Can Anyone Besides Nora Ephron Possibly Find Me a New Place to Live?

The more Nora Ephron tributes I read, the more I regret not having known her—and no longer because
I once had hopes that she’d blurb my memoir (not knowing then that I couldn’t write it and she didn’t blurb) or otherwise guide my “writing career,"  but to fix my life—my practical life. I’ve searched for decades for someone to fix it, I’ve hired people who said they could fix it--—ye gods, I’ve even tried to fix it myself—but here it remains, completely unfixed.

Nora was famous for constantly fixing the lives of her friends, one of them being Richard Cohen, to wit:

Nora took my life and renovated it. She decided that I should become a columnist and somehow it happened. She found summer rentals for me and made her friends mine, and she instructed me about love, writing, real estate and investments. I hardly made a move without her.

Another being Melina Bellows (also a writer, but also a girl): 

At our first lunch, she locked her brown eyes on mine, lowered her voice and gave me a lecture. "You must take your personal life every single bit as seriously as your career. You have to work hard at it. Go out every single night of the week. I don't care how tired you are. That's what you have to do if you want a boyfriend.  It also helped me to have a very loose description of the term attractive."  

     Nora set me up on blind dates.

Though it’s clearly too late for finding the boyfriend and even more so for the (paying) career, there are still two things I would have liked to ask Nora to find for me before the sun sets tonight:

A New Place To Live

Yes, once again the house I live under has gone on the market, and once again, eviction doth loom, only this time it loometh ten times more darkly.  All I need is a detached one bedroom cottage with updated everything plus plenty of quiet, sunlight, and charm, and, what the hell, my own private patio.

The film producer upon whose estate this empty cottage now waits will, of course--because Nora asked him--rent this to me for what I pay now.

Bolognese Sauce--the kind that's slightly sweet and orange from the carrots as opposed to brick red

from the meat and tomatoes--a distinction Nora would so understand. 

I'm not insisting on the actual sauce, just the recipe Il Farro used for the twenty minutes it was in business before it vanished from Burlingame Avenue and, it would seem, the face of this earth.

Nora Ephron and Lima Beans

No one will ever convince me Nora is gone--she was too contemporary, too smart, too funny, and we didn't even know she was sick.  Very few people knew--she was just that dignified, cool, and unwhiny.  If she was, as I think I just read somewhere, diagnosed in 2006, she stayed that dignified, cool, and unwhiny for six years--and spent at least one of them making Julia and Julia.  

Ever since I heard the news, my dissolving brain has been repeating the same seven words:  If Nora can die, then anyone can.   And since my brain is dissolving (or since, as Nora so perfectly put it, I Remember Nothing), I have no idea what those words even mean.  I spent the whole morning trying to remember when, where, and even if I'd ever written about her, and finally gave up and let Google (who remembers everything) figure it out.  Which of course it did (see below).

Horrifyingly enough, I do not recall having read these words, let alone having written them, and I completely forgot about our both liking lima beans.  I actually have some in my freezer right now and I'm going to cook them up tonight on my hotplate. Yes, after six years, still the sad hotplate.  But the one I have now at least has two burners, and if that isn't progress I just don't know what.

Failing At Living
San Francisco Chronicle
Saturday, September 16, 2006

No one has suffered like Nora Ephron -- well, except for me

I've loved Nora Ephron ever since I read "Heartburn," her 1983 roman a clef about getting dumped -- while seven months pregnant with their second child -- by her lowdown husband, dog Carl Bernstein.

Because I was convinced she and I shared the same leaky boat (albeit mine a mere dinghy beside her Titanic), her anguish stabbed me anew with each page. The sharper her wit, the deeper the stab.

She felt, I could tell, savagely butchered, salted and seared. Not unlike a steak which, if she'd cooked it, would have been bathed in a marinade first and served with a ball of fresh tarragon butter.

That was the other thing I loved about Nora. She not only confessed to her life's being ruined, she detailed said ruination's cuisine. She even gave recipes. I, of course, tried them.

We had, I was certain, a cosmic connection. After all, had I not, before ever hearing of "Heartburn," published my very first essay and called it "Cuisine of a Failed Romance"?

Were our two titles not interchangeable?

Did Nora, with her two failed marriages, and I, with my two failed whatevers, not both long for the very same things -- a sane man to love, a kitchen to cook in, and, oh yeah, successful writing careers? Had Nora not begun hers by addressing, in Esquire magazine, her failure to grow gargantuan breasts? Had I not failed to grow breasts as well?

To all questions, a deafening yes.

Nora, I knew, was the eldest of three writing sisters, and I hungered to join their sisterly team. Or at least be seen as a tagalong cousin. Cousin Itt maybe. The wee Ephronette.

When "Heartburn" came out as a blockbuster movie, I wrote a column dissecting the folly of letting two Jews be played by the goyim. (Right, like I wouldn't want Meryl Streep playing me?)

I sobbed all through "When Harry Met Sally" because it was hilarious and I didn't write it.

Oh the horrible horror of envy. Not one of my screenplays ever got off the page. Unless you count Andrew Dice Clay reading the "Pretend You're Sensitive Handbook" in an '88 movie called "Casual Sex?" whose script I "punched up" while going insane in a cottage in the producer's backyard. In Beverly Hills, mind you, where Nora had once gone to high school with starlets and blondes. Another reason I just had to love her. She'd survived that experience. Survived it? She'd thrived!

Nora's triumphs -- from turning her failings into a best-seller to imbuing her work with her passion for food -- were coups I could sort of relate to, at least. But when she became a real live director, I could only regard her with jaw-dropping awe. Directing a film required such genius and massive self confidence that just thinking about it made me pass out.

Which was good, because when you can't relate, you can't envy, either. I finally, sadly, accepted the fact that we did, after all, come from disparate planets.

Until a few millennia later when I saw the logo at the top of this column. I had no idea I was getting a logo, but when this happy surprise appeared in the paper, I recalled in an instant what Nora had said: "When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh." Or something like that. Boy, was she smart.

Actually, it was her mother who'd said it to her, and I just read the passage again in Nora's new book "I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts About Being a Woman." Since I too feel bad about my neck, not to mention what lurks above and below it, I felt that cosmic connection spark up, the sisterly bond, the rapture resumed.

Once gain Nora is speaking the truth, this time about getting older. People do not, in fact, age like fine wine, and the years are not golden so much as jaundiced by losing your friends forever and always. Mortality looms. And then there's the neck.

"Right on, Nora!" I would have said to myself if I were a person who made such remarks. The point is, she made me feel better. I'd known for years I had entered the Crone Zone, and now I knew she was right there beside me.

But then, oops, I read on:

"Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over. Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it's your last or do you save your money on the chance you'll live 20 more years? Is life too short or is to going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? Are we really going to have to spend our last years avoiding bread especially now that bread in America is so unbelievably delicious?"

Nora, I recalled with a jolt, wasn't beside me in the Crone Zone at all, but beside her third husband, writer and mensch Nick Pileggi. Plus, she's been beside him for the past 20 years, all through which she's probably cooked on a stove with, at minimum, six working burners. As for the question of "splurging or hoarding," I happen to know that every time Meg Ryan sneezes, Nora's income is squared and then cubed. Or something like that. Am I an accountant?

I don't know why she feels bad about her neck. Personally, I think if you have a husband who knew your neck when you both still felt good about it, no one cares how much it disintegrates. The experience of the good neck is, you know, internalized. Anyway, I can't imagine a man like Nick leaving a woman like Nora over something so banal as a neck.

Then again, it wasn't my neck that was publicly guillotined by the grand executioner named Carl Bernstein.

Talk about internalization. An experience like that can make a gal feel bad to the end of her days. Trust me, I know. I still have nightmares about my whatevers and even I don't remember their names.

OK, so Nora and I really are just the same!

Except for the man and, you know, the money. Plus the fact that I now have only one burner to cook on. And as horrified as I am by my neck, it's as nothing compared to the implications of doom that radiate from my hotplate.

OK, so Nora and I have nothing in common. Except for lima beans. She likes them, too. 

What to Do When A Sandpiper Sends You A Joy

All I can say is: Never tell anyone you're going through even the slightest bit of unpleasantness. They  just might tell someone who tells someone else who tells someone else who, eager to help and inspire you, sends you the following email.

Note: Even though it's waaaay too long (as only an atrociously written, flagrantly unedited narrative can be) and possibly something you've already read (though new to me, various versions have been circulating for years), I am presenting this unbidden message in its entirety (all in italics) if only to present the email exchange (not in italics) that ensues once it finally (repeatedly) ends. So here goes:

A beautiful story.... with a good message.   This story doesn't ask anyone to forward it or take any action other than to read and enjoy.

The Sandpiper  by Robert Peterson 

 She was six years old when I first met her on the beach near where I live.
 I drive to this beach, a distance of three or four miles, whenever the world 
begins to close in on me. She was building a sand castle or something and
 looked up, her eyes as blue as the sea. 

 "Hello," she said.

 I answered with a nod, not really in the mood to bother with a small child.

 "I'm building," she said.

"I see that. What is it?" I asked, not really caring.

 "Oh, I don't know, I just like the feel of sand."

That sounds good, I thought, and slipped off my shoes. 

A sandpiper glided by.

 "That's a joy," the child said. 

 "It's a what?"

"It's a joy. My mama says sandpipers come to bring us joy."

 The bird went gliding down the beach. Good-bye joy, I muttered to myself,
 hello pain, and turned to walk on. I was depressed, my life seemed  completely out of balance.

