Yesterday on Warren Street, Richard and I were wandering up and down and stopping into the shops of people we'd become friends with. They gave us cake. Richard said, “Christmas warms the cockles of the heart.”
Then we wondered at the exact same moment why cockles would have any place near the heart. "They would smell fishy," Richard said, reminded of the lyric of "Molly Malone, "Selling cockles and mussels alive, alive, oh!"
I started to think about places where I'd eaten cockles, which are small, and you need a lot to feel you've eaten something. Perhaps I'd wondered if the effort of picking them out of the shells was worth it and also, no doubt, decided it was, because I will sit for a day picking out the tiniest bits of lobster from the shells other people have discarded.
It turns out the "cockles" of the heart actually refers to the ventricles, named by some in Latin as "cochleae cordis", from "cochlea" (snail), alluding to their shape. The saying means to warm and gratify one's deepest feelings.
Which brings us back to the cake. We felt held in the bosom of Warren Street, and since we are there every day, people feed us the way they feed pigeons.
Sauna
In my twenties, I began to swim as a way to gain control of my body, and for many years it worked. I would swim a mile a day. At Columbia, that was 72 laps. At the Paris Health Club, it was 104 laps. After swimming, I’d sit in the sauna and sweat, and in these saunas was a culture of women without clothes.
Some women sat with a towel around them, but most of us stretched out naked on the wooden planks. I studied the bodies quietly. I suspect everyone did. It was a brilliant and beautiful sisterhood that had no name or function, really, except to allow us a form of freedom, although we weren’t free. We were never free from ourselves.
At the Columbia gym, I was young, and I remember observing the bodies of women who were the age I am now. I remember a woman who was very thin and had lost her pubic hair, or it was sparse. It had not occurred to me before this would happen, and I didn’t think it would happen to me.
At the Paris, there was a beautiful woman named Barbara or Carol. She was the queen of the sauna, smoothing off sweat from her long, muscled limbs. She developed a form of blood cancer and eventually died. When she was diagnosed, she wondered if, somehow, her prolonged sessions in the sauna were responsible. She liked to sweat for long periods in order to lose weight, and I think she feared that loving her body had doomed her. I think women are raised to believe our pleasure in being embodied will kill us.
I’ve arrived, again, at the point I’d arrived at in my early twenties, which is how to gain control of my body, and it makes me feel helpless in a way I recall from that time, and when I tell people I feel helpless and kind of a mess, I think I become easier to like.
Carol or Barbara, although very beautiful, sleek, and tall, was easy to love as the queen of the sauna, even before she got sick. There was something porous about her, as if things could flow into her as well as flow out of her. Isn’t that what other people enjoy, the sense they can make an impression on you?
I wanted a hard body but not enough to make one, just enough to walk around without that much that jiggled or looked loose. In the world of naked women, I remember a softness of gaze we didn’t extend to each other when we were clothed. Everyone was different and everyone was subject to scrutiny in the same way. I remember skinny, wiry women who sat like cats on the higher shelves. I couldn’t stay much longer than 20 minutes, and once I left I didn’t come back.
I liked the stories women traded in the sauna. They just poured out of them the way the sweat did, and many women were silent, listening to the show, as if they couldn’t speak and also be naked at the same time. The women who talked spoke about their problems with men or with work or with their families. We didn’t trade stories of celebration. Stories of celebration did not go with the setting of release. We had already celebrated ourselves in the pool or on the training floor before arriving at the sauna. I don’t think we talked about sex. That, too, might have felt too intimate in the context of our nakedness.
When I speak, now, about bringing my body under control, it feels like a fantasy about a time that has passed, although I think this is how we always feel about making a difficult change. We think we have already been formed, and that’s that. There’s a pleasant inertia in our minds about how life works, although we always have to heave ourselves from one state of being to the next at every age.
