A beautiful day, finally, with so much sunlight filling the blue sky that I thought I was in Bermuda, looking out over Harrington Sound instead of Queens. On all my trips to Bermuda, I’ve never spent much time looking out over Harrington Sound, but this morning I was staring so hard at photographs of the view from a terrace that I burned through to some sense memory of actually being in the vicinity. I was trying to figure out the location of a rather imposing pile, dating from 1929 and unimaginatively called the “Manor House.” 

It began with a real estate ad in today’s online edition of the Times. The Bermuda pink of the — for Bermuda — palatial façade must have caught my eye. I could not resist the slideshow of the two-bedroom unit that has been carved out of, or perhaps created alongside, the old mansion. It wasn’t terribly interesting in itself, except as an example of grandeur cut down to modern size. But the view of a strange old tower, connected to a boathouse apparently, ignited the sort of curiosity that inevitably leads me to Google Maps. I had to know where the place was. 

Make no mistake: Kathleen and I are not in the market for a $1.3 million pied-à-terre in Bermuda. (I will omit discussion of the fact that this property can indeed be owned by foreigners rich enough to meet Bermuda’s steep net-worth requirements.) My interest in locating the Manor House was absolutely and purely idle. But it was not the less obsessive for that. I have to know where everything is nowadays. Give me an address, and I fly off on my browser’s satellite for an overhead view. It’s a bit more intrusive than a drive-by, because I can peer into backyards (and back forties), but I feel not the slightest compunction about being surprised to discover that certain affluent relations live very close to a major airport. Or happy to know that a friend’s mother will be only a block from the subway when she moves next month — which I can tell even though I’ve never been to that part of town. When there’s nothing new to snoop into, I revisit the homes of my youth, two of which have been rather unbecomingly “improved” since my day. (I’d have torn them down.) 

Harrington Sound, rather witlessly described in the Times ad, as “a scenic inland lake,” is simply a body of seawater that is almost but not entirely surrounded by the bits and pieces of volcano-top that constitute the Bermuda Islands. (Perhaps more precisely, it is a slightly submerged bit of volcano- top; but it is full of seawater and in no sense a “lake.” The reference to “inland” would be ludicrous if it weren’t necessary to make it clear that ocean beaches are not part of the deal.) With one exception, I’ve only seen the Sound from the back seat of a taxi, on interminable rides between Hamilton and St George’s. Bermuda is about as long as Manhattan, but getting from one end to the other involves roads barely wider than driveways, traveling through an extended version of Central Park’s Ramble. Harrington Sound always seems to take forever to drive around. You might see a sailboat, but usually not. It is quiet, but without being interesting or inviting. What was this Manor House place doing on Harrington Sound? And where the hell was it? 

I perused what I considered to be the likely shores, to the north and the east. There are some pretty big “properties” in those parts, but nothing correlating to the images in the slide show presented itself. In this way, an hour passed. Over and over, I coursed from Castle Harbor to Pink Beach, ignoring the Mid-Ocean Club and trying to recall the year in which the black denizens of Tucker’s Town were evacuated to make room for a golf course, surrounded by homes of the rich one of which is owned by our own Mayor Bloomberg. Nothing.

As you can see from the slides, the front of the Manor House is very unusual (for Bermuda), with its peristyle entry to an interior courtyard. I tried to guess the orientation of the building from the shadows, but all I could really tell was that the house didn’t face north. Finally, I cheated. I looked for and found other real estate listings. One of these placed the Manor in Smith’s, the parish that includes Pink Beach (which Kathleen and I visited twice, long ago) and the south shore of Harrington Sound. Further investigation revealed that the Manor is “steps away” from the Bermuda Aquarium and from a restaurant called Rustico’s, both of which are in a village the name of which no one ever mentions, perhaps because, according to the maps, it’s “Flatt’s.” 

The first time that Kathleen and I visited Pink Beach, the atmosphere of luxe was neither calm nor voluptuous enough to soften my conviction that my beard was seriously unkempt. I needed a trim! Kathleen discovered that there was a barber shop in nearby Flatt’s, and, Flatt’s’ being nearby, I suggested that we walk from the hotel. This turned out to be a memorable mistake, one that still takes up a full page in our virtual album of holiday horrors. When I called Bermuda’s roads driveways just now, I hope you didn’t think that they’re fitted with correspondingly reduced sidewalks. There are no sidewalks (not outside of Hamilton, anyway). So you are walking in a narrow lane with the traffic. You are walking in the lane because the edge of the lane is shielded by the low-lying canopy of riotous wildnerness growth that serves Bermudians as free natural fences. And because you cannot walk in the low-hanging shade, you walk in the hot sun. Every once in a while, you get a glimpse of Harrington Sound. By the time you get to your destination, after a walk that ought to have taken fifteen minutes for sheer mileage, instead of forty, you are no longer speaking to your traveling companion. She, at any rate, is not speaking to you. 

So it’s not without reason that I have no recollection of walking under the quaint footbridge that, just east of Flatt’s — not that I had any idea of being near to the end of our ordeal — connects the Manor House to the picturesque boathouse. You can see the bridge from the satellite as well as from the slideshow, and it is mentioned in a description of the Manor House that appears on the “See Smith’s” page of Bermuda-online.org. According to the Web page, the Manor House used to be called “Deepdene,” and — what a small world it is!— it turns out to have been built for “an American millionaire, Charles Ledyard Blair and his first wife who was related to the Bermudian Butterfield family. Blair was from Blairstown (New Jersey) and imported non-Bermudian architecture.” I’ll say! But let’s stop at Blairstown, which is (as regular readers know) where I went to prep school, at an institution of the same name as the builder of Deepdene. 

Finding the Manor House, I was released by a quick burst into carefree possession of the useless information that I had sought all morning. That ought to have been the end of it, but I been out in the virtual sun too long, and now the real one took me back to Bermuda as well. It has left me feeling as though I were there yesterday. I can feel the heat and smell the air and hear the lilting accents. That I would no longer ask for a Tanqueraymartiniupwithanoliveandnottoodryplease makes it even easier to be satisfied with the imaginary trip. 

I am of course not much of a traveler. I was explaining this to Tito, the Peruvian barber who keeps my beard trim, only yesterday. He asked if I had ever been to South America or if I had plans to go, and I said that, no, I didn’t travel much, and when I did, I preferred to go to Europe (although when that’s going to happen next is beyond guessing). I added that for an eighteen-month stretch, beginning in 2008, I did not leave Manhattan Island. That made him laugh. When he goes home to Lima, he told me, his friends ask him what New York is like, and he has a terrible time explaining the boroughs. Queens, for example — what is that? Tito shrugged. “New York,” he tells them, “is just Manhattan Island.” But to them, an island is something that sits in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and is topped by a few palm trees and grass huts. They can’t imagine that the dense forest of skyscrapers that they’ve seen in the movies actually sits on an island. 

I forgot to tell him to direct his friends to Google Maps.