 "What's your name?" She wouldn't give up.

"Robert," I answered. "I'm Robert Peterson."

"Mine's Wendy... I'm six."

"Hi, Wendy."

She giggled. "You're funny," she said. 

 In spite of my gloom, I laughed too and walked on.

Her musical giggle followed me.

 "Come again, Mr.. P," she called. "We'll have another happy day."

The next few days consisted of a group of unruly Boy Scouts, PTA meetings,
and an ailing mother. The sun was shining one morning as I took my hands
 out of the dishwater. I need a sandpiper, I said to myself, gathering up my  coat.

 The ever-changing balm of the seashore awaited me.. The breeze was chilly
but I strode along, trying to recapture the serenity I needed.

 "Hello, Mr. P," she said. "Do you want to play?" 

"What did you have in mind?" I asked, with a twinge of annoyance. 

"I don't know. You say."

"How about charades?" I asked sarcastically.

 The tinkling laughter burst forth again. "I don't know what that is."

 "Then let's just walk."

 Looking at her, I noticed the delicate fairness of her face.  "Where do you live?" I asked.

"Over there." She pointed toward a row of summer cottages. 

 Strange, I thought, in winter. "Where do you go to school?"

 "I don't go to school. Mommy says we're on vacation"

 She chattered little girl talk as we strolled up the beach, but my mind was
 on other things. When I left for home, Wendy said it had been a happy day.
 Feeling surprisingly better, I smiled at her and agreed.

 Three weeks later, I rushed to my beach in a state of near panic. I was in
 no mood to even greet Wendy. I thought I saw her mother on the porch and
 felt like demanding she keep her child at home.

 "Look, if you don't mind," I said crossly when Wendy caught up with me, "I'd
 rather be alone today." She seemed unusually pale and out of breath.

 "Why?" she asked.

 I turned to her and shouted, "Because my mother died!" and thought, My God,
 why was I saying this to a little child?

 "Oh," she said quietly, "then this is a bad day."

 "Yes," I said, "and yesterday and the day before and -- oh, go away!"

 "Did it hurt?" she inquired.

 "Did what hurt?" I was exasperated with her, with myself.

 "When she died?"

 "Of course it hurt!" I snapped, misunderstanding, wrapped up in myself. I strode off.

A month or so after that, when I next went to the beach, she wasn't there.
 Feeling guilty, ashamed, and admitting to myself I missed her, I went up to
 the cottage after my walk and knocked at the door. A drawn looking young
 woman with honey-colored hair opened the door.
 
"Hello," I said, "I'm Robert Peterson. I missed your little girl today and
 wondered where she was."

 "Oh yes, Mr. Peterson, please come in. Wendy spoke of you so much. I'm  afraid I allowed her to bother you. If she was a nuisance, please, accept my apologies." 

 "Not at all! she's a delightful child." I said, suddenly realizing  that I meant what I had just said.

"Wendy died last week, Mr. Peterson. She had leukemia.  Maybe she didn't tell you."

 Struck dumb, I groped for a chair. I had to catch my breath.

 "She loved this beach, so when she asked to come, we couldn't say no. She seemed so much better here and had a lot of what she called happy days. But the last few weeks, she declined rapidly..." Her voice faltered, "She left  something for you, if only I can find it. Could you wait a moment while I
 look?"

 I nodded stupidly, my mind racing for something to say to this lovely young  woman. She handed me a smeared envelope with "MR. P" printed in bold  childish letters.. Inside was a drawing in bright crayon hues -- a yellow beach, a blue sea, and a brown bird. Underneath was carefully printed:

 A SANDPIPER TO BRING YOU JOY.

 Tears welled up in my eyes, and a heart that had almost forgotten to love opened wide. I took Wendy's mother in my arms. "I'm so sorry, I'm so  sorry, I'm so sorry," I uttered over and over, and we wept together. The precious little picture is framed now and hangs in my study. Six words -- one for each year of her life -- that speak to me of harmony, courage, and  undemanding love.
 A gift from a child with sea blue eyes and hair the color of sand  -- who taught me the gift of love. 

NOTE: This is a true story sent out by Robert Peterson. It happened over 20  years ago and the incident changed his life forever. It serves as a  reminder to all of us that we need to take time to enjoy living and life and each other. The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.

 Life is so complicated, the hustle and bustle of everyday traumas can make  us lose focus about what is truly important  or what is only a momentary setback or crisis..

 This week, be sure to give your loved ones an extra hug, and by all means,  take a moment... even if it is only ten seconds, to stop and smell the roses.

 This comes from someone's heart, and is read by many and now I share it with you..

 May God Bless everyone who receives this! There are NO coincidences!

 Everything that happens to us happens for a reason. Never brush aside  anyone as insignificant. Who knows what they can teach us?
 I wish for you, a sandpiper.

What sort of response was the sender expecting?  Confirmation that I, too, had been blind like poor Robert Peterson until reading this email and finally--gratefully--seeing the light?   Alas, like George Washington and Christopher Hitchens, I could not tell a lie.

So I gave her my only and honest response:
Even a dying child should be taught 
not to talk to strange men---on the beach
or anywhere else. 

To which she said:
Not all of those men on the beach are nasty. 
 Sometimes we all help each other without harm. 

To which, unable to curb myself, I said:
Trust me--even I realize that "sometimes we all help each other without harm" and that
 not all men, or women for that matter, on all beaches are, as you say, "nasty."
I just think it's best not to take any chances.
If that makes me a negative sandpiper, so be it! 

To which she said:
No not a negative anything. Safety is a positive thing. Be Safe. 

To which this sandpiper could not respond, as all this hippie talk gave her a headache. 

The Most Lovely Otis, Sondheim, and Seuss

Thank you, dear readers,  for your happy responses to my last post.  Here's what happened next with dear Otis:    

Okay, so on my last day with Otis I read my farewell poem aloud (see epic work on previous post) and then--like all pathetic praise-seeking writers, i.e., all writers—sought his face for the glowing grin of approval. 

But there was no grinning. Au contraire, if god had just turned me into a sea horse, he couldn’t have looked an iota more shocked. His mouth was stuck in the shape of an O and so were his unblinking brown eyes. He stared at me, saying nothing. Ohmygod, I thought, I’ve crossed some sort of invisible line and now his mother will have me arrested. Then, even as I was wondering where a gal might find good prosciutto in prison, he spoke.

“How did you do it?” he asked.

Since I couldn’t believe such a question would ever occur to a seven year old--and also since my right ear is dead--I had to make sure I’d heard him correctly.

“How did I do it?” I echoed.

He solemnly nodded and sat back to wait. Weird as it was, I understood then that he genuinely wanted to know, to know how a person—a person he knew to be real because he could see her--had gone about turning a piece of paper into a poem.

A poem, no less, that was all about him. Call me crazy, but, unless you’re interviewing someone on 60 Minutes, the question How did you do it? sounds a lot to me like: How can I do it? and whether or not I’m right about that,  just thinking it was totally thrilled me.

So I told him. I gave him the recipe.  The nuts and the bolts of composing faux-Seussian verse.  Yes, indeed, I explained to Otis:  

1.  How Dr. Seuss likes to rhyme and so I rhymed too.

2.  How Dr. Seuss likes to talk nonsense (a boy, not a moose) (as if you’d ever really confuse the one with the other!) so I did the same.

3.  How Dr. Seuss likes to talk the same nonsense over and over, but with a new twist.  Hence my moose becoming a mule becoming a flea and finally a pup-- but never an aardvark because you can’t rhyme it, and never a dinosaur because the accent goes on the di and not on the saur, which, if you listen--and listen you must----completely throws everything off.

4.  And, oh yeah: how  Dr. Seuss (and every other writer worth reading) takes the time to talk in specifics, hence Green Eggs and Ham and not Just Some Breakfast, ditto Eloise and Ms Frizzle and not Just Some People We Met in Some Books. 

 Naturally, I longed to go on and talk about Sondheim, to explain how he too liked to rhyme words with pup, and did so most effectively in  Losing My Mind, a song from Follies, to wit:

The sun comes up
I think about you
The coffee cup
I think about you 

and how the domestic detail of the coffee cup could wrench the heart right out of one's chest, but his eyes --which were actually still open and on me--were, understandably, starting to glaze.   Anyway, I can always tell him next fall, if he still needs a tutor and if that tutor turns out to be me. For which I of course am crossing all fingers.

 

Checking into Heartbreak Hotel or: How I Said Farewell to Otis

Good gracious god--why haven’t I posted for almost two months? Was April that cruel, May that intense, my own wretched self truly that lazy? (The Cowboy constantly tells me I’m lazy, but that’s just about sex. But never you mind.) 

Loyal Reader, if you’re even still out there, let me tell you right now I don’t know the answer. However, it doesn’t matter today, because yesterday I broke up with Otis (the first grader whose reading skills I’d volunteered to try to improve--see my post of March 9, 1812) and must share the heartbreak or fall down and croak.

Of course we didn’t break up per se--we just had our last session per the school schedule--but it felt the same because, if you’re me, every good-bye is horrid and piercing. And, as it turns out, saying goodbye to a boy who, over five months, has come to actually like you a little (or at least not turn and run when you showed up in his classroom to whisk him away to work on his reading) is even more piercing. Indeed, as a really avid reader might say, it perced right to the roote.

The only good thing about it was that it gave me an excuse to buy him a book.  Or, since I’m nuts, two books that really amounted to seven (Six by Seuss being six in one volume, The Cat in the Hat in both English and Spanish being alone in another) and to tell him goodbye in faux Seussian verse. 

