Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(23)
Do you think she knows how pretty she is?
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9-30-12:
Why is it hardest to write when there is so much to say?
Let me rephrase: It is hardest to write when there is so much to say.
Wendy Weil, my agent, has died. She was found at her home in Connecticut on Monday; apparently, she’d had a heart attack while in bed—she was surrounded by manuscripts, I was told (“I have so much reading to catch up on,” she’d said when we spoke on Friday afternoon—we had just finalized my new book contract).
I am so sad to lose this friend, not just a friend but also a mentor. I can hear her saying so many things to me, always supportive: how she’d say, “O-kay,” a hard stress on the second syllable, drawn out, say it several times, as you told her what you wanted, maybe what you wanted answered by a publisher or editor. How when she said something like, “This is you at your very best,” lowering her eyes and looking at you dead-on through her bangs, as she did about some of my Times pieces, I knew she really meant it. How, after lunch with that editor from Simon & Schuster, we decided to walk back to her office rather than take a cab. We saw an expensive chocolate shop near Rockefeller Center—“Their chocolates are divine,” she said—so we stopped and bought five, one each for Emily, Emma, and Anne back at her office. Wendy and I ate ours as we continued walking.
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10-2-12:
This morning on a crowded subway, I spotted a young black woman dressed entirely in shades of pink: pink pants, pink ruffled blouse, pink jacket, pink ballet slippers, and pink clutch handbag. She was wearing giant round sunglasses. I thought about how Wendy enjoyed hearing stories of my subway encounters and sightings. I had my iPod on, as I always do, and was listening to a Neil Young song, his voice plangent and impossibly beautiful. I started to weep. I put on my sunglasses. I took a breath. I didn’t really want to be crying on the subway. I zeroed in again on the young woman in pink. I loved that she had dressed up in what must be her favorite color. Her lucky color. I imagined she was going to an interview for a new job. She was looking in my direction. Although I couldn’t see her eyes, I was sure they were meeting mine, tears falling. “You are going to have an amazing day,” I told her, purely through my thoughts. “You look fabulous.” The subway came to a stop. The woman in pink stood and smiled back at me as she exited.
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10-8-12:
Sunday night: attended a concert with O at St. Bart’s church: Mozart’s Requiem Mass, performed by an orchestra composed of Weill Cornell med students and doctors. One of the doctors recognized O and ushered us to some good seats. Exquisite performance. Saw Linn and Ved Mehta afterward. A rainy night.
Talking in the car on the way home: O said, listening to the Requiem he couldn’t help thinking about, in a way “picturing,” seeing, his own death and feeling “not troubled in the least—not serene, but … as if it is the right thing at the right time. And so it will be.”
I looked over at him and nodded. I took his hand.
Back home, we reheated the salmon and vegetables we’d made the night before, set the table, opened a bottle of wine, turned on the radio.
Cleaning up the kitchen, O, washing the dishes, commented: “One feels they want to be cleaned. One feels they appreciate it.” The dishwasher wasn’t completely full, so he added already-clean coffee mugs and glasses to it, “so they have company.”
He is endearing and hilarious this way, how he invests objects such as pots and pans and the table we eat on (rushing to put a protective place mat down so as not to “hurt” it) with feelings. He views most things—and I do mean things (pots, the alarm clock, his fountain pens, the piano, and most especially, books)—as having life to them, a nature … while at the same time acknowledging that this is absurd, ridiculous.
Earlier, over dinner, O talking about his late friend Gaj—Carleton Gajdusek, a Nobel laureate in medicine—with great excitement and conviction, comparing him to Goethe, of whom it was said, O told me, “He had a nature. A nature.”
I thought I knew what O meant—O, who has always disliked being pigeonholed, typed, as simply one thing or another, doctor or writer, gay or not, Jewish or atheist, etc.—but I wasn’t completely sure and prodded him.
“A nature,” he repeated, as if that was the only way to say it. “He wasn’t this or that, fitted with so many labels, an ‘identity,’ like people today, but all aspects of him were of a piece—this is who he was, not what he was; a force of nature, I suppose.”
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10-21-12:
Finding O at his desk, hunched over a yellow pad, writing, I sat across from him. He is working on a new “little piece”—an atheist’s take on the “absurd” idea of an afterlife. He’s titled it, “Seeing God in the Third Millennium.”
I like it already, I tell him. He reads for me the many pages he has written—twelve or fifteen. I am with him, every word. It reads fluidly, authoritatively.
Outside: a racket of horns blasting on Eighth Avenue; there must be a traffic jam. I can see the river of red lights. Oliver doesn’t notice anything. He has come to the end of what he has written. He is not sure where to go next. A phrase suddenly comes to him: “… a handsome apprehension of heaven …”