Here I am because I said I’d be here.

A day of avoiding news and watching unused credits return to my account. The gentle timing out. A misting rain in this park this morning, making a wide arcs around the other runners. The grass in the ball fields a little overgrown and too green.

Felt out of sorts most of the day as is often the case with Mondays. And this despite episodes of good fortune, such as finding that the obstruction in the vacuum cleaner hose was near the nozzle and easy to remove. You have to grab what you can get in this life.

In the early afternoon it poured for no apparent reason, and stopped. One of those summer storms when the rain comes in silvery strands and nothing gets wet.

The radio said there’d be violent storms, a tornado even. Watch out for flying branches. But instead it was beautiful, just a little cloudy. It got weirdly bright and silvery midafternoon and then big, fat drops of rain fell straight down like they were dripping from a sieve.

When you’re watching your team it doesn’t matter how good they are, they seem plagued to you, forever vulnerable, unlucky. Because you see yourself in them maybe. I was so sure they’d lose the penalty shootout I braced myself. Clenched my stomach against the inevitable sorrow. Then they had a chance to win, and missed. Now for sure it’s all over. How can it not be over? But they won.

Day 4

I dove down to touch the canon and tried to appreciate something of its antiquity. It really just felt hard under a veneer of moss. Like an old stone wall in the Connecticut woods. The anchor veiled in seaweed looked like a crucifix someone had escaped and discarded. And yet the fish and the coral and everything else is alive.

On the way out some others on the boat, maybe Eastern European, Russian, asked if it was okay to smoke. Nods all around. A mother and son pulling from the same pack. He lit up right after he got out of the water, too. Cigarettes as a means to delineate events.

It had rained pretty hard in the afternoon.The flagstone terrace of Rick’s ran with rivulets of dirty water that amassed in little pools. We watched the cliff jumpers, saw the sun set through the remains of the storm. The DJ played loud, punctuating the music with birthday shout-outs. Goddamn if it isn’t always someone’s birthday. A young couple, well-dressed, sat facing each other romantically at the corner of the bar. They were daintily eating dishes of penne pasta, one marinara, one cream. She lifted her phone and gazed into it as though it were a mirror.

Sideways rain gave way to hail, rattling angrily off the windows and air conditioners. They were marble-sized or less—not like the ones upstate someone had posted pictures of, which were the size of a man’s balls and dented the roofs of cars. Still I beheld them with awe. They had come from so far away to land on our planting terrace. I imagined they were fragments of meteorites, or a warning from God. Frogs and locusts next.

Then the sun shone again and I tried to remember what it felt like, two or three minutes before, to be in the storm, and I barely could, the way you sometimes remember a dream.

Someone in the park said hey look, the sun is coming out again and minutes later the wind picked up like crazy. A mylar birthday balloon blew out of the woods onto the sidewalk and hit Jackie, shit that’s not supposed to happen—balloons and plastic bags are like pigeons, they always get out of the way. By the time we got upstairs ropes of rain were pounding down and the sun shone straight through the west side of our apartment and out the east. And of course there was a rainbow. 

The requisite guys in windbreakers doing reports from the hurricane, the sea at night behind them, waves coming in ominously fast.

Breaking news.

A man steps out of the post office into the rain and brusquely opens his umbrella.

The crossing guard stands in the middle of the avenue in his garish yellow rainsuit, doing nothing. Until the light’s about to change and he wanders to the corner yet again.

Why do I have the disco hit “Ring My Bell” playing incessantly in my head?

Maybe ‘cause it stopped raining today.

During the rare intervals when the English summer sun shines unobstructed it has a venomous ferocity, as though angry at having been veiled so long by clouds. I rolled up the collar of my jacket as I sat in the Hyde Park playground, hoping I wouldn’t get burned. Jackie played on a large swing with a family that I guessed was Iranian. I wondered whether they were very rich or very poor. Probably very rich.

The day before, we went to the London Eye. We had a dreary, sodden lunch, seated around a trash-strewn table by a tree, with rain falling through the branches and the leaves. I ate a tomato and mozzarella Panini that had the peculiar blandness of international tourist trap snack-stand food. Water pounded our Ferris wheel car, forming rivulets that blurred the views of Big Ben and MI6. There was Coca-Cola everywhere, in refrigerated cases along the queue to get in, at the snack bar outside, in the gift shop at the exit.

When we returned to Eddie’s house rain had leaked through a fissure in the ceiling and was dripping on the shag carpeting. We placed a bowl on the floor and suddenly the water went plunk, plunk, plunk. Greeting cards on a side table were soaked, including one of Mary, Joseph and the Baby Jesus that played “Silent Night” when you opened it.

There I was on the platform, waiting for the train. There I was in the hallway, on the way to the coffee machine. There I was on the sidewalk. Looking over my shoulder. Making sure I wasn’t followed.

When Jackie and I were on our way out at 14th Street there was a commotion around the stairwell. A bigger crowd than usual. There were groans and weary exclamations. It was pouring rain. Just a little earlier it was crystal clear, blue sky. I opened my umbrella and handed it to her. Outside, everything was wet but gleamed a little from the sun.

There’s that very nice freelance copywriter, always remembers my name. So I made a point of learning hers.

I was never completely awake today. Through the windows in the office the rain was coming down almost sideways and I thought, I should really feel something about this, but I can’t. There’s kind of a feeling you get when you’re in a large, bustling space, a corporate space, and the weather outside is chaotic. I’m sure I’ve had that feeling before. In the old Heublein building in Hartford, maybe. Temp days. It’s an insular feeling. A feeling of enforced kinship. Almost a cozy feeling. But I didn’t feel it.

