Dear Diary: Insouci
I had dreams of bringing the late spate of light entries to an end this evening, but now that it’s time to write, I haven’t a thought in my head. I made the mistake of watching the second half of Honolulu after dinner, and it gummed up my brain. “Gum,” you may not realize, is an anagram, more or less, of “MGM.” Honolulu is a catalogue raisoné of the high-minded vulgarities to which MGM was prone in years around 1940. It’s all there, but never moreso than in the hula skirt worn by Eleanor Powell with her tap shoes. Kathleen is in a state somewhere between apoplexy and plotz.
I loved every minute.
But I’d probably love anything tonight, now that my latest slate of doctoring is over. Friday’s Remicade infusion had its effect on Saturday, as I sloughed off a dully inexplicable fatigue and worked hard enough to feel tired for a reason. This morning’s procedure was devoid of bad news. At my age, and perhaps at any, there is only one form for good news: the fact that you are as alive as you are today means that you will probably be alive tomorrow. This state of affairs could end at any time, and indeed it will. There will come a time when tomorrow looks unlikely. There does for everyone, or at least for everyone who is not crushed in an unforeseen catastrophe.
Quatorze met me at the flat afterward, and we set out for lunch — how good it was to chew! — and an hour at Westphalia, which more than ever hums with currency. Q was determined to gratify my desire to get an imposing portrait of Kathleen off the floor and onto one of the storage unit’s walls, and I was resolved to let him try for as long as he liked. What’s imposing is not so much the portrait itself, which nobody likes except Kathleen and the artist who painted it, as the frame in which the artist mounted it, a baroque object found on the street with a pope in its hole. Getting it off the floor opened up quite a number of shelves.
Then we went to Gracious! I used to call this UES hardware store “Gracious Empire,” but now that I am thinking of writing a musical about the enterprise (with branches in Lincoln Plaza and Chelsea), I prefer the exclamation point. We went to the lighting branch first and then to the main store, and in both locations I placed bulky, low three-figure orders and had them delivered. (“Had them delivered” is New-Yorkese for “asked that they be delivered.”) Then I strode into Third Avenue and hailed a cab. There was nothing at all out of the way about my buying a dozen boxes of lightbulbs and a garment rack, but I felt, stepping into the taxi, that I’d bought a shooting box in Scotland. I was almost intolerably pleased with life. I have been in Tired-of-London mode for so many weeks now (Remicade withdrawal?) that I feel honor-bound to report this afternoon’s bout of gross insouciance.
Spring must be just around the corner.