Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(31)

“Well, gentlemen, it has been a true pleasure. I cannot thank you enough. This is where I exit. Goodbye—for now.” And she was gone, as suddenly as she’d arrived.

Oliver took a breath as we headed west and home. “I don’t know who that was, but she seems like a very remarkable person.”





NOTES FROM A JOURNAL

3-21-13:

Finding O writing letters and listening to the Bach festival on WQXR—“I can’t tear myself away,” he says. He burrows his head into my abdomen and talks as I scratch his neck. He tells me how he’d slept, of his dreams (all “dull”), and of an article in Science about genetic variation that led to the Ruffled Grouse’s ruffled head.

“I wish I could take a crash course in genetics,” O says.

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Undated Note—March 2013:

A heavyset young black woman is squeezed into a spot at the end of a bench near the door on a Brooklyn-bound 2 train. She is probably going home from work. She has her iPod on and her eyes closed—she’s clearly dozed off to sleep; you can see it in her slack face. She hugs a big chunky, bejeweled leather purse to her chest.

Sitting next to her is a small, rail-thin, young white woman—Eastern European?—who has a little boy in a stroller at her feet. The mother’s eyes are closed. The little boy is about two. He’s fidgety, as if he’s just awakened from a nap and eaten some sugar. He eyes the woman’s purse. He starts sort of swatting the purse, swatting at whatever is dazzling him—the colors, the rhinestones. Maybe he’s deliberately trying to get her attention—anyone’s attention. The woman feels something at her hands, brushes it off, her eyes still closed, as if it’s a fly.

The little boy loves this. He starts slapping back at her hands. The young black woman cracks open one eye to see what the heck is going on. All she sees, I imagine, is this little hand—bothering her. She pushes it away. He pushes back. He’s laughing now. She opens both eyes narrowly, and at first looks pissed but then can’t help smiling. She’s sort of giggling, like, “You little rascal, I’m gonna get you!” but also still half-asleep. She flicks his little hand away. He’s giggling now, too, and wants to play more. But finally, she tires of this pest. She repositions her purse and closes her eyes. The little boy turns and grabs for his mother, who smiles at him lovingly.

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3-26-13:

We made dinner—baked halibut, rice, salad—while listening to Bach playing loudly from radios in every room. O, so happy, eager to help out—chopping vegetables, preparing rice, advising whether I should use lemon or lime in the halibut, spontaneously coming over to hug me and have his back scratched—then sitting in his chair and reading from a fat file of the many forewords he’s written over the years, holding his magnifying glass to his eye, reading aloud to me, stopping now and then just to savor the music.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a planet where the sound of rain falling is like Bach?” he says.

“Yes, Planet Bach,” I respond.

He smiles—“Yes,” he murmurs—picturing it, hearing it.

Later, lying on the couch, his legs over mine, we listen to what seems an endless Bach piece. It goes on and on and on, the pauses between passages “a majestic silence,” as O says. We keep thinking it will end, the announcer interrupting to say what the piece is. Neither of us is sure. But instead, the music continues. One begins to wonder if it will ever end, life on Earth returning. O has his eyes closed.

Finally, at 9 P.M. the piece comes to an end and we learn what it was—“The Musical Offering,” one of Bach’s last works, composed for Frederick II. He asks for the Oxford Companion to Music to look it up, I hand it to him along with reading glasses and a magnifying glass, and then he places a call to his assistant and leaves a message on the machine:

“Hailey, I wonder if you can order a CD of this very marvelous Bach piece that has been playing…”

I watch his face as he speaks. He looks so peaceful and happy … on a planet where the sound of rain falling is like Bach…

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3-30-13:

It is hard to describe how tired I am. Noises hurt a little. I crave the quiet—my kind of quiet: the sound of skateboarders going uptown and taxicabs hitting the metal plate on Eighth. Nothing else. Even the radio is too much.

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4-30-13:

Random images and thoughts:

O, grumpily doing the dishes in the sink: “I wish the plates would somehow magically spring up and clean themselves…”

How, during a daylong series of panels and performances on O’s work, he would repeatedly open his little tin and offer me a mint before taking one himself.

How, when we first met, he didn’t really know how to (or didn’t think to) share with another person. He’d never shared his life before, after all.

How, when I didn’t feel well recently and took a long bath, he brought in to me a piece of toast with a slice of cheese on it. When I transferred to the bed, he brought me another slice.

How I could hear his feet shuffling on the carpet. And how I like that sound.





LESSONS FROM THE SMOKE SHOP


My thirty-year-long subscription to the New Yorker ran out—pure absentmindedness on my part—and since then I have been buying a copy each week at the smoke shop around the corner from our building.