Today, still, I am winding down. From what exactly?—well. Sometimes a girl takes a day off, and sometimes a girl takes three days off. And it’s surprising, really, what a girl can get up to taking three days off. Thursday after class, I put in what one would call, if one were Chinese, which one is, an yi su session at the library, working my way through Biffures for maybe a couple of hours. One thing, as they say, led to another, and Sunday night I was stumbling home through the crunchy leaves on Ninth Street in a pair of gold shoes, the clasp on the right one broken, its thin strap helplessly flopping about my ankle.

So:

Thursday evening, sometime in the eight o’clock hour, the weekend began when we hogged a corner of the bar at Frank’s, me and Tom and Jeff and our triplet glasses of chianti. By the time we showed up at Mogador, we were Maud and Gab and Tom and Tom and Jeff and me at the best table in the house, snagged through the French-girl connexion. And all too soon there were small bowls of hummus and beets and roasted eggplant in front of us—

when we were looking at the menu, Tom said, “Don’t they bring you little dishes of food here?” “Yes,” I said, “but you have to ask for them.” “You mean order?” he said. “Um, yeeess.” “So let’s,” he said. “Well,” I said, “yes. Let’s.”

—and a lamb tagine with apricots and prunes, the kind of lamb tagine that you order almost every time you go to Mogador because it is so, so good—and, truly, you do, every now and again, think that maybe you need to try something new, but then you remember how desperately tasty this lamb tagine is, all savor and sweet and couscous, and then you can’t even see anything else on the menu, it’s all just collections and arrangements of letters, so that by the time the waitress comes by to ask for your order, with glazed eyes you can only ask for the one thing.

Hours later, after the mint tea, sweet and toothpastey and quite pleasant; after the rhubarb-and-strawberry crumble and the warm chocolate cake and the cappuccino; after our having finessed, like so many fourteen-year-old boys, various French-English translations of various genitalia-related terms; after Maud having discovered that the switch on the wall behind her head could send the ceiling fan spinning wildly in jerky revolutions; after the boys shouting down our idea to road-trip in a Mini; after so much chortling and thumping on the table and falling over; we were sitting outside on the patio, ready to leave and not ready to leave. There were smokes, and a photograph project, and people walking by on East Eighth Street saying “Reagan’s grave has just been violated!” and “Why don’t you come over and we can make out for old time’s sake?” and “Whoo! Whoo! Whoooooo!”

And then it was one in the morning, and some of us had already left, and some of us were yawning. “Let’s move,” Gab said, so we did, a cold hand in a warm hand till the end of the block.



Friday morning I woke to the grey, and, on the phone to Maud, I said, “I am so not in the mood to do any work today.” “Of course you’re not,” she said. “It’s Friday.” And somehow, her saying it, her putting it out there sanctioned the books shut and shoved aside. It was like I’d been given a stiff golden ticket to ride a golden rollercoaster, screaming with glee as the wind whipped through my hair.

There was an excursion to the Empire State Building, then, because why not. Now here’s the thing about going to the Empire State Building. When you’re at the top, it’s some kind of marvelous. But to be at the top, you have to get to the top. And getting to the top means from the get-go being inducted into a labyrinth that winds upward from the basement, elevators and stairs included, building employees barking at you all the while from all sides—to go here, to go there, to put your bag on the X-ray machine belt, to take a tour, to have exact change, to stand at the black line, to smile for the camera, to go through the security arch again, and—inexplicably—to keep moving and not look out the window from the eightieth floor. (The tip is, it helps if you’re with a Gab, who has a small bag of chocolate in his pocket and hands you jolly M&Ms to keep your spirits up.) Ultimately, though, you find yourself on the eighty-sixth floor, and you feel the wind on your face from a door open to the observation deck, and, even through the faint grey of an overcast sky, New York City from up high makes you quicken your step.

There were rooftop gardens and rooftop pools; there were small buildings perched on the tops of big buildings; there were treetops like bunches of broccoli, except in red and yellow instead of deep green. There were sirens floating up on the wind; there was a plane landing at LaGuardia; like a spy movie, there was Thomas flashing his lights at us from his Midtown apartment, non mais c’est cooool. Eventually day became dusk and dusk became night: the lights came on all over the city—the bluewhites and yellowwhites of offices and apartments; the small red and white halos of traffic coming and going; the Pepsi-Cola sign and the Colgate Clock and, like beauty, like sparkle, like tapdancers in shiny shoes and spangled tophats, the Chrysler Building—and then the lights were the city; and my fingers, jammed into my jacket pockets, were numb from the cold; and still we were there, mesmerized, seeing everything and nothing.

Later that night, I’m not sure what possessed us exactly, maybe it was Empire State Building–related exhilaration, it seemed clear to us that embarking on a cheesecake-baking frenzy was not only possible but necessary.

(Maybe it was just, we wanted to celebrate the new moule à cheesecake. Maybe it was just, we like cheesecake. In any case, the moule à cheesecake story is, we were at Crate and Barrel, and we were marveling at the variety of kitchen whatsits and thingamabobs and doohickeys, and Gab picked up a candy thermometer, and it was shiny silver with a smart red-and-white dial on which one of the markings read “Caramelize,” and, well, it was candy-related. And we admired it, and we admired it, and finally I said, “Okay, put it back.” “Really?” he said. “Yes,” I said. “Am I really putting this back?” “Put it back.” “. . .” “Put it back.”)

