When I wasn’t playing Schubert impromptus on the piano (without the pedals), I listened to my box-set of La Bohème again and again, as a kind of cardiovascular workout (a reminder of that dimly remembered thing: romance). So now I had a sore ankle and a sore spot for MimÌ, a real hankering for the flower-girl to come warm her little cold hands at my artificial log fire, which couldn’t be much worse than Rodolfo’s fire (all he had was paper!). . . But what was I thinking?! Not another bohemian! I’d barely rid myself of the last one yet: Gertrude’s phone calls had gone down, post-break-up, to two or three a day, as opposed to six or more, but it still wasn’t the decisive split I’d had in mind. And now she wanted Explanations. To be kind, I didn’t give her any.
“Is it somebody else?” she asked. “You’ve found somebody else!”
“I found my senses, Gertrude.”
Some of her bewilderment was understandable. Nobody usually ends an affair in this town without snagging a replacement first. The fact that I hadn’t indulged in the conventional two-timing stage was an indication of just how intolerable Gertrude was. I’d ditched her for her own deficiencies, not because I was cunt-struck on somebody else.
Gertrude was like one of those boa constrictors, those beautiful creatures people in Florida keep as pets until the thing gets too big and uncontrollable—whereupon they let it loose outside to terrorize the neighborhood, until some jerk finally comes along and shoots it. The snake was set up for a fall from the start! You take a wild animal into your home and then blame it for being wild. It was Gertrude’s nature, for chrissake, to be obnoxious, and my mistake to have had anything to do with her, no matter how appealingly she sauntered up 42nd Street. I chose the woman, I ushered her into my building and made what I considered a suave pass at her in the elevator, the actions of a supposedly grown man. And she could still slither into my life and undermine me, even from the snowbound wastes of Connecticut.
“Did I say something wrong? Did I do something horrible?” (Yes, and yes.)“Didn’t I try to please you? I took you into my home, my family, Harrison. I gave you everything. . . !”
“I’m no family man, Gertrude. I told you that from the beginning.”
And yet, my biggest regret in breaking up with her was the loss of Claude. I would really miss that kid, and I’d worry about him too, stuck over there all alone with Gertrude (and the army of au pairs). But what could I do? He wasn’t my son—Gertrude was already pregnant when I met her, having had herself artificially inseminated on a whim, some months before. When we broke up, I thought of asking for visiting rights but didn’t, for fear that she’d use my fondness for Claude as some sort of weapon.
I once asked him, “How was the playground today?” and he answered, “Homoerotic.” What a guy! And what a vocabulary—Gertrude must’ve read Webster’s to him when he was still in the womb.
The sprained ankle had given me an unforeseen vacation from work, and after some initial shock at the extent of my solitude and spare time, I discovered: my apartment! Always scooting between New York and Long Island and Gertrude’s various approximations of bohemia in Manhattan, Connecticut, and Hilton Head, I never had time to enjoy it, and it’s a great apartment! Neither bohemian nor po-mo metro minimalist chic: my place was “modern” in about 1920. It’s a converted penthouse loft at the top of the century fabric design co. building in the Garment District (36th, between 7th and 8th), a business long defunct but still proudly commemorated in gold lettering over the front entrance. It’s now mixed-use, with about a million mysterious enterprises going on below me: hats, buttons, hooks, eyes, feathers, SM gear, rubber nurse uniforms, transgender lingerie, godknowswhat. I sometimes study the brass-framed list of my fellow inhabitants while waiting for the elevator, trying to imagine what the hell they’re all up to in there:
FEATHER FLAUNT
THE QUICK-FIX COMPANY
COUTURE CUTEY
BARRY’S BRAS
JEEPERS & CO.
MATERNITY PANTS
FIFI FUN
CHOCOLATEX
BUSKYDELL CORP.
SNAPPY ZIPPER. . .
Living in the Garment District is very convenient—you never have to wash a shirt, just go down and buy a new one at Ramin’s! I work across town, right by the Morgan Library, so daily pass all of female fashion, from underwear to eveningwear. I’m a block away from the General Post Office too, where on tax day a guy runs up and down the steps dressed as an Excedrin, passing out free samples to late filers.
The elevator doesn’t reach my floor—you have to walk up the last flight on foot (sprained ankle or not). But because I’m on the top, it’s very quiet: I can play the piano whenever I want, and don’t have to listen to other people’s idiotic choice of music. I don’t own the roof terrace, but nobody ever comes up there so it’s effectively mine. Gertrude had hopes of turning the whole place into an urban farm, but my main use for it is as a lookout post for terrorist attacks and more benign types of fireworks. It’s also a bracing spot for the first cup of coffee of the day, while staring at the ancient faded ad for boots on a building opposite—
LOOKS WELL
FEELS WELL
WEARS WELL
—which pretty much sums up how I feel about my apartment! Another sign further on, “baar & beard’s” (ladies’ scarves), reminds me to shave.
