Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky is coming back to theaters this summer, the one where Peter Falk and John Cassavetes play best friends who have been assigned to betray one another and try to delay the inevitable by running around Philadelphia all night drinking half-and-half and frightening women.

It’s very good and if you get the chance to see it in the theater I hope you do. It’s also a little stagey and more than a little exhausting in a way I find pretty realistic; every fight I’ve ever had with a friend or a lover has similarly felt totally pointless and insane. One leaves the world for a few hours, and nothing feels possible any longer. Why not switch coats and watches? Why not get off the bus and walk in the opposite direction? Why not go to the movies or get kicked out of a bar; nothing makes sense in the middle of an argument anyhow.

Recently I’ve grown a little talked out on the subject of women interpreting intimacy between men1 (see Return to Pervert Ethnography Island if you’re still looking for more), but I have to admit that Elaine May is the indisputed queen of such interpretation. Not five minutes into her second movie, Mikey and Nicky, Peter Falk breaks down a door so he can start gentling John Cassavetes like a damn horse, petting his flanks and rubbing pills down his throat.

The script opens with a little explanation of the setup that never makes it onto the screen:

One of the oddest and perhaps, most frightening characteristics of a “hit” is the behavior of the victim who is aware that he is slated to die.

He knows, almost as a certainty, that someone inside his organization, someone whom he considers a friend, will be used to set him up for the kill. This is done for obvious reasons. It is easier to kill a man who has been set up, and he can only be set up by a friend, because who else will he trust? The friend must also be known and accepted by the organization, because who else can they trust?

There is also a flavor of ritual about the procedure, as primitive as the Cosa Nostra’s ritual kiss of death. Perhaps it is because of the ritualistic .response of the intended victim. Knowing the custom of the set-up as well as he does, and sometimes having actively participated in it, he will, almost invariably, call on someone inside the organization for help. Why he does this is a matter for speculation. That he does do it is a matter of fact. That he seldom escapes is a matter of record.

I don’t know how many times Falk intimidates Cassavetes into taking a pill in this movie. At least three. And that’s to say nothing of the crackers he force-feeds him. When people talk about Mikey and Nicky they often focus on how May shot an absolute unreal amount of footage for it, something like a million hours more than Gone With The Wind, like she just unhinged her eyes and turned into this endlessly hungry camera and never stopped looking at these two guys for the rest of their lives.

Vincent Canby thought the movie was a mildly interesting failure —

“It’s a melodrama about male friendship told in such insistently claustrophobic detail that to watch it is to risk an artificially induced anxiety attack. It’s nearly two hours of being locked in a telephone booth with a couple of method actors who won’t stop talking, though they have nothing of interest to say, and who won’t stop jiggling around, though they plainly aren’t going anywhere. They just seem to be carrying on—making elaborate actor fusses—in front of the camera. Miss May is a witty, gifted, very intelligent director. It took guts for her to attempt a film like this, but she failed.”

— although I think if you look at the review it’s clear he’s anxious that she’s somehow contaminated Cassavetes and Falk with her womanly interest (“Melodrama, claustrophobic, artificial, jiggling, carrying on, fusses,” are these men behaving like men? are these men behaving like women? are these friends behaving like friends?). Canby’s not precisely wrong about the fussing, of course, but I think John Cassavetes and Peter Falk are about as good as actor-fussing as anybody. Sometimes two hours of watching guys with unbelievable heads of hair doing a lot of jittery prop work is just the ticket.

Oddly, Canby also seems to think that Mikey and Nicky grew up in California (“It’s about a couple of small-time Los Angeles hoods who’ve grown up together, joined the same mob and now, on this particular night, find their lifelong relationship passing in front of our eyes in aggressive close-up”), even though the movie is set in Philadelphia. In fact Mikey and Nicky is arguably about how it is impossible to ever leave Philadelphia once you are in it, even if you want to, very badly.

I tried to take notes the last time I rewatched Mikey and Nicky, because I was interested in the reactions it produced in me, but they all looked more or less like this:

• “All my life I wanted to be a guy who knew a guy for thirty years”

• “I want to shave a man’s face. No funny business, just a solid job”

• “People always used to get ulcers, but you never hear people talk about ulcers anymore. They’ll still be anxious or stressed, but they won’t get ulcers anymore”

John Cassavetes behaves unbearably throughout; he is desperately attached to his wretched little life, and becomes more desperate and wicked and brattish the closer he gets to losing it. His behavior is objectionable — more than objectionable — but really the reason no one can stand to be around him is they all know he’s perfectly aware that he’s going to be killed.

If A New Leaf is about the joy of realizing you no longer want to kill your wife, Mike and Nicky is about the devastation that comes from realizing you’re going to let Ned Beatty — a man with a friendless face, a friendless voice, a friendless carriage, a friendless spirit — kill the guy you grew up with.

I’m inclined to think that Henrietta in A New Life is aware her husband is planning to kill her; I’m also inclined to think she manages to get out of it by offering to sign all her money over to him before they get married, less because she thinks of the cash as a straightforward exchange and more because she wants to use his own weight and momentum against him. Henry wants Henrietta to become civilized, or at least civilizable, and Henrietta wants Henry to experience the pleasures of helplessness, and they both more or less get their way in the end. Nicky is similarly aware, but the difference is that Mikey is going to let him die; he doesn’t really want to do anything to him anymore, and there’s no way to get out of that sort of thing.

“I just want to not do it anymore,” Falk tells him on the street in the middle of one of their endless quarrels. “Be your friend.”

“Then I’ll be your friend,” Cassavetes counters, like that fixes everything. Every once in a while in life you’ll run into the kind of person who refuses to be broken up with, and they’ll give you some of the longest nights of your life.

I think people with narcissistic tendencies can do very well in the caregiving and customer-service professions, so long as theose tendencies are properly managed.

I have a number of narcissistic tendencies. In disclosing this, I hope the reader thinks to himself, “What a charming, candid disclosure of what can after all be only a little and eminently forgiveable fault.”

I also prefer to think primarily about myself in the context of my professional life, because I am very anxious not to write down a lot of whimsical anecdotes about the “fun” things residents say and do, to sketch personalities and share homespun wisdom and turn myself into Mitch Albom.

People like to congratulate you when you say you work with children or the elderly. But if you say you work with people your own age, no one has a very strong reaction one way or the other. I think it is better to take a square look at one’s own narcissism, one’s desire to appear special and young and strong by default, than to mistake working with a particular age group for a virtue.

I work in the Activities department of a large senior-living corporation. I drive, I put up and take down fliers, I issue reminders, maintain confidences, I set the evening movie schedule, twice a week I lead a seated exercise class, I am responsible for a number of keys, I help to manage the bistro; in this way and in several others I am very much like François Vatel:

The maître d’hôtel, superintendent of chefs and household staff, acted as the public face and temporary repository of his master’s honor, and was responsible for making all arrangements necessary for convenience, comfort, and prestige. He was master of all servants except himself and very nearly not a servant at all. His role was not to absorb barked instructions and turn them into repetitive acts of obedience, as was the lot of a lower-ranked servant, but to act as if he were his own master in absentia, to think as he might think, to act as he might act, to anticipate and contrive on someone else’s behalf. The task of the maître d’hôtel was therefore doubly difficult: first, he must successfully twin himself, and once that impossibility was achieved, he must teach one of those selves to think like a master of servants, and then teach the other to take orders from the first.

When my sense of dignity is well in order and I feel myself on a stage in the hallways I take great pride in being approachable. If I see a piece of trash on the ground, I sink down to retrieve it in grand humility. If nobody is there to see and admire me as I do it, I might wait until the moment becomes more opportune.

Once, when I was straining to replace the big wall calendar by the elevator bank: “Look at him, with his long arms!”

Once, carrying two grocery bags from the car into the lobby (each bag containing only a single grocery): “So strong!”

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People will sometimes try to recommend Marty in light of the incel movement or the “male loneliness epidemic,” but you can safely ignore that sort of talk. Nor should you believe anyone who describes the movie with any of the following words: sentimental, universal, simple, little, or humble. It’s a movie about how the GI Bill remembered to provide servicemen with college degrees, steady employment, and a home, but forgot to throw a wife into the bargain during the 1950s, a decade that acted like a marriage-producing machine, where your neighbors could lawfully kill and eat you in the streets if you stayed single too long.

Ernest Borgnine plays Marty, a thirty-four-year-old Italian-American butcher living in the Bronx, the only unmarried Italian-American man left in the world, who has ten thousand brothers and sisters, each of them more married than the last. Imagine an Omelas child who is allowed to leave the house once a day in order to slice lamb chops and experience sexual humiliation and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the character. Imagine a world where marriage exists primarily as a form of conversational currency that will prevent people from screaming at you in a butcher shop, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the moral universe this character lives in.1

You don’t get either Moonstruck or When Harry Met Sally… without Marty, incidentally. When Harry Met Sally shares Marty’s preoccupation with New Year’s Eve as a bellwether of the safety the couple-form provides, and Moonstruck manages to pull off the same trick of making a Catholic Italian-American from a traditional family getting engaged seem like the most shocking and subversive act imaginable, with the same remarkable neatness.

In the opening scene, one of Marty’s middle-aged customers, Mrs. Fusari, asks him which of his brothers got married the past weekend. During his monologue she occasionally interrupts him to heckle or correct in an increasingly aggrieved tone.

“No, that’s my other brother, Freddie,” he says. “My other brother Freddie, he’s been married four years already. He lives down on Webb Avenue. The one who got married Sunday, that was my little brother, Nickie…No, that’s my sister Margaret’s husband, Frank. My sister Margaret, she’s married to the insurance salesman, and my sister Rose, she married a contractor. They moved to Detroit last year. And my other sister Frances, she got married about two and a half years ago in Saint John’s Church on Kingsbridge Avenue. Oh, that was a big affair. Well, let’s see now, that’ll be about a dollar-seventy-nine. How’s that with you?”

“When you gonna get married, Marty?” Mrs. Fusari says in response. “You should be ashamed of yourself. All your brothers and sisters, they all younger than you, they married and they got children.”

People will sometimes refer to Borgnine’s Marty as “gentle” or “amiable,” but this is not true either.2 His affability is paper-thin and exaggeratedly wounded. He is not a cheerful man; scratch him and he will scream. He lives in an impossible world. His friends want to meet women, not keep them, and his mother, Mrs. Pilletti, wants him to get married right up until he meets a viable candidate, at which point she sours on them both.

About a third of the way through the movie Marty does meet Clara Snyder at the Stardust Ballroom, it is because her date has approached him in the stag line and offers him five bucks to pretend to be an old army buddy and take “a dog” off his hands. The stag line at the Stardust is a wretched place to be: a row of dateless, danceless men all waiting their turn to work up their nerves or to sweat out a rejection. The “dog” in question is played by Betsy Blair, who has the face of a saint, and spends most of the movie either weeping or listening radiantly. Blair often plays Clara as if she were playing a blind woman, turning her face in expectant radiance towards Marty without making direct eye contact. She wears a terrible little Peter Pan collar with a bolo tie, too, which is how you know she does not expect to ever be loved, and her splendid long face makes a wonderful counterpoint to Borgnine’s splendid wide face.

Everybody will tell you to get married but nobody really wants to let you do it on your own terms. This is where the Omelas complex comes back in; no one is happy when two plain wallflowers find one another. Marriage is for the young and the beautiful. No one is excited for Marty to meet someone, if the someone he’s met is just another Marty. When Marty realizes this, his despair is complete.

Everyone around him is cruel; so excuse him when he’s cruel.

He makes his verbal restraint (withholding is often a better term) conspicuous at every opportunity, and only drops his passive-aggression for the occasional burst of aggression. He is polite only to remind others around him where they have failed to be polite, to highlight their lapse in standards, and the lapses are frequent and deranged. Mrs. Fusari says “What’s the matter with you?” and “You oughta be ashamed” at least twice more before completing her purchase; the very next customer, Mrs. Canduso, asks after the wedding and immediately follows it with “You oughta be ashamed,” while Marty is wrapping up a four-pound pullet for her.

Marty is as far above his surroundings as an Austen heroine, and like an Austen heroine knows his continued existence rests upon resisting the values of his most beloved friends and relations.

Every woman Marty knows wants him to get married, and every man Marty knows wants him to waste his time endlessly, like the Terrible Trivium from The Phantom Tollbooth. His friends hang out in bars and the street and back porches reading newspapers, magazines, dime store novels, having pointless, sterile, repetitive, masturbatory (sometimes literally) conversations. A few illustrative pieces of dialogue:

“What happened?”

“The Yanks took two.”

“Any homers?” [No answer.]

and:

[Reading a dirty magazine in public] “They shouldn’t sell magazines like this on a public newsstand.”

Worst of all is a conversation between Marty and his wretched friends that takes place right before the climactic phone call, as he sits sweating in a punishing vision of the sort of future he can look forward to in their company:

Joe: “I always figure a guy oughta marry a girl who’s twenty years younger than he is, so that when he’s forty, his wife is a real nice-lookin’ doll.”

Leo: “That means he’d have to marry the girl when she was one year old.”

Joe: “I never thought of that.”

There’s a sense throughout the movie that Marty becomes increasingly aware that he is living in Hell. It was perhaps more than a little narcissistic of me to respond in this way, but I could not help but take it personal, upon learning that both my brother and my father were pedophiles a little more than a year after I had decided to make a go out of living as a man. Certainly I had not decided to transition solely out of admiration for my male relatives, but the information nevertheless threw a dampener over the scheme for a time. The walls are closing in on Marty. The only train leaving the station is marriage and the only other passenger is Clara.

It’s not a sweet movie, is what I mean. But there’s something bracing and even refreshing about watching people leave the house and visit a lot of “third spaces” and still experience non-stop loneliness, brutality, one-upmanship, and defeated bids for intimacy. The screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky came up with the idea after going to a dance at the “Friendship Club” (!) one night where he saw a sign reading “Girls, Dance With the Man Who Asks You. Men Have Feelings, Too” (!!). That’s exactly the sort of leverage Marty uses on Clara, too; his insecurity and self-pity are so massive, so lit up in neon, so demanding of attention, that there is little room for hers.

