The Plaisante

West Village, Nov 1

Most mornings, before my eyes even open, I can sense her waiting for me, Mylord’s giant body stuffed into the linen closet on the other side of the wall my pillow rests against. The wall trembles with expectation and dread. Mylord, huffing and pumping, but going nowhere. When she is away on location, the wall relaxes, relieved of its ontological burdens, just a simple barrier between us. This morning, though, the wall is dead quiet and it irks me.

My nipple is stuck between the babe’s teeth and every now and then his mouth springs into a flurry of shallow sucking motions. Will snores on the other side of the bed, one arm hanging off the edge, like in that painting with the dead man in the bathtub, one hand holding a pen and the other a freshly written letter only in our story the letter is an email—an email about the lease—to be or not to be sent—and the threat is exile rather than execution.

You see, the feeling in the atmosphere—the vibe—reminds me of the Planck epoch, though time and death and quiet did not exist in the Planck epoch. There was no transmission of sound, of course, no ticking of time. Still, I was “born” from that conformal veil—the threshold, as contemporary physicists now call it—at the edge of the Planck Wall, and from there I, or rather we, were carried into the quantum storm by the last dim thread of light from the “previous” aeon. Our light umbilicus, so to speak.


I keep my body very still as I wedge my index finger between the babe’s teeth, free my nipple, put a foot on the floor to stabilize myself, wait a few seconds, breathe steadily, and roll off the mattress, praying he doesn’t cry out for more boob and wake Will. Mustn’t wake Will. Woken, his booming voice drowns out my own thoughts. I often wish we could still use the gentle poisons to keep the menfolk quieted down.

I love Will’s force and decisiveness, but I need to decide if it is time to call it into action. 

So, I remain on the floor, naked, a thread of saliva and milk still connecting me to the Babe’s mouth (the babe is actually a toddler—I nurse children until they are five, almost six, enough time to destroy me in order to ensure that the child knows I’ve survived their hatred and have become real). I stare at the orange hammock dangling from a beam on the slanted wood ceiling like a limp body. The room is empty. Other than the giant hammock, the kingsize mattress, the brick fireplace, there is nothing else in there. We keep it empty because it has to turn into a yoga studio in the daytime. This is why the bed has no frame—so I can more easily hoist it up against the wall to make space for the students. The room’s emptiness makes it great for dance parties and water-birthing, but ultimately its emptiness served as an empty frame where I could surrender to what Artaud called the “physics of the absolute gesture.” I flip around to my belly, push myself up to all fours, and to briefly entertain myself, I swing my breasts from side to side like a cow before I stand up. 

Standing now, I notice the frayed end of a rope pinned down by the closed window: Yorick. Fuck me twice in the wrong hole, I think, and remind myself to remind Will to pull Yorick in before he kills a pedestrian. Or, more importantly, before Mylord notices he is still hanging.

Mylord is obsessed with these skeletons. Every year, before Halloween, we create a hospital ward of sorts in her little yard next door—line up the femurs, tibias, and fibulas on the astro turf and match them to their correct pelvis, take notes on which bones are missing or ill-fitting. That’s when I prance around the skeletons and do my “Alas, poor Yorick” routine. I pick up a skull, hold it across from my face and say, “I knew him—he was a lover of mine. I hath borne him on my back a thousand times,” then I twist my arm so the skull is behind my back and mock an air-fucking-from-behind, then I kneel down, hold the skull above my head, and as I fondle Yorick’s balls, while I perform air fellatio, I say, “Here hung those balls that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now?” 

(The servants have mostly loved it, I think. Though some probably believe I stole my lines from Shakespeare and not the other way around. Nothing to be done about that. After all, what am I supposed to do? Tell everyone I am a Plaisant from the Middle Ages from whom men stole their material? We would end up on the street, homeless. So, yes, even when one’s brain holds within it the cosmic residue of the infinite jest—yes, I came up with that, not him—one must continue to live as though this is the only lifetime one has ever known.)

