Crisis 22

Macaron, Not Macron

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Curtus was a tax lawyer at Firm, Button, & Tucker, where he earned about half a million dollars a year. In three years he planned to have paid off the mortgage on his Central Park West penthouse. He monitored these payments on a chart: the mortgage numbers fell in a straight line, balanced by the upward line of his equity. It was the law of the universe: when one thing falls, another rises.

His penthouse was spotless. It had everything. Through his enormous crystal-clear windows he looked across the park, above the cars and the trees and the petty concerns of the ants below. It was late afternoon and the sun was just hitting the tops of the trees. He was particularly proud of his study, which had a leather-topped mahogany writing table and a Natuzzi Cocò red leather armchair. The table was accompanied on either side by two Louis XVI mahogany chairs. On the shelves were 371 leather-bound volumes culled from the finest antiquaries in London, Paris, and the reputable cities of the Atlantic Seaboard. He loved the way the books looked, with their stiff spines and golden letters.

A silk sash had been carelessly strewn over yesterday’s New York Times, which had hitherto laid neatly on the plush bottom of one of his Louis XVI mahogany chairs. The paper mentioned something about Ukraine and the war having spread, like weeds across a perfect green lawn, with a ring of birch trees in the middle and the sent of lilacs in the air. Curtus remembered yesterday afternoon as if it were now: Phyllis was in her silk pink dressing gown, sitting primly on the chair while he worked away on his charts. All of a sudden she shivered and said, “Ouf!,” then stood up without drawing the sash. She put the paper on the plush bottom of the chair with a grimace and then shrugged her shoulders. This shrug had the magical side-effect of allowing the gown to drift haphazardly from her shoulders and down along her perfect white body. All the while she held on to one end of the sash, and let it slide through the hole till the gown was safely on the carpet. She then tossed the sash over the paper and walked to the window, stark naked.

Now there was only the gown crumpled on the floor, the Louis XVI chair, and the sash which had been tossed with such calculated nonchalance across the paper. The disorderly display reminded Curtus of the poem Phyllis had taped onto his bathroom mirror several weeks ago. She’d typed it onto the faint image of a painting by Henri Gervex:

If the disorderly display didn’t remind Curtus of this poem, he would have been displeased. For Curtus was keen to have his visitors see the prestigious New York Times neatly placed on the elegant chair, as if about to be read. Although why anyone would willingly read such a long and complicated paper was hard to imagine.

Beneath the sash, Curtus saw a headline in the top right corner: “Putin and Xi Combine Forces: Gerasimov Vows to Nuke New York City.” The crazy stories they made up! Even if it were true, Curtus had his own little world to worry about. His favourite quote was from the novella Candide, by the famous French writer Voltaire: Il faut cultiver notre jardin. He translated this, We must cultivate our gardens. He explained that this meant we should look after ourselves first, and let other people worry about other people’s gardens.

Beside the chair was a 6-foot, 2-inch ebony statue of David, by Michelangelo. Curtus insisted it was the real thing: “I mean, just look at it!” When people objected and said it was a miniature, and that they had been to this or that museum in Italy and had seen for themsel— Curtus cut them off: “It’s my Black David, and its proportions are what they ought to be.” When they objected, saying that the enormous black wood was more a thing to play with than to wonder at, Curtus winced and ushered them back to the living room. Later, he thought to himself, It’s fine if people come and go, talking of Michelangelo, but at least they should be cultured enough to know that Art is what one makes of it. If I want to make it smaller or bigger, so that it can be loved like no other art, who are they to judge? Who do they think they are, the Pope? If others want to reduce Art to copies, that’s their business.

Cultus had asked the antiques dealer to inscribe around the torso of his David a longer quotation, also from Candide and also in gold script: Les malheurs particuliers font le bien général; de sorte que plus il y a de malheurs particuliers, et plus tout est bien. The quote was followed by his translation in English, so that the gold script wrapped twice around the torso, and dipped gently toward the smooth-shaven mound: Particular misfortunes make the general good, so that the more particular misfortune there is the more all is good. Curtus considered this the pinnacle of Philosophy. From Montaigne to Camus, nothing mattered but the senses, what we could see, fondle, and suck. No doubt this was the reason why the French were universally admired.

