"Miss Bacall" to Y'all (Sandy)

Dear Sandy,

° I quote you to your face: "Gina says that if she'd known Edwina could be placated, and that you (Giac) knew how it was done, you'd've been invited to all the club meetings."

° Ah yes, Mavis. For you well remember that I was the only living soul who loved her, fluffy and subtly shaded as she was, invariable as she was in selecting the bathtub for her wastings of both the drier and the damper sorts. A cat whose temperament was modestly softened by having her brainpan squashed by a car, her jaw broken and reknit permanently crooked, and her eyes blinded. Intact, she had been a bramble thicket of claws and teeth at the least scent of a human, but after her misadventure she began to present herself to be stroked at six o'clock sharp every evening, and continued that drill for the many years till her death.

° And it was I that did the stroking.

° What was my secret, with Edwina? Well I will tell you.

° But not just yet.

§

° O for the good old days. Mae West used to have a plugugly cauliflowereared exboxer in her entourage, just to reprove any journalist who dared to say, familiarly, "Mae . . . ?"

° "Miss West!" came the growl from the reckless muscleman.

° "Miss West, I mean," was the invariable, prudent response of the newsman.

° I have read Nietzsche.

° I have read Sade.

° I have read Piers trinitatis.

° But when the day comes that I am so sufficiently beyond good and evil that I can torment a 79yearold Lauren Bacall with stupidaggini like "And isn't your thirtysomething legendary principal, Miss Kidman, something else?"--well that'll just be the day.

° A ninetysomethng Lillian Gish costarring with eightysomething Ann Sotherns and countlesssomething Bette Davises--in those days legends didn't outlive the memories of their fans.

° In these days, when memories are shorter than Tom Cruise in flipflops, legends need to die at 33, just to be on the safe side.

° And really, I'm sorry for anybody who ignorantly watched Dogville without feeling that extra shock when Schatzi, just graduated from How to Marry a Millionaire, just costarred with Betty Grable (who? say the simps) and Marilyn Monroe (who? say the simps), hardveneered heartofgold Schatzi, who accidentally won the gold ring--when Schatzi suddenly bares her teeth over the innocent trespassing of a gooseberry path.

° As Mother's cook R---- used to say, "The world grows wickeder, nor wiser."

° Underline the "nor."

§

° The other day I was waiting for Coz onehandedly to finish juggling orders from a line halfway out to the street, so he could come play Fool and Juggler with me a moment or two.

° So I had plenty of leisure to observe, and plenty of aural acuity to overhear, the doings at a table in the corner of the room. By "leisure" I mean I was not so busied with joking with the queue, keeping an eye on a couple of guys outside the window one of whom looked remarkably like Kiel but unblondined, watching a seedylooker stockpile sugar from the condiment stand, examining current fashion with an especial emphasis on footwear, your fave; meanwhile--well I had the leisure, through the miracle of multitasking nosiness.

° A quite finelooking female (of a certain age), immaculately dressed in a tailored--not indeed Juljalike, but efforts clearly made--was sitting with a teeshirted, closecropped, slightly pierced and plain twentysomething female and a cargotrousered twentysomething boy, effeminate and extremely goodlooking. I make no guess as to relationship, but I know who paid the tab.

° Before the line had quite played out I overheard three times, like Peter's cock's crow, the following exchange, exact wording altered each time:

Fiftysomething: "It reminds me that Aunt--"

Twentysomething boygirl to twentysomething girlboy: "Me and J--- got home falling down wasted last night."

Twentysomething girlboy to twentysomething boygirl: "It was some righteous f------ s--- all right!"

I myself longed to know what "Aunt --" had said or done. I felt it might have been quaint, not just banal.

° But overhear as I might, I never did hear what "Aunt --" had said or done, nor later what "Dr. --" had warned, nor finally what had happened "back when Jim was still with us . . . ."

° Nor did I care, for the line had worked itself down, and Coz was free to--well that lasted about five seconds, till the line began to refill.

§§§§§

° You yourself have dropped ten years this summer by working your mind and body overtime and by recreating a b&b life for yourself in the company of thirtysomethings.

° I myself am ageing something fierce, if Piers doesn't abandon his twenties soon, it's stuntwork on Nip and Tuck for me.

° Edwina is 75 (to round off a number). A wonderfully preserved, wonderfully vigourous, wonderfully prosperous 75.

° I was the only one there, besides Edwina herself, who remembered how much more vigourous she had been at 65, 55, 45. Lordy but she could rack the horses. While effeminate females were burning bras and banishing the suffix "-ess" from the English language, Edwina was trampling male competitors as if they were limp pansyflowers. More power to Edwina.

° And now she's sitting on a mountain of money and it doesn't buy her a single thing she wants.

° For what she wants is not to be transparent. She has disappeared in plain view.

° She is old.

° "Cranky"? That's what "journalists" called Miss Bacall. "Cranky," as in, "needs placating."

§

° But I said I'd tell you my secret, and I'm nothing if not aspergerially truthful.

° It goes without saying that I did no such thing as "placate" the "cranky" Miss Edwina.

° What I did, and it was absolutely the only thing I did, or needed to do, was hand her the 1940 yearbook already opened to the page whereon her young love still dwells in blackandwhite halftone.

° Do you understand?

° I simply made a gesture that she could not fail to understand had been made for her alone.

° And yes, I'm ready to interview Miss Bacall, havemercy the stories she'd tell me . . . .

° Love, Giac.

° P.S. The house was splendid, the colours freshly reinterpreted by the change from daylight to artificial, the mood mellow and enveloping. The parfait! Congratulations on so many jobs so well done.