the age of discovery (every rose loses its bloom)

It is a confusing time, more than the question of when to leave the windows open and what hat to squeeze on my daughter's head. The leaves turn and die. The wind slams doors shut like an angry ghost. September, and you can see your breath hang in the air at night sometimes.

I am not ready.

Children are back at school, but not E. We are waiting for a seat to open, a bed to sleep in at nap time. We are waiting for a phone call telling us one child left and she can take their place.

The living room is a forest of toys. Me, working all hours of the night making up for that lost week in New York. Soon the rent is due. Soon the snow will fall in tiny hard flakes.

A beautiful chunk of fresh cheese I bought has turned sour. It will be a plain egg omelette for breakfast today. N smiles anyway, dabbing her skin with tiny bits of cream at the kitchen table, putting her contacts in, pulsing a little perfume on her sweater. I have no idea how she learned such grace. I wish she could teach me how to hover instead of plod along, how to skim across and enjoy.

Maybe she does, and I am a slow learner.

After the rain, I am walking down Kutuzovsky with E. We pass a wedding party. I remember when she would shout from the stroller as we passed them, "Papa, etta princessa! Etta princessa!" Now, she just calls them brides. That stroller gave out one icy February afternoon and we left it there, wheels broken off, torn plastic flipping around in the wind as I hoisted her up and carried her home. Now, she picks up the hearts on the sidewalk by herself.

She pockets a few and gives me the rest to tuck into my wallet.

We will have her first guitar lesson today. The tiny instrument will be ferried along in one of my big cases. It is a Yamaha, like my first saxophone. We bought it on Saturday when the sky was full of clouds and the sun was shining. We wandered inside the dark store, as E ran her fingers along pink stratocasters, as we gazed on cases of shiny harmonicas.

Later she asked for chicken soup for lunch, and rested. The guitar stood across the room waiting for her.

I am restless. I have work to do before I can indulge. I am exhausted. There is a book to finish before I can dig into the new one. So long between the spark and the completion. I am always a different person by the time it is all over, a foreigner to the life that inspired that first page. Every rose loses its bloom. Every book feels like one mitten lost in the snow, half useless.

I pull my old guitar to my knee. The Gretsch. For every songwriter, there is the one you write on - that invisible instrument, the one no one hears but you. When it is time to record, another steps in. No, this is your secret sound, kind and forgiving. This is that myth about the strong woman behind the man. This is an old friend that knows you better than you know yourself. Tobacco stain as beautiful as ever, a crack growing under the bridge, it yields to me. This is the guitar I play for E when she takes a bath. This is the guitar I played softly in the kitchen for N when we met, with a few tiny candles showing me where to find the chords.

Maybe I do see the way now.

yes, I am home

The avenues open up to me, sidewalks allowing a path towards Rector Street, then Duane. New boots clicking beneath me, sweat sticking the shirt to my back and a wad of cash burning a hole in my pocket, New York is my favorite pair of jeans. I walk up and down the island for six days without a thought of policemen, without a thought of how to find an address. I can do it all with my eyes closed.

Yes, the Mars Bar is finally gone. Like a cockroach, I thought it could outlive any apocalypse - but no, not this one. Maryann is still around, laughing hard on St. Marks Place. We eat good food that was not here a few years ago, grabbing each other's hands and arms as we talk. She is well, this woman who taught me so much - more than how to make gnocchi. A new last name, a new haircut but beneath it all the same heart that bleeds, the same raw accent chewing through the words. She is Brooklyn. She is unstoppable. I imagine the day she can meet E and share her Flatbush wisdom with my child - maybe tell her what I was like in my 30's, when I was the Mayor of East 1st Street.

I call every morning as soon as I am awake, talking E through the day's events as she sits in that apartment waiting for someone to take her outside. They never do. She makes things work, teaching the cats to dance, finding lost dolls in the bottom of a closet.