Then she comes out to inspect the skeletons. All bravado, lumbering stride. A handsome king with her subjects. She prides herself on what you now call: “The Art of Attention.” When she picks up the skull I stand behind her and whisper, “Old Yorick was just reminding us all of our fates.” She chuffs through her nose, but also winces, like she felt a pinprick to her breast. She is petrified of death.

Joking aside, it is quite tense when she is planning a play, and/or creating a mis-en-scene. Like every lord, every guru, every parent, she uses her quest for perfection to camouflage her compulsion to dominate and belittle. She demands that we tolerate her rule. Almost every religious holiday, including the High Holy Days and Passover, is equal opportunity to put on a show. Easter, for example. Once, one of MyLord’s sprongs plucked a purple egg from the armpit of an apple tree, split it open, and found nothing inside: no gold coin. We all looked at each other. The horror of the empty hollow reflected on our faces. Sweetie, MyLord said to Latch, This isn’t right. She knows what I know: causality comes from our experience in the world. To look is to interact.

Trying not to creak the planks, I walk to the window from which old Yorick hangs. The window frames a patch of city that is almost still. No cabs, no pedestrians yet, only The Lamb’s Waterer wetting the night’s grime from the sidewalk and soaking its clutter of potted plants. Beyond the frame, a garbage truck screeches, glass bottles tumble in, crash, shatter, a metal shutter rolls up. The acoustics are amplified by the room’s emptiness.

My phone buzzes. I look into the blue light.


serious buyers today—4pm—make sure house is cleaned properly and looks good.

This is the moment I know what must be done: unearth the lease. And the unearthing of the lease will incite chaos, and shortly after the chaos excommunication. So, communication has to remain open as long as possible. So I text back:

Give me an egg, nuncle, and I’ll give thee two crowns 

No, I don’t really text that to Mylord. Instead I text (a lie):
                    

no worries, the house already looks great, no problem.

The first part of the text—no worries—is our little inside joke. Our joke is at Will’s expense, for she and I have spent some time ridiculing Will for habitually using the phrase no worries. 

I am tempted to nudge Will and alert him to the latest. Once the lease—as an option—is brought forth, he will take the reins. But I don’t want him taking them just yet. I must move through the gauntlet of this morning’s session and then assess the situation.

The babe stirs. I place a heavy hand on his back until he settles back into sleep again (the problem with nursing babes for so many years is that they then can never sleep without being in direct contact with human warmth).

I wanted to live in this building more than I have wanted anything else in this aeon. Like the act of inhabiting the building is not the means to the end, but the end itself. It has a visceral communication with the city. The city’s potential sweeps in through all the windows on each of the three floors. The scale of it makes you feel like you are in the current of the city without having to actually step outside. There is something about it that distorts the dimensions of the outer world, allowing for a certain kind of intimacy with pedestrians, like you are on a proscenium stage and the city is your audience. And, yes, there has been violence between the spectacle and the spectator. But also tenderness and communion. 

One New Year’s Eve, for example, I leaned out from a second-floor window, topless, with the handle of a cast-iron frying pan tucked under my left breast (this was a trique I carried over from the old world, wherein I deliver to an unsuspecting person a pen or a pair of reading glasses completely concealed under my left breast. Were you looking for this? I say, as I lean in and slowly lift my breast, allowing the object to drop into their hands. Or, for more of a grand entrance, and fit for a larger crowd, I emerge from the kitchen with my apron and kirtle drawn to my waist, my chemise pulled to the side to expose my bare left breast which is holding a pot of Hissope soup). For the contemporary New Year’s version, I clonked a large wooden spoon on the cast iron pan to get the attention of passersby, and when they looked up I said, “Hoo there, goodman swayn! Wend thee in, lest hunger gnaw thy bones to gristle! Come taste o’ me broth! I’ve stew that bubbles like a whore’s laugh!” They could almost reach up and touch the pan held by my left breast, touch me, but, no, I was just out of reach. 

I have done my best work in this building.