“You can’t just walk off on a girl like that,” Marty says to Clara’s date, appalled at the waste. But he’s fascinated by the effects of cruelty on Clara, and watches hungrily as some other stag is willing to take the five bucks and lie to her. It’s a new sort of cuckoldry, where rejection takes the place of sex, and Marty gets to watch it all from the best seat in the house. He sees her unwanted first and crying second; that’s how he knows she’s the girl for him, because of her exquisite sensitivity to deception and cruelty. He sees in Clara the possibility of someone who will recognize his own suffering, and their union a reward for their mutual distress — hers for necer complaining, his for incessant grumbling. She endures distress in silent tears, like the little mermaid, while he endures distress loudly, like the prophet Jonah, or saint Martha, or Christ cursing the fig tree.3 He never shuts up once on their date. Occasionally he will curse himself for talking to me, and promises to stop talking, but he can’t, and she does not seem to mind. His loneliness has always been accompanied by plenty of talk, and he’s used to it; her loneliness, we suspect, has involved a great deal of silence, and she is relieved to be bathed in chatter.

Incidentally, Marty frequently refers to both himself and Clara as “dogs,” not because he thinks she’s ugly but because everyone else claims to. Which is all well and good, communally-mediated attractiveness being an important element of the story, but it makes it all the stranger that no one acknowledges the fact that his sister-in-law Virginia, who plays an important role in the movie’s subplot, is beautiful almost beyond the point of reason.

Frankly, 20-30% of the movie’s dialogue should be given over to this woman’s beauty. People should be talking about it all the time. They should be talking to her like Jon Hamm in 30 Rock’s “The Bubble” episode, but everyone just wants to talk about how ugly Marty and Clara are, as if having an angel’s face were an unremarkable fact of everyday life.

Virginia is married to Marty’s cousin Thomas. Her mother-in-law, Marty’s aunt Catherine, lives with the two of them and their new baby, and Virginia and Catherine fight all the time. Both Virginia and Thomas are desperate for Marty and his mother to invite Catherine to live with him, although as soon as the tradeoff is made, Virginia and Thomas turn on each other, and there is no indication in the script that their lives will improve as a result of being left to their own devices.

Catherine and Mrs. Pilletti have a Death of A Salesman sort of conversation, poignant and embittered by turns, about being forced into early retirement as wives and mothers: “I’m only fifty-six years old,” Catherine says to her sister before begrudgingly accepting her invitation to move in together. “What am I going to do with myself? I have strength in my hands. I want to cook. I want to clean. I want to make dinner for my children. Am I an old dog to lie in front of the fire til my eyes close? These are the terrible years.”

Mrs. Pilletti offers sisterly consolation, tenderness, and understanding in return: “Catherine, you are very dear to me. We have cried many times together. When my husband died, I would have gone insane if it were not for you. I ask you to come to my house, because I can make you happy. Please come to my house.” It makes no dent, it makes no difference. Catherine is not consoled one whit.

Speaking of things you can ignore! Don’t let anybody try to tell you that this movie is about how the midcentury ideal of the nuclear family pushed out older ideals of extended kinship or raising a child with a village, either. I’m sure it did, but Aunt Catherine doesn’t want to be part of a village. She wants to be a vampire king. She exaggerates Virginia’s gestures as potential violence — “That girl was shaking her hand at the the baby. I said, ‘You brute! Don’t you strike that baby! That’s my son’s baby!’” — to which her sister tries to remind her, “Well, it’s her baby, too, you know.”

“That’s my son Thomas’ baby,” Catherine repeats.

“Well, it ain’t your baby,” Mrs. Pilletti says.

An in-law unit would not solve Aunt Catherine’s problems, is what I mean, when what she wants is to kill and eat her daughter-in-law, and never stand aside for anyone. Wonderfully, the Catherine-and-Mrs. Pilletti storyline is never resolved in the slightest. There is not even a gesture towards resolution. Catherine is unhappy, and infects Mrs. Pilletti with her unhappiness; Virginia and Thomas are not cured of their unhappiness by expelling her from their home. Their scenes simply stop showing up on the screen.

Mrs. Pilletti, who had been so eager for Marty to meet a nice girl, who had been so tentatively warm to Clara when they met briefly in the kitchen, becomes nervous and hateful as soon as Catherine suggests that she too will be crowded out when her last son gets married: “She don’t look Italian to me,” she tells Marty the day after his date. “I don’t like her. Don’t bring her to the house no more — I don’t know. She don’t look Italian to me.”

No one wants Marty to call Clara the day after their date except for Marty. His furious announcement that he likes her despite the general disapproval of his neighborhood is at least an avowal of pleasure (“I had a good time last night. I’m gonna have a good time tonight”):

“Miserable and lonely! Miserable and lonely and stupid! What am I, crazy or something? I got something good here! What am I hanging around with you guys for?…You don’t like her. My mother don’t like her. She’s a dog, and I’m a fat, ugly little man. All I know is I had a good time last night. I’m gonna have a good time tonight. If we have enough good times together, I’m gonna go down on my knees and beg that girl to marry me. If we make a party again this New Year’s, I gotta date for the party. You don’t like her, that’s too bad.”

That he does make the call feels hugely significant. I had been prepared to find the sentiment of Marty grating, but I was on the edge of my seat; it felt as though I was watching a single soul escape Hell at the very last possible second, and for the first time I understood Luke 15:7, “I say unto you that likewise more joy shall be in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance.”

But it’s important, I think, that our final glimpse of Clara is at home, alone on the couch with her parents, watching television and weeping, because Marty did not call when he said he would, was not willing to avow the pleasure he took from her company until after he had broken the only promise he’s made to her.

It’s fitting that, aside from the conversations between Aunt Catherine and Mrs. Pilletti, the only other time we see two women discussing marriage in Marty it’s between two unnamed Irish women drinking at Marty’s regular bar. They’re discussing a mutual acquaintance who keeps having children, despite her doctor’s admonition that more children will kill her:

“Well, last week Tuesday, she gave birth to the baby in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital,” the first woman says, “a big healthy boy of nine pounds.”

“Oh, that’s nice. So the doctor was wrong, wasn’t he?” says the other.

“Oh, no. She died right in the hospital.”

“Oh, that’s a sad story. And her husband is that little fellow, works in Peter Reeves?”

“That’s the one.”

“Oh, that’s a sad story.”

Clara leaves the movie the same way she entered it: weeping, in a high collar. Marriage is no good and will kill you, but the alternative is worse.

Marty at least gets to experience the pleasure of doling out cruelty rather than absorbing it before the credits roll. Just as he slides into the phone booth to call Clara up, utterly secure in the knowledge that she will forgive him, he turns to his best friend and tormenter Angie and repeats what Mrs. Fusari told him at the beginning of the film:

When you gonna get married, Angie? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You’re thirty-three years old. All your kid brothers are married. You oughta be ashamed of yourself.

Then he closes the door to the phone booth, decisively, like Al Neri shutting Kay out of the room at the end of the Godfather. It’s a wonderful, vicious little film, and I felt as though I had been suffocated by the end of it.

Danny: You mentioned new atheism, which was very popular at the time, and maybe all the more so at Christian college for appealing to a very small group of people!

Ella: There was a small group of angry exvangelicals including Andrew and myself who seemed to be the most vocal and militant about it. We sat in the back of Dr. Noble’s Problem of Evil senior seminar, scoffing and being in general rather rude to the entire class. I wrote my thesis on the decline of democracy at the hands of evangelical political power and remember rushing to intervene with Andrew at what looked to be a professor’s last ditch effort to keep you in the fold over coffee. Did you identify with the movement at that time? I found my way to Korean Zen and then added on an identity as an Episcopalian CEO (Christmas and Easter Only), but retain the general skepticism of that era regarding anything metaphysical.

Danny: I don’t remember encountering the “exvangelical” portmanteau, which I’m afraid I find unlovely, until well after college. But I certainly remember that strange combination of anger and motionlessness. I was so resentful over being at APU and so completely unwilling to consider transferring schools. It never even crossed my mind. And I did think of myself as an atheist then, certainly. I probably still do, although in a way that feels a lot more relaxed now. I share your distant affinity with Episcopalians, although Zen practice isn’t for me. Skeptical of metaphysics but very woo-woo and excited about the process of aging and dying.

I remember Dr. Noble! He was terribly kind. To the best of my recollection he seemed desirous of establishing a possible path for me, should I want to remain or re-become a Christian, but not in a way that felt overbearing or officious. I’m afraid that I do remember telling him on at least one occasion that he would have been a terrific lesbian, which was hardly appropriate of me. But for all that it’s a clumsy construction, I think I was trying to make cross-gender identification possible when I would offer the honorary appellation to people I felt some sort of tie with, using language that was somewhat popular at the time.

I did enjoy the occasional bursts of attention I got from faculty and students as a possible lost sheep who might be persuaded back in. It made me feel important. Being at APU flattered my vanity in that way.

Do you remember any other trans students at APU? I don’t remember anyone who was out or had transitioned at the time, of course, but a few of us did so pretty shortly after graduation.

Ella: As for meeting other trans people at APU, many of my friends and one professor ended up being trans but all transitioned after I graduated: Joh C., Jade P., Xio C., and of course, you. The four of you, forged what looked like a feasible path to surviving if not thriving as a trans person so that by 2018 I could take a giant step in transitioning.

Danny: Did you do anything memorable with your gender at APU? I got married as a joke to a friend of my ex-boyfriend’s, and got in a lot of trouble for it. Were you there? I remember that Andrew was, but I was very drunk at the time and I’m not sure who all was present that day.

Ella: I don’t think I, or anyone else, really digested my internal female reading voice or the moniker of “male lesbian” until long after the fact. The bits of gender exploration I did find myself doing in that time were always in secret, either locked in my dorm room or swishing in a mini skirt at Temptation Tuesdays, what was essentially a chaser event held at a gay spa in Hollywood. I recall seeing familiar faces at those events but nothing that was ever acknowledged outside of those dimly lit halls.

I don’t remember if I was at your joke wedding but that is the downside I suppose of having been constantly on weed and mushrooms. What prompted that for you?

Danny: Very little other than impulse and a desire for attention, I think. A few days beforehand I had gotten dessert at a little Filipino bakery in Duarte with Jamie Noling (one of the co-campus pastors) and a few other students. I don’t know if you remember Duarte – it was that little town next to Irwindale, where they have the big Renaissance fair every summer, about halfway between APU and Pasadena. The strip mall the bakery was in also had a wedding venue called the Amoré Chapel. I was at the Brass Elephant bar in Monrovia a few nights later with my roommate Jen and a few other people. This was right around the Prop 8 referendum. It was very much like the “series of escalating dares” that resulted in Gob’s wedding on Arrested Development.

This guy James – who I didn’t know very well but who was visiting Andrew from Yucaipa – and I kept drinking and saying the sort of things that were popular at the time, you know, How ridiculous that you and I could get married, just because you’re a man and I’m a woman, for no reason at all, we should show them, et cetera. And I called the Amoré Chapel and left them a very drunken voicemail at two in the morning and then we all went back to my apartment and passed out. In the morning I got a call back and they said there was an available timeslot that evening if we could bring a few witnesses and, I think, seventy-five dollars.

I had recently stopped dating my college boyfriend because I felt I wasn’t getting enough attention from him, and started dating my college girlfriend, who gave me plenty of attention but I always felt I could do with more. So I kept saying how funny it would be and we all kept drinking throughout the day and stumbled through the ceremony.

Later that evening my roommate told me, “I didn’t want to say anything at the time, because it was pretty funny, but I think if your parents claim you as a dependent on their tax returns while you’re secretly married, that they could get investigated for tax fraud.” I don’t know if that’s actually true or not but of course it scared the hell out of me at the time.

And of course James’ girlfriend ended up being pretty angry with him when she found out he’d gotten married to someone else during a weekend trip to Los Angeles. I think she broke up with him over it, although I wouldn’t swear to it. My girlfriend hadn’t been there either, and she did not love being left out of the loop, although she otherwise maintained a pretty lighthearted attitude towards the whole affair. We met up a few weeks later at a Starbucks somewhere halfway between Azusa and the High Desert to file for divorce because it turns out it’s very difficult to get an annulment in the state of California.

It cost $500 and the court clerk told us there would be a six-month delay before the divorce could go through, as a sort of mandatory cooling-off period. I had to borrow the money from my friend Maddie because I didn’t want to tell my parents I’d gotten married or divorced, and paid her back over the next year. It was sort of funny, and sort of anxiegenic, and sort of troubling, like a lot of things I did at the time. I still have my divorce papers in a silver folder. Every time I moved in the next ten years, my mother would come to help me pack up, and I would drive myself crazy trying to hide the folder so she wouldn’t see it.

I don’t always think of that wedding as an experience of insufficiently-realized transsexuality, but I do think I tended towards bluster, attention-seeking, bids for control and domination, forced bonhomie, etc, rather than secrecy when it came to unusual expressions of gender. I wanted every man in a fifty-mile radius to be my comrade and my bondservant at the same time, not to mention find me wildly charming, and I was perfectly willing to behave atrociously and drive people away in the pursuit of my goal.

Ella: After graduation I got an interdisciplinary humanities degree at NYU and remember being embarrassed of APU but also woefully unprepared. Part of this is my own fault for majoring in creative writing to avoid Literary Theory, which I ended up having to catch up on rapidly to make sense of Zizek’s endless, mostly unnecessary, sniveling allusions. I quickly learned that most of my very expensive reading lists would never be referred to in class, not even Sartre’s excruciatingly long Critique of Dialectical Reason which was marked an “essential text” in the required reading section of the syllabus. I managed to fake it through to graduation, blaming APU for not properly setting me up for success, having expanded my library but not really having digested much.

Danny: I never took a run at grad school. I don’t think I could hack it. I still don’t. I do think I could have done better than APU for undergrad, but I don’t think there’s any version of me that could have successfully gone to graduate school. Lucky for me there was blogging, I suppose. Not now there isn’t. But for a few shining years, there it was.

How evangelical was your extended network in 2018 when you started transitioning? It’s remarkable how quickly I went from being immersed in an almost-exclusively evangelical culture to almost completely out of it after graduating. Everyone I knew played soccer all the time and had the worst ACL tears you’ve ever heard of in your life and carried around copies of, like, 365 Devotions to Set Your Faith on Fire – evangelicals are always anxious to set their faith on fire, except for the slightly progressive ones, who were into Francis Chan and wanted to be “biblically outrageous” – and then I almost never met that kind of person ever again.

Ella: While I think you could have done well in grad school1, I’m grateful for the blog to book publishing route your life has taken. For one, you gave me my first byline on The Toast, which I still parade in my author bio with deep pride. More importantly, your work and presence has been a needed mirror to so many. For instance, one of my favorite couples - Achu and Michaela - who I love as individuals and as a unit, used your beautiful words to Grace in the acknowledgements of Something That May Shock and Discredit You at their wedding this past December. I just reread it now to ensure accuracy and my eyes are still watery.

