by Lucy Ellmann
“In Queens?” I added.
“Oh, herbs grow really well in window boxes,” Gertrude assured us, and there followed an endless monologue on every herb Gertrude had ever grown, every wild flower she’d ever picked, watercress this and water mint that, and the infinite culinary uses to which they had been, or could have been, or should have been, put—except in dishes containing fish of course, for Gertrude had never really cared for fish… “I can eat a little tuna sometimes, if it’s cooked just right, but they so often overcook it! You wouldn’t dare overdo a steak in a good restaurant but there seems to be no consensus on how to cook tuna. It’s a real gamble.”
Was she being deliberately obtuse, or just plain dumb? I could never be sure.
REASON NO. 48: Gertrude’s efforts as a conversationalist (which at first I took as a sign of insecurity). Everything you say is just an excuse for Gertrude to issue some rambling amplification, meditation, or digression of her own. Mention coffee and she’ll give you a rundown of every cup she ever drank, and where. Her favorite conversational gambit is the foods she hates, and there are a million of them. But so what if Gertrude doesn’t like pot roast? (Who likes it?!) She also insists on reducing every topic to the most banal level: if somebody brings up Rembrandt, Gertrude will start jabbering on about some hat she once had that resembled Rembrandt’s in a self-portrait but she lent it to somebody who never returned it and therefore will never lend anything to anyone again or not a hat anyway… and other goofy ruminations totally unconnected to Rembrandt. She has no idea what conversation is, the give-and-take of it. She never listens to anyone else, in fact seems to think she’s doing everybody a favor by holding the floor. I tentatively suggested to her once, in private, that she should give no more than two opinions at a time before waiting to see if someone else had anything to add. But she never tried it—she probably never even heard me say it, she was too busy trying to find a way to interrupt me.
REASON NO. 49: Insecure, my ass! The woman has the ego of a colossus.
Later that night, you could have seen the berserk figure of my sister Bee running pell-mell from the house, screaming, “You idiot! You idiot!”—like Beethoven when some prince he was counting on suggested he might make do with two bassoons instead of three for a rehearsal of Fidelio. I think what finally flipped Bee over the edge was Gertrude’s bright idea that she should work smaller, do stuff in clay, use “inexpensive materials”, or maybe give up sculpture altogether and get a dog. Gertrude’s answer to everything is for people to become more like Gertrude: a nincompoop with a pumpkin patch who can speak coherently only about coffee and cat food. (REASON NO. 81.)
So Bee took up some dopey residency in England, and I, through superhuman efforts, finally extracted myself from Gertrude’s clutches, and thus was all alone on Christmas Day, free at last—to rearrange my cds and dvds. Not alphabetically, that’s for zhlubs. My cds I effortfully shelved by composer, performer, and ensemble: solos, duets, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, septets, octets, small chamber groups, orchestras, jazz and… Bluegrass (my weak spot—not so much the yodeling as that “high lonesome sound”). Dewey wouldn’t have liked my system, but Dewey wasn’t there. The movies I did by era: the 1920s, the ’30s, the ’40s, the ’50s, the ’60s, the ’70s, etc., each decade (after the ’40s) more redolent of cinematic decline. I never got to watch these movies when Gertrude was around. She was always jumping up and rushing around the room for no reason, or talking all the way through. So, examining them now was like retrieving a treasure trove. I turned out to have a whole bunch of Bette Davis movies! I decided I would revive my psyche, post-Gertrude, by watching Bette Davis—her weirdness would be my therapy.
But first I had to organize my cartoon collection, this time alphabetically: Alvin and the Chipmunks, Betty Boop, Bugs Bunny, Crusader Rabbit, Donald Duck, the Flintstones, Fritz the Cat, Goofy, Heckle and Jeckle, Hercules, Huckleberry Hound, the Jetsons, Mickey Mouse, Mighty Mouse, Mr Magoo, Penelope Pitstop, Pingu, Popeye, Porky Pig, Road Runner, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Screwball Squirrel, the Simpsons, Sylvester and Tweetie Pie, Tom and Jerry, Tom Terrific and Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog, Top Cat, Wally Gator, Woody Woodpecker, and Yogi Bear. Well, what of it? What’s a plastic surgeon supposed to do after a hard day’s work realigning human flesh, if not chill out to scenes of imaginary animals getting punched, stretched, bounced up and down, steamrollered, blown to smithereens, and reborn good as new? Brutal, I know, but optimistic! Claude and I had bonded over episodes of Yogi Bear, and had watched Olive Oyl deliberate over which size roller skates to rent about a million times: “I usually take a three but an eight feels sooo gooood!”
Hidden among all the dvds I found some old Ant and Bee books (being about the same size): Ant and Bee and the Rainbow, and One, Two, Three with Ant and Bee. Now there was a true nut: Angela Banner. Puts ol’ Bette in the shade! Pondering the perversity of these little books, I realized I’d always sort of associated my sister Bee with Angela Banner’s Bee—not his authoritarian side exactly, but because he seems older, wiser, and more on the ball than Ant. Bee’s the sensible one, almost parental, the one who holds everything together while Ant gets himself into scrapes. Bee knows what time it is, for instance, when to go to bed… Bee’s always telling Ant what to do, and he’s always right.
But when I called up my Bee to fill her in on this ancient confusion of mine, she objected to the comparison: I’d forgotten how much she hated being compared to a bee. She deflected all my well-meant attempts to flatter her by praising Bee, and cited as evidence of his dopeyness: Around the World with Ant and Bee.
“What about that madcap hunt for Bee’s lost umbrella?” she asked. “That’s not sensible, it’s insane! At Bee’s insistence, they travel the world asking people if they’ve seen his stupid umbrella. Big surprise, nobody’s seen a microscopic umbrella belonging to a bee.”
“But Bee’s mobile. That’s the great thing about him!”I pleaded. “Ant just hitches a ride on Bee’s back when they go to the store, then manages to drop all the groceries on the way home. One little tart, two little apples—”
“Yeah, yeah. Six little eggs… Look, Harry, I’m kind of in the middle of something here…”
“And then, and then,” I babbled, finding new relevance in Ant and Bee the more it irritated Bee, “after dropping all that stuff, Ant falls too and hits his head and has to stay home for three weeks—he’s a shut-in like me! Doctor’s orders.”
“Ew, I always hated their doctor. He’s two hundred times their size, and human, and makes house calls to insects? He really freaked me out.”
“Freaked you out?” I said. “What about me? You’re the one who was always reading those books to me! You showed no mercy. I think we both permanently depressed ourselves reading those things. How’d we get hold of them anyway? Nobody else in America was reading Ant and Bee. They’re so… English! Hey, you want me to send them to you?”
“What would I do with them here? I’ve got England right outside the window.”
Poor Ant, poor Bee. I’d have to give them to Claude instead. But first I had to read them myself—to remind me of the olden days. Also, I felt a certain affinity with Ant right now, as a fellow shut-in. But when he’s sick in bed, he receives get-well parcels from everyone in England, and Kind Dog. Where were my parcels? Bee and I always wanted to know what was in these parcels of Ant’s, especially the biggest one, labeled, “Do not open until Ant is better,” which turns out to contain two wind-up tin motorboats, the SS ANT and the SS BEE. Ant and Bee launch them immediately. We longed for similar boats! But it was the labels that really got me. I found some at the dime store one day and labeled every piece of furniture in the house, forgetting to take them off before my dad came home and realized what a corny goofball he had for a son.
My study of Ant and Bee was interrupted by Gertrude, who called to ask what I was doing.
“Nothing,”I said warily. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, trying to source some cucumbers for the punch,”she r
eplied. “But all the markets are out of cucumbers! Can you imagine? I don’t know what else to make. Well, que sera sera.” (This was really about Eggnog, because my absence had forced her to rustle up a substitute beverage: “punch”. It sounded godawful.)
REASON NO. 224: Gertrude’s philosophy of que sera sera. Gertrude likes to come across all scatterbrained and laid-back, like she was just some simple goose girl who leaves things to chance. Like hell. I never saw a person take fewer chances. She doesn’t even take a chance on her kind of sun cream being available in the Hamptons, but packs the car with thirty gallons of the stuff. She never took a chance on me either (my loyalty or love); instead, imprisoned me in bookings, duties, organizations, and five-year plans. The box at the Met, wines that won’t mature for a decade, the pigs of Piedmont already scouring the land for truffles in anticipation of our next autumn trip… And her putrid musical ventures, those kooky salons and soirées she put on, where the tanned and the toned tried to talk learnedly about Schubert or Mozart or Dohnányi. I once heard a whole bunch of them discussing who knew Dohnányi best—none of them knew Dohnányi at all! A few may have glimpsed him coming down a shady path at some music camp. Much was made of that shady path. As for Schubert, it was his death they liked best. They acted like he only wrote that stuff so we could think about syphilis the whole time it’s being played. no more! No more entanglements at Tanglewood, no more glimmers of hope at Glimmerglass.