The lease holds potential. And what is potential? Potential is empty space, and empty space is the belief in a future. And what is the future? A long unwinding. Mass increases. Disorder grows. Stars burn out. Black holes devour what’s left, and even they evaporate, leaving behind only faint radiation—the dimmest, thinnest glimmer of light that stretches, smooths, and spreads until all distinction nearly vanishes. But it doesn’t! The cold, scale-invariant radiation—the void—becomes the searing birth of a new cosmos.

The hard thing to grasp here is that the void is not an end, but a transformation. A conformal shift. A threshold. A veil. Quarks begin to play, entropy can run in reverse. Matter and antimatter mirror each other until…Poof! A new universe: unimaginably tiny, hot, and dense. And so another aeon “begins” just as the last one “ends,” splitting the arrow of time. It’s an and, and an and: the law of play. And this is where I step in. Well, step? Not exactly. More: Galliard my way in. My phone buzzed.                                 

coming?

Mylord is and will be forever in my ear:


You may think me a fool, harhar, but I have no message to deliver other than this: there is no singularity, no god, only lords and increasing entropy. Which brings me to John Wesley, founder of Methodism, who writes in a 1778 sermon: “Slovenliness is no part of religion... cleanliness is indeed next to godliness.” Wrong. The arrow of time doesn’t just move towards disorder—it insists on disorder. And disorder brings you as close to creation as order. Order is intimately connected to the past. The future is the condition of increasing mess. Which brings me back to Mylord. Mylord demands order. But things are moving towards chaos. If cleanliness is next to godliness then godliness is next to collapse. Mylord is in a battle with entropy, constantly holding the line against the advancing hordes of disorder, decay, and grime, and this requires a staff. I text back:
                           

on my way

*

It is 6:03am, and I am already late. I tiptoe out of the room and lightly jog down the stairs, still naked. The building has three floors, each with a stairwell landing, each landing with a window and a door, and each door leads to a 400 square foot triangle-shaped room. 

The stairwell is like a series of thresholds from the Planck epoch—compressed, tidy, humming with potential. If we remember to shut the landing doors, the students we buzz in will climb to the third floor completely unaware of the chaos sealed behind each one. After I buzz in a Private, I wait for her on the third-floor landing, listening for the sound of the front door closing, the rustling of her bags and overcoats, her footsteps ascending the first set of stairs. I listen for the pause as she stops at the second-floor landing to use the bathroom—the sweet relief of her delayed arrival, and during the delay I imagine her fainting, or dying, but there is no stopping the trajectory of her body in space, and soon the sound of her feet ascending the final staircase begins. 

(I have to remind you here that you can only work with someone’s body in seven-year increments at the most. The relationship inevitably sours. The person with the body must blame the body-worker for the failings of their own body. The body-worker also gets fed up with the body of the other. Fed up? No, we have always dreaded you. Don’t take it personally. It doesn’t matter who you are—if you have ever paid for a private session, you must know that you are dreaded, even loathed, and if you don’t understand this, then you are simply delusional, or worse, you simply don’t care that you are loathed. It’s no different, really, than whoring. We, the whores, put on a great act and you, the Janes, put on the great act of believing our act, but I’m sure you would agree that if a man truly believes his whore enjoys his cock, then he is an imbecile. Anyhow, I think we are on the same page: you know your private yoga teacher dreads every moment leading up to the session, and during every moment of the session your private teacher can’t wait for its end because you—with your needs, whines, complaints, aches, pains, desire for gains—you, with your folded check written out for a set of ten classes at 10% off, which is not handed over until the bitter end—or worse yet, not even written out until you are gently reminded—you are a blood-sucker draining the very life force from this woman, your private yoga teacher, your whore. The only exchange truly worth the torture of a private yoga session would be a townhouse in the West Village.)

Inevitably the Private opens the door to my bedroom/yoga studio, where I’ve been waiting, pretending to be the fixed point in her morning, measured, prepared, and entertaining, ready to fill the empty egg with one gold coin and a fat purple jelly bean and hide it in the armpit of an apple tree. Wealthy bodies want to pay to have their limbs manipulated and their souls wrestled free while they sleep. In essence, I was what you would now call a Personal Trainer, but with the promise that the fruit of my labor was seeded with spiritual advancement. Teaching only Privates was financially precarious, because I was (and am) subject to the wealthy body’s folly. And by god’s bones, folly it is full of.

