Dear Diary: False Picture
Today’s banner is not what today looked like. At all. It’s hard to imagine, in fact, that the city ever looks as it does above, given its appearance over the past few grey days. By the way, what seems to be smoke drifting over the Park is actually the already bare branches of trees that have shed their leaves for the year.
The day was mezza mezza. I didn’t take a stab at the paperwork project, but I drew hope from the fact that I hadn’t given up on it and put things “away.” After yesterday’s excitement — for a sexagenarian like me, yesterday was chock full of incident, even though nothing happened that, twenty years ago, would not have gone unremarked — I felt dead on arousal, and if the morning was a struggle, the afternoon was — existential. I did write a letter to a good friend in which I described something that, for the first time in ages, I wouldn’t write about here. The letter took over an hour to compose, but I had a ball. I’ve been living such a dull life! Which is all for the best — I love dull! Dull is the new thrill! But it takes the gleam of indiscretion for me to write a proper letter these days; it calls for secrets that I must keep from you, my gentle readers.
By return post, the suggestion was made… but never mind. It involved Quatorze. It projected an unthinkable scenario. Delicious (and wholly respectable!), but unthinkable.
In the evening, I braved the pluviosity and took the train down to Bleecker Street, whence I hopped, skipped and jumped over puddles to McNally Jackson, where the paperback editions of three Atlas & Co biographies was celebrated by the three authors. Louis Begley (Kafka), Francine du Plessix Gray (Mme de Staël) and Edmund White (Rimbaud) talked about the pleasures of writing nonfiction books about long-ago writers — Mr Begley subtitled his book “biographical essay.” Ms Gray pronounced an aphorism that can’t have been making its first appearance, but I was so struck by it that I must copy it out:Â
Biography is the transformation of information into illumination.
It’s not the solution to world hunger, but it’s pretty fantastic all the same.
As you can imagine, I hadn’t been in the mood to go out on a nasty day, especially as I’d gone out the night before. (Sexagenarian!) But two carrots were waving in front of me. One was so mundane that I’m not even going to discuss it. The other, however, was Ms NOLA’s enthusiastic agreement to have dinner with me after the event. I’ve been wanting to have dinner at the Chinatown Brasserie for the longest time! Ever since Quatorze and I walked by the place last spring, in fact. I’ve been several times for lunch, and while the food was always delicious, I had no reason to think that it would be different after dark. But the room would be different — and tonight I found out that indeed it is. For the Chinatown Brasserie, occupying the generically beaux-arts interior of a former bank or insurance office, has been decked out with Shanghai nightclub drag. Think the opening scene of …Temple of Doom. (Oh, how downhill that movie went from there!) Red red red paper lanterns hanging from the high ceiling ought to be enough to put you in the picture, but there is also the carp pool at the base of the stairs to the banqueting rooms in the basement. (How elegant the right sort of corpse would look, bobbing among those huge gold fish.)
Edmund White told a wonderful story about gaining access to a source of information for his book about Jean Genet. He paid a pretty young woman to take French lessons from the source; I guess he paid for the lessons as well. Eventually, the pretty girl was able to charm the source into seeing Mr White. They became friends, but it was la solita storia — Genet eventually broke with anybody who was close to him. Sooner or later, he mistreated his friends and “made them cry.” I thought of the lunacy of taking Jean Genet’s bad behavior personally. Then I remembered how personally I had taken — have taken — a rather Genetish fellow’s bad behavior toward me. It almost got me crying! Nobody has been planted at my doorstop, asking for English lessons!
That it is raining late at night on the second of December is not made any easier to bear by the fact that it is really rather cold as well. If it were just a few degrees colder, it could at least be scenic.