We like the country when it is sunny, but we like the country when it is rainy, too, because then it is time for Maud to start the fire in the big room, and then we sit around all day.

It was raining when I woke this morning, and it continued to rain as we breakfasted on coffees and teas, on chocolate muesli and spoonfuls of yoghurt and apricot jam. The rain came straight down in white lines, and we watched through the kitchen window, me and Dartagnan, and he miaowed and it was hard to tell if it was because he wanted out or because it was also breakfasttime for black cats.



Monday morning we woke early to go to the market in town. Maud was one with the country roads, and we whipped round the green fields in her jaunty, junky Samba before pulling up the narrow stone paths in Pleaux. “I am going to be calm,” I said, but then, holy crap!, there were the wooden cages of chickens and rabbits and little yellow ducklings, and all restraint was lost.



At the fortnightly market:

there are sausages and round zucchini and rattan chairs and French-housewife aprons and a pink T-shirt that says Horse Fashion;

the fruit women have lips red like the summer cherries they sell;

the fish lady catches glistening trout from a tank on her truck bed, and slaps them over the head with a short wooden stick. I’d been warned, but I said “Oh!” all the same when the smack came;

we bought honey from Madame Rivière, the honey maker. One pot of miel toutes fleurs, because it has a pretty name, and one pot of treacly dark miel de chataignier, because it is hands-down my favorite honey, honey.



The triumph of the market means that back home, there is baked trout for now, a cherry clafouti for later, and homemade apricot jam for days on end. It’s not as if all we do in the country is sit about and eat—

well—

okay—

fine.

But when it is not tartines à volonté, there is piano-playing, and card tricks, and horoscopes in the free Shopi magazine, and some of us knit, and some of us do the quizzes in old issues of French Elle. And I am learning all sorts of useful things, like what to do with baked trout two days after, and the answer is, trout and spinach pie, easy-peasy, with eggs and cream and milk and curry powder mixed together in a big aluminium bowl.

What to do after trout and spinach pie is easy-peasy, too, and it is this: espressos and squares of Poulain dark chocolate, and Virginia Rodriguez on the stereo, and falling asleep in the low corduroy chairs next to the crackling fire.

It’s sometime in the morning, I suppose, I don’t know. I haven’t looked at a clock in days, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because I don’t have anywhere to be but right here right now. We’re in the large, open kitchen at Maud’s house in Prades—I’m at the solid, knotty table, and Maud is up and about making a clafouti with cherries we picked up yesterday from the market in Pleaux. We have Jorge Ben Jor on, because I love this album, but also to drown out the feeble buzzing of a dying fly. The fly is one of eleven fat, black spots on a roll of flypaper that has been unraveled along the wire of a pendant lamp as a warning to other flies. Our tribal warning is ineffective; the flies fear nothing, and buzz and land where they will.

Our train pulled into Laroquebrou late Sunday. We were three to descend toward the small station light glowing yellow in the deep black night. A taxi ride round the winding country roads, and then we tumbled into the house, Maud and India and me, and we breathed in the house smell. “Tea?” Maud said. “Water and sleep,” I said, so of course in minutes we were sitting down to a pot of tea, a baking tin of Angéla’s chocolate cake, and a good slab of Cantal. “On a trouvé le fromage,” I said, “ou bien le fromage nous a trouvé,” because this, if you will remember from such episodes as last summer, is le fromage qui bouge tout seul. “Some bread maybe?” Maud said, and I went toward the bread drawer. “I like that you remember where things are,” Maud said, but of course I remember where things are, c’est dans la boîte quoi.



I was talking to CC on the phone yesterday, and she said, “You’re going to use your UK visa to spend all your time in Paris.” Well...yeah. Because, hot damn, Paris.

A week ago I packed up the Brooklyn house and said good-bye with little sadness, because sometimes it is just time to pack up and go, and, anyway, it is hard to wallow in grey nostalgia when a girl has a one-way ticket to Paris.



Paris is la fête de la musique the day I arrive, a bal musette in the courtyard of the Mairie du deuxième arrondissement, a woman in a giraffe dress and mascara’d eyes. We are all dancing, the tango, the rhumba, the farandolle, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know the steps, because under the stars and the blimp in the sky and the strings of multicolored lights, the dance is the dance is the dance.

Paris is the drums at la Place Sainte-Marthe after midnight, deep and thumping and unstoppable up the street, and a couple kissing under a streetlamp, and a stumbling drunk, and Chinese families hanging out of their windows, in pyjamas or half-dressed, above rue Sainte-Marthe, watching the hullabaloo from overhead.

Paris is Moots and Panda and Magdalena and Fab. Manel, Sophie, Tania. Flojo and Chris and Philippe and Karen. Rebekah, Simon, Olive, Rémi. Gigi, Lili, Benjamine, Jeanne. Louis qui est Lui, Bastien qui est Spider, Paul qui est Pol qui est Tige. Of course Paris is Maud and Hector and Klem and Gabriel.

Paris is an afternoon siesta after an overnight flight, drifting in and out of sweet sleep while Gab plays a languid Spanish something that floats on the blue sky above Belleville. “C’est un peu le bonheur ici,” I said, because it was true. Later, we were lounging about, and the sky outside was white like the apartment walls, almost-white on off-white and the sunlight streaming in white-white, like starting anew.