The best thing about my apartment is that there are no dingy areas. Dinginess is the source of all human misery. There’s a skylight over the front door, and windows on three sides of the building. Light fills the place, coming in from all angles, drifting through internal doors and windows, over diagonally cut white breezeblock walls, and bouncing off the high ceilings. It’s airy in my eyrie! Some of the woodwork is dark mahogany, but most of the doors are filled with old frosted glass. And, next to the French doors that open out onto the roof, there’s just one huge window that stretches the length of the living room, a slanted wall of glass. The coziest thing in the world is to sit under this window at twilight when it’s raining heavily outside and the water patters on the glass, forming a steady sheet of drips through which you glimpse the twinkling lights of a million other windows and the bridge (a guy’s always got to have an escape route in sight).
So now, a martini to the left of me, fire to the right of me, piano in stasis before me, and all of Manhattan in motion behind me, I sat in torpor, my foot on its footstool, my head in its fool’s cap, and a pad of foolscap on my lap in case I wanted to jot down anything melancholy. This activity was not new: my List of Melancholy Things pre-dated my break-up and the sprained ankle. It’s my life’s work.
LIST OF MELANCHOLY
– Liszt himself—such bombast, and for what?
– MimÌ, a torn and tender woman
– being alone on New Year’s Eve
– forced marriages among five-year-olds
– master’s degrees in highway lighting
– the rushed minimal morning walks of a million Manhattan mutts
– puppetry
– pep talks
– the Great Auk
– shrimp-eating contests
– unpredictable air fares
– pregnant women pushing strollers uphill like Sisyphus—just stop breeding, why don’t you?
– the existence of Walmart
– Superman T-shirts
– Bach’s solo cello suites, especially No. 5; also, 2 and 4. . . aw, throw them all in (they all exhibit “exquisite melancholy”)
My kitchen is triangular, which turns out to be the perfect shape for a kitchen to be: everything’s visible and within reach. There’s even a little table and chair in there for eating sandwiches in a hurry. My kitchen’s equipped with every gadget known to man, gifts from grateful patients and patient girlfriends, or worry-warts like Bee (who sprang a juicer on me some years back when she noticed the only Vitamin C I was getting was from the celery in my Bloody Marys). I’ve got technology up the wazoo in there: a milk-frother from a cappuccino-lover who’d hurriedly assumed, on the basis of a few nights together, that we’d be sharing breakfast more often than we ever did. A lemon-zester, from a patient who claimed it was symbolic of her new zest in life since the rejuvenation job I’d done on her. An egg-boiler (for one egg at a time), a panic-buy of my own when I realized I’d reached maturity without knowing how to boil an egg (but had I reached maturity? And how would eggs help me if I had?). And an olive-pitter I mistakenly thought necessary for making martinis. A bread-maker, that had continued kneading its dough long after the girl who gave it to me walked out for good. An electric nutmeg-grater that must have cost more than a lifetime’s supply of nutmegs (this, from a woman much taken with my Eggnog and our Eggnog snog out on Gertrude’s porch one Christmas). And its rival, Gertrude’s five-hundred-buck coffee machine that took up half my counter space and looked like it would be of more use printing revolutionary pamphlets. I also had a big fancy stove with six burners and an inbuilt griddle I never used, microwave, fridge, automatic ice-producing freezer full of gin, vodka, and an ancient carton of sherbet (which somehow always got forgotten at the sight of the gin), dishwasher, prehensile-mangling blender, my mother’s long-retired Revere Ware pots, and the weighty tortilla pan I purchased at a medical conference in Bilbao, under the influence of an attractive anesthesiologist and too much Rioja. All the conveniences of modern life were there! (And I’d even read the manuals.) And crackers—a guy can’t have too many crackers.
But I went in the kitchen on New Year’s Eve and thought, how the hell do I just heat something up in here? And my appliances stared back at me, seething with resentment and hope. use me! choose me! abuse me! take me! shake me! bake me! at least plug me in, you dope! It was scary in there! I cautiously backed out and, with the assistance of an old cane (bought long ago in a moment of self-deception, for the purpose of hill-walking), hauled ass down to the diner on the corner and got me a nice big bowl of matzo ball soup. You can survive a New York winter as long as you know where to go for soup.
