1 4 2 Y S E L F - P O R T R A I T A T F I F T Y - S I X F L E M I N G M E E K S 1. Begin at twenty-eight, arms around a curvy waitress, parked in a ’65 Skylark in Brattleboro, Vermont, light snow falling. Scratch that. A dental hygienist, also blonde but narrow with a cartoon laugh, who works nights at the Mole’s Eye Café, raking my gums with her tongue, moving my hands to where she wants them, kissing my neck. You’re making this up. ‘‘Now turn towards me.’’ There’s that laugh again. Windows fogged from the inside, fresh snow sealing out the night in white. She smooths her hair and straightens her skirt. But which waitress? ‘‘Later,’’ she says, and slips out the door. Degas wrote, ‘‘A touch of false color heightens intimacy.’’ No, what he really said was, ‘‘All art is lies with just enough reality to make it read true.’’ Now flash forward twenty-eight years, add gray hair, glasses, two kids, a wife you love and a house in the suburbs. How much of this is really true? Most of it. No, all of it really is. 1 4 3 R 2. Two beers at the Holiday Lounge on St. Mark’s and First with a twenty-four-year-old actress from Minneapolis who temps in Rockefeller Center for a company she calls Acme Screw & Die. ‘‘This is like a date, right,’’ she says, burying her face in my arm. Pool balls clatter and chatter. The jukebox pounds out Richard Hell, Blank Generation, and She’s Too Fat for Me. The Ukrainian bartender slaps the counter and does a little hula dance: ‘‘I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me.’’ So this is New York, her hand on my arm, leading me out the door and up the steps. ‘‘What did I tell you,’’ she says, flashing perfect actress teeth and laughing. Kissing her around the corner by a fish market on First as cabs rush past, half a life ago, her face hot against mine, brown eyes lit up in a steady river of headlights. 3. Later, it’s snowing. The downtown streets are empty, an angular maze of fire escapes and cast-iron façades, dark slashes of gray in a haze of white. Much later, three months later, the haunting cityscape stripped of hard edges like carefully chosen words: ‘‘You looked so beautiful sleeping there beside me,’’ I wrote, cutting out the noise and adding it back, like a puzzle to be solved and solved again. ‘‘Your face framed by window light.’’ And fitting it back together. The post-urban quiet of narrow streets at three a.m. A bicyclist pedals past like a silent movie, and then: just me and a typewriter. ‘‘Last week a fortune cookie read, 1 4 4 Y ‘Two pupil of the eye cutting through the water like scissors.’ Tomorrow you’ll tell me it’s not important, but right now none of that matters.’’ 4. Walking past her doorway after a bad marriage and seven lifeless years, her name, still on the intercom, as if time had slowed or reversed or turned around, like a bead of mercury in my hand. It would have been summer then, hot, and me fierce with longing – I could write a book about that, and not just that summer – but without the nerve to call and show her how I tightened the messy parts into an elegant line, like the swoop of her neck when I saw her dancing by the jukebox at Barnabus Rex, and show her the poem or even drop it in the mail. 5. Lunch with a Wall Street analyst in midtown, a magazine blonde in Chanel who I dated that same hot summer. She told me to go back to my wife over dinner at Bar Six. ‘‘A cross between Cybil Shepherd and Teri Garr, are you kidding,’’ she said and picked up the tab. ‘‘Momentum is the only thing that’s working,’’ she confides over crab and avocado salad...
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Oct 10, 2023
Terry Ofner 
Open Access
