I Shudder Read online

  Of course, I don’t have to do it. I could take the day off. I could let the planet wallow in its customary Christmas stench. But I won’t do that, for one simple reason, for the reason which illustrates what should be the true spirit of what Jews prefer to call “the holidays.”

  I will fix Christmas, because I am, or I hope to become, a saint.

  On the night before Christmas, I had to of course consider my ensemble. Santa’s appearance is a cruel prank: red velvet on a fat man, with a wide, black patent leather belt to provide some laughable stab at a waistline? The beard and the boots? Over the centuries, Santa has begun to dress like an effeminate, drunken lumberjack, and without his watchful, presumably deeply embittered elves, he would most likely lurch out into a snowbank, fall asleep, and freeze to death, and his bloated, rigid bulk would be gnawed by his own reindeer, who would then develop crippling cholesterol problems.

  As I stood before the full-length mirror attached to the open door of my single narrow closet, I asked myself: how can I show the proper respect for Christmas Eve, combined with an appropriately severe elegance? I instantly donned my tuxedo, a garment which still appears sleek and fresh, although it has been passed down through over eighty generations of Vionnet men, and, of course, Great Aunt Vestra Vionnet, who wore the family tux to bewitch half the women of Bucharest. No, Vestra was not Europe’s first lesbian postmistress, but she was the first one to get it right.

  Pleased with my tuxedo-clad reflection, I added a small sprig of berry-ripe holly to my lapel. For a moment I hesitated: was the sprig too much? Was I suddenly one of those matronly big-box store cashiers who overdo their snowflaked holiday cardigans by adding a plastic, battery-powered brooch of a reindeer head, where, when a small string is pulled, the tiny bulb at the end of Rudolph’s nose lights up?

  No. The sprig was perfect, as it gave the offhand impression, “Merry Christmas, but not that much.”

  I left my apartment and went down to the street, knowing that any animal-drawn sleigh was out of the question. Yes, it might be pretty and pictorial, but please—the aroma. The droppings. The incessant, nightmarish jingling. No, instead I decided to test my powers, as a saint-in-the-making. I wondered if, just maybe, I had developed, through my newfound allegiance to goodness, a miraculous gift: the ability to summon a taxi, just by thinking about it, the way Tarzan could silently mind-meld with lions and zebras. I stood on the curb, shut my eyes, and concentrated. I saw yellow, only yellow, of the most stirring, hopeful, soul-warming tint, as if a blazing comet of love were racing toward me. I briefly lost consciousness, but as I opened my eyes, there it was! My jolly Christmas cab!

  The cab was being driven by a woman named, according to the barely legible license mounted on her cab’s filthy Plexiglas partition, Ludmila Darp. Ludmila had thick, jet black hair which, for the season, had been braided with lush plastic poinsettia blossoms, sparkling with clear glitter. Like all cabdrivers, Ludmila refused to speak to her passengers, choosing instead to mutter, in seeming gibberish, into her headpiece for our entire journey. I would ordinarily find such behavior ill-mannered and offensive, except for this little-known fact: when cabdrivers mutter in this nonstop, stream-of-consciousness fashion, they are never, as is commonly believed, speaking to their spouses, their adulterous attachments who await them in motels near the entrances to various tunnels, their dispatcher, or their abandoned, greedy relatives halfway around the world. The cabdrivers are, in fact, maintaining a direct gravitational link with an alien space station orbiting Jupiter, and if the cabdrivers were to stop muttering for even a millisecond, Earth would spin wildly off its axis and hurtle into the sun. This is only one of the many reasons why I revere cabdrivers: they keep our planet safe. And, by the way, those small, shiny gold plastic crowns which are mounted above the dashboards of many cabs do not contain air freshener; they are real crowns, hammered from priceless gold nuggets, which the cabdrivers wear after work, as the rulers of their subterranean city.

  Ludmila first brought me to an address in faraway Brooklyn, to a recently reclaimed factory building. I pressed a random buzzer, and, when a disembodied voice asked me who I was, I replied, “I’m from the New York Times, and we’re thinking of including your apartment in our next Home section on Eco-Style.” Before I even finished the sentence, the buzzer blasted eagerly and the door flew pantingly open, as if I were a returning war hero, or a spokesperson carrying an outsized lottery check.

