la semaine

I’m deciding to believe the week drained me just enough to start a fresh. When i was little there was something that puzzled me about the mind. How could i think two things at once? How can I think one thing and know another? I remember sitting under the mantle and trying it out, thinking two opposite thoughts at once. Which was my favorite doll?: “Molly” I would tell myself. Deep down, I knew it was Cici. I decided the mind must run on many tracks, like the roller coaster, Space Mountain, with its networks of overlapping avenues suspended in the dark. Though I couldn’t explain it, at that time I thought “deep down” was something I would understand some day when I grew up, like what my dad did for work. I still understand neither. On Sunday morning I rode with CH in a cab to drop him at Grand Central. On Friday I’d known deep down that we would be back together by now. Or was it that I’d been telling myself we would be, but deep down I’d known nothing would change? I’d known deep down that he would extend his stay another night, and he had. As the bridge at Park Avenue grew nearer and nearer, I stopped plying Charles for concessions and felt surer and surer I would not contact him again. When he got out of the car I saved the melodrama and thought, It could be for long time. I’d said this to myself before, but deep down I’d always known I’d call if something came up. This time felt different. Today, he contacted me a few times before I quickly caved, and I realized deep down I’d known I would. Wondering why I’d felt so certain just a few days ago, I’m telling myself it was because at the train station I’d been tired and moody.

Looking back on the week, many moments look like they belong to someone enjoying a fulfilling and exciting city life. I’ve dined with friends or family every night, been out to the movies, a reading, a concert, a few different art shows. I discovered a new neighborhood and finished two books, not to mention hundreds of short stories, which have got to be good for something. I took pleasure in chance encounters, like someone walking by scribbling down a thought in a notepad, people laughing on a park-bench, overhearing a conversation between two hip hopsters comparing notes on what they’d heard of misogyny in India’s factories. Women are only allowed to use the bathroom at work when they can prove to their male supervisors they are menstruating. No joke, I learned this fact from walking behind two horrified, swaggering guys in cool sneakers.

On Tuesday Gail introduced me to a magical hidden city gem. She picked me up by town car at the office and we took lunch at her private club. The club is hidden on the top floor of a landmarked building and filled with leather couches, art, and framed letters. A long communal table seats members united by their interest in literature. I was the only one under sixty, so they were thrilled to talk to me. I knew the scene from many a time spent at the private clubs of CH parents. Conversation about intellectual topics is expected and your own interestingness, just for being seated at their table, is assumed. These are people who take an interest in other people (especially people who are friends with a well-liked member and look reasonably comfortable in the dress code). You invariably leave feeling like a delightful young lady. At Gail’s club, a rule requires visitors to fill in the next available seat at the lunch table, and I was sandwiched between retired journalists, who weren’t, by club rules, supposed to be discussing their work, but who talked to me about the philosophy of interviewing and their ideas about research before the internet. Over chicken salad and the signature corn bread, they volunteered to sponsor my membership. It sounded like a fabulous idea.

That night I went to a reading with friends and we heard a moving piece about Michael Jackson, in yet another hidden upstairs club. This is the piece he read: http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/200908/michael-jackson-john-jeremiah-sullivan-tribute
During the Q&A someone asked about the process of researching, and the author said something I totally related to. He said he wishes he could have just faxed out the documents he found in his research and had GQ publish them instead. Certain quotes he had to throw away, he said, were worth more than his whole piece.

It’s true, the interviews he quoted were full of insight about MJ’s relationship to his own creativity, a heartbreaking saga, his essay convinced me. But really it was the author’s perspective and not MJ that made the piece interesting. Even in journalism, we want to know more about the author more than the subject. Like, what kind of person would be so moved by Michael Jackson to invest in this kind of research and passionate description? Not that we’d rather hear a story about the author, just that his particular view is attractive. We want to see it as he does. I would like to write something similar about Britney someday. I think my view of her, if I could communicate it well, is similarly one that only I could have. I find her innocence and likeability beyond charismatic. I had thoughts like this all day: inspiring, fun.

But on my way home, I was shocked and amazed only that Charles hadn’t called, despite my attempts to get a hold of him, which had been near constant and through every imaginable avenue of communico short of messenger dove. I called a few more times that night to no answer, swallowed some nyquill, and had to wake up before I was ready.