Before coming out I had been adjuncting at APU and working with Allbaugh on organizing the Freshmen Writing Program straight out of grad school through the recommendations of Okamoto and Carlson, who I still keep in touch with. I taught Thomas Merton’s New Seeds and Rob Bell’s What We Talk About When We Talk About God as a way of trying to evangelize a more humanist approach to faith to students that seemed to get more fundamentalist and less curious by the year. Then I picked up a day job for a steadier paycheck at an evangelical prep school in Pasadena, which is where I was working when I came out in 2018.

What sparked it was my ex discovering that her makeup had been used and worrying that I was cheating on her, inviting strangers into the house to use her things. This made me sad enough to come out of the closet to her, which I don’t think I could have done entirely for my own sake, possibly ever. The truth of course wasn’t consoling to her in any way - that it wasn’t any secret affair, but a husband who spent every spare hour alone crossdressing and putting on her makeup - wishing for a life I never thought I could have. She was kind enough to encourage me to push forward regardless of what that meant for our relationship and I came out to my family on Father’s Day (highly do not recommend this) after a service at All Saints Church in which Father Mike Kinman preached on David’s queerness and the God who includes that which has been cast out or devalued. The next step would be to come out at work, which I felt emboldened to do because evangelicals do a really good job at making you feel like you will always belong.

Danny: You came out to your family on Father’s Day! You ought to get back hazard pay for that. I came out to my family after a Thanksgiving weekend where my mother looked critically at my neck and said “You’ve been breaking out a lot lately. Did you start testosterone without telling me?” which I can’t recommend either.

Ella: I thought that I could barter with transition and with the school leadership - my plan was to just be referred to by last name and to dress in male drag while in my roles at school, while I would be free to live as myself outside of school hours [See Let Me Save You Some Time: On Transitioning Like You’re Opening A Candy Bar In A Crowded Movie Theater With A Really Loud Wrapper for a guide to avoiding this phenomenon]. The bargain was of course not struck and I was promptly coerced to resign or be fired, which somehow shocked me. I love my life and the work I do today but I do miss the summer camp feeling of the campus and the deep mentoring I was able to do for so many students, some of which later came out to me as trans and many of which reached out to me to express their continued support including a few of their moms and a few straight boys - which happily surprised me and continues to warm my heart. You never really know where they might be found, the hats they wear, or the identities they hold, but allies are everywhere and love really does abound.

Danny: I’m very proud to know you. Since we’ve been a little hard on Christian college today, I’d like to close with a few things I liked about it: They sold good chicken fingers in the snack cafe. I want to call it Cougar Café? The old-fashioned streetcar trolley that went back and forth between West and East Campus was charming. Pretending my college girlfriend was just my good buddy and then secretly hooking up in the stacks at the library was a transgressive sort of fun that I would never have been able to experience at a regular college.

And I really was fond of quite a few of those earnest longboarders, sailing from class to class, hair blown back from the force of God’s love and the Santa Ana winds.

[Image via]

Ella Baker and I attended the same evangelical Christian college in Greater Los Angeles between the years 2005 and 2009.1 Later we both transitioned, although not at the same time, and a few years ago I was very pleasantly surprised to see her in The People’s Joker. Recently we had a long chat about the experience. You can expect the second part of our conversation later this weekend.

Danny: Hello, Ella! I don’t always think about the fact that I went to evangelical Christian college, but when I do, my mind turns fondly to thoughts of you. I was reminded this week because I was writing at the library and saw a copy of The Advocate with Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig on the cover.2

Our tenure at Azusa Pacific University (“Christ first since 1899”) overlapped with the original run of The L Word, and I remember spending a fair amount of senior year going off-campus with one of the handful of other gay students to go drinking in West Hollywood, where we were forever trying to convince one another that we had “just seen” a cast or crew member around the next corner. I’m sure we never saw anyone from that show, but we kept hyping one another up about it.

Neither of us are evangelical Christians today, and I feel reasonably certain that neither of us were evangelical Christians between 2005 and 2009, either. But we are both transsexuals, and I think “changing sex” and “going to Christian college” are two relatively unusual experiences, and I don’t know many people who have done both.

I don’t intend to merely invite complaints about the experience. It is easy to focus on the elements of evangelicalism one doesn’t like, after all, and there has already been plenty written on the subject.

Do you remember much about deciding to attend APU? Were you prepared to enjoy yourself, or did you already think of it as something you were going to have to get through? Do you remember, incidentally, how and when we first met? I’m not sure I do. I think it must have been in one of Dr. Esselstrom’s English classes, but part of me wonders if you were part of that cigarette-smoking club that met off-campus near the Stater Brothers, since we weren’t allowed to smoke on school grounds. If memory serves, they called themselves the Pirates, and in order to stand around and smoke with them you had to put out a cigarette somewhere on your own arm. I did it four times, to show off, and the scars are barely noticeable now.

Ella: The memories I have of you at APU are equally fond and I remember you as someone who was miles ahead of where I was in terms of self-understanding and the courage to actualize. I was indeed an evangelical for the first year at APU and chose to apply exclusively to the school as I was hellbent on becoming an evangelical pastor. My choice was solidified after attending a preview weekend which painted life at APU like a four-year long Christian summer camp.

Danny: I did enjoy Christian summer camp, even the very extreme one in the Ozarks. I played so much tennis.

Ella: I held multiple perhaps contradictory viewpoints - CS Lewis-loving creationist, Republican Socialist, affirming gay rights but still viewing “homosexual behavior” as sin - which made APU a logical place where I thought I could be a scholar who held deeply committed ideological nonnegotiables.

I very much enjoyed and celebrated my first year until I went to a creationist museum in San Diego (to help me better debate the evolutionists on MySpace) and felt like the rug was pulled from under me, which sent the whole fragile structure tumbling down. It was an exhibit on the second law of thermodynamics which was what pushed me firmly into the rising “new atheism” of that era, at least for my last three years at APU. The exhibit was full of lies and bad faith, I came away fuming and eager to learn what other received ideological commitments were equally false.

As for how we first met, I believe it might have been Eaton’s Film and Lit class? I remember you talking about Nabokov and recommending Pale Fire to me, which I must admit I still have not read (but will!). I remember being instantly intimidated by having met someone who was so vastly more wide read but was quickly charmed by your impish iconoclasm which came out in full force in nearly every class and interaction. I don’t think I ever was cool enough to be part of the Pirates but I did smoke with you and Andrew often (Djarum Blacks that crinkled). It was also either you or Joh C. who deemed me at the time a “male lesbian” which my closeted self grasped with deep pride. By sophomore year I knew there was some weird gender stuff going on, having felt the most joy I’d ever felt two years prior as a cross dressing cheerleader for my high school’s powderpuff game and telling my classmates in Carlson’s Intro to Poetry lecture on voice that the voice I read with and spoke to myself in was female. I took to burying my feelings beneath constant clouds of weed smoke and I’m not sure who sold to who but do remember sharing a bowl with you on a weekly basis, which became the daily bread of our communion.

Danny: I do think it’s unfair that there are so many vapes now, just anyone can purchase a little vehicle for watermelon-flavored steam, but you can’t get Djarum Blacks anymore, or even Camel Crushes, which had those wonderful little menthol balls in the filter. They tasted pretty bad for regular cigarettes, but absolutely terrific as mentholated cigarettes.

I’m both charmed and a little chagrined to think that I might have been handing out “male lesbian” appellations. I don’t remember if I said it to you, but it certainly sounds like something I would have said. It’s flirtatious, a little controlling, and positions the speaker as an authority on lesbianism, which I certainly wasn’t, but was perfectly happy to let people think I was one at the time.

There’s a sort of rude and Masonic quality to the things I used to say before I transitioned to other people who were also yet to transition. I remember the day I met my wife – I was speaking to a class of graduate students at UC Berkeley at her invitation – and I asked her outright, “So what kind of gay are you?” in front of them. She deflected it admirably, and it took us a few more years to sort out the answer to that question to everyone’s mutual satisfaction. I was often, I fear, astonishingly rude when what I was privately experiencing was flustered interest, but I’m glad that at least some of the time it came across as impish.

You mentioned Lewis and it reminded me of the strange Anglophilic strain running through certain parts of SoCal evangelicalism. We had a surprising number of classmates who wore Rainbow sandals to class and longboarded everywhere, while also being super into Chesterton and Belloc. Of the major evangelical Christian universities in Southern California – I don’t count Pepperdine because they don’t require faculty or students to sign a statement of faith, besides which their chapel requirement is something laughably low, like fourteen hours a semester – I think Westmont and APU skew more scholarly, while California Baptist University and Biola skew more pious, at least in terms of vibe. “Scholarly” being a relative term, as most people don’t go to either San Bernadino County or evangelical school to think deeply. But certainly some did!

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Back in 2024 an editor friend of mine asked me to review the Elaine May biography Miss May Does Not Exist. Unfortunately, I disliked the book so much after reading the first four chapters that I had to back out.1 I don’t mind the idea of writing a pan, but I don’t think I’m very well suited to it, and at a certain degree of intensity, I lose the ability to describe something that irritates me, and am reduced to pointing and trembling.

The upside is that it led me to revisit Elaine May’s first two movies, 1971’s A New Leaf and 1976’s Mikey and Nicky, which more than made up for the time wasted. A New Leaf is a Bluebeard comedy that asks the important question, “What if a vicious would-be wife killer developed the criminal equivalent of erectile dysfunction?” and you should see it at once if you haven’t already. May also co-starred in A New Leaf (which is quite faithfully based on Jack Ritchie’s short story “The Green Heart2) alongside Walter Matthau, who is splendidly, ideally miscast as the world’s oldest playboy.

He both looks and behaves like the Grinch in a screwball comedy about an aging roué named Henry Graham, who upon learning he has outspent his own trust fund, decides to marry and murder the first wealthy woman he finds bearable. He is so old, and so uniquely unsuited to impoverishment, and so attractively petulant that the only way I can think to describe him is if Jude Law’s version of Lord Alfred Douglas in the Stephen Fry Wilde movie suffered from Benjamin Button syndrome.3 I cannot recommend his performance highly enough.

Incidentally, Matthau’s hair is so improbably lush, robust, and twirling, especially when compared with his marvelously eroded, perpetually crestfallen face, I was absolutely convinced he was wearing a hairpiece (and not a very good one). He was 51 in this movie and looked every minute of it. But I was mistaken, and the hair was all his own. Apparently I had fallen prey to the same cruel lack of faith that plagued Pauline Kael:

A few minutes later producer Daniel Melnick and writer-director Buck Henry approach the actor.

“Am I in your next picture?” Mr. Matthau asks the pair.

Mr. Melnick jokes, “First you have to lose the beard.”

“No,” Mr. Matthau replies. “The beard makes me look less clownish, more heroic. Besides, I want Pauline Kael to see that my hair is real. She once accused me of having a bad toupee like John Wayne.”

Walter Matthau’s face in A New Leaf is like the picture of Dorian Gray: cunning, and old as sin, depraved and loveless and sinister, monstrous and melted, withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. He looks like if a very old ventriloquist’s dummy were given the same wardrobe and chance at life as Pinocchio. But Walter Matthau’s hair in A New Leaf looks like Dorian Gray, the man: unfaded, insouciant, youthful, exquisite.

Henry Graham is told that he has no money. He reels onto the street, in an impeccably cut suit — who knew Matthau could wear clothes so well? Not I — while Ketélby’s “In a Monastery Garden” plans, whispering to himself in broken amazement: “I’m poor.” After taking a brief farewell tour of his favorite haunts (his club, the tailor, his other club) he staggers home to take counsel with his valet Harold4, the most devoted and disloyal manservant on the planet. (Perhaps rather than Dorian Gray, the apter comparison is to Hitchcock; A New Leaf is the movie you end up with if you were to drop Bertie Wooster and Jeeves into the plot of Rope.)

Harold first promises to give notice the day Henry runs out of money, and subsequently chides him against giving up:

HENRY: “What will I do?”

HARRY: “What any gentleman of similar breeding and temperament would do in your position, sir.”

HENRY: “Suicide?”

HARRY: “No, sir, I was not going to suggest suicide. I was going to suggest marriage.”

HENRY: “Marriage? You mean to a woman?”

HARRY: “Yes, sir. It’s the only way to acquire property without labor.”

HENRY: “Oh, I can’t, Harold. I couldn’t. I mean — she’d be there, asking where I’d been, talking to me. Talking. I wouldn’t be able to bear it.”

HARRY: “Well, it was only a suggestion, sir, but the alternatives are very limited and unspeakably depressing.”

It’s difficult to say whether Matthau plays Henry as a homosexual, as such. He is gay in the same way Rex Harrison’s Henry Higgins is gay, which is to say that it does not prevent him from developing a single-minded, murderous obsession with giving a perfect, permanent makeover to the one woman who matters to him more than anyone else besides himself.5

“The only difference between us is I am a man and you are a woman,” he tells Henrietta during a strained and uncomfortable proposal, “and we don’t have to let that interfere if we are reasonably careful.” She’s very pleased with him, strained and uncomfortable as he is; who better than a botanist to tolerate a sensitive plant?

It is more strictly correct to say the one girl who matters to him. It’s very important to the story of My Fair Lady that Eliza Doolittle is a girl, not a woman, and even though May was nearly 40 at time of filming, you cannot call Henrietta Lowell (later Henrietta Graham) anything but a girl. The only woman Henry considers courting (they go waterskiing together) is voluptuous, blonde, aware of her own sentimentality, and full of desire, and he flees from her in horror. But Henrietta is a girl, with a girl’s problems; she is awkward and self-conscious, shy and inexperienced, stuck in school (as a teacher rather than a student, but schoolgirlish nevertheless), cheated by her servants, bullied by her lawyer, and not yet alive to herself, and Henry finds her tolerable enough to want to murder. She is a botanist, she is soft-spoken, she startles easily, she never makes demands, only suggestions; she never contradicts Henry, only reroutes him, as gently and as inexorably as water.

Henrietta is such a nonentity, such a wife-shaped vacuum that Henry is forced to become a husband and eventually even a person to make up for her haplessness. At a certain point both he and Harold realize they have become a butler to his wife, and it is rather as if Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering had both married Eliza Doolittle:

HENRY: “Oh, no. I forgot to check her before she went to school this morning. She’ll be walking around all day with price tags dangling from her sleeves.”

HAROLD: “I took the liberty, sir.”

HENRY: “Thank you, Harold. Was she free of crumbs?”

HAROLD: “Only a slight sprinkling, sir.”

Henry has enormous contempt for his wife, but nothing about her does not matter to him, which is why I think his repeated half-hearted attempts at uxoricide still come across as funny rather than depressing. Henrietta is never beneath her husband’s attention.6 It helps too that she never once realizes she is in any danger, and is never once hurt by anything he says. She’s like Pepe Le Pew in that way — shielded from all harm, bounding with unending vitality from crisis to crisis, never once breaking a sweat. From Henrietta’s perspective, she meets a very nice, slightly odd old man who marries her, improves her domestic life, helps her discover a new kind of fern on their honeymoon, and eventually agrees to come to work with her every day. Imagine a slapstick version of When A Stranger Calls, about a woman so hapless that she is safely inoculated against male violence — the “you don’t know you’re beautiful, and that’s what makes you beautiful” principle applied instead to vulnerability.

Moreover, his attempts to kill her are constantly being derailed by his indefatigable efforts at improving her life. Everyone else in her life is also trying to take advantage of her, and after they are married Henry cannot stand the idea of Henrietta’s life being any less gracious than his own. He fires, threatens, blackmails, and bullies them all out of her life until her home is filled with competent, respectful servants and beautiful floral arrangements.

Henry fails as utterly in transforming his wife as he does in murdering her. She becomes no more stylish, no tidier, no less accident-prone. In spite of his best attempts to improve her he manages only to make her happy. Two nonenties cannot coexist in proximity; one or both of them is going to have to become a person. Eventually he sinks so much energy into thwarting his wife that he finds she has become necessary to his happiness, and he is defeated at last. Splendid narcissist that he is, he cannot fail to fall in love with the blustering chivalric hero he has pretended to be in order to lull her into a false sense of security; loving himself in this new light, how can he bear to destroy the reflecting pool that shows his new face to him? You simply must see it at once.

[Image via]

Eli and Max are two guys I know from the internet.

The three of us most recently discussed gooning and sexual kayfabe back in October, after Harper’s Magazine published a very silly piece on the same subject.

Eli: It seems like he thinks he’s doing an authoritative study on a swelling group of internet-poisoned young men (the scale of which always seems somewhat foggy), but doesn’t see himself as caught up in the performance. He picks up the fact that getting swept away in sex for 8-12 hours is a fantasy that is very rarely achieved, but I don’t think he really understands why it’s a fantasy. He’s just like, It would feel good I guess, like drugs, or TikTok.

Max: Yeah, he doesn’t seem to totally grasp that it’s a fantasy of degradation specifically, a variant of bimbofication. Kolitz seems to harbor the fear that instant gratification rots your brain and fucks up your life, but that’s the explicit point of the fetish…

Eli: I feel so crazy about how people are responding to this article, specifically the sort of florid tone of Doom (a tone that Kolitz also slips in and out of). Like, I fear the extremely online, particularly extremely online men who frequent Discord, but I haven’t seen any particular reason to fear the gooners. I don’t think the subculture is very big and I think the people engaging in it are directly incentivised to lie that they definitely do it all the time, and it’s definitely melting their brains.

I’ve brought the band back together this week after The Cut published an article by E. Alex Jung (“Girls Who Love Boys Who Love Boys”: When did everyone start fujoing out?) about women1 who read and write slash fiction2, particularly as it relates to the recently popular Heated Rivalry book and TV series.

Danny: Hello again, fellas. In our last conversation, Max said he wished Kolitz had intervewed female gooners for the Harper’s piece:

“There’s a subreddit with 555k subscribers called “Goonette Hub” where only women are allowed to post. I’m sure a lot of the subscribers are horny men, and a lot of the posters are sex workers essentially doing business, but I imagine there’s at least some proportion of women that are sincerely into the fetish. The effect of internet pornography on women seems totally underexplored, beyond anxieties about it affecting what men expect of them and their bodies.

I think a lot of people still quietly believe that women don’t watch porn and don’t have fetishes. And I think this piece would’ve been improved by any attempt to investigate or potentially challenge that underlying assumption.”

It seems like we got our wish! I’ve neither read nor seen HR, but I’m very interested in online subcultures that spring up around shared sexual fantasies, so I’m having a great time following the conversation. Part of me wishes we could throw a party to introduce some of the gooners and the fujoshis to one another. I think they’d have a really fun time comparing notes!

I apologize if that sounds like a fantasy of heterosexual reconstruction. I don’t mean that they ought to pair off. But I think there is a a fun overlap between certain popular fantasies like cuckolding, gooning, and fujoshis – a really intense sexual fantasy that involves a certain level of detachment and non-involvement.

None of them are quite pillow princesses, but they’re perhaps all pillow-princess adjacent? Let me lie back in a comfortable position [the cuck chair, the goon cave, the, I suppose, fujoshi futon?] and watch some hot people who aren’t me do all of the work.

I wonder if you both think, as I do, that the overlap between the gooning and the fujoshi subcultures is significant. I realize there are differences between watching pornography and writing/reading smut, but it seems to me that both are communities that exist primarily so people with similar sexual fantasies can share erotic material with their fellow masturbators.

Max: The press about why women like yaoi is driving me crazy. Imagine if there were a blitz of articles asking “Why do so many men like lesbian porn?” Who can say. World’s biggest mystery. People are so confused and scared by the idea that women could have a sex drive and a sexual imaginary.

There are also women who enjoy yaoi for different, more complex personal reasons. “It’s sexy” is an oversimplification. But I don’t really see that as a mystery that needs to be solved, either. Women like art about men all the time. That’s one of the most mainstream types of art that there is. We accept that it’s normal for women to enjoy art about straight men, including art that deals with their sexual and romantic lives, because straight men are “normal” and everyone is supposed to relate to them.

Must Masturbatory Material Be Liberating? Is It Not Enough To See Two Beautiful Faces, Masculine?

Danny: The article acknowledges that it’s not only women who produce and share this sort of thing, but it is primarily interested in the women who do it because there’s no identity-category justification for it. Which sometimes leads to a weird attempt to cobble together an after-the-fact justification like “It’s actually feminist of me” or “Stories about men having sex is an escape from misogyny,” which doesn’t make much sense to me. I suppose part of that has to do with the question of Well, what is this? Is it a hobby, is it a creative community, is it a sexual subculture? It’s hard to imagine gooners trying to furnish virtuous explanations for their own kinks in the same way, for example.

Max: “Edging for a long time is actually more respectful than busting right away, because of all the hard work performers put into doing porn.”

I think it does bug me inasmuch as I don’t think we need to explain why women get horny. It feels like it feeds into the stereotype that women naturally hate sex, that their fantasies are or should be romantic in nature, and revolve around heterosexual dating and marriage.

Danny: Yeah, a lot of my sexual fantasies over the years have looked really different from the kind of sex I’ve had in person. I’m not sure why it’s important for a person’s sexual fantasies to always align with the real or even the possible. Part of the fun of having an imagination is using it, no?

I agree that sort of justification often feels protective. Like it’s easier to say “I can only get off to stories of closeted men having intense sex and feelings for one another in order to escape sexism” than “I’m a pervert.”

And depending on how a person feels about this phenomenon, that’s how they’ll categorize the kind of women who participate in it. If they want to be mad about it, it’s straight women (who are therefore committing objectification, fetishization, appropriation), and if they want to defend it, it’s queer women (and therefore responding to trauma, surviving a sexist world, subverting something). But I don’t really see how having this sort of sexual fantasy is suspect if you’re straight but virtuous if you’re gay or bisexual.

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I’ve been rereading Julius Caesar this week in a fit of nostalgia.1 Two things have struck me on this go-round which did not always stick out to me before:

1. Brutus and Cassius are incredibly concerned with whether the other thinks of him as a really good friend or just a work friend,

2. For all Cassius’ reputation for being a conniving, subtle, behind-the-scenes manipulator, his number-one go-to strategy for trying to get people on side is to mention how willing he is to commit suicide. He does it right away, and all the time, and it’s wonderfully off-putting. I realize Romans had their own set of values around suicide, but even by their standards he really front-loads the conversation. Trying to encourage your work friends into doing something very risky with you by mentioning your extreme willingness to engage in risky behavior seems complicated!

The second scene of the first act could almost word-for-word be replicated at any number of uncomfortable sleepovers I attended in the year 2000, especially if Katie F. and Monica K. were both present.2 No one wants to be the first to admit they’re not having a good time, so instead they have this highly uncomfortably and obviously-charged back-and-forth about whether or not they look tired.

I don’t mean to suggest it’s in any way surprising that a text about Roman conspirators could involve cattiness, merely that the breadth and detail of the cattiness on display is rich and delightful:

CASSIUS: Are you having a good time?

BRUTUS: I’m not sure. Are you having a good time?

CASSIUS [Carefully]: You should go have a good time with everybody else. Unless you’re tired! You do look a little tired.

BRUTUS [Diplomatic]: I’m not as much fun as some of our other friends. Antony, for example. He’s a lot of fun. I hope I’m not keeping you from having fun.

CASSIUS: No, not at all.

BRUTUS: Should I go? I can go. I don’t want to spoil your fun.

CASSIUS: I hope this doesn’t sound like a criticism. But you’ve been a lot less gentle lately. Everyone’s been talking about it. Because ordinarily you’re a very gentle and demonstrative person, and there’s this quality of love that’s very visible and very warm in your eyes. It’s gone lately. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that, or if anyone’s told you, but it’s very distinctly vanished from your eyes, that light.

BRUTUS: You sound like you have something to say.

CASSIUS: I don’t have anything to say. Do you have something to say?

BRUTUS: If I had anything to say, I would say it. I don’t like talking about people behind their backs; I’m very direct. I’ve always been a very direct person.

CASSIUS: Oh, I know. That’s something I’ve always admired about you.

Then it’s that first proper monologue of Cassius’ that really lets loose. It’s remarkable how quickly he falls from the subject of honor to cattiness about who can swim the fastest and how sniffly Caesar gets when he has a cold:

I know that virtue [honor] to be in you, Brutus,
As well as I do know your outward favor.
Well, honor is the subject of my story.
I cannot tell what you and other men
Think of this life; but, for my single self,
I had as lief not be as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself.
I was born free as Caesar; so were you;
We both have fed as well, and we can both
Endure the winter’s cold as well as he.

For once, upon a raw and gusty day,
The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores,
Caesar said to me “Dar’st thou, Cassius, now
Leap in with me into this angry flood
And swim to yonder point?” Upon the word,
Accoutered as I was, I plungèd in
And bade him follow; so indeed he did.
The torrent roared, and we did buffet it

And stemming it with hearts of controversy.
But ere we could arrive the point proposed,
Caesar cried “Help me, Cassius, or I sink!”
I, as Aeneas, our great ancestor,
Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder
The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of Tiber
Did I the tired Caesar. And this man
Is now become a god, and Cassius is
A wretched creature and must bend his body
If Caesar carelessly but nod on him.
He had a fever when he was in Spain,
And when the fit was on him, I did mark
How he did shake. ’Tis true, this god did shake.
His coward lips did from their color fly,
And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world
Did lose his luster. I did hear him groan.
Ay, and that tongue of his that bade the Romans
Mark him and write his speeches in their books,
“Alas,” it cried “Give me some drink, Titinius”
As a sick girl. You gods, it doth amaze me
A man of such a feeble temper should
So get the start of the majestic world
And bear the palm alone…

“Brutus” and “Caesar”—what should be in that
“Caesar”?
Why should that name be sounded more than
yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with ’em,
“Brutus” will start a spirit as soon as “Caesar.”

1. I know honor is important to you. I love honor!

2. Honor is actually what I came here to talk about today.

3. I would have zero problem committing suicide if I felt the situation called for it.

4. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I just want you to know, before we get into anything else, that I am ready to die, right now.

5. While we are on the subject of honor: when it comes to Julius Caesar, in the winter — not that it’s a contest, but when it comes to winter weather, his coats are warmer and my shorts are shorter. Do you know what I mean? Like he has to get very bundled up in this very precious way, and isn’t Gaul supposed to be cold? Shouldn’t he be used to it by now?

6. I can swim faster than him too

7. Again I realize this is not a contest but it has to count for something, no? We both eat dinner, we both put on our sandals one foot at a time in the morning,

8. When he gets sick it’s a mess

9. [Remembering this conversation was supposed to be about honor] And I guess I just don’t think that’s right. Because of Rome. Who deserves better.

10. [Remembering that this conversation should be about Brutus] And I’m sure you could outswim him too

11. Your name has the same number of syllables in it, even, we wouldn’t have to work that hard to change all the signs

[Caesar returns onstage]

BRUTUS: And he looks weird, right? Weirder than usual. And his wife and all his friends look weird too, right?

CASSIUS: I’m so glad you said something. I didn’t want to say anything, because I was worried it would sound catty, but he and his wife and his close friends have been looking so weird lately.

CAESAR [pointedly]: I don’t like the way Cassius looks. [Even louder] I DON’T LIKE HIS WEIGHT

In Scene Three, Cassius once again tries to impress his friends by announcing how ready he is to kill himself:

CASSIUS: Sorry if I look wet. I’ve just been walking in a rainstorm WITHOUT A SHIRT ON because I don’t care if I get struck by lightning…If the senators offer Caesar a crown tomorrow I’ll stab myself. The best thing about life is that you can always kill yourself. If nothing else.

He suggests it again in Act 3, scene 1, so prematurely that Brutus has to tell him “Cassius, be constant.”

Brutus has the sort of relationship to death I’d expect from a history play – “If it comes, it comes; I hope it doesn’t, but we’re playing a high-stakes game and I’m prepared for whatever outcome,” whereas it’s Cassius’ first and seemingly only card in the pocket.3

Luckily everything works out for the best in the end.

[Image via]

Every year in the late fall I become tremendously insane for anywhere between 18 to 45 days. I remember each September that my annual fit of madness is approaching, and intend to prepare for it, but by November I forget, and happily, involuntarily descend. On this date last year…on this date four years ago…on this date eight years ago, my brother came to my house and spoke to me in a reassuring, sensible voice to tell me that he was a pedophile, and that he and the rest of our family had a marvelous plan for keeping it a secret from everyone else in the world, and that they expected me to join in this confederacy. And so I go mad again.

I resume smoking cigarettes, I avoid all things friendly and wholesome, I tremble, I begin telling small and inconsequential lies, I pick quarrels, and generally grow worse and worse until clarity and sanity are both returned to me in the same terrible instant, and I come back to my own mind like Seneca’s Hercules, asking,

“What place is this? What quarter of the world? Where am I? ‘Neath the rising sun, or where the frozen Bear wheels slowly overhead? Or in that farthest land whose shores are washed by the Hesperian sea? What air is this I breathe? What soil supports my weary frame? For surely have I come again to earth…I speak with shame: I am afraid.”

