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| Alberto Giacometti, The Palace at 4 a.m., 1932 |
The day after our engagement, Ben and I went to MoMA. I moved more quickly than him through the galleries. I wish I could say it’s because I liked catching sight of him across the room and feeling the rush of everything that had happened in the last 24 hours, but actually I’ve always been this way.
I stopped in front of a piece by Alberto Giacometti called The Palace at 4 a.m. In true surrealist fashion, it evokes consciousness stripped down to fundamentals. In one palace ‘room’ is a woman in front of three panels. At the center of the palace is a shoehorn-shaped figure that I’ve read is supposed to evoke the artist. Another room contains a dangling cord of vertebrae beneath a fourth room with a birdlike skeleton.
It was February 29th, the day the first coronavirus death was reported in the United States and a month after WHO declared a public health emergency. Nobody I knew was panicking yet, although I had begun to order extra items for the pantry. All month Ben had been dropping hints he was going to propose, asking me to keep the entire weekend open. It was hard not to weigh every new piece of news in counterbalance to the giddy anticipation I felt. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but what if it was never going to drop? What if it was just pressing down slowly?*
I’ve seen the soul depicted as a ribbon of smoke leaving the body. As people clamored to congratulate me on my new identity as an engaged woman, I felt a version of myself slipping away. My best friend took me for a reflexology massage and I told her she should consider stockpiling groceries, wincing in pain as the masseuse dug his thumb into my arch. Afterwards, over oysters, I tried to explain the loss I was feeling. “I think a part of me always thought I would end up alone.” After I knew Ben was going to propose, but before he actually did, I had the strangest sensation that men were staring at me everywhere I went. On February 27th, a guy I hooked up with in college requested me on Facebook and my finger hovered between accept and reject. I barely recognized him. It was like I was a dying star emitting sexual energy. (Or maybe I was just ovulating.) Men knew I wasn’t for them anymore.**
This is a secret, but it’s one that feels safe to tell now. Just like it’s acceptable for me to make a public Pinterest board or browse wedding dresses in bed with Ben. A few weeks before he proposed, ring advertisements started following me around the web and I would try to cover them up when I showed my boss something on my computer. It’s embarrassing to want things. Now that I have a ring, the advertisements have multiplied, but it’s socially acceptable for them to wink in the margins of long book reviews. Someone wants to marry me.
Yesterday, I found a letter I wrote to New York Magazine’s resident therapist in 2017 and never sent. “I think of thoughtfulness as a key you use to open door after door until finally you get to the room where you don’t have to worry about people leaving you.” In that letter, I am the figure at the center of Giacometti’s palace. At least, that is how I have imagined myself these last weeks. The woman in front of the three screens is the way the world sees me: first a girl, then a wife, then a mother.
I am sitting in an office above Rockefeller Center watching an appraiser measure my engagement ring with calipers. His desk is glass topped, and every time a bird flies by outside, its reflection appears like a bug skittering across the periphery of my vision. The spa music playing in the background is interrupted by a clock that chimes on the quarter hour, and despite that, I think I could lose all sense of time here. “You’re on the cusp of a modern cut,” the appraiser tells me. The diamond is imperfect. As he fills out his report he rates the proportions fair then pauses before switching it to good. Yesterday was my 29th birthday.
I take the elevator back to the street, its doors decorated like my ring with art deco filigree. The sounds of the Today Show taping and fire engines I was so desperate to escape an hour ago have now quieted. It occurs to me that this is the last ‘normal’ thing I might do for a while. I take the train downtown to the literary journal where I work. My ring, freshly cleaned, twists its way around my finger like a pencil skirt slit slowly rotating to the front of my thigh.
A CNN headline reads: “Coronavirus is about to change your life.”
For a year or so the ring sat in a bakelite ring box in Ben’s mother’s bathroom. Sometimes I would peek at it while we were visiting. Its origins aren’t totally clear. In one telling, it belonged to his great grandmother. In another telling, it belonged to his grandfather’s aunt who never married and worked for the state department. In yet another telling, she worked for the state department but was really a spy. None of these origins can be gleaned by the appraiser’s loupe, but each of his minor pronouncements feels heavy with kinship. “Fluorescence: none.”
The train is emptier than usual, I count a few masks. For three years I worked as a freelance writer and strategist, often in complete isolation. My short term contracts (lasting anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of years) ended with little closure except politely worded emails. Today I will get an email from the literary journal telling me we are working from home indefinitely. I overhear my coworkers exchanging phone numbers and write “summer camp feeling” in the little red notebook we give away to subscribers. Near the end of the day, we gather in a conference room with wine. My boss clinks my glass and deadpans “It was nice knowing you.” It feels like the last day of summer camp, his wife says.
