Photograph courtesy of Adelaide Faith.

CAVEH

Ever since I was five years old, I’ve been obsessed with finding a romantic partner. I believe that the purpose of life is to join with others and my main goal in life has always been to find a life partner. Unfortunately, this quest has proven elusive and I have been divorced three times. After my last divorce, at the age of fifty-seven, I found myself dating mostly twentysomethings, not because I was especially drawn to twentysomethings but because they were the only ones who seemed drawn to me. My last several girlfriends all approached me as fans after a film screening or messaged me on Instagram. They’ve been the only ones who have seemed interested.

ADELAIDE

I hadn’t had a boyfriend for eight and a half years. In all that time I’d only had two dates. They were both with the same person, but they were a girl on the first date and a boy on the second. I found that interesting, but nothing else about them. On the first date they told me they liked to wear odd socks. Between dates they sent me a selfie with a sock on each ear. I don’t know why I agreed to the second date. It was something to do, and maybe I wanted to experience not being the needy one for once. Maybe I thought I’d enjoy acting cold, but I didn’t enjoy it at all. It was easy to get rid of them in the end. I told them I didn’t believe in romance. “I don’t think anybody really loves anybody,” I said toward the end of the second date. “They just pretend they do to secure backup. They want someone on their side in case they’re struck down by misfortune.” I believed that was true at the time.

CAVEH

After my breakup with Kathy, who had been twenty-four when I met her and twenty-seven when we broke up, I was lonely and single again. I was more famous than I’d ever been, so getting laid was a little easier than it used to be, but not by much. After a few demoralizing one-night stands, I met Kate, who was also twenty-seven. She emailed me asking if I could teach her how to appreciate poetry. I googled her. She was cute. So I offered to meet her over Zoom and read through a poem together. My main motivation was romantic. But I wanted to meet over Zoom because I was worried that (1) she might be crazy (I attract a lot of them), or (2) that I was projecting my own desires onto her. But I enjoy close readings of poems, so I figured the worst that could happen was that I deepen my knowledge of poetry.

ADELAIDE

It was hard to find anyone I was interested in. My capacity for being interested in someone had been absorbed by my therapist for so many years, and this had been all projection. Since I wasn’t able to get to know her, she couldn’t fall short of my ideal. Whenever I told a friend I’d been single for eight years they acted like I must be mistaken. It seemed an impossibility to them, just unthinkable. But what did they mean? Was there some specific practical thing they would have done that I hadn’t, which would have prevented my being single? Or did they think interesting people had been appearing right under my nose but I’d refused to really see them? Nobody had interested me in all those years. I’m sure my friends could easily imagine experiencing one single day of not meeting anyone they wanted to date, so why not three thousand consecutive days? That’s what had happened to me. Read More

Balthazar in the nineties. Photo by James Leynse/Corbis, via Getty Images.

It was lunchtime at the restaurant. Sunlight streamed through the blinds, cutting the halogens from the side so you could see everyone’s lines and shadows and they could see yours. It was loud, and the air between me and the customers was caffeinated. Lunches were always rush, rush, rush. They gave us twice as many tables as they did at dinner, and I was usually behind on orders, showing up at the table pale and sweaty. At dinner, there was the wine haze. The lights were dimmer, and you could duck in and out of view. Dinner meant grappa and lingering and more time to charm the customers. At lunch, we turned our tables fast—it was the fall of 1997, and the crowds kept coming. I was twenty-six, with a bunch of other lives behind me—or beside me, or in front of me. Balthazar had just opened that April. I lied on my resume and I had the look.

I checked the floor plan. I was penciled to work the big tables. The VIP section was easy to spot, and everyone wanted a seat at the red banquettes that lined the back wall. Was this a mistake? It was probably a test. Back then, the restaurant was always testing us, and we never knew if our customers were plants.

Balthazar wanted stars from a New York Times review, and the general managers trained us to get them. One of the higher-ups (I’ll call her Debra) told us the restaurant hired an outside service to dine anonymously and rate the staff. If I hear something like this, I will approach every table with suspicion, asking myself, Are they a little too attentive? Too plainclothed? Too curious about the menu? Are they exchanging knowing glances after I mispronounce the name of a cheese or let a water glass sit empty while they thrum their fingers against it?

I smoked a lot in those days and ate Clif Bars I’d stuff into the pockets of my apron. I looked like a French maid in my uniform. I bought black loafers with the thickest heels I could find. You think restaurant work is easy? You probably don’t think that. Maybe you think it’s hard, but honestly, if you haven’t served at a place like Balthazar in the nineties, you have no idea.

