Barclays Capital Grove! One sputters, wanting the eloquence of Pope and Swift. How to express, ineffably, the desire that this plaque won’t be around in ten years. One wishes its erasure more than to know What Were They Thinking?

It is almost not today anymore; shortly, it will be tomorrow. But what a wonderful day it was — a New York impromptu. Such as never happens, or only very, very rarely. It began with Fossil Darling’s decision to take today off, which he made yesterday, when someone at work pointed out that, in view of what we’ll call the inequality of income, he was in a very bad mood. So he decided to take the day off. Consubstantially — it would be a grievous doctrinal error to assert that his “next” realizaation preceded or followed the first — he remembered that today would be Ray Soleil’s birthday, something that Ray himself would never admit to doing. I was asked to join the two of them for lunch at Demarchelier (meaning that they would come over to my part of town), and, when I told her, Kathleen invited herself along even before I could tell her that Fossil had asked me to do so.

In the event, Kathleen, bedeviled by an upset stomach and crying clients, didn’t have lunch with us, but only showed up for a minute to wish Ray a happy birthday. As it happened, the widowed father of her oldest friend was having lunch at a table nearby, with a most interesting-looking lady, about whose age Kathleen and I later argued, Kathleen thinking that the lady was younger than herself, a position I emphatically pooh-poohed. The lady was very interesting, and semi-familiar. I won’t be surprised to learn, down the road, that I met her once. With her upswept, almost turbaned hair, and her complete eschewal of makeup, she looked like one of Edward Gorey’s dance mistresses.

Anyway, I had a plan. I had already looked into movies showing in the neighborhood after lunch, and found the tally wanting. But something made me look a bit further, and at Demarchelier I found myself proposing that we head over to Fossil’s neighborhood after lunch, to the Walter Reade theatre, to see the four-o’clock showing of Stranger by the Lake, the Alain Guiraudie movie that has elicited all the latest wide-awake reviews. Ray and Fossil had already talked about seeing it, and we needed but to cross town, buy tickets, and see it.

I might write about the cold here. It was terribly cold. We walked from the taxi at Broadway to the theatre (where we bought tickets for the 4 PM show ahead of time) and thence to Fossil’s flat across the street from Lincoln Center, freezing in the process. We could not believe that the distance between 65th Street one one side of Broadway could be so far from 64th Street on the other, but it was, absolutely, terribly cold. I suppose that the fact that we survived means that it couldn’t have been all that cold. But death did at times seem a sweet option. Later, walking back to the theatre to see the movie, and walking to Fossil’s from seeing the movie, it wasn’t so bad.

I have never in my life been so happy that a movie ended on an ambiguous note. That is all that I’m going to say about L’inconnu du lac at the moment. No, there’s one other thing. It’s not unlike The Swimming Pool, the François Ozon movie with Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier. Deliberate as hell.

After the movie, we got comfy at Fossil’s flat. By now, we had decided on a dinner at Shun Lee West, with the young marrieds and Kathleen. Presently, the former arrived, the  couple of which Ms NOLA is a married half — we haven’t agreed on the proper nom du blog. We progressed to the restaurant, where we waited for Kathleen, although we didn’t wait to eat. She materialized at last.

Everyone agrees that Kathleen is an angel, but nobody can say why. I don’t have to argue, because I can see her wings.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 25th, 2014 at 12:09 am.