Too Much and Not the Mood Read online

  In the years I’ve lived in New York, the women I’ve made friends with seem not unfocused, and not absorbed by what’s next or what happened days ago, but by what is marginally missing. As if they’re trying to place a face when crossing a busy street. Women who seem satisfied when riding an escalator, who never fare well when they run into someone and are forced to reenter the world by speaking in banalities. The women I love reenter the world so poorly. Their elegance lies in how summarily they’ll dodge its many attenuations, advancing alongside the world as if passing their fingers over the rails of a fence and cleverly selecting the right moment to hop over.

  They are women who are loveliest when just a little bit haunted or mad as hell on a clear day. Who carefully believe in ghosts and kismet, and are mistrustful of shortcuts. Who laugh like villains. Wake up earliest when the sky is overcast. Who needn’t say much for all to know, tonight, they won’t be staying out long. Who dip their toes into the current, only to retreat and fantasize about the bowl of cereal they’d rather be scarfing down at home. Who, like my friend Jenny specifically, are hot. Who don’t need anyone—including me right now—to depict why. Proximity to hotness can feel like a link to the universe. Your hot friend on a balmy summer night telling you about some good news in her life is—How do I put this without sounding absurd? It’s barometric. It’s love and someone you love’s power growing, and it’s watching the elements cater to a woman who exudes.

  I won’t go on more about the aura-photo-taking tradition my friend and I have, because the more one talks about these extravagances, the more they invite questions that cannot be answered. At any rate, some ceremonies exist so long as they aren’t solicited for profound meaning. They are as is, hardly ceremony but what we repeat in order to make sense of how disentangling personhood is. They are nothing to effectuate. A lozenge that doesn’t do much except taste like honey. We get our auras taken in order to blueprint the week or consider why we’ve been emotionally congested, or, for kicks, plot some emotional solvency. We play with life in order to play life, and often all a dark patch means is a dark patch. Figurative, literal, neither, both. Take from it what you will.

  So one Monday afternoon, when my friend had a day off, we ambled from midtown to Magic Jewelry, stopping on the way for pea soup. A detail I cannot forget because the pea soup was bright, bright green. Unnaturally so. It’s something we both noticed and continued to address with each spoonful, because even the deepest friendships are liable to remark on the color of soup. Greeeeeen, we said as if it were slime. Delicious goo that seemed to establish our day as one to remember, because from now on bright green reminds me of the soup, which reminds me of my friend’s gold dress that she was wearing with black tights, and how somewhere on Canal we dropped a letter for another friend in a freshly painted mailbox. And how later, my friend ordered apple-flavored sorbet, and me, tiramisu. And at night we ate a box of Thin Mints while she read my tarot, and then, as it happens, we talked about a boy who was once in a band.

  Whenever my friend and I are together, our entire mode approximates switchbacks on a mountain railway. The zigzag required to climb. The You were saying that rounds our conversations and never anticipates close, like jelly legs from long walks, but, in this case, breathlessness from having talked so much and lost our train of thought as if losing it were a custom of recovery.

  But back to her dressing table. On it, my friend’s continued to collect objects like a curio cabinet of stuff that together becomes something. Her gallery. For the next five months, this parish of miscellany will provide my friend with the familiar. The way bedside tables become altars, and objects become testimonials, and candy bowls in dive restaurants: the perfect manifestation of Until next time. My friend’s dressing table is what happens when the uncollected becomes a village of items, like a skyline formed from a row of shapes: the vile of dandelion fluff, a tube of lotion, a canister of Wet Ones. A yellow rose, now dried and dead, and somehow gilded as if when parched, the rose becomes royal.