Revelers were trying to revel outside in the snow. I watched them rush past the windows, and felt another pang of New Year’s exasperation about my lovelessness: no kiss at midnight for me. No Mimì either. But it was a fairly abstract concern, since Gertrude had ruined me for other women. Love now seemed ridiculous and Wagnerian to me, like the Bugs Bunny cartoon when he dresses up as Brunhilda and Elmer Fudd falls instantly in love, bellowing, “Bwoonhiwlda, you’re so wuvvawy!” and Bugs sings, “Yes, I know it. I can’t help it!”—Wagner and all of human sentiment, mocked in one cartoon. Wagner deserved it. no chair, not even a box at the Met, equips you for such interminable spectatorship.
Fortified by soup, I inched my way through the snowy wastes. For fear of being knocked over by the movers and shakers, I turned down a dark alley, feeling like an Antarctic explorer who’d had to leave his sled team behind to eat each other. “I may be some time.” The snow was a foot deep in places; I tackled each glacier as it arose. It was peaceful in the alley, an ideal spot for the unloved. Heaps of trash and tinsel peeked out from under snowbanks, and I came upon a ten-foot-high Styrofoam Santa who stood with his face against a brick wall, as if he’d just slipped out of some bar for a pee. Poor old Santa—his day was done, adoration time over. I stumbled on toward the North Pole (represented by the lights at the end of the alley) until I heard a voice. Not Santa’s luckily, but a muffled miaow. A cat, out in weather like this?
“Ain’t a fit night out for man nor beast!” I said to him, and the cat miaowed louder. A W. C. Fields fan! I headed in his direction, as unthreateningly as possible, to see if the cat needed any help. The miaowing seemed to be coming from behind a snow-covered mound of trash, and it became more frantic the closer I got. I scraped the snow away and, under a pile of crumpled bikes and lost umbrellas, finally saw a small form moving around. I put out my hand to pat him, and he obligingly tried to reach it but was prevented by a bunch of spokes. Maybe he’d gone under the bikes for shelter in a blizzard, and they’d shifted under the weight of the snow, barring his exit. Anyway, what might have seemed a safe sleeping spot before the snowstorm had become a potential tomb. It was freezing out there! He couldn’t survive the night.
Luckily, Pick-up Sticks was my ancient rainy-day specialty. I’d honed my skills by making Bee play it again and again when we were kids. (A talent that had proved handy in surgery too.) So I now carefully removed one knot of metal at a time, trying to prevent the whole structure collapsing onto the cat, who continued to cry out to me as I worked: he was a friendly little guy. When I finally got him out and placed him gently on a thin patch of snow, he limped right over to me and rubbed himself against my legs. A limp?! That did it. I couldn’t leave a fellow crip out in the cold. I’d search for his owners some other time—for now, he was coming home with me. And when I picked him up he clung to my shoulder like a baby, but weighed so little I had to keep checking he was still there beneath my thick glove.
Back in the apartment, I put him in a sink full of warm soapy water to raise his core body temperature (and clean him off), an ordeal he tolerated pretty well, for a cat. What emerged was a handsome young fellow, with black, white and reddish fur.
“What’s black and white and red all over?” I asked him. No answer. “A newspaper. Get with it, man!”
In the kitchen I found him some milk and an old ham sandwich, which he politely ate. So easy to please! Then he investigated my whole place, every nook and cranny, undaunted by his limp. He was particularly taken with the scalloped window seat below the slanted window in the living room, instantly recognizing it as the longest cat bed in the world. He jumped up and paused to stand there on his back legs, front paws on the window sill, looking out at New York.
I was about to lay down some newspapers in a closet, for him to use as a temporary cat-box, when I remembered an extremely bijou tray of 100% organic Irish peat-bog mulch, or some such thing, that Gertrude had lugged over at some point and dumped on my terrace intending me to grow tarragon or lemon thyme in it, maybe sorrel. Thanks to the gaudy phosphorescent swirls and curlicues around its rim, I was able to find it in the dark and brought it in. Bubbles, as I now called him since his bubble bath, instantly recognized the true purpose of Gertrude’s agricultural gift and scrabbled energetically in the dirt. He was clearly not feral. He was sophisticated, trusting, and accustomed to human contact and the demands of domesticity. But so thin—he must have been faring for himself on the streets of Manhattan for some time. And now he was sitting on my lap, licking my finger, and looking up at me with love. I hadn’t felt this good in years! Gertrude rarely licked me, and never liked me. Hell, she’d hardly even noticed me.
I checked his legs for any sign of a wound that might cause the limp, but nothing seemed amiss. He’d probably sprained an ankle, or the feline equivalent (my veterinary knowledge was scanty), but at least he didn’t seem uncomfortable. He luxuriated in the warmth and companionship offered, and stretched out on his back to have his stomach rubbed. This cat really knew how to live!
At midnight, we went out on the roof terrace together. I held Bubbles to my chest so he wouldn’t get lost out there in the dark, and we watched the faraway fireworks that seemed to mark his arrival.