Gotham Diary:
Anticipation
7 January 2014
Back in 2000, I created a convention. The trick of naming document files with dates, in YYMMDD format, which had worked so well in the previous century, suddenly yawned with a sea of zeroes. So I replaced the YY part with L, where L is a letter of the alphabet, beginning with “A.” (B0911 was that day; on E0425 I had my first Remicade infusion.) Slowly or quickly as might seem to be the case, the years passed by. My grandson had his first birthday when L=”L,” but “L” is still in the first half of the alphabet, if only just. The letter “O” is not. The letter “O” — which is how 2014 is represented in my convention — is right next to PQRST, which is nothing but a greased banister to the end of things. I seem to have tumbled into the wrong end of the alphabet overnight. So stunned am I by this development that I can think of nothing else to say. The end.
***
What happened was, I had to go to the dentist. I should have rescheduled for a presumably warmer day, but I had already rescheduled a December appointment, on account of snow. So I bundled up and went out. By the middle of the block between Second Avenue and Third, I was in a state of physical alarm. It was 10:30, sunny and dry, but it was also very windy, and the wind seemed about to knock me down, not by blowing me over but by rushing down my trachea and freezing my lungs. I covered my mouth with a gloved hand. When I reached the subway station, I had to tear off the gloves, because they were thoroughly penetrated by the cold. All of this after just two blocks!
Later, after the dentist’s, it wasn’t so bad. I went out to lunch and then to Fairway. Both the restaurant and the market were pretty empty. (Come to think of it, so were the sidewalks and the subways.) While I was at Fairway, the idea of brewing a pot of coffee in my stovetop percolator came to me, and that’s the first thing that I did when I got home. By the time the perking started, I had changed into my house clothes and put the fresh flowers in vases. By the time the coffee was ready to drink, I’d emptied all the bags and was dealing with the contents. There was a chicken to cut in two, one half to cook tonight, the other to freeze. (I chopped fresh tarragon, beat it with butter and sea salt, and spread it under the breast skin.) There were greens to replace (iceberg lettuce, parsley). Beans to cut for dinner. Everything to be put away. All of this took rather more than an hour.
Then it was time to pay the bills. I pay bills the old-fashioned way, although I do make use of Quicken to keep track of things. If I were a young man, I’d be paying my bills online, but I’ve followed a routine for about twenty years that it would be foolish to change now. Paying bills by mail — tearing the stubs from the statements, printing checks, signing checks (with a stamp, of course), putting everything in the right envelope and then affixing postage — has become a pleasant routine, and it takes a lot less time than messing in the kitchen with chickens and beans. So I did that.
I thought I might watch a movie, but I couldn’t decide on one, and in any case I was distracted (from deciding on a movie to watch) by Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-Century Britain, which I dipped into while running an errand down to the lobby, where I was able to finish this year’s round of holiday tips to building staff. Back in the apartment, I sank into my reading chair and read about “lady-helps” and servantless houses. Servants is engaging and readable, and from time to time it’s also very funny, but I’m reading it for a reason. I’m stocking my mind with food for thought on the subject of living a comfortable life while seeing to all those comforts myself. I’ll have more to say about this when I finish reading the book.
I was about to begin writing here when an old friend called. Calls from old friends are not common events in this household, and I had no desire not to take this one. But as Kathleen, equally an old friend, wasn’t at home, I was able to schedule a call for the weekend. Even so, by the time I hung up I hadn’t got an interesting thought in my head. Besides, it was time to start dinner.
I will say that we watched Gosford Park last night, partly because it seemed like a nice birthday treat but also because Lethbridge had me thinking about it. I certainly saw it in a new way. The system of servants, it was clear, screenwriter Julian Fellowes had thoroughly anatomized, to the point that the movie might serve as an animated model of the parts of Lethbridge’s book that deal with great houses. But there was something else that I’d never quite noticed, not quite, and it had nothing to do with servants. The key to this view is Lady Trentham’s withering dismissal of Morris Weissman’s fastidiousness about keeping the plot of his new Charlie Chan movie a secret. “None of us will see it,” she assures him. And that mirrors the movie’s approach to all the genres that it traduces, most particularly the upstairs/downstairs movie and the country-house murder movie. It’s as though the movie were made by people who never saw another movie — but only, very much only, “as though.”
At every turn, Gosford Park goes the other way. None of the characters is very disturbed by the murder of Sir William, not even the few who liked him. No one is the least bit worked up about staying under the same roof with the murderer. Life goes on — as the dead man’s widow puts it, it must. The entire film is soaked in Lady Trentham’s aristocratic disdain for irregularities. As a result, the actual drama of the show, the mother’s self-sacrifice for the sake of the son who does not know her, leaps up at the end with a spectral flame that is far more haunting than any whodunit could ever be. The scene that Helen Mirren and Kelly Macdonald have in the housekeeper’s office is not long, but it packs a wallop. And the speech that Ms Mirren delivers, as fine a moment as any in her career, begins with the key to running a well-kept house.