I have lunch with Thomas Keller every day.  I watch him working in his cool stone kitchen.  I learn to confit eggplant, I learn the difference between glazed and carmelized, I contemplate pureeing artichokes.

He is in a thirteen inch computer on my breakfast room table.  I close the blinds behind him so that he is not in the glare.  The blinds are plain and squared and seem a perfect backdrop for his assured presentation.

He soothes me. 

I eat my Trader Joe’s fried rice with a fresh fried egg on top and I can pretend that the world is not in the midst of stopping on its axis, that I don’t need to analyze the disease and death counts in my city today, that I don’t need to have a recoiling reaction to the thought of going to the grocery store. 

Look at how carefully he chooses the angle for cutting those carrots.

I am not a cook.  Yes, I know how to cook but that role is taken over in my household by a much more enthused and reliable family member.  But I am an able eater and a steady student of restaurant culture.  I have never been to a Thomas Keller restaurant.  A parade of small dishes which will almost assuredly contain ingredients I don’t like is off-putting.  And who has the budget. 

            After lunch I wash the dishes and make tea which we will each take to our separate desks.  We are mirroring the habits of our true office, where our entire team has tea and treats after lunch.  When we hire someone new we ask them if they prefer Earl Grey or firm black Indian tea.

            There is a line of writing burning in my mind.  I am eager to get to the dining room table and write it down.  I know how those things can just evaporate.  But I’m asked to help make starter for focaccia that we will have tomorrow.  It takes three risings which explains why it’s been years since we’ve made it.  But now we can monitor risings and basting and all of the other things that seemed like something only our mothers and grandmothers did.

            Our street is turning into an updated agri-mercantile experience.  We trade yeast for a container of Sunday sauce, pumpkin bread for a serving of beef stew from the Belgian restaurant we are trying to keep in business.  I am familiar with every new bud on the grapevine and I worry we are going through the thyme in the front garden at too quick a pace.  Our own sustainability experience. 

            Tomorrow I will start to learn about leadership from Anna Wintour.  Just in case I ever have people to lead or cajole ever again.  But now I’m ferreting around in the cupboards to see if there is something we can put on top of the fresh focaccia tomorrow. 

I’m a little too good at this.

Tea in the morning. French grammar, needlework, a stub nib pen with jade green ink; a walk in the garden in sturdy shoes.

I could be Jane Austen’s neighbor.

Lunch will be lentils and chicken soup. Later maybe some Chopin preludes.

And more tea. Maybe a cookie. I should probably call it a biscuit.

At bedtime – silver silence out the window. No traffic, no parties, no wayward laughter from a conversation somewhere nearby. Not even coyotes right now. I will sleep deep and well.

Yes, I’ll stay inside. And enrich myself.

It’s all a little too easy.

A short story

            The guard waved and opened the gate for her.  Christina smiled and raised one hand in recognition as she swung around the delivery truck waiting to be signed in.  She knew it was a violation of the rules.  Every visitor was to be given a guest pass and the address to be visited duly noted in some log to be studied later if necessary.  But the guard must have remembered her from all those afternoons she came to the Humphries to pick up Ethan after school.  She felt a little chagrined, sneaking into one of the leafy, old money developments in Newport Beach, a little worried that the guard might get in trouble if his lapse were discovered.  But she pushed the thought away.  None of that would happen.  They had nothing to fear from her; just another toned, chipper woman in her forties, tooling around in an oversized vehicle wearing jeans designed to be worn by a 14-year-old.  She pursed her lips and smiled at the self image formed in her mind.

            She moved slowly along the main road, bracing herself for the speedbumps.  She counted the streets she passed, still unable to remember or distinguish any of the individual street names even after years of visits.  The names seemed to be plucked randomly from a French dictionary, with no connection to the actual physical location they labeled.  After five streets she made a right into the circular street.  She pulled to the curb, one house down and across the street from her target.  She cracked the window against the October heat and turned off the ignition.  The house was quiet in the late afternoon.  Halloween decorations were already up.  Cutouts of skinny, stylized black cats skittered across the windows.  Amused ghosts peered out from behind the bushes.  The black front door looked freshly painted, nestled into the front alcove, against the mossy green of the rest of the house.  It all was so fresh, so new, warm and welcoming.  She remembered flipping through the book of allowed paint combinations with Shelley last spring, paying detailed attention to almost imperceptible variations of green and taupe.  It looked like Shelley had finally gone with her initial selection and had ignored Christina’s input.  Not a surprise.  More fallout from a friendship gone inexplicably awry.

            Christina looked down at her hands in her lap, congratulating herself for not biting her cuticles in several days.  Before even the first tear rose over the edge of her eye, she had the car in gear, making a sweeping U-turn, on her way home before Shelley or anyone else saw her on their way home from late afternoon sports practices.

            On Saturday morning, after a long, thoughtful session awake in her bed and then in a verbena bath, she drove into Shady Canyon.  She still had a transponder that opened the heavy wooden gates.  In the confusion of the property settlement no one had thought to demand that she return it.  First she drove to the street where they had all lived together.  Even though it had only been three months since she’d been here the street was almost unrecognizable.  More of the houses had completed landscaping and dozens of spindly trees competed for space along the side of the road.  Two little boys in purple soccer uniforms raced out into the street from a driveway and swarmed back up onto the lawn of the house next door.  The house, her house as she still thought of it, had a for sale sign in front.  There were a few others down the long block.  It was an abysmal time to sell.  The sign was enough of an announcement of failure to eliminate any need for discussion with neighbors.  Only the financially or maritally fallen needed to face the market right now.  She wondered if anyone was really looking after the house, making sure that the blinds were closed at the right angle to keep the chestnut colored floors from fading, making sure the pittosforum in the rear garden looked properly lacy and inviting.  It really still was her business to know the status of the house.  She would call Carl and ask him about it. 

She knew she should want the house to sell.  Until it was disposed of, she was tied to Carl, and tied only financially, the least of the ways she could fathom remaining linked to him.  But she felt an inexplicable lift every week the house remained uncommitted.  Until then, she would stay in her rental, getting quieter every week as the summer crowds at the beach continued to diminish.  And that morning, as she felt the first grey wisps of winter fog trail across her in bed through the open windows, she thought it wouldn’t be too distasteful to be in the apartment all winter, to be able to experience all those Pacific storms firsthand, one of the diehard people on the beach waiting for the gusts to reach land. 

            The garage at the house next door started to open and Christina quickly drove to the end of the street and hovered in the cul de sac until the neighbor’s car was out of sight.  She drove to the other end of the development, the area with yet another coded gate, where the view lots and eight figure pricetags clustered together.  She knew the gate code here from a school fundraiser she’d been invited to last year.  She’d noted it in her phone and scrolled now to the family’s name to find the code.  Ah, yes.  1A.  Perhaps the most predictable two character combination that could be imagined.  It was strange that the people in this inner most sanctum of privilege and privacy had allowed such a mundane code to be used. 

            She punched it in and felt a click of satisfaction as the gate started its lurch open.  She drove up the hill, past the houses that had been built first, now with mature fruit trees and full driveways, up past the side streets where the houses were under construction or just stakes outlined on the ground.  She made a left and climbed up higher, past a taco truck with a dozen workers clustered around it.  There were fewer cars now.  A red hawk wheeled to her left, dancing on a current right at the edge of the canyon.  Carl’s new house was near the top, almost the only house built up here.  She pulled up higher on the hill and turned around so she could get a full view of the property.  She felt an odd calm of appreciation as she studied the cool grey-blue stone that she had suggested, the elongated curve of the windows, the beginnings of the grove of olive and lemon trees that she had envisioned.  She opened the window and heard the tink, tink, tink of a worker chipping apart pieces of slate, fitting them into the walkway from the house to the grove.  The hawk glided over the man’s head.  She wondered if she could go walk through the house, see what Carl had decided to keep of her ideas and which had been erased.  She hesitated, forming the conversation she would have with the workman with the chisel, and then let the idea float away.  It was too much, too invasive.  She didn’t want to think of herself that way.