In this week’s New Yorker, James Surowiecki devotes his column to the price of gasoline and its outsize effect on the economy. I read it with an odd detachment, as if I lived in some other economy. Well, I do; I live in the economy of Manhattan, which while not unrelated to the national economy isn’t the same, either. There are other cities in the United States, but none of them is like New York in having an enormous concentration of wealthy residents not far from the heart of town. Nor so many merely affluent inhabitants, either. The “city” parts of the other American cities are clusters of office buildings. We have plenty of office buildings, too, but they’re all a few blocks at most from apartment buildings where people actually live. The marginal avenues on the East and West Sides of the island are lined with shops and services — dry cleaners, nail salons, liquor stores — by the dozens. Food is sold in many different ways, from delicatessens to bodegas to vegetable stands to supermarkets. (The supermarkets are much, much smaller than their suburban counterparts.) Wherever you live in Manhattan, you will find the necessities of life on sale within walking distance. You won’t need a car. A car, in fact, will be an expensive and inconvenient albatross. Every day, I give thanks that I do not own a car. 

When I lived in Houston in the Seventies, I did not give daily thanks that I didn’t own a car; not owning a car in Houston was, as you might surmise, a royal pain. I managed, because it so happened that I rarely needed to be more than a few blocks from Westheimer Boulevard, a long thoroughfare served by a bus line. But everybody else had a car; having a car was the done thing. To say that you couldn’t do something because you didn’t have a car — well, you might as well come out and say that you were broke, improvident, poor. As indeed I was, working in classical FM radio. But at least I was spared the equally royal pain of taking care of a car, that is of paying someone else to take care of a car, at ruinous prices and on an unaccommodating timetable. My mother had a Mercedes that was always in the shop, even though it never broke down; at her level of consumption, neurosis took the place of need, and if the engine didn’t sound just right, in went the car. But my mother would have been happy to live in her car. She did live in her car. She was always driving to the other side of the county to take advantage of a special on Planter’s Dry Roasted Peanuts, horrid things. I learned about unsustainable energy use up close. 

The only habit worse than car-owning is smoking. I smoked for twenty years, and I’m glad to be done with that, too. Cigarettes are also very expensive these days, at least here in New York, where taxes have raised the price of a pack of cigarettes to something like eleven dollars. Imagine! Quite aside from health concerns, I’m delighted that I no longer smoke. Even when “everybody smoked,” plenty of people didn’t, and they minded if you did, at least in their apartments. Running out of cigarettes could be just as catastrophic as running out of gas, or at least it felt that way. And matches — to have to think about matches! Or disposable lighters that managed to dispose of themselves unexpectedly. I took up smoking in prep school, where I was desperate to send some kind of signal that I was not totally weird. Smoking, I hoped, would smooth the abrading edges of my strangeness and make me look worldly and intellectual. It was at least a bad thing to do, a noticeable vice. My other vices were all private, in that they involved not doing the things that I was supposed to do. I might not look particularly vicious, sitting there reading quietly, but in fact I was undoubtedly shirking, or at best reading the wrong book. The worst thing about reading is that it never looks as transgressive as it really is.  

The worst thing about driving a car is that you can’t read, not even the wrong book. You can be read to, of course, but as far as I’m concerned that is just not the same thing at all. In one ear and out the other, is what happens to me. When we had a weekend house in Connecticut (oh, what were we thinking?), we had a car. The drive was about seventy-five minutes long if there was no traffic. I listened to a lot of NPR. My favorite thing to listen to, though was Wallace Stevens reading “The Credences of Summer.” It’s a terrible shame that Stevens didn’t record more of this verse than he did, but “Credences” became a big hit with me, and fragments of it still float around in my brain, like aural muscae volitantes. “Fully made, fully apparent, fully found.” “Ten thousand tumblers tumbling down.”  

If I were driving these days, I’d put the time to good use with my extensive library of Teach Yourself language kits. It breaks my heart that, for all the time that I have put into them, I remain hopelessly non-fluent in Dutch, Turkish, Chinese, and even French, which I can read well enough but which I don’t understand very well when I hear it spoken. It appears likely that I will go to my grave speaking only the one language — the one language that everybody else on earth wants to speak. I do give daily thanks that I do not have to learn English; I can’t imagine how anybody picks it up. Such is my life of privilege that I don’t have to.

Elsewhere in The New Yorker, I came across the word “aotelaise,” which is how Evan Osnos renders the new Chinese word for “outlets.” How does he say this “aotelaise”? Is that a Chinese “ao,” which sounds the same as the “ou” in “outlet”? If so, it’s not how I would spell it for an English speaker. The simple fact is that you never know how anything in English is supposed to be pronounced until you know it. Which is almost but not quite as bad as never being able to get a cab after the theatre, and having to take the subway home, while all the bridge and tunnel people get in their cars and drive back to New Jersey.

What an awful day! Or, should I say, what awful weather. Spring has definitely arrived in New York City, but that doesn’t mean that it’s nice out.

I had a rather good day, very productive. Hmmm… I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to hear that phrase, “very productive,” with a bit of a squint. What it means is that I took care of a number of items on the the to-do list that had piled during a spell of very unproductive days. I would like to have days in which I do not have to make up for other days. The other thing about today’s “productivity”— besides its remedial tenor — is that it involved a lot of ordering things on line and over the phone. “Expensive” would be a very good substitute: I had a very expensive day. I don’t know why I should call it “productive”; I didn’t make anything.

But I was out there in the weather, too, and let’s hope that that wasn’t expensive health-wise. I had some things to take to storage. Nothing much, really. A bolt of fabric that’s destined for the canape in the blue room, which is slated to be reupholstered in a month or so. Taking the fabric to the storage unit made sense because it got a big long box out of the house but even more because the upholsterer’s shop is right around the corner from the storage unit. We had lunch — WWW was helping out — at the Baker Street Pub, where the waiter asked us if we were there for the game. There seems to be a soccer tournament at the moment. I never did figure out who was playing whom or where, but players by the name of O’Shea and Ramirez seemed to be much on the commentators’ lips. By the time I was through with my black and tan, we could hardly hear ourselves think.

Then I had to buy a lampshade. You see what I mean by “productivity.” I did not have to go to the Museum, but when I mentioned the Forbidden City show, WWW jumped. Or maybe he jumped at the mention of the Museum; I’m not sure. It was indeed, as he said, the perfect day for visiting the Museum. I ought to have asked him what he wanted to see, but I was keen to hear what he thought of my pots. If  WWW agrees with Kathleen (she thinks that the pots are kitsch), he didn’t say so.

This time, I bought the Forbidden City show’s catalogue, but as I haven’t read it yet I still don’t have anything intelligent to say, except that the subject of the show is a pavilion that has recently been renovated. This pavilion is in the Forbidden City, or, in other words, Beijing. It is not at the Museum. A number of tchotchkes and home furnishings associated with the pavilion have been shipped over for our delight and edification, but every time I happened on something really impressive, it turned out to belong to the Museum. I suppose I really ought to have seen “Cézanne’s Card Players” or “The Open Window,” current exhibitions of Nineteenth-Century paintings. I’ll get to them eventually.

