Week 2: Meat, Wine, Wool, Music.
I keep forgetting to take pictures of my food. Maybe that means I am growing out of a ridiculous habit. Or maybe it only means that the food is more delicious, now, too delicious to stop and photograph.
There was lots of watercress left over from the tea party last week, so I made a creamy watercress soup with potatoes, from a Mark Bittman recipe. I cleaned the house from top to bottom this afternoon. I did some errands. I went down to Smith Street to get some shoes repaired, and I stopped by Paisano’s Meat Market down there to buy a natural roasting chicken. And then they had this deal, ten pounds of natural chicken legs for $10. I asked about it. “For you,” said the shop guy, in the manner of cute flirty shop guys at cute old-timey stores. So that’s how I came to be wandering Smith Street with a hand-killing fifteen-pound plastic bag of chicken in the freezing cold tonight.
Meat isn’t something I normally think of spaving on, but I couldn’t pass that up. It’s in five separate packets in the freezer now, waiting.
Then I went to Smith & Vine and bought wine for Christmas dinner and Christmas Eve dinner or any other Christmas applications that might be necessary. I bought a couple of nice bottles of red, a small bottle of Sauternes—I love buying wine; I’m not really knowledgable about wine but there is something about the whole experience that I just like, wandering the store, reading labels, asking for help, all of it—and I was on the subway on the way home with my fifteen pounds of chicken and my bottles of wine before I realized that my dad’s become allergic to wine in the last year, which I felt like a big dork for forgetting.
But the high point of the week was going to see the New York Philharmonic perform Handel’s Messiah. It was M—’s idea.
She got the tickets. We sat in the fourth row, off to the left, right in the sight-line of the soloist singers when they were sitting and waiting for their parts.
I’ve never been to many classical music performances. Not as an adult. Not since the childhood attempts at cello lessons and musical education were abandoned. The Messiah was amazing. I came from a day of frantic errand-doing. I’d been shopping for a coat, all over everywhere, and had finally found one. Shopping for a coat put me in a consumer frenzy, a fashion frenzy, as though all the austerity of the last few months were striving to come undone all at once. Well, you know how it is. When you’re shopping for a car or looking to get a haircut, how all you notice for a while are cars or hairstyles? So peeling the lid off of fashion made me unable to think about anything else, as I piled into Avery Fisher Hall, as I wended my way through the crowds of different-looking people (more of a refined-preppie vibe than what I’m used to, here at the AFH), found M—, and beat our path upstairs into the warm, wood-lined concert hall along with the 2,000 or so others.
Hush. They tune up, like the sound you’ve heard at the beginning of so many recordings.
There were shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
I snuggle down into my new coat in the seat. I like the feeling of the felty wool between my fingers as I button the buttons.
The orchestra, the chorus, the conductor and the singers are all wearing black. Only the soprano is wearing red, a billowy, firebird-red gown. I imagine the orchestra members shopping for their clothes, and the soprano too. I wonder whether she wears the same dress every night of the performances, or if she varies it. When I was a child, we had a picture book at my house called “The New York Philharmonic Gets Dressed.” It was a great hit with my sister and me. We used to read it backwards, call it “The New York Philharmonic Gets Undressed,” and laugh until our sides ached.
He shall feed His flock like a shepherd: and He shall gather the lambs with His arm, and carry them in His bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.
It’s been a strange year. In some ways, it went so fast. In others, everything looks different now.
Just the other day, my first good friend lost his job because of the financial crisis. In journalism, of course, which is hit extra hard. Another friend is looking, and having a hard time finding. It makes me feel—I don’t know. Grateful, sorry, intense. As the singers sing, I move through pools of anxiety and pools of comfort, like a swimmer in a lake crossing through colder and warmer patches of water.
He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.
I like the countertenor best. He is handsome. When he says, “He gave his back to the smiters, and His cheeks to them that plucked off the hair; He hid not His face from shame and spitting,” he seems to be in his own world of feeling. What crazy courage, I think, to stand up in front of two thousand people and sing. And just to stand there. No fly girls, no hand mic, no pyrotechnics. Just a man and his beautiful, Neil-Young-like quaver.
All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned ev’ry one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
After the show, it’s cold. The people disperse quietly. M— goes into her subway at Columbus Circle, and I walk across the southern edge of the Park, looking for mine. There are doormen inside of lighted buildings, wearing uniforms; there are wreaths and silvery boughs arranged behind plate glass. I like this part of town, I think, as we walk away from the performance. It feels almost civilized.
I turn at the glittering temple of the Mac store and walk down 5th Avenue. The élite department stores have their holiday window displays out. Bergdorf’s has a four-seasons motif; I walk past winter. A winter bride, a winter huntress, hundreds of layers of chiffon and lace, pallid skin, accessories. Henri Bendel is emerald green and Takashimaya has shiny handbags, so perfect and new, like fruits at an unnatural stage of ripeness. Sometimes I think that shopping may be an addicition to this kind of newness and shine, a death-defying state that we can never replicate at home. Yes: maybe we shop to give the finger to death. To try to.
But this year, even at Escada, the week before Christmas, things are 60% off. This is the eeriest holiday retail season I’ve ever seen. Past Bulgari and the St. Regis Hotel, past the breakfast-at window of Tiffany’s, there’s a stuffed peacock inside, the jewelry has been taken in for the night. There are girls in wool coats and Uggs on the street, not a lot of people out, in this un-peopled shopping area after hours, but some.
Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in!
There’s a man-sized, LED-lit snowflake dangling over the intersection of 5th Avenue and 55th Street.
And around the corner, the strange non-residential fashion business college where I taught comp this fall. Here is the subway I used to come from in the mornings, completely transfigured now.
New York: you’re the tension of always being ’somewhere,’ and always feeling lost in the flux. Between belonging, as a small part of your cosmos, and never belonging. How you forget.
I know that my redeemer liveth, and he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.
The train is warm, it sways. I scribble in a notebook, I look at the people and their coats. The music reverberates in my head. And still, walking up Nassau Street. It is supposed to snow, any hour now. I stop in for bread and eggs. They are playing something else, something poppy. All that I just heard starts to dislodge, I don’t want to let it go, all the parts that made me shiver.
Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be chang’d, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.
‘We shall all be chang’d!’ The way the tenor sounded when he sang that. So hopeful, and so frightened too. We want to change, and we have a terror of changing. It gives me that choked-up feeling, like crying at a wedding. We shall all be chang’d. Yes. It kills me.
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