Gotham Diary:
Purge
2 October 2014
As we were coming home from Ocean Beach in August, I said, semi-jocularly, “I wonder what will happen this year. Something always happens after Fire Island.” There was a hurricane one year, and then the dishwasher motor broke the following September, and, last year, Will and his parents moved to California. We saw that one coming, of course, but we didn’t know how it would hit. The winter that followed made an old man of me.
So much has happened this fall that I feel as though I’ve spent a few weeks in a large tumble dryer. There is still much to happen: next month, we leave this apartment, after thirty-one years. I have a good idea where we’ll be going, but I’m too superstitious to go into details here. That can wait until it’s all over. Meanwhile, though, my head is something of a beehive.
I came to a momentous decision the other day: I’m not going to try to maintain a computer catalogue of my library anymore. I suddenly saw that it was more trouble than it was worth, and that a far better way of library management is to reduce the size of the library. By at least half. That sounds radical, I know, but the clarity which with the new rule of thumb has emerged is even more convincing than it is surprising. Very simply, it’s time to let go of merely aspirational books. How to tell? Tick one:
- I’d like to learn something about that someday.
- I’d like to learn more about that, sooner rather than later.
Books described by the first statement must go. So must most curiosities. Example? A (cheap) facsimile edition of Mrs Beeton’s tome on household management. Very amusing, in its way; then again, not. It’s amusing until you read a bit of it, and then you begin to gasp for air. The heavy fustian of Victorian respectability (at bargain prices) blocks out all light and air. The heavy dinners! The dodgy servants! The dark, over-upholstered rooms! I’m glad to have spent some time with the book over the years, and I’m not sorry that I owned it, but it’s of no further use to me. My household management problems are beyond Mrs Beeton’s imagining.
Speaking of upholstery, I am not sorry to be saying goodbye to the draperies in the living room. They were always slightly ostentatious (“window treatments”), and now they are pretty dirty. Dirt may in fact what is holding them together. That’s what happens when you live in a place for decades on end. The services that used to come and take such things away for cleaning are fewer and farther between, and it is much more difficult to get them in and out of the building. (Homeland Security at home.) Much better to buy reasonably-priced ready-mades, and replace them after a few years. Fabric is not forever. Slipcovers are your friend. Although, now I think of it, the gent who made the newest slipcovers that we have was so old that, although still expert at his craft, he had to be guided to and from the apartment by one of his sons, a middle-aged man who was not otherwise going to follow in his father’s footsteps.
We used to look down our noses at white walls. There hasn’t been a white wall in this apartment since we moved in. Even the ceilings are painted light shades of the color on the walls — they look white, but aren’t. I have enjoyed the colors of this apartment very much. But it is time to settle for ease and convenience. And light. The blue room is actually very dark, which is charming by night, but not so much by day.
Everything in the apartments that we’ve looked at is so new and clean! How I look forward to using a spacious kitchen — complete with window — that does not suggest the slightly updated corner of some very dingy apartment photographed over a century ago by Eugène Atget. I’m mildly astonished, and have been for some time, than anyone who has ever seen it was willing to sit down at the dining table and eat, as it were, from it.
I know that friends will look back and say, “That was such a great apartment!” I’ll nod, perhaps a bit absently, trying not to think of the gyres of dust, or the ingrained filth of the parquet floors peeping up between the carpets. Some people say that this apartment is “cozy.” Others, less sentimental, pronounce it “cluttered.” Even though everything has its place and there are no unsightly piles of newspapers and magazines or battalions of knick-knacks, there is still too far much stuff. Surfaces tend to sprout objects, usually quite useless objects. The solution is not to have emptier tables, but fewer tables.
When I was in my forties, I formulated my design scheme as that of an exiled landowner who had managed to take only a few of the best things with him — enough, say, for only one ballroom. My new design scheme is somewhat simpler: Assisted Living. Something tells me that the new apartment will fall short of this ideal, or, rather, much, much further.
***
I don’t know how many times I’ve consulted my internist since I got out of the hospital last month, but in all our conversations I completely forgot to mention that I needed a new prescription for my sleeping tablets. I didn’t mention it because I failed to check the number of refills on the label. The other day, I discovered that the number of refills was “No.” No refills. I called the internist’s office yesterday and asked that the prescription be held for to pick it up today. No problem, I’m happy to say. I took a taxi to the doctor’s office, and walked home, via my favorite restaurant for club sandwiches midway. I used to indulge in a Manhattan or two whenever I had lunch there, but those days are over. I like the way my clothes are falling off me and would like to continue in the same direction. Liquor is of course no good for anybody, beyond that sacred daily glass of red wine that I never drink, but abstinence is the last thing on my mind. It’s my weight that I want to bring down, almost as earnestly as I want to slim my library. I’ve already been watering the plonk that I drink out of a box (one part water to four parts wine) for several months, and, to tell you the truth, I can’t tell the difference, except, on rare occasions, the next morning.
I embrace the lesson that I learned, in adverse circumstances, at the hospital: I now live a very quiet life. I think that I have put my adolescence entirely behind me. It’s always hard to tell, in this country.