I now stop at the second-floor landing to pee, note the dark orange color of my urine, a symptom of my eternal dehydration, then quietly open the door to Lui’s bedroom where we keep the majority of our personal belongings. Our clothes are meant to hang from a couple of bockety racks, but they mostly end up in piles on the floor. 

I frantically rummage through a pile, and finally find a pair of fluorescent yellow draw-string pants with hot pink stripes and a dirty white sweatshirt. I throw this outfit on and jog down to the ground floor.

At the bottom of the stairwell to my right, the living room/kitchen door is ajar—empty wine bottles, dirty Moroccan glasses, a stained kitchen rag draped over the fireplace screen, muddy socks on the rug next to a purple wig tangled with dry leaves, counter and sink stacked with dirty dishes, and on the dining room table is a two-foot-long pink plastic tub with white plastic bubbles in which a naked American Girl Doll is taking a bath.

Behind me and to my left are the stairs down to the basement. The basement is meant to be Will’s therapy suite, but Mylord insists it is the groundskeeper’s storehouse. The lease is down there, or at least we hope it is down there, buried in a filing cabinet. 

(Funny thing about the lease: years after we had been living in the townhouse, lease-less, Mylord’s reeve wrote to us with an accusatory tone that seemed to imply Mylord feared we would commit dereliction and defect, and so he insisted that a lease must immediately be signed, as though we had intentionally shirked this duty in years previous. It was an odd attitude, for it would appear that signing a five-year lease was to our benefit, so we obeyed, of course, and we walked the narrow and low-ceilinged halls of shame in the Studio building next door, where we were sat at a desk and handed the contract and a pen.) 

Directly in front of me is the front door, flanked by sidelight windows. I put my hand on the knob, take a breath, open it, and step out to our stoop, braless and barefoot. 

It’s a perfect fall day— crisp air with a nip and a bright blue sky with wispy clouds. A mere two stoop-steps to the public sidewalk. This easy access, and the fact that Mylord’s entry gate is directly next to our door, entices me to treat the sidewalk—much to Mylord’s dismay—as an extension of our living room. 

From across the street, The Lamb’s Waterer nods to me as he continues to hose down the cement. I smile and perform a little Hunchback-of-Notre Dame-shuffle to Mylord’s wrought-iron gate, where I use my single key to enter.

I have crossed this 20x20 rectangle patch of astro turf—pierced in its center by a single honeylocust—two thousand and eighty times, and yet each time there is a mystery as to how I will be received at the end of the approach. This morning, though, I feel in my bones that this could very well be my final procession. 

I leap up the four slate stairs to the slate patio and press a four-digit code to get into the kitchen. 

Inside, everything is a significantly more pristine and ordered version of our place—smoother and unscuffed white plaster walls, blacker-black trim, greaseless subway tiles, and shinier stainless steel. 

Did I mention to you that I thrive in chaos? I’m seduced by order, yes, but ultimately disturbed by its intoxicating nature. I find an overly ordered house a little dangerous.

In the dim early morning light by the stove, Nette tends to her boiling eggs. Always three eggs—one for each girl—in a small copper saucepan with not quite enough water to cover the white shells. We say our good-mornings perfunctorily. We go way back, Nette and I, back to the subterranean tunnel days (more on that later). She gives no indication that anything is different. 

But would she ever? No, I could be heading to the scaffold and Nette would continue to stare down at the half-submerged eggs. Nette: the world’s most expensive egg-boiler. Mylord keeps her on salary due to loyalty, though I suppose Nette’s duties can’t be disregarded—the girls need breakfast, and the girls need their lunches packed, and the girls also need their cashmere cardigans buttoned and unbuttoned. The girls, the girls, the girls. The girls consume matter like three black holes. I should have reduced, Mylord has admitted to me in confidence. Give me an egg, nuncle, and I’ll give thee two crowns.