            Later that night she thought about Ethan’s friend, Matthew.  His parents had divorced in kindergarten and all the time Ethan and Matthew had been friends he had lived with his mother and two little sisters in a narrow house not far from the school.  She remembered wondering how they all fit in the house, even though she knew there were three bedrooms, and speculating how Matthew’s father had ended up with the big spread of a house in south county while the mother and the children compromised here.  At first she hadn’t been excited about Ethan’s friendship with Matthew and had looked for signs of instability or poor parenting in Matthew.  But he was a sunny, bright boy with an even temperament and a bubbly sense of humor.  He always bounded happily out of the car when she dropped him home and when she saw his mother at school events she too had an aura of calm about her that both invited and dispelled comment. 

She wondered where Matthew was now.  In the haze of last spring she had paid little attention to the diaspora of graduating eighth graders.  Her frozen horror at finally agreeing, after months of Carl’s insistence, that Ethan could, indeed should, go away to school this year had robbed her of any ability to find any joy or sadness in the achievements of the other kids. 

On Tuesday, she went to the grocery store near Ethan’s old school to get the Italian truffle cheese that she loved.  She would put a tablespoon in an omelette for dinner and would feel on top of the world when the richness filled her mouth.  As she left, unbidden, she drove to Matthew’s neighborhood.  She remembered the gate code here too.  1492#.  She smiled as she pulled up to the keypad and tried to guess who the unrelenting Christopher Columbus fan was who had been in a position to select the code. 

She pulled through the gates and made the series of turns to Matthew’s house.  A leering six foot transparent pumpkin was on the lawn and two toddler girls tumbled on the grass in front.  They weren’t Matthew’s little sisters.  A new Land Rover sat in the driveway.  She couldn’t picture Matthew’s precise, self-contained mother driving that.  They must have moved.  She should ask Ethan when she next spoke to him.

Her phone rang.  It was the cleaning service for her apartment needing to arrange a different day.  When the call ended she sat with her phone heavy in her hand.  In a rush, she thought of all the little boys Ethan had been friends with in his nine years at the school.  She saw a parade of blond, freckled boys in navy sweatshirts with the sailboat logo over their embroidered names.  Now, only four months after they left the school, they were spread to the winds, her own son and Matthew among them.  She scrolled through her address book, looking for one after another of Ethan’s friends, as if the listing of a mother’s name or a phone number would lend them permanence.  In each entry she had included some information to help her keep everyone straight.  Siblings’ names, father’s occupation, address of stepparents for weekend playdates.  But in most entries one consistent entry.  The gate code. 

As she studied them, one after another, she started to laugh.  She had never noticed before but now she understood why she had rarely had to look them up.  Each neighborhood was linked in her mind with some fact of history triggered by the gate code.  1066 – the code for St. Michel, peopled in her mind by tall, Norman-featured men; 1865 – always expecting to find a Civil War battle reenactment underway; 1963 – imaging the narrow, booted figures of the Beatles getting ready to appear on the Ed Sullivan show; 1620 – the smell of turkey almost palpable in the air.  She put down the phone and pushed her head back hard against the seat.  She laughed as if it were a forgotten practice, experiencing the physical release as if for the first time. 

She wondered if there were one lucky person at some central management company in an office near the Irvine Spectrum whose job it was to select these numbers; something he had turned into a special perq as he created one more layer of artifice for all of the unsuspecting residents.  She wanted to meet the person and congratulate him on his work.  And to get his advice.  If she ever got her money from the house, she wanted to live in a place with a gate code to her liking.  Maybe she would even be able to talk him into letting her choose it.  Her mind flitted through possible dates, considering and rejecting the birth years of her favorite historical women – Elizabeth I, Coco Chanel, Katherine Hepburn.  All too precious, too predictable.  She wanted something removed from herself, in no way self-reflective, and yet also amusing, so that each time she gave it to a visitor she would smile.  Nothing came to her but she enjoyed the anticipation of coming up with the perfect combination.  Now she would go home, make her omelette and maybe have a glass of good Chablis from that case Carl had left with her.  She would have her dinner and continue thinking about her plan.  For tonight, she was set. 