NEW YEAR’S EVE
When I wasn’t playing Schubert impromptus on the piano (without the pedals), I listened to my box-set of La Bohème again and again, as a kind of cardiovascular workout (a reminder of that dimly remembered thing: romance). So now I had a sore ankle and a sore spot for MimÌ, a real hankering for the flower-girl to come warm her little cold hands at my artificial log fire, which couldn’t be much worse than Rodolfo’s fire (all he had was paper!)… But what was I thinking?! Not another bohemian! I’d barely rid myself of the last one yet: Gertrude’s phone calls had gone down, post-break-up, to two or three a day, as opposed to six or more, but it still wasn’t the decisive split I’d had in mind. And now she wanted Explanations. To be kind, I didn’t give her any.
“Is it somebody else?” she asked. “You’ve found somebody else!”
“I found my senses, Gertrude.”
Some of her bewilderment was understandable. Nobody usually ends an affair in this town without snagging a replacement first. The fact that I hadn’t indulged in the conventional two-timing stage was an indication of just how intolerable Gertrude was. I’d ditched her for her own deficiencies, not because I was cunt-struck on somebody else.
Gertrude was like one of those boa constrictors, those beautiful creatures people in Florida keep as pets until the thing gets too big and uncontrollable—whereupon they let it loose outside to terrorize the neighborhood, until some jerk finally comes along and shoots it. The snake was set up for a fall from the start! You take a wild animal into your home and then blame it for being wild. It was Gertrude’s nature, for chrissake, to be obnoxious, and my mistake to have had anything to do with her, no matter how appealingly she sauntered up 42nd Street. I chose the woman, I ushered her into my building and made what I considered a suave pass at her in the elevator, the actions of a supposedly grown man. And she could still slither into my life and undermine me, even from the snowbound wastes of Connecticut.
“Did I say something wrong? Did I do something horrible?” (Yes, and yes.)“Didn’t I try to please you? I took you into my home, my family, Harrison. I gave you everything… !”
“I’m no family man, Gertrude. I told you that from the beginning.”
And yet, my biggest regret in breaking up with her was the loss of Claude. I would really miss that kid, and I’d worry about him too, stuck over there all alone with Gertrude (and the army of au pairs). But what could I do? He wasn’t my son—Gertrude was already pregnant when I met her, having had herself artificially inseminated on a whim, some months before. When we broke up, I thought of asking for visiting rights but didn’t, for fear that she’d use my fondness for Claude as some sort of weapon.
I once asked him, “How was the playground today?” and he answered, “Homoerotic.” What a guy! And what a vocabulary—Gertrude must’ve read Webster’s to him when he was still in the womb.
The sprained ankle had given me an unforeseen vacation from work, and after some initial shock at the extent of my solitude and spare time, I discovered: my apartment! Always scooting between New York and Long Island and Gertrude’s various approximations of bohemia in Manhattan, Connecticut, and Hilton Head, I never had time to enjoy it, and it’s a great apartment! Neither bohemian nor po-mo metro minimalist chic: my place was “modern” in about 1920. It’s a converted penthouse loft at the top of the century fabric design co. building in the Garment District (36th, between 7th and 8th), a business long defunct but still proudly commemorated in gold lettering over the front entrance. It’s now mixed-use, with about a million mysterious enterprises going on below me: hats, buttons, hooks, eyes, feathers, SM gear, rubber nurse uniforms, transgender lingerie, godknowswhat. I sometimes study the brass-framed list of my fellow inhabitants while waiting for the elevator, trying to imagine what the hell they’re all up to in there:
FEATHER FLAUNT
THE QUICK-FIX COMPANY
COUTURE CUTEY
BARRY’S BRAS
JEEPERS & CO.
MATERNITY PANTS
FIFI FUN
CHOCOLATEX
BUSKYDELL CORP.
SNAPPY ZIPPER…
Living in the Garment District is very convenient—you never have to wash a shirt, just go down and buy a new one at Ramin’s! I work across town, right by the Morgan Library, so daily pass all of female fashion, from underwear to eveningwear. I’m a block away from the General Post Office too, where on tax day a guy runs up and down the steps dressed as an Excedrin, passing out free samples to late filers.
