Gotham Diary:
Damned Things
1 July 2015
Well, that’s over. Kathleen doesn’t know her new phone number, and she hasn’t met any of the support staff, but she has seen her new office and enjoyed a partners’ lunch. The move to Kaye Scholer takes her a few blocks across town, to Fifty-Fifth Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, but this will be closer to home, in time, anyway, when the Q train begins to operate beneath Second Avenue. Four stops and voilà.
It has not been a fun experience, the transition, largely because there were, as there always are, uncertainties, and yet these could absolutely not be discussed. Fewer than ten people in our lives, all of them family or close friends, knew anything about it. We did not discuss it with them, and they were asked not to raise the subject. The curious thing is that by the time Kathleen announced her resignation at one firm while the other issued a press release, we were too exhausted to be excited about telling the world. I posted the press release at Facebook and let it go at that.
We heard the good news on Friday. We were having a very nice lunch at Café d’Alsace — I will never forget the gay sprig of rosemary that garnished the very Mediterranean dish of soft-shelled crabs and pilaf that I ordered instead of my usual fare — when the call came through. The partners at Kaye Scholer had voted, and Kathleen was in. We didn’t really believe it, but, immediately, our emotional pores began to open and release the pent-up pressure of enormous anxiety caused by having Kathleen’s career up in the air. More than any other change, this relocation struck us both as a matter of life and death. I am not going to discuss the reasons. It’s enough to report that Kathleen and her closest partner (in practice, not friendship) managed their adieux without either one’s saying that it had been a pleasure &c. It’s enough to mention Bitcoin. I shall add only that I have begging Kathleen to find a better fit for five years or more.
Over the weekend, which stretched out for about a month, we came back to feeling okay about life. The distension of time was extraordinary. Even now, yesterday seems to have occurred last week. We’ve had the hyperconsciousness of lucky survivors. Is it real? Are we still here?
The role, or the contribution, of age has been interesting. On the one hand, it makes upheavals hugely tiring — and we have had almost a year of upheavals. Last September, I was in the hospital with cellulitis (which can lead to sepsis and death), and no sooner did I stop taking the massive antibiotics that fought the staph infection to the death than we learned that our old lease would not be renewed. How about that for a shock! Presently it emerged that we should have a chance to move within the building, and the happy ending has settled me in the nicest place I’ve ever lived in. But the move was hardly complete when Kathleen sought the counsel of a recruiter. One damned thing after another. And as a faithful, positively glued reader of Jenny Diski’s “cancer diary” in the LRB, I know that more damned things are always a possibility.
On the other hand, age equipped us to endure the uncertainty without falling apart, as I certainly should have done years ago. I’d have let everything go — housekeeping, correspondence, writing here, even reading — to hell. But I didn’t; I didn’t let anything go, not even an inch, netherwards. I observed all of my routines, went through all the motions. And as the ordeal dragged on, everyday discipline became a comfort. And it will not be forgotten that it was during this time that I got to be proficient at making pizzas that Kathleen and I find so satisfying that we shouldn’t dream of having anyone else’s delivered. (Easy-peasy, too.) We had our big party in May, and it went very nicely, demonstrating, as was expected, that this apartment is much better suited to “entertaining” than the old one was.
Mindful of the stream of more damned things, I’m hesitant about drawing a line under the narrative and writing “The End.” Nothing is ever really over, if only because we don’t know one way or the other until so much time has passed that we’ve forgotten all about it. “Remember when we were so worried…?” I’d much rather say that than, “Remember when we didn’t have a care in the world?” I don’t in fact remember not having a care in the world, certainly not when I was a child. But I can remember what so often came of the feeling that things were going well. It does seem unlikely, however, that Kathleen will be thinking of a job change anytime soon. Not impossible but unlikely — unlikely enough for me to say,
— but I’ve already said it once. Saying it twice would be asking for trouble.