In the past two weeks the following phrase, sometimes on the hour, has echoed in my mind: I want a Paul Thek to my Peter Hujar. It is with me now, seeking release. At turns, it spurs me to laugh, at turns fills me with desire. SAID ANOTHER WAY
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The above was taken around 11:50pm on Thursday July 13th, 2023 in my parents' Manhattan bedroom. The heat of the day suffused the room. I had just returned from a poetry reading that S, someone I'd only just met, invited me to. S was all kindness and anxiety. [The next day they wrote: "thank you for the weird, sweet, humid company."]
I was alone in the apartment now; my parents had driven upstate earlier in the day, after my father's doctor's appointment and our morning visit to the Frick collection. Soon, the collection will return to the Frick mansion, but for now it’s in the Breuer building. When we walked over, we disagreed about where it was. 73rd? 74th? 75th? Sotheby’s purchased the building, so, soon, you'll only get to see auction-related exhibitions there.
He was fine with me wanting to skip looking at the Fragonards- I've never liked them. He said: Frick bought the Fragonards from JP Morgan. Then: When I have trouble falling asleep at night, I wander through the Frick in my mind. When we got to the Rembrandts, he said: I like the Polish Rider. What about it? The bows, the movement of the horse. I like paintings with a little action and pending action. There will be use for those bows before the end of the day. When we got to the Turner, we zoomed in to observe the details that get lost in the yellow of the whole. There was a woman passing a jug down to a man on a boat crowded with goods. He said: What do you suppose they are saying to one another? At St. Francis in the Desert, while I contemplated the line of St. Francis' sight towards the Breuer window, he commented that the donkey also faced that way. I was annoyed. It reminded me of what he'd said at MoMA on Tuesday: Monet's water-lilies are a shallow pond no more than a foot deep. At the Van Eyck, he liked the detail of the city in the distance beyond the archways. I admired that each set of eyes in the foreground moved us in a circle within the frame. At Brueghel the Elder's 3 Soldiers, the soldiers are playing music and seem jovial, but the painting is gray, drained of color, so it contains a feeling of death.
On my way back to the apartment that night, I got an ice-cream from the bodega I usually go to. There was a mildly acrid smell about the place from food sitting out in their open buffet. It was late, but a woman was buying flowers. I remembered encouraging my ex to buy my parents tulips there when we visited last April. Tulips look great in their place.
The walls came covered in the pictured fabric when they bought the apartment my sophomore year of college, and at the advice of their decorator, they sourced the fabric and additionally used it for the curtains, headboard of the bed, dust-ruffle, and lampshades. The mirror is on the back of their bedroom door, and is also original to the apartment. It is the only full-length mirror in the place; there are mirrors in the bathrooms, and above their dresser, and a large heavily gilded mirror above the living-room sofa, but that's it. There's nothing in the small guest room where I stay when I visit. Mirrors enlarge a room, do they not? Conflate opposite walls into a shared space? And provide us, of course, with a mirrored view of ourselves.
My parents pull the blinds when they leave the apartment so the sun won't bleach their interiors. Now, I lifted the blinds so I could look out into the night and break the claustrophobia of the room; the cool blue-black outside was a welcome contrast to the yellow-red inside. But, the night absorbed too much light, and I pulled them down again. I saw that oil from my face had gotten on the mirror and wondered whether they might notice. The apartment would be cleaned on Sunday, so perhaps the mirror would get wiped down and evidence of my presence in the room erased. At one point, I lay down on the bed so that I could smell their scent. As they grow older, and as I witness their fragility, I feel achingly protective. The prior day, as I was walking home from lunch, I ran into my mother on the street, but she didn't recognize me. When I told a friend about this later, she said it sounded like I was describing a dream, but her lack of recognition was shocking and real. As I walked towards her, she moved out of the way. Then, I said MOM! MOM! and, slowly, she heard me, slowly she recognized me, and, flatly, she replied: I'm lost in my thoughts. I'm going to get my nails done. I'll be back in an hour.