, an honesty, a transgression. There’s something equal about it, this mutual penetration, a relaxation (if only temporary) of self-love. Forget dualism—in the midst of a kiss you’re neither male nor female, yin nor yang. You’re not yourself! I only paused to ask, “You don’t embroider, do you?” before Ant and Bee painted the tire the color called RED, and we went to bed.