Was out in the hallway hearing fat, cold raindrops pelting the skylight and I wondered whether I felt happy or depressed about it, and decided I felt happy, because fuck it, I was inside and safe and cozy. Who’d be outside right now? Cops directing traffic. In the cold, wet dark. In the inclement weather. I thought about that word. Inclement, clemency. Pope Clement the Sixth. The same root in a word about the wind and the rain and a word about some killer tossing and turning on his cot, hoping to get a reprieve from the governor. And the pope who granted absolution to all the sinners who died in the Plague.

I like the storms that occur at the end of the afternoon, this time of year; that make commuters loiter on subway landings, waiting for a break.

Did I dream about China last night?

We awoke a bit too late after a bad night, Sophia having cried and moaned senselessly, to an oppressively dreary morning, so dark it didn't seem the sun could be done rising. I stood in the kitchen and watched as the rain pounded the streets and sidewalks in ropy jets.

On the first full day of spring fat snowflakes fell between the raindrops.

Sophia cried and strained on my lap, batting away the bottle, convulsed by her mysterious forces.

Later I put her in the crib, tamping down her cries with shhhh, shhhh, shhhh. When she finally stopped I tiptoed away as if she were my house of cards.

Here we are on the night of the great trapped miner rescue of twenty-ten.

On Columbus Day we embarked on a series of rather mundane errands in the early evening. The frame shop, the Y to get a discount membership, the grocery store.

They're inserting the rocketlike rescue pod into a hole in the ground. Steam is rising out of somewhere. The terrain is bald, barren rock. O, cruel mother earth! It's like the set of some bad sci-fi movie.

Our kitchen timer rings.

When we left the house it was seventy-three degrees. The rain was pelting the street in fat drops by the time we left our second stop and it was falling steady by the time we reached our third. We parked up close to the automatic doors.

There were few people in the vast supermarket. A surly woman watching over the organic health and beauty department. A couple we kept bumping into. As we left, a stockboy smiled and expressed a cryptic warning about the world outside: "Exercise caution on account of extreme conditions."

It was raining hard, harder than before. We turned the corner out of the parking lot and found the intersection to be flooded who knows how deep, maybe a foot, or maybe fifty. We turned around and found another way.

The streets were matted with yellowed leaves. Weren't the trees still green? It poured in places, it was still and dry in others.

When we turned onto our block it seemed to have been inundated with foamy, toxic waste. It was ice, piling up, leaf-flecked and tire-tracked. It produces a strange effect, a familiar sight appearing incongruously early.

Upstairs, our home was intact but for one thing: one of our window screens was torn to ribbons.

Though the wind blew the misted air around it wouldn't rain.

Oil & Hay - 11

On Monday I drove the thousand kilometres to Paris in the pouring rain. My hangover didn't lift until I reached Lyon, but when it did I was plunged into a honeyed realm of ecstasy and nearly cried. Still it rained.

When I pulled up in front of 48 Rue de Grenelle I half expected to find her waiting in her soaking pea coat, blond hair matted to her brow. But she wasn't.

Upstairs I mixed a gin and tonic and leafed through my little black book to the page of her ever-changing numbers. The only one not crossed out was for the Hotel Pierre in New York City.

"I'm sorry, sir. Miss Welles has checked out," said the clerk. "She did leave a message for you in the event that you called."

"And?"

"And it reads as follows: Had to fly back to Los Angeles. Publicity for the record. Will call you in Paris."

"Is that all?"

"Kisses."

"What?"

"Her salutation, sir."

"Kisses?"

"Kisses."

I hung up, walked out on the balcony, and lit a cigarette. I gazed out at the intersection, at Boulevard Raspail divided by its treed median. I thought about Mel. Her night terrors, her love of Calder. Her advocacy on behalf of prisoners of conscience. Her past lives. She believed she'd been an emperor's taster in an ancient Chinese court.

"Which emperor?" I had asked her then, chidingly.

"Xian, the last emperor of the Han dynasty. He didn't see the writing on the wall. Also, his diet was overly rich in salt. I adored him though."

Her certitude startled me.

"Were you his concubine as well?"

"I was a male eunuch, Mal."

I remembered another thing she said that night at the party in St. Moritz.

"There's a new world coming. Don't you know that?"

"What in heaven's name do you mean?"

"It's about to be born. Can you feel it?"

"Where is this new world you speak of?" I asked, a bit pompously I fear, as if to say: This world you see is all there is, my dear.

"Not where, what. And when."

"So what? When?"

"We're evolving. We're casting off the old ideas. Sure, it might be rough at first. A bloody revolution in the streets. But the time has come. Are your chakras in order?"

"Beg pardon?"

"Seven energy centers run along your spine."

"Do you know where you are in time and space?" she queried.

"Right here. Right now," I answered. A bit defensively.

"I'm unconvinced, darling. You seem a little fuzzy."

I rattled my ice in mild irritation and smiled a tense little smile. "But I'm not driving, you see. I'm all sorted when I drive."

"You don't have to go around in circles to find yourself."

It struck me that I did. But I kept the thought to myself.

"You should meditate. You should do yoga."

"Will it help me drive faster?"

"It will help you do anything."

I traipsed through Midtown yesterday, on a mission to complete some dreary chores. Sweat poured off my scalp in rivulets that ran down my forehead and into my eyes.

A few fat drops of rain fell before I got on the 42nd Street crosstown bus, just enough for everyone to catch one on the flesh. It was one of those hybrid buses with the elevated platform in the back; the front was crowded but a man sat alone in the middle of the back row, legs apart, regal. I made myself small and sat in a window seat beside him.