We stopped off at Crawford Doyle on the way home. Until this morning, I had never heard of Peter Mountford or of his debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, but after reading bits and pieces at The Millions and The Rumpus (which I shall write up in this week’s Grand Hours, at some more genuinely productive time), I had to have it — and Crawford Doyle had it to sell. Then I bought some pots of ivy at the flower shop, to replace the ivy in the living room that I had killed by neglect. It is not like me to kill plants by neglect, and I chalk the minor disaster up to the business of changing my routines. It’s also the case that the ivy required a lot more watering than the nepenthe that used to be in the living room. The ivy will be delivered tomorrow. It was productivity at its most blissful: I was in and out of the flower shop in three minutes, and all I did was ask for ivy and say that I’d take four pots. Oh, and that tomorrow morning would be a good time for delivery. I did not produce a credit card or sign an invoice — all of that sort of thing is on file. Not only did I tick something off the list, but I was tickled by the illusion of living in a quaint village where everybody has known everybody forever and there is no need to pay for anything. Delicious! Thinking what Karl Marx would say only made it more delicious.

Then we went to Williams-Sonoma, where I bought some tableware for Will: a rimmed plate, a bowl with a suction cup on the bottom, and a sippy cup. All in unbreakable melamine and all decorated with cute French cochons and papillons and bottles of lait. When we came out of the store, it was pouring with rain. Since WWW had a big umbrella, I asked him to carry the shopping bag with my books. Rain wouldn’t hurt the plastic dishes! It did, however, turn the Williams-Sonoma shopping bag to pulp, and half a block from home everything tumbled onto the pavement. No harm done, though; the bowl with its suction cup were wrapped in stout paper, which also cushioned the fall of the other two items.  

At home, I made a pot of tea and did not spend any more money.

Ten days or so ago, in a burst of strange enthusiasm, I bought a couple of expensive opera tickets. I almost immediately regretted having done so, and this regret materialized in the form of a certainty that the tickets would not arrive in time via the mail — which indeed they did not. I was assured that this wouldn’t be a problem, and indeed it wasn’t: when I called the Metropolitan Opera this afternoon to report the problem, I was told that tickets would be waiting for me at the box office. But I asked instead to donate them. Now I can wait for a tax certificate instead.

The opera in question was Capriccio, which for all of my adult life has been a beloved work of art. I know every line; I even own a full score. The flash of enthusiasm that I felt ten days ago, excited by an ad in the online edition of the Times, was an urge to see the role performed by a great exponent of Richard Strauss’s music, Renée Fleming. I booked two aisle seats in the parterre. They were fairly far back, but still very pricey.

If I’d bought just one ticket, maybe I’d have gone. The prospects of hustling to Lincoln Center in time to fetch the tickets at the box office, on the one hand, and of dragging Kathleen along with me, after her week in bed with a bad flu, on the other, combined to transform an evening to look forward to into a nightmare. And in fact I had a bad dream about it this morning, one that woke me up. 

There was a third worry: Capriccio, properly performed, runs for two and half hours, without intermission. I’m certain that I would spend the final hour — full of beautiful music thought it be — longing for a bathroom. Some pleasure. Until the seat donation was settled, I

Most people would probably agree that my ability to take pleasure in anything is too dependent upon my physical comfort. But I can’t enjoy anything if I’m irritated by aches and pangs. I can endure. But few things are as wicked, in my view, as enduring what ought to be pleasure. The falseness is unspeakable.

I saw Capriccio at the Met thirteen years ago, when the production was new, and I recall that the great pleasure of the evening was sitting in a theatre full of people who, thanks to Met Titles, were enjoying the civilized repartee that constitutes the opera’s libretto. Like almost all of my recollections of evenings at the Met, beautiful music did not figure much in what was memorable. This isn’t to say that the performances were unsatisfactory; but there was no special joy in hearing familiar music in the opera house.

Give me a concert performance at Carnegie Hall any time.

 

Convalescing from a nasty bit of stomach flu — or virus or whatever it was that sent me flying to the bathroom on Saturday night, hoping to minimize the messy side-effects of reverse peristalsis — has me in a ghostly state of mind. Not being wretchedly sick is oddly like not being alive, or the idea of it anyway. Convulsed with physical misery, you long for release, and release, when it comes, feels like heaven — but an empty heaven, one in which there is nothing to feel, not even boredom.

Recovering from a bout of good old-fashioned upchuck tipped me off to the way in which our manner of speaking about illness hasn’t caught up with the way in which medicine has changed it — especially for those of us who are older. Traditionally, the doctor’s job was to cure disease — to make it go away. People were either sick or they weren’t. But much of modern medicine is aimed at symptoms. Nothing has been done to cure the autoimmune disease that has turned my spinal column into one long bony mass, and that would afflict me with low-grade arthritis if it were not for remedial infusions of Remicade. I’m sick all the time, in other words; I just don’t feel it. The same goes for my hypertension issues. As I get older, the list is likely to longer — until it gets fatally short.

There are certainly days when I don’t “feel well.” I’m not sick, but I’m tired, creaky; sometimes, I’ve had too much wine the night before. The worst thing about not feeling well is the guilt at not getting things done. The wasted time hurts as badly as watching money fly out the window would. But when I’m really sick, this is not a problem. I don’t have the mental space for guilt. Either I’m in agony, seeking release in that vacant heaven, or I’m there, not feeling much of anything. On balance, I’ll take the guilt that goes with not feeling well.

Convalescing is a pleasant way of not feeling well, and I tried to make as much tried-and-true use of the day after as I could. I read two books and watched two movies. The books were Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey — I was already about halfway through — and Anne Roiphe’s Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason. Both were obviously delightful or I’d never have been able to look at them. The movies — neither of them “delightful” — were Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (Auf der aderen Seite) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen). There’s a tremendous, if incidental, sadness to The Lives of Others: Ulrich Mühe, who plays Wiesler, the diligent and committed Stasi agent who turns out to be “a good man,” died at about the time the film was being shown in the United States.

My indisposition was not without comic incident — ha ha. On Thursday, a glance at my Google calendar told me that we were scheduled for brunch with friends on Sunday. I’d have to cancel, I knew, because Kathleen was running off to Miami Beach for an impromptu getaway with another friend. But I dithered. On Saturday afternoon, I was on the point of picking up the phone when I procrastinated yet again, this time fatally, if not for me than for good manners. You can imagine how appalled I was when the doorman rang up our friends early on Sunday afternoon. You can imagine how appalled our friends must have been when I greeted them in the corridor — in my bathrobe! I can only imagine how appalled they were, though, because outwardly they were wonderful about it. It’s a pathetic thread to hold on to, but I can say that nothing like this has ever happened before! And it will never happen again, either.

I’ve been taking it easy today, but not so easy that I couldn’t change the sheets. 

The Times is running a new feature in the Thursday Home section, “Domestic Lives,” in which writers — novelists, so far as I can tell — revisit the scenes of their youth. I don’t know how long the series has been running, but I noticed it for the first time last week, when Kevin Baker went back to Rockport, Massachusetts, and wrote warmly if ambivalently about the town. “Rockport, as a good town should, showed me the way out when I was young and I seized those invitations.” This week, Francine Prose revisited her childhood home, a big house in Ditmas Park, a once-grand part of Brooklyn. She was welcomed by the Grenadian family that owns the house now, but only to enter the living room, not the rest of the house. She left with ambivalent feelings as well, although in her case these were attributable to the work of time. In any case, both pieces surprised me with the realization that I’ve grown very detached from my own childhood. 

