3-26-13:
We made dinner—baked halibut, rice, salad—while listening to Bach playing loudly from radios in every room. O, so happy, eager to help out—chopping vegetables, preparing rice, advising whether I should use lemon or lime in the halibut, spontaneously coming over to hug me and have his back scratched—then sitting in his chair and reading from a fat file of the many forewords he’s written over the years, holding his magnifying glass to his eye, reading aloud to me, stopping now and then just to savor the music.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a planet where the sound of rain falling is like Bach?” he says.
“Yes, Planet Bach,” I respond.
He smiles—“Yes,” he murmurs—picturing it, hearing it.
Later, lying on the couch, his legs over mine, we listen to what seems an endless Bach piece. It goes on and on and on, the pauses between passages “a majestic silence,” as O says. We keep thinking it will end, the announcer interrupting to say what the piece is. Neither of us is sure. But instead, the music continues. One begins to wonder if it will ever end, life on Earth returning. O has his eyes closed.
Finally, at 9 P.M. the piece comes to an end and we learn what it was—“The Musical Offering,” one of Bach’s last works, composed for Frederick II. He asks for the Oxford Companion to Music to look it up, I hand it to him along with reading glasses and a magnifying glass, and then he places a call to his assistant and leaves a message on the machine:
“Hailey, I wonder if you can order a CD of this very marvelous Bach piece that has been playing…”
I watch his face as he speaks. He looks so peaceful and happy … on a planet where the sound of rain falling is like Bach…
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3-30-13:
It is hard to describe how tired I am. Noises hurt a little. I crave the quiet—my kind of quiet: the sound of skateboarders going uptown and taxicabs hitting the metal plate on Eighth. Nothing else. Even the radio is too much.
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4-30-13:
Random images and thoughts:
O, grumpily doing the dishes in the sink: “I wish the plates would somehow magically spring up and clean themselves…”
How, during a daylong series of panels and performances on O’s work, he would repeatedly open his little tin and offer me a mint before taking one himself.
How, when we first met, he didn’t really know how to (or didn’t think to) share with another person. He’d never shared his life before, after all.
How, when I didn’t feel well recently and took a long bath, he brought in to me a piece of toast with a slice of cheese on it. When I transferred to the bed, he brought me another slice.
How I could hear his feet shuffling on the carpet. And how I like that sound.
LESSONS FROM THE SMOKE SHOP
My thirty-year-long subscription to the New Yorker ran out—pure absentmindedness on my part—and since then I have been buying a copy each week at the smoke shop around the corner from our building.
It makes no sense financially. I could save seventy-three percent off the cover price if I renewed for just a year; even more for two. But I’ve found I enjoy the benefits that come with my $6.99 a week, beginning with Ali, the shop’s manager.
Ali had formerly known me as a customer who occasionally came in late at night for a single vanilla H?agen-Dazs bar and asked for a book of matches.
The asking part is important. He once told me about a customer who reached over the counter and grabbed a book of matches from the box next to the cash register.
“‘No, you don’t do that,’ I tell him,” Ali recounted, still bristling. “‘That is wrong. You don’t go reaching across like that, without permission. You ask, I will give you a book of matches.’” He paused, looked at me. “Not everyone gets one.”
Maybe they look like nothing special, Ali’s matches. They’re a generic white, and have “Thank You” printed on them.
I half-reached for one, just to mess with him. He held up a warning finger and tried to look stern, then selected a book of Thank You matches from the box as deliberately as if he were making a chess move.
“Here! Go, with your matches and your ice cream.”
“Thank you, Ali. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
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Here’s another thing I’ve learned from hanging out in Ali’s shop: There’s no haggling here. This may seem obvious, but apparently it’s not—not to everyone. I went in last Friday night to buy my New Yorker and, while browsing the magazines, saw a tall, imposingly built young man try to haggle with him over the price of a single cigarillo, single cigarillos and cigarettes being for sale here.
He fished in his pockets and spilled pennies on the counter. “C’mon, man!”