TWO WEEKS
Friday
"I sometimes get a deviled egg" he said.
Saturday
C wore a black leather coat and black slacks.
Her son's ex-wife and long-term girlfriend designed houses in plots across the street from one another, each taking up the maximum space allowed. One was gray, the other white. The garden smelled of rosemary and thyme. The staircase had metal railing like a fire-escape, a fireplace in the living-room, and a low-hanging metal lamp. The gray house sold and the white house would soon be on the market.
Sunday
I read aloud "For a long time I continued to be a sort of secret Achilles, profiting from his sexual ambiguity which permitted me mine. But you can't be Achilles every day. And I wanted to become a woman I can love."
Tuesday (2014.01.28)
On Monday Nov. 28, 2005, we went to hear Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson sing Neruda Songs at Carnegie Hall; her husband Peter Lieberson set the love-poems to music for her mezzo-soprano voice (a voice that delivers insides) as she passed through illness into (a few months later) death.
The songs are atonal, melancholic swells of longing offset with little trills of instrumental pleasure. Amor mio, si muero y tu no mueres. As I listen now, it feels she calls from the dead.
The Mahler afterwords (his 4th) seemed an entirely different evening. I distrusted the giddy opening, the sleigh bells, the looks of rapture on the faces around me, as he set dark and light into pleasing (I thought manipulative) opposition.
Wednesday before taking my car to the shop
In the fall, over a drink, Cl told me about Whistler's interest in interior yellows. I told her, over a drink, or in writing, that Rilke offered himself as assistant to Rodin. He wrote a beautiful book about it: just now I looked on my shelf but found instead his Letters on Cezanne ["after the master's death I followed his traces everywhere"] written to his wife. Slim as it is, I only ever open it at random.
[Oct. 2, 1907 "Clouds, loose clouds, wind, swift rains, and from an elevated clearing, suddenly, sunlight, as if cast with a reflector, strong, concentrated, and as if in a hurry, onto some wet thing that turned completely white in this blinding glare, and in all the windows brightness and sky."]
Friday
Until this afternoon I'd forgotten ontological was a question or even a word.
We haven't returned to the 1980s but the 1890s she said. (The trauma of changes in technology and speed). I look at the sunset off the exit at Avenue 60: gradations of color set behind trees.
Saturday
C made tuna salad with celery (she should have taken out the strings she said and the deviled eggs had too much salt). She didn't have lettuce but a muffin in the toaster and crackers from the freezer (where they keep their crunch). She put the cherry tomatoes on a plate and peeled then sliced half an avocado (although it's not the season, she said, they're not so green).
Sunday
At one point during the film, a young woman reads (while laughing) to her lover in bed. She runs her finger down the ridge of his nose, across his forehead, between his brows. "Listen to this" she says. In cataloguing this moment, I must include that I worked the prior year as the filmmaker's assistant. My cheeks grew hot as the young woman read to him and hotter still when, for a moment, the book's title flashed before us.
Tuesday
The young car-insurance-salesman wrote:
"this is a co[u]rtesy email only …
"I like the upper left horse painting - the blue horse with rider too
"The yellow vested man entering red door
"the older man drawing, the 'split' man drawing that has two people halves facing away-
"I like the blue horse at bottom of drawing section- the duo of dancing horses with yellow band-
"What are the sizes of your paintings in general? Drawings? Prices in general/ range?
"I see angst, or love- struggle- and yet unity-"
He sent me a movie-script he'd written [Counterfeit a hustle].
Wednesday
The electric wires buzz. The eucalypti take all the water. They have smooth skin. John said Hockney used this for his shower painting. I showed him Nerves. He admired the picture on the inside cover and the typography. He opened to "Menu" and read aloud. Deviled eggs are comforting (the kitchen in which they're made). One must love firm gelatinous white and whipped pale yellow yolk.
