new work, new digs. this for a neighbor one flight down. and he looks happy, as in easy to smile happy, as in not about to bitch anytime happy.
he showed us his new pad yesterday. and boy was he beaming. who would not be?
the new apartment, well, studio for the finicky, is in one of those storied pre-war hotels turned residential complexes right smack in money soaked east side.
all these and a (gasp!) courteous white-not ethnic-doorman downstairs for less than fifteen hundred. no wonder the bastard is all teeth, surgically abraded white teeth.
must have done something good in my previous life. must have done something good. all he keeps on muttering. since when does this agnostic ever clung to the validity of the karmic cycle, anyway?
then he cabbed us to this fusion thai bistro in lower east. like he was saying, hey, i've got this great apartment now and i have no problem at all slumming, at times.
he ordered one of those red curry dishes, pronouncing its thai name quite successfully. mellifluously, in fact. and the wine he ordered for the group, a frail pacific northwest pinot, was just right. inspired, another friend exclaimed. the boy could not make any mistakes.
what is it in moving that animates people, that ushers mortals back to their demigod status? I don't think it has something to do with hope, what most of us call optimism.
then over dessert of mango float, he kept on regaling us with his floor plans. that ledge, near the radiator, that's where my plasma tv goes. oh, and I guess, a japanese rice paper screen divider would be perfect, don't you think so? he looked at me straight. I nodded and quaffed what's left of my wine.
I wanted to suggest he also get one of those tatamis to complete his neo-japanese ryokan theme but I could feel a burp coming up. I suppressed it just in time and what seemed a genuinely pleasant surprise, I became aware of my breath - tasted it in fact - metallic and faintly acidic.
I kept on breathing, like I always did, but this time consciously, animatedly.
and I looked at this happy man in front of me, gesticulating like a touched man in a pentecostal revival. and I feel what's touching him. this awareness, this sentience of a previously unrecognized preoccupation, now floating up, bubbling forth and drawn out by some mysterious surprise, some inscrutable dawning.