  There are the lucky few who zone out their windows and stare at brinks. The faraway intrigue of a forest—how it conspires—or the streaked lines of an ocean fringed by its horizon, or a city with more sky than scrapers, or even the informality of a backyard at dawn. But there are those—my friend and I—who can zone out, quite easily, to whatever’s right in front of us, no matter how unspectacular. A poorly painted wall. Its cracks. The ceiling fan’s chop. A woman on the C train pulling her ponytail through its tie, not once or twice, but six times. Six complete loops; her fingers closing into a claw each time. It’d been months since I’d been to a museum, but watching this woman mechanically tie her hair was softly enormous. Like the Apollo, the Lincoln Center at night, Film Forum’s marquee—its lobby, its popcorn, perhaps not its seats. Like Rucker Park; like the screaming woman on East Seventy-seventh Street; like Dyker Heights at Christmas or the psychic with prime real estate and inexplicably zero clients ever; like the line outside Levain; like jumping out of the cab and walking instead; like speakers facing out apartment windows come summer and neighbors watering their plants, and sometimes watering their downstairs neighbors too, and like fire escapes in general; like an old eccentric in monochrome; the pinkness of Palazzo Chupi and Bill Cunningham blue; like a couple fighting for blocks, gesticulating crosstown and finally Cold Warring on the Hudson. Like Eastern Parkway on Labor Day; like Café Edison and Kim’s before they were gone; like bodega cats and a bacon, egg, and cheese—a woman grooming on her subway commute is a New York institution.

  I don’t require much to feel far-removed; to impose my wanderings on what’s close. Because of this, my friend and I have started calling ourselves nook people. Those of us who seek corners and bays in order to redeploy our hearts and not break the mood. Those of us who retreat in order to cubicle our flame. Who collect sea glass. Who value a deep pants pocket. Who are our own understudies and may as well have shadowboxes for brains.

  We remember the soapy swoosh and high-pressure jets of car washes fondly. Of sitting in the backseat, near-worshipful of its cooped, walled-in chaos. We see a baby, burrito-wrapped in her blanket, and think, Now, wouldn’t that be nice?

  Nook people express appreciation in the moment by maintaining how much we will miss what is presently happening. Our priorities are spectacularly disordered. A nook person might spend the last few years of her twenties thinking she is dying. Convinced of it.

  Nook people might be terrible at giving and receiving hugs despite often feeling—on the whole, at home and in public—as though we are holding on tight. Nook people sense slight tremors or the onset of a neck rash when faced with people at parties who yell-speak. A nook person catches sight of the quiet cranny at any gathering: the arm of a couch, a sill to perch on, the corner of a counter where the vegetable platter—only celery and ashy carrots are left—has been abandoned. A nook person finds the dog at the party; drinks wine from a mug; sits on the floor and braids carpet tassels only to become self-conscious and unbraid them. From afar, even nearby actually, a nook person can seem like a real bore. The last person whom you want to meet. A fun-killer.

  A nook person plays catch-up when someone’s joke lands, embarrassed that her laugh isn’t proportionate to just how funny she thought the joke actually was. That was funny, she’ll say to compensate. Despite her many efforts, a nook person often suffers from a few-seconds lag.

  Nook people know the words to a movie by heart but never say them out loud because anticipation is an asset. Because there’s no interrupting Katharine Hepburn when she’s interrupting herself: “Aren’t the geraniums pretty, Professor?”

  Nook people can overstate their love for a movie, having only watched it once. They are alert to how some spectacles become basically unbearable the second time. And, well, there are benefits to claiming something you’ve only experienced once as your favorite. It’s useful to have many favorites. So many that you’ve depreciated the use of “favorite.” Favorite. Favorite. Favorite. Who cares? At an
y rate, substantiating favorites is an absurd practice. The genius of the word is that it’s more of an expression than a word.

  Nook people have tricks. For instance, if I’m experiencing panic brought on by someone who leaves me fainthearted, I picture that person carrying with caution a just-filled ice tray back from the sink to the freezer. That image, on its own, can sometimes get me closer to where I’m meant to be. Just beyond the jam. Less impatient to compare myself. If I’m at an impasse and suddenly immovable, and unable to smile, I picture a plot of daffodils; how alien and dumb-eager they seem. Craning the way gooseneck lamps on desks—those too—look keen. I think about Little Flint introducing himself to Jane Goodall. Grown siblings being kind to each other. I wonder if penguins have knees.

  Nook people are those of us who need solitude, but also the sound of someone puttering in the next room. Someone working on his project, down the hall and behind a door left ajar. We look away from our screen and hear him turning a page or readjusting his posture, and isn’t it time for lunch? Resurfacing is nonpareil. And splitting a sandwich with someone you’ve said maybe two words to all morning is idyllic. A brief belief that life picks up after a few bites of toasted rye.

