July 26, 2003 Brookline
Nice eight A.M. chainsaw wakeup call. The neighbors chose such an hour on Saturday to remove an old stump. Met our downstairs neighbor I., who was on her way to read them their rights. The poor workers played dumb saying, with very good accents, that they didn't speak English. Stopped sneering a little when I suggested we continue in Spanish and soured further when I suggested we call the police and discuss the matter. They packed up their goddamn chainsaw and left. My neighbor I. was certainly more severe than I was, swearing to go inside and draft a nasty letter to the neighbors. Well, strength in numbers. I could have really used the sleep. I didn't mean to be a prick; I just was. Buen trabajo, amigos.

July 27, 2003 Brookline
Excellent visit with B. and her boyfriend B2, she of Scottish extraction and he a Scot himself. Lunch at the Fish Place in spite of C.'s sickness. She soldiered through remembrances of St. Louis as did B.'s boyfriend. Charming fellow and happy to have met him. They seem very good together. Odd to hear all these colleagues' names again after what is getting on to be years. Am slightly jealous of B. finishing her dissertation. Aside from intense personal pain in St. Louis and my thorough-going disgust for the members of the Nameless Department, I nevertheless wonder why I didn't go that way, why I didn't find a way, there or elsewhere. Though I imagine that thinking this way has more to do with a fascination for imagining possible fates than with any real nostalgia for the road not taken. Right there in the restaurant my grandmother took herself to every Sunday after my grandfather died.

July 28, 2003 Brookline
Can already feel the end of these pages coming a few months hence and am anxious to be able to return to my private ones. So much goes unrecorded as you, these few readers that I have, must necessarily be censored for. Some of you know why and some of you wonder. How much does one reveal? The question posed by the so-called information age. I write these pages very quickly and so they are little invaded by any sense of form. Am thinking about what surface to present, trying to remember who is reading and not necessarily for whom I am writing. Sorry condition, for I've always written for people I've never met. This sentiment too much cited in digital and paper pages anyway. Every word you read is true. Everything is less and more than it seems. All our secrets are the same. It would be hard to imagine the world differently.

July 29, 2003 Boston (Tarrytown, New York)

Mary Provost did not look her best
The day the cops busted in to her lonely nest
In the cheap hotel up
on Hollywood West July 29

Nine years since I left New York. It may have been the grandest of mistakes. Have since lived in St. Louis, Chicago, Nantes, New York again, Nantes again. Remember the exact date less because of the memories of a lovely going away party under a grape arbor in Tarrytown but because the WFMU deejay, Dave the Spazz, kept playing the old Nick Lowe song about the silent film star who dies alone and is eaten by her poodle.

For hungry eyes that couid not speak
Said even little doggies have got to eat

The other reasons why I remember this date merit hours of writing that one day I will do. Not July 29, 2003. It would take so much longer than your life to write it; it would be so much less for the writing. For nine years, my head returns to Tarrytown on this date.

July 30, 2003 Brookline
Bought ten dollars worth of tokens from the man in the booth at Copley Station. Guy had all his tokens arranged in a big diamond, repeated my request very precisely ("Lemme have ten rides, please.") and left a perfectly-arranged stack in the little depression at the bottom of the window. I had to be very careful in pulling them out of the tray. "Nice pickup" said the token man. A New York-like moment that happens all too infrequently in Boston. I grant Copley Token Man honorary citizenship in my private Republic.

July 31, 2003 Boston
Met C. at school and had a late Chinese lunch on Newbury Street. She was right there in the lobby this time, hidden behind a plant, drawing the lobby architecture as quickly as she could. Such a good sign to see her draw. She is usually rather tense about teaching obligations no matter how far in the future they may be. She has a good hand that trusts her eye.

August 1, 2003 Brookline
Certainly this would have been better if I had got up yet again from bed, for I lay there composing this entry with the usual wondrous (false) facility for language one has when half asleep. As it is, I'll have to settle for typing with my eyes closed. I was along but with my entire family on a woody island that was either Italy or, more likely, the north end of Noirmoutier. As usual, I looked for some solitude and spent a few pleasant hours walking through leaves, reading the work of a poet who had written about the land I was walking through. Perhaps it was her estate. The trees and plants had an arranged, owned look about them. A paragraph about death lead me down a staircase at the middle of what was no certainly a garden. At the bottom was a concrete tub, much like the one on the south end of the Kimball Museum in Fort Worth. There was iron lawn furniture arranged there.

As I was walking up, my sister came to harass me about something I hadn't done, some oversight that she found unforgivable. I'm not sure. She egged and provoked until she had the fight she wanted and I followed her back to a kind of A-frame building on the edge of the estate where all my relatives, including Aunt B. (!) were gathered. There she proceeded to insult me before everyone. It was clear I was seen as the bad guy. My father did come out and I tried to explain to him that I had only come to make my excuses for leaving. My sister physically interposed herself, flush with a new anger, and would not let him speak. I walked back to the garden where I had been earlier and was walking down the hill when she was there again, in the trees like a crow, cawing some inexplicable displeasure down on my head. The only thing that seems invented upon rereading this passage is that my family has never been to Noirmoutier.

I will leave it to you to judge whether this dream contains any guilt. I think, rather, it has more to do with my fear of my sister's monstrous and unshakable self-regard. She was, every time I've seen her since that awful afternoon in Paris a year ago, flush with the confidences of her arrogance. Like nearly every rich person I have ever known she confuses the circumstance of her station to be earned, rather than chanced upon. Luck, let me tell you, doesn't exist in the rich man's world: money is what happens when divine merit meets a good rolodex. The only time my sister and I were "close" I realize now, was when I had similar, crippling levels of self-regard, something I've been trying to get shut of for a long time. There never was anything else between us save the support two arrogant people give one another, a kind of dare, the collusion of snobs.

I woke finding C. had taken herself to the other room. I was worried that I had disturbed her and so waddled out in that loose-hipped way of walking one uses to get to the bathroom at four o'clock in the morning. I found her watching some horror about Africa on television. She said I had been snoring and that she had a stomach ache but agreed to come back to bed. On the way back I brushed the small table beside the door, causing a bell to fall, waking the whole house.