Paris is hanging on tight on the back of Gab’s scooter as we scoot around the city, if this is not Paris I don’t know what is. The scooter is called Shadow, and Shadow needs a little tune-up, because at the moment he goes somewhat faster than a bicycle and groans uphill. “Faut pas être trop pressé,” Gab says, which is fine by me, because it is summer in Paris and I am in no hurry to get anywhere. We weave in between cars and putt along the Seine, we lean around corners and rattle about on cobblestone streets. Sometimes we stop for a crêpe jambon-fromage and sometimes we carry a bag of pastries from the swank Aoki Sadaharu on Boulevard Port Royal. Sometimes we are reflected in shop windows as we zip past, a silver helmet and a rose-print skirt and a big cheesy grin but I can’t help it. And the scooter ride around Paris is something, but the scooter ride around Paris at night after the dance, when the air is cool and quiet, when you turn your head to see the deep yellow city lights pulling away behind you, well there is a feeling somewhere inside you, and that feeling may well be l-o-v-e.

Paris is a picnic in the Jardin de Tuileries with Maud and Hector, after a stop into Ladurée for fancy-pants sandwiches and macarons de luxe. I tried to tell the story about the wide-mouthed frog, and—who knew?—the story exists in French. Hector saw me one histoire de la grenouille à grande bouche and upped me le clown qui s’est réveillé et qui se sentait tout drôle.

Paris is trying to bake a cheesecake and a chocolate tart, converting all measurements from American to French, and I am afraid I am turning into a two-trick pony with these baked goods, but what can you do when your fan club puts in a request. Where condensed milk as I have known it comes in a little can, in Paris the condensed milk comes in a tube that you can suck on. I am not making this up, this is a true story. I tried to squeeze out a little taste onto my fingertip, delicate-like, you know, like a jeune fille bien élevée, but Hector said the right way was to put the whole thing to my mouth and suck. When in Paris....



Paris is knowing where I’m going, rue de l’Atlas to rue du Buisson Saint-Louis, hang a left on rue Saint Maur, hang a right on rue du Faubourg du Temple, et le Monoprix nous y voilà for wine and yoghurt. This is what else I know: In Belleville, the corner in front of Wing Seng smells like durian. No one will share the durian with you, so it is best to leave it alone, but rambutans are innocuous and just five euros a kilo to satiate a craving. On rue Saint Maur, stop for a pain suisse and a bar of chocolate at the first boulangerie, not the second. In the Marais, the Muji shop is just down the street from the falafel joint; the falafel joint is just down the street from the park in which to eat a falafel sandwich in the shade; the park is just down the street from Le Palais des thés; and in Le Palais des thés, they have tea for the sampling, cold and light on a hot day.



Paris is out and out and out, and then hot and tired but out some more, but then Paris is also coming back in, and being quiet with a book, sometimes, or a movie, sometimes. If you are lucky, Paris is walking about in the cool after an afternoon storm, and then coming home at night to find a surprise companion for a mousse au chocolat and a DVD rental.

Chez Gab on ne dort pas avant trois heures, and mostly Paris is going to bed around four, or staying up talking till the sky starts to lighten again and the birds chirp hello. We rested one on top of the other, and the moon made her way from left to right in the sky, low and round and bright. Paris, then, is waking at half past noon, because why not.



Paris is the Friday market in Belleville, people pushing, trolleys and bags and baskets, melons and tomatoes and beans, cheeses and meats and fish, dresses, shoes, things. Gab walked me to the métro after, and he said, “So maybe some cherries? And maybe some figs?” and when I got back he’d gotten both, we like Gab a lot. Sunday morning some of us had a bowl of fresh figs and honey yoghurt, and a teacup of strong coffee, with La vie devant soi propped on our knees, we like Sunday mornings a lot.



Paris is picking out all kinds of treats at Gérard Mulot—a pear tart, a pistachio-grapefruit tart, a good generous helping of peach tart—and then Paris is a thé de pétasses downstairs at the Buisson. We talk about girls, Maud and Gigi and me, but we also talk about boys. And we talk about London, and we talk about Paris, and there will be visits here and visits there, we like Gigi a lot. We also like the Buisson a lot, for when there is not a thé de pétasses, there may be an apéro de connards, or chouquettes and croissants for breakfast, or a late-night petit suisse with pear jam, or a sandwich and fries from the Tunisian place round the corner on a rainy afternoon.

Paris is my own personal amazement that I speak French, and Paris is the triumph of hanging up the phone after a Whole French Conversation, without the aid of gestures or pantomimes or any kind of nonverbal cue, a Whole French Phone Conversation in which I understand everything, even a boy locking his shirt in the attic, which seems like something got lost in the translation, but which in fact is exactly what he said.



Paris is chez Gab, chez Maud, chez Benjamine, chez Philippe. Friday night, boulevard de Choisy smells of roast pork. Up seven flights at Philippe’s, sourires et fous rires, we noshed while the saffron curtains billowed in the wind. The storm came down, then, and the sky far in the distance was purple with thick rain.

Leaving Paris Sunday afternoon made us stomachaches and bad moods, even if we were heading for the country, and even if the country is brown butterflies and giant heads of lettuce in the sprawling garden, and maybe sixteen teapots in the kitchen cupboard, and volcano stones in the big room. There is more to say about the country, of course, but it is hours now since I started this post, and I have been in my pyjamas all day, mais enfin ce sont les vacances quoi.

Going to London: eight pairs of shoes (all the better for mobile Taoist monking). The March 2005 issue of Gourmet magazine from Lurlene, in which London is heralded as an all-round aces place of good eats. Proust, Peter Carey, Jeffrey Steingarten, Raymond Queneau. A banged-up rattan suitcase of CDs.

Staying: The boys and the coffees at Café Regular. The F train to Coney Island. The trees in Prospect Park. The neighborhood firemen buying dinner groceries at Steve’s C-Town the Supermarket for Savings. (They like meat.) (A lot.)

I miss it already.

I can’t wait to be there already.