Since I started the job two months ago I have felt like a raw nerve or a roving pen tip, overwhelmed by having coworkers after so long. I gather all of the books on my desk into a shopping bag and push the vase my best friend sent me as an engagement gift under my desk with the toe of my boot. On the street, I fight back tears. I have so much more to lose now.
I know I will always associate the pandemic with my engagement. I’ve started to think of Giacometti’s bird skeleton as a bat, the alleged source of the virus. It hangs like the Sword of Damocles over the entire palace. And the spine below? It’s a dinosaur’s tail. It signifies every living creature, every extinct creature. All of us riding through space on this imperfect diamond. And I am one of the lucky ones. God, I am so lucky.
Ben says that when we have kids we will look back on this time as the time when we were the most free. He comes home with a duffel bag full of canned tomatoes and hamburger meat. I lean over and tell him “thank you for everything you do for me and for our home.” Because it is, in the end, our home.
I haven’t met Ben’s living grandparents. They are both in long term care near Seattle and have thankfully not been affected by the virus. I pray that doesn’t change. I have an old receipt from a Christmas order his grandmother placed to the Vermont Country Store. I found it in a suitcase Ben’s parents lent me and kept it because the list helped me feel close to her. On the list of gifts was a peppermint pig, a candy confection that you smash with a hammer. Since Donald Trump was elected, I feel like both the pig and the hammer.
I remember one November day in particular, the day of an important congressional testimony about corruption. The wind coming off the Hudson river smelled like the layered bits of leaves along the bottom. It reminded me of the eels that swam in the lake at my summer camp, the ones we only saw when they floated, inert, to the surface. (I fished one out with a milk crate once, eyes like tumors.)
I would say that there was something in the air, but our senses are more astute than we give them credit for. My brain knit together half-glimpsed headlines about the market and complaints of unanswered emails from major magazines. A longtime client paid me late two months in a row. My animal instincts were telling me to hunker down, look for a cave, a safe perch. Shortly after, the literary journal emailed me back.
“How is your new job?” asks my old roommate. It’s the day after they told us all to work from home and the last time I will visit a restaurant for the foreseeable future. Before I met Ben, Lisa was the closest thing I had to a partner. We took care of each other when we were sick and during break ups, when it felt like our lives were ending and the rest of the world was just fine. (How appropriate, to be having lunch amid the inverse circumstance.)
Once, an old employer made me book a trip to London on my personal credit card. Without my asking, Lisa gave me $300 in cash which I used for meals after the hotel inevitably overdrew my bank account. The first night I was there I walked along the Thames and cried. On the way home, after my company finally picked up the tab, I luxuriated in a British Airlines row to myself and ate extra servings of ice cream. I landed to a flow of panicked text messages. It was November 14th, 2015. Between the time my plane took off and landed, terrorists attacked the Bataclan theater in Paris.
The dislocation I felt in that moment resurfaced early this February when I woke up to screaming in my hallway. I looked through the peephole and saw a police officer leading a woman away, wailing with grief. Unsure of what to do, I went outside to get coffee and found a news crew already in front of the building. “A child was stabbed,” they told me. It wasn’t until later– after I had gathered my things and fled to Ben’s apartment, after I refreshed the local news once every five minutes, that I learned the child lived.
For the next few days, everything took on a sinister cast. A man told another man to fuck off on the train and my heart raced. And yet, my knowledge of the impending proposal made everything sparkle. I was stuck halfway down the throat of the universe. I told Lisa this story over lunch after we compared our quarantine plans. “You and I were always good in a disaster,” I said.
New York City is full of incongruities, which is why you can be staring at a pile of dog shit but be smelling homemade tortillas. Or watching ice skaters in Prospect Park as the mayor declares a state of emergency.
The week I knew Ben was going to propose, I went to get a manicure after work. It was Fat Tuesday and raining. A jazz band was playing in the doorway of a pizza restaurant and the smell of truffle oil exploded from the doorway of every overpriced French bistro in the West Village.
Each woman who entered the nail salon had the same lost, damp look before snapping into the grooves of a familiar script:
“How long is the wait?”
“Round or square?”
“Cut or filed?”
“Cash or card?”
