Glass Houses

Finished reading The Glass Room in the early afternoon. I was sitting outside a cafe, damp cold and raining.  When I got to the end, I started to cry.  "I am Ottilie" reduced me to tears. Just as I was wiping my eyes, my friend stepped off the bus and we set off on our usual Sunday expedition. We laughed at me.  Am I soft today or was that amazing writing?  I will have to reread the last part to ascertain that.

I want to know what house Mawer was describing in his book. It exists apparently but it is never identified outright.  Somewhere in the outskirts of Prague this glass house still stands.

Today was supposed to be a trip uptown to the Cloisters but the rain made us lazy. Wendy and I stayed in the Upper West Side. We watched a movie about Queen Victoria and ate terrible Chinese food and complained about the cold.

I have never been to The Cloisters. There is always an excuse not to go. In a way I was glad because I would like to see it alone.  I have a strange love for buildings, there are structures I prefer to see alone. Mostly because I never know how I will react to certain places. The Maparium makes me catch my breath and I can never explain to anyone why that is. The Temple of Dendaur, not the temple itself but the room it is housed in, makes me sad and happy in the same moment.

This morning I found out that my friend Sara does know the violinist I was raving about in December.  Her cousin went to high school with him in Livorno and her husband knows him from the chamber music world of New York. "Do you want to meet him again?" she asked me.  "We could arrange it." My fanhood is not quite so devoted so I declined.

My twin friends are trying to fix up with a friend of theirs. He is kind and trust-funded, they tell me.  He could buy you season tickets to the opera. I met this friend on Tuesday (not part of a set up), been to his big townhouse. I don't know about dating him because he is so shy it sort of hurts me, and I am happy to continue self-financing my expensive habits.

Last night I wrote many pages to add to the novel.  I hesitate to use the N word.  It scares me. The bursts of ideas amaze me, how for months on end I am backed into a corner not knowing how to go from one chapter to another and then suddenly, with two clicks of the mouse, everything falls into place.  My haphazard prose has been there all along, it just needed to be organized.  Here's hoping for more of last night.