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Valentine’s Day, 2014
By
Published: Feb 11, 2014
Category:
Beyond Classification
For a decade now on this site, I’ve put “Valentine’s Day” and “loathing” in the same sentence.
This year? I must be getting soft. My excuse: Many of us spend our days and nights looking more at screens than at people. It might be better if we look up once in a while. Not that I begrudge the time I spend at this desk. I’m doing what I think I’m supposed to do: this site, books for others, and, best of all, writing love stories. To my surprise, “Married Sex” wasn’t a one-off; I’ve started another novel that is, at its core, a romance.
When I kissed journalism goodbye after four decades, I wouldn’t have predicted that novels about relationships were any kind of next step. But this marriage and this child seem to have changed me, and now I find I’m more interested in domestic moments than juicy scandals. And I’m increasingly sympathetic to any impulse that brings people together, decreases loneliness, gets blood pumping at the sight of a lover.
In “Married Sex,” there’s a separation. As it’s getting resolved, the wife sends her husband an e-mail with a Joni Mitchell lyric.
Blue, here is a shell for you
Inside you’ll hear a sigh
A foggy lullaby
There is your song from me.
It prompts this reaction:
“A foggy lullaby” — it wasn’t late, but I wanted to go to bed, to imagine Blair’s good night kiss, the day’s last declaration of love, her breath warm in my ear. In the dark, I’d remember all the nights behind us and hope for the ones ahead. I’d recall cool sheets in summer, hiding under the duvet in winter, my hand massaging her shoulders as foreplay, her hair streaming across the pillow as she slept.
Is that me writing? Apparently. And it’s in that mood of domestic romance that I thought to suggest a few emotional ice-breakers for a holiday that’s a commercial cliché — flowers, candy and restaurants — but doesn’t have to be. And it’s in that mood I realized something else: I used to make these lists for men and women who are straight. No more. He loves her, she loves him — that’s just one story. He loves him is another. As is: she loves her. Only the verb matters. The gift is just a metaphor. These are some metaphors that might resonate for you…
The Queen’s Gambit
My favorite love story. An eight-year-old orphan named Beth Harmon is the Mozart of chess. Which brings her joy (she wins! people notice her!) and misery (she’s alone and unloved and incapable of asking for help). She gets addicted to pills. She drinks. She loses. And then, at 17, Beth faces her biggest challenge — a match with the world champion, a Russian of scary brilliance. The love story? She’s alone, but she can’t win alone. Will she let someone in, accept support, risk hurt?
Etta James
A woman who lived this hard — who loved and lost and paid the price for everything she got and a lot she didn’t — oozes the kind of wisdom you don’t find in books. That was the thing about Etta: She had total credibility. She lived the blues, and you’d best believe she was going to tell you about them, and in the bluntest (and thus, most poetic) way possible.
Bryan Ferry
Here lust and longing are so intense they redline into love. Obsessive love. Love on two bottles of Krug and maybe a puff of Mendocino’s best. Love that jets you out of this vale of struggle and anxiety into elegance and glory. Love that makes you, as one of his songs has it, a “slave” to love.
Roxy Music
“Avalon” sounds like sex. Slow, dreamy sex; deep, underwater sex; dark, midnight sex. Above all, sex so powerful it passes for love, sex that might as well be love. On the Amazon page for “Avalon,” a man writes that “Any, and I mean any, guy going to college during the early to mid eighties understands the importance of this record/CD in regards to taking care of business with their girlfriends.” I’d bet some women also bought it.
Big Mama Thornton
She lived in Houston, performing in clubs, learning to play drums and harmonica, drinking gin and milk, and being open about her sexuality decades before it was cool to be a lesbian. “My singing comes from my experience…my own experience,” she said. “I never had no one teach me nothin’. I never went to school for music or nothin’. I taught myself to sing and to blow harmonica and even to play drums by watchin’ other people! I can’t read music, but I know what I’m singing!”
Prada L’Eau Ambree Body Powder with Puff
Over and over I read this: No beauty treatment is more sensual than a powder puff after a bath or shower. My wife goes further: “I use it on the pillows. I shake the puff in the air. For me, it’s a kind of aromatherapy.”
A Sport and a Pastime
“She cannot be satisfied. She will not let him alone. She removes her clothes and calls to him. Once that night and twice the next morning he complies and in the faint darkness between lies awake, the lights of Dijon faint on the ceiling, the boulevards still. It’s a bitter night. Flats of rain are passing. Heavy drops ring in the gutter outside their window, but they are in a dovecote, they are pigeons between the eaves. The rain is falling all around them. Deep in feathers, breathing softly, they lie.”
Bombino
The new CD is on 10 Best lists. There African desert meets American rock. But I’d give “Agadez,” recorded before his association with American musicians and American production. It’s dreamy, mysterious desert music, better suited to late-night listening — for sheer beauty, it’s the superior choice.
Zojirushi Stainless Steel Vacuum Insulated Mug
Take that, terrible winter! What is astonishing about the Zojirushi is how long hot stays hot and how long cold stays cold. Fill it with 16 ounces of steaming coffee in the morning, and six hours later, you can still burn your lips. Put ice cubes in a cold drink, and, six hours later, there’s still ice. Stylish? It’s sleek. At 9.5 inches, it’s just the right size for a tote.
Travel Humidor
This small (9 x 6 x 4.5 inches), light (1 pound), inexpensive ($16) travel humidor holds 10 to 12 cigars and keeps them in smoke-me-now condition. It’s well-made: real wood, with strong magnets built into the hinges to keep the lid tightly closed. For infrequent cigar smokers, this could easily take the place of a larger, more expensive humidor.
Pu-erh tea
This tea may have health benefits. It also has taste benefits. Milk and sweetener are superfluous — this is a rich brew that delivers an unusually modest caffeine hit along with a welcome hint of natural sweetness. Some Pu-erh fans say the last drop is actually the best, that the last infusions taste richer and sweeter than the first.