It’s not all bad, this season. My partners Grace and Lily are particularly kind to me around this time of year, speaking slowly, making no sudden movements, and holding very little against me. I sometimes emerge with a new hobby or acquisition that I still like after I have recovered my reason, or to find that I have moved to New York City. Afterwards, during the tidying-up phase, I sometimes find I wish to reintegrate this new acquisition into the remaining eleven months of my yearly life, which serves as a reassuring little project.

Sometimes I suspect I unconsciously put off certain decisions for November on purpose, trusting that I will act more boldly under the veil, and leaving my more timid self to make any necessary adjustments and arrangements afterwards. Last year, for example, I began sleeping with men again for the first time in almost a decade. There was no reason for me to make a production out of it. It’s perfectly legal to sleep with men, if you’d like to. Nobody really frowns on it. No one had any interest in trying to stop me from doing it.1 I have two wonderful partners, both closer to lesbians than otherwise, who have always encouraged my interest in men in the same way I might encourage our dogs Bon-Bon and Gogo at the dog park: lightly baffled, affectionate, pleased at the alien pleasures of someone you love. That’s not how I might choose to spend a free afternoon, but as long as you’re having a good time and clean off before you come back inside the house, then go crazy.

After some time had passed I began to do the work of finding a non-insane way to sleep with men while also maintaining a family, a day job, a writing career, in keeping up with my correspondence, et cetera. There are only so many hours in a day, after all, and I also wanted to continue sleeping with men in a relatively ordered, right-minded fashion.

Read more

(Yes, I’ve been reading Beebo Brinker again.)

That bar we went to last night, the one Bill just seemed to know about as if by intuition — that bar didn’t have any windows in it…

The innately feminine curves of your roommate’s hairbrush

Subway full of people on it — the deadening press of bodies — the insolent yet knowing stares of strange men — the queer feeling of being buried alive and yet somehow still in a hurry to get somewhere —

She knows. She knows!

“A butch? What’s that?”

Marsha has the fine, high coloring and the aristocratic step of the Palomino horses your mother used to ride before her accident

Someone made a joke last night and you didn’t realize until you arrived at home. You never realize when someone’s telling a joke, which leads to the wildly destabilizing conclusion that most of the people you know are joking most of the time.

Had that handsome brown voice on the phone that morning belonged to a boy or a girl? And why did it matter so?

Baxter called again for you last night — he says he’s picking you up at eight whether you’re dressed or not

A woman you barely know is rude and has a bracingly short haircut

Nothing’s the matter, Jackie! Please, just leave me alone!

A glass of milk failed to steady your nerves after witnessing a primal scene

A double date with you and Rick? What other choice did she have? This was normal society, and that was the game to be played…

“If I had wanted sarcasm,” Jeff had remarked acidly, “I would have stayed at Chita’s.”

Soft fawn-colored shirtwaist

Learned about coffee shops

Silver flash of hair curlers in the moonlight

Angry belt-tying

Swept laughing through a doorway in the Village

Diner sexuality

Shared a plate of eggs with a softly handsome woman

Saw your roommate kissing a man last night and felt instinctively repulsed and nauseated by the unnatural lines of their embrace

Hung out in a bookstore without buying anything

Weight of newspaper oppressive in your handbag

Spent the night sitting half-upright in bed listening for something, hearing nothing

Roommate wore pajamas last night

Midnight ironing

Your beard has started quoting his analyst to you

Your father.

[Image via]

Everyone gets a sincere “Bless you” for the first two sneezes. The second “Bless you” ought to sound indistinguishable from the first. No need to make a little joke out of it. The third sneeze receives stony silence. By the fourth sneeze, you must excuse yourself from the room until you have regained your composure.

Do your best not to lie, within reason. When you are caught in a lie, admit to it instantly, and if possible, cheerfully. In this way you will still be able to maintain a reputation for honesty, and save yourself a great deal of wasted time and anxiety. Trying to salvage a lie that has already been sniffed out is almost never successful. Recognize that you have lost, and lose graciously.

Whenever you lose, lose graciously. If you can manage it, lose magnificently, like King Arthur. Whenever he met someone who could lay him out cold, the minute he woke up he invited them to move into his house. People still talk about him all the time.

If someone stops you in order to ask a question or a favor, you must either say “I’m sorry, I can’t talk just now” or offer them your complete, prompt, and willing attention until they have finished. By no means say, “Can we make this quick?” Never enter into a conversation with someone with the attitude of needing to be somewhere else; 99% of people would prefer an immediate denial to a slowly fading show of patience. The remaining 1% are fascinating monsters who will not hesitate to drain you dry.

If someone asks, “Does anyone else think this room is too hot/too cold?” and you have the power to change the thermostat, unless you strongly feel the opposite is true, agree with them immediately and make the adjustment. Reward them for their daring by saying, “I’m so glad you said something.” If this happens at work, you can now reasonably expect them to side with you on a point of minor significance in your next official disagreement.

If you live with a partner or roommates, make sure they see you doing something useful early in the day. It need not be something time- or labor-intensive, if you’re in a rush, although of course every once in a while it should be. Establishing your reputation of being a helpful person is just as important as being helpful, or very nearly. Better to be seen doing it, however, than to work it awkwardly into conversation (“The other night, when I was taking the trash out, I saw the strangest thing…”), which will almost certainly overplay your hand and establish your reputation as a self-aggrandizing tryhard. Pretty much the same applies to work, incidentally.

If you decide to come on to someone, regardless of how nervous you may feel about it, extend your offer in a manner that suggests you think it would be a good idea, and that you have something of value to offer. You need not pretend a level of confidence you do not possess, but making a pass deprecatorily, as if you were apologizing for vomiting in public, is the very worst of bad manners.

Whenever you are driving and have the opportunity to let someone else in ahead of you, do it, no matter how much of a hurry you are in or how much you dislike the other driver’s conduct. You will feel like a benevolent emperor sparing gladiators in the arena, rather than a red-faced status jockey.

Clean out your refrigerator often and ruthlessly. Better to throw too much away than the reverse. If you’re very concerned about food waste, you need to address it at point of purchase, not once you’ve got it in the house.

Try cross-sex hormones just once, if you can. You don’t have to do anything further about it if you don’t care to, but it’s always fun to see how the other half lives.

You really don’t have to stop spending time on your phone this year. If you do decide to spend less time on your phone, by no means should you discuss it with others. There is a time to keep silence, and a time to speak!

In a similar vein, don’t start keeping lists of all the books you read. You will not get more enjoyment from listing a book than you did from reading it.

If your profile includes a sentiment like “I like older men” on hookup apps, you should be aware that at least 50% of your audience is going to read that as “I like the oldest men.” If you do not seek this outcome, find another way to phrase it.

[If transmasculine] Start using the men’s room much sooner than you think you should after starting hormones. Generally speaking, it is better to have a bad time in the men’s room than it is to have a bad time in the women’s room.2 I cannot of course promise a good time in any location, but in this case the devil you know is not worth sticking with.

It is almost never worth trying to “make good time” on a road trip. Pull over as much as you want!

Have a baby, if you’re on the fence. Have two! Don’t overthink it. They’re a lot of fun.

Breakups occur primarily when you and a partner can no longer agree on a shared narrative of your relationship. If you were unable to convince a person of your point of view while you were dating, you are unlikely to be more successful in convincing them once you have become their ex. Do not waste your time in post-breakup image management. You will, at least once, because you are a human being, but do your best to shake the habit.

It’s never too early to take sarcopenia and osteoporosis seriously. You ought to do at least a little load-bearing, muscle-preserving exercise a few times a week. I don’t have anything more specific than that; go talk to someone who knows about that sort of thing. But you should worry about it now.

[Borgia and Machiavelli]

He was master of all servants except himself and very nearly not a servant at all. His role was not to absorb barked instructions and turn them into repetitive acts of obedience, as was the lot of a lower-ranked servant, but to act as if he were his own master in absentia, to think as he might think, to act as he might act, to anticipate and contrive on someone else’s behalf. The task of the maître d’hôtel was therefore doubly difficult: first, he must successfully twin himself, and once that impossibility was achieved, he must teach one of those selves to think like a master of servants, and then teach the other to take orders from the first.

But any Butler Movie has to decide pretty quickly where it’s going to land on the Butler Sorrows Index. You can either have a Happy Butler Movie, where the butler is a jolly and sneaky fellow who quite cheerfully countermands his master’s orders at every opportunity, or a Sad Butler Movie, where the butler is eaten alive by his own dignity and the audience can weep unrestrainedly at the spectacle of his gorgeously humble restraint. (When in doubt, apply the following rule: If the Butler Movie breaks on the side of emphasizing dignity, it’s sad; if it breaks on the side of emphasizing hauteur, it’s happy. A really happy butler is incorrigible; such films are rare and to be treasured.)

I am on the side of the Happy Butler, although like anyone I’m a sucker for a Sad Butler from time to time. The Remains of the Day drives me crazy in this sense, because it’s such an obvious, unrepetant, melodrama (“Oh, if only I could go outside. But I daren’t, for I am a butler!”) that sticks its jammy fingers directly into the most predictable nodes of my brain.

A while back I was joking around with a buddy of mine about the need for a version of The Remains of the Day from the perspective of Stevens’ new employer Lewis, as a brace against the cloud of self-pity hanging over the story, and came up with the following:

The Ford was not in the garage this morning. This was just another of the minor errors Stephens had taken to committing recently. Losing himself in little reveries while dusting portraits, a chore which ought to take no more than twenty minutes of his time, folding and unfolding an old letter in his breast pocket when he thinks nobody is looking, leaving me to handle the salmon alone when it’s really a two-man operation, that sort of thing.

In my experience there is no one more colossally thoughtless, more openly transparent in their wistfulness than people who think of themselves as being reserved. Butlers are often the worst of that kind. You know the type I mean. Swanning in and out of rooms in the most obviously distressed of tempers. Wanly pouring the sherry. Tedious little world-weary sighs while poking at the fire, followed by a barbed remark a week later about how tending to a fire is beneath a butler’s dignity, and twenty years ago there would have been a brace of lesser footmen to poke at it. Well, it isn’t twenty years ago, and I for one am plenty tired of being blamed for the fact.

And when finally you are driven to say “What’s that, Stephens?” you get nothing in response but “Oh-nothing-sir-will-that-be-all-for-the-evening,” with “the old Master would never have had to ask, he would have merely sensed what was wrong in his blood” never openly stated but all the more painfully implied. From the way Stephens tells it, the two of them barely had to speak a word to one another, just went floating over the grounds together in perfect sympathy, as if their brains had been connected by a coil of garden hose. I wish to God he was dead.

I’ve done my best to categorize all the Butler Movies I’ve seen according to the Happy/Sad Index. If it’s not on this list, it’s probably not a Butler movie. The Butler’s inner life has to be of primary importance to the plot. You can’t just throw a butler in there for a few scenes and call it a Butler Movie.

Happy Butler: Ruggles of Red Gap, 1935, Charles Laughton

Ruggles is gambled away by the Earl of Bumstead in a poker game and leaves behind his life as a gentleman’s personal gentleman (I know I said no valets, but hear me out) in order to become the butler to an entire frontier town, where he learns about the value of the marriage plot and being a small business owner. It’s genuinely delightful, but if you have a low tolerance for yokel humor, it might not be for you. If you can’t stand Green Acres, I suggest you don’t bother.

Line most illustrative of butler happiness: “Why, you old plate of soup, they’re singing it for you.”

Sad Butler: Albert Nobbs, 2011, Glenn Close

Ugh. Jesus! Do You Have A Moment To Talk About Historical Transmasculine Abjection. No I do not! It wants to be Of Mice and Men, which is bad enough, but it also wants pretty much every scene to be “Tell me about the rabbits again,” which is unconscionable. Skip!

Line most illustrative of butler sadness: “A life without decency is unbearable.” And the whole movie’s like that, too.

Happy Butler: My Man Godfrey, 1936, William Powell

It’s terrific! You’ve already seen it, I’m sure, but it always bears a rewatch. He wears being a butler lightly, as Christ wore the mantle of humanity. A lot of Butler Movies ask the important question, “Can a woman ever fall in love with a butler?” If they’re sad, the answer is “No.” My Man Godfrey asks if an entire family can fall in love with a butler, and the answer is yes, so long as everybody takes turns.

Line most illustrative of butler happiness: “And I want to justify your faith in me by being a very good butler, and filling the void created by your late, lamented Pomeranian.”

Sad Butler: The Butler, 2013, Forest Whitaker

“The sixties are an important and exciting time.” You get the idea!

Line most illustrative of butler sadness: “Vietnam took my boy, and I didn’t understand why we were there in the first place.”

Happy Butler: Rebecca, 1940, Judith Anderson

Don’t get distracted by Joan Fontaine’s mousy terror; this is a fundamentally happy movie. Mrs. Danvers is as thrilled as a pig in shit to be swanning over her dead girlfriend’s lingerie and waging psychological warfare over every meal. She loves being a butler! She owns all the underwear in the house and she hates you!

Line most illustrative of butler happiness: “You thought you could be Mrs. de Winter, live in her house, walk in her steps, take the things that were hers! But she’s too strong for you. You can’t fight her — no one ever got the better of her. Never, never. She was beaten in the end, but it wasn’t a man, it wasn’t a woman. It was the sea!”

Sad Butler: The Remains of the Day, 1993, Anthony Hopkins

If you like Sad Butler movies, they don’t get much better than this, but it really does hit all the usual points. If you don’t have much patience for sad butler types, you’re going to get so sick of this man’s moony-eyed “I daren’t” attitude.

Line most illustrative of butler sadness: “You have my warmest congratulations.”

Happy Butler: Come September, 1961, Walter Slezak

There is perhaps more of Bobby Darin in this movie than is strictly necessary — and I say that as a real appreciator of Bobby Darin — but if you want to watch a picture about a crafty and enterprising major-domo who’s fleecing Rock Hudson for every penny he can, they don’t get much craftier or enterprising than Walter Slezak.3

Line most illustrative of butler happiness: “Mr. Talbot will be here any minute! Madonna mia! He’ll find out, we are lost — but God helps those who help themselves.”

Sad Butler: The Admirable Crichton, 1957, Kenneth More

Line most illustrative of butler sadness:

LORD LOAM: Be a man, Crichton. You are the same flesh and blood as myself.

CRICHTON (in pain): Oh, my lord!

Last night Grace and Lily and I had a guest over for dinner and I asked them whether they felt, when it came to making new friends, that they experienced the process as a case of discovering a shared affinity and making roughly equitable overtures towards intimacy with someone else, or whether they thought of it as a decision to select and woo someone.