  Once I reached the fifth floor, a heavy steel door was opened by a thirty-five-ish fellow wearing the tight black stovepipe jeans of someone who either had his own band or sometimes claimed to; the scuffed, chunky motorcycle boots of someone who either rode a Harley or had named his daughter Harley; and the untucked, artfully creased and faded shirt of someone who either knows this dude who makes these really cool shirts or who at least knows the hole-in-the-wall boutique which sells these really cool shirts, a boutique which was especially designed to look like an abandoned sawmill. This fellow also sprouted professionally sheared sideburns, a thatch of only mildly thinning, product-rumpled hair, and the tiniest shadow of a fuzzy patch beneath his lower lip, as if the fellow knew that such facial hair was so eight years ago but he still couldn’t let it go. It was a phantom soul patch, to match the empty, echoing three holes in his right earlobe.

  “I’m Ned,” the fellow said, holding out his hand, which was attached to a wrist draped with a vintage Rolex, a rawhide shoelace strung with a Zen brass disc, and a knotted strip of red twine, which signaled his interest in, if not the Kabbalah, then at least the celebrities who promoted the Kabbalah. “Come on in.”

  Ned ushered me into a long, many-windowed loft. Each element of the space’s industrial heritage had been lovingly and expensively restored, so that every unvarnished, scarred oak beam and fist-sized iron rivet had attained the status of a Hemingway first edition. The furniture, by contrast, was ultramodern, a gallery of Italian and Dutch design, with the tubular chrome-and-cowhide chaise poised in precise conversation with the reclaimed bamboo armchair, and the transparent, undulating Lucite coffee table. There were a few overlapping, heirloom-quality oriental rugs, some enormous, jug-shaped lamps dripping with long-hardened green and brown glazes, and an open kitchen where the brushed-steel, restaurant-grade appliances guarded the poured-concrete countertops, which were kept bare, as poured concrete is more costly and delicate than the finest French porcelain.

  “And this is Tash, for Natasha,” said Ned, turning to his wife, whose real name I knew instantly was Amy, because a recent Nobel Prize winner has proved conclusively that no one has ever actually been named Natasha, let alone Tash.

  “And you’re from the Times, on Christmas Eve,” said Tash, “that is so cool! It’s like an early Christmas present! Ned, get him some wine. Our friends Breen and Casey have their own vineyard up in Maine, at their summer place.”

  As I contemplated both the thought of a Maine wine, and the possible genders of people named Breen and Casey, I saw that Tash was aggressively thin, as if she’d taped an Audubon watercolor of a starving wren to her refrigerator, for inspiration. Her hair drifted in deliberate wisps of a mousey-blond shade found only in girls who were ceramics majors, because Bennington had been forced, after much parental outcry, to eliminate its major in advanced bulimia, or as it’s also known, dance. Tash’s wardrobe was, I’m just going to say it, layered: I counted an ivory, spaghetti-strap camisole beneath a patterned rayon forties cocktail dress, beneath a beaded, black cashmere sweater with three-quarter-length sleeves, beneath many strands of pewter chains, amber beads that weighed more than Tash, and hemp knotted with bits of beach glass, all set off by openwork, crocheted fingerless gloves and black cotton-and-spandex leggings which exposed a shinful of gleamingly waxed flesh, ending in spike-heeled, mucus-colored, smushed-velvet half-boots. Just looking at Tash was exhausting; merely getting dressed in the morning was probably enough to keep her so arachnid slim.

  “So how are you celebrating Christmas?” I asked Ned and
Tash, who had now settled in side by side on their deep pumpkin, goatskin couch. Together, they looked like a Calder mobile which had fallen from the ceiling and landed on the furniture in an angular heap.

  “I’ll tell you what we’d like to do,” said Ned, tilting his chin upward so that the light glinted off his thick black eyeglass frames, the frames which he’d ordered online from a site offering “Eyeglass Frames of the Great Midcentury Architectural Visionaries.” “We’d like to somehow create a completely authentic Christmas,” Ned continued, “an outsider Christmas.”

  “We want a Christmas,” said Tash, “so that if someone came up here and saw us, they wouldn’t go, ‘Oh, right, Christmas,’ they’d go, ‘Christmas. Yeah. Cool.’”