This feels like a side-effect of grandfatherhood: It’s Will’s childhood that’s interesting now. But it’s easy for me to feel that way, because my own childhood was not interesting — or, rather, it was interesting in a lot of unpleasant ways. I was an odd little boy and I felt that this made me a bad little boy, because oddness was not appreciated in the Fifties, not at all. I have never entirely gotten over the feeling that there is something deeply wrong with me, wrong at the core — and all the worse because I’m untroubled by it. If the atmosphere in my parents’ house had been religious, I suppose I’d simply feel like a sinner. Instead, I feel like a deviant, and nothing makes that sense of deviance sharper than the idea of returning to Bronxville. 

It’s hard to talk about an unhappy childhood without seeming to blame somebody, and I’ve long outgrown any desire to complain about my parents. I reserve my complaints for the adoption racket that placed me with them. I don’t mean that somebody at the Foundling Hospital made a bad choice. It’s rather the system itself, which encouraged everyone involved to simulate the appearance of natural bonds. “We couldn’t love you more if you were really ours,” they were told to say. I don’t think that it took long for my mother to fear that she didn’t mean it. She could never have produced such a strange little boy — such a critical little boy. 

From an early age, I thought that our house could have been much nicer, and I often said so. I hated my own room, which was furnished with what was supposed to be manly, Southwestern-themed oak; I thought it was tacky. So I hung out in the basement and played with my train sets (which were always pathetically juvenile — I have never lusted after anything with my eyes the way I did the amazing layouts in Model Railroader). Or I wandered through the undeveloped forest across the road, telling myself stories about building a house for myself in the middle of the woods. This house would be small and neat, like the ones in the mural of New Amsterdam that hung on the wall of the den, over the sofa. I would live either in the basement, with a high window at sidewalk level, or in the attic, in a cosy dormer. (This is how I spent my time, instead of tossing balls of one size or another at other boys.)

My dreams of snug corners didn’t mean that, for the time being — until my new town with its canals and squares occupied the vacant lots — I wouldn’t prefer to live in a larger, more imposing house, preferably one with columns along the front. Eventually, the appeal of columns paled beside that of a rambling late-medieval manor house, like one of the impressive exemples of faux-Tudor architecture that clustered in the triangle made by Masterson Road, Elm Rock Road, and Studio Lane. Not that I’d have wanted to live in one of them, though, because they were in Bronxville. 

I don’t want to complain about Bronxville, either. But the thought of living there is so horrifying that it almost stops my heart. Let me just say that I have every reason that Bronxville’s is still the kind of community that it was when I was a boy, and that I could never live in such a community. Not ever. Which is what makes the essays by Kevin Baker and Francine Prose so interesting. They can write about their childhoods more or less equably. I have a hard time keeping mine from sounding like a Dickensian nightmare. Which it wasn’t. But I’ve long since fallen into the habit of associating the good memories with “who I am proud to be today,” and all the bad ones with “childhood.” I can’t go back, because I’ve turned the past into a dump. 

So, even though I grew up in one of the most affluent and comfortable spots on earth (I do not exaggerate), I think that my grandson is a great deal luckier to be growing up a block away from Tomkins Square Park in Alphabet City, a neighborhood that my parents wouldn’t think much of even in its current semi-gentrified condition. Manhattan life never appealed to either one of them; they knew that the island was home to a lot of strange people, people whom one wouldn’t know, people odd enough to enjoy being alone in the middle of a crowd. In creaky old Yorkville, I have found something that i never had when I was a little boy. I’m inclined to call it “privacy.” 

The easiest thing about cooking is the actual cooking. You find a recipe and follow it; you learn, from experience or from teachers, how to navigate the difficult bits; you figure out how to get a complete meal on the table, with everything served as hot or cold as it ought to be, and at the right time, too. You put in a lot of hours acquiring all this experience, and then, voilà, cooking is no big deal. The cooking itself, I mean. 

The hard part is finding out where cooking fits in your life. Perhaps you’re a professional — that’s one simple answer. Here are some others: Perhaps you’re a weekend chef, or someone who does the occasional feast, whether a carefully-planned dégustation involving days of planning before a single egg is cracked, or a groaning board assemblage of hearty dishes that you can prepare without opening a cookbook. Maybe you’re a housewife who’s got the time, energy, and skill to feed your family interesting fare every day. Maybe you’re a bachelor who only cooks for girlfriends, with a repertoire of recipes for two that involve expensive ingredients. (Word to the wise, guys: this works.) 

Maybe you’re none of the above. 

Maybe you’re the husband of a securities lawyer whose hours are wildly unpredictable — hers, that is. Your own hours are yours to do with as you see fit, which is great except for the cooking part. When cooking is not conditional — when it is not the invariable response to a certain signal (showing up for work at a restaurant, seeing that it’s five o’clock in the afternoon, planning a special night) — it’s often difficult to get going. And of all the things that we do, eating is probably the least forgiving if you’re one of those spirits who likes to wait until you’re in the mood. Wait until you’re in the mood to cook, and you’re probably already too hungry to wait for anything to cook. 

All I have to say today is that I haven’t found where cooking fits in my life. I know only that I have to find a place for it. I’ve tried giving it up, and I’ve tried making it regular. Neither campaign was successful. 

One thing that helps, though, is having a thick sheaf of varied recipes, and I’m happy to have just added a new one to mine. Let me tell you about it. 

The other day, seeking to offset the richness of a richly-sauced chicken sauté, I worked up a simple salad of six ingredients, all but five of which are staples. I cut up half of a smoked, fileted trout into bite-size pieces, and tossed them with cut up sun-dried tomatoes, pitted and halved niçoise olives, and steamed haricots verts that I’d cut into short lengths. I drizzled olive oil over these ingredients and then tossed them all in the juice of a half lemon.Served shortly thereafter, the salad was a vivid array of vibrant flavors, harmonious but distinct. A few days later, the flavors had melded, and the salad had developed a pleasant taste that didn’t betray its constituents. So the same recipe yields two results, or more, depending entirely on timing. 

The next time I make this smoked trout salad, I’m going to combine the olives, the tomatoes, and the olive oil a day ahead of time, throwing in the fish about an hour or two before serving, and the beans and the lemon juice at the last minute. I seasoned the salad very lightly with salt and pepper, but gave dried herbs a pass. I might sprinkle some fresh tarragon, or perhaps some snipped chives, if I had them on hand.  I expect that the dish could be plumped up with white beans or some other canned variety.— always, however, bearing in mind that the simplicity of this salad is an illusion: three of its ingredients — the trout, the olives, and the sun-dried tomatoes — have complex flavors. (The smoked fish is doubly complex.) That’s why I think the haricots are essential: they’re green, they’re crunchy, and they’re bland. (And they’re green only if you’ve just steamed them; after a day in the fridge, they turn rather drab.) 

Last night, when we had the leftovers, I hit upon the perfect complement, a cheese soufflé. The light pillowy texture of the soufflé, with its understated backing of gruyère and parmesan, made a perfect contrast to the salad. It’s curious, but an equivalent omelette would be much, much heavier in this combination, even though you’d of course omit the cup of béchamel. 