Midnight saw me and Gab setting off on the adventure, smashing graham crackers and pecans for a crusty crust, and then spending the next hour and a half peering hopefully through the oven window. It wasn’t exactly the kind of adventure Blaise Cendrars might have undertaken, he of—so I hear—the tiger-battling in the jungles of Africa and all, but really, at the end of the day, this girl would much rather have a cheesecake than a tiger in the kitchen.

And it’s a funny thing about a frenzy, because by the time the cake came out of the oven at two in the morning, it seemed neither possible nor necessary to stay up any longer waiting for it to cool before digging in. Uh, which is not to say we launched an immediate attack: “Cheesecake for breakfast?” he said. “Cheesecake for breakfast,” I said. Tucked deep under my down comforter, I fell asleep enveloped in the sweet, warm scent of baking.

Like the luxe life, there was cheesecake waiting and a pot of Stockholm Blend when we woke.

And then, and this is a true story, I made another cheesecake. You hardly ever think you’re going to be baking two cheesecakes within twelve hours of each other, but, oh, how we smile and embrace life and its little surprises. And cheesecake number two was gorgeous because of having been baked with a mind clear from a sound sleep, and cheesecake number two was soon riding on a bus with me and Jeff and Dana and a happy bag containing red wine and sparkling wine and a thick glass container of strawberries macerated in orange juice and orange zest.

Nobody who is anybody doesn’t like riding a bus, and Jeff and I totally heart the B61 because it takes us good places, like Schmio’s in Williamsburg or Tom’s in Long Island City. And the B61 goes up Bedford with its crazy cool Polish shopperies that made me want to get off the bus right then, especially outside the Polish confectionary with its chocolate boxes decorated, all Eastern-European chic, with photographs of big red roses.

Now you know and I know that I know how to throw a party, but Tom, Tom knows how to throw a party. Because we got to Tom’s, and Vio was cooking up a storm (a lasagne storm) in the kitchen, and shortly after, having handed the boy his presents, I was put to work making a vinaigrette for the megasalad. When Maud came by later with a bag of Halloween candy, Tom said, “Oh, cool, I told Claire I was gonna get candy, and I forgot, and now I can tell her I—” “No,” Maud said, “you cannot.”



We were rockin’ it Long Island City–style, then, with The Beach Boys and Zap Mama, and sometimes we danced (well, one of us danced), and sometimes we smoked (well, one of us didn’t smoke), and sometimes we put out Tom’s joint ’cause it smelled crazy. Mostly we sat around the big table, some of us upon others of us, almost, squished on the soft red sofa, and it was good times enough that alls we could do was slouch about and soak it in. There was a very large grinning pumpkin, and a tire-bouchon named Charles de Gaulle, and a gladiator so thin the lions would’ve snubbed him, and a boy working on his French nasal tones: “Tellement. Tellement-tellement-tellement. Tellement. Vachement.” There was food like comfort, and always an open bottle of wine, and the fine mist obscuring ’most everything outside made it so it was like we were all of us collected, cozy-like, in the warm circle of a deep old tree trunk.



We realized a grim moment of reality when we reached the bottom of the bonbon dish, but then Gab excavated a couple of pints of ice cream from the freezer, and the fun began anew. At the end of the night, Tom ordered us a white car fancy like white horses to take us up to Harlem. Like I said: the boy knows how to throw a party.

Sunday morning an aria woke us up, and the sun was shining down One-hundred-thirty-sixth Street like a welcome and a kiss. Because some of us are kids, we turned down Maud’s offer of an energy-packed strawberry-banana-yoghurt blend and reached for bowls of cocoa puffs and pink Frankenberry cereal. Then we were about to be late, so we quick-stepped, bleary-eyed, round the corner to the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where, ha-ha, we’d forgotten that the time had changed in the night, so we were now one hour early for the nine a.m. service. Um, yeah, ha-ha.

We got it right the second time, though, and then there was a gospel choir, and an organ, and stained-glass windows, and fanning with church bulletins, and palms open and raised. And the preacher preached; and people said “Mm-hm”; and an oldish gent in a grey suit in front of me sang loudly and clearly and strongly.

There was smothered chicken after, in a pleathered booth in Miss Maude’s Spoonbread Two, with a small tower of candied yams, sweet and orangebrown, while Thomas exalted the all-American unlimited coffee refill. And then the sun was calling, and we stood outside and made plans to head for the park. It turned out, then, that “plans to head for the park” meant sitting about in the cool of Maud’s apartment, lazy and content, the day floating by on cottonwool clouds.

Gab and I were heading to the subway downtown in the evening when the clasp on my shoe gave out. I guess that’s just what happens when you take a pair of party shoes with delicate straps and a dainty heel, and make them walk you around downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City and Harlem over the course of twenty-four hours. Crouching down on the sidewalk, I failed a quick fix. “Ça va, princesse?” he said. “Si si non non,” I said, “c’est cool,” and I made a silent apology to my feet.

And then there was the downtown train, and then there was Brooklyn, and then there was home; and then a hot hot shower, and sleep welcomed, soft like the night.