The next day it was pouring rain and I dressed improperly. Was drenched and angry by the time I arrived at work, only a few minutes late. It was my turn to open but the other intern had arrived too early, and was already waiting to be let in when I arrived (we alternate days with the key). The sight of her minuscule body waiting outside the door irritated me in spite of myself and I prayed she wouldn’t want to talk. “You’re so wet,” she said, in a typically obvious conversation style that makes up the bulk of my interaction with her. Most mornings she can be counted on to ask me whether or not I rode my bike. Why she cares is beyond me. I used to follow up her question racking my brain for an interesting explanation. I used to make things up. “I had to leave it at home because the CRAZIEST thing happened.” In fact the decision whether to ride my bike or not is completely random and i’ve started answering with a simple “yes” or “no”. She reminds me of a hummingbird--so fluttery that she comes off as still and peaceful, but is actually a living dart of nervous energy. On her fact checking assignments she is all color-codes and perfect cursive, but when it’s her turn to answer the phone, she snatches it like it’s a ticking bomb. Literally no sooner than the ring has stopped she is whispering a greeting into the phone--literally whispering, because she is overly careful not to disturb the office silence. The effect is much more sultry secretary than chipper receptionist. I find the transition from ring to voice so sudden and jarring I have to stop myself from physically wincing every time. When it’s my turn to man the phones I intentionally exaggerate the time between the end of the ring and my greeting, to set an example. I might shake out my wrist a few times just after lifting the phone, and then slowly stretch my arm over my head before bringing it languidly down to rest at the side of my ear in a pleasing arching motion. Then I say the greeting in as casual and normal and even a tone as possible.

Being soaked through to the bone by rain enhanced my irritability and when I finally got a text from Charles, ostensibly in apology for having “just noticed” a missed call, I collapsed with self-pity and had to step outside. At the end of the day, I wrote back to say, with every ounce of restraint, how lonely I’ve been. I don’t bother to ask what he’d done with my emails, chats, and facebook messages. Until I do, a few lines later. And he is immediately defensive, until he’s sincere and tells me it’s been a hard week for him, too. His review did not go as he’d hoped, and he feels humiliated. I feel a literal swelling in my heart of empathy for him and back down.

On my way out I wanted to respond to Charles but it was raining and I knew I couldn’t call under the cover of the building because my coworkers would be coming down. I was paralyzed under the lip of the roof, wondering where I’d go for cover. I was just starting to cry silently when an attractive guy about my age in a hoodie and a beanie turned to me and said, “Do you by any chance work at the paris review?” Was it my melancholy or my corduroy? “Why yes, yes i do.” “Thank God,” he said. “I have an odd request,” wielding a manuscript. He works for a man as a typist (?) and had been instructed to drop this off in person. He described his boss’s apartment (sweet, TriBeCa) and said “He’s pretty legit.” He asks me about myself: “Are you a writer?” An intern. “Do you want to be one?” Doesn’t everybody. He looked like a jock dressed up as a hipster, sounded like a bit of a ditz, but was dressed like an intellectual. “So your boss,” I asked, “does he know an editor here? Because it doesn’t have a chance if not.” “I have no idea.” “Well is he a real writer?” Long answer, but no, it seemed, a rich hobbyist. “So what do you do for him again?” He is payed absurdly well to re-type manuscripts. Is your boss an older gay guy, by any chance? I wanted to say, because I know a guy just like you who does this kind of work for a wealthy aspiring painter in Chelsea. The guy was clearly distressed about his role at his odd new job, so I brought up the manuscript for him and dropped it in the slush pile, told him it not to worry, it would get read, and started to walk away. As I did the wind picked up and some reflective silver poster boards the size of door-frames flew out of the back of a truck parked outside the next door print shop. It’s a sign! I thought. We will both run to help load them and I’ll catch his reflection on the silver board, and we will fall in love. He is sweet, ditzy and handsome, and would never put his career ahead of me. We both rushed over and helped the workers recover their beautiful flying objects. “You’re just saving the world today,” he said to me. Then the rain really picked up, and I got nervous, and ran away.

All week sadness has sharpened my perspective, I’m convinced, like Hemingway says that hunger does. I noticed things. Little city scenes. A Chinese couple crouched on the ground between a stoop and the sidewalk, hovering over something I thought was an argument, but turned out to be a lottery ticket they were scratching off together. When I walked by boring down at them, they gazed up at me in what seemed like slow motion as if I were a sign or an omen. Also, I was more shaken by homeless people than I ever have been. On the subway, a man begging for change in a wheelchair passed between cars as the train was moving, cackling in acknowledgment of his recklessness, and I thought I might throw up.

Friday I got to travel to the reading room of the Morgan Library and fill out multiple applications to photograph documents in a supervised room. I got to trace the discussion which took place in a series of letters that vacillated between friendly and catty about whether to publish an interview with Richard Stern. The time flew and I can’t remember whether I hardly thought about CH and his imminent arrival, or if I thought of nothing else. When I finally did see him later that night I thought it had been the worst week of my life, but maybe I knew it wasn’t so bad.