  Though if I’m honest, the thought of splitting a sandwich suddenly makes me enormously sad. How long has it been since I’ve enjoyed the company of someone else enjoying his food? The way he’d toss chips in his mouth and savor the crunch, and then wipe his hands on his jeans, and smile—not at me specifically, but at this wonderfully unspectacular event: the sandwich, the chips, the crunch, our appetites.

  Nook people need relief from distraction’s overall insistence: the trap of everything else. Their ambition is not to be understood outright, but to return to an original peg. To share without betraying whatever mechanism individuates him or her. Perhaps that’s what we call our disposition. How becoming is multipart, but mainly a pilgrimage inward. If you share too much of yourself, you risk growing into someone who has nothing unacknowledged. Those yet-to-access riches that I’d suspect are what tingle when a song’s lyrics eject me into outer space; assure me I can love; can go about and be loved; can retreat and still get, as in both catch and understand, love. Those yet-to-access riches that I’d suspect too are what tingle when a building’s architecture persuades me to notice other systems of proportion.

  Or when an Annie Baker play sets in motion a story I’d like to write; an ex I’d like to call; a dinner party I’d like to have and invite Annie Baker to, and Sarah Polley, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Dolly Parton, and Shirin Neshat, my friend Judnick, and Eartha Kitt, were she still here, and one of my heroes, Polly Platt, were she still here too, and my stepfather, Mritiunjoy, because he’s always good company, and my old super Sherlock, from my first apartment in Crown Heights, because he’d get along well with Mritiunjoy; with everyone really. It’s that floating feeling—a light, invigorating sickness—that stems from seeing an Annie Baker play; that makes me want to make stuff instead of make sense, even if it’s just a dinner party, or, quite the opposite, committing to a weeklong vow of silence. Because nook people are turned on by and twig how terribly normal it is to drop out of life occasionally.

  What a nook person wants is space, however small, to follow whatever image is driving her, instead of sensing like she might have to trade it in or share it before she’s willing. Her awakening demands no stage but, rather room to store that second half of what she deems her double life: what’s corrugated inside. Intuition’s buildup.

  Nook people find it trying to imagine themselves in real-life situations but long to climb into, for instance, a movie still. Into a pasture of wildflowers and tall grass and Merchant Ivory and Helena Bonham Carter’s mane. Into 3 Women’s desert pastels; those lenient yellows and corpse violets. Into Tom Hanks’s Soho loft in Big. Every single frame of Maurice Pialat’s À nos amours, but especially when Sandrine Bonnaire is dangling spaghetti into her mouth while a teenage couple makes out right next to her. Especially then.

  Heat’s floor-to-ceiling-windowed Malibu view, because a nook person forever seeks enclosed perpetuity. That Escher-like Beetlejuice house. Its patio. The discoverable mess of Elliott’s closet in E.T. Or Céline’s Paris apartment in Before Sunset. Where she’s making tea and coyly dancing to Nina Simone, looking over her shoulder at Jesse to say, “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane.”

  Nook people are interested in what’s backstage; are especially passionate about the small-scale bedlam of wimmelbooks; seek coats that cocoon; seek windows with shutters; a pattern that reveals itself over time; a vacation alone. Nook people can gently disagree while securing their spark. No. No. Spark is not substantive enough. Their approach. That radiant heat they typically keep stored inside because it functions as insulation.

  Nook people love signing with a heavy pen; don’t mind waiting in the car; love sitting on a stack of banquet chairs in an empty banquet hall, feet dangling; appreciate the surprising density of a beaded curtain; the weight of a pile of denim; gripping a large Fuji apple with both hands; the twine of Joni singing, Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling and wish they too could live in a box of paints.

  Nook people fall asleep in their palms; are pacified by tucking their hands in the warm seam of two thighs; are rarely sure how they got good at anything; confront despair with a strong drink or by giving up for months, only writing first sentences or returning to a corrupted love; or converting their bed into a life raft, or wearing a thick cat-eye simply to walk to the store; or making innocent decisions like buying a shower radio to cure a bad day, or finding a friend who is folding her laundry and requesting that you sit on her floor while she pairs socks, or suggesting that you donate your bunch of brown bananas so that she might bake the bread.