Saturday evening Kumiko and I were on our way to dinner with Beefy, but we were so hungry already at that moment, that kind of loopy slow-mo can’t-speak hunger, and Beefy was somewhere on top of the Empire State Building still, and I thought maybe we’d just pop into a Japanese joint I keep meaning to go to on Saint Mark’s Place, because it seemed like the kind of place where two girls can get a little pre-dinner snack—specifically the kind of little pre-dinner snack that comes on a stick.

There weren’t too many snacks on sticks at Izakaya Kenka, but there sure was grilled mackerel and takoyaki, among other things we didn’t order. Salted cow tongue, I am talking to you.

Do you know takoyaki? Takoyaki is dough balls stuffed with octopus. It comes hot, with bonito flakes dancing on top. Takoyaki is your friend.

The thing is, takoyaki is your friend, but it is best if Kumiko is also your friend, because Kumiko is (a) Japanese and (b) hence, lucky!!!, and (c) knows how to say things. Like: Ohashi!, which is Please, may I have some chopsticks?, or Lemonhai!, which is It would be great if I could have a glass of refreshing lemonade sake drink, or Yorokonde!, which is Happily I will do for you what you ask.

Handy. Tokyo, here I come.

I’m not entirely packed yet, but the car to the airport isn’t coming for another four hours, so it’s not quite time to panic. I think everything’s pretty much taken care of, but we’ll see. I’ve dealt with enough bloody logistics to last several months, at least. Phone company, gas company, electricity company, shipping company. So many minutes on the phone with UPS finding out what brown cannot do for me.

Those were the crappy logistics.

Good logistics include getting in touch with this girl Elizabeth, who was holding on to the keys to the London flat. Friday I headed up Mulberry to her place, upstairs from a storefront playing Dean Martin into the afternoon bustle. On the third floor, she opened the door, and two ginger cats turned to look. They sat in the middle of the living room, fat and ginger as ginger cats should be, and they turned, with the barest of interest, to look.

The London keys are three on a ring, and two of them are heavy and gold and round, as if they open the door to everything that is good, like many-colored Chinese paper lanterns hanging in a room of sunlight white.

In the last few days before I leave, there have been things old and new, which sounds like a spot-on description of life anyway. Amid the flurries and the phone calls—the wining and the dining. And, oh, I embrace it all, because what can you do, and because, well, I am good at being fêted.

Thursday night at Giorgione with Cheryl and Mike and Brian, with fried artichokes and pastas and desserts all around. A post-dinner drink at the Ear brought an almost-celebrity sighting: Where once upon a time I swore I saw Harrison Ford, this time I swear I saw Ethan Hawke.

Friday afternoon in NoLIta, after an outside lunch at Bistrot Margot, Jazon suggested a rice pudding digestif. We like Jazon a lot, because I have been walking by Rice to Riches for months, a little curious, but never going in. Who knew?, rice pudding is big, people. Big. We split some mango rice pudding and some chocolate chip rice pudding, and Jazon later said it was rice pudding tinged with sadness, but Jazon, don’t you worry, because surely there will be rice pudding a-plenty for us in London, failing which I think a fried Mars bar will do us nicely.

Friday night Kat and I met on the corner of Rivington and Ludlow to try our luck at ’inoteca once again. I have tried to go to ’inoteca two or three times in the past so many months, but I have never made it in because I cannot be bothered to wait two hours to be seated. The Lower East Side’s good-bye kiss to me Friday night was a manageable hang-out on the corner, while the sun set in a brilliant blaze over in the west. We eyed the front window seat, with its giant windows open to the balmy evening, but the three girls in the space, all cotton dresses and cleavage, were dawdling over candy-colored rosés. Inside, eventually, plates of meats and cheeses, rucola and preserved onions, beets with orange and mint and hazelnuts. We had to excuse ourselves and pretend to stand outside for a smoke, but really we were stretching and readying ourselves for chocolate budino and a plate of roasted fruits. “I wish I smoked,” I said, and not five minutes later, a smiling, wrinkly Chinese uncle came up to us hawking Marlboros out of a black nylon sack. It’s almost like that day I picked up the phone and it was some guy, speaking Chinese, who’d dialed the wrong number. I wonder what the chances are that—say you don’t speak English—you dial the wrong number and the person on the other end speaks your language. Man, it’d be something if you could just pick up the phone and have a loud Chinese person on the other line. Mm. Well. It’d be somethin’.

The weekend before I leave, this is a Saturday morning:

Almost ten on a Saturday morning, Marius stops in at Café Regular for his first coffee of the day. Me, I’m on my second cappuccino, and, huzzah, someone’s left a copy of the June Vogue.

In Chinatown, at the Hong Kong Supermarket, tubs of wriggling eels and fine, blue-legged crabs, and a basket of frogs—frogs!!!—sitting, piled one on top of another in a pool of muddy water. Frogs green, spotted, and still, but for the shiny black eyes, blink blink blink. Are you squirming??? I was squirming Saturday morning, and I am squirming now.

Saturday morning on East Broadway, Sa Sa Cosmetic Skin Care has a poster out front saying I can get my lips done in styles such as Arousing, Pretty, Trendy, Dreamy, or Paris.

Saturday morning on Forsyth, the scallion buns are hot and fragrant, and the only thing stopping me from snarfing one was that I was heading to dim sum at Golden Unicorn. Cheryl and I can be perfectly socially acceptable in mixed company, but when the balance tips so that it is not just Cheryl and me against a bunch of Americans, but is instead Cheryl and Kumix and me, and we have all grown up in Singapore, then the aunties come out to play, and there is hand-waving and Hokkien-shouting, and Mike, bless his heart, Mike sits and smiles.

