Intimate Love

(Note: From Friday)

Hi friends!

Up to my usual tricks, which is to say: matchmaking, having migraines, eating pudding.

The match: two young men of impeccable family, going to a movie. The pudding: butterscotch. The migraine: somewhat abated, but unpleasant enough to necessitate the cancellation of a drinks date and my attendance at a much-anticipated party. Slim – now working a late gig – gave me a very helpful head rub before he left. Besides the pudding, I have Letter From an Unknown Woman to console me for the loss of fun.

(Really out of stuff to tell my psychiatrist. Want to switch to this other guy everybody goes to who sounds wildly irresponsible and gives everybody as many amphetamines as they want, but only makes you come in twice a year.)


Before I fell ill, I had lunch with Roger at the Morgan Library’s restaurant, not far from his office. (I wore: a wrap dress, high boots, my trench coat and, because it was rainy, the extra-big brown fedora. The heel fell off one of the boots as soon as I got home, but it held out until then – a real trooper.) Roger was recovering from flu and a cruise on the Adriatic, so we just had half a bottle of wine. He recommended Duff Cooper’s biography of Talleyrand. (I ate: beet salad, chicken fricassee, coffee, half of miniature-cookie plate.)

“You’re lucky to have missed John Graham’s performance piece,” he told me confidentially about a college friend. “It was just a film of him, half-naked, breaking furniture for an hour.”

He’s going shooting with GK4, former fiancé, next weekend. GK4 and I were on the phone for a while today while he looked at Celebrity Baby Blog. We like Keri Russell’s little baby a lot. Slim likes this gruckimish baby with stick-up hair.


Speaking of Slim, he has a sprained ankle; he hurt it on the stairs of the G coming to meet me for our date Wednesday night. As a result, he’s gotten Toll House cookies, Superman III (the one with Richard Pryor) and as many Financial Times as his little heart desires. The other day, at the Salvation Army on Manhattan Avenue, he happens to have picked up American Letters of the 20th Century and since he’s been bed-ridden we’ve been doing lots of readings. I’ve taken the women (Ayn Rand, Lillian Hellman, An Ex-Flapper), while he is Mark Twain, Old Man, and Ronald Reagan.

Here is what Woodrow Wilson wrote to Edith Galt:

“I hate to argue the matter in my own interest, but…I am absolutely dependent on intimate love for right and free and most effective use of my powers and I know by experience what it costs my work to do without it.”

Obviously, am now referring to anything sexual exclusively as “intimate love.”

Also now in the lexicon: “boy-husband,” courtesy of the Ex-Flapper. (And if you assume there’s some context that makes it less odd, there isn’t.) I tried calling Slim my “boy-boyfriend,” but it doesn’t really have the same ring.

(I ate: cold Chinese food. Oh, and pudding.)

As ever –

SS