  Nook people confuse emotional truth with other varieties of truth. They are a composite of the last person who complimented them and the next person who might ignore them, and also whomever or whatever they consider themselves a child of.

  As children, nook people so wished to be forgotten in department stores. Locked inside once the doors were closed. They were very good at hide-and-seek, perhaps even overlooking the game’s reciprocal nature. Because when nook people find themselves lost briefly, they are stunned into a phenomenal sense of peace. Once, as a kid, I took a nap in the woods in the dead of winter because I couldn’t find my way back to the farmhouse in upstate New York where my family was visiting friends. I’d walked in circles and confused my trail of footprints. Disoriented, all I could think to do was take a nap. I slept deeply, which is rare for me. As the sun began to set and as my parents began to worry, there I was snoozing soundly on a mound of snow, palisaded by a forest of bare trees and the holy, cease-fire quiet only nature can administer.

  As adults, nook people cower under overhead lighting. They prefer when lamps yoke the floor rather than animate an entire room. They are habitual creatures who fear each time they’re charmed by something, because what if it’s the last time they are charmed by anything?

  I keep a miniature pink flamingo on my desk at all times. It sits next to me when I type, like a charm that isn’t a charm but a knickknack that proves I am not immune to superstition. If I lay it flat, the flamingo is smaller than my SHIFT key and just about the size of a date pit. The flamingo is rubbery and painted, and shaded as only mini things can be painted and shaded: so meticulously, so verbatim. It looks as if it’s been zapped small from real life.

  When I’m traveling, I tuck the flamingo into my purse. It sits next to a stuffed red heart that my friend—the one in the gold dress on pea soup day—gave to me. The heart fits into my palm—flat-round like a plush pebble—and was mailed to my friend with a box of other novelties, including the vile of dandelion fluff, I think. The heart, I learned, is from Build-A-Bear. I’ve never been to one of its stores or know much about it, but I’ve heard there is a tradition of placing the heart inside the bear while it’s in the workshop. Maybe the employees blow on it? Or ask the customers to? Some
thing like that. Maybe the children make a wish and rub the heart between their thumb and index finger the way adults test the touch of cashmere or gossip about someone’s financial provenance. Either way, there is a ritual. How strange. How sort of gruesome and surgical. The most benign transplant, occurring in malls across America.

  I think about my mother again. Young again. I wonder if she did in fact, like me, consider the fit of things: how the cherry liqueur gets inside the chocolate and if it’s possible to sit on clouds. If cracking open scabs and peeling them off like bark on a tree was pleasing to her. If she dreamt about attics and the potential for troublemaking sloped ceilings provide. How everyone in an attic becomes a giant. How someone’s head cautiously ducking under wood beams is, in some way, the universal symbol for explorer. Did they even have attics in Calcutta? Was the concept utterly foreign? Whenever I’ve asked my mother about what I deem rudimentary to child-wonder, like the mystery of attics, the word dampness repeats. Calcutta’s dampness, that is. Like a relapsing obstacle for children born in tropical, wet-and-dry climates. It was too damp for this, too damp for that, she might say. Too damp for attics.

  Or what about skylights. Did she have those? Know about those as a kid? How the sky seen through a skylight creates—at least in my mind—a more viable world. Isn’t it cool how a skylight doesn’t bring the blue inside, but instead influences a category of stupor? Everyone is reduced to aquarium eyes. There’s no suspense in wondering what lies outside the frame, because skylights show bias but abet abandon. Bordered and mounted on a ceiling, a blue sky looks especially artificial, doesn’t it? Like a portal elsewhere. Soothsaying.

  I think about Build-A-Bear too. Would my mother have cared for one of those toys? Was she a child who hid things in other things? Was she curious about their make? The how? The How?! Had Build-A-Bear existed when I was a kid, would I have begged for one? Probably. The toys I wanted and never got as a child were one of many spites I held against my parents. It wasn’t simply greed but superiority. The rank we pull as children of immigrants, believing our parents are, most days, confused or dead wrong. That they just don’t know. That they’ll get you a version of what you wanted; what’s close will have to do. That they are uniquely assertive in the kitchen and don’t pick up on cues, and smile reluctantly because smiling is the quickest way to appear as though you are aware. To mislead anyone doubting your ability. Especially your ungrateful children.