Yesterday there was the flurry of phone calls that involved me hanging up on Jeff maybe three times in a row—“Wait, lemme call the girl with the keys, and I will call you back.” “Wait, it’s my mum, I have to take this.” “Okay I’m all yours, wait, it’s the girl with the keys, I will call you back in a second.”—before we got our act together enough to meet at Kelley & Ping for a little luncheon. Lunch and a midday movie like the unemployed high-lifers we are.

I seem to remember an article in the Times a while ago—needless to say, we are talking the City section, or the Sunday Styles section, unless we are talking the new bubbleheaded Thursday Styles section—about People in New York City who are able to sit about at Three-hour Lunches, buying each other noontime glasses of Champagne or fancy water.

(The Thursday Styles tangent is, today’s Styles includes a full-page story on rugby shirts being the new new thing for boys who care about fashion:

“This is sexy rugby,” said Robert Burke, the fashion director for Bergdorf Goodman, which is doing a brisk business in jerseys with four-inch-wide stripes (or “hoops” in rugby parlance) in fine-gauge cotton knit. Bergdorf purposely made the shirts more fitted and tapered. The smaller sizes sell best, suggesting that fit and fashionable customers are the buyers. “These are not the XXL guys,” Mr. Burke said. “You don’t want to see that coming at you in a stripe, whether he can play rugby or not.”

Mr. Burke, that quote is GOLD. People. You understand how we needed an extra version of the Sunday Styles to get through the week?

Meanwhile, the Thursday Styles always makes me think of my friend Lurlene, for rather roundabout reasons, which are these: I came across the first issue of the Thursday Styles section at the Sullivan Street Bakery, one happy day when I stopped in for a slice of rosepetal crostata. They have newspapers lying about at the Sullivan Street Bakery so a girl can sit on a vintage tin chair with both reading and eating material to equal an altogether A-plus midday break. It was some other lucky day I stopped in at the Sullivan Street Bakery, maybe for a zucchini-gruyère slice or some other likely treat, when the paper on the table was the House & Garden section with a front-page story about the Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury. It was the sort of story you cannot just sit and read in silence, the sort of story one must immediately call Lurlene about. I can’t really explain why; maybe it is just because somewhere in my head I understand that Lurlene is quite possibly the Dowager Marchioness of Nashville. In any case: Thursday Styles-Sullivan Street Bakery-Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury-Lurlene. It is perhaps not so convoluted a path after all, and it is certainly less meandering than the path that has brought us to this point.

But I—you know it—I digress.)

I think the reporter in the story about lunch spoke with a “filmmaker,” a “writer,” and some lady with big jewels. Oh, as I write this I feel like I might be making it all up, it is too good to be true. In any case, me and Jeff, we are all of them put together, and so much more. That’s right, I am claiming my spot as the lady with big jewels, me in my dangly heart earrings, “gold” earrings, bought for eighteen dollars from a skinny girl by a makeshift stand on Broadway.

Nobody bought anybody fancy water at our lunch, but—OH NO WAIT, totally Jeff bought Jeff a bottle of Perrier—so alright: Jeff bought Jeff some fancy water and bought me lunch, and then I bought him a movie—James Dean in “East of Eden,” the kind of old-timey movie where the yellows are yellow and the blues are blue, where passion is spelled with a capital “P.” Afterward, outside the Film Forum, Jeff said: “I wish James Dean were alive, and he were my boyfriend.”

Man, I wish James Dean were alive, and he were packing all my boxes for me.

I had to do a whirlwind clean when I got home, ’cause Jason’d invited himself over to cook me dinner. Mother, are you reading this? This is not Jason the gay. Oh, god, I really hope my mother isn’t reading this. Neways, the point is, the whirlwind clean was done with an light heart. I will do a whirlwind clean anytime if a boy is coming over to cook me dinner.

With the mess sequestered in one room, the living room is bare bones and echo-ey. It feels good, this clean slate, this clean state, which is just as well, because take-off is in four days and counting.

I forgot that what I do in New York is not sit around and be miserable, but go outside and walk. With my book and my camera and my red kungfu shoes, heat be damned, I take the city by storm. Through the Meatpacking District, through the Village, and into SoHo, I clicked pictures all the way.

(I recently came into a camera. Which is to say, I’d mentioned to Jill a couple of weeks ago that I was thinking of finally getting a manual focus camera (of course he will be named Manuel) (of course it is pronounced like he goes by Papito and me by Mamita), and then, because the girl is surprising that way, when we took India out to a birthday tea last Sunday, Jill reached into her bag and handed me her Nikon FM10, as if it were my birthday. We like Jill a lot, even if we had to return the camera loan this evening. Sunday after tea, India loaded in the film for me in the low light under the scaffolding opposite the Union Square Walgreen’s, and then I took a picture of a water tower. Click, advance. Man, that click doesn’t just sound good, it feels good.)



An hour or somesuch into my trajectory this afternoon, wilting, I popped into the Apple store on Prince, because it seemed like the kind of place where the A/C would be on high. I was admiring a green argyle iPod case when an Apple guy came over and said, “Do you need some help?”

“Well—” I said.

“I like your dress,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said. “Are you gay?”

“What?”

“Kidding. Do they make these for third-generation iPods?”



At 5 Ninth, a giant gnarled vine crawls up the brownstone façade, and the door knocker is a brass hand. I was twenty minutes early for an eight-thirty dinner date, but I’d been walking about for at least two hours by then, and I needed a sit-down. I was trying to get the bartender’s attention for a glass of water when I was invited to join Robert and Robert for champagne. Shit, why not. (I didn’t know then that they were Robert and Robert. They both kept referring to Robert, and just as I was about to ask whom Robert was, exactly, the Robert dropped. Apparently sometimes everyone’s Robert.) Robert runs an advertising agency. He is fluent in Vietnamese, having served in Vietnam when he was part of the Marine Corps. Robert is a lawyer whose work often brings him to Eastern Europe. He likes sunrises and sunsets. In a couple of years, he is going to retire and spend six months on the beach.