I often think of myself as choosing and wooing my friends, but I’m not sure this is an accurate reflection of my social life. I think it’s pretty often a mutual process, but I like to think of myself as being in control and tell myself a retroactive story whereby I was secretly running the whole show, distinguishing someone with my particular regard and ardency.

I do always want to have a particular friend, whenever I arrive in a new season of my life. A new school, a new town, a new job; my first impulse is always to identify a likely candidate and to make them my conspicuous and particular friend. Part of the pleasure comes from the recognition of others. My desire for friendship is not exclusive, but it is often possessive. Usually, when I meet someone I like, I want to bowl them over, but to appear suave as I do it. I mistrust charm in other people but I always trust it in myself. It goes further than that — I am startled when other people mistrust my charm.

I wanted to write a book about the failure of friendships and in particular the panic that can arise in a person who has recently been dumped and realizes that their previously-successful friendship overture strategy is no longer effective. (You can preorder it here, if you like, and it will go properly on sale June 2nd, but if you don’t want to buy it you certainly don’t have to.)

I have spent much of the last six years thinking about the aftermath of failed relationships in the context of family estrangement, but I had no interest in writing a novel about family estrangement. I wanted to write about someone experiencing the same level of alienation and despair over their friends as a regular poster in r/deadbedrooms, someone vulnerable to incel logic outside of a romantic context, someone who is responsible for her own loneliness but who nevertheless doesn’t deserve her loneliness. Or at least who deserves more than her present loneliness. I wanted to examine a different sort of loneliness than my own, which is how I came to write a book about a not-quite-sixty-year-old woman named Barbara who would dislike me very much, if ever we were to meet one another1:

I think almost everyone has a list of friendships that never quite managed to come together for one reason or another. Often it’s situational. Maybe the two of you had an incredible weekend at an out-of-town conference, or summer camp, or group vacation, but because all the shared references and jokes you built up together had nothing to do with your personality back at home, there’s not enough material to graft onto your real life. Or maybe just as you start to get to know each other, she suddenly gets transferred for work somewhere halfway across the country. You both still like each other, but that doesn’t change the fact that you just haven’t been able to invest enough time into the friendship for her to justify taking it with her when she goes. There are a hundred possible reasons. And you might never know exactly which one is responsible for the relationship not taking, because it’s not like when a friendship falls apart after years of closeness. In those cases you can almost always point to some betrayal, some fight or moment of disagreement, even if you didn’t talk much about what was bothering you at the time, and say That’s it, that’s where it all went wrong with us.

Half the time when a friendship looks like it’s going to take and then doesn’t, neither of you ever knows why, because things happened on an almost totally unconscious level. Like with animals—something just didn’t smell right. Your nose said no. Since you’re still mostly at the being-polite stage in those early days, there’s no way for you to say anything about it. You just discreetly back off, and the other one just as discreetly lets you. It’s entirely fair, and there’s no fault to be apportioned out to anyone. Maybe it’s a little crushing, but you get over it, and after a while, it becomes a hazy, pretty memory, the cut being mild and healing quickly. Someone you met only briefly really liked you once. You can’t quite remember what happened afterwards, but she really liked you. Of course, it’s not like that when a real friendship ends.

When you’ve really gotten to know somebody, you earn the right to at least ask why they don’t love you anymore, which is not an especially pleasant right, but it’s still one that most people tend to insist on exercising. I don’t know why. I’ve never heard anyone tell me why they don’t want to be friends anymore and thought, Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Now I feel better, thanks for letting me know. I’ll be on my way.

People sometimes complain that it’s hard to make friends once you’re out of your twenties, but in my experience, the real trouble doesn’t come until the tail end of your forties, or once your kids reach their teenage years, whichever comes first. Back when I was still married with a three-year-old kid, I could have picked up five new friends a day if I’d wanted to. Women with toddlers cruise each other for friendship the way gay men do for anonymous sex. So even if you’ve drifted away from a lot of your college friends, the way I had at that age, you pick up new ones all the time.

This, of course, creates its own problem, which you might not notice for a year or two, where all of your friends have known you for the same amount of time. It’s a little bit like how farmers need to practice crop rotation, otherwise they’ll wear out the soil after a few years. You need friends of a few different vintages if you don’t want to lose them all at once. When my best “mom friend” Sasha got divorced and only had custody of her kids every other week, we pretty much stopped seeing each other, and then our whole friend group fell apart within a few months. Nobody wanted to fall apart, I don’t think. I don’t remember there being any hard feelings, and if I bumped into Sasha on the street tomorrow, I honestly think we’d be happy to see each other, which is more than I can say for a lot of my former best friends, but we just didn’t have a long enough history to make it through a divorce together.

Besides which, I can’t stand friendships based on divorce. You’re always acting like cheerleaders and talking about how great being divorced is and how you only wish you’d done it years ago, but as soon as one of you starts dating someone seriously, she drops off the face of the earth. Not because she doesn’t like you anymore, but because it’s embarrassing: “Remember last month when we said we’d never live with a man again, and that we should all get a house in Florida together when we retire, like on The Golden Girls? Well, meet Rick, and please God let’s just pretend we never said any of those things.”

I was thinking, too, of the Léon Bloy quote (did he say it? If so, where? If you know, please email this theology professor at Abilene Christian University who’s been trying to find a solid attribution for at least two years now), “the only great tragedy in life is not to become a saint.”

I have two very sentimental impulses that are very dear to me, when it comes to my own family of origin; the first is that I imagine killing them every single day, often multiple times a day,2 and the second is that I imagine how happy I would be if ever I learned they had heartily repented of their wrongdoing and changed the course of their lives. Neither of those two fantasies is very likely to happen, and the idea of ever being delivered from these fantasies strikes me as tremendously improbable. Being relieved of the likeliest possible outcomes requires an act of God.

Without getting into the question of whether Barbara does or does not acquire another best friend, I wanted to give her, if not sainthood, at least the ability to recognize a saint when she saw one, and I wanted her to see it through clothes. The old Roman technique for depicting gods in art is called velificatio. I imagine this technique predates halos but I really don’t know. You know someone is a god in ancient Roman art if their clothes billow vigorously about them. I figured the closest equivalent for Barbara would be having strong opinions about the age cutoff for wearing cap sleeves3, and for that opinion to be eventually shaken and for her character to be fundamentally changed as a result.

“It made me ashamed, sometimes, how easily [Redacted] had accepted my changing attitude towards her. She never asked why I stopped to speak to her now, or what made me knock on her door instead of faking phone calls to avoid her. But the shame was light enough, and I felt less of it with each day. It was nothing compared to the relief I felt from no longer having to act badly. That was a joy that did not pall.”

• Don’t talk like that

• Say, don’t talk like that

• Why, don’t talk like that

• You just leave that alone now

• What you need is a drink

• What you need is a stiff drink

• What you need is a couple of drinks

• I know what you need – a drink

• How about a cup of coffee?

• I know what’ll put you right –

• Hey, now – not another word of that!

• You’ve got too much sense to talk like this

• Now what put an idea like that into your head?

Part of the pleasure of the family doctor’s appearance in middlebrow midcentury literature — the black bag, the easy confidence, the careless acceptance of the deference of others, the free hand with the prescription pad, the home visit — is how much free time they seem to have, and what genuine pleasure they seem to take in explaining things. I’m sure there are doctors who spend a lot of time explaining things nowadays, but I never run into them. Everyone I know, unless they are very ill, spends most of their medically-appointed time with NPs and CNAs and medtechs and pharmacists, usually on the other end of a phone tree or a proprietary app, and they don’t have time to explain much of anything.

But there did used to be doctors, quite a lot of them, and they used to have so much free time they could turn up at the end of an Alfred Hitchcock movie to explain what murder is. And if you’ve ever spent time with a popular midcentury paperback novel, you know that a doctor’s two favorite things to do are give people pills to calm them down and tell young people whose aunts have just been murdered that they ought to get married.

The joke is not that doctors used to say foolish things confidently and don’t now. We all say the most ridiculous things about the body and medicine all the time; it just takes a little longer to figure out what’s ridiculous so we’re always catching up to ourselves.

“The best prescription I can offer him is peace and quiet. As little movement as possible. If he could see a horse from his window from time to time — a peaceful, quiet sort of horse, you understand, not a nervous one, certainly not a thoroughbred — that would be even better.”

“Have you still got those yellow pills I gave you?”

“Your father’s heart is weak. You must never tell him this; it would weaken his heart.”

“The best prescription I can offer him is someone who believes he’s going to get better.”

“Say, you ought to be in bed!”

“Where on earth did you get those pills from? The only pills you ought to be taking are the pills I give you. I’m really very annoyed about this sort of thing, Miss Frances, and I’ve got half a mind to stop writing you prescriptions for pills unless you can promise me frankly that you’ll stop mixing them together like this. Do I have your word?”

“Have you still got those green pills I gave you?”

“I don’t want to worry you any further with a lot of technical talk. The worst thing for this sort of case is discussion.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you. If you need a further prescription than that, I’ll go so far as to say you ought to be married. Everybody ought to be married.”

“[Examining a body] Yes, it might have been poison. But I still say he was simply upset.”

“Oh, there’s nothing at all wrong with his mind, except that he believes there’s something wrong with it.”

“You seem awfully tired. Have you still got any of those blue pills I gave you?”

“There’s no better prescription than a little fresh air and hard work.” [Becoming suddenly daring] “Especially if it’s in your company, Miss Millner.”

“The worst thing you could do for her right now is to give her what she wants.”

“Say, you ought to get back in bed.”

“The best thing I can do for you in this case is to help you laugh it off.”

“My diagnosis is this: You’re worn out. You’re not cut out for city living. You ought to be nearer to a ranch, speaking as a medical man.”

“I don’t see how someone could have gotten their hands on poison — unless they happened to steal some out of my car, which I leave unlocked and running outside of my office every afternoon for an hour or so while I take my lunch. Of course I carry a valise of poisons with me as a general rule, but if that’s a crime, I’m afraid you’ll have to lock up every M.D. in the country.”

“You’re not out of pills, are you?”

“The best prescription I can give the two of you is this: Get married.”

[References include Malice Aforethought, Anthony Berkeley Cox; Beebo Brinker, Ann Bannon; Patricia Highsmith; The Group, Mary McCarthy; Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann; Dark Victory, George Brewer Jr.; The Man in the Brown Suit, Agatha Christie. If you haven’t yet read Malice Aforethought, you really should, and if you already have, then you ought to read The 12.30 from Croydon by Freeman Wills Crofts.]

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Beebo drinks milk for a few reasons: because she grew up on a farm, to establish that she’s still young and naive and not much of a drinker yet, and as an act of defiance when people make her uncomfortable. Leo, the husband of Beebo’s lover Venus, almost exclusively drinks orange juice. According to his son Toby, “That’s all Leo ever drinks. He says we’ve got orange trees in the yard and the juice is free. He likes things that are free. Besides, he’s always on a health kick. Right now it’s citric acid. When he’s home there’s always a mess of sticky glasses around.” Whenever he talks to Beebo, he puts down a recently-emptied orange juice glass to emphasize a point.2

The most exotic dish that shows up in Beebo Brinker (the fifth book published in the series but the first chronologically) is Italian food (as category, rather than a series of named dishes). Mostly, I’m sorry to say, it’s hamburgers and cigarettes, and will do very little to dispel popular conceptions about 1960s-era cuisine.

Three sandwiches in a train toilet:

“‘Yes. I ate three sandwiches in the rest room, on the train. That was yesterday.’”

Milk:

“Beebo drained her milk glass and put it on the table.”

Milk and cigarettes:

“‘My pleasure.’ He observed her through a scrim of cigarette smoke. ‘If I weren’t afraid of scaring hell out of you, I’d ask you over to my place for a drink,’ he said. She blanched. ‘I mean, a drink of milk,’ he said.”

Milk for Pat:

“Beebo got the chicken down Pat and made him drink his milk, which he did out of pure infatuation for her.”

Milk again:

“Pete folded his arms on the table and leaned on them, unoffended. ‘You want to be in that position too, Beebo?’

‘Not for a million bucks,’ she said, and drank down her milk in a gesture of scorn.”

At last, time for milk:

“She joined them, passing the milk around, and badgered Beebo to eat more than Beebo wanted. Toby couldn’t stand it.”

At last! A milk break:

He picked up his beer and the schnapps bottle, and she followed him into the living room. ‘You can drink all the milk you want, honey,’ he said, settling into a leather arm chair, ‘before the sun goes over the yardarm. After that, we switch to spirits.’”

Italian food, non-specified type:

“They sat down at the table and Jack told her, ‘This is the greatest Italian food you’ll ever eat. Pasquini on Thompson Street makes it up.’ He glanced up and found Beebo studying him. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t like pasta?’

‘Jack, have you ever been in love?’ she said.”

Spaghetti pickles:

“She got the hot spaghetti and, on a sudden inspiration, included a jar of kosher dills intended for a different customer.”

Two plates weiner schnitzel:

“‘Better to spend it on food,’ he said. ‘Anyway, what the hell, I’ll treat you. There’s some good Wiener schnitzel about a block back.’

They walked back to the German delicatessen, Beebo with a firm grip on her suitcase. She finished her meal in ten minutes. Jack ordered another for her, over her protests, kidding her about her appetite…The pneumatic little blonde waitress brought the second plateful.”

Beer and sausage:

“He bought some Dutch beer and sausage, paid the cashier, and walked with Beebo out the front door. On the pavement she stopped, swinging her wicker case around in front of her like a piece of fragile armor.”

Cigarette hamburger:

“Beebo doused her cigarette. “Can you eat all that hamburger by yourself?” she said, pointing at it.”

Just food:

“Toby grimaced at his mother, and Beebo handed her the carton of home-cooked food. ‘Here’s your dinner,’ she said. ‘Mrs. Pasquini appreciates all the orders.’”

What kind of food? It’s dinner. It’s Italian food. Don’t worry about it. Drink your milk.

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I’m not a very good one, I ought to begin by saying so. I only started riding a bike to work this summer; the last time I rode a bike this regularly I was in high school. My first day biking I got yelled at. I deserved it too, worse luck.

I had developed a belief, based on my repeat observations of cyclists blowing through stop signs over my thirty-nine years of life, that people riding bikes didn’t have to stop at stop signs, so I rode my bike through a stop sign, and someone yelled at me from the other side of the street. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cyclist stop at a stop sign, come to think of it. Have you? If you told me you had, I don’t think I’d believe you. I looked it up afterwards. We do have to stop at stop signs, as it turns out, and ever since I have gone out of my way to observe the custom.

