Colder Than Memory

January 7, 2014

     The news reported that this morning in Central Park, temperatures were lower than at their lowest since records began being kept, back in the 1890s.  After a big snowfall Friday, New Yorkers spent their weekends tenuously navigating its leavings, hoping for relief, only to have the temperature rise into a comfortable range briefly, then plummet fifty degrees overnight.  When I awoke this morning, the temperature was 5 degrees Farenheit with forty mile an hour winds making it feel well below zero.

     There is no question of Beau's exiting the building, or of my doing any outdoor activities until tomorrow, when the temperatures are expected to reach the balmy 20s.  So the time is ripe for putting books to go to France in boxes.

     I have determined that it makes sense for me to move much of this apartment's contents to my new home in Caunes-Minervois and to store the rest while I rent the apartment for one to two years.  I have listed the apartment with Columbia's office of off-campus housing, as well as with a website for professors planning sabbaticals, sabbatical.com  "In for a penny, in for a pound", I have to follow through with my intentions and prepare the apartment for its new tenant or tenants.

      I take piles of books off the tops of cabinets and empty the bookshelf in the closet office from where I am writing this.  Few people own as many books as I do, unless they are academics.  My collection is catholic, ranging from history to literature to finance to history to music to fashion to language to art.  The apartment contains, in addition to the piles of books atop the cabinetry, four built-in bookshelves filled with titles.  I have too many books for this apartment, but not too many for an apartment and a house.  The books I took down from atop the cabinets  will go to France; the ones in bookshelves will be stored for my return, whenever that may be.

     I don't know where I and Beau might go once my six months in France have come to an end.  A friend in Zurich has invited me for Christmas, a lovely thought to keep in mind as I wrestle with the anguish of leaving my home since 1989.  I have no choice, though: I still have the energy to resettle somewhere other than New York; or, if it turns out my heart remains that of a New Yorker, to return and reconfigure a life here.

     In the winter light, everything around me looks a bit shabby: the bathroom and kitchen sinks leak, the walls, so beautifully painted a decade ago, are showing hairline cracks, where they don't show outright chips filled in with a gold nail polish I found that matched the hue of the vanished walls.  The patching is no better-looking than an amateur's attempt to fix a chip on a manicured nail --it is obviously a "touch-up".

     The floors, the original 1909 wood planks, are breaking apart, and if I don't watch Beau, he'll chew off splinters the way he does twigs off a tree branch lying in his path outside.  The laminate on the cabinets is chipping at the corners, where it isn't completely bald.  And I'll be paying twice as much for the privilege of living where I do in seven years, three times as much in fourteen. There are cheaper places to live than Manhattan; indeed, almost anywhere in the United States is cheaper.

     As I pack the books going to France, I'm strangely exhilarated.  I find John Clive's Macaulay: The Shaping Of The Historian, a biography I loved enough to read twice, partly because Clive taught me as an undergraduate.  The Hill Stations Of India: A Guide looks intriguing, as does a biography of the Count de Olivares, subject of one of Velasquez' greatest portraits.  English books are a rarity in the Languedoc: only Patrice Cartier, the seller of used books who lives across the way from the chapel of Notre Dame du Cros in Caunes, carries any.  His offerings tend to be mainstream English mysteries or art books about France's treasures.  The books shipped will be a welcome addition to 13, porte de Narbonne.

     Nevertheless, taking apart a cherished apartment makes me think about whether, when I empty the apartment, I will have emptied myself of all the happy memories that went with it.  I never stopped telling Bill how much I loved the Columbia area, with its Beaux Arts architecture and its associations with the friendship that became a romance that became a perduring and happy marriage.  When I leave, I will no longer pass the corner of 107th Street where building number "245" stands, and where I met Bill by lucky accident.  I won't have occasion to see the cupola of St. Paul's Chapel, where Bill and I were married, or to attend Mass at Ascension Church, where the banns for our marriage were announced.  When I leave I'll say goodbye --at least for a year or two-- to the reinforcing landmarks of our relationship: Morningside Park, through which he and his friend, Blair Axel, walked the first week of their first year of law school, a promenade that horrified all who heard them tell of it, such was the reputation of the park for crime in 1982.  I'll say goodbye to the streets he traversed happily, both as a law school student and as an up-and-coming lawyer, then as an established one.

     I'll also say goodbye to The Church of Notre Dame, where his funeral Mass was celebrated, and perhaps that's worth forgetting.  I'll say a sort of farewell to the friends who have sustained me throughout the three years since Bill's death. And I'll venture into foreign parts where my future is uncertain.  It seems to me though, that it is as important to know when to go, when to put the past in a box, as it is to know when to stay in a place.

     Today my reflections are colder than my memories: I'm not happy that events have turned out as they have, but nostalgia will not bring Bill back to me.  I have to search for that place where I can live with my memories of Bill and my life with Bill without feeling that my life since his death has shrunken.  And I have to do this for him, as much as for myself.