The Damning Photos Were Behind the Tame Photos in an Album

I just woke up from fantastically creative dreams--lush and gorgeously Victorian settings, strange objects, odd and damning photos, a boy who walked on his hands in a desert country, a 1,000-page dissertation I'd written about women/the ghost world/ something much more concrete--I forget now. The kind of dreams that make you feel interesting and intrigued, filled with men from the past lounging on chairs and disciplinary women teachers, large architectural spaces and new filigreed ideas to discover in them.

It’s a day I’d like to stay and write, but I have to go prepare for Thanksgiving. And I am thankful. There is so much to be grateful for, and that is clearer every year.

Enjoy the day, everyone. The sky is sandstone blue.

(Also, a nice way to give today: City Harvest.)

Absalon

I showed up earlier than my host. Everywhere there were canvases: draped over a bed, splayed across tables, floors, walls. Sloshes of color, occasional nude photos. And then I noticed the view: Half-height windows to the ceiling on a corner looking out over Central Park and the city to the left and right and ahead from the 31^st floor.

“Do you mind if we play the video again?”

Across from the black leather couches on which we sunk was a flat-screen showing a naked woman doing a kind of gymnastic dance, creating art as her body hit the paper with paint. (Yes.)

“No, go ahead,” I said. There were two guys, both middle-aged-ish, one heavily haired and bearded. Suited.

“It’s called ‘movement art.’ ”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I see that. She’s…moving. And making...art.”

One of the men laughed, one pretended not to hear me. Or did not hear me.

The evening wore better than this though, as I wandered through the “salon” to which I’d been invited. During formal introductions I learned that among the comic illustrators, sex bloggers, and one city planner was one right-wing bigwig for a former (still) bigwig in government. When I talked near him later, I found him to be shouty and spitty. Not about politics, just in general. Shouty. And spitty.

I was at some point in the thrall of a short young man with misanthropic tendencies. We spoke a lot about Jews, about being Jewish, about many things Jewy. And then there was this:

“I had surgery while awake recently.”

“What?” he leapt.

“I had a tumor removed from…here,” I told him as I touched the spot.

“I just got a boner,” he said.

We laughed and laughed and laughed.

Later he made a gas chamber joke. Which left me floored and breathless and for some reason led me to hug him. The irreverence was charming and disgusting at once.

In retrospect, I only remember one piece of art from all the crammed canvases. A terrible tiny painting of a monkey across from the toilet. It had a red background. Awful.

Cutting Through It

I cut Ladyfriend’s hair last night.

In the bathtub.

After a series of bourbons, neat.

I also cut my finger.

Damn, Ladyfriend has some lush, thick hair.

Lushladyfriend.

(Lushes.)

Also? This lamp? I met a composed person beneath it who radiates sex. I tried to think of another word to describe what he radiates, but it’s “sex.” Sort of like sexy, but dirtier.

Things Take Time to Understand

After a couple of years of knowing him I finally had a word for the color of his hair.

It is gunmetal silver, black and gray, shiny and shimmery, watery and cold. It sways like seaweed in a tender surf.

“It’s like mercury,” I said.

“Quicksilver,” he replied.

And Now.

Cheering in the streets at 1:42 a.m.

It’s honking from garbage trucks—I hugged the men who disembarked from one—they honk still blocks away, cheers rising up to meet them. I remember the thrill of Clinton at 18. It’s different. We’re all older now, even the young ones. It’s real and terrifying for its possibilities, good, bad, opaque.


So we wait and see.