The automatic coffee pot sizzles. It is three-quarters full. The half-and-half is open, a wet sugar spoon on the counter. 

“Yup, she up,” Nette says. Stater-of-the-Obvious, Nette is. 

Had the coffee pot been totally full, and a clean white mug next to it, I would know Mylord was not up; in that case she might be on her way down to the pot—that scenario is nice because we’d chat a bit while pouring and concocting our coffee, which would reduce the amount of time I would have to spend in her chamber upstairs; or, a full pot would mean she was still sleeping. Still sleeping always left me with a difficult choice: skulk up the blood-colored runner and gently call her name, or sneak out and climb back into my own bed, where I would text: didn’t want to wake you. In the latter case, I’d have the upper hand for a day or so until soon enough I would accidentally over-sleep and have to scramble to regain her affection. Then there were the times when she had altogether forgotten to tell me she was away on location. And there was no greater joy than to unexpectedly discover she was not on the premises. It reminded me of coming home from school and finding our little hovel of an apartment emptied of Jayne.  

I take a white mug from the open shelf stacked with thirty identical white mugs and fill it with the black sludge. Mylord’s coffee resists dilution, but I pour in enough glugs of half-and-half to make it acquiesce and turn a sickly gray. Resisting shit cramps during sessions with Mylord is an underappreciated skill I have developed. 

“Ok,” I say to Nette. “I’m heading up.”

Through the galley kitchen I step into the only room on the ground floor—a grand room—long and narrow with a very high ceiling and a floor of wide oak planks. Here, at the kitchen end of the room, is a twenty-foot-long wood table from Japan that all the guests fuss over. Along the North wall are floor-to-ceiling bookshelves made from utilitarian chic compressed plywood. At the opposite end of the grand room is the front door, and also the stairs that lead to Mylord’s linen closet and her bedchamber (the girls' quarters are on the third floor).

Every surface in the grand room is bare and wiped clean save for the round coffee table in front of the fireplace where a few art books as large as tombstones are displayed and regularly swapped out. An oatmeal-colored cashmere throw, folded with precision, hangs over the back of a flax-colored linen couch, and that couch faces its own twin. The order makes me light-headed. It is here at these couches that we have spent many tense Christmas Eves, during which Mylord behaves as though trimming the fifteen-foot tree requires the same amount of focus and precision as a siege engineer. Each of the girls, and also our Lui, are allowed to hang one ornament at a time by climbing a step ladder, excruciatingly slow, while the three of us adults—myself, Will, and Mylord—watch from the twin couches. While Mylord watches, each and every move the children make seems to be duplicated inside her own body, forcing her to make strange little interrupted gestures, while also anticipating any wrong move, any action that might infringe upon the pleasures of Little Ellen.  

Inevitably, there is an argument between her girls over the handling and placement of a particular bauble, because Little Ellen is always given first choice, and often the twins are reduced to tears after being chastised for being clumsy and greedy, especially Poor Hannah—the thick-lipped, drooling twin of Poor Greta—and the one whom Mylord wishes had been scraped and plucked from her womb. And Lui? She is and always was herself: a charming and gifted child who understands when absolute compliance is demanded from her.

Now, on my way to the stairs, I pass the credenza on top of which sits Eleanor’s tome. In essence, this credenza holds everything that has destroyed Mylord’s standing. The tome swelled so much that it has become the tomb.

The tomb holds the children’s schedules—laminated pages filled with information about their Upper East Side school pick-up and drop-off times, music lessons (piano and violin), Lacrosse, upcoming playdates, synagogue activities, doctor and dentist appointments. On and around the credenza are the latest purchases: a dozen children’s cashmere cardigans, beige, neatly folded next to two open boxes filled with new black patent leather Mary Janes in various sizes, and a few new pairs of huge—really humongous—black velvet opera slippers. Mylord loves her opera slippers. She has her very own Cordwainer to fashion them big enough for her unusually large feet. 

I arrive at the bottom of the stairs and place one of my own very dainty bare feet (for my height my feet are unusually small) on the runner of the first step, and I look up to the ribbony waves of the blood-red sea…