Mimi Read Online Free Page B

little table and chair in there for eating sandwiches in a hurry. My kitchen’s equipped with every gadget known to man, gifts from grateful patients and patient girlfriends, or worry-warts like Bee (who sprang a juicer on me some years back when she noticed the only Vitamin C I was getting was from the celery in my Bloody Marys). I’ve got technology up the wazoo in there: a milk-frother from a cappuccino-lover who’d hurriedly assumed, on the basis of a few nights together, that we’d be sharing breakfast more often than we ever did. A lemon-zester, from a patient who claimed it was symbolic of her new zest in life since the rejuvenation job I’d done on her. An egg-boiler (for one egg at a time), a panic-buy of my own when I realized I’d reached maturity without knowing how to boil an egg (but had I reached maturity? And how would eggs help me if I had?). And an olive-pitter I mistakenly thought necessary for making martinis. A bread-maker, that had continued kneading its dough long after the girl who gave it to me walked out for good. An electric nutmeg-grater that must have cost more than a lifetime’s supply of nutmegs (this, from a woman much taken with my Eggnog and our Eggnog snog out on Gertrude’s porch one Christmas). And its rival, Gertrude’s five-hundred-buck coffee machine that took up half my counter space and looked like it would be of more use printing revolutionary pamphlets. I also had a big fancy stove with six burners and an inbuilt griddle I never used, microwave, fridge, automatic ice-producing freezer full of gin, vodka, and an ancient carton of sherbet (which somehow always got forgotten at the sight of the gin), dishwasher, prehensile-mangling blender, my mother’s long-retired Revere Ware pots, and the weighty tortilla pan I purchased at a medical conference in Bilbao, under the influence of an attractive anesthesiologist and too much Rioja. All the conveniences of modern life were there! ( And I’d even read the manuals.) And crackers—a guy can’t have too many crackers.
    But I went in the kitchen on New Year’s Eve and thought, how the hell do I just heat something up in here? And my appliances stared back at me, seething with resentment and hope. use me! choose me! abuse me! take me! shake me! bake me! at least plug me in, you dope! It was scary in there! I cautiously backed out and, with the assistance of an old cane (bought long ago in a moment of self-deception, for the purpose of hill-walking), hauled ass down to the diner on the corner and got me a nice big bowl of matzo ball soup. You can survive a New York winter as long as you know where to go for soup.
    Revelers were trying to revel outside in the snow. I watched them rush past the windows, and felt another pang of New Year’s exasperation about my lovelessness: no kiss at midnight for me. No Mimì either. But it was a fairly abstract concern, since Gertrude had ruined me for other women. Love now seemed ridiculous and Wagnerian to me, like the Bugs Bunny cartoon when he dresses up as Brunhilda and Elmer Fudd falls instantly in love, bellowing, “Bwoonhiwlda, you’re so wuvvawy!” and Bugs sings, “Yes, I know it. I can’t help it!”—Wagner and all of human sentiment, mocked in one cartoon. Wagner deserved it. no chair, not even a box at the Met, equips you for such interminable spectatorship.
    Fortified by soup, I inched my way through the snowy wastes. For fear of being knocked over by the movers and shakers, I turned down a dark alley, feeling like an Antarctic explorer who’d had to leave his sled team behind to eat each other. “I may be some time.” The snow was a foot deep in places; I tackled each glacier as it arose. It was peaceful in the alley, an ideal spot for the unloved. Heaps of trash and tinsel peeked out from under snowbanks, and I came upon a ten-foot-high Styrofoam Santa who stood with his face against a brick