Altogether, it was a meal that was easy to prepare, and comprised of a small number of ingredients (most of them, as I say, things that I had on hand); but it packed a lot of interest, and it left us feeling satisfied but not stuffed. 

You may be wondering where the recipe is. It’s in your head: you know better than I do what the ratio of fish to tomatoes to olives to beans out to be. You do! That much I do know.

The weather was awful — snow! — but I had to get out of the house. I had to get a haircut, but that’s not what I mean; I had to break out of the ordinary routines, which regular readers will know about my fiddling with since the New Year. The new ordinary routines are working well; they’re much more flexible thant the old ordinary routines. But they’re also much more conservative: the list of things to do is quite a bit smaller. In fact, it’s comprised of necessities. There has been no room in the routines for optional entertainments. That’s why, although I’ve been writing well and regularly, I’ve been circling my navel so far as subject-matter goes. I had to get out of the house in order to have something fresh to report. 

How conservative? My idea of “something fresh” was a trip to the Museum. Oh, boy; how exotic! Sad truth is: it has gotten to be exotic. I’ve been to the Museum once this year, and that was to take my grandson on his first visit — to get him out of the house on a cold day. He and I did not study the curios, exactly; from my point of view, the trip was all about him, not the Museum. 

Today, I vowed, I would go to the Museum and see something new. The Qianlong Emperor obliged. More about him in a minute. Even better, the Museum’s curators obliged. I saw something old — old and very familiar. In a show complementing the exhibition of knickknacks from the emperor’s retirement pavilion, constructed in the Forbidden City in the 1770s, the Museum has displayed one of the few treasures that I long to possess — a large painted-enamel ginger jar. The Museum has two of them; I’d be happy to let it keep one. (As long as they’ve got the pair, though, I wish that they’d turn one of them around, so that I could inspect the back.) 

What I love about the jar, aside from its riotous tackiness, is its cosmopolitan flavor; in a vitrine with other Chinese decorative objects, it stands out as  foreign. And it is foreign. According to the label, one of the patterns beneath the illusory wrapping looks more Indian than Chinese. The technique of painted enamel was developed a few centuries earlier in Limoges. The Chinese, after all, didn’t invent everything. The Qianlong period (1736-1795) was unusually open to foreign styles; the Jesuits were still providing the emperor with a window on the West through which European styles were allowed to pass. One of the objects on display this afternoon — I don’t think that it came from the Forbidden City — was a perfectly frightful vase with long panels showing ladies in French court attire romping beneath parasols; the panels are “framed” with half-carat crystals. Unlike my ginger jar, it’s heavy and dreary and an embarrassment really. 

The conceit of the ginger jar lies in the incompatibility of the patterns above and below the trompe-l’oeil cloth wrapping; it’s as if the broken top and bottom of completely different jars had been glued together, with the swath of ribbony fabric concealing the join. You don’t notice this right away, though, because the cloth itself is so busy: layered fantastically in three colors, embroidered with a tiny pattern, and overlaid with floral emblems that don’t quite tuck into the folds. The whole thing comes this close to being one of those horrors that you used to see in the furniture showrooms on Grand street — when Grand Street was still part of Little Italy. With a ghastly tasseled lampshade. 

I can’t help thinking of the Qianlong Emperor as the Chinese Louis XV. Their long reigns overlapped considerably, and were characterized by an easygoing opulence and a nonchalant grandeur that inspired the production of a lot of beautiful things. (And their régimes were equally doomed, even if it took China more than a century longer to tumble into the abyss.) Of course we know a lot more about the French king than we ever will about the Chinese emperor; it’s not difficult to bring the lazy and sensual but warm-hearted and good-natured Louis to life, but the personal qualities of the Qianlong Emperor are so much rubble beneath the official transcripts of his reign, in which almost everything occurs as it was supposed to occur. (There are no reliable unofficial transcripts.) Poor Lord Macartney never got to have the tête-à-tête that would have allowed him to take the emperor’s measure; the wall of officialdom that blandly blanketed the empror was never breached. 

A nearby vitrine held an assortment of medium-sized lacquer dishes and boxes. I wondered, as always, what they are like to hold. The thought of what it must be like to have to keep a piece of lacquerware dusted led immediately to the guilty recollection that I’ve forgotten all about my resolution to re-read The Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as The Story of the Stone, all four Penguin volumes of which rest beneath my bedside table. I have Volume I in my hands as I write. A Taoist  is talking to a large, inscribed stone — a stone that has everything written on it save the authentication of a dynastic date. Somehow, the stone is going to be sent down to participate in the great illusion of human life — it’s probably best not to dwell on the mechanics. When does the story get going? If I could only get past this prefatory mumbo-jumbo….

I have been thinking lately that I ought to stop reading new books for a year and just re-read old favorites. The Tale of Genji. Austen, Eliot, and James. And Forster. And Waugh. The barber today asked me to recommend a book. He’s from Peru and he wants to improve his English by reading a book that is interesting but not too difficult. I almost suggested Vile Bodies. The language itself is not very difficult, as I recall. But the goings-onmight shock him, might sail right over his uncomprehending head. I recommended Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live, the book about Montaigne. Tito may never ask me to recommend another book, but it will be for a perfectly respectable reason. 

Ah, there’s nothing new here at all! It looks like I’ve fallen back on my old game, trying to write about the same old things with a hint of freshness. How well I’d have fit in at the Qianlong Emperor’s retirement pavilion,which was called, by the way, the Juanqinzhai — the Studio of Exhaustion from Diligent Service.

Last night, Kathleen had a business dinner, so I scooted across the street to the Japanese pub. Like any pub, this place has its regulars, who can be found at the bar on almost any night. I didn’t at first note that one of the regulars was sitting at a nearby table, with an older couple. I was reading Sandra Tsing Loh’s response to the Tiger Mom and sipping a Sapporo contentedly when my chicken teriyaki arrived. As I began piling a few pieces of dripping chicken onto the bowl of rice, however, I became aware of the regular’s voice, which was expressing concern about military preparedness. It was, as always, a very clear voice, almost unaccented — a public speaker’s voice if ever there was one. Without being loud, exactly, the regular was projecting his well-modulated tones throughout the bar area, and I later realized that he was intending to be heard by another regular, this one seated at the bar, whom he was baiting with opposing political views. 

By this time, he held me captive; I couldn’t keep my mind on the page. I couldn’t stop listening to his remarks, but, worse, I couldn’t fathom an effective challenge. As he sang the praises of Sarah Palin and charged Barack Obama with having adopted some of his father’s communist ideas; as he informed his fellow diners that the problem with liberals is that they reduce politics to the personal, and try to smear their opponents with scandal instead of confronting the real issues; as he conceded that he would vote for a libertarian — reluctantly — against a socialist — as he spouted a stream of idiotically short-sighted and poisonously selfish vews, I could think of nothing to say that would pierce his sleek smugness. I had no intention of barging in on the conversation, but I was so unnerved by my inability to venture any silent counter-arguments that I gobbled down my dinner and fled. 

