Gotham Diary:
Old Hobblesticks
4 February 2014
When I opened the fridge this morning to fetch milk for Kathleen’s tea, the light bulb sparked and went out. At the very same time, it seemed, the fridge stopped humming. I feared worse than a blown bulb. As the morning wore on, I stepped into the kitchen to listen, and the fridge was always silent. I emptied the cubes from an ice tray and filled it with water. An hour later, the water was beginning to freeze; but whenever I listened, the fridge was silent.
By the time that the ice started forming in the top ice tray, I had called Ray Soleil to ask if he was up for visiting the sick. He didn’t ask for an explanation, and he agreed to pick up an appliance light bulb on his way uptown. His coming was a great kindness, as I had been teetering on the edge of self-pity. I’d read the paper and eaten an English muffin, and, if there was more to life, it was too much work. Surely everything could be put off until tomorrow! Surely not: tomorrow, it will probably be snowing again. So I called Ray, as a way of getting myself out of the house.
With Ray’s company at lunch to look forward to, I found the resolve to change the sheets, a task for Tuesdays, and then to deal with a batch of small paper jobs. Meanwhile, I got dressed — for indoors. At this time of year, I can’t wear outdoor clothing in the apartment without boiling. When Ray arrived, I wasn’t feeling too shabby, especially as the fridge was humming. We wouldn’t have to check out the stock at PC Richard for a replacement after all. While Ray changed the bulb, I popped into street clothes.
At the restaurant, I saw two gentlemen of my vintage, neighbors from the building who often have lunch together; we’ve never been introduced, but I enjoy more than a nodding acquaintance with them, especially with the bigger of the two, whom I ran into once at the midtown big and tall shop where I buy clothes. For no particular reason, I asked him how long he thought Gristede’s would stay in business. I was just making conversation, preparing to repeat my joke the grocery chain’s owner, who ran for the Republican nomination for mayor last year, and lost. But my neighbor, who tends to know what’s really going on, gave me a far more detailed answer than I bargained for, and I am still whistling.
I am also frowning at something else that he told me: when the excavators withdraw from the scene in the fall, they will be replaced by the construction workers who will actually build the subway station — laying tiles, installing escalators and lighting, and so on. I do hope that the newcomers won’t take up as much surface area aboveground as their predecessors. Meanwhile, our building’s balcony railing replacement project is running behind schedule, which is dismal because the scaffolding that surrounds the building on three sides (covering — and narrowing — all sidewalks) cannot be removed until the entire project is complete. The unexpected news about Gristede’s (and not just Gristede’s) provides a welcome diversion from the dreariness of our war-torn building site of an intersection.
I asked Ray to come back to the apartment with me for a cup of tea. I knew that there were things I wanted to ask him about, or to tell him about, concerning the apartment and its problems, but I couldn’t think what any of them were, and I hadn’t been keeping a list. As we sat in the blue room, Ray entertaining me with tales of his adventures with obnoxious locals — “I told her, ‘If you turn that radio on again at midnight, while I’m trying to sleep in the next apartment, I’m going to cut your head off and shove the radio down your throat” — the little matters came to mind. There is a stain on a ceiling. That corner needs a can light. And what about the light fixture over the sink? After an hour or so, I called the barber to ask when I might come in. (That was what I really had to do today; I couldn’t touch my face without feeling shag-carpeted.) Forty minutes, he said. After about twenty-five, we left the apartment, and Ray walked with me to the barber. I was so lost in chitchat that I almost overshot both the correct side street and the barber shop itself. I thanked Ray for getting souls out of Purgatory — that’s what Fossil Darling said Ray would be doing by coming up to see me — and he went on his merry way.
Tito, the barber, told me about seeing 12 Years a Slave at the theatre in Queens, where he and an equally dark-complected Peruvian friend were the only non-blacks. “I wouldn’t have wanted to be white,” he said, meaning me. I couldn’t have agreed more. I haven’t even seen the movie here in Yorkville. I’m waiting for it to come out on DVD, so that I can stop it every few minutes and take a deep breath. I know that I have to see it, not just because of the cast — it was news to Tito, by the way, that Chiwetel Ejiofor had made any other motion pictures — but because I have to be reminded how much worse the life of slavery was than I imagine it to have been.
From the barber shop, I went round the corner to the Video Room, just to see what I hadn’t already seen elsewhere, and after a while I spotted Hannah Arendt. That’s what I’m going to watch after signing off here.
My next stop was Eli’s, just a block up Third Avenue. I ducked in to buy frozen croissants. These are treats for weekend breakfasts. They come packaged in threes, so I buy two, which makes for three breakfasts. I hardly ever go into Eli’s for any other reason; it’s both somewhat out of the way and very dear.
Then I headed for Fairway, where I thought I’d better buy a new bottle of milk, not that anything was wrong with the old one — not yet. Along the way, I passed both McDonald’s and Burger King, having crossed neither threshold in many a year. Kathleen would be working late, and ordering in with her team at the office, so I was on my own. — You can’t be serious, half of me said. — I can’t imagine anything I’d rather eat, said the other, the half that is ordinarily rather inconspicuous but that swells up to grotesque proportions when I am deprived of Remicade, and teetering on the edge &c.
At Fairway, I bought a chicken Caesar salad, knowing that it would be nowhere near as good as one that I made myself. It looked almost unappetizing in its plastic shell. After paying and walking out of the store, I turned left instead of right and headed straight for Burger King, two doors away.
That I brought the Whopper &c home instead of consuming all of it right there tells you how long it has been since my last descent into fast-food hell. French fries don’t travel well, nor do they wait for you to change back into indoor clothes. This didn’t stop me from eating them, however, and the Whopper, I have to say, was indecently satisfying. As I ate, I read the letters that Diana Cooper wrote from St John and St Elizabeth’s hospital, where she spent several weeks in an as-yet unspecified malaise at the beginning of 1949. Nothing could have been more congenial than reading these very letters — short, that is, of crawling into an adjacent hospital bed and writing letters to Will, were he old enough to receive my nonsense. I wallowed heartily, like one of Cooper’s pigs.
Only then did I roll up my sleeves and sit down at my desk. In my inbox, there was a note from a friend asking me if I’d read a certain story mentioning Kathleen. I hadn’t; I hadn’t had to. It was the subject of much weekend conversation here. But I did take a look and was glad to see that everything had been straightened out. Kathleen learned from the experience that it is not a good idea to talk to a reporter about Project A when you are about to speak on a panel about (related but distinct) Project B — and are really thinking of nothing else.