I tuned into various conversations. None overtly hinted at the impending emergency. Two women discussed global markets, another wedding planning. The girl next to me called her boyfriend over to pull her wallet out of her tight pants pocket as her day-glo nails dried. I wanted to test the waters with strangers: “My boyfriend is going to propose this weekend.” But I didn’t. I wondered if any of these women ever sat in the bathroom stall at work and moved a ring onto their left ring finger, just to see what it would look like.
It felt like spring outside even though it was only 40 degrees. I could smell it. Soon Dow would plunge. Soon a corner near my office would be littered with Sotheby’s catalogs. Soon I would see a girl yelling at a bicyclist from the back of a convertible, her hand trailing like Princess Grace. And I would think be careful.
“The diamond business is an illusion propped up by romance,” says the appraiser. “People don’t care about romance anymore, they care about fundamentals.”
According to Giacometti, The Palace at 4 a.m. relates to "a period of six months passed in the presence of a woman who, concentrating all life in herself, transported my every moment into a state of enchantment. We constructed a fantastical palace in the night—a very fragile palace of matches. At the least false movement a whole section would collapse. We always began it again."
Let’s go back in time: Ben texts me the address of a hotel in Manhattan. I ask the front desk for the room key. I open the door. He is sitting in a chair facing the door. Next to him is the ring and a bouquet of flowers. He gets down on one knee. I begin to cry.
Or back even further. A bat clinging to a wet cave, unaware of its own poison.
Even further. A fish crawls out of the ocean. Several million years from having four legs.
*When I see someone wearing a mask in MoMA, the word that comes to mind is “punctum,” a relic of my college English classes, I have to remind myself what it means. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes uses punctum to describe the effect of a photograph. “Some soldiers with nuns behind them served as an example to explain what the punctum was for me… but when Bruce Gilden photographs a nun and some drag queens together (New Orleans, 1973), the deliberate (not to say, rhetorical) contrast produces no effect on me…” That’s why I could look at someone on the train in a mask and feel unaffected, but reflected in one of Donald Judd’s stacks I felt a sense of dread. Why I could look at a Picasso and think of the tourists quarantined in Costa del Sol, loosening the elastic hooked behind their ears so that they could eat croquettes. In the eye, the lacrimal punctum is the place where tears collect.
**The night before my best friend’s wedding a man grabbed her ass at a bar and she had to hold the other maid of honor and I back from confronting him.
I stopped in front of a piece by Alberto Giacometti called The Palace at 4 a.m. In true surrealist fashion, it evokes consciousness stripped down to fundamentals. In one palace ‘room’ is a woman in front of three panels. At the center of the palace is a shoehorn-shaped figure that I’ve read is supposed to evoke the artist. Another room contains a dangling cord of vertebrae beneath a fourth room with a birdlike skeleton.
It was February 29th, the day the first coronavirus death was reported in the United States and a month after WHO declared a public health emergency. Nobody I knew was panicking yet, although I had begun to order extra items for the pantry. All month Ben had been dropping hints he was going to propose, asking me to keep the entire weekend open. It was hard not to weigh every new piece of news in counterbalance to the giddy anticipation I felt. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but what if it was never going to drop? What if it was just pressing down slowly?*
I’ve seen the soul depicted as a ribbon of smoke leaving the body. As people clamored to congratulate me on my new identity as an engaged woman, I felt a version of myself slipping away. My best friend took me for a reflexology massage and I told her she should consider stockpiling groceries, wincing in pain as the masseuse dug his thumb into my arch. Afterwards, over oysters, I tried to explain the loss I was feeling. “I think a part of me always thought I would end up alone.” After I knew Ben was going to propose, but before he actually did, I had the strangest sensation that men were staring at me everywhere I went. On February 27th, a guy I hooked up with in college requested me on Facebook and my finger hovered between accept and reject. I barely recognized him. It was like I was a dying star emitting sexual energy. (Or maybe I was just ovulating.) Men knew I wasn’t for them anymore.**
This is a secret, but it’s one that feels safe to tell now. Just like it’s acceptable for me to make a public Pinterest board or browse wedding dresses in bed with Ben. A few weeks before he proposed, ring advertisements started following me around the web and I would try to cover them up when I showed my boss something on my computer. It’s embarrassing to want things. Now that I have a ring, the advertisements have multiplied, but it’s socially acceptable for them to wink in the margins of long book reviews. Someone wants to marry me.