The elevator doesn’t reach my floor—you have to walk up the last flight on foot (sprained ankle or not). But because I’m on the top, it’s very quiet: I can play the piano whenever I want, and don’t have to listen to other people’s idiotic choice of music. I don’t own the roof terrace, but nobody ever comes up there so it’s effectively mine. Gertrude had hopes of turning the whole place into an urban farm, but my main use for it is as a lookout post for terrorist attacks and more benign types of fireworks. It’s also a bracing spot for the first cup of coffee of the day, while staring at the ancient faded ad for boots on a building opposite—
LOOKS WELL
FEELS WELL
WEARS WELL
—which pretty much sums up how I feel about my apartment! Another sign further on, “baar & beard’s” (ladies’ scarves), reminds me to shave.
The best thing about my apartment is that there are no dingy areas. Dinginess is the source of all human misery. There’s a skylight over the front door, and windows on three sides of the building. Light fills the place, coming in from all angles, drifting through internal doors and windows, over diagonally cut white breezeblock walls, and bouncing off the high ceilings. It’s airy in my eyrie! Some of the woodwork is dark mahogany, but most of the doors are filled with old frosted glass. And, next to the French doors that open out onto the roof, there’s just one huge window that stretches the length of the living room, a slanted wall of glass. The coziest thing in the world is to sit under this window at twilight when it’s raining heavily outside and the water patters on the glass, forming a steady sheet of drips through which you glimpse the twinkling lights of a million other windows and the bridge (a guy’s always got to have an escape route in sight).
So now, a martini to the left of me, fire to the right of me, piano in stasis before me, and all of Manhattan in motion behind me, I sat in torpor, my foot on its footstool, my head in its fool’s cap, and a pad of foolscap on my lap in case I wanted to jot down anything melancholy. This activity was not new: my List of Melancholy Things predated m
y break-up and the sprained ankle. It’s my life’s work.
LIST OF MELANCHOLY
– Liszt himself—such bombast, and for what?
– MimÌ, a torn and tender woman
– being alone on New Year’s Eve
– forced marriages among five-year-olds
– master’s degrees in highway lighting
– the rushed minimal morning walks of a million Manhattan mutts
– puppetry
– pep talks
– the Great Auk
– shrimp-eating contests
– unpredictable air fares
– pregnant women pushing strollers uphill like Sisyphus—just stop breeding, why don’t you?
– the existence of Walmart
– Superman T-shirts
– Bach’s solo cello suites, especially No. 5; also, 2 and 4… aw, throw them all in (they all exhibit “exquisite melancholy”)
My kitchen is triangular, which turns out to be the perfect shape for a kitchen to be: everything’s visible and within reach. There’s even a little table and chair in there for eating sandwiches in a hurry. My kitchen’s equipped with every gadget known to man, gifts from grateful patients and patient girlfriends, or worry-warts like Bee (who sprang a juicer on me some years back when she noticed the only Vitamin C I was getting was from the celery in my Bloody Marys). I’ve got technology up the wazoo in there: a milk-frother from a cappuccino-lover who’d hurriedly assumed, on the basis of a few nights together, that we’d be sharing breakfast more often than we ever did. A lemon-zester, from a patient who claimed it was symbolic of her new zest in life since the rejuvenation job I’d done on her. An egg-boiler (for one egg at a time), a panic-buy of my own when I realized I’d reached maturity without knowing how to boil an egg (but had I reached maturity? And how would eggs help me if I had?). And an olive-pitter I mistakenly thought necessary for making martinis. A bread-maker, that had continued kneading its dough long after the girl who gave it to me walked out for good. An electric nutmeg-grater that must have cost more than a lifetime’s supply of nutmegs (this, from a woman much taken with my Eggnog and our Eggnog snog out on Gertrude’s porch one Christmas). And its rival, Gertrude’s five-hundred-buck coffee machine that took up half my counter space and looked like it would be of more use printing revolutionary pamphlets. I also had a big fancy stove with six burners and an inbuilt griddle I never used, microwave, fridge, automatic ice-producing freezer full of gin, vodka, and an ancient carton of sherbet (which somehow always got forgotten at the sight of the gin), dishwasher, prehensile-mangling blender, my mother’s long-retired Revere Ware pots, and the weighty tortilla pan I purchased at a medical conference in Bilbao, under the influence of an attractive anesthesiologist and too much Rioja. All the conveniences of modern life were there! (And I’d even read the manuals.) And crackers—a guy can’t have too many crackers.
