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The sauce is done. Then I went to visit a girlfriend of mine who was going to a Jesuit college in Syracuse. When I came home Bob met me at the airport, it was the first time I’d flown and I had fallen in love with someone and that was Ed. We went back to my house in Ridgewood, this was when I was trying to go to Barnard but it took me two hours to get there. Bob’s mother had given me a wedding shower because my grandfather had given me my mother’s diamond ring and she took that to mean we were engaged since she was worried anyway I’d get pregnant before we got married, though she was relieved that Bob wasn’t queer after all. I didn’t know anything about birth control. We had set a date for the wedding and arranged a reception but the place we were going to have it in burned down. Bob’s mother worked as a maker of wedding gowns. So that night in my house I told Bob to watch me sleep because I was afraid to sleep otherwise. In the middle of the night I sat up in bed, he said, and asked him a question. After that he always understood that I was no longer in love with him. I didn’t know what Ed wanted to do but a couple of days later he came to my house and said I want to live with you, meet me in two weeks. The night before I was supposed to leave I went out with Grace who a while before had been in such a bad car accident she was still walking with a cane. We went to a bar and I left with a minor league baseball player who had an MG, Grace left with somebody else and we met later at my house. I missed the taxi I had called to make the early plane but I caught a later one and when Grace woke up in my house all alone my grandfather mistook her for me even though she has red hair and he called her Bernie. When Grace left my neighbor Tex told her he’d seen the taxi and wondered what was going on, he’s the one who had said when my father died, “Who’s that?”

Mindwinter day (22nd December 1978)
New Directions Books 1982
p. 70
cuisine états-unis notation poésie américaine quotidien relations sauce