Yesterday, I found a letter I wrote to New York Magazine’s resident therapist in 2017 and never sent. “I think of thoughtfulness as a key you use to open door after door until finally you get to the room where you don’t have to worry about people leaving you.” In that letter, I am the figure at the center of Giacometti’s palace. At least, that is how I have imagined myself these last weeks. The woman in front of the three screens is the way the world sees me: first a girl, then a wife, then a mother.
***
I am sitting in an office above Rockefeller Center watching an appraiser measure my engagement ring with calipers. His desk is glass topped, and every time a bird flies by outside, its reflection appears like a bug skittering across the periphery of my vision. The spa music playing in the background is interrupted by a clock that chimes on the quarter hour, and despite that, I think I could lose all sense of time here. “You’re on the cusp of a modern cut,” the appraiser tells me. The diamond is imperfect. As he fills out his report he rates the proportions fair then pauses before switching it to good. Yesterday was my 29th birthday.
I take the elevator back to the street, its doors decorated like my ring with art deco filigree. The sounds of the Today Show taping and fire engines I was so desperate to escape an hour ago have now quieted. It occurs to me that this is the last ‘normal’ thing I might do for a while. I take the train downtown to the literary journal where I work. My ring, freshly cleaned, twists its way around my finger like a pencil skirt slit slowly rotating to the front of my thigh.
A CNN headline reads: “Coronavirus is about to change your life.”
For a year or so the ring sat in a bakelite ring box in Ben’s mother’s bathroom. Sometimes I would peek at it while we were visiting. Its origins aren’t totally clear. In one telling, it belonged to his great grandmother. In another telling, it belonged to his grandfather’s aunt who never married and worked for the state department. In yet another telling, she worked for the state department but was really a spy. None of these origins can be gleaned by the appraiser’s loupe, but each of his minor pronouncements feels heavy with kinship. “Fluorescence: none.”
The train is emptier than usual, I count a few masks. For three years I worked as a freelance writer and strategist, often in complete isolation. My short term contracts (lasting anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of years) ended with little closure except politely worded emails. Today I will get an email from the literary journal telling me we are working from home indefinitely. I overhear my coworkers exchanging phone numbers and write “summer camp feeling” in the little red notebook we give away to subscribers. Near the end of the day, we gather in a conference room with wine. My boss clinks my glass and deadpans “It was nice knowing you.” It feels like the last day of summer camp, his wife says.
Since I started the job two months ago I have felt like a raw nerve or a roving pen tip, overwhelmed by having coworkers after so long. I gather all of the books on my desk into a shopping bag and push the vase my best friend sent me as an engagement gift under my desk with the toe of my boot. On the street, I fight back tears. I have so much more to lose now.
***
I know I will always associate the pandemic with my engagement. I’ve started to think of Giacometti’s bird skeleton as a bat, the alleged source of the virus. It hangs like the Sword of Damocles over the entire palace. And the spine below? It’s a dinosaur’s tail. It signifies every living creature, every extinct creature. All of us riding through space on this imperfect diamond. And I am one of the lucky ones. God, I am so lucky.
Ben says that when we have kids we will look back on this time as the time when we were the most free. He comes home with a duffel bag full of canned tomatoes and hamburger meat. I lean over and tell him “thank you for everything you do for me and for our home.” Because it is, in the end, our home.
I haven’t met Ben’s living grandparents. They are both in long term care near Seattle and have thankfully not been affected by the virus. I pray that doesn’t change. I have an old receipt from a Christmas order his grandmother placed to the Vermont Country Store. I found it in a suitcase Ben’s parents lent me and kept it because the list helped me feel close to her. On the list of gifts was a peppermint pig, a candy confection that you smash with a hammer. Since Donald Trump was elected, I feel like both the pig and the hammer.
***
I remember one November day in particular, the day of an important congressional testimony about corruption. The wind coming off the Hudson river smelled like the layered bits of leaves along the bottom. It reminded me of the eels that swam in the lake at my summer camp, the ones we only saw when they floated, inert, to the surface. (I fished one out with a milk crate once, eyes like tumors.)
I would say that there was something in the air, but our senses are more astute than we give them credit for. My brain knit together half-glimpsed headlines about the market and complaints of unanswered emails from major magazines. A longtime client paid me late two months in a row. My animal instincts were telling me to hunker down, look for a cave, a safe perch. Shortly after, the literary journal emailed me back.
“How is your new job?” asks my old roommate. It’s the day after they told us all to work from home and the last time I will visit a restaurant for the foreseeable future. Before I met Ben, Lisa was the closest thing I had to a partner. We took care of each other when we were sick and during break ups, when it felt like our lives were ending and the rest of the world was just fine. (How appropriate, to be having lunch amid the inverse circumstance.)