And then Jill tumbled in, grin and smiling eyes, and, Lord knows why, in the swelter helter-skelter, we asked for a table on the patio out back.

“Jill,” I said once we were seated, “our waiter is hot.”

“I know,” she said, because it was true.

Our hot waiter brought me a florodora cocktail, which was described in the menu as gin and lime juice and raspberry syrup. I could have drunk six of them, it tasted like candy. There was nattering, then, and noshing, two of my favorite things; that nun can keep her raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. We turned down the pig cheeks for arugula and fontina-anchovy panini, for suckling pig and scallions, for polenta and olive oil, for sweet treats outside on a sultry summer night.

The ice cream sandwich was strawberry gelato and coconut macaroons. And the coconut macaroons were coconutty and macaroony and quite delightful, but the strawberry gelato, well, the strawberry gelato was like picking frozen strawberries off glistening icy sugar bushes and having them melt and bloom on your tongue.

On West Twelfth, we hugged, and then we hugged again. We didn’t say good-bye, because what good is that, and because Jill likes London better than she does New York anyway. Just after midnight, the F train was waiting for me at the West Fourth station. The F train is on the orange line, but no one turned into a pumpkin tonight.

Days of malaise. Boxes half packed. Existence in half-measures. Stuff to do but don’t want to do any of it. People to see but all I can think to say is Good-bye. It’s been a long time since I’ve left a country.

It is very warm these days. Brightly so. Glisteningly so. Wiltingly so. I take naps to escape. When I wake, I yawn into the still heat.

In the late afternoons, the summer rain is emphatic, driven. From inside Café Regular, we watch the rainwater rush down the street. The storm is all bluster, and tires itself out in a matter of minutes. Then only under the trees, thick with wet leaves, do hesitant drops continue to fall.

I was finishing up an iced latte yesterday when the sky burst, and here’s me in a white dress and no umbrella. “This rain has to end in fifteen minutes,” I told Josh. “I have places to be.” It was over in ten.

At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, Kat and I watched a 1930s “Pygmalion.” Kat and me and a handful of olds scattered about in the little screening room, with seats in velvet and gold. The film popped and sparked, and then the first reel burned into brown spots. It wasn’t the influenza done it in.

The thing that is especially good about our going to the Pioneer, I’d e-mailed Kat earlier, is that then we can go to Katz’s for dinner. I have spent the past so many years walking by Katz’s and never going in. Last night just before I pulled open the door, I started to get a little nervous, ’cause what if I lost my ticket? The thing about the ticket is, you enter, you get a ticket, you go up to the counter, you order, they mark your ticket. You give the cashier your ticket on the way out. If you lose
your ticket...jeez, I don’t know. You just...you just don’t want to lose your ticket.



There are various sandwich queues at the counter, and various sandwiches advertised on plastic signs above the counter. Knockwurst, corned beef, tongue. Send a salami to your boy in the army. Lettuce or tomatoes, twenty-five cents extra.

The old guy behind the counter was trying to set me up with the pastrami boy with the sweet eyes. “You single?” he asked, and put his arm around the pastrami boy’s shoulders. “You single? He’s single.” The pastrami boy blushed under his Katz’s cap. The old guy lives at Coney Island, has lived there for some twenty years. Maybe we’ll see each other on the F train sometime. I tried to get away without a pickle, but he said it was not okay. The pastrami boy gave me a plate loaded with two kinds.

Between me and Kat, our linoleum-topped table held: a hot dog, a pastrami on rye, a hard salami on rye, two plates of pickles, a bowl of matzoh ball soup, a vanilla egg cream, and a chocolate egg cream. I wanted to try the potato pancakes, too, with both sour cream and apple sauce, but it just wasn’t possible. I have a week yet in the city, and I figure, if I go back to Katz’s every day before I leave, I might be able to work my way through everything else I need to try.



Almost midnight on a summer Friday, the streets of the Lower East Side look like this: island-print dresses with gold chain belts. Shorts and little stilettos. Light cotton dresses flowing over cropped leggings. The Schiller’s sign glows against white tiles.

Almost midnight on a summer Friday, NoLIta looks like this: the boys are sharp. The girls are sharp. The girls are butterflies. In orange and blue, the girls are butterflies in party dresses.

The walk east on Houston toward the Second Avenue F stop is a walk my legs do without my head thinking about it. It is a walk like walking home, it is a walk like walking along the veins on the back of your hand. It was at the Second Avenue F stop that, once upon a time, I made a long-distance phone call, having discovered I was no longer in love with a boy. It was at the Second Avenue F stop that, once upon another time, I made a long-distance phone call, having discovered I was in love with a boy.

I tried to stay up to finish The Tax Inspector—it is that sort of book that you are desperate to finish, its heartbeat thumping along with yours beneath the lines of black ink—but it was very late, and I’d been out all day, and my eyes were doing that closing trick.

(The book review tangent is that just before I started on The Tax Inspector, I was reading Ha Jin’s Waiting. I picked up Waiting because Mowmy was reading Manil Suri while she was visiting, and she said something about appreciating an Indian writer rather than a Chinese one. Her example of a Chinese writer was Amy Tan, which made me say, quite loudly: AMY TAN IS NOT A CHINESE WRITER. So then even though I’d told Jacq I’d read Dogs of Babel so that we could play Oprah’s Book Club, I was driven to read Ha Jin, who certainly appears to be a Chinese writer. I seem to remember, when Waiting was first published, a bunch of hoo-ha about how the book was the gorgeous what-happens when someone who doesn’t have English as a first language writes a book in English, for the language in his hands, well, it is born again, it is poetry, it opens our eyes to a renewed joy, that sort of thing. Waiting won the National Book Award that year the book came out.

