The Autumn of Our Spring

“Each day she sensed something creeping nearer. If it was happening to someone, it being unspeakable violence, how could she be happy: the real question of existence.” – Olivia Laing, Crudo 

Before the pandemic, I remember seeing a triangle of winter light out the window of Ben's apartment and feeling pure happiness. Everything good was contained in that shard of sun. That was before, but there will be other triangles.

My ancestors were stained glass artists. Here is what my great, great grandmother’s brother wrote in his memoirs: “An experienced glass stainer cannot be entirely sure that the work will live up to his conceptions. I admit that on more than one occasion I have, to the best of my knowledge, prepared everything properly in my studio, and yet I was greatly disappointed that the work, once in place, was not what I had intended.” When I read this I thought, “Ah, we are the same.”





Lately, I have been deriving joy from a Twitter account that shares works by the Russian impressionist painter Isaac Levitan. Most recently, I liked a painting called Golden autumn, village, 1889 because it glowed like contentment does. The other day I couldn’t remember what season it was. Fall, I thought. It’s fall. Spring is not when we prepare for death. And yet here we are, squirreling away acorns of paintings– or are they platitudes?

Isaac Levitan was in Anton Chekhov’s social circle. Apparently, he is the painter in Chekhov’s short story The Grasshopper, the lover of a married woman. The woman is a painter herself– in real life, Sofia Kuvshinnikova, but in the story she is Olga. Chekhov writes of Olga, “Her talents showed themselves in nothing so clearly as in her faculty for quickly becoming acquainted and on intimate terms with celebrated people. No sooner did any one become ever so little celebrated, and set people talking about him, than she made his acquaintance, got on friendly terms the same day, and invited him to her house.”

Olga is shallow and vain. She turns her back on her husband, a humble doctor, for the painter Ryabovsky, who eventually tires of her. Only after her husband contracts diphtheria from sucking phlegm from the back of a young patient’s throat does she realize the depths of her mistake: “She did not think now of the moonlight evening on the Volga, nor the words of love, nor their poetical life in the peasant's hut. She thought only that from an idle whim, from self-indulgence, she had sullied herself all over from head to foot in something filthy, sticky, which one could never wash off.”

Levitan was not pleased with this portrayal, and nearly challenged Chekhov to a duel over it. The plot itself is a classic set-up, like W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, but without the redemption arc. The story only works if the reader doesn’t know the husband is a hero, if they too believe he is unforgivably boring.

Who could be more desirable now than a doctor? After 9/11, I read that women were more attracted to firefighters. In 2016 and 2017, I found myself fantasizing about immigration lawyers. As I read The Grasshopper, Olga blended together with the voice of Kathy in Olivia Laing’s Crudo. “Maybe possessions were like beauty, they made you impermeable. Kathy loathed permeability, she wanted to be gilded. I mean everyone did.” Kathy is ripped from the life of Kathy Acker, herself a notorious borrower of narrative. (I am thinking of plagiarizing The Grasshopper.)

Kathy likes things; I like things, too. Last year, my mom wanted me to pick out a Christmas present. Something relatively practical that I wouldn’t buy for myself. I couldn’t think of anything I needed. I chose a Williams Sonoma panini press. I ordered it to Ben’s office– his coworkers admired it. We don’t know how to turn it off and on without unplugging it.

Kathy is a little bit of an emotional terrorist. Aren’t we all? I consider asking Ben, “If we had a dog, which one of us would it love more?” But we don’t have a dog. Today, I peel off my nailpolish in pieces that look like rose petals and I leave them in an empty coffee mug. I am embodying the word no on three levels: the feeling of no, the emotion of no, and the mood of no. It’s important for my mental health that these remain distinct.

I keep checking my email but if someone emails me I get mad. Therefore, I have to check my email to make sure nothing is in there to get mad at. I take great pride in doing the right thing. Like making a note to myself to fill out the census later. I am constantly dehydrated.

Here is a list of things I did in the before times: ate rose-flavored crème brûlée at Dover Street Market. Made out with a rockstar’s older brother in a booth at Dorrian's. Smelled every candle in abc carpet & home, peeled pieces of my skin off in a hotel pool in Austin, took a night train to Baku, broke up with a man whose anger scared me.