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The photo on the cover of The New York Times was distasteful — garish trenches on the Hudson, shoppers scrambling for toilet paper — so he turned to the bedroom, which was a masterpiece of Edwardian design. It was inspired by the cork wall and blue satin curtains of Proust, by sad memories of Oscar, and by what he imagined he might have found in Lord Byron's bedchamber, deep in the Albany. 

Luxuriance, it was a gift from the Greeks. It was the greatest gift anyone could give, as Marcel well knew. The cork walls sealed in that luxury, protecting it from the obscene revelry and the common ear. It kept his senses alive to the unheard melodies and the soft pipes, to the silent Attic graces that could still tease him out of thought. These unheard melodies urged him to contemplate the one Truth that he believed above all else: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

The bedroom window had the same enormous view over the park — red ants, white ants, the usual scrabble — yet the room was more intimate than the living room. The sun was creeping downward toward the grubby tenements of Yorkville and Astoria, and it gave the room a warm, pale pink glow.

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The next morning it was almost noon and yet Curtis still lay in bed. For the last half hour or so, he’d been thinking about charts and billable hours. He heard celebrations outside, which seemed odd for this time in the morning, Yet the fireworks and bright lights only confirmed that people who get up before 9 AM are capable of anything.

His right arm lay loosely down his back side, his wrist held firmly in place by the elastic of his pyjama bottom. He imagined himself in the office, going over the projected billable hours of the coming month. He imagined putting his hand around one of the small breasts of his secretary, Phyllis, with her short dark hair and wandering eyes. His middle finger tightened, then relaxed, still firmly held in place by the tight ring of his thoughts, which were focused on the golden ring which held the dark strands of Phyllis' ponytail in place.

Curtus got up from his bed and intended to wander to the kitchen, but he stood staring at the bed. All he could think about was smooth marble and the cornucopia of Rome, the light rust of time on the buildings of Messina, and the life-like statues of the Mezzogiorno.

He remembered a relief in the Vatican Museum, of a boy riding a seahorse. How he would have liked to be that boy, with Neptune doing his worst!

Curtus had heard others talk about philosophy and democracy. And Christianity. They said that it all started somewhere in the Middle East, and then funnelled through Greece to the Western world. He was sure that these things were true. But to him, all that mattered was Art. Luxe, calme, et volupté, Baudelaire got that right. Beauty with a capital B, just as Keats would have had it, had he only lived past those horrible days on the Spanish steps. Just as Byron did have it, with his fondness for Countess Guiccioli and the liberation of Greek boys.

Curtus also recalled walking into a room at the Louvre, in which he saw a sleeping marble nude.

His senses were stirred as he walked around it, although he didn’t normally pay much attention to statues of women lying on couches. Something about the room excited him, but he didn’t know what.

And then everything became clear to him. Trust the Greeks and Romans, he thought.

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Quietly, Curtus made his way to the kitchen. He prepared Earl Grey tea in a blue and gold samovar.

He placed two blue and gold cups, along with four cherry macarons, onto a light blue, late 19th-century Sèvres porcelain plate. He went back into the bedroom and set the plate on one of the mahogany stands beside the queen-size bed, with its white cotton Cairo sheets and its eiderdown pillows wrapped in blue satin. The sheets were open, like an invitation at three in the morning. The macarons were aux cerises, flown in yesterday from Paris.

Curtus put one of the macarons to his lips, letting his tongue slide in exploration between the rounded light pink edges. He thought of billable hours and the chart he would make to compare this and last year's earnings. He put the macaron in his mouth, allowing his tongue to linger between the stiff almond flanks.

He read once that the macaron was a historical, magical sort of pastry. He read that it was connected to art and politics and astronomy and all sorts of things one might read in the Books section of the New York Times. Yet even if the macaron could magically parade the armies of Alexander in front of his eyes, or could mirror all the stars in the universe, he’d still forego it for the experience, for how the tea melted the crust and how the crust became one with the filling. The tea would never make him remember anything past billable hours and Phyllis and the way her hair curled around her ears.