Me, I thought Waiting was a bit tiresome. Like waiting! There was an overwhelming sense of clunkiness, like it was written by someone who doesn’t have English as a first language, or like it was translated, from the Chinese, by someone who doesn’t have English as a first language. But I kept reading, because it had its moments, and because I am the sort who, after having waited for the train for twenty minutes, and after other, more sensible people have walked off, muttering darkly at the public transportation system, I am the sort who will wait some more, because the logic is: I have waited so long already, surely it must come very, very soon.

I got to the end, finally, and it all came together, I suppose—the little lives drawn out over the years, heading slowly but surely toward their weary nonconclusion, it all made sense eventually. Waiting, waiting.)

(All is not lost with the Oprah Book Club. When I get back to Singapore, Jacq is going to lend me her Dogs of Babel. We may even do the thing where we look under our seats! and there is a special prize! and today’s special prize is a car! Well, a car would be nice, a little red Mini Cooper S with a black roof and white stripes on the bonnet, but I will happily settle for a pink iced bandung.)

Anyways.

Pure and utter exhaustion.

You think it is easy being a socialite, you try eating out every day, including that one day you wake at six-thirty to meet a breakfast date, then stroll uptown to a lunch date, and only return late that night post-dinner, walking slowly down Ninth Street dark and quiet, your eyes shut, that one glass of Spanish red beating, beating in your veins.

Oh, I am not whining. It turns out it is not only possible but quite easy, and terribly pleasant, (I should leave town every day!), to eat out three meals a day, even when one is not the lady president of Veuve Clicquot. There has been a smoked trout salad. Broiled mackerel in breadcrumbs. A ceviche trio, delightful, of squid, scallops, and red snapper. Pork and fennel pollen sausages. Squash blossom stuffed with peeky toe crab. Tagliatelle in a rabbit ragù. A boiled egg, and a donut. Ricotta fritters drizzled with a pomegranate molasses. I will say that again: Ricotta fritters drizzled with a pomegranate molasses.

Plus, people keep offering gifts, as if I am a King Chulalongkorn, dressed in gold. The only difference is that they do not retreat backward with small steps, heads bowed and hands pressed together. Schmio gave me a bunch of Maira Kalman books, Nicole gave me the new Ian McEwan, and Barbara—well, Barbara wants to introduce me to a lovely young lad in London who knows how to dance. We’ll take it. We’ll take it all.

The only problem is: I have a large bunch of asparagus and several round, sweet tomatoes in my fridge, and cheeses in varieties of more than one. I even have a mango, who has been sitting in the chiller drawer smiling at me for days. It is just as well I am making Jeff come over for dinner tonight, whereupon we will eat, and, if all goes well, we will drink hard liquor.

Monday morning I was waiting for my breakfast date at the bar at Bubby’s, and a guy came by, and he said: “Must be a good book you’re reading.”

“Yes,” I said. “Peter Carey.”

“Never hearda him.”

I held up the book so he could see.

He squinted at the cover, then he said: “Never hearda him.”

I suppose, now, there are other things one could say to identify Peter Carey, but the first that came to mind was: “He’s Australian.”

“Never hearda—”

“But I think he lives in New York now.”

“Never hearda him.”

He wouldn’t stop talking, then, this guy, Ralph, who is trying to get his cleaning business up and running, and he was the sort of fella who refers to himself in the third person. “I tell myself,” he said, “‘Ralph, what am I doing wrong?’”

He was a blinker, Ralph, he’d roll his eyes and blink in between sentences, sometimes in between words. A tattoo on the lower part of his right arm read, in uneven uppercase letters: NEZ + MARY.

I phoned my breakfast date, now half an hour late, and found out I was twenty-four hours early. I excused myself from Ralph, then, and sat down to one sour cream pancake, a turkey-apple sausage, and Peter Carey.

We like surprises, oh yes we do—but surely I am talking about good surprises, not the surprises that rise up black and murky from the black and murky depths of a black and murky box. I don’t want to name names, Pandora, but sometimes the box is marked “DON’T OPEN” for a reason.

A good surprise is India calling late on a Saturday afternoon, saying she’s across the street from my house. I understand that a normal person might say, “Is that right. How lovely. Why don’t you come in for some tea and a snacky cake?” However, because I am me, I said: “OH MY GOD WAIT WAIT LET ME LOOK OUT THE WINDOW OH SHIT I SEE YOU I TOTALLY SEE YOU” or somesuch. To which India said, “I think I just heard you from across the street.”

Good surprises such as India popping in can, and do, result in perusing a list of New York City teahouses, and then making plans for a fancy tea next Sunday. All signs point to Lady Mendl’s Tea Salon, where tea comes in five courses AND tea. We will eat sandwiches with their crusts cut off. We will drink tea with our pinky fingers pointed outward. And, oh, we will scarf, oh-so-delicately we will scarf ALL POSSIBLE SCONES with AS MUCH CREAM AS A SCONE CAN HOLD.

The India surprise went so well that I thought, come Sunday afternoon, when I found myself in Kat’s neighborhood, that I might see if the magic was still upon us. And truly, the girl wasn’t pulling overtime at work, which meant she was free to coffee with me. “Coffee” meant a hang-out at the City Bakery for lemonade and a vanilla cookie, then all of a sudden poking around in the gleaming paradise that is the new(ish) Whole Foods Market at Union Square, then all of a sudden having dinner at Union Square Café: rhubarb Bellinis and a spring salad and perfect orechiette in a ribs ragù.