It was very distressing. A great deal of my helplessness, I knew, owed to the man’s genial, level tone. Several times, he said that he quite liked a certain politician, but wouldn’t vote for him because the politican’s views were too far to the left. Nothing personal! In defense of his preposterous claim about the president’s alleged communism, he urged his antagonee, who had joined in from his perch at the bar (making reading quite perfectly impossible), to read Dreams of My Father. Then they would talk about it and he would see! This was as close as the guy came to offering proof of anything — and I almost wished that I had an annotated copy of the book with me, so that I could ask him to point to passages in support of his claim. It would be a depressing exercise, of course; to my objection that a such-and-such a sentence in the book did not make Mr Obama out to be a communist (and here I thought that “socialist” was as extreme as the name-calling was going to get), he would demur suavely and even regretfully; I must be naive, misinformed, or in some other way intellectually wanting. The best that I could hope for would be an offer to agree to disagree — and that has become a wholly unsatisfactory option (hence my liberal “hostility”). 

I can agree to disagree about the nature of the Holy Trinity, but I cannot agree to disagree about creationism or evolutionism. I cannot agree to disagree about drug laws, the death penalty, or restrictions on abortion. As lamentable as some actions may be, they neither justify nor warrant incarceration, execution, or unwanted pregnancy. I can expect society to arrange for my protection, but I don’t give it permission to punish those who would endanger me (hence my liberal “naiveté”). I can only persist in denouncing the opposing position as wrong. I can only tear my hair out wondering how the humanism that I have always espoused and that used to be honored in the breach has become so embattled. 

I can only hope that those who think the way I do outnumber those who think the way he does.

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been getting Remicade infusions for seven years now. The anniversary falls next month, but when I have my next infusion, in June, I’ll be in my eighth year of treatments. As Sarah said — Sarah is one of the two nurses who have been at the HSS’s Infusion Therapy Unit longer than I’ve been a patient there — time flies when you’re having fun. Or, I thought to myself, when you have good health insurance.

The Remicade infusion protocol calls for infusions at eight-week intervals — roughly six per year. Each dose — each bag of mixed-to-order Remicade — costs about $10,000. If I were following the protocol, I’d have cost our health insurer $430,000 since 2004. (I believe that less money changes hands in practise, but the bill is still huge.) That’s a staggering amount of money — what does it buy?

A much better quality of life, to be sure. The medicine prevents the low-grade inflammation of arthritis, and it also calms the irritable bowel problem that has plagued me since my twenties. In short, it spares me the consequences of having an overactive auto-immune system. But it doesn’t actually prevent any auto-immune disorders. And by the time I started taking Remicade, it was already too late for the drug to halt the advance of ankylosing spondylitis. There was nothing to halt; the degenerative process of ossifying my spinal discs was complete.

So I have felt a moral incentive to reduce the number of infusions, and I’m happy to say that I’ve cut it down from six to four. It’s a bit of a stretch. If I had five infusions per year, I would never notice the gradual ebbing of the drug’s effect. At thirteen-week intervals, I do notice. From anywhere between two weeks to ten days before the next infusion, I begin to find that doing almost anything is more of an effort than it usually is. There’s no pain, but there’s no vigor. Once I accept the fact that I’m running low on Remicade, and not malingering, I can turn my time in what I call “the trough” to advantage: it’s a great time for reading and watching videos. 

I tell myself now that this is how life felt every day for about six years before Remicade came to the rescue. I can’t believe it.   

By the time I heard from Kathleen —After a delayed but otherwise uneventful flight to Raleigh-Durham, Kathleen enjoyed a nice lunch with her father and her brother. Then she called me to check in. Ordinarily, she calls whenever her flight lands, but today she decided not to, since I’d be at the movies as usual. Trouble was, I didn’t go to the movies. I’m not sure that it would have calmed down to surmise what turned out to be the case, because it had never happened before. But once I heard her voice — well, it seems in poor taste today to talk of floods of relief.

I didn’t go to the movies because when I finally did stagger out of bed at 8:30 this morning (Kathleen called to say that her plane had just arrived at LaGuardia, when it ought to have been taking off), every joint and tissue clamored for a day off. I wanted only to spend the day reading and watching movies. Kathleen’s being away for the weekend was slightly liberating but largely dispiriting; more often that not, when she’s out of town I feel like the gods in Das Rheingold after the giants carry off Freia, the goddess who tends the orchard where the apples of youthfulness grow.

It’s amazing, though, how quickly a day passes when all you’re doing is reading a book like James Gleick’s The Information. I’m struggling to keep my head about the symbolo-logico-mathematical waters. I nourish a fond hope that Mr Gleick or some other worthy will sex up set theory for me, so that I can at least imagine being interested in the topic. Despite all my years in radio, I have absolutely no palpable grasp of how sound waves, converted into electromagnetic ones, shoot through wires or zoom through the air. I can’t see how it works, and the words get in the way. And whenever the pursuit of abstraction begins to look like a game, I not only lose interest but become annoyed. I don’t like games.

I used to like a lot of games (although never athletic ones), but the passing years presented me with ever-better things to do with my time. I used to do Thomas Middleton’s acrostics whenever they appeared in the Times — something that I had occasion to remember when The Information taught me the counterintuitive but absolutely sound equation of certainty with the total lack of information. If the message can say only one thing — if there is not even the possibility of the message’s not being sent or received — then it is completly devoid of information. It was always very helpful, when solving the acrostics, to try out suffixes such as tion. (And, if that didn’t work — if, say, I had ti for sure — then ting.) But even though I’ve waded through pages about Claude Shannon and bits, I can’t quantify the amount of information that is conveyed by the difference between I  and a, the only two words that can fill a single space. It’s lots, though. A passage narrated in the first person calls up a world of probabilities that distinguishes it from other kinds of prose.

(Playing games with Will will be different. I don’t in fact have anything better to do with my time than play with my grandson. I expect to have at least as much patience with games as he does.)

As for the day’s videos, I’ve watched the latter half of Morning Glory; all of Coco Before Chanel, a picture that I missed in the theatres, heaven knows why; and a strange BBC thing about Agatha Christie with Olivia Williams and Anna Massey. The last is a sort of enacted documentary, with a script taken from genuine records and from Christie’s press talk at the umpteenth anniversary of Mousetrap. I’ll watch anything with Olivia Williams in it, and I just about have.

Kathleen is going to calls tongiht, after dinner, she is bound to have more to report than I do.

Last night, at MTC, we saw Matthew Lopez’s play, Whipping Man. I admired the play and the performances, and I noted the skill with which the playwright wove his plot lines into a dense mat of ironies. But I didn’t enjoy myself for a moment. 

I don’t much like plays without roles for women; there’s that. Nor do I care for plays set in ruined houses — I want to tidy them up, and I exhaust myself trying to decide where I’d start. But the biggest handicap presented by Whipping Man was its Civil War context. When I wasn’t mentally repairing broken windows, I was simmering in my contrarian view of what many Southerners quite rightfully call the War of Northern Aggression. This is not the place to expound on that theme, but listening to a former slave celebrate his new freedom, while knowing what that freedom would in all likelihood mean for him, for his children, and for his children’s children, was an irony so bitter that only the comic flash of a Tom Stoppard could have made it supportable. No one is going to mistake Whipping Man for the work of Tom Stoppard. It is an earnest, well-crafted morality tale, built on a twist designed to make audiences sit up and think. As such, I wish it a flourishing career in the theatre departments of the nation’s colleges and universities. 

