Housekeeping Twaddle:
Blue Onion
27 October 2014
Over the weekend, a friend who has retired to Cape Cod called up, to say that he had been reading the blog (this blog), and WTF! — we were moving! At the end of the conversation, he apologized, because he and his wife were in town for a few days only, and wouldn’t be able to help us pack.
Everyone has said something like this. I am always slightly alarmed to hear it, because the idea of someone’s “helping” me with the packing is not as welcome as it is meant to be. Although I should desperately appreciate real help with this move, it would have to come from supernatural beings who know better than I do what to keep and what to discard. I suppose that if I were to pile up everything that we’re keeping in one corner of the apartment, I could say, “Please wrap this up and put it in a box.” But I should have to know what we’re keeping ahead of time. As it is, I decide as I go along.
Or I shall. Nothing besides books has been packed so far. At first, the house seemed to be nothing but a library, and, indeed, nearly seventy boxes have been filled with books. (I expect to fill a further twenty-five.) But the disappearance of books into boxes has highlighted the plethora of other things that seem to be everywhere, divisible into two groups, “ornaments” and “stuff.” As soon as I have packed all the books, I shall tackle the ornaments, and I’ve been saving the Times for weeks for just this purpose. Surfaces throughout the apartment will clear up as if in the wake of a rapture. Then there will only be stuff.
(Stuff, and the kitchen.
I’ve been toying with the idea of starting with All New Food, with not taking so much as a crumb from this apartment. Of course there would be exceptions: Parmesan cheese, for example, and that delicious lime vinegar that’s hard to get. Saffron, if there’s any lying about, and the dried mushrooms that don’t taste like cardboard. But canned and bottled goods int the pantry would not follow us downstairs. I will pitch the sourdough starter for a second time and order a new batch from King Arthur. (My plans to develop expertise with sourdough bread this autumn were potholed by last month’s illness.) The contents of the fridge — now that would be a good job to delegate to some helpful friend. “Just pitch it all and don’t ask me about anything.” The freezer, too.
Maybe — here’s an idea — I won’t wait until the last minute to implement this plan. I can pretend to be that friend!)
Once upon a time, when we were all young, moving was a communal experience, or so it seemed. Friends helped out, especially anyone with a truck. The other day, I came across photographs of every building that I’d lived in during my seven years in Houston; I moved, in those days, about once a year. (The pictures were taken later, after, greatly relieved, I had settled in New York.) I already had a lot of books — and a lot of LPs. But I didn’t have too much else, and moving was never a big deal. It was a kind of party, really, usually ending with sixpacks and wine. Or dinner somewhere (else). I don’t really remember very well; it has been nearly forty years since I left Houston for law school.
After law school, Kathleen and I and our best friend Barry packed up a U-Haul trailer. There was not a cubic inch of empty space when we were done. Somehow, the trailer made it to New Jersey, along with the car and Kathleen and me, and that’s where its contents were put into storage. For how long, I don’t remember — not very. I took a flat in Park Slope, and Kathleen spent the summer on a friend’s couch on the Upper West Side. In the fall of 1980, right after we took the Bar exam, Kathleen and her mother found a studio apartment in this building, and we’ve been here ever since. I kept the place in Park Slope, but lived in sin with Kathleen. Our plans to get married quickly were postponed by Kathleen’s parents’ relocation to San Francisco, so I didn’t feel too guilty. We maintained an elaborate ruse about my answering Kathleen’s phone whenever her mother called (which she did far more often than would happen after we were married) with the information that Kathleen, because she was “working late,” had forwarded the phone to my Brooklyn apartment. This was respected if not believed.
I remember a time, a weekend afternoon, when the phone rang, and it wasn’t Kathleen’s mother, but her brother, Kevin. “Mummy and Daddy and I are downstairs at the coffee shop!” he whispered in a sympathetic panic from a phone booth. “They want to come up and see your place!” Thanks, Kevin! I had five minutes in which to drag all my clothes from the closet to the floor under the bed. The very first thing that Kathleen’s mother did when she came into the apartment — and I do mean the very first, after saying hello and how are you — was to sweep open the closet door. “What a lot of space you’ve got!” she croaked with hollow triumph, undoubtedly noticing that Kathleen’s clothes were pressed into half the space available, but saying nothing. On the night before the wedding, she came out and asked Kathleen if we’d been living together, and Kathleen said that we had. “Good,” was all her mother said, meaning “Good for you for managing appearances so well.”
We left the studio right after the wedding, moving downstairs to a one-bedroom, which we had for two years. Then, back upstairs, higher and bigger than ever. Another photograph that I came across over the weekend showed this apartment in the early days of our occupancy. We still didn’t have a lot of stuff. There wasn’t much art on the walls. The bookshelves were small. The draperies were home-made and looked it. The love seats that had been Kathleen’s grandmother’s were in desperate need of reupholstery. Sophisticated arrangement of what furniture there was could not entirely repress the air of student housing.
When I look around the apartment now, I’m reminded of two things. The first is the first Star Trek movie, which featured an unmanned spacecraft called “Veejer.” This was short, it developed, for “Voyager,” the probe sent from earth centuries before (in the movie’s time frame). On its travels, Veejer had picked up a lot of junk, and was nearly as big as a planet itself. (It had also conceived a lethal determination to cleanse its home base of “carbon units,” but that’s neither here nor there.) When I look at the apartment, or remember what it looked like before the eruption of corrugated boxes, I think of Veejer.
Then I think of the new apartment, which will not look like this one, and I think of Pauline de Rothschild. This elegant dame took a flat in the Albany toward the end of her life, and of course she furnished it in great style. She made a point of telling the journalist who wrote it all up, however, that, in contrast to the choice of 150 different china patterns at her French country house, she had selected just one for London — Blue Onion.
That’s what the new apartment is going to be like. No student housing, no impecunious exiguity. No exile’s warehouse, either. Just a few of the nice things that we have accumulated over the years. It’s the end of the blue room period and the beginning of the blue onion.