It goes without saying that the Union Square Café default dessert of choice is the banana tart, oh good god is it ever, but recently I have been thinking that maybe I need to diversify. Hence when the nice waitress came by and cleared our plates, I said: “Is the Baked Alaska something that comes AFLAME?” and made flames of my fingers, as if I were Kirsten Dunst in “Bring It On.”

It did not come aflame, the Baked Alaska, but it came on a bed of chocolate cake, like good surprises often do.

These days I am packing up the house. I drew up a packing schedule, even; you cannot say I am not dedicated to the process. But, oh, how the things—the THINGS!!—they hold their bellies and laugh at me and mock me, for I wrote on my notepad: Thursday, living room; Friday, bedroom; Saturday, library; Sunday, downstairs, and figured that’d be the end of that, whereas the awful truth is that by late Thursday night the room was strewn with piles of old photographs and albums, while full drawers remained yet unexplored.

Aaaaaa this is going to take forever.

And the reformed drug addicts of the Salvation Army are coming for a pick-up next week. But I have, (among my things), faith. The Salvation Army pick-up date is a good thing. Deadlines. I need deadlines.

The good news about packing is, my cousin is coming to take over the apartment furnished, so I don’t have to pack any kitchen breakables in rolls of bubble wrap, and I don’t have to move any furniture. (Sorry, Jeffy, the Conran dinner chairs aren’t showing up at your place anytime soon. It is in writing now; you will just have to accept the difficult truth.) The bad news is, the contents of all the closets and drawers and trunks and underbed storage still need to be dealt with.

Because I plan to move to London with not very much at all—

(truly, I believe this is possible. There are detractors: When my mum was in town the other day, she mentioned that there has recently been a spate of stories in the Singapore Straits Times about young people in the corporate world quitting their jobs to become priests. I asked if it would surprise her if I became a Taoist priest, and she said, after a good bout of cackling: “Yes, I would have you checked for a brain tumor.” Oh, FINE. I have had a tendency to like Things, but these days I am working on austerity. Well—that singular sort of austerity that allows for three pairs of pink shoes in one’s life.)—

(Well, but they’re all different.)—

Because I plan to move with not very much at all, ultimately it’s not so much packing I’m doing, I guess, as facing—and then organizing—a bunch of stuff I haven’t looked at in years. And dammit I will embrace this organizing, for I have been told that one thing I do is organize. My mother has such a fervent and unmoving belief in my ability to organize that she thinks it would be a Great Job Opportunity for me to move back to Singapore and become an Administrator. It is at about this point in the conversation, and this coversation has happened more than once, that I must fall about and start twitching.

In any case. These days I am packing up the house. The question that comes to mind is, Whatever have I been thinking, all these years, collecting Chinese tea tins and Austrian milk cartons, hoarding candy wrappers and clothing tags and stickers and advertising postcards from all over the world? Today, THEY ARE ALL IN THE TRASH. There was very little emotion involved; you see, I am on my way to Taoist priesthood.

More difficult are all the CDs I seem to have amassed. I am listening to every single one of them to see if they make the cut. I had to turn off Oasis’s whining after maybe two songs, but was pleasantly surprised by the rediscovery of Fiona Apple. And is it so bad if the Neil Young album goes into the Salvo pile?

Meanwhile, if there is some good that comes out of all of this, it is that going up and down the stairs in the apartment, and climbing up and down the ladder to the storage space, and running in and out to the trash and recycling bins, and lifting no small number of boxes, means I don’t have to go to the gym.

Well, I knew David Sedaris was big, I just didn’t know how big. This whole time I’ve been sitting around talking about icing and cupcakes and Amy Sedaris, I’ve also been sitting around not knowing how big David Sedaris is.

I was smug, so smug like a mug, walking up to the bookshop around six, a full hour before the reading was scheduled to start. Somewhere on the escalator heading upstairs, surrounded by hordes of young people all checked shirts and halter tops and plastic spectacles, and me just another one of them, I had the faint, growing understanding that I was about to be very, very wrong.

The seating section on the fourth floor was packed, packed like a pack, and I was herded into the standing-room-only area, where I stood, and marveled, and began to realize how big David Sedaris is. Some guy behind me was on his cellphone to a friend, and he said: “Yeah, I’m here but I’m willing to ditch this and meet you-all somewhere, it’s just not worth it, there are so many people here, it is almost like the other night at Tori Amos.” So apparently David Sedaris is almost as big as Tori Amos.

But one hour before the reading is scheduled to start is early days yet; one hour before the reading means there is one hour more for the masses to come teeming in. They came teeming in, then, and they were sitting on the floor to wait, and I didn’t know if I wanted to sit,
because—

and I don’t mean to be a diva about this—if you know something about me, it is perhaps that I am often quite eager to sprawl on the floor in an indecorous manner, but said floor is generally the floor of a good Chinese household where one doesn’t wear shoes indoors—

I didn’t know if I wanted to sit, because (a) I was in a white dress and (b) sitting would have meant sitting on the germ-trapping carpet of a very large Barnes & Noble, and who knows how many people had stepped in dog poo in the park first before coming in to look at New Hardcover Fiction.

So there I was, standing in the middle of a crowd of people sitting cross-legged on the floor, me a gangly stalk—one of those round, white, fragile blooms you can pick up in order to blow the pollen every which way in the wind—

me a gangly stalk in the middle of a newly shorn lawn—I am a hundred and fifty-seven centimeters tall, so this is not a feeling that is common for me, unless truly I am standing in a newly shorn lawn, then, okay, I am taller than grass—

I was standing there, and I looked over in a two o’clock direction, and I saw one other person standing, one other gangly stalk in the field. And this other gangly stalk looked, from the side, almost exactly like the ex: dark blond hair just so, tweed jacket and khakis just so, reading with his brow furrowed just so. And I thought fondly of the ex and his lawyerly exactitude, his preppy neuroses, and then I thought, Wait, am I just like him after all? And the almost-affinity with this non-ex, with this approximate-ex, was enough to make me want to promptly plop down on the floor, germs be damned, just to remind myself how opposite we were in the end...

