I thought about that, mildly awed by its wrongheadedness. I almost tried to explain what a mistake it was to take comedy for happiness, or good cheer for joy. But it was none of Olive’s business how happy I was or wasn’t, so I didn’t.
If I had, I might also have told her that she had it backwards. It wasn’t that happiness led to humor, but more that humor could lead, perhaps, to happiness—that an eye for the absurd could keep one active in one’s despair, the opposite of depressed: static and passive.
Instead I walked Olive out, just as Helen—lovely, ingenious Helen McGoldrick—walked in, blonde as a sunrise and just as warm, lighting the lingering darkness of Olive from the corners of my office.
“Congratulations, sugar,” she said in her Alabama drawl, pulling a chair around to my side of the desk. “And thanks for getting that little drawing of mine in the paper.”
Then she and I got to work, sprinkling each page of copy, mine and others’, with irresistible little eyedrop-sized points of wit.
4
Great with Imagination
All my life, I have taken satisfaction in finishing things in order that I may experience a sense of achievement, regardless of whether the thing was really worth achieving.
Graduating from college, writing scores of institutional advertisements for R.H. Macy’s, mowing the lush Maine lawn at Pin Point, weeding, washing dishes, and writing inferior verse—any and all of these have given and can still give me this lulling feeling of accomplishment. So does finishing a drink.
Across Park, across Lexington, I’m beginning to think I might as well stop in somewhere for one. I turn down Third Avenue and head for the Back Porch. It’s a bar in my neighborhood, though I would not call it my neighborhood bar. My relationship with liquor has always been less regimented, more improvisatory. Sometimes I have an old friend or two up for cocktails, or walk to meet them somewhere just to get out and about. And sometimes, yes still, even still, sometimes I make myself a drink and have it alone, with no one else but purring Phoebe. What’s the harm?
Death, I suspect, will likely be unsatisfying because I will no longer be present to feel the achievement thereof.
The Back Porch is clean and dim and almost empty except for that mellow bar smell of disinfectant and beer and lingering smoke, and as I walk in the bartender greets me. I haven’t seen him before. Maybe the regular bartender will be in later for the holiday rush. By then I’ll be at Grimaldi.
I hang my mink coat on a wall hook next to the stool I intend to occupy—I have my pick, apart from a couple at the opposite end of the bar—and as I do I see a television set. The Back Porch never used to have a television set. Now it does. I want to walk right back out and find another place, but there’s not really time before my reservation and I badly want a drink, so I sit anyway.
“What’ll it be, miss?” the bartender asks, and I like his tie and his mustache and the friendliness in his eyes that does not seem fake.
“Thank you for not ma’am-ing me,” I say. “What’s your name?”
“Sam,” he says.
“You can call me Lily, Sam, and I’d like a Negroni, please.”
“Coming right up, Lily.”
I watch him walk down the bar and gather up the gin, the Campari. Then my eyes—what choice have they?—are drawn to that interloper, that damned TV. Sam has on some show that I don’t recognize, but the program’s going to a commercial break: a subtle thunderclap of increased volume and then that Wendy’s ad that everyone on the planet seems gaga over.
There they stand, two-dimensional and flickering, the three little old ladies in a fast-food emporium arrayed around a preposterously large and fluffy bun. They open it up. Therein lies a meager amount of mystery meat. The ancient dame who comprises the right flank of the triumvirate appears to be wearing a doily around her neck. She bellows like a musk ox:
“Where’s the beef?”
Not once, but thrice. Is that what we, the aged, are like?
I despise this ad, and the TV on which it plays with those flashing lights. I mourn the conversations murdered by their juvenile intrusions.
“Your Negroni, Lily,” says Sam. “Bon appétit.”
“Cheers,” I say, and sip the bitter red liquid.
I am about to tell him that it’s funny he should say bon appétit, because that’s the whole problem, I haven’t got much of one now, when another ad comes on.
It begins with the familiar image of a bespectacled boy who reminds me of my studious Gian when he was young. The pleasant recognition curdles and spoils as a folksy tenor sings, “O, O, O, bright ideas and an Oreo cookie!”