Daniel the Writer

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Imagine being in a garden terrace where American ‘90s jazz plays and the art that hangs on the walls is a menagerie of midcentury color-swerving, obviously Picasso inspired. One particular painting strikes you, this one more Fauvist: a purple blonde clutches a pearl necklace as she emerges, orange-nippled and open-mouthed, from a parlor with sitting chair. Now imagine yourself as the painter, or voyeur or whoever, sitting comfortably in another chair watching self-satisfied. This is how I felt as I ate the steak au poivre avec pomme frites. This reminded me what it was like to be in love.

And I wish I could transmit the same feeling to you – it is so luxurious, so serene. So I looked up to the sky through the swinging beech branches that clamber over the black fire escapes and brown brick apartments and stored in my memory what New York was like.

Maybe I would do better to show you in a story of my own, how it feels to be in love. But that’s so 20th century, not metamodern at all.

The great duality: the body and the mind. The ethereal and the ephemeral. High and low. I’ve been thinking a lot about the low recently, especially while reading a certain postmodern piece of classic literature, Molloy. Meanwhile, Portnoy’s Complaint has led me to start thinking about the parent-child dynamic, and I realized that in Hot Love on the Wing poor Gabriel is trapped in the middle. Read on.

Like Sancho Panza she rebutted his criticism with the body. She ate, she laughed, and her bromides were saturated with undeniable truth. “You like what you like.” “Bad things come in threes.” And when the old man droned, they’re taking steps to preserve Bach’s original manuscripts in Leipzig, she listened interested and let him go on.

But his lean figure betrayed an inability to see things from her side. He ate like a bird and his health suffered. After a long day he was neurasthenic. He used Preparation H the way an 8-year-old used whip cream. She guffawed at sitcoms while he lined the bathroom floor with magazines. Bracelets jingling like a small animal’s bell, she poured wine through the gap in her incisors. The blue TV glow cast reels in her chinked eyes. Her back hurt sometimes so she sat on the floor flushed, while he chased windmills and dreamed of glory.