We speak across the computer, our faces soft and distorted - light, shadow, color - night in one place, day in another. Her eyes are red. I ask if she is getting sick.
"No." She says. "I just cried a lot last night."
"Did something happen?" I ask.
She pauses, sighs deeply.
"No." She says quietly.
I will be home in four days.
"Nobody kisses me goodnight here." She says.
"Ever?" I ask.
"Ever." She whispers, as if she cannot speak anymore.
I tell her to get under the covers. I send her a kiss across the ocean. We count how long it should take to travel to her - maybe thirty seconds. I see her face change. A tiny smile is creeping across her mouth.

The tacos are magnificent, juices dripping down my arm as I suck lime and salt and pork from my fingertips. I will slug thick coffees. I will spoon into strudel. I will throw back glasses of fine wine. There will be egg sandwiches on homemade English muffins. There will be a walking dog from Katz's, the dry mustard smacking against the snap of the meat, the fragrant kraut seeping into the soft bun all gone in a matter of steps as I lick the mustard from the corner of my mouth.

There will be tiny cucumbers that look like dollhouse watermelons. I will cook duck, pasta and risotto. I will make shrimp quenelles, and chickpea blini. There will be caviar and compote. There will be a lemon mousseline and more. Friends will crack open bottles of prosecco, the corks making that magic burst. I will feed them, coaxing flavors from the bags of mushrooms I buy. Roasting, sauteing, steeping, reducing. I will see faces shining in candlelight, glasses bumping in toasts, plates wiped clean until we are full, sitting way back back in our chairs breathing in the night air that surrounds us.

They ask about N, about how we met. I describe it all, the impossible chain of events. I think to call her now, to wake her up in the middle of the night. But no, I will wait until it is morning. Morning and I am coming home with bags swollen at the edges, stuffed with winter coats and French perfume, with a tiny umbrella that looks like a cloud, with a small tin of smoked paprika.

And all at once the airport is solved, the lines running long as I shove a last hamburger into my face, running to the gate with a new guitar thumping against my side. It is raining.

Geneva, and more running to catch the connecting flight.

And N is there as I turn the corner, bags sliding off the cart about to topple to the floor. We kiss in the great hall, and I do not let go of her for some time. She is laughing at my new hat. As usual, she takes it and wears it. She has khachapuri for me, and a cold coke in the car. We will be home in an hour, where I dig her presents out of the chaos of my bags. We will sip strong tea and she will try on the Italian lingerie I bought her, and then it will all come off and we will be together, the way lovers do when they have been apart.

Now time to get E, after a flurry of text messages and negotiations. I will still stand in the hallway for thirty minutes until she emerges, raincoat on, a stray doll dangling from her hand. She is chirping like a little bird.

I will make her an egg sandwich when we get home, before the living room is lost in boxes and bags that explode from the suitcases. She gallops around the house in new pyjamas. She brushes her teeth for the first time in a week, as I make pasta. It is time for amatriciana, to kiss E goodnight as she squeezes her eyes closed, as N twirls linguine around her fork.

We all sleep that narcotic sleep, knowing we are together again.

3AM - the Devil plays guitar

3AM, and the airport coffee tastes especially weak. The thick layer of stale cinnamon I did not ask for floats on the top, adding nothing. A man and a woman approach slowly and sit at the table next to mine. She is in red, from head to toe. A waitress appears, drops menus in front of them. He opens a plastic box meant for leftovers. It is full of eggs.

He begins to peel one. The woman sighs, and does not open the menu. The waitress returns, her hands jumping into the air. Her voice cuts across the empty space.

He offers the egg to her, half surprised there is a problem. The woman stands up, her chair squeaking across the floor. I smell her perfume, thick and floral - powdery. He finishes peeling the egg, salts it then holds it gingerly between his fingers, half-standing up to follow her.

The man sits back down, and eats it in three sloppy bites.