I tried to use words he already knew (i.e., not faux) and I'm pretty sure I succeeded.  Except perhaps for "fond" and "discuss" which--if he does what I’ve begged him to do since December--he might just ask an adult to define.  Not his mom maybe, since she doesn't know English, and perhaps not his dad, whom I think might know English but also suspect to have taken some kind of marital powder, but maybe his older brother or sister, or maybe--if he does yet another thing I've begged him to do--he might just deign to, you know, look it up.

Okay, so he won't look it up.  Nonetheless, here's what I wrote and, per his own sweet request, read to him with the maniacal fanfare of a narcissist who forgot to have children:

There once was a boy—(a boy, not a moose)
Who really and truly enjoyed Dr. Seuss.

But that wasn’t all. He loved dinosaurs too,
And the more stuff he read, the more stuff he knew,

Like which ones were nice and ate only plants
And which ones would eat all your uncles and aunts.

But that wasn’t all this boy liked to read.
He also liked Stars and Science and Speed,

Like the speed of Ms Frizzle’s Big Magic Bus
That took him to places too strange to discuss!

Shall I go on? All right, if you please.
He also liked bees and--oh yeah!—Eloise—

That girl who takes bawths in The Plaza Hotel!
He liked all these books--and more--very well.

So why did this boy—(a boy, not a mule)
This boy who's so fond of computers and school

Tell me he thinks that reading is boring?
When I’ve seen for myself how he likes the exploring?

He’s good at it too—and he gets even better
Whenever he stops to look at each letter—

I mean look with both eyes till he sees the whole word 

And can fly to the next like the world’s fastest bird!

Want to know what else he said that was crazy?
That he didn’t read much because he was lazy.

But would a lazy boy have been willing to go
From guessing at words to working to know

How much faster it’d be if he sounded them out?
Is that what a lazy boy is about?

No! This certain boy—(a boy, not a flea)
Worked harder than even the busiest bee!

He did it for weeks and he never gave up!
I tell you this boy—(a boy, not a pup) ­

Is the smartest and nicest and absolute best.
Do we call this boy Otis?  Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!

Mad Men: Then, Now and (One Hopes) Forever

A hundred years ago when I was too mental for a permanent job but not too mental to work as a temp (temping is a good solution for mentals as you can pass up jobs when you’re having a breakdown and, if you recover, get another assignment), I spent several days as an office drudge for an ad agency in San Francisco.

The only reason I’m recalling it now (cuz trust me, I try very hard not to recall one single thing from my odious past) is because Mad Men—praise be—has finally come back. And even though season five picks up in the year 1966, it seems not so very different from my own Mad Men stint that took place about seven years later. By which I mean that everyone who worked in this ad agency was very good-looking. Maybe not as gorgeous as Joan (a character I could watch evermore) but certainly right up there: No grown-up Chubbettes, and not one Deformo.

(By Deformo I mean a Facial Deformo, which I was at the time, and still am within my traumatized brain, never mind that I got the deformity surgically “solved” almost three decades ago. Having become a Deformo at the age of 13, I was, shall we say, acutely attuned to (completely obsessed with) the mandibular symmetry—or not-- of all others. All I wanted was to find just one other person whose mandible was even slightly askew, and every time I did not, I felt newly irate and cruelly betrayed. Which is just one explanation for why I wasn’t that sane. What I was instead was maniacally conscious of American standards of beauty and which people met them, and which did not--and, crazier yet, why they did not. I never made these observations aloud, of course, as I was simultaneously trying to pass for a person who might be mistaken, if only by the blindest of drunks,  for Jean Shrimpton.)

I’d been answering their phones for two days before I noticed the agency’s bulletin board, on which my least favorite things—photographs—were posted for everyone in the office to see.

“These are from our company picnic,” a perky version of Don Draper—if such an oxymoron could even exist—told me when he saw me studying them.

Being insane almost always you gives you a bad personality, which is why I said: “Why do you hire only good-looking people?”

Skipping barely a beat while ignoring my question, he said: “Everyone’s good-looking when they’re happy!”

“No, they’re not,” I said, which is just one reason why people with bad personalities have a hard time staying employed.

“Sure they are,” he insisted. “Look, everyone’s smiling.”

They were all smiling, displaying white and radiant teeth, their sleek tresses shining as if Hair & Make-up had just touched them up. I was preparing to say that smiles had nothing to do with it, that a euphoric Quasimodo was still Quasimodo, that a sulking Warren Beatty was even more of a sex god, and, by the by, which man would he choose to sell cigarets--but by the time I’d formulated this tirade, someone had stolen Don Draper away.

Someone like Jean Shrimpton, no doubt. For a six hour lunch steeped in equal parts Gin and Mad Sex. Unless it was someone more like Roger Sterling, in which case the Mad Sex would be replaced (as it so gloriously was in an earlier season) by Mad Barfing. 

Either way I’m grateful I can sit back and watch it, as having to live it would be too totally maddening. And I'm pretty sure--nay, unflinchingly sure--I'm quite mad enough as it is. 

You Might As Well Live on the (Yuck) Whites of Eggs

I used to limp into Dr. Mars’ office, collapse like an abandoned accordion onto his couch, and beg him to try just a little bit harder (and 50 times faster) to make me even slightly less mentally ill.  Now that he’s somewhat accomplished this feat, I march right in, perch on his couch as The Raven might have once perched on Poe, and announce what will be our theme for the day.

What I actually announce is the quote that inspired the theme for the day--usually a philosophical point made by some deceased writer or other. E.M. Cioran’s He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama used to sum things up for me perfectly. But recently I came across a quote that sums things up even more perfectly:

Without an ever present sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

This (as I patiently informed Dr. Mars) comes from the late Muriel Spark, the woman who secured her financial future, (i.e., her future) by writing The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  This particular pearl comes, however, from another Spark novel called, much more fittingly, Memento Mori. Which, as I also patiently told Dr. Mars, translates to English as: Yer gonna dah ‘n’ dontchew fergit it.

Dr. Mars, who almost always pretends to warm to my themes, dutifully asked if I was finding my own life insipid, to which I replied:

“Au contraire, Dr. Mars. I’m completely awash in Hollandaise sauce.”

“Hollandaise?” he asked in that handy shrink dialect known as The Echo.

“Bernaise,“ I said. “Pot de crème. Custard.” Then I gave up and said: “Rich golden yolks.”

I realize everybody my age (sixty-doyoumind-two on the dreaded June 4th) feels compelled to observe this, and now I will too:

Getting closer to death (or absolute penury which is the same thing) really does enhance life the way falling in love (or sexual swoon) used to do, only it does it without the romantic delusion. In fact, that’s the whole point, the lack of delusion.

We really are going to die (which, as my previous and late shrink used to say, is the fact that keeps life from getting too ghastly), and finally believing this makes everything--except maybe hospitals, funerals, acute pain and grief—both brighter (like yolks) and (like the yolks in Zabaglione) much sweeter.
  

For me anyway.  But maybe that’s because, despite Dr. Mars’ valiant efforts, I’m still, you know, sorta mentally ill.

The Long and the Short of Otis's Vowels

Imagine my megalomaniacal joy when, seven whole days after I’d drilled him to death, Otis still remembered his vowels.

“A E I O U and sometimes Y!” he said with a triumphant grin. Now imagine that grin disappearing as I told him we weren’t done with them yet, that the vowels he’d learned were the ones they called Long, and that every Long Vowel had a short brother.

“The short ones are just as good,” I added, since I happen to know Otis has a big brother who probably exceeds him two feet in height. “It’s just that the short ones have minds of their own.”

I didn’t say that the short ones had to have minds of their own for the simple reason that they weren’t, like their longer brothers, first-born, nor did I say that the first-borns didn’t need minds at all because they would inherit everything anyway while the second-borns had to enter the clergy.  And I certainly didn't point out that this explained why the short ones broke rules--that they weren’t merely short, but  poor and resentful. All of which I know he’ll find out for himself as soon as he starts reading Jane Austen, which, let’s face it, is why I show up.

“Let me put it this way,” I said. ”If the U in Seuss was short and not long, Dr. Seuss would be Dr. Suss.”

“Suss?” said Otis, looking repulsed as he took this in.

“Yes,” I said. “Suss.  And that, as you know, would be so very wrong.”

That's when I started in on the drilling again, this time with the Made and the Mad, the Neat and the Net, the Bite and the Bit, the Hope and the Hop, the stroll one sometimes took By the Gym, and,  just to refresh, the Seuss and the Suss, indeed---

The very same Suss 

Who gets on a bus 

To visit Huge Gus

Who makes such a fuss

Over wearing size Plus

at which point Otis balked.

“He didn’t really write that,” he said.

“Well, he could have,” I sniffed, because I am twelve.

I then asked Otis what horrors he thought might occur if the vowels in our names switched their identities, if the longs went short and the shorts went long.  It took a while but he finally suggested that he’d be known around the world as Ah-Tise (tise like precise, not like circumcise), which would be very horrid indeed, not that being known as Ms. Go-Nike (nike like a bike, not a shoe) would be any better.

The only rough spot came when Otis studied the cover of his Dr. Seuss book and finally noticed the odious E. “What does the E do?” he just had to ask.

Here's the truth: I have no more idea what the E does in Seuss than I do what the A does in my first name.  Not that I can ever admit this to Otis. I need him to think I understand English grammar which, very frankly, I never have. I’ve always absorbed it by reading good books. Which is what I want him to be able to do, to swallow the syntax he sees on the page until correct grammar becomes second nature. Which is why I want him to read Pride and Prejudice before he moves on to, say, Naked Lunch.