And right then a store guy got on the mic to ask that everyone seated on the floor stand up to make more space for more people filing in, because David Sedaris is so big, approaching the bigness of Tori Amos, maybe even, by this point—twenty minutes before the scheduled start of the reading—exceeding the bigness of Tori Amos. “Will the people in the standing-room area stand up, please?” he said. “It is, um—” and then, here, with emphasis, “—Standing Room.” And then the head of he who was not the ex disappeared in the crowd.

Amy Sedaris was nowhere in sight, at least not in sight to me, but Lurlene pointed out, when I phoned her later, that Amy Sedaris likes to put on a disguise. So maybe Amy Sedaris was that large woman in a neck brace I passed on the way to the restroom, but I guess I’ll never know.

David Sedaris, eventually, spotted sporadically in the space between some girl’s dark, curly ’do and the curve of another woman’s neck, was small, in blue, and smiling. David Sedaris likes: monkeys, crossword puzzles, Richard Yates, and books on tape. He says “innerduction” for “introduction,” and the Southernness of his accent is charming on him where on a Texas State Trooper it is not so much.

Later, at dinner with Kat, I remembered that I’d thought, If David Sedaris and Amy Sedaris ask me out to dinner, I will have to ditch Kat, I will just have to do it. I suppose it was lucky for all that Kat and I kept our dinner date, because, at the end of it all—

I just want to interrupt and say that in the middle of it all, the sushi chefs at the bar yelled “hello” to someone, the way they will at these Japanese joints, and I jumped, I couldn’t help it, I was startled, and the sushi chefs chortled, oh, how they shook and chortled, and then one of them said to me: “Do not be afraid.” And now I return you to your regular programming, for at the end of it all—

at the end of it all, there was the surprising tastiness of a coconut tempura cheesecake.

I am a little bit stressed out because I am about to head to the Union Square Barnes & Noble for a David Sedaris reading, and, in discussion with Lurlene, the thought occurred to me that Amy Sedaris might be there. What if Amy Sedaris is there? What do I say? What do I do? Lurlene said that when David Sedaris was speaking in Nashville, he took questions from the audience, and Lurlene suggested that my question be: “Is Amy here?” Lurlene thinks that I should go say Hello to Amy Sedaris, but I don’t know what I would say. I am bringing an orange,

(I like to have food in my bag),

(and, you know how sometimes people in prison learn useful things, like reading, or law, or building chairs?; similarly, my roadtrip car time taught me how to peel an orange while keeping its rind intact. I feel pretty special.),

I am bringing an orange, so maybe if Amy Sedaris is peckish, I will share it with her.

We were yelling, just yelling, yelling because of the F train clattering, yelling because of the Cyclone rattling, yelling because of the sea breeze, yelling just because it felt alive and good.



We know how to rock a sunny day at the beach, me and Jeff, and it involves very little actual sitting on said beach. We walked on the sand, soft and smooth, to the water, then we put our feet into the blue because, Jeff said, that’s what one does at the beach. It was cold, icy cold, and refresca, and it wasn’t till later that I realized this was the capital O Ocean.

We kept saying we were going to eat boardwalk food till we made ourselves sick, but all it took for me was half a bagel, part of a small bag of crinkly Nathan’s fries, and some cold, sweet lemonade. The smell of fried was everywhere, I wish I coulda brung it, but I had to call it quits. I didn’t even have the wherewithal to ask for a banana-chocolate twisty cone.



We rode on the Wonder Wheel in a bright red swinging car, and lemme tell ya, you think the Wonder Wheel is for kids, well, we screamed when the swinging car swung us over the edge and into the open way above the merry-go-round.



We changed dollars into quarters, so many quarters, and this is what you can accomplish with two fistfuls of quarters:

Jeff can teach you how to play Skee-Ball. His instructions will include the phrase: “You have to Skee-Ball it.” You will win nothing, not even one ticket, but Jeff will win so many, like twenty-four. You will both feel victorious—you are happy to share in his triumph—until you go to the redemption booth to find out a Proctor-Silex toaster is 8000 tickets. The Mount Rushmore-esque memorabilia item in the shape of the band KISS is unmarked and placed on the highest shelf, it is worth so unspeakably many tickets. Twenty-four tickets will get you a plastic spider ring or an American flag keyring or a small rubber ball with a smiley face printed on it.

You can have your picture taken in a photobooth. You will drop in your quarters, and then wonder, aloud, whether you have to press a button or something, and while you are wondering, the machine will go flash! and take a picture. Three more flashes later, you will fidget impatiently for four and a half minutes for the results, still wet with streaks of photo-developing chemicals. This is twelve quarters well spent.

You can take the Dating Game compatibility test. If you are us, your results, printed out zreek-zreek-zreek on a dot-matrix printer hidden in a plastic box, will read: She’d like the honeymoon to last forever. His color is orange.



At Brighton Beach, the crowd had aged considerably. Boardwalk cafés advertised food in a language I couldn’t read. All of a sudden transported elsewhere. And then elsewhere still. And I remembered being in Nice with Pranj, early fall 1997, in Paris it was maybe starting to feel like autumn but down south it was still warmish, and we walked past the beachfront cafés with their colorful awnings flapping in the wind, and I popped into a phone booth to call a hello home.



On Brighton Beach Avenue, the Russians looked like Russians. By the time we got to the Ocean Parkway platform for the train home, my bag of tricks held a hunk of fresh pistachio halva and a poppy-seed baked good from a white-haired-granny sort on the street.