© 2020 Kathleen O’Hanlon

At the end of high school I was obsessed with the Kinks and, in particular, Ray Davies.  It was the late 1970’s and I was already quite familiar with the full oeuvre of early sixties’ rock and roll.  I was the youngest of four in a household led by a man who had been a working musician since the 1920’s.  There were eighteen guitars in our house (two of them were mine) and I knew the lyrics of the hits of the Zombies better than I knew Mother Goose. 

But I somehow waited until my mid-teens, when my elder siblings had all departed and there was finally some calm and quiet, for me to develop my own particular favorites.  I was emerging from my Joni Mitchell poet-girl with long hair stage and ready to launch myself into the toothpick thin arms of the overlooked genius of the British Invasion. 

I don’t know what got me started.  Perhaps “Victoria,” with its ironic ode to unquestioning devotion to class structure, or “Village Green Preservation Society.”  Who could resist an artist who put the line “God save little shops, china cups, and virginity” into a pop song?  And then “Lola,” when for the first time I started musing about ambiguous sexuality and gender roles. 

In any case, I found several albums left behind by my oldest brother Jack when he had moved out a year or so earlier and I made them my own.  I lay on my stomach on the wood floor in my room and listened and listened and listened, staring out at the clouds and the trees in our front yard. 

I loved how squashed up the mixing was on the songs, how the music was so primary and Ray’s vocals sounded like he was almost in a different room or pressed up against the ceiling as they were recorded.  His voice was light and delicate and didn’t seem to match the driving guitar, especially the barking dog lead guitar of his brother Ray Davies.  The records seemed like they were made in someone’s garage and distributed only to people in the know.  They felt like an enormous, beautiful secret.

I asked Jack about the Kinks the next time he came over.  He was eleven years older than me.  He had started college the same day I started kindergarten and always represented an unachievable level of taste and sophistication.  I needed to phrase the question just right.  I didn’t want him to make fun of me. 

            “Why don’t the Kinks ever come here?” is what I chose.

He still looked at me as if I was the stupidest person to ever exist.  He reeled off facts that it seemed everyone in the world knew but me – the brothers fought; they’d been banned from coming to the United States because of bad behavior on early tours in the mid 1960’s, Ray had a drinking problem and drank directly from champagne bottles on stage. 

I nodded and fell back into silence.  That made them even more intriguing.

            I poured over the lyrics to “Arthur” and “Muswell Hillbillies.”  I studied the cover art of “Muswell Hillbillies,” which was a photo in a pub, with two of the Kinks standing at the bar on the left hand side.  The rest of the bar is filled with what I imagined by be normal Londoners, all men, having a beer on a sunny afternoon.  When you opened the cover there were the other Kinks, including Ray, looking out at me, with his skinny red pants and a plaid shirt.  He looked as uncomfortable and unkempt as he did in every other photo I’d ever seen.  I liked him more for that. 

            I wanted to be there.  I wanted to live in Muswell Hill.  I knew enough about London to guess that it wasn’t a fashionable area.  I didn’t care.  I wanted to be there, in skinny jeans and high-heeled boots, to walk and be ironic and be a social critic. 

            Based on this, it would be reasonable to guess that I lived in a small town where I had no opportunity to express myself or observe people who lived different kinds of life.  But you would be wrong.  I lived in New York.  I went to Stuyvesant High School, an intense, math and science public school where I was well on my way to absorbing the physics and trigonometry and German that would get me into Stanford not too far in the future.  And when I wasn’t spread out on the floor contemplating London suburbs I was a student at American Ballet Theatre, throwing myself into a pre-professional classical ballet curriculum that I had no business attempting.  I see now that I’ve always sought particular passions with absurdly unlikely, unachievable goals.  But I didn’t see that then.

            At ballet school, I watched Baryshnikov and Makarova and Kirkland rehearse almost every day, I watched Jerome Robbins lead rehearsals, and with my eagle eye on the street, I saw Balanchine walking back from lunch or John and Yoko waiting in line for a movie. 

I haunted the stretch of Broadway from Columbus Center to 72^nd Street.  I went to performances at the Met, I window shopped, I edged along the park and never dared actually going in unless I was with friends, I bought cups of tea and dried pineapple at delis to keep me going on my limited caloric and financial budget.  I bought nothing but leotards and tights, I read nineteenth century British novels, and I went home to listen to music, study, and get ready to do it all again the next day.  Sometimes I would stray down to the theater district to see a show. 