I was about to tell him that the E in Seuss was there for no reason except to be quiet when a crazy thing happened: the recess bell rang and, for the first time in history, Otis ignored it and stayed in his chair. He was so busy getting that the first E in recess was just as long as the second was short, and delighting in the glory of getting it—I mean visibly delighting in that he glowed like a bright giddy lamp--that he did not want to stop.

I would have let him go on forever, but my supervisor, who has, you know, sense, pushed him out the the Reading Room door into the vicious, Darwinian playground.

Did I feel, for that moment, like Annie Sullivan?

Reader, I’ll say it: I totally did.

Deaf and Mental but Tutoring Anyway!

Though it was several millennia ago that my esteemed shrink Dr. Mars suggested I break through my solipsistic shell just long enough to, you know, volunteer--I didn't do it until last December.

Let me just point out that I’d made several attempts to do so before that but it was either too late to get into the program I wanted (helping grammar school kids who have trouble reading) or I was still too mental to think I could do it. But after a few months of working out at Gym Nosferatu three times a week (after which my triceps still pool on the floor, thanks) I figured I could do anything.

I don’t know what I pictured exactly, but I don’t think it was Me being Paired with a Boy. Most of the other tutors got paired with Girls, sweet pliable girls who actually hug them (since they too are girls, albeit old ones) to show their gratitude and affection. I, on the other hand, got paired with Otis.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Otis—indeed, he’s completely adorable. And if he didn’t spend our 45 minutes together vrooming his  eraser back and forth on our desk, he’d be even more so. Whenever I ask him to stop with the vroom, he collapses like Greta Garbo’s Camille and complains of fatigue. When I ask him to straighten up and please focus, he insists he has to go to the bathroom. Needless to say, none of the other tutees do any of this, be they the pink-cupcake girls or his own fellow boys. In fact, if  Otis (who's in the first grade) hadn’t told me the first day we met just how much he loved Dr. Seuss, I’m not even sure I could have continued.

But he did, so I could.

Here are just three examples of how I've advised Young Otis so far:

1.  It’s only fair to read all the books that weren’t so lucky as to have Dr. Seuss be their author exactly as if they had been so lucky, i.e., with the same fervent zeal and zesty expression. And, yes, this includes the incredibly boring Yip and Yap Take a Nap.

2.  You can sound out a word as a Buh and an Og but only if you go back immediately to smash them together into a bog. No matter how much you think you don’t want to, you must smash it, smash it, and smash it again! As for what a bog is, all I can say is one finds them outdoors, or indoors while reading a Sherlock Holmes novel.

3.  No one but U wants to hang out with Q and U will never leave Q alone. Except in Iraq but that is for later.

Today our lesson (which, lest you think tutors make it all up, are provided for us in clear plastic packets) was to be about words that have double consonants. Which is how I found out he didn’t know what a consonant was, which is how I found out he did not know his vowels.

A, E, I, O, U and, yes, sometimes Y!---I made him say it a million times. After which I said, “Hello there, Otis, my name is Miss B, so what the heck am I--some kind of vowel?” I did this 26 times, five and sometimes six of which I very naturally did turn out to be some kind of vowel.

When I asked him how many vowels his own actual name had, and he told me two, my craven heart sang. When I asked how many consonants (and reminded him that everyone who wasn’t a vowel had no choice but to be one) and he said two again, it performed a whole opera. But will he remember all this next week?  That, for now, is the question.

“He just might remember you later,” says Dr. Mars to keep me encouraged. “I remember who taught me to read.”

“So do I,” I say. “But I didn’t teach him. I’m just reinforcing.”

“Don’t underestimate your impact,” he says.

Isn't he great?  I mean, isn't he really? Such fabulous doctors, both Mars and Seuss.

Happy Valentine's Day to My Four Pretend Husbands and Especially to My Two Pretend Adjuncts

For me, a Pretend Husband is all about being able to listen to Gershwin without becoming completely undone. Not all Gershwin, certainly, just the heart-stabbing Someone to Watch Over Me. Which, as far as I’m concerned, could just as easily be called Someone to Drive Me Home From My Colonoscopy, except for the problem of scanning. Someone to Drop to His Naked Pulverized Knees Just to Unclog My Horrible Shower Drain would work for me too, so please let me take this fine opportunity to thank the Cowboy for doing so. Even though I’ve already thanked him profusely and even though he was yelling at me the whole time and hurling Ajax cans at my head.

But even if the Cowboy had not fixed my drain (It’s a cesspool, Jeannie! D’ya hear me? A cesspool!); even if he and his three P.H. brothers had written me off and moved to Des Moines, I would not feel nearly as ruined as I might have before because now I know there are adjuncts. Really! I’d had no idea   I was being watched over by peripheral others, but I was, and you might be too.

My first adjunct presented himself when I once again ordered the swordfish kebabs from my favorite kebab place in Boringame. But this time the guy at the register stopped before he put in my order, looked at me with something like pity and quietly said: “Do you not like salmon?”

“I love salmon,” I said.

“Then why do you not ever order it?”

I had ordered their salmon in fact, and had only stopped because, very frankly, they cooked it to death. 

Which I'd of course never mentioned, but since he had asked:

“Because,” I said, “you cook it to death. No offense.”

No offense taken. Au contraire! He swore to me I had only to ask them to not overcook it (“Translucent,” I warned him. “I like it translucent!”) and it would be cooked to my absolute order. Which, frankly, I doubted, because this is a tiny fast busy place that would seem to have neither time nor a motive to bother to do any crazy such thing. “Please,” he said. “Please, for today, have the salmon.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why do you care?”

“You eat too much swordfish!” he bleated. “They are filled up with mercury! Don’t you know how bad it is for your body?”

Well, of course I did, as who doesn't?  In fact, when Hank Fitz and I go there together, we refer to them as Mercury Kebabs and never order anything else except maybe some baba ganoush.

But never mind--his was a rhetorical question and now he was saying: “You should eat them no more than three times a month!” You’d think I’d been eating them three times a minute. And maybe I had—I’m just that obsessive, about what I eat, and everything else.

“All right!” I said. “I’ll get the damn salmon.”

But why why why did he look so relieved? Did he think I would sue him as soon as I got whatever you get from a mercury surplus? Or did I already look so old and atrocious he feared I might croak right there in his restaurant? Or was he just some wacky altruist? I still haven’t figured it out, but let me just say that they did keep the salmon’s middle translucent and still do every time. It makes me feel not just watched over but famous.

My second Adjunct Pretend Husband appeared less dramatically in the form of my auto mechanic. After giving my car one of those major overhauls that cost twice the rent no matter what happens, he told me he was still waiting for my new wipers and that I should come in the next morning so he could install them.

I said I would be there but of course I was not, because I’m a moron who thinks she is busy but is merely a moron, and after a few days he called me and said: “Jean! Come get your wipers! Please! It is raining!” 

Which surely it was--Cats and Dogs and Swordfish Kebabs--so I put on some speed and followed his lead before you could say Ira Gershwin.

Fun Times At Gym Nosferatu

The reason I did not make resolutions this New Years is simple: I’ve already joined a damn gym. I joined in September and, what’s more, I still go.   In fact, I go there three times a week. And by go there I don’t mean lurk in the lobby, but all the way in to use their equipment--eight different pieces of their equipment. And if the Noisy Bonehead with the Shit-Eating Grin is not in there too, I use the machines for ninety whole minutes. If the bonehead IS there, however, I throw up and flee. Sometimes concurrently, which is not only hard, but way unattractive.

My friends are astounded at my new discipline, but in the words of Mae West, discipline had nothing to do with it. My sole motivation was and is terror--the terror I feel when I realize the flesh that hangs from my arms (the gym calls them triceps) could easily be repurposed as drapes, by which I mean those extra-length drapes fashionably designed to pool on the floor. After working out for four months, they’ve become just enough more like two café curtains to keep me going the rest of my life.

Of course I couldn’t have joined up at all if this weren’t the only gym in our universe (trust me, I checked) that doesn’t bombard its members with music. This must be because, as with my lovely Cadavercise class (which I still attend twice a week), this gym exists in a hospital setting. You don’t have to be ancient or ruined to use it, but you do need a note from your doctor saying you probably won’t die on the treadmill. And most of the ancients I see on the treadmills (some of whom remind me of Samuel Beckett, some, more alarmingly, of Nosferatu) come strictly for the Cardiac Rehab.

But back to the Bonehead, who reminds me of cinema's great Dr. Evil, if Dr. Evil had spent his salad days getting concussed on a football field and the rest of them watching every game ever played in order to come to my gym and make concussed comments about them while perched on his bike like a hideous albatross.  An albatross whose bellows are just as nasal as they are loud. An albatross who, when he’s not sitting atop his unmoving bike but actually roaming loose on the floor, sneaks up behind others and jokingly shakes their machines to startle them unto hilarious death.

Personally, I think Bonehead should be barred from the gym, as well as the world, but since he is not, and since hearing him speak is ten times worse than hearing a garbage truck playing rap music, all I can do is avoid him like plague.

And, lest you think I’m the most hypersensitive person alive, which I am, I’m not the only person who feels this way. A very kind woman (the same one who corrected my form on the rowing machine as well as the odious arm curl) told me once in a whisper that “the loudmouth comes Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, from 11:30 to 1:00” even as the loudmouth was mouthing.

