So this morning I got up late even though I lay in bed for a couple of hours wanting to get up, but not really being able to put the idea into practice, and made myself an enormous cup of coffee with some hot milk stirred into it and made a nice bread-and-butter tartine and lit the last of the Gauloises I stole from Lillian's husband (except for the lucky one, because I can never bring myself to smoke the lucky one and keep them all in their crumpled packets in a special drawer in my pink enamel vanity) and picked up the phone and called the IR. Her voice was heavy with sleep and drawly as usual and it took a few minutes before our conversation made any sense at all. Finally I asked her if she'd gone to the appointment at the clinic and she said yes, she had, and that her Norplant had expired months ago and that they had taken it out and that it hurt like a motherfucker.

So I said, well darling, at least that's taken care of, no harm done, and you'll know better next time, and let's hang out again soon.

And she said, yeah, that's taken care of, except for the fucking baby in her fucking uterus.

Oh, great, I thought. She doesn't know what she's going to do about it. I am officially there for her should she want advice. I'm not sure if others are as well, and I don't know whether she's going to tell its daddy anything about it. It's difficult because the IR is clearly an unfit mother, but she's twenty-seven and not a teen pregnancy or anything and will certainly never be any more fit than she is now. She didn't sound particularly surprised or upset. When I hung up, I had to remind myself that I am not pregnant and have no decisions to make about anything, except whether to have dinner or brunch or drinks or nothing with the MB's brother when he comes into town, and what color I ought to use for livingroom curtains (madder rose? tangerine?)

Nonetheless I accomplished nothing today but much coffee, the newspaper, a feeble walk to the park and back, and half a chapter of this dreadful novel about Sylvia Plath, by Kate Moses, which I will have to review in these pages when I have finished it. I suspect it of being dreadful but perhaps that is uncharitable of me.

Otherwise, artistically-speaking: saw a new band this weekend called Tallboys: four pale and mysteriously beautiful girls with slick dark hair or gingery bobs or loose goldy waves, playing what the boys might say was relatively kickass rock and roll. I was particularly fond of the shrill orgasms that the singer hiccupped between choruses of "Sex with a Stranger" (an experience for which one ought to "face the danger," & I guess I might agree) and of the still-lipped coolness of the guitarist. They played at this bar with scarlet walls and brocaded lampshades and Christmas lights of the same cherry color as the ones on the IR's bed, and I sat with my date (the guy from the Stevie Wonder concert last year -- we go to concerts and make out and part kind of tearfully because of our lack of a future together) in this funny alcove with a deep velvety chair in it, with curtains hanging nearly in front of it, and I sat on his knee and my Stoli Orange cosmopolitan hovered over my knee and tasted as sweet and difficult as Pez, just the way I like them.

The other thing I saw was a one-act by Jacques, who is a friend of Paul Redcloud's (the subject of my study, duh) and it was fucking incredible. I had expected it to be odd and quirky and absurd and peppered with non-sequiturs, which it was, but it was also very well-constructed and a little moving in a weird way and charming and good, and well-acted, and the author's brother was in it and was extremely charming with his constant bemused smiling and it was lovely. Hurrah, I say. Hurrah.