The twist is that Southern Jews not only owned slaves but imposed Jewish ways upon them. Whether this made the slaves Jews is the crux of Whipping Man. The Book of Leviticus is quoted: “Such you may treat as slaves. But as for your Israelite kinsmen, no one shall rule ruthlessly over the other.” (25:46). I quote from the JPS edition of the Tanakh; for “Israelite kinsmen,” Mr Lopez substitutes the far more pungent “brothers.” Pungent, that is, because, in a glaringly foreseeable development at the end of the show, two of his characters discover a fraternal bond. When they were children, the slave brother was frequently sent off to the whipping man for chastisement. (The whipping man was never fully explained. We surmised that he provided a service for urban slaveholders who did not staff an overseer.) The first time this happened, the white brother was taken along by the father. During the whipping, the white boy cried out, “Stop!” The black boy thought that his playmate was going to save him, but no: the white boy asked to do the whipping himself. And yet the boys remained playmates for all that. To the degradation of slaveholding, Mr Lopez adds the degradation of Jews, who might have been expected to have known better, his play keens, than to own slaves themselves. But the larger point is that Jews are human beings no better than others. That is the seal of their humanity. 

Whipping Man is set in Richmond, Virginia, in the middle of April, 1865. At the beginning, Caleb, a defecting Confederate officer with a serious leg wound (Jay Wilkison), returns to his stripped and damaged home, to find it in the care of Simon, the butler (André Braugher). When Simon blesses Caleb in Hebrew, the twist begins to turn. Presently another former slave, Nigger John, appears, loaded with goods pilfered from other deserted homes and banters edgily with Caleb about ordering people around. John can read, and he has worked out the date: Pesach. The upshot is that the second act of the play features a makeshift seder (with a brick for the charoset) that has been organized by a pious but illiterate black man — a man who has good reason to walk out on the meal at the play’s climax. It would be wrong to call the construction formulaic, but the ironies are so think that there is barely enough air for the actors to breathe. 

André Braugher does a highly commendable job of showing us a man who has been sustained by wrestling with his faithd; his Simon is neither priggish nor (notwithstanding John’s taunts) “simple.” When the full extent of his master’s faithlessness is revealed to him, Simon does not so much abandon his post as continue in the ways of righteousness with redoubled vigor. But he is as much the slave of a foreordained theatre piece as Simon was the property of a Jewish merchant. André Holland is suitably mercurial as John, a fast talker with cold feet. Jay Wilkison’s Caleb is something of a puzzle; altogether indistinguishable from any good old son of the South, he came across as evidence that a Jewish family could produce a callow college boy. That’s not much of a point to make unless, of course, you’re making the larger one that Jews are just like Mormons or the members of some other American cult. Although interesting in its way, this take on being Jewish is at odds with the rich and complicated sense of being Jewish shared by Simon and John, who, unlike Caleb, regard their faith as no more optional than the color of their skin. Perhaps Mr Lopez is making a point about the pitfalls of assimilation, which is also interesting. Interesting, but not particularly engaging as drama. 

But that’s just me. Most of the audience, once the somber mood of the final curtain had been shaken off, responded with warm appreciation. I just think it’s a pity that Whipping Man was not conceived as a heartbreaking comedy.

Photo by Kathleen Moriarty

Until last Thursday, Kathleen and I were planning to go to Venice in September, to celebrate our thirtieth wedding anniversary. Some time ago, concluding from the debris of our junked plans to visit Italy for the first time, that we’d never get there until we narrowed our ambitions to a few days spent in one city or the other, I’d asked Kathleen to choose between Venice and Rome, and she chose Venice. But on Thursday, she changed her mind in favor of another island, this one much closer to home. At dinner, Megan had said that she would like Will to spend some time on Fire Island this summer. What a nice idea, I thought — but I mentioned that Kathleen was already busy planning Venice (as well as a business trip to Amsterdam in May).

Little did I know. When Kathleen got home from a bar association meeting, I told her Megan’s wish, and she got right online and scouted the offerings for a few hours. Before we went to bed, she had four very attractive rentals in mind. The next morning, Kathleen decided that what she wanted in the way of an anniversary present was not a few days in Venice but a month of weekends (at least) with Will and his parents, on a beach where she’d been very happy as a child. The glamorous pleasure of top-drawer sightseeing in a distant Oz was replaced by the richer one of extended family time on a local sand bar. If I’m a bit wistful about Venice, it’s probably because I don’t have to travel there, not for the moment, anyway. And a month on Fire Island is actually more fun to look forward to. 

We change our plans fairly regularly in this household, which is why I avoid mentioning them. I was looking forward all week to Paul Taylor on Saturday. I’d had the bright idea of making a day of it, and seeing both a matinee and an evening show. It did not threaten to be an ordeal; in the three hours between the events, we’d do some shopping and have an early dinner. And that’s exactly what happened; it couldn’t have been simpler. When the matinee was over, we cut through the arcade that runs for four blocks south of 55th Street to 52nd Street, where there’s a men’s clothing shop that I like and that is never open when I’m in that part of town; and then we went to Cognac, where we enjoyed a very leisurely meal. Instead of shooting back to City Center, we walked up a bit to Carnegie Hall, so that I could take some photographs that I might use as  decoration here. The second show let out at about ten, and we dashed for a taxi. We were home by 10:20, exhilarated but nicely exhausted as well, our brains still popping from the day’s workout. 

No doubt because I happen to be reading James’s Gleick’s The Information, I’m seeing and recalling Paul Taylor’s dances as fountains of information — fountains as fancily up-to-date as Mark Fuller’s celebrated installation at Lincoln Center. No: fancier. Most information that we process as such comes to us in streams that are comprehensible because they’re filtered according to overall expectations. Within the context of dancers moving voicelessly, Taylor tells us a lot of things that we don’t expect to hear, not in the order in which we hear them. A good deal of it looks meaninglessly decorative, but if we suspect that this appearance is misleading, that’s because the vocabulary of movement, no matter how wide-ranging, is coherent. What seems decorative or unintelligible is as much a part of the story being told as the bits that we easily get (fists shaken at heaven, for example, in The Word, or in the very different Phantasmagoria). Taylor tells his stories in his own kind of time; it is not the linear sequence of narrative but something more neural. Meaning often feels short-circuited, as if too much information were being pushed through too narrow a pipeline; and yet this effect always seems quite calmly planned. A lot of information is addressed to parts of my brain that know nothing of logic or history. I don’t know if I’ll ever put much of it to use, but I enjoy taking it in. 

We very much liked four of the six dances that we saw, including one of the premieres, Three Dubious Memories. This dance, which Alistair Macaulay didn’t much like, overtly foregrounds three little love stories, involving a man in green, a man in blue, and a woman in red (Robert Kleinendorst, Sean Mahoney, and Amy Young); and in each iteration the point of view is that of the exluded lover. Behind them, however, a chorus, dressed in grey (and led by James Samson), plays out a larger drama that is not so easily grasped. Indeed, this dance subverts the very idea of a chorus. Here, the chorus does not comment responsively on the colorful romances but rather it resists them, as if to remind us that life is more complex than boy-meets-girl. The choristers warn, they agonize, they resign themselves. They even try out the lovers’ gestures, but experimentally, not reflectively. The lovers, for their part, ignore the chorus, and their movement is designed to look spontaneous. The effect is oddly like that of a Bach chorale, with a steady, singable tune cutting through highly worked, almost complicated counterpoint. 