Which is why I go Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. But occasionally something comes up and, lest I miss even one opportunity to turn those drapes into tight Roman shades if not paralyzed blinds, I have to go on a Bonehead Day, and then, of course, I go well after 1:00.

But last Friday, while curling my arms well after 3:00, I heard it again--that blood-curdling bleat--and promptly lost count of my now spastic reps.

I saw him then, perched on his bike in full stupid glory, with that shit-eating grin all over his face. My disgust and sense of betrayal (after all, I’d come when it was supposed to be safe) were such that, before I knew it, I found myself giving Bonehead the stinkeye. By which I mean really serious stink eye.

“Am I in trouble?” he sneered like some incorrigible five year old boy, which, thanks to football, either playing or watching, I think he might neurologically be, for which I know I should have compassion, but, since he’s huge and aggressive, do not.

I could have said “Yes!” but that would have made too much noise so I put my finger to my lips and said “Shhh.” Then, lest I find myself using the gym’s handy defibrillator to beat him to a still grinning pulp, I ran right out of Gym Nosferatu. And took myself out to overeat  pizza, which, since I work out now, I understand I can do every day.

Never Again the Festive Negroni

It was only two mornings ago that I dumped fresh tangerine juice into my cup of hot tea, and I made this spazzy mistake without being even slightly hung over. Indeed, I might never be hung over again because, evidently, while I wasn’t looking, I snuck out last June and joined up with A.A. Which is to say I stopped drinking in June--not because I was drinking too much, or even just much--but because my liver, shall we say, broke.

It did not break entirely, but it did decide to stop processing alcohol. I first noticed something was gravely amiss when just one glass of wine—one enjoyed with a vast obscene dinner, no less, eaten no later than, I sweartagod, six—became enough to give me a headache the following day. The gravity deepened when I realized I no longer had to wait overnight, as the headache seized me by my fourth or fifth sip.  

It felt as if the devil herself was putting Antabuse into my drinks while leaving pristine the drinks of others—say, Ed Head’s Negronis and Hank Fitz’s martinis. After weeks of denial and half-baked experiments (Maybe it only happens with wine! Okay, only vodka and wine! In months that have Rs! In months that do not!) which all, of course failed, I had to give up.

So now I’m the person who drinks Diet Coke with her shrimp salad lunch while her friends order what shrimp really screams for, a glass of luscious cold crisp Chardonnay. As for dinner, which I almost always eat home alone unless Ed Head carries my body into a restaurant, I still don’t get how people can make it without a glass of wine in one hand. I mean, really, what is the point of sautéing shallots when you can’t taste the wine you’re about to pour over them to make the sauce that goes with your steak? Why, for that matter, eat steak at all when you can’t wash it down with a good, or even bad, Cabernet? 

Oh yeah, because steak is still fun to eat and doesn’t make you feel insane the next morning, never mind that it murders you later.

I still keep vodka in my freezer for guests, also half-bottles of both red and white wine--the ones that have corks, not to be snobby but because the screw tops never let me unscrew them. And while I still feel envy while watching friends drink, my envy’s now joined by something even more creepy, which is of course the vicarious thrill.

Strangely enough for someone who always enjoyed it so much, I find I don’t really miss drinking. Which is to say that while I miss the taste and the gleam of the glassware, I don’t miss the high. But that's only because I am, by dint of age or brain tumor or both, already high--as in exceedingly stupid and inexplicably giddy. And, per the tangerine juice I just dumped in my tea, I still act like a hung over person. 

I do miss being able to face the odd crisis by getting purposefully, medicinally drunk, but, what can I say, now I face them with Xanax.  Which, though not nearly as effective as cocktails, is something my liver, for now, still allows.

Did I Mention the Mollusks?

Every morning when Boo claws my eyes open and leads me, bleeding and blind, to his empty bowl, I take a moment before pouring his Friskies to see if he has any houseguests.

The reason I check is I don’t want to step on them, and the reason I don’t want to step on them is not that they're dead (like the crusty mouse Boo left in our bedroom which I finally threw out the window) but that they’re alive.  Maybe not vivaciously so, but technically so: alive and vile and squishy to boot.

Yes, Dear Reader, these houseguests are slugs. Tiny slugs (praise the powers that be) but slugs nonetheless. And while they never show up in my part of the house, this is small comfort when I see them sitting--unless they are standing—let's say occupying--Boo’s private space.

As small as they are, I loathe them and fear them and have done so acutely for all of my life. Indeed, next to The Priest and The Barbie Doll, you could say The Slug was the baniest bane of my childhood. Back when there used to be regular rain (and not one long heat wave interspersed now and then with a festive tornado), hordes of huge slugs seemed to rule the whole world, or at least every sidewalk I had to travel to get from my house to my school.

To keep from making even the slightest physical contact with one, I had to suffer looking at them, which was almost worse but not quite. My one solace came when I realized that slugs didn’t run. Later I drew even more solace from murdering them with Morton’s Iodized Salt.

Since I’m way too evolved to salt a slug now, I use a paper towel (and I fully admit I could not live without them) to escort them outside and hurl them back into what they call Nature. And then I pray they’ll never return.

But oy! Answered prayers! Why don’t I have those? The horrid creatures always return and I have no idea how or where they get in. Through the floor? Through the wall? Through the mollusky mail? (And why do they come? They don’t touch Boo’s Friskies. With what would they touch them? Have they mouths? Have they heads? Aren’t they really just tentacled feet?)  Moreover, when they’re not there displaying their actual selves (which, praise god, is most of the time), they leave their calling cards in long silver trails to make sure Boo knows that they have dropped by.

But wait a minute—aren’t silver trails exclusive to snails? Do they visit too? How do they get inside with those houses?  And if snails do come, what can be next except Puppy Dog Tails? And then, what? Little Boys? Why not grown boys?  

By which, Dear Reader, you know I mean cowboys. Elderly cowboys in freshly- pressed Wranglers. One who might know how to get rid of slugs. Now that’s a guest I’d be happy to see. And thankful as well, as in Happy Thanksgiving.  And may you all have one, with nary a mollusk, just fabulous turkey with succulent stuffing, and friends (if you have them, more wine if you don't) and always forever the best pumpkin pie!

Living In The Animal Kingdom

Firstly, I'd like to thank all the kind persons who wrote me about that heinous raccoon. Secondly, let me just say that, happily, he hasn’t been back. Or that, if he has, he must have dined first because he ignored both my garbage and Boo’s horrid food. (Which in itself is sort of like garbage, no offense meant to Boo--I’m just, as the vernacular has it these days, sayin’.  Which doesn’t quite work when you split it up, does it, so here it is one more time: I’m just sayin’.)

Since I’m still waiting for that magnetic cat door to happen, Boo and I have had to regress to our pre-cat-door life, when Boo got in and out through our bedroom window. Of course, the raccoon could certainly get in that way too, but I always close this windowat night in hopes that he won’t. In hopes that everyone won’t, if it comes to that, but, as the vernacular also has it these days: Let us not go there.

Naturally, as soon as I began to relax about the raccoon, a brand new animal entered our house, and it did not need an open cat door to do so. That’s because this animal was a flea.

General Flea and his army (ten million at least) marched into my house in silent black waves and bit every single part of my body. And since I’m pretty much allergic to all signs of life, the bites swelled up into vibrant red welts. So itchy and ugly and leprous was I that for the first time ever I was actually glad The Cowboy was not on his way over to see me as he would surely have hollered and hightailed it back outta Boringame fast.

“Has Boo had his Frontline?” Hank Fitz wanted to know. He meant the supposedly non-toxic stuff I squeeze onto the back of Boo’s neck every month. It’s supposed to ward off all buggy evil to the tune of four million dollars a squirt.

“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t think it works.”

The truth is it probably works fine when it actually gets onto a cat, but when I apply it alone, which is of course every time, most of it gets onto the floor as Boo springs forth and goes into orbit.

“Perhaps it’s time for a new application,” said Hank. “I’ll come down tomorrow and you can hold him down while I squeeze.”

It’s amazing what two people can do in one second what one person cannot do in one year or for that matter ever but don’t get me started. Let me just say that when Hank Fitz (surely the most uxorious of all my P. Husbands) arrived he had a box of Flea Fogger Time Bombs in hand. After we Frontlined Boo and tossed him outdoors, we shut all the windows, set off the bomb, and flew like crazy bats from the house.

“The label says not to go back for two hours,” Hank said.

“Good, that gives us just enough time for lunch at Duarte's."

Since Duarte’s is in Pescadero, we actually needed more like four hours, which was fine with me as this  gave the fleas even more time to die.

And now let us all hail Hank Fitz, for one week later I no longer itched, and another week later I had no more welts. And just when I began to relax about both the raccoon and the myriad fleas--well, I think you can guess--another animal entered the house.

Not of its own volition, mind you.  Boo brought it in, and not in his fur. I saw it this morning when I awoke.  It was on the rug under our bedroom window, all curled up—and I do not mean as in with a good book.

“God DAMN you,” I said to the murderous Boo, as he lolled around on his nonchalant back. “Why can’t you be like a regular cat and leave your victims outside the front door?”  Outside being the operative word.

It's a stiff bloodied thing with a tail like an earthworm, and I am waiting for a husband to dispose of it for me.  Which, lest you think otherwise, I do realize means I'll be decorating it for Christmas.

It Happened One Night--to Me and Boo

So there we were watching night-time TV—we being myself and Boo Radley, Unfriendly Cat and Fourth Pretend Husband--when my left ear (being luckily pointed in that direction) heard the telltale squeak of Boo’s new cat door swinging wide open.

