January 13, 2017

Inauguration Day

          However that happened ... he's there ... and let's go says Nicole Kidman.
         I liked her in "The Others." I wondered why Tom Cruise let her go—so peachlike and tiny waisted, a perfect doll.
          So I tried to imagine them fighting in the car, avoiding each other on weekends, drinking separately, secretly. Why lay an ace down upon the table? Is one so confident of winning the game that lovers—with their morning scent, their habit of draping a leg over yours on windy March nights, their dull prurience and fascinating innocence—can be discarded?
          However that happened ...
          My face, map-wide and shapeless, a pancake of worry, looks like it has been dropped from a great height. My clothes don't fit. Something is pushing outward, like a baby's fist, just below my right rib. I push it back with my right hand.
          I have had 16 doctor's appointments in 3 months. I am tired of running downtown.
          No impassioned appeal can turn things back, no eloquence or status, no confidence, no righteousness or bravery. We have arrived herelimping, stoned—we have awakened in an empty bed, and the mirror cannot lie.
          Not even Meryl Streep can save us.
          The ace is somewhere else, now: in private determination, the reluctant wisdom of age, in the sort of quietness that long walks bring. Nothing will be easy but it will still be rich, slightly sexy, and well worth having—the little satisfactions of John Updike and Bach, the surprise of nameless brooks in the woods, and the ability to remember without the tearful misery of loss.
          The grand gestures—the crash diets and all-night rowsbelong to an earlier time.
          Let's go.