We like birthdays around here, and this girl’s been known to make a birthday last a couple of weeks—at the very least. With not one but two birthdays to fête this past weekend, the days have been chock-full of birthday festivities, and, oh, you’d better believe we’ve only just begun.

Birthday weekend kicked off Friday night at Kat’s. I showed up at her place and was saying hello to Matthew when his hand went to his hip and he said, “Wait, is that my phone?” “No,” Kat said, “it’s just your crotch vibrating.” “Oh,” he said, “my crotch always vibrates when I think of ’stella.” Dude sure knows how to sweet-talk a lady.

We walked over to Gramercy Tavern, where, as if it was my birthday, I got taken out to dinner in style. There were scallops and mushrooms, there was monkfish and pancetta and red cabbage, there was a caramelized banana tart with cashew-nut ice cream, there was a silver carafe of coffee laced, enticingly, with cinnamon and cardamom. There were unexpected little treats that appeared at the table throughout the night: white bean purée and salsa verde crostini, cod roe and slivers of fingerling potatoes, a delicate pannacotta with lemon sorbet. At the end, there were even, to accompany the bill, muffins packed to go—“For breakfast,” the waitress said. Oh, the bill, there was so totally a three-hundred-thirty-something-dollar bill that was so totally taken care of by not-me. Thanks, Kat’s parents!

Saturday night was made for Danny’s Skylight Room on West Forty-sixth, where everyone is in love with Blossom Dearie. We scored a table, me and Maud and Hector, in the back of the old-timey cabaret room with the dim, cozy lighting and the mirror walls, next to a guy in glasses and a roundish middle who introduced himself to Hector as “le roi de New York.”

Under the purple lights on stage, it seemed, at times, that Blossom Dearie had pink little-old-lady hair. It wasn’t unbecoming, it went with her pink little-old-lady voice. She sang about ladies who lunch, about a drag queen named Bruce, about a surrey with a fringe on top, about giving him the ooh-la-la, about taking a liking to you. At no point did she say, “Thanks, we’re Sausalito.”

We were standing outside for smokes and a chat after the show when Blossom Dearie walked by us on her way home. “Okay,” she said, in response to nothing, “good night.” “Merci,” Hector said. “Yes,” she said, and, holding the fabric of her skirt between her thumb and index finger in order to raise the hem ever so slightly, headed up the stairs to her apartment just next door.

“Joyeux anniversaire numéro un,” I said to Maud, then headed for the subway, where, like it was no-one’s birthday, the F train home was the mass transit ride from hell. The train was doing that thing where it stops. It just stops, not because we’re at a station, not because it’s about to run over someone working on the tracks, it just stops. And it stands, and it stands. A homeless guy made his way up to the front of the carriage: “Hep me, hep me, I don’t have a gun, I don’t have a knife, I don’t bother women—not that I’m a faggot. I’m a bum.” He eventually made it to the head of the car where, after maybe twelve minutes of motionlessness, he decided he’d had enough. “ALRIGHT!” he shouted into the silence, then turned and walked back down the length of the car. “Hep me, I don’t have a gun, I don’t have a knife....” The schlump of a man sitting next to me reached into his jacket pocket, eased out a goodly-sized bottle of gin, and took a swig from it.

Sunday morning I woke up before the alarm and baked a chocolate tart to Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd while the sky lightened outside. There was a sage sausage off the grill pan and raspberry jam on sourdough toast while the sweet nut tart crust cooled in the fridge and the house filled with baking smell.

In the afternoon, the Harlem street was scented orange blossoms for a birthday tea. Maud’s neighbor across the way was naked except for his thong again, but that wasn’t a special celebration so much as a daily performance. In the sky north of us, a plane climbed into the blue, its silver bullet exterior catching the setting sun and glinting orange.

(The plane story is, well, not a plane story so much as a Zeppelin story, wherein, at some point during the afternoon, I tried to describe a Zeppelin en français: “C’est un truc dans le ciel. Genre, pas un nuage, pas un avion, pas un oiseau. Oh, pas un ballon. C’est, jeez, genre, un truc. Dans le ciel. C’est, um, ovale.” People, you cannot say I don’t try. You just cannot. And, anyway, the thing is, I don’t know that I would’ve done a better job in English.)

(I’m also just now remembering that when I was trying to explain about being so over some dude, I said, “Non mais, c’est cool, lui il est dans le passé, et moi, je bouge dans le futur.” This incited Jazon to ask if I was drunk, but not long after this the boy was telling us about this movie, “LadyHawke,” apparently one of his favorite movies once upon a time in his life. Something like, there’s a couple in love, but a wizard puts a spell on them so the woman’s a hawk in the day and the guy’s a wolf in the night. Crap. Something about, like, Matthew Broderick being a hero monk, I don’t know. Jazon, lov, hello, are you drunk?)



Inside, with the radiator on high, I was down to a tank top and hanging out the fourth-floor window into winter.

Inside, there was tea in little golden cups, the lazy afternoon carried by India’s raspberry linzertorte, sweet, crumbly perfection with slivered almonds and powdered sugar on top.

(The chocolate tart, well, it sucks when a chocolate tart is subpar, but it really sucks when a chocolate tart has been known, in the past, to be way beyond par, and this time you’ve just presented it as a birthday present in a beaut red tart dish, and you’ve been looking forward to tasting it all day, and you lift a morsel to your mouth on a fork, and all you taste is its overwhelming subpar-ness. When we are dealing with that level of suckitude, you consider putting down your fork and walking out—and, furthermore, because it’s you who’s responsible for the subpar, you can’t even slam down your fork and storm out in protest, you have to sneak out and shut the door quietly behind you.

The gorgeous, deep brown was flat somehow, not sweet enough, not chocolatey enough, I don’t know what exactly, and I even used the good chocolate this time. On the train later, India said the flavor was missing a roundness. She suggested that maybe I’d put in too much chocolate (ten eager ounces instead of the eight the recipe called for), which surprised me, because this is the possibly the first time in the history of the world that too much chocolate has proved itself a problem.

Well, there is only one way to find out what the chocolate problem was, exactly, and clearly this means there exists another chocolate tart in my very near future, and maybe this time I’ll follow the recipe.)

Inside, we popped open a bottle of Champagne, and I felt the blush spreading warmly beneath my skin as I sat on the sofa with my legs curled up under me.