He would show the billable hours chart to Phyllis, and watch as she followed the black lines, which mirrored the white and black stripes of her pants. These lines led upward from her polished black leather shoes to the bulge between her thighs. Her pony-tail was jet-black, tied into a tight thick bundle by a golden ring. Two strands of slightly-oiled hair fell in tight swirls down her cheeks. These swirled in different formations, tempting her diamond ear-rings into a game of hide and seek. Her black suspenders caressed her white cotton shirt, smartly pressed and turned up ever so slightly at the collar.

The suspenders curved in unison over the swelling of her breasts, which were growing bigger every month. At first they were like wet nipples in the cold air, then like the breasts of twelve year-old girls who can’t decide whether or not to wear a bra. Now they were the size of apples, large enough that she could confidently breath in deep and swell out her chest without any sort of embarrassment or confusion. He thought of the Garden of Eden, and of how he’d pluck them from the tree.

Phyllis was amused by his obsession with the correctness of accounting, charts, and the flexibility of numbers. She called him Quintus Accountus Curtius, even Kirk Donker Courteous. It made him mad with desire.

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Curtus stuffed a second macaron in his mouth and imagined himself again in the office behind Phyllis, the plaid wool of his Zanella trousers up flush against the full curves of her ass. She was bent over, glued to the numbers, pretending to be interested. He slid his hands up and down the sides of her waist as together they checked the columns for accuracy. They calculated the billable hours for each department as he extracted the edge of her blouse from the elastic belt of her pants.

His greedy fingers drifted lightly, restrained and impetuous, up her torso and across the soft white triangles that dangled like forbidden fruit from her chest. Then he moved his fingers slowly downward, under the elastic belt, and into the lace panties that he knew would be pink, the colour of cherry macarons.

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He took a sip of Earl Grey, letting it caress the bits of macaron that lingered on his tongue. There wasn’t a sound in the apartment. This morning’s New York Times, with its alarmist headline “Xi Announces Third Chinese Reich: Australia and India Fall,” was safely in the mailbox. He was yet to place it strategically on the Louis XVI chair, the chair Phyllis had sat on before she took off her gown and pretended that she wasn’t being watched as she walked over to the window.

Phyllis felt completely free to show herself to the world, for their apartment was on the top floor. They looked down on a world which didn’t have the good fortune to be able to look up at them. The rest of the apartment was also completely sealed off from the neighbourhood. The penthouse had its own elevator. Even the emergency stairs between floors were inaccessible, except to those who had the right Schlage encoded fob. As Curtus looked across the bed, all he saw were lines of billable goats and an asterisk in the middle of the final column.

If the ratio of billed to billable hours increased slightly from one quarter to the next, could it still be depicted in an elegant line? Or would the curve suggest a soupçon of a doubt to the perspicacious shareholder? With the second macaron au cerise melting in his mouth, and sliding now like a pulsing syrup down his throat, Curtus shifted on the Cairo sheets. Phyllis would know. Shifting ever closer, so that his cock rode between the curves of her rounded buttocks, back and forth, bareback, Curtus inserted himself gently but firmly inside her. 

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Three seconds after Curtus inserted his penis into the plush bottom of Phyllis, the sky exploded. The bombs blew apart several of the buildings around him. He heard fizzling and grilling sounds even in the bowels of his own building, which had hitherto been as solid as Central Park West itself.

Apparently Donald Rumsfeld was right: there are things that you know, things that you don’t know, and things that you don’t know that you don’t know. Curtus felt that within the vast hidden world of unknowns was a faraway galaxy dedicated to the idea that the world of practical things only existed to ensure the survival of Beauty and Pleasure. The leaders of this galaxy had enacted privacy laws to make sure that everyone had the freedom to do exactly what they wanted to please themselves in the privacy of their own space and in the freedom of their own time.

Curtus looked at the cork walls and the crumbs of cherry macaron on the pink, late 19th-century Sèvres porcelain plate. He looked at the leather chairs and the Louis XIV table stands. He saw Phyllis, now upright in their bed, her short black hair curling like question marks outward from her small, exquisite ears. Outside the window, which was bordered by Antwerp lace in heart-shaped patterns of mirth and debauchery, they