  “Especially for Jasper,” said Ned, as a four-year-old wandered in from some tucked-away bedroom-pod. Jasper had blond, dreadlocked hair and he was wearing pull-up potty-training pants, printed with characters from the Shrek movies, and a sleeveless black T-shirt with the logo and schedule of a 1968 Rolling Stones tour, a brand-new T-shirt which had been sanded to a vintage limpness by a factory worker in Nepal.

  “Jasper, honey,” said Tash, “come over here, and tell this nice man about Christmas.”

  “Mr. Christmas!” said Jasper, excitedly catching sight of me. I wasn’t surprised that Jasper recognized me, as I was obviously a friendly, mythical figure, like the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy or Tash’s first husband.

  “We don’t want to give Jas just some big, bogus, crap Christmas,” said Ned, as his son nestled between his parents’ bony hips.

  “Jas, do you like our tree?” asked Tash, pointing Jasper’s little hand toward a small blue spruce, still bundled with wire, and leaning against a nearby wall.

  “It’s really more of a piece,” said Ned, regarding this tree. “That’s why I leaned it. I don’t want it to say, hey, we went out and spent a fortune on some pile of Christmas shit. I wanted us to have something that’s sort of about Christmas, that makes a gesture toward Christmas but that’s more of a comment on Christmas.”

  “It’s like, that tree will be even cooler once it gets a little brown,” said Tash, “and maybe on the floor we’ll have one broken, clear glass ornament. Like the tree is weeping.”

  “Are you both artists?” I asked, and the couple became almost radioactive with gratitude.

  “We’re sort of life-artists,” said Ned. “I mean, I’m in a band, sort of neo-soul-bluegrass, but during the day I’m a tech consultant, for people who want to create websites about wholly sustainable furniture, like end tables made from fossilized South African tree stumps, or dining room tables molded from thousands of compressed Evian bottles.”

  I found this mix of recycling and invention to be admirable, because I knew it meant that Ned also had family money.

  “I’m working on a children’s book,” said Tash. “It’s about a group of little girls who all have eating disorders, which allow them to fly.”

  “Because they’re so thin?” I wondered. “So they just sort of waft upwards?”

  “Yes,” said Tash. “And of course they look great, but they fly to get the help they need. I’m calling it The Airy Fairies, and I’m still outlining and conceptualizing, but once I finish, I want the book to be printed on this amazing artisanal paper, crafted from oatmeal and gravel.”

  “Jasper,” I asked, “what would you like for Christmas?”

  “Jas?” said Ned, as the child looked from one parent to the next.

  “Gun!” said Jasper merrily. “Big gun!” And then he pointed his finger around the room, making the sound of a sniper barrage. “Powpowpowpowpow!!!”

  “Jesus Christ, Ned,” said Tash, “why do you keep letting him watch your DVDs?”

  “I was busy!” Ned protested. “I was working on a song, the one about my father’s lawyers, and I had the headphones on, and those DVDs keep Jasper quiet.”

  “I hate guns,” said Tash, “but Ned has this whole collection of Japanese gangster movies from the seventies. It’s disgusting.”

  “They’re incredible,” said Ned, “and they’ve been unbelievably influential on an entire generation of American filmmakers!”

  “Die! Die! Everybody die!” shouted Jasper happily, as he ran around the loft, hurling coffee-table books onto the floor.

  “This Christmas,” said Tash, trying to get things back on track, “we picked a theme, and we’re all going to give each other gifts related to world music.”

  “And so I’m getting this amazing 1952 steel guitar, from France,” said Ned, “and I got Tash this pair of diamond earrings that she wanted, from Cartier.”

  “Which I’m going to wear next week,” said Tash, quickly, “when we go to see this Tongolese punk band, at this new club in this storefront where they used to sell corrective shoes. We heard about it from our nanny.”

  “And what are you getting Jasper?” I whispered.

  “We’re getting him gamelan lessons,” Tash whispered back, “and a set of Balinese shadow puppets, so he can create his own ritualized dance/theater evenings.”

  “MERRY CHRISTMAS!” Jasper was now yelling. “KILL BASTARD! DIE DIE DIE!”

  2.