I’ve never wanted to be a cyclist. At heart I’m a walking man. There remains in me the soul of the pedestrian even when mounted and wheeled, and it pains me to cycle past people going about on foot who don’t recognize me as one of their own. “I’m just like you,” I want to say, instead of “On your left.” This isn’t who I am, not really. It’s not the wheels, but the feet that matter.

The worst part about riding a bicycle, in my opinion, is having to say things like “On your left” to people as you pass them. Whenever I go walking and hear someone call out “On your left” behind me I am filled with a murderous rage so intense I can hardly speak or move. I could easily slaughter and gut a full-grown cow in such a mood, I think, although I’d probably need some help moving the legs.

I have always prided myself on being a calm and relaxed driver. I feel nothing but contempt for anyone who displays irritation or anger on the road. Nothing pleases me more, on a walk, than to exchange absurd little courtesies with strangers as we pass one another. A nod, a sly little salute, a “Good morning” or better yet, “Mornin’—”; it can’t get too folksy for me. But to hear someone call out “On your left” behind you, with no hope or chance of friendly eye contact, and to have to leap out of the way lest they jangle their hateful little bell at you — without those little courtesies, I become an animal. I would happily kill and kill again.

Part of my commute involves a hiking trail that is shared by cyclists, pedestrians, and the occasional horseback rider. There’s an intricate little rock-paper-scissors method to determining right-of-way (cyclists must give way to pedestrians and everyone must give way to horses), and it’s part of my obligation as a fellow on wheels to announce myself to anyone who can’t see me coming.

With people walking towards me, there are no problems. I can slow my bike down to a crawl quite happily and toss out all the folksy greetings I like. “Mornin’!” “That’s one good-lookin’ baby!” “You again!” That sort of thing.

But the people who are walking in the same direction as myself — who dare to turn their backs on me, their brother and their king — I must directly address, and it is as poison to me. I will not say “On your left.” It is demeaning to say such a thing to a human being. When you say such a thing to one of your equals, he jumps back. His face closes against you. He gives way, but not out of fullness of heart and the spirit of being fellow-travelers on the road; he merely sets himself aside from you.

My compulsive need to be liked1 will not allow for this. What I am prepared to say is “Good morning [or evening, as the case may be]. Pardon me. I’m on your left. Thank you!”

This, as you might imagine, takes a few seconds to get through, so I have to slow down to about a quarter of a mile per hour in order to deliver the whole thing. Between 70 and 80 percent of the time it works. I don’t just mean that it works in matters of road safety, which is only an incidental concern, but it works in getting them to treat me like a fellow pedestrian instead of a cyclist, which is my primary goal. I often receive in return for this courteous little speech a sincere “Good morning!” or better still, a “Thank you” that I believe implies “Thank you for addressing me not as a cyclist, but as a brother; in your tender hands I believe power would never corrupt.”

Once someone asked me to ring my bell instead of making my little speech, but I will never put a bell on my bicycle. The day I use a bell to communicate with another living creature is the day I leave polite society forever and set my face against humanity.2

Occasionally I ride the bike with the baby strapped into the gunner’s seat, and I have no problem at all then. People will say to me things like “That’s a good-lookin’ baby!” or stop their cars to let me know the baby threw one of his shoes onto the shoulder a quarter-mile back. But I can’t haul him to work with me every morning.

The problem remains: I am a calm and steady driver, a friendly and conscientious pedestrian, but as a cyclist I am so beset by ruinous urges towards violence, self-loathing, and self-denial that I must fit myself with a straitjacket of courtesy and rigid rules, lest I tear myself in half like Rumpelstiltskin.

But it’s not all bad. Last week when I drove the big bus at work, I came to a red stoplight right next to a city bus, and I knew before I turned my head that the city bus driver was going to look through his big window and nod at me, bus driver to bus driver, fellow to fellow, brother to brother. He did it, too. We were at the exact same height, seated behind the same big wheel, and in my heart I knew he wanted to honk his horn in greeting. Neither of us did it, but I felt it just the same.

A round table with Grace and Lily about all of our baby books:

GRACE: “Good night, you, get under there” — I think the thing I like about that one is the prosody. It’s really good.

DANNY: Whereas I feel like, Have You Ever Seen A Flower, which I love, the text is really trying too hard sometimes —

GRACE: Well, that’s a book about the saturation of image. I mean, there are words in it, but it’s mostly about blood turning into flowers, and flowers turning into blood —

DANNY: I wish it would scale back on the prosody. I always feel like, you’ve got great stuff here, you don’t need to be asking precious questions about columns and labyrinths.

The Pages of Goodnight Moon, Ranked by our Ten-Month-Old Son:

“The baby Rocco is ten months old today. He takes two naps a day and goes to sleep for the night around 7pm, which means that he experiences “bedtime” three times a day. It’s remarkable, how much of his day revolves around getting ready for bed. When he was a newborn, he slept even more than this, but there was less of a process to it. We could just wrap him up and stow him on his back, and he’d be out like a light. Now that he’s older, he has to be formally guided into sleep, like a little king responsible for discharging certain religio-civic rituals.”

Love’s Work in Go, Dog, Go:

Each encounter runs along the same lines. They say hello; she asks him if he likes her hat; he offers judgment, and they part ways. He never likes any of her hats until the very last; the Party Hat. After he sees the Party Hat they ride off into the sunset together.

(It may interest you to know that the baby calls this book Dog Go Dog, and that he correctly identifies the sunset on the final page by pointing a fat, deliberate hand towards the sun and croaking, “Sun set,” after which he shake the book at me and say, “Dog Go Dog again.”)

Dog. Big dog. Little dog.

Psalms 22:16: “For dogs have surrounded me.”

Big dogs and little dogs. Black and white dogs.

Acts 10:12: “In it were all kinds of four-footed animals of the earth, wild beasts.”

“Hello!”

“Hello!”

“Do you like my hat?”

“I do not.”

“Good-by! Good-by!”

Matthew 6:28-30: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?”

One little dog going in. Three big dogs going out.

Psalms 121:8: “The Lord shall preserve your going out and your coming in from this time forth, and even forever.”

A red dog on a blue tree. A blue dog on a red tree. A green dog on a yellow tree.

Rev. 9:17: “And thus I saw the beasts in the vision: those who sat on them had breastplates of fiery read, hyacinth blue, and sulfur yellow; and the heads of the horses were like the heads of lions, and out of their mouths came fire, smoke, and brimstone.”

Some big dogs and some little dogs going around in cars. A dog out of a car.

Deuteronomy 1:17: “You shall not show partiality in judgment; you shall hear the small as well as the great.”

Two big dogs going up. One little dog going down.

Genesis 47:4: “I will go down with you and I will also surely bring you up again; and Joseph will put his hand on your eyes.”

The green dog is up. The yellow dog is down. The blue dog is in. The red dog is out.

Genesis 37:8: “Shall you indeed reign over us? Shall you indeed have dominion over us?”

One dog up on a house. Three dogs down in the water.

1 John 5:8: “And there are three that bear witness on earth: the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree as one.”

A green dog over a tree. A yellow dog under a tree.

John 1:48: “Jesus answered and said to him, ‘Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.”

Two dogs in a house on a boat in the water. A dog over the water. A dog under the water.

Ezekiel 47:1: “Then he brought me back to the door of the temple; and there was water, flowing from under the threshold of the temple toward the east.”

The dogs are all going around, and around, and around. “Go around again!”

Ecclesiastes 1:1-6: “‘Vanity of vanities,’ says the Preacher; ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’

What profit has a man from all his labor in which he toils under the sun? One generation passes away, and another generation comes; But the earth abides forever. The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it arose. The wind goes toward the south, and turns around to the north; the wind whirls about continually, and comes again on its circuit.”

The sun is up. The sun is yellow. The yellow sun is over the house.

“It is hot out here in the sun.”

“It is not hot here under the house.”

Luke 16: 22-26: “So it was that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried. And being in torments in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.

Then he cried and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.’

But Abraham said, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted and you are tormented. And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that those who want to pass from here to you cannot, nor can those from there pass to us.’”

Now it is night. Three dogs at a party on a boat at night.

Mark 4:35-36: “On the same day, when evening had come, He said to them, ‘Let us cross over to the other side.’ Now when they had left the multitude, they took Him along in the boat as He was.”

Dogs at work. Work, dogs, work!

Exodus 5:9: “Let more work be laid on them, that they may labor in it.” (cf. Genesis 3:19: “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, ‘till you return to the ground.”)

Dogs at play. “Play, dogs, play!”

Philippians 4:4: “Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, rejoice!”

“Hello again.”

“Hello?”

“Do you like my hat?”

“I do not like it.”

“Good-by again.”

“Good-by!”

John 18:21: “Why do you ask me?”

Dogs in cars again. Going away. Going away fast.

John 14:2: “I am going away to prepare a place for you.”

Look at those dogs go. Go, dogs. Go!

Deuteronomy 3:27: “Go up to the top of Pisgah, and lift your eyes toward the west, the north, the south, and the east; behold it with your eyes.”

“Stop, dogs. Stop! The light is red now.”

Jeremiah 6:16: “Stand in the ways and see, and ask for the old paths, where the good way is, and walk in it; then you will find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’”

“Go, dogs. Go! The light is green now.”

Isaiah 43:18: “Forget the former things; do not consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing! Now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness.”

“Hello again.”

“Hello.”

“Do you like my hat?”

“I do not like it.”

“Good-by again.”

“Good-by.”

Matthew 6:28-30, ibid.

Two dogs at play. At play up on top. “Go down, dogs. Do not play up there. Go down.”

Luke 14:8-9: “When you are invited by anyone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in the best place, lest one more honorable than you be invited by him; and he who invited you and him come and say to you, ‘Give place to this man,’ and then you begin with shame to take the lowest place.”

Now it is night. Night is not a time for play. It is time for sleep. The dogs go to sleep. They will sleep all night.

Psalms 4:8: “I will both lie down in peace, and sleep; for You alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.”

Now it is day. The sun is up. Now is the time for all dogs to get up.

“Get up!”

It is day. Time to get going. Go, dogs. Go!

1 Thessalonians 5:6: “Therefore let us not sleep, as others do, but let us watch and be sober.”

There they go. Look at those dogs go! Why are they going fast in those cars? What are they going to do? Where are those dogs going?

Ecclesiastes 2:22-24: “For what has man for all his labor, and for the striving of his heart with which he has toiled under the sun? For all his days are sorrowful, and his work burdensome; even in the night his heart takes no rest. This also is vanity.”

Look where they are going. They are all going to that big tree over there. Now the cars stop. Now all the dogs get out. And now look where those dogs are going! To the tree! To the tree!

Jeremiah 17:8: “For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters,
Which spreads out its roots by the river,
And will not fear when heat comes;
But its leaf will be green,
And will not be anxious in the year of drought,
Nor will cease from yielding fruit.”

Up the tree! Up the tree! Up they go to the top of the tree. Why? Will they work there? Will they play there? What is up there on top of that tree?

Genesis 28:12: “Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.”

A dog party! A big dog party! Big dogs, little dogs, red dogs, blue dogs, yellow dogs, green dogs, black dogs, and white dogs are all at a dog party! What a dog party!

Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

“Hello again. And now do you like my hat?”

“I do. What a hat! I like it! I like that party hat!”

Proverbs 31:10-24: “A virtuous woman, who can find?...Her clothing is fine linen and purple…Strength and honor are her clothing; She shall rejoice in time to come.”

“Good-by!”

“Good-by.”

Titus 3:15: “All who are with me greet you. Greet those who love us in the faith. Grace be with you all. Amen.”

Ordinarily I dislike standing in line. You might as well advertise that here’s something you need but don’t have yet. I will do almost anything to avoid it. You can easily see how unpleasant and narcissistic this sort of self-conscious discomfort with acknowledging desire can become. Never in my life have I walked past a person waiting in line and thought twice about it, but I cannot bring myself to believe that anyone could ignore the sight of me waiting in line. But I liked this line…

The bathhouse provides you with a towel, which you may choose to either wear or carry. But you had better hang onto it because there is nothing to visually distinguish your towel from anybody else’s. So even if you think “I’m sure I’ll remember which towel is mine. I’m standing right next to the towel rack,” you’d better be sure you have a bulletproof memory, because five minutes later you will have no idea which one of them is yours. You must provide your own shower shoes, and woe betide you if you forget them. That’s the uniform.

Every once in a while you’ll see someone add a hat to the ensemble, but I do not consider this to be advisable. It brings nothing to the table. There is no rule against wearing hats, at least not that I could see, but between the darkness and the humidity there is no reason to wear one.

Previously in kitchen coverage: Don’t use your freezer too much, you’ll get complacent and forget about the food you’ve got in there.

How to win the battle against objects: “Find at least two things to blame besides yourself after an avoidable domestic accident.”

Point/Counterpoint: Point: Look at that. I want it. Counterpoint: But there’s already so much food at home that you hate.

Buy more canned potatoes: “Weeknight dinners are always ‘coming together,’ like nation-states after a tragedy.”

Never soak a pan for longer than twenty minutes: “Fifteen minutes is plenty long enough. Set a timer and clean something else in the kitchen so your body knows it has not yet exited Chore Mode, and then when the timer goes off, go and scrub.”

Always buy a can of condensed milk when you buy a can of evaporated milk and vice versa: “They’re always right next to each other in the same aisle, no matter which grocery store you go to, so it’s no extra trouble. They both last forever, and the difference is pretty clear once you open the can (the condensed stuff having the consistency of wallpaper-paste and the evaporated stuff having the consistency of light cream), so the only real problem is the risk of coming home with the wrong one and not the other, which I have just handily eliminated at no additional cost to you, the thrifty consumer.”

They’re always telling you to get a new kind of vitamin (you know how they are!), these days. And it’s easy enough to fall into a vitamin-chasing cycle, because you don’t need a prescription to pick them up at the drugstore and maybe you won’t end up having to see a doctor if you just find the right vitamin.

But more fool you if you run out and buy whatever kind of vitamin is supposed to cure your ailments. The very minute that you do, you’re going to find out that the regular, factory-standard-issue version of the vitamin in question doesn’t do a damn thing, that it either needs some secondary vitamin in order to activate the salient properties or there’s some further subgenre of vitamin, and only that one works.

Let us say that you’re a little tired. And who among us isn’t? The truth is that you’re probably supposed to be a little tired. You’re supposed to get tired every single day so that you will become willing to fall asleep. But maybe your tiredness has become inveterate, so you decide you might be deficient in Vitamin D.

