Lux Lotus

The Graces

Heading back out to the Hamptons tomorrow (Late summer's touch was an intoxicating brand, remember?), but not before I make a frittata out of farm-fresh eggs, a little Swedish cheddar, ripe tomatoes and perhaps a leek or two. Easy does it. Lunch was duck salad and a glass of champagne with a friend at Bar Tabac. 31 years later, I understand: you have to love yourself first.

Windowlicker

Maison du Lux is exuding a real "Empress" glow, although at first I thought, no empress ever worked as hard as I have today, bound up, a cog, and then I thought of Catherine the Great, Queen Elizabeth I. I suppose it depends on your definition of empire. Certainly, the wheels turn 'round here. How did they see themselves in the world they needed for everything, power, money, so boldly alone at its center? What becomes the look best? A cape, a gown, jewels, a crown? No. It's the gaze that tells you.

[Crushed Ostrich Eggshell Mirror, $895 at Williams-Sonoma]

Windowlicker - from the French for window shopping: faire du lèche-vitrine - is more or less on summer hiatus, and will return in the fall.

Be a better actor

I got the best advice I've ever gotten today, about the fact that I put my whole heart into everything I do, and it invariably exhausts me. And that was it, you don't have to put your whole heart in. Fake it and see if anyone even notices. Be a better actor.

Windowlicker

Once a few years ago, I went out with a man who I knew everyone wanted to go out with, sort of... he asked me where I wanted to have lunch and I said Gramercy Tavern and we did, for three hours, and he made a map of Connecticut out of some sugar packets to show me where he was from and sent me a perfect note before I got home, and little did he know I'd stayed out so late at my friend's book party the night before that I'd slept in my dress on her couch and woken up just in time to breathlessly hail a cab; later he said he couldn't believe I'd chosen such an expensive restaurant (didn't I realize he wasn't that high up in the company yet?). Soon after, fate brought us together and we went from an author's reading to a publishing party and then out for a drink. Since then, many more than one woman has confided in me her abiding obsession with him and hey, I get it. Anyway, I was no meek miss at the time, and I suppose he was aware of his charms and the conversation turned and I said something to the effect of, rather clumsily yet assured, "I could have ten men just like you falling at my feet right now, and I'm here, so make it worth my while," and he said, either shortly before or shortly thereafter, "you really are like the heroine in a Fitzgerald story," and bless me, I was such a girl then: I thought he meant that because I had a flower on my hat. We kissed out front until we agreed to part or get arrested.

["Emeline" fur velour cloche in camel, $178 at Hats in the Belfry]

Windowlicker - from the French for window shopping: faire du lèche-vitrine - is more or less on summer hiatus, and will return in the fall.

On Midway

Wednesdays are grounding because I go to acupuncture in the morning, riding the subway back and forth from Brooklyn, and then in the afternoon I pick up my farmshare of fruits, vegetables and eggs that I share with two friends, and that alone is a big walk in a loop that takes an hour.  I'm often late for acupuncture because I so seldom take the subway or go to Brooklyn that my time management and the train line's unpredictability conspire against me almost every time. Today I left early to stop by the post office and mail a friend's birthday gift and ended up in a cafe with a croissant and a cup of tea and a few minutes to spare. I had a lot of time to think today, actually, because of the aforementioned and the steady thrum was the rhythm of my deepest heart's desire: what do I truly want? want? want? what is it that I need? need? need? Lately people have been expanding my mind with their actions, more expansive than anything I might have considered myself. So I hear that. And I would like a (cough, Pashley Princess Classic) bicycle. And a garden, with aspirations to Sissinghurst and a brick or slate patio and some wrought iron furniture and stone benches like I grew with, dotted around. Sitting on a chaise by the pool, listening to the pebble rain of the waterfall at one end. And a little house. And a month off. Now that I've decided to stick around New York for a while, it's suddenly apparent that everything might be altogether different now in a way it never could before.

Windowlicker

The first time I went to Barneys New York, I was 22 and dropped a week's pay at the Yves Saint Laurent cosmetics counter. The summer before that, I spent a week's pay in one night when I went to Los Angeles for the first time from San Francisco. Although I couldn't afford (or legally rent) a car, I could do a hotel room, and stayed in a junior suite at the Luxe Summit Bel-Air near the Getty so that I could go there. And that's all I did. At the time, I was horrified. I was an intern! A decade on, I still remember it, and it was awesome. I recently bought an exey bottle of perfume and was aghast when the clerk rang it up. At home, as soon as I inhaled an ethereal little puff, I thought to myself how that's the one lesson for a good life I wish I'd understood when I was broke all the time and for the indefinite future. That one nice thing, every once in a while, goes a very, very long way.

[Oversized smoking jacket with ribbon tie, $240 (sale) at ACNE]

Windowlicker - from the French for window shopping: faire du lèche-vitrine - is more or less on summer hiatus, and will return in the fall.

Publishing Perspectives

The excellent globally-focused online chronicle of the evolving industry landscape has a profile about the work that I do today.

The Quotable GG

"The story of my life is about back entrances, side doors, secret elevators and other ways of getting in and out of places so that people won't bother me." –– Garbo (photo: Genthe, 1925)

Mama Said

 

Earlier tonight I called my mother, the lovely and delectable "Mischa" as she is known, reminding us of a certain teenage celebrity as she does, to see if she got the shoes I sent home with my best friend for her (they live in the same apartment building, and when I come to visit I go back and forth between floors like Eloise). I mentioned that my brother loved Sweden and would like to go back as soon as possible and my sister loved Portland and was practically looking at houses, and she said, with a glimmer of her champagne bubble laugh, "yeah, they don't get out much."

(Anticipated) postscript: my brother notes that he went straight on to Austin and then Palm Beach from Stockholm, and my sister points out that she was in Spain, Gibraltar and Morocco earlier this month. Mischa would remind you that she's been to Caracas and Hong Kong and flew LA - San Juan as a flight attendant, and is currently late for a pool party.

A Reason to Read: Billy Bathgate

While I was in Portland I came across Billy Bathgate, which I read long ago and had entirely forgotten about; surprising because it left such an indelible impression upon me the first time that I read it. For instance, this spring, "...my only sartorial aspiration has ever been, and possibly will ever be, to look like a Prohibition-era gunrunner's moll, in the manner of Billy Bathgate..." ––  is just about the truest thing I ever said. The narrator is enchantingly streetwise and green shoot-tender, the era captivating, and the girl in question, Miss Lola Miss Drew aka Mrs. Harvey Preston, unforgettable. Her beauty and its correspondent cool charm, and the advantages, and dangers, it accords her in life, is sort of its own subplot in a way, and thus described in aching detail. You never  know what she's thinking, but you know how she looks, because no one can tear his eyes away while she's in the picture:

"There she was across the table from me, we were cocooned in our own light, and I had to remind myself I had intercourse with her, that I had carnal knowledge of her, that I had made her come because I wanted to do this all over again, but with the same yearning as if it never happened, with the same questions about her, and wonderings and imaginings of her physical quality, as if I was looking at an actress in a movie. This was the moment I began to understand that you can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing. You can remember its anatomy, and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened, and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again." –– Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow.