Belted Galloway. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0.
The other day we went to Albany so I could return all eight items I had bought online from Athleta. The store was in a giant mall that smelled tragically of Cinnabons. The Cinnabons reminded me of the TV series Better Call Saul, which is set in part in a Cinnabon shop, and the way Saul Goodman was unable to resist pulling a con. He missed his old life. Jail was preferable to feeling unknown to himself.
The clothes in the store were made of fabrics that were โwhat is this?โ and โno.โ And there were mirrors, unlike in our house. Richard said, โLetโs go to the Banana.โ He wanted a cashmere sweater. There were two he looked great in, and it made me so happy for someone to look good in clothes I said, โBuy both.โ He said, โI donโt deserve them.โ I said, โNo one deserves anything. You are beautiful. Beauty is its own whatever.โ One of the sweaters had a soft hoodie thing, and Richard liked walking around in the house in it. The hood came down a little low. I said, โYouโre getting a seven dwarfs thing happening with the hood.โ He pulled it back a little, and it was perfect.
The next day on our walk, he wore the hoodie over a cap covering his ears. When we recited three things in the moment we loved, he said, โIโm glad weโre walking, although Iโm against it.โ I said, โWhy are you against it?โ He said, โItโs too cold.โ It was during the Arctic cyclone, and I was wearing my down coat from the eighties. The shoulder pads are out to Mars, and Richard said, โEveryone on Warren Street thinks youโve been released from an alien abduction after thirty years. They are wondering why you were released.โ I said, โWhy was I released?โ He said, โThey couldnโt get anything useful from you about earthlings. It was a total waste of their time.โ
I bought a giant wheel of focaccia with salt and olives from a bakery. The grease was soaking through the bag when I got outside. I tore off a hunk. Richard said, โAre you going to eat all that?โ I said, โIt tastes like a crispy pretzel from Central Park,โ and I could see I was missing my old life. The way we live, there are cows outside our windows that belong to Abby Rockefeller. Abby Rockefeller has built a dairy farm down the road where a piece of cheese is either pay this or your mortgage. Richard took a bite of the focaccia. It still took forever to get through the hunk Iโd torn off, and my hands froze. I said, โMy fingers could break off like one of those corpses holding a clue to their murder.โ
Earlier in the day, weโd installed two bookcases in the basement. Richard was arranging the books in alphabetical order. At one time, in New York, the books had been in alphabetical order and every morning Iโd walked on Broadway, looking for free samples from the food markets. COVID ended the era of free samples, and now I buy things to eat on Warren Street. The other day I went into a new cafรฉ. Sun glared from the smile of the woman behind the counter when she said, โAll the pastries are gluten-free and vegan.โ I wondered if there was something about me that made her happy to announce this or if it had become a cultural commonplace like using the word bandwidth to mean mental space. I said, โI welcome gluten, and Iโm not vegan.โ She swore I wouldnโt know the difference, and even though I knew she would be wrong, I bought a slice of gluten-free vegan lemon pound cake, which lacked all the ingredients of pound cake. Itโs in a bag on the kitchen counter. You can have it.
How we got the bookcases is the mother of a man on Facebook Marketplace had died, and he was clearing out her house. The cases were taller and heavier than reported. Richard wanted me to understand the logistics required to stand up each bookcase and edge it against a wall. He kept saying, โDonโt you see it has to go this way and then that way. Donโt you see it wonโt fit from that angle?โ I kept saying, โNo, I donโt understand, and it thrills me to tell you I will never need to understand, as long as we stick it out together.โ
Recently, he found an early book by Louisa May Alcott in one of the free bins on Warren Street. This morning he said, โWe didnโt read American literature in school.โ (Heโs from England.) โMaybe a poem by Longfellow and Moby-Dick.โ I said, โMoby-Dick is not chopped liver.โ Then I thought that was unfair to chopped liver. If you tasted my chopped liver, you wouldnโt call it โchopped liver.โ
I told him about a dream. If I were you, I would save myself and move on from this section. In the dream, we live in a chรขteau, and Iโm talking to the woman who owns it. First she wants me to take her change and give her dollar bills. Fine. Then there is an enormous platter of lobsterlike creatures. Itโs enormous. She holds up one of the creatures, and at first I donโt realize itโs alive. Alive and sluggish. I see the lobsters moving in a jumble on the platter, and Iโm horrified for them, for me, for existence as we know it. Why are there lobsters that arenโt quite lobsters!! Why are they so huge!! Then Iโm digging in a flower bed, and I think, Ah, itโs time to get the dahlia tubers from the basement. Donโt forget to plant the dahlias. Richard said, โThe lobsters are from the zombie apocalypse show we watched with the fungus.โ I thought, Yes, and I could see my mind had infinite bandwidth for any old crap fed to it.
A few nights ago, we watched a conversation with Mike Nichols filmed during his last days. He looks emaciated and speaks with his usual clarity and animation. Intercut with the conversation are scenes from some of his films. In one sequence from The Graduate, the camera shoots Dustin Hoffman in his convertible on a California freeway, racing to his future, racing to chaos from a death-in-life torporโnot unlike Saul Goodman fleeing the Cinnabon shop for a life of crime. The camera stays on Dustinโs look of determination, and then it moves to the scenery on his left as heโs racing along, it moves to trees and sky over his shoulder, and then, finally it shoots the road aheadโa tangle of beams and signs and other cars he is driving toward. And I thought that movement of the camera, that layering of shots and the thoughts those shots arouse in the moment and in memory, is exactly what to do with sentences to form a paragraph.
If there were a point to life, the point would be pleasure. I knew a man, an Italian communist, who liked to say, raising a glass of champagne and nibbling a blini with caviar, โNothingโs too good for the working class.โ Kafkaโs Hunger Artist explains to the overseer at the end of the story heโs not a saint, nor is he devoted to art or sacrifice. Heโs just a picky eater. โI have to fast. I canโt help it โฆ I couldnโt find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.โ
I once promised a man who was touchy about his privacy I would keep his secrets, and I kept his secrets. Otherwise I have made few promises, and I have never made a resolution. Today Richard was grumpier than me, and it made me so happy I was nice the whole time we walked. I love my phone. I love the first sip of a cocktail when the elevator drops. There is a woman I donโt love and canโt stop thinking about. I love that I will never understand my connection to her. There is a kind of vulnerability that makes me feel my whole life is stretched out in front of me. In a way, it is.
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Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now, Postcards from the Thing that is Happening (Dottir Press), which has been long listed for theย PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes the โStreaming Nowโ column for Liber a Feminist Review, and she writes the Everything is Personal substack.ย