Daily Blague

Last night, I went out for drinks and dinner with friends. It was altogether impromptu. We met at the bar at The Modern, the restaurant attached to the Museum of Modern Art. It is a small, loud, and somewhat amorphous space. I resolved to stick to wine. Unfortunately, I stuck to a lot of wine. The evening was delightful, and I remember every minute of it, but this morning what ailed me felt like nothing less than pancreatitis. (I know about pancreatitis because it is induced by my allergy to a drug that, owing to my not having bothered to request the transfer of medical records, I tried not once but twice.) I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt so awful.

I spent the day in bed, reading Patricia Marx's Him Her Him Again The End of Him. I couldn't read two pages without dropping the book on my chest and falling asleep for a moment. Shortly after five, I picked up the massive collection of Joan Didion's nonfiction that Everyman Library recently published. I read "Goodbye To All That," the valedictory essay with which she bid adieu to her youth and also, as she thought, to the New York in which she had passed it.

There were certain parts of the city which I had to avoid. I could not bear upper Madison Avenue on weekday mornings (this was a particularly inconvenient aversion, since I then lived just fifty or sixty feet east of Madison), because I would see women walking Yorkshire terriers and shopping at Gristede's , and some Veblenesque gorge would rise in my throat. I could not go to Times Square in the afternoon, or to the New York Public Library for any reason whatsoever. One day I could not go into a Schrafft's; the next day it would be Bonwit Teller.

I know what she means. And then, as I'm sure Ms Didion found out, living in the City again, you get over the disappointment of realizing that even Shangri-La can be repetitious and predictable. You forgive that. It's not hard, because you are no longer young, and no longer teasing dreams out of stone.