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New York City Marble Cemetery interior. Photograph by Dmadeo, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

In issue no. 253, we published an excerpt of Eileen Myles’s “Bird Watching,” a poem written in 1978 and unpublished until now. In this essay, Myles reflects on the time when they wrote it—alongside drinking and dancing and falling in love in New York. “It was a movie for sure,” they write.

I think Chelsea Girls is me teaching myself to be a novelist and Bird Watching [and Their First Three Books of Poetry] is me teaching myself to be a poet. Poets have the same rights as all other humans, but each of us in our own exact way has made that be our business. Possibly even being the lawyer of it. Constructing reality inch by inch in language. Making a new space I believe. All poetry is hyperbole. That can’t possibly be true, but it is.

Excepting “Bird Watching,” which I think is the main heave of this volume, the three books here are sort of young me taking my measure, figuring out what I’ve got. This is so different from a selected, because it’s not so much about what matters but what I did. And across it all the person is variously asserting their gender and the blurriness of that enterprise (I’m heartened to see that in my twenties I really didn’t feel I fit in this or that gender. Or sexuality). And gender and genre are linked as always, because despite these being my first public assertions of being a poet, the person making them would often have preferred to be a journalist (wanting to be seen in the world rather than in language) and so the direction of some of the poems’ content feels like I was trying to have it both ways. I mean talking to some imaginary everybody, being fun and broad like the village voice. I even wrote for them a while. And then there’s the self that camped out entirely in feminism, even lesbian feminism, making tons of statements (which embarrassed me and I didn’t include in my selected) sounding to me by now (except for the part about shooting the pope) like a middle-aged man. I was trying to sound like the world or how a lesbian like me sounded in it but the result was some horny geezer, a guy being open about his lust for chicks—yet I was one.

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Lily Allen. Photograph courtesy of Jean Garnett.

“Who is Madeline?” asks my daughter. We’ve been singing that new Lily Allen song all morning—“Da da da da da da da who’s Madeline?”; we can’t get it out of our heads. How should I answer? Madeline seems to be a woman with whom the singer’s husband is having an affair? Then I’ll have to explain what an affair is. And wait, affair isn’t the word, since Allen and her husband had an open marriage, though the song tells us he’s “broken the rules” of their arrangement with Madeline … Anyway, I’m not going to try to explain nonmonogamy to a seven-year-old.

By a stroke of genius, I hit on the right answer: “I don’t know.” My daughter seems to need no further clarification on the issue, but I’m realizing that I do, actually. That is, I want to understand why for some reason, despite Allen’s deft and amusing sketch of this Madeline person as a vacuous, woo-woo home-wrecker, I feel a certain sympathy with her. I care about Madeline, about her desires and her right to pursue them without being villainized.

West End Girl, Lily Allen’s first album in seven years, is a pop marital memoir chronicling the dissolution of Allen’s partnership with the actor David Harbour in the wake of their agreement to try out nonmonogamy. I get why people are in raptures over this record. There’s a certain phoenix-from-the-ashes satisfaction in seeing a romantically wounded, no-longer-young woman artist explode back into the spotlight with a series of sexy, delectable bops: we love that for her. There’s the earworm indelibility of Allen’s tunes that has my kid humming them while brushing her teeth, the charm and humor of her lyrics, and the generosity of her voice, which confides in us like a friend: we love her for that. She’s very lovable.

Does it follow that her husband, and his “Madeline,” must be hateable? Because, whether Allen intended it or not, that appears to be one takeaway here. West End Girl has been described approvingly as a revenge album, and the consensus among fans seems to be that Allen sure got Harbour’s ass good, that in the process of transmuting her pain into art she has served him a much-deserved pillorying. Remind me why he deserves this? It does sound from the lyrics like there was dishonesty on his part, but his original sin, in the story of Allen’s record, is that he open-marriaged her. Read More

She was standing in the middle of the crowd. I looked at her once, and then I kept staring. I tried to see the other eyes in the room, green eyes, brown and blue, but I kept looking back at her. I looked, and she looked, and I moved toward her holding a plastic ring above her crooked fingers and hand. I thought, Somehow, I’ve conjured her. Or perhaps she’s conjured me.

Then I saw one of her eyes was brown and her other eye was green, like a wild animal.

So look into these eyes, and you’ll see what I saw that night.

THE NEW WORLD.

I pushed the plastic ring on her finger and the strange eyes shined.

I saw the future. Read More