Yesterday, I found a corn husk on the counter. I thought Ben had snuck out to buy tamales. Of course, you can buy tamales frozen. You can buy everything frozen. Why am I so distrusting?

My great, great grandmother’s brother designed the stained glass windows of the Gresham Palace in Budapest. (It was never a palace, just apartments and offices.) Now, it is a Four Seasons hotel. I emailed the hotel before we visited and a woman met us in the lobby. The only original windows are in the back staircase. She took us to see them.

The back staircase was more like a past self than a secret. “Who is your favorite Beatle?” I asked Ben the day after we got engaged. He said Paul. I asked him to guess mine. He said George, which is correct. “I’m glad we got that out of the way,” I said.

We reveal our past selves to one another out of order. I used to be a lifeguard and a cheerleader. I took ballet for 18 years and stood on my toes. I won an award for a painting of a roseate spoonbill based on a National Geographic photo. I once made a candy shop out of tiny pieces of paper with jars of peppermints as small as larvae.

I know now that Barneys was a warning. WeWork was a warning. We were heading down this road in a clown car, pandemic or not. Maybe I’ve coped with it by cutting out other sources of anxiety, like phone calls. I get along well with negative people, I just don’t get along with deeply unhappy people pretending to be happy.

***

When I moved out of New York City in 2018, my walk to the train station took me past a restaurant called Zeph’s. The kitchen window faced the sidewalk and it was possible to see the chef chopping herbs and sometimes the smell of pork chops wafted out, but I could also smell their compost pile in the heat of August.

The restaurant was a converted mill and the front steps were painted purple. One day I was walking past with Ben and crouched to take a picture of some white lilies. Those were some of the first walks we took together.

“We can never eat at Zeph’s,” I told him. The restaurant had taken on a special quality. He understood intuitively. “Walking by and knowing that it’s a shitty restaurant inside would make Zeph’s less special,” he said. Zeph’s was a set of smoldering windows at dusk. It was the fruit of love without a rotten core. I read Yelp reviews that called the interior dated and felt angry on the restaurant’s behalf.

On the day of the Kavanaugh hearing I came back from Brooklyn and trudged uphill past the window, overhearing the Congressional testimony on the kitchen radio. I had bled through my tights on the train while refreshing my Twitter feed but I was wearing all black and it didn’t matter. I felt in sync with Zeph’s that day.

I could have gone on forever like this, but once day I heard a rumor Zeph’s was going to close. We had one perfect meal there in the spring. I ate duck and looked out the windows I was used to looking into. Then, one day, it did close.

I saw the owner one more time. It was pouring rain. Ben and I had run for the train together. Through Grand Central, like a movie, jumping inside the doors as the alarm blared. As we walked up the hill to my apartment I looked over my shoulder into the restaurant. The owner was sitting alone in the dining room. We made eye contact– at least, I think we did.

“We couldn’t have saved it,” Ben assured me. Even if we ate there every week. But the message of the moment seems to be we can save everything we love if we just try hard enough. I’m not sure what to do with that.

***

Yesterday, I went outside for the first time in three weeks. Ben was worried about me. I didn’t see how the simple action of going outside could be so powerful. My staying inside for too long was a form of wrongness, but I went outside so now it’s ok. Going outside was morally neutral. (You can talk yourself out of doing anything this way.)

I found a pad of post-its inside my desk shaped like little polar bears. I took notes during a webinar about filing for unemployment. Each bear could accommodate a single sentence. I lined them up on the edge of the desk like an ice floe. Like a procession toward– I don’t want to think about it.

There was a state legislator on the webinar. She started crying and covered her face. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said. Nobody wanted her to be embarrassed. We all thought she was very brave. We thought: she speaks for the bears.

There’s a hole in the ceiling above our shower. I have to resist the urge to check under the trash bag we taped over it, like a bandage, to see whether it is healing on its own. It’s not.

“A design is a promise and only if the one who produces the final work is talented enough will it be kept,” my ancestor wrote.