Since Boo was seated on top of my stomach (and also because I am taking good meds) it did not take me overly long to conclude that it was probably not he who had just sauntered in.  And I don’t think it took me more than a minute to figure out that if it wasn’t Boo, it almost certainly had to be someone else. And since my friends always call before they come over, and Boo rather famously doesn’t have friends, I was pretty sure it was an intruder.

An intruder in our own private home. An intruder, no less, who could squeeze through a cat door. Or, assuming the intruder were a three-headed serpent, would not even have to squeeze himself through, and could well be slithering toward us right now.

Muting the movie and hearing no slithers, I was seized by questions about Freddie Krueger. Was he short? Was he thin? Incredibly thin? An incredibly thin and bendy contortionist? On the lam perhaps from Cirque du Soleil, the better to kill me in Boringame?

It was only then that I realized that Boo had stopped watching the movie and turned his wee orange head toward the door. Not wanting Boo to think me a coward, I made myself do the same. And then I saw what Boo's green eyes were totally glued to: a large and utterly silent raccoon. Silent and thankfully, for the moment at least, also still.

Our four eyes stared at him like two deer caught in the raccoony headlights until what’s left of my instincts finally kicked in and made me put Boo into a vise grip. What’s a vise grip? I have no idea, but, knowing that raccoon could shred Boo to bits in two seconds flat, I put him into one anyway. And Boo, who perhaps also understood how easily he could be shredded, did not even try to spring out of it.

Though it felt like we stayed that way for an hour, it was probably more like a minute, after which the raccoon became bored and squeezed himself back from whence he had come.  I felt relief and then the requisite post-relief indignation.

“What an asshole,” I said to Boo.

“Meow,” Boo agreed. 

And then, our night ruined, we went to bed.

The next morning I strolled into my living room only to find my freshly washed carpet freshly carpeted with bits of strewn garbage. I followed the trail of chicken bones and avocado peels into the kitchen where of course my garbage bag had exploded.

“He was casing the joint!” I said to Boo. “Didn’t I tell you he was an asshole?”

But it hit me then that I was the asshole because this was the second time I'd found strewn garbage, and when it had happened ten days before, I’d put the blame completely on Boo. Which is one more reason we should not have a death penalty: Boo was the victim of a wrongful conviction.

I apologized to Boo 20 times, but what good was that since I did not even think to close up his cat door to prevent a raccoon recurrence? Then again, neither had Pretend Husbands Hank Fitz or Ed Head when I'd told them the story, they had just laughed. Nosireebob, it was only The Cowboy, my most elusive and thus most valued P. Husband, who threw his crippled self onto my floor to examine the cat door and lock it up tight.

“I didn’t even know it had a lock,” I said lamely.

 Not that I’d bothered to get down and look.  

“Well, Jeannie," he said. "That’s probably because you're the laziest person in the world."

"Well duh," I said. “You’re just noticing now?”

My landlady has promised to install one of those magic magnetic cat doors that only Boo will be able to open, and I hope she does it today. I hope this because the newly vindicated Boo is punishing me for his wrongful conviction by insisting I let him outside, and then back inside, and then back outside, all day and night every two seconds.  And if I’m even one second late, he screams at me like a banshee from hell.  For which I can't blame him because, let's face it,  I'd do the same, only 50 times worse.  

How Open House Sent Me Back To The Movies

Thanks to HBO and the now-despised Netflix, I pretty much stopped going to movies--but when the house I live under was put up for sale, I started to go again big time.

For the last 95 Sundays I’ve been asked to tidy my in-law apartment (which mostly means hiding my myriad drugs from the millionaires who might want to steal them) and then, if you will, get the fuck outta Dodge for the duration of this week’s Open House.

The Open House goes from 2 to 4, but in order to not see the Vivacious Agent or any Encroaching Last Minute Stragglers, I try to stay out from at least 1 to 5. (Noon to 6 would be better yet, but I can’t spend six hours away from my Cat Pretend Husband without becoming quite lonely and mental.) Movies, of course, make the perfect escape and, better yet, the perfect distraction from my personal apocalypse of potential eviction.

Which is why the first film I chose to see was Contagion. I wanted its reputed world wide apocalypse to scare my own down to the size of a zygote, but, to my disappointment, it neither scared me nor remotely upset me.

I don’t know if this is because I am Old, or because it sort of pleased me to see Kate Winslet die, or because I’m finally on Really Good Meds---but it made me long to re-see On the Beach, where everyone really does get evicted in a really no-kidding permanent way.

For the next Open House I selected The Debt, mostly to worship the great Helen Mirren, and though this movie did distract me, it was only because I could not figure out which young men had turned into which old men, or why anyone thought that lame ending would fly.

And for last week's Open House---never mind that I completely expected to hate it and chose it only because it was over two hours long--I saw The Help. Which was not unlike seeing Bridesmaids again except, of course, not nearly as funny.

I’d read somewhere that the role of Hilly was over-the-top, a caricature, but let me just tell you that it is so not.  I understand that not everyone raised in the South is a Hilly, but I used to know a person who was, and thirty-five years ago, when we were still young, I had to explain to her—literally and slowly explain to her—why and how it just might behoove her--a woman who’d moved from The Junior League South to the Junior League version of San Francisco--to finally stop using the N word. 

As heinous as some people might seem in the movies, they are always twice as heinous in life.

The good news is that no one--so far--seems ready to buy the house I live under, but I won’t relax till the For Sale sign comes down.

And even then I can’t really relax because who's to say it won't go back up in a year?

If there’s another Open House here this Sunday, all I can say is: I just don’t know what. Do I really have to sit through The Lion King? Killer Elite? I Don’t Know How She Does It? And, by the way, how does she do it? That is to say, how does anyone do it?  Seriously—my cat and I are both desperate to know. 

How Hank Fitz and I Fell Down the Rabbit Hole Into Filoli Gardens

You know how every once a millennium you get to experience the odd serendipity? Well, that’s what just happened to Hank Fitz (my gay Pretend Husband) and me on our way to a high-end estate sale.

Hank Fitz loves to go to estate sales and since neither of us can afford real vacations, we pretend the estate sale IS the vacation, which sort of works because, after all, we get to fly (okay, drive) to a new country (all right, neighborhood) filled with new people (well, we don’t know them) and new things to see (salt and pepper shaker sets from around 1940). And, if Hank Fitz finds a tie that he likes, we even bring back souvenirs.

So this time, while trying to reach some crazy address in the high curvy hills of San Mateo, we got totally lost and found ourselves driving down the kind of beautiful road that makes you think you're in Italy.  And on this road I saw a sign that said Filoli Gardens. Which, because of the vowels, really convinced me we were in Italy.

That sign reminded me that Filoli Gardens was one of those places I’d always sort of wanted to go to but hadn’t because, as a lifelong paranoid, I’d assumed it would be Too Hard and Expensive, plus, like all well-known destinations, Relentlessly Crowded and Sweaty and Hot.

But when Hank Fitz told me he’d always meant to visit it too, I turned into a hippie—or maybe a Christian—and said god or karma must have brought us here (on a sunny day that was warm but Not Hot!) for A Reason. To which he replied that it was his inability to followYahoo directions that had brought us here, but he drove us through the gate anyway.

If you’ve been to Filoli, you know what we experienced. If you haven’t, let me just say that the entrance fee was $15 ($12 for seniors, not that I am one), which is what a glass of wine costs you now, and the parking lot cost nothing at all and was big enough that we could find a space quickly and not have to have nervous breakdowns.

Another good thing is that no one was mean to us. Indeed, the docents were so lovely and kind that both Hank Fitz and I wanted to take a few home to be our new mothers. Yet another good thing is that on this particular day (Saturday and yet for some reason not crowded) most of the other visitors seemed to be either Older or Fatter than us, which made us feel vaguely young and attractive. Granted, there were too many couples—okay, only couples—but since Hank Fitz and I sort of LOOK like a couple, we got to forgo the twin Envy-ectomies.

There’s no point in my trying to describe indescribable gardens (you can see them yourself on filoli.org) so let me just say they made me remember the Power of Beauty, how it can just overwhelm you and then make you weep as you sit with Hank Fitz on a nice wooden bench because your mother--who once, to your ten-year old puzzlement and despair, planted plastic pansies in your own back yard garden--never got to go to Filoli and now, being dead, most surely would not.

There’s a house to see too, which Hank Fitz and I strolled through but did not really care about because we’d both been spoiled by the completely crazed mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, which, if you've seen them, you know what I mean. But I’d recommend you walk through it anyway as a prelude to a two to three hour walk through the gardens, after which you will feel so Soothed and Relaxed and Inspired you will need to get something to eat.

And yes, even the café was sublime. Hank Fitz and I sat at a table outside and wondered aloud how we’d gotten so lucky and if we’d ever get so lucky again.

But then I realized we didn’t need luck. Filoli is about a ten second drive from the city of Boringame, where I am currently living (until the house I live under gets sold to a Horrid Rich Couple who will promptly evict me), so as long as we each have $15 to spend, we can visit Filoli whenever we want.
Which for me (I can't speak for Hank Fitz) might well be every weekend from now unto death.

The Dinner Party From Hell: More TOTALLY RETRO Fiction for Foodies!

I STILL REMEMBER the morning I decided never to give another dinner party. It was foggy and I was hung over.

"Hal," I said. "Last night was the last time. We either decline all dinner invitations from now on, or accept them and reciprocate by taking our friends out to restaurants."