I must say a word about Company B, which is set to pop songs sung mostly by the Andrews Sisters but in two instances by Patti Andrews alone. Santo Loquasto’s costumes, always interesting, are here truly superb: clothed in generously-cut, pale-colored outfits laced with bright red belts, the dancers are animated by a period ease recognizable from the old movies; but unlike the studios, Paul Taylor does not want you to forget that this is a ballet set in war time. At the end of his number, the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B (Robert Kleinendorst) falls dead under fire. It is a moment, as they used to say, of great pathos.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company is made up of sixteen dancers, some of them starrier than others. Everybody gets a chance to shine, but some manage, by whatever theatrical alchemy, to make more of the opportunity. The tension between dancers’ distinct personalities and their mastery of the common Taylor idiom is one of the company’s wellsprings of excitement. The wonderful Annmaria Mazzini danced her last season with the company this go-round, but she leaves behind three full-blooded peers in Amy Young, Parisa Khobdeh, and Laura Halzack. It’s harder to foresee what the inevitable loss of Michael Trusnovec, the company’s senior dancer, will do to the make-up. The only dancer to remind me of him is the most junior, Michael Novak; both are sly understaters who pull of the stunt of making a complete spectacle of art concealing art.

Robert Kleinendorst, on the contrary, is a virtuoso on the lines of Robert Downey, Jr or Johnny Depp; morsels of the scenery are always disappearing into his brilliant smile. In her nice reflection on Paul Taylor and this season’s performances, Gia Kourlas calls James Sansom “rigorous,” and this seems just right, if not the whole story; in Company B, donning a pair of horn-rim spectacles, Mr Sansom teases the girls in “Oh Johnny Oh!” so bewitchingly that Laura Halzack walks away spouting a spoken line: “Oh, phooey!” Of Ms Halzack, Kourlas writes, “Laura Halzack is the most versatile and beautiful company member: versatile because she’s not afraid to appear uncomely, and beautiful because she has a sense of humor,” and that seems just, too, except that, er, Laura Halzack is beautiful.

Sunday was a wet and gloomy day, and sensible people everywhere stayed at home. But Kathleen and I ventured forth to take Will for his Sunday walk, which may or may not delight him but which gives his parents an hour or so of precious time to themselves. At Tomkins Square Park, the very air was sodden, and there could be no thought of sitting on a bench of putting Will in the swings. What Will did want to do was to splash his hands in the small puddles that accumulated on the railing surrounding the dog run. He was very entertained when Kathleen flicked at the water herself, sending it flying. (This turned out to be a trick that I could not pull off.) We pushed on toward Third Avenue and the St Mark Bookshop, our usual turning point. Back in the literature shelves, an attractive Japanese woman asked with great decorousness if she could take a picture of the “cute” little boy. When she had done so, she petted Will lightly on the shoulder and murmured “arigato.” Kathleen decided that the woman must have been as surprised by a child’s being carried by a man as she was delighted by Will’s appearance, but I wonder if this is entirely fair.  

The other day, I was about to step into the shower when I realized that there was no water. There was no water in the line of my bathroom, nor that of Kathleen’s; neither was there running water in the laundry room across the hall. It took more than an hour for the senior doorman to nail down an explanation: the pump was broken.( In any Manhattan building over a certain height — six or seven floors, roughly — city water has to be pumped into the rooftop tanks that are such a distinctive feature of the neighborhood skyline.) At the same time that José learned about the pump he was told that an electrician was working on the problem. But by this time a rumor had taken hold: that the Second Avenue subway excavators had hit a water main. I heard it myself from the check-out ladies at Food Emporium, when I went back for a second hoard of Deer Park 2.5 gallon jugs. (The first three jugs I’d carried up myself — not a good idea; I had the second batch delivered.) I didn’t correct them; I wasn’t entirely sure that I knew better, notwithstanding José’s assurances. 

Back upstairs, I read the last pages of the book by Eduardo Porter that I would write up later in the day — not very well, I’m afraid. Although I never quite freaked out on Tuesday, I was subject to agitated aftershocks long after the water came back on. Panne d’eau is the worst thing that can happen in the house without actually damaging it. (There’s no reason to compare the drawbacks of losing power, because “no electricity” means “no pump” means — “no water.”) At least it is at my house. The only way that I could be less of a desert person would be to move into a houseboat. I am wretched without two short showers a day, and I am always giving my hands a light wash. If I believed in divine intervention, then Thomas Crapper would be my god. (Correction: he would constitute, together with John Harington and Joseph Bramah, my holy trinity.) I regard the loss of running water as something much worse, and more frightening, than an inconvenience.

But I soldiered on with Porter’s final chapter, which deals with the environmental apocalypse that already seemed to have begun chez moi. I had fifteen gallons of water and a promise from Kathleen that we would stay at a hotel if the water didn’t come back on. Also, I had arranged to run down to a friend’s flat at about one, if I couldn’t take a shower at home;  and, if it came to that, I would take him out to lunch afterward. So I was set. I was almost at the end when I heard a strange roiling noise, such as might be made by a very large but very muffled washing machine. It came primarily from the direction of my bathroom, which is right next to the room where I work, but it really came from everywhere. I got up to investigate (hope springs eternal), and indeed as I neared the bathroom the sound became more distinct, taking on bubbling, gurgling notes. This went on for about ten ten minutes. Every now and then it would taper off, and my heart would sink, but the intermissions were never long, and at long last a filthy brown liquid streamed from the tap. What must have happened is that the pump stopped working hours before anyone noticed, and the water ran out when the tank was empty. The fresh water pouring into it, now that the pump was working again, was stirring up all the sediment that accumulates naturally over time and that periodically has to be cleaned out (meaning “no water” for several hours — but with plenty of advance notice). The water came back on at about a quarter past twelve; it was well past one before the water was clear enough to think of using to wash out a teapot, much less fill it.

Now I have five jugs of bottled water, and what am I going to do with them? Rather, where can I store them? The balcony is tempting, but experience teaches that it’s a bad idea. The jugs will get dirty, and the highly variable temperature will — well, I don’t know what it will do to the water, but it will make me not want to drink anything that has been sitting through sun and chill. Eventually, the jugs will develop very slow leaks. No, if I’m going to put the jugs out on the balcony, I might just as pour them down the drain, or take them to the service elevator room, for scavenging by the handymen and the porters. (Who aren’t needy enough, however, to lug jugs of bottled water to their homes in the outer boroughs.) I really would like to have the water on hand, Just In Case. And there you have it: I’m so perplexed by this pressing domestic difficulty — the jugs are sitting quite impossibly on the foyer floor, very much in the way — I can’t think of anything more interesting to write about. I was going to muse on Alan Riding’s book about the arts in Occupied France, but, frankly, the water problem is less depressing, at least now that it’s over.