Chef, shirt, gun

Some things that didn't happen and some things that did.

Nov 09, 2025

Chef

I was in love with a chef, who was writing a recipe for a soufflé on my back, starting at my neck and working his way down. Some ashes from his cigarette fell lightly on my skin. His handwriting was small. How many eggs? Was this sex?

I was thinking about particles that can be in two places at the same time. When I cooked apples in a pan, the slices formed the face of the chef. I examined nerve cells under a microscope and there, too, I saw the smile of the chef. I knew I would think about him for the rest of my life. Time would tell if I was right.

One day he said to me, “You’re not beautiful, but you are intelligent,” and I knew he was saying goodbye. I called my father, and we met by the river. A seagull cawed. I could see its black eyes. New Jersey looked close enough to swim to, and I said, “Let’s do it.” My father could have made it there easily. He was a strong swimmer. He made a gesture as if to dive over the rail. Wind ruffled his hair. He smoothed it down. A sailboat tacked past us on its way north.

A kid came over and asked my father if he wanted to buy a joint. My father said yes. The kid looked sixteen and was carrying a skateboard. He was wearing one of those mesh T-shirts with shorts that rode off his slim hips and flapped around his knees. My father and I smoked the joint on a bench with our hips touching. He said, “Your demon lover is always an ass in someone else’s eyes.” I liked that he was being kind to me and that I would be in exactly this situation again and no better equipped for life. The feeling of being alone in the world moved into the warm air.

Later that year, my father drowned on holiday alone in Greece. Why was he alone? Why had he drowned, given how well he could swim? He left me his cat in his will. My father is the one I think about every day. I would, wouldn’t I, given I have the cat?

Novel

I was reading a novel about a woman who is in love with a man who has two other women in his life. She sees him seldom and has written him a long letter, which is the book. The tone is quiet and matter-of-fact, except the tone is also in love with its attention on the out-of-reachness of the man. The author is hoping you won’t notice this, but as you read along, it feels like watching a fantasy through the eyes of a person masturbating, and I was reminded of an incident in my past concerning a man who was as distant from me as the man is from the narrator of the book. I was reminded of a shirt I gave him.

The shirt was made of thick silk, maybe silk charmeuse, and was a shade of blue I don’t recall well enough to name precisely. Maybe sky blue. The brand was Equipment. I know this because I also have a shirt from the company, and maybe I bought the two shirts at the same time. It had belonged to Gardner. After he died, I gave away most of his clothes. The shirt was one of the few things I still had.

I had liked buying expensive things for Gardner because I had liked seeing him wearing them. It’s a good sign when I freely spend money on someone. It’s eight years after Gardner has died when I meet a man I can sense early on will maintain a distance from me and also play with me often enough to keep me uncertain. I never relax, and me never relaxed, I am at my worst. It’s hell for me and for anyone around me, and I can’t really grab hold of the hell. It’s gauzy, like a ghost.

We’re together, or a facsimile of together, for I don’t know, a few weeks when I give him Gardner’s shirt. It doesn’t fit him. The sleeves are too short. This guy is taller and bigger in general than Gardner was. The man says he will wear it with the sleeves rolled up. I don’t care how he wears it or if he wears it. I want him to have it, and right now, more than twenty-five years later, I’m trying to see what I was doing.

I don’t know, except it connects in some way to the book I was reading and the infatuated state of the narrator, who is so wrapped up in the feeling of infatuation she doesn’t pause to show us the man on the page. He’s not there. All we have is the impression he makes on her, much the same way I’m not showing you the man I gave the shirt to. I don’t want to. He’s not that important, and he’s not the point.

The point is the gift. I’m embarrassed I gave it to this man because I must have thought the gesture would produce the feelings between us that weren’t there, like the scene in the movie Sleeper, where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton attempt to clone a dictator from his nose by setting up shoes and socks, pants and a shirt on an operating table for the dictator’s clone to grow into. As I was reading the book, I felt guilty toward the shirt. I felt guilty toward Gardner. I wished I had kept the shirt to give to Richard! Wouldn’t he look nice in it. The person I was who gave away the shirt makes me dislike myself because I think she knew every moment that the project was doomed. What an idiot. I remain potentially her. The thing with the man and the shirt, it’s something, it appears, I do.

September 13 2022

Jean-Luc Godard died on this day at the age of 91. Famously, he said, “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.” When I was young, the French New Wave was a road sign in the garden of forking paths. It was foreign. There was smoke. It was moody and funny in ways you didn’t always get the joke. Every film that came out, I stood on the ticket line, and I can see myself from an overhead shot wearing the right scarf. People said, “Godard is not making political films, he’s making films politically.” Didn’t we do everything politically? You wanted to be confused by film. You sat close and slunk down. You wanted to pay attention. It’s how you knew you were in love.

It’s still how you know you’re in love. Richard is always looking back at his younger self and saying, “I was so naïve. I didn’t understand what people were telling me. I didn’t understand how I was being seen.” I say to him, “We were all naïve. That’s what it’s like to be young. You don’t know anything. It’s great. You can fall in love with so many things, because they are the moon, and you can’t see any of the dark side.” The other night at a party, I was talking to a man, and he told me about this thing he does with his male friends, only his male friends, and how great it is they meet at their gym, and then they all go out together, it’s only the guys, he kept saying, and I was reminded of Godard’s line, “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl,” and I thought, yes, that is true, for a certain kind of movie, that’s all you need, and then I turned away from the man at the party, without saying a word, and went to get something to eat.

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