  As I returned to my cab, I thought to myself, being a parent is never easy, especially at the holidays. And I wondered what would happen tomorrow morning, when Ned and Tash and Jasper ripped off the hand-blocked rice-paper wrapping from their gifts, which had been lovingly tied with strips of cypress-infused raffia, to discover that all of their boxes, large and small, were now empty, and that their contents had somehow made their way into the trunk of my cab. At first I considered distributing these gifts to the less fortunate, but then I decided that if I gave the less fortunate Balinese shadow puppets, they’d only get irritated and groan, “Balinese shadow puppets? More Balinese shadow puppets?”

  I was feeling smudged with Brooklyn hipster sophistication, so I asked Ludmila to bring me to a home where a more traditional Christmas was being celebrated. But how, you may ask, did Ludmila then pilot her cab from New York to the snow-battered plains of Twineheart, Kansas, in what felt like an instant? Did the car actually leave the ground, silhouetted against the Christmas moon? Did partygoers from over twenty states look up and wave their arms, in a vain attempt to hail Ludmila, forcing me to lean out the window and point ostentatiously to the cab’s darkened rooftop light, while howling, “Occupied!” Can a taxi take flight, like a sleigh or a Learjet or an anorexic fairy?

  I will only say this: never underestimate the driving abilities of a Manhattan cabdriver, or the fact that Ludmila was from the backcountry outside Kiev, so she had no concept of red lights.

  From the darkness, I saw a set of squarish, invitingly yellow beacons, which, as they grew steadily larger and more distinct, I found were the windows of a generously scaled Kansas farmhouse. Ludmila pulled up beside a snowbanked picket fence and uttered her first understandable words of the evening: “Go insidt. Haf de fun. Meter ees steel runnink.”

  The contours of the farmhouse were framed in those richly hued Christmas lights, which I much prefer to the bland, year-round, noncommittal twinkle of those all-white strands. The snow was many feet deep, exposing only the top hat of a molded plastic snowman, the curving tips of several six-foot-tall striped Styrofoam candy canes, and the heads of at least three plastic Santas—the front yard of this farmhouse was like the grim aftermath of some Yuletide ocean-liner disaster, as survivors paddled around, miles out at sea. I stamped my way toward the front door, which had been covered with tinfoil and wide, red plastic ribbon, to resemble a wrapped package, and which was also outlined with evergreen garland and hung with a mighty hollyberry wreath, embedded with golden spheres and lit-from-within plastic angels with ruddy, airbrushed cheeks. I wondered if this wreath could be tossed out into the yard, as a life preserver to be grasped by the buried snowman and the surely frostbitten Santas. But still, this was clearly a house where Christmas was lived, and lived well.

  I pushed the doorbell, w
hich rang with a recorded chorus of chipmunk voices chirping “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” and then the door popped open to reveal a cheerfully stout middle-aged woman who had, I felt, been hosed down with Christmas. Her head of joyously abundant corkscrew curls had been severely parted down the center, with one side colored iodine red and the other AstroTurf green, as if Christmas were a brutal, take-no-prisoners arena sporting event. Her face was wonderfully puglike and flushed, as if she were not only happy to see me, but equally ecstatic to just be opening her front door.

  “Well, howdy-ho!” the woman said. “I don’t know who you are or why you’re here or why the hecky-hay you’re not wearing a winter coat, but come right on in!”

  As she led me inside, I smelled her home’s many holiday fragrances, from the musky pine of her twelve-foot tree, to the cloves that had been studded into the oranges which were stacked in pyramids on footed cake plates, to the baking gingerbread from the kitchen, to the thick candles which filled the mantel and gave off an additional, trademarked Baking Gingerbread scent. The woman had even perfumed herself with drops of peppermint oil, as the perfect top note to her oversize holiday sweatshirt, which had been extravagantly sequinned and hand-painted with a mural of not just Santa’s workshop, but also the North Pole train station, Mrs. Claus’s sewing nook, the elves’ cafeteria, and, running down onto her coordinated sweatpants, a reindeer red-light district, complete with a pimpish looking Blitzen in a wide-brimmed fedora.

  “Look, everybody—we got company!” said the woman, as she presented me to her expansive parlor, which was packed with hundreds of pieces of skirted colonial reproduction furniture, and even more high-spirited relatives. The room looked like a global summit of the happiest, friendliest, and most stain-resistant coven.