            I liked being a savvy city kid.  I liked taking the subway late at night and feeling impervious and unapproachable.  As insecure as I was, I felt like I knew what I liked and what I wanted and as long as I didn’t need to talk to anyone about it or express an enthusiasm that might not be reciprocated I was fine.

            But I guess my eyes were not as open and observant they should have been.  I turned down invitations from classmates to go see new bands like Blondie and the Ramones.  What could they possibly offer to me?  While I liked Springsteen’s music and had seen Patti Smith on the cover of “Horses,” I didn’t realize that if I looked harder as I walked to the Union Square subway station from school I would likely have seen them wandering around, let alone whoever might have been coming in and out of the Lee Strasberg Institute, that I passed twice every day.  No – all of my attention went to ballet and to the Kinks who waited for me at home. 

            Many years later I learned the true cost of my tunnel vision.  When I was in my forties I read an interview with Ray Davies.  He was visiting New York and he and the writer were walking through the neighborhood he had lived in in the late seventies, when the Kinks were not recording for a while.  I held my breath.  I read further.  Yes, he lived on the upper west side.  They walked along Broadway, down to the newly built Warner Center.  They stopped into a grocery store Ray used to go to. 

            I felt true pain.  I had missed him.  We had been wandering the same blocks at the same time for months and months and months.  And I had never noticed.  I didn’t think further to realize that if I had recognized him I most likely wouldn’t have done anything.  Just as I had never spoken to Balanchine or John and Yoko or done anything other than nod to Baryshnikov on the stairway.  I would have noted him walking to the end of the block and I would have hoped to see him again.

            I am still an enormous Kinks fan.  I listen to one or another song several times a week.  I’ve gone to see Ray when he’s been in Los Angeles in recent years and they have been among the best shows I’ve ever seen.  And in the past few years, as we’ve seen Bowie and Prince and even Dolores O’Riordan leave us before they were done, I know that it will be a very difficult day for me indeed when Ray Davies dies.  Because he doesn’t know it, but he’s been one of my best friends for over forty years. 

My muse wears tap shoes.  And sateen pajamas. She has dark hair and a gleaming head.  She wisecracks, she jokes, she drinks too much gin at times.  But she floats across the floor on silent feet when she wants to and pulls up the chair right next to me.  

She was born on a farm and doesn’t look away when the guts of food are being prepared, laid out before her.  But she left, seeking other people who could look to the horizon and see something other than bad weather or a reason to be sad.  

She looks up, she looks around, she looks down and she sees things that others don’t.  She puzzles over the pattern of cracks in the sidewalk, the pattern of a spider web among the ferns, she looks always for the perfect orange and the perfect silver blue, which can never go together, but which are the most elusive, most delicious shades nature and the human hand can create.   

She brings me little gifts of things I don’t know what to do with.  Yet one more interesting secondary character who can take up days of my time dressing, educating, feeding, accessorizing.  She gives me entire plots – jolted into my brain like they are freeze-dried.  I’m not sure how to access them or in what order.  I feel the need to compress them, to make enough room for them and the others that will come, even though I don’t feel any rush.   

She gives me a little, shiny piece of music that squeezes my heart and makes me so unbearably glad I am alive – and sad for anyone who doesn’t get to feel like this at least once in a while.  What if I had been born in a time when I had to just try to imagine what Bach sounded like?   

She lets my eye be restful when it needs to be.  She lets me be soothed by color and taste and touch.  She makes my spine straighter and my foot surer.   

She brought me boys to practice upon.  Each with little shards of me in them, to file or sand as they decide.  I like to think I guide them.  But I don’t really think so.  I think I’ve just helped them keep watch for their own muse and made room at the table for her.   

She tucks me into the cushion in the corner of the couch.  She helps me understand who I can talk to and who I can’t and helps prevent me from being an over eager puppy when I find a fellow traveler.  She makes me untwirl the mystery of myself just a little bit more each time she visits and makes me feel like I have the tools to go out in the world without her one more time.