Once, an old employer made me book a trip to London on my personal credit card. Without my asking, Lisa gave me $300 in cash which I used for meals after the hotel inevitably overdrew my bank account. The first night I was there I walked along the Thames and cried. On the way home, after my company finally picked up the tab, I luxuriated in a British Airlines row to myself and ate extra servings of ice cream. I landed to a flow of panicked text messages. It was November 14th, 2015. Between the time my plane took off and landed, terrorists attacked the Bataclan theater in Paris.
The dislocation I felt in that moment resurfaced early this February when I woke up to screaming in my hallway. I looked through the peephole and saw a police officer leading a woman away, wailing with grief. Unsure of what to do, I went outside to get coffee and found a news crew already in front of the building. “A child was stabbed,” they told me. It wasn’t until later– after I had gathered my things and fled to Ben’s apartment, after I refreshed the local news once every five minutes, that I learned the child lived.
For the next few days, everything took on a sinister cast. A man told another man to fuck off on the train and my heart raced. And yet, my knowledge of the impending proposal made everything sparkle. I was stuck halfway down the throat of the universe. I told Lisa this story over lunch after we compared our quarantine plans. “You and I were always good in a disaster,” I said.
***
New York City is full of incongruities, which is why you can be staring at a pile of dog shit but be smelling homemade tortillas. Or watching ice skaters in Prospect Park as the mayor declares a state of emergency.
The week I knew Ben was going to propose, I went to get a manicure after work. It was Fat Tuesday and raining. A jazz band was playing in the doorway of a pizza restaurant and the smell of truffle oil exploded from the doorway of every overpriced French bistro in the West Village.
Each woman who entered the nail salon had the same lost, damp look before snapping into the grooves of a familiar script:
“How long is the wait?”
“Round or square?”
“Cut or filed?”
“Cash or card?”
I tuned into various conversations. None overtly hinted at the impending emergency. Two women discussed global markets, another wedding planning. The girl next to me called her boyfriend over to pull her wallet out of her tight pants pocket as her day-glo nails dried. I wanted to test the waters with strangers: “My boyfriend is going to propose this weekend.” But I didn’t. I wondered if any of these women ever sat in the bathroom stall at work and moved a ring onto their left ring finger, just to see what it would look like.
It felt like spring outside even though it was only 40 degrees. I could smell it. Soon Dow would plunge. Soon a corner near my office would be littered with Sotheby’s catalogs. Soon I would see a girl yelling at a bicyclist from the back of a convertible, her hand trailing like Princess Grace. And I would think be careful.
***
“The diamond business is an illusion propped up by romance,” says the appraiser. “People don’t care about romance anymore, they care about fundamentals.”
According to Giacometti, The Palace at 4 a.m. relates to "a period of six months passed in the presence of a woman who, concentrating all life in herself, transported my every moment into a state of enchantment. We constructed a fantastical palace in the night—a very fragile palace of matches. At the least false movement a whole section would collapse. We always began it again."
Let’s go back in time: Ben texts me the address of a hotel in Manhattan. I ask the front desk for the room key. I open the door. He is sitting in a chair facing the door. Next to him is the ring and a bouquet of flowers. He gets down on one knee. I begin to cry.
Or back even further. A bat clinging to a wet cave, unaware of its own poison.
Even further. A fish crawls out of the ocean. Several million years from having four legs.
*When I see someone wearing a mask in MoMA, the word that comes to mind is “punctum,” a relic of my college English classes, I have to remind myself what it means. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes uses punctum to describe the effect of a photograph. “Some soldiers with nuns behind them served as an example to explain what the punctum was for me… but when Bruce Gilden photographs a nun and some drag queens together (New Orleans, 1973), the deliberate (not to say, rhetorical) contrast produces no effect on me…” That’s why I could look at someone on the train in a mask and feel unaffected, but reflected in one of Donald Judd’s stacks I felt a sense of dread. Why I could look at a Picasso and think of the tourists quarantined in Costa del Sol, loosening the elastic hooked behind their ears so that they could eat croquettes. In the eye, the lacrimal punctum is the place where tears collect.
**The night before my best friend’s wedding a man grabbed her ass at a bar and she had to hold the other maid of honor and I back from confronting him.
This is so masterful woven. Sharing now on Twitter. Forgive me -- I don't know your handle to tag you. I'm @saintsoftness .
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