Like a rube you purchase a bottle of Vitamin D at the supermarket, and only then do you discover that Vitamin D by itself will do nothing and also kill you. You were the only person in the world who had never heard about the synergistic interplay between Vitamin D and Vitamin K, and now you’re down twenty dollars in exchange for a bottle of poison that is also useless.

Or let us say, conversely, that you suffer from being insufficiently tired, at which point a podcast will find you and see to it that you order melatonin (melatonin is a vitamin); only after you made a substantial purchase will you learn that you need a comically small dose of melatonin in order for it to work, that you should be taking homeopathic quantities of melatonin, that homeopathy is in fact legitimate in this case. Worse, you might try magnesium to increase your sleepiness, but woe betide you if you only bought “magnesium,” because the only good kind of magnesium is magnesium glycinate, and if you buy magnesium with any other surname you’ve just paid to give yourself diarrhea.

And it’s no good trying to find out the trick before you buy the vitamin. They’ll just release a new update as soon as you’ve parted with some cash, and besides which you’re only going to get tired again tomorrow. No point in trying to fight it.

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Go Ahead, See If I Care Theory: A Heterosexual Woman’s Guide To Stifling Herself

First Things: Why The Morning Ends (And Why It Doesn’t Have To)

The Mastery of Circles

A Complete History of Breakfast

Pasta Fabulous

Be A Miracle Right Now

Why We Age

They Don’t Call It Menostop: Keep Going After Fifty

Keep Going After Fifty. Go Harder After Sixty. Kill Them All At Seventy

How To Age Without Getting Old

What Being Chinese Can Teach Us About Aging

1927: The Year Before 1928

The Untethered Mouth: Eating For ADHD

Stop Hitting Yourself: How Not To Notice Other People

What Did People Do During World War II?

What The Chinese Can Teach Us About Breakfast

The Science of Fiddling: What Recipes Say About Containment Theory

The Prehistoric Origins of Uncertainty

The Art of Talking Bravely To Children

The New Sleepiness

World War II When It Happened

Learn to Dare By Doing

The Paradox of Tenacity

The Courage To Stop Mattering

The Darkest Month: December 1942

A True Story of Love and Shipwreck

Humble Risks

Relearning Unlearning (Vulnerable)

Reclaiming the Brain and Finding Your Keys

52 Weeks of Biblical Watercolors

The Youngest Brother Protocol (How Living Like Your Youngest Sibling Just Might Be The Secret To A Happy Life)

Stop Underestimating The Pear

Don’t Hold Everything You Touch

The Secret Neuroscience of Getting Lost

What Happens When You Stop Dying

The Lifechanging Wisdom of Sea Anenomes

The Hardest Year: The Lifechanging Habit

The Four Types of Money

The Pivot Hour

Core Coaching Effect: How To Transform More, Focus Outward, and Change The Generation You Way

The Other Side Of Daring

The Remarkable Discipline of Procrastination

What Happens When You Stop Dying?

Legacy of Governance: Warren G. Harding

What China Has To Teach Us About Longevity And Also Exceptional One-Pan Meals

Inheritance of Rust: The History of the EPA

Presume to Grow: How ACE Hardware Rescued Itself

What Plants Teach Us About Leaves

The Great Unsettling of the American Spleen

What Music Sounds Like

The Next Big Idea

My Winter Kitchen

What Costco Can Teach Us About China, and What China Can Teach Us About Strategy

Salad Whore (ten years ago this would have been Vegetarian Bitch)

Raising Kids Cold, Raising Kids Strong: The Surprising Science Of Turning The Heat Off

How They Make Airplane Or Whatever

Why Some Societies Last Forever

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You don’t need to go out and get a copy of His Monkey Wife, I don’t think. When it’s good, it’s very, very good, but just as often it drags. I don’t know whether the fact that Anthony Burgess loved His Monkey Wife carries much weight with you. It did not with me.

But when I read aloud the line “The chimp, drowned in happiness, heard his words falling like the sound of bells from an infinite height” I laughed so hard I wept in the car,1 and I believe you ought to benefit from my experience. And when I arrived at “Who would have thought, seeing all this, that beneath that rather Charlotte Brontë exterior, there was actually a Charlotte Brontë interior, full of meek pride, hopeless hope, and timid determination?” I gnashed my teeth with helpless fury over not having come up with the line myself.

I have selected the best bits from John Collier’s 1930 novel His Monkey Wife, wherein a man accidentally marries a chimpanzee2 named Emily. Naturally this drives a wedge between himself and his fiancée Amy, but Emily’s quiet dignity and loving heart eventually carry the day.

“Can you wonder that, petite, dark and vivacious, she is the life and soul of the lonely bungalow, so that the passing trader or Colonial Office man has no sooner thrust out his legs into the cool comfort of his evening’s rest, than he says, “Now then, old man, where’s that chimp of yours? Let’s see Emily. Ho! Ho! Ho!”

But as she ambles forward on such occasions, turning a somersault, perhaps, as slowly and gravely as day and night, see! her smile dawning at the end of it has something of trouble and strain splintering under its sensitive flexibility. Loyal in her support of Mr. Fatigay, quixotically hospitable in her determination to give such guests what they are most fitted to enjoy, she is nonetheless ill at ease. Yet she masks it.”

“She saw pictures enough of cats with the letters CAT printed beside them. Is it so hard to understand how she came by a curiosity as to the nature of letters, and even, perhaps, of the abstracter function of literature?”

“Who would have thought, seeing the trim little brown figure trip so self-containedly through the village, or describe such a suave arc on the end of the swinging bough that landed her pat, here, back again at Mr. Fatigay’s feet, as he sat at dinner on the veranda; who would have thought, seeing all this, that beneath that rather Charlotte Brontë exterior, there was actually a Charlotte Brontë interior, full of meek pride, hopeless hope, and timid determination.”

“This, as when the spring grass cracks stone slabs of pavement, was a signal instance of the futility of the strongest antivital contrivances, when pitted against the forces latent in even the very softest of living tissue. Mr. Bernard Shaw would have been delighted. So was the chimp.”

“Frowning slightly, she peered hard at the crabbed writing. Frowning still more, she peered still harder. At last the fatal words conveyed their message to her.

“My beloved darling Amy.”

It was the draft of a love letter. Aghast, the stricken chimp reeled back, one hand pressed to her brow. Her dream world lay in ruins about her feet, and, with the deathly faintness which now spread over her, it slowly began to revolve around, evoking a sensation not unlike (yet how unlike!) that procurable on the joy wheel at the fun fairs and luna parks of the carnal capitals of Europe…

She longed to feel again, to know, the very wound against which she had clenched her mind; it was, even in the very killing of her, life, and, compared with it, all that she could fly to was desert and dead beyond bearing.

Besides (and here she took wider leaps) there might be some unimaginable misunderstanding. Perhaps he was writing a novel.”

“Let the future bring what it may,” she thought, standing very erect and earnest in the middle of her little white room, “my place is beside Mr. Fatigay, and who knows but that even he may come to be grateful to the humble chimp, when the dawning sense of her love and constancy shines as the only light on the dark path he seems fated to tread.”

And, going down to his study, she took from the shelf a pocket encyclopedia, and soon was deeply immersed in an account of the divorce laws of England, which she read, not from vain hopes of its future practical utility, but for its prose, which struck her, in its stark and puritanical terseness, as being far superior to the more exotic phrasing of the marriage service.”

“With this, she drew into her shell a little, and, as there was little entertainment in the sight of even a chimp sitting hour after hour staring at a book, the fickle interest of the voyagers soon slackened and was diverted. A seaman was discovered to be a woman masquerading in man’s clothes. An actress’s pearls were declared missing. A fancy-dress ball was organized, and in the general excitement the chimp soon ceased to be an object of remark.”

“For the heart is, in a sense, like the Prince of Wales; we would not have it cut in stone, yet how pathetic it is, when, as at Wembley, we see it modeled in butter.”

“Good heavens!” said Amy at last. “Is that the wonderful present you’ve been hinting at in all your letters? A monkey! Darling! My poor old boy! What in the world could you have been thinking of? What should I want with a monkey? Covered with fleas, no doubt, and sure to make a filthy mess about the house! You’d better shoot it, or give it to the zoo or something. I don’t want it.”

“Her name’s Emily,” said Mr. Fatigay, very cast down.

“Well, I like her,” said a simple fellow, “because she’s a little woman. A bouncing little woman. I like them like that. My first wife was a bouncing little woman. My second wife was not. I was deliriously happy with my first wife. With my second — not altogether so. I like a bouncing little woman.”

“I must get a cat. It would be terrible if she found out that I had no cat. But if I had a cat, and she is a cat lover, she must become quite interested. She will very probably express a fondness for the animals. At once I will reply, ‘But I have another cat, a little one. Some consider it beautiful. May I, dare I . . . beg your acceptance . . .’ ”

And, lost in the sweet reverie, he smirked and bowed upon the empty air.”

“Emily next thought of appealing to Amy by the only means in her power, pantomime and passages from the printed works of great minds.”

“Emily,” she said, speaking very slowly and distinctly, “I have a little surprise for you. It struck me that it might be amusing — and Mr. Fatigay, needless to say, has raised no objection — if you were to perform the part of bridesmaid this morning. Freak weddings are quite the thing in these days, and ‘The Monkey Bridesmaid’ will be very attractive to the gossip writers, if to no one else.

“Open that box,” she continued, pointing an imperious finger. “There are two white dresses in it. Bring them here. “This,” she said, “is yours, and you may get into it, and lay the other out for me, while I take my bath. Unpack the hats also, which are in that box above the wardrobe. It’s a pity Mother’s ill, and can’t come, but she’ll love the photographs.”

And, drawing a batik silk dressing gown about her shoulders, she went to the bathroom, leaving the poor chimp to savor the full bitterness of the cup now placed before her.”

“Oh!” said he. “It is only Emily, fallen over a chair.”

For Amy was already beginning to stir a little in the throes of a painful returning consciousness. The ardent bridegroom, instead of rushing up to set his fallen pet, as he imagined, upon her feet, turned again towards his bride, and, lifting her veil with a gentle hand, he bent down to imprint a passionate kiss upon her lips.

The chimp, in the tumult of whose consciousness all but her invulnerable love was lost, protruded these responsively.

A pause, an abyss in time, followed. Then the astounded man, turning to where the clergyman was departing the church, cried out in the voice of agony: “Hi, sir! Hi, sir! You’ve married me to a chimp!”

The clergyman, suave, debonair, equal to any emergency his ragtag and bobtail parish could thrust upon him, conscious too, that standing in the carven doorway, haloed in his blondness against the murky air without, he must look rather like the St. George in his stained-glass window, especially with the bowed and writhing form of the verger cringing at his knee, replied in befitting tones: “Well, sir, what of that? The Church, you should be aware, is inspired from on High, and is therefore always abreast with the latest discoveries of science.”"

“But what shall we do now? Surely, in spite of what the clergyman said, this marriage can’t be legal. There’s a law against chimps.”

“Mr. Fatigay peeped humbly out from behind the sumptuous car to feast his eyes with a glimpse of this happy being. The door swung, a commissionaire bowed respectfully, and our hero’s eyes protruded from their hollow sockets. For there, smartly groomed and fastidiously fastening a glove, stood Emily, his monkey wife.”

“In spite of her tumultuous feelings, the chimp remained mistress of herself and the situation.”

“At once the docile chimp hurried to the typewriter, whence a few minutes later she drew a sheet on which was written: “This place, my dear master, is a desirable first-floor flat in South Audley Street, W.1, and until you entered it I have considered it mine, but upon that auspicious day it automatically became yours, with all else that belongs to me, including, needless to say, such trifles as my body and soul.”

“Thank you, Emily, very much indeed,” said Mr. Fatigay.”

“Emily!” he cried. “How could you? Ah, the libertine! Did you? You couldn’t! You didn’t? Yes or no?”

“When he thought of what she must have suffered, and when he contrasted her constant good humor and control with Amy’s pampered peevishness, he began to feel for her not as a chimp, but as a woman, or, at the very least, as an angel.”

“Yes, I see you’ve got Emily,” replied Amy brightly. “And what a nice place you’ve got, Alfred. You must have prospered. But why do you dress the monkey up in that gaudy thing? Surely it’s unsuitable for a servant? It would be for anyone, for that matter.” For she meant to show how utterly impossible it was for any normal civilized person to conceive that the chimp could exist on any other footing.

“Emily isn’t a servant,” said Mr. Fatigay firmly. “If either was the servant here, it would be me. This place is hers, for she’s now a well-known dancer, and she simply saved my life by taking me in when I was starving.”

“You know perfectly well,” said Mr. Fatigay, “that none of your insinuations about Emily and myself are true — put that teapot down, Emily — either in the past or now. Whatever it was you felt when you came here, you’ve not gone the right way to bring it off. And vague accusations will carry us no farther. Why don’t you say it downright?”

“Well, if you force me to, I will,” said Amy. “You don’t know just one thing that may alter your opinion of your beloved wife. You don’t know that it was she who threatened me with a carving knife, and made me put on the bridesmaid’s hat, and would have killed me if I’d said a word — it was she who spoiled everything I’d been longing for — and on my bridal day, too.”

“Good god!” cried Mr. Fatigay. “Emily! Emily, is this true?”

The chimp nodded piteously.”

“Mr. Fatigay looked at the chimp more in sorrow than in anger, for even in his shaken state he found the motive thus indicated to be at least a possibly forgivable one.”

“No, Emily,” he went on, “remain where you are. I will show Amy to the door.”

“Well,” said Amy with a dry sob of humiliation, “if you treat me like this, don’t be surprised at anything you hear about me and Dennis, that’s all. Or anyone else for that matter. You’ll have driven me to it by your hardness.” And she began to weep.

“Don’t cry, Amy,” said Alfred. “The people in the street will see you.” And he closed the door.

“Emily!” he cried, as he turned back to where the chimp stood, waiting with downcast doubtful gaze. “Emily! My twice preserver! My good angel! My consolation! My wife.” The chimp, drowned in happiness, heard his words falling like the sound of bells from an infinite height.

Several cameras clicked; it had been impossible to conceal the monkey dancer’s romance from the press.

“My message to your readers,” said Mr. Fatigay, when he had escorted his shy bride to her stateroom, and was able to give his attention to the group of slick young interviewers who surrounded him, “is simply this. It is true my wife is not a woman. She is, in fact, an angel in more or less human form. My experience has taught me that they are unequaled as soul mates, if that is the correct term, when skies are either gray or blue. Behind every great man there may indeed be a woman, and beneath every performing flea a hot plate, but beside the only happy man I know of — there is a chimp.”

Well, there you have it. It certainly delivers on the promise of the title.