The rain is heavy, like giant soft pancakes. I am flying on September 11th, by choice. Yawning, searching for oxygen I rub my eyes and stand on one foot then the other, trying to stay awake.  The plane will board at five. I want to enjoy this trip, to wrestle with a pile of papers in my bag - the last story for my new book. I will thrust a fresh cartridge in the Montegrappa, mark a few points in juicy red ink that soaks through the cheap paper.

I will ignore the threats piled up on my phone, the text messages and emails from a madwoman. E will be ok, even if she keeps us from talking for seven days. She knows I am coming back with giant boxes of gifts, with Hello Kitty rain boots, with harmonicas.

The latest scandal is about music school. E wants to learn the guitar, and the conservatory happily assigned a teacher to us. Piano, violin, recorder - all of no interest to her. Her mother babbles and screams over the phone at me. She says I am the Devil if I destroy E's life by letting her learn the guitar. It is an instrument for idiots, she says. No, E must play the piano like she does (or pretends to). This, or I will never see my daughter again. The typical threat. The typical madcap ultimatum. I have a personal terrorist, one thorn, one bag of salt to run into every wound. She is tireless, and wise. She is reckless and sloppy.

She should be ignored, but there is always a moment when I look over my shoulder, when the hair on my arm prickles as the police pass close to me.

Ten years ago I was as innocent as E. The brutality of the world was a story told to me, defused in its translation. Vicious acts were the stuff of movies, of video clips from faraway lands.

Not any more.

snapshots of an alphabet

I make egg sandwiches with the yellowest of butters slathered across the white toast. We eat quickly, me checking the cold air drifting in the windows as we decide what she will wear today. Then outside, we feel the late summer sun and are stripping off layers of sweatshirts, wiping a quick sweat from our foreheads. E is calm, as this is not her first trip to the recording studio. The first time she was all nerves and excitement, jumping around the escalators in the metro. That was almost a year ago. She plays the result for everyone on our Ipad, over and over. Her voice bursts from the tiny speakers, all crackle and humor, sincere, surprised, utterly specific. I remember that day, as she sat on the tiny stool in the booth that I have recorded in so many times now. Her pigtails poking from her head, the headphones giant on her ears, me inside with her - reading, prepping, directing her.


And now we are back, and she is taller. She does not want to wear the headphones this time - just wants to hear my voice, then take a breath and do her own version. Sometimes she impersonates me. Sometimes she impersonates herself. The words roll off her tongue - mustache so long and the crunch of the "shhhhhhh" hangs in the air. Zebra, so happy, bouncing off the glass window, all "eeeeee".  Nest, and I ask her to close to her eyes, to imagine tiny birds and then to say the word. She does, smiling first, that child's Mona Lisa smile. Flower, and she almost breaks it into two words, flow-wer. The work seems effortless until she stumbles, and then I work with her suddenly caught up in the moment, showing her how closing her mouth finishes a word. She looks up at me with those big brown eyes, satisfied and proud. I am waving my hands around, almost knock over the microphone a few times. This is great fun for both of us.


Not the typical Monday.

She rests, listening to herself. It is time for a box of juice, maybe a cracker. The engineer checks the selected takes. The producer is beaming, making small talk with us. E is a sort of celebrity here. I am her entourage.

And then back to the metro, to buy Legos and dolls with her earnings. The rush, the midday slogs of people in the metro absorbs us. The session is already behind us, done, old news. The day is about other things already.

A manager in the sushi place gives her a little pink doll with a giant head of hair. The food arrives randomly. She squeezes slices of lemon into her water glass, cooking lemonade for imaginary friends.

We sit back in our chairs, our bellies full, our glasses empty. She rests an elbow on the collection of new Legos, the promise of fascinating days ahead of her. I look at the other people eating, scouting the floor for our waitress who has completely disappeared. 


We will walk home now, across the river, the cars roaring on the bridge. We will stop at the playground. There is a birthday party there, a sheep tied to a tree for some reason. Bags of red balloons that will drift up into the sky. E will run over to me, making sure I guard her new toys. She will trot across the dirt and dust, singing to herself. She will wave at me when she is on the swing, showing me what she can do all by herself.