Nothing in life has come easily for me or what people call “naturally.” I mean, I lack the skills and grace you don’t have to work for to look good. As I write these pieces with Richard, I am sitting on a plank in the sauna, and these words and images are flowing out. It requires almost no effort except the effort that becomes invisible after years of long practice. When we walk on Warren Street, I often want to walk faster to regain my normal gait, which is the gait of walking in the city, which is the gait of walking the streets of Long Beach as a kid, which is the gait of Lucy, my primate ancestor, walking along the savanna three and a half million years ago.
The Bleecker Street Cinema
I’m 16, and my parents have moved from Long Beach to Manhattan. I go on a ski trip, and now we live someplace else. My bike is gone. My drawings have been tossed out. I have to say, in looking back, the weirdness of this move, the lack of communication between my parents and me, the sense I have of myself as a suitcase they move around seems funnier than sad. They are saying, “You’ll be out on your own in a year and a half, so you might as well start thinking of our apartment as a hotel you’re visiting.”
That is exactly what happened.
I’m 16, and I’m commuting to Woodmere from Penn Station on the Long Island Railroad. As soon as I return to the city, I walk south from our apartment on 34th Street, between Park and Lexington. (Bette Davis has a daughter in this building. I see Bette in the elevator.) I walk south to the Village because everyone finds the magnets they need.
My parents are happy to be back on their streets. My father can walk to his business on 8th Avenue. My mother is taking classes at the New School because André has encouraged her to open her mind, André—the shrink who took me to his bed and I’ve told no one about. I think this is the year my sister has her first child, and I stand outside her room in the hospital as the ghost I am becoming.
I walk south to the Village. I know how to walk alone. When I’m a kid, Long Beach is where you’re seven and your mother gives you money to buy cigarettes and maybe milk. On the way to the stores, you pass the canals. If the tide is out, you look down at the armies of horse shoe crabs gathered on the sand. You hate them, and that’s about all you can think to hate.
I’m sixteen and fat. I stare through the windows fogged with steam from espresso machines. People lean in across little marble tables. Lovers kiss on the grass in the park. The arch is the shape of two giant arms that surround me.
Jules and Jim and Hiroshima, Mon Amour are playing at the Bleecker Street Cinema. Oh my god, I can feel the thrill of this encounter, alone in the dark. Jules and Jim I understand. Am I supposed to be Catherine? Am I supposed to have two men and a mysterious smile? Drive off a cliff with one man and kill us both? By the time I’m 17 and thin, Bruce will take a picture of me on a Lambretta scooter, wearing a beret and aviator sun glasses. It will be the summer after I’ve graduated from high school and I will never again sleep in the apartment of my parents.
There is much to be said for this freedom, although I never lose the sense of being easily let go of, and I wonder if I was in training to be let go of.
Hiroshima, Mon Amour—I have no idea how to watch this. What is gong on? Who are these people to each other? What do the images mean? Why is there so much repetition? What is a story that has no beginning or end and doesn’t maybe go anywhere? I’m lost and kind of bored, and I know I can’t leave. I think hard work in the dark is something I need to learn. Is it a good movie or a bad movie? I have no strainer at this time to catch any kind of tea leaves. Everyone is happier at the movies, with the world rushing into you. I don’t know, then, this will be the way I’ll make a life.
Lenny
We are listening to Lenny's music and the great performances he conducted in order to commune with a brilliant artist and human being. Among several docs and interviews we’ve watched is a very revealing session with Stephen Sondheim, recorded in 1998, 8 years after Lenny's death, about their collaboration on West Side Story and their friendship during the 1950s and 1960s. In looking back at the life of an artist, it's the art that matters most, in my opinion. Do we want to be with it? Do we still love it? I love the music. I want to be with it. All of this, plus the way Lenny communicated with musicians in the orchestras he led are far more compelling to me than his personal life and the way it's represented in Maestro.
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The sauna piece. Beautiful observed. The cockles piece: I read it to my hopelessly pedantic male companion who said, “she doesn’t mean ventricles, she means valves, which do look like shells.” Men: can’t live with ‘em, can’t kill ‘em, which is all I have to say on that subject.
I bemoan the greying, balding muff I now have... all that black thick hair, gone gone gone. I miss it.