Householding Twaddle:
Privacy
9 December 2014
Growing up, I hated Venetian blinds. Back then, there was nothing stylish about them. They were the default setting for soulless housing. Like the blinds in the photograph, they were usually metal — in the bedroom, we have wood — but they came in unattractive shades of white, cream, and grey. The tapes were cheesy. When we moved into this building, the first thing I did was to get rid of the blinds. Three times I did this. The fourth apartment came without them, and I couldn’t wait for the blinds that I was obliged to pay for myself to arrive and to be installed. That’s what thirty years will do to you. Thirty years, and a complete reversal of taste.
It would be interesting to know how much of its prosperity the firm of Smith and Noble owes to the 1981 adaptation of Double Indemnity, Body Heat, with Kathleen Turner and William Hurt. As I recall, the glass walls in Hurt’s character’s law office are shaded by blinds. Not the itsy-bitsy ones that were common at the time, but wide, woody blinds that were reminiscent of an earlier decade. It was a feeble attempt, I always thought, to explain all that sweat on the bodies of modern-day Floridians. It was as if air conditioning hadn’t come in yet. Sort of a cake and eat it problem. Anyway, the blinds were super; everybody noticed them. Everyone said, blinds — hmm. (Well, not everybody.) Now you can order up the Body Heat look online. I actually did that — for the blue room upstairs. Having done it, I didn’t want to do it again. Let there be light.
Although: the blinds will make it possible for me to remain in the book room in the middle of clear days, when the sun pours down like molten ore.
In other developments: thanks to the tireless efforts of JM, Tech God, we now have regular land-line phone service in the bedroom and the book room. Hitherto, we have depended on a battery-powered phone plugged into a jack in one of Kathleen’s closets. We have also discovered that we’re signed up for a Verizon voicemail option that we never knew about. It picks up calls on the fourth ring — but slightly later than our old answering machine did. We have no idea how to access this voicemail. For three weeks, it has been taking messages, and who knows what awaits us when Kathleen finally manages to unlock the mailbox.
Also, the book-box count is down to 34. I emptied three boxes, though, not two. One box had almost become part of the furniture. It was marked to indicate books from the living room, but it was full of treatises on needlecraft, and there was no dealing with it when I discovered the error. (There was at that time no furniture in the bedroom.) The box was overlooked in later counts. Among the duly counted boxes, I came across a one that was actually marked “Trollope,” and I set it aside. I’ll open it later, take out what’s not Trollope (if anything), and top it off with other books for storage. I haven’t mentioned my Trollope problem recently, have I? Two summers ago, out at Fire Island, I re-read Orley Farm, and quite liked it, but Kathleen and I were reading Wilkie Collins’s sensation novels at the time, so the air was thick with context. And the young-persons romance in Orley Farm is about as recessed as it can be.
Next summer, perhaps I’ll read The Small House at Allington again. I loved that book the first time I read it. I wasn’t yet onto Trollope’s penchant for lockjaw female monogamy. Now, whenever I read Trollope, it’s like a bad smell, as of virgin immolations in a neighboring park.
More of a boost than that from emptying the three boxes was gained from clearing the clutter on and around Great Wall Island. When we were moving in, the Wall was a very convenient dump for things that didn’t seem to belong anywhere. For a long time, I didn’t even see the mess, because the Wall itself was so formidable. Now that it has been vastly reduced, the Wall and its purlieus must be kept neat and tidy, dusted and swept, and they are. I could simply call it all an Installation and be done with it. Untitled: The Artist’s Library #34. But we know how I’d feel about that.
***
Like everybody else (well, maybe not everybody), I’m reading Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald. I’ve read three or four novels by Fitzgerald, and I think that I read them while she was still alive. I have not read The Blue Flower, but I have a copy. It’s an odd edition — QPBC, perhaps? — that couples The Blue Flower with The Bookshop, which I did read. I’ve also read At Freddie’s and Offshore. I can’t say that I’m a great fan of Fitzgerald, but then I’ve just confessed to not having read anything since the year 2000. (That can’t be right, surely?) It doesn’t matter. Hermione Lee writes superb biographies. I wouldn’t say that she could write a fascinating book about just anybody, but then, neither would she. In Fitzgerald, she has an intriguingly late-blooming subject who belonged to a family, the Knoxes, that was practically its own Bloomsbury group. (And both of her grandfathers were bishops!) I haven’t forgotten how Lee made Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf new and desperately interesting figures, despite all that one had read before, and I’m afraid that I’m reading Penelope Fitzgerald as if it were a novel. Pure pleasure; I’m not learning anything.
At night, when I’ve got ready for bed but am not about to get into it, I sit at the end of the living room that I call the boudoir and inhabit it. I sit in my corner chair, which pivots easily for different views. It is very quiet, but I can imagine parties so easily that they almost materialize. One of my favorite sounds is the burble of a good cocktail party, heard from an adjacent room (such as the kitchen). This tells you something about my childhood, I suppose. Although we went to Mass every Sunday, cocktail parties (much less frequent) were the big events in our household. They were, quite literally, productions, and they were always successful, in that most of the guests/audience were glad that they had bothered to show up. I like to think that I have a somewhat higher caliber of acquaintance. I put drinks on the bar and food on the table, and everything’s tasty, but largely I stand out of the way and let my friends entertain each other, which they rarely fail to do. The “production” part is all in what used to be called the Rolodex.