"Won't that be expensive?" he asked.

"Yes. But it's better than my going insane."

"How can cooking dinner for six make you insane?"

"I don't know," I lied. "It just does."

What Hal couldn't understand was that cooking was the least odious of the dinner-party chores. First there was the mixing and matching of guests, the careful separation of the shrilly ambitious from the quietly unassuming. Then there was the perusal of cookbooks, the search for the elusive recipe that required no more than 10 seconds preparation. This search always backfired with seduction of the most wrongheaded sort; I'd find myself stuffing six game hens with a far-too-expensive substance, then injuring myself with trussing needles, then dealing with six inevitably dried-out breasts.

Add to this the cleaning of bathrooms, the spinning of lettuce leaves, the assemblage of candles, flowers, appetizers, wines, desserts and coffees, and the last-minute emptying of the medicine cabinet in case Marilyn's husband still had that little problem, and there lay the roots of my looming insanity.

No, it wasn't cooking for six that shook me, because my paranoia always made me cook for 12. What if someone hated leg of lamb? What if someone liked it so much they had to eat four servings? What if I set fire to it? There had to be plenitude, alternatives, and excess. There had to be. To shortchange or disappoint an invited guest was unthinkable.

Hal was too male to appreciate this. The culture, after all, hadn't tyrannized him into feeling guilty for supposed domestic failures. He did, however, suffer vestigial guilt over failures of the wallet, which proved he was at least as retro as I.

"I don't think we can afford to reciprocate in restaurants," Hal said.

"Pizzas, Hal."

"We could make pizza at home for a third the cost!"

"Have you ever made a pizza, Hal?"

"How hard can it be?"

"Hard enough that everyone either goes out for it or calls out for it."

"Then I'll just make a big pot of spaghetti." Hal's eyes lit up like two blazing dinner candles."I'll do the dinner. I'll take responsibility."

I remember letting this notion sink through the hangover fog that shrouded my brain. This, I was thinking, is 1992 - not 1962. And Hal is an adult. And he is not from the generation of men that thinks it's perfectly acceptable to make spaghetti with sauce that comes from an envelope. He will understand that people require garlic bread, and that it can't be made with garlic powder.

"OK," I consented, against my better judgment. "Just don't invite anyone I like very much."

He invited the shrilly ambitious couple and two depressed singles who'd been set up three years previously to no romantic avail. "Go to an afternoon movie or something," he advised me. "I don't want you standing around telling me what to do."

"You mean like reminding you to make a salad and dessert?" I said brightly.

He just laughed. "Norman's bringing the salad," he said. "And Patty's bringing dessert."

"You're making the single people contribute?"

"They offered."

"So what? A potluck can't count as reciprocity."

"Sure it can. I'm doing the real work."

"I'd better make a vinaigrette before I go."

"Why?"

"Norman will bring bottled dressing. Low-calorie. With fake bacon bits floating in it. I know Norman. This is the kind of thing he does."

Hal almost literally threw me out the door, yelling after me that Norman was a splendid person for whom no woman was good enough.

When I returned from my double feature, the shrilly ambitious couple were seated in our living room lecturing Norman and Patty on what they'd bought that week while Hal poured scotch into smudged wine glasses.

"All right, I forgot about ice cubes," he muttered under his breath as I took off my coat.

"Hal's the official host tonight!" I announced, trying to clear myself of all potential dinner crimes, and taking a seat next to Patty. She gave me a defeated smile and gazed at the empty coffee table. No crackers, no cheese, nary a salted nut.

"There's no sense ruining our appetites," Hal said.

"No sense whatsoever," I agreed. "Besides, we'll need room for Patty's dessert, won't we?"

Patty's face fell into further defeat. "Oh shit," she said.

I told Hal in the kitchen that all human beings were undependable, which was why a good host always had a backup salad, backup dessert, backup everything. "I hate your uptightness," he said, leaning against a Pyrex bowl full of Norman's carrot-and-raisin salad.

"Not as much as you're going to hate that carrot business," I said, pouring myself more tepid scotch. "How come I don't smell spaghetti sauce?"

He pointed to an envelope graced with the buoyant grin of Chef Boyardee. "I haven't opened it yet," he said.

I didn't care that Hal served the worst meal anyone had since college. I didn't care that he ran out of wine or had assumed one box of spaghetti was plenty for six or that when Norman asked for bread Hal had to drag out half a bag of cold whole-wheat English muffins. What I cared about was that Hal was in no way humiliated. It wasn't just bravado, either. He said he would take responsibility for feeding his guests, but in reality he felt not one shred of responsibility for their well-being. He felt no shame, not one iota. It was brazen, bizarre, male beyond measure. He should have been wearing a codpiece.

"I don't get it," I said later. It was 8:30 p.m. Everyone was gone. "You're not even embarrassed."

"Why should I be? Everyone got fed."

"Everyone did not. They're probably out now, wolfing down cheeseburgers and cursing my existence."

"Why would they be cursing you? I made the dinner."

"Chef Boyardee made the dinner. And I'm the woman who let it happen."

"What?"

"The woman always gets blamed for hospitality deficiencies! Everyone pretends they've advanced into occasionally blaming the man, but trust me - it never happens!"

"Gosh, you're uptight."

"Stop using that word around me. How much did you spend on groceries?"

"Three bucks. Home entertaining is really the way to go."

"Yeah. Especially when you don't buy anything."

The only good aspect of Hal's dinner was that we never heard from the shrilly ambitious couple again, and Norman and Patty told so many people what a horrid thing I'd allowed my husband to do that we stopped getting invited anywhere. This meant we didn't owe anybody anything, hospitality-wise.

"Except for the Lees and the Howards," said Hal. "I'll just make a big pot of spaghetti."

I knew I couldn't go through it again. I didn't have the strength, the wherewithal to distance myself from Hal's heinous acts. Even if our guests were progressive enough to hate Hal instead of me when he served them nothing for dessert, was I progressive enough to join them? My calendar told me it was 1992, but I had to admit it was still 1962 in the more damaged parts of my brain.

"Pizzas, Hal. Out."

"You're chicken," he accused.

Chicken, but relaxed. I didn't feel obliged to spin lettuce leaves, empty medicine cabinets, or cringe when food appeared. Even if I blamed myself for Hal's domestic deficiencies, I wasn't crazy enough to blame myself for a restaurant's. And the restaurant, as it turned out, was nearly blameless: The pizzas dripped Gorgonzola, the salads were well dressed, and Hal even found a decent merlot.

The problem came when Hal realized he'd forgotten his credit card and had 25 cents in cash. He stared at me piercingly; I reached for my credit card. Alas, this pizza place didn't take credit cards, and the Lees and the Howards fought each other for the check.

Hal's color was amazing. He turned redder than the merlot, redder than I would have if faced with 12 exploded game hens. He stammered, he stumbled, his codpiece fell off.

"Why be embarrassed?" I asked him on the way home. "Everyone got fed."

I refrained from further comment purely because of the expression on Hal's red face. It wasn't a look of insanity exactly. It was more like, well, you know, uptight.

Foodie Fiction! (As Published in 1886--Oops, I Mean 1986, Which, Never mind Math, Is Equally Distant)

FRITO PIE
A WORK OF FOOD FICTION
     by the Eons Younger Ms. Gonick 
(If you've seen this before, please forgive and So Be It.) 

I WON`T SAY THAT BEN HAMILTON`S BEing a restaurant critic was the only reason I dated him. It was, however, the main one. And why not? They say you can fall for a rich man as easily as for a poor one; I say you can be as attracted to a man who has endless access to fabulous free meals as to one who frequents Burger King.

Opportunistic? Yes. Did I use Ben so I could go to the finest restaurants without making reservations six weeks in advance? Absolutely. Call me what you will -- like Edith Piaf, I regret nothing. If Ben suffered because of me, it was certainly no more than when his lamb was overcooked.

And I myself suffered a far more serious upheaval: I lost my lifelong love of fine food. And how am I convinced of this loss? Because I have just polished off a big bowl full of Kraft`s macaroni and cheese. Because, far worse, I enjoyed it.

I HAD READ Ben`s newspaper column for years, just as every restaurant-crazed resident of our city has. He has the power to make or break a new eatery with the stroke of a pen. I devoured his reports of festive evenings with feasting friends. Even more seductive than his accounts of duck breast with green peppercorns were the intimations of conviviality: ``The five of us agreed that no appetizer on the menu could match the leek pate with tarragon sauce.`` ``Although more than sated, our group shared a pear and ginger tart and a chocolate orange souffle, unanimously deeming the tart the superior dessert.``

I lusted for such pastimes as this: to luxuriate with my knowledgeable peers in this cocoon of fine food and wine, to share tender judgments, to evaluate, to discuss nothing more controversial than pear versus chocolate. ``I belong at that table,`` I`d reflect as I read.

I never dreamed I`d be so lucky as to meet Mr. Haute Cuisine, just as I have never dreamed of meeting Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger. He came to me, as miracles do, unannounced. At an elaborate cocktail party, I stood alone beside a gleaming chafing dish, and he walked up and introduced himself.

Did I panic and wish I had just freshened my lipstick? Did I wish I hadn`t just put a run in my stocking? No. I wished more than anything in the world that I was not in the middle of consuming a cold prawn dipped in mustard vinaigrette. I remembered him railing in his latest column against the omnipresence of the prawn: ``Are these crustaceans not the most ubiquitous of all? Can hosts not think of more imaginative fare?``

``Forgive me,`` I said quickly, nervously depositing the uneaten half of my prawn into a pitcher of aioli sauce. ``Oh God.`` I retrieved it clumsily and wrapped its nasty pinkness in a napkin.

``There is nothing to forgive,`` he said generously. He was 4 inches shorter than I, with blazing brown eyes. ``Try this,`` he said, slipping a scallop adorned with fresh cilantro into my mouth. ``Better?``

``Thank you,`` I murmured, as he fed me another one. Twice blessed. ``I read your column every week,`` I blurted.

``That`s very good of you,`` he said. ``And may I say that your dress is quite lovely? It is precisely the color of an eggplant.``

Imagine Priscilla Presley`s joy when the King of Rock `n` Roll chose her, from all the corners of the universe, to be his bride. Imagine mine.

``Do you fear innards?`` Ben then asked.

I didn`t, but if I had, I`d have lied. I prayed this was a prelude to something grand.

It was. ``I am sampling the sweetbreads in urchin sauce at Ernesto`s this Thursday. Would you care to join my party?``

``I adore thymus glands. I would be honored.``

OUR PARTY WAS comprised of three well-heeled couples. I was indisputably Ben Hamilton`s date. Oh, the unspeakable pleasure of being on a celebrity`s arm, even if the arm was attached to a shoulder that barely grazed my bicep.

The six of us unfolded our napkins as Ben uncapped his pen and ordered the entire meal. Appetizers covered the table.

``Let me squeeze just a drop of fresh lime onto your mussel,`` he said to me, solicitously. And one drop is exactly what he squeezed, rerouting the second one onto the tablecloth. ``Just enough to refresh,`` he explained. I ate it, and he was absolutely correct: Two drops would have overwhelmed the poor bivalve, while one drop made it sing.

Sweetbreads arrived; we discussed their tenderness, the complexity of their sauce. Wine flowed, as did well-pondered pronouncements on the tartness of the raspberries in creme fraiche.

Ben leaned toward me, the slightest trace of creme on his mustache. ``Are you having a good time?`` he asked.

``I`m in heaven,`` I told him.

I suppose this was the correct answer, because I was invited to the next five dinners. The membership of the convivial core group rotated, depending on who was in town, who owed whom what favor, who had a special feeling for sashimi.

By the fourth dinner, it occurred to me that Ben was starting to like me in my eggplant dress even better than he liked braised eggplant salad. By the fifth dinner, I stopped feeling so intimidated.

``I made a duck in cherry sauce once,`` I announced to the table. ``But I couldn`t figure out how to carve it. I think you have to be a surgeon.``

``It`s a snap,`` Ben said. ``You just need the right knives. But of course, the love affair between duck and cherry has long been over.``

I knew that, naturally -- my duck attempt had been seven years ago -- but, ever polite, I did not defend myself. ``How would you prepare it?`` I asked.

``With juniper berries,`` he promptly said. Inspiration lit his face. ``I`ll cook it for you all this Saturday. My house at 8. All right?``

All right? To be personally cooked for by Mr. Benjamin Hamilton? Was this how Priscilla felt when her husband sang Love Me Tender to her in their bedroom?

I SPENT ONE hour and 20 dollars selecting the wine to bring to Ben`s duck dinner. I figured if it wasn`t appropriate, at least it wasn`t dirt cheap. When I arrived at Ben`s spotless and cleverly decorated apartment, he was holding court in his model kitchen, emperor of the butcher block. We guests sipped champagne from chilled flute-shaped glasses and exclaimed happily over the first course of angel-hair pasta in a red-pepper puree. As everyone applauded, Ben turned directly to me and asked, ``What do you think?``

I was mesmerized by his perfectly alphabetized spice rack. ``It`s delicious,`` I said.

He beamed. A different wine was served with each course, and mine wasn`t one of them. ``Let me show you how to carve the duck,`` he said, leading me to the huge cutting board. He stood behind me, struggling to rest his chin on my shoulder, and guided my hand. ``See how easy it is?`` he encouraged, squeezing my thickening waist.

I inhaled. ``The duck smells like gin.``

``That`s because gin is made with juniper berries,`` he said. ``Very aromatic. And lovely, like yourself.``

I had never been compared to a juniper berry before, but maybe it was harmless enough. On the other hand, maybe it wasn`t. The next morning at 11 o`clock, my doorbell rang. When I answered it, a delivery boy handed me a large bouquet of gorgeous red radicchio.

The card read:  To my lovely juniper berry. I would have grilled these if I could. Love, Ben.

Now what? Although I felt no guilt about eating dinners he wasn`t paying for anyway, this juniper berry business was something else. Was I leading him on?

I put my radicchio in water and pondered a romance with Benjamin Hamilton. If there were a chance for passion it would have to flower on a turf not entirely his own. How could I get to know the real Ben if he were constantly surrounded by gastronomical sycophants? Could Jerry Hall relate to Mick if they never left the rock concert? Perhaps an all-day outing in the countryside would help: no waiters, no convivial guests, just sunshine and fresh air.

I decided to invite Ben on such a trek when I called to thank him for the bouquet. He loved the idea but wondered aloud what food to bring.

``I`ll make some sandwiches,`` I said. ``And I`ll bring some trail mix.``

``Trail mix?`` he echoed, as if this described the animal leavings one encountered on trails. ``Perhaps I could bring a few items.``

``Fine,`` I said, cheerily.

I WAS THE picture of the well-adjusted outdoors woman by 10 the next morning. But where was Ben? The ham on rye was wrapped and ready to go. It was 11, then it was 12. The doorbell rang.

``Sorry,`` he said. ``I had trouble locating the right pate.``

``Pate? In the sun? It`ll melt.``

He insisted it wouldn`t, but it did, all three kinds. All afternoon Ben carried a baguette that was half his height; it turned to cement by the end of our walk.

``I made sandwiches,`` I reminded him, handing him one. He stared at it.

``I used Dijon mustard.``

He sniffed slightly. ``I`m not an outdoor type,`` he admitted as we sat down to admire the view. He put his hand on my knee.

``Would you like to help me review Robert`s Bistro tonight?``

I declined. I told him I`d like him to meet some of my friends, that Dennis and June were giving a barbecue and all we had to do was bring our own meat.

``I would love to meet your friends,`` he said. ``I`ll supply our main course.``

MY LOVE OF fine cuisine aside, to me a barbecue is still a barbecue -- a good, old-fashioned, all-American tradition whether you use mesquite or not. But it was not to be that simple.

As Dennis and June`s grill sizzled with beef patties and foot-long hot dogs, Ben carefully laid our meal alongside: marinated duck liver and rabbit parts brushed with mustard.

Everyone gathered around to look.

``Duck liver?`` said my friend Bill.

``A delicacy,`` Ben assured him.

``I didn`t even know those little quack-quacks had livers,`` guffawed Bill, grabbing another beer.

When it was ready, Ben made up two perfect plates garnished with the papaya and ginger salad he`d brought and insisted we eat at the end of the table, away from the group.

``Don`t you want to try June`s potato salad?`` I asked.

``Certainly not!`` he said. ``This meal cries for papaya.``

My guilt, as I ate, was twofold: Our elitist meal tasted absolutely terrific and I, too, had no craving for June`s potato salad. I was also guilty because throughout the repast, Ben stared into my eyes and told me I was his juniper berry.

``I don`t think I am,`` I told him.

He looked huffy. ``It`s because I`m short, isn`t it?``

No, it`s because you`re crazy, a voice inside me said. But instead I told him, ``If you really like me, then you should let me do something for you. Let`s spend a quiet evening together. At my house. I`ll do all the work this time.``

I knew that no matter how hard I labored over cookbooks and Cuisinarts, I could never come up with a meal that would meet his standards -- but, perversely enough, I did not feel like trying.

Cooking badly is surprisingly easy and takes hardly any time at all. By the time Ben arrived, the Cheese Whiz waited in delicate twirls upon the Ritz crackers, assembled on my coffee table alongside the bottle of Thunderbird.

``Ice?`` I asked, tossing some cubes into a Fred Flintstone glass I had left over from childhood.

I could see he didn`t know if I was serious, but I kept my countenance sincere.

``You don`t seem very hungry,`` I said. ``Wait till you try the salad. You won`t resist that.`` At the table I presented him with a perfect square of lime Jell-O filled with miniature marshmallows and pimento and topped with a dollop of Miracle Whip. ``Come on and eat,`` I said with a straight face. He reached for the Thunderbird instead.

But I would not be put off. ``Now for the piece de resistance.`` I`d read the recipe for Frito Pie in a women`s magazine. You open a giant bag of Fritos corn chips, dump in hot canned chili and grated cheese and onion, mix lightly and serve directly from the bag. I guess the theory is that the chips melt into a pleasantly pliable state.

It was almost painful to observe Ben`s face. I thought he might barf, then I thought he might cry. ``Ben, don`t you like it? Aren`t I your juniper berry?``

He threw down his blue paper napkin. ``You are not!`` he squeaked, rising and heading for the door. ``You are perfectly disgusting!`` he called over his shoulder. ``To think I grilled a duck`s liver for you!``

Goodbye, conviviality. Goodbye, free meals. I don`t even care, and that is the problem. Thanks to Ben, I, a woman once obsessed with every subtle variation of fine cuisine, now crave Kraft macaroni and cheese, and prefer M&Ms to Godiva. He out-obsessed me.

I wonder if Priscilla Presley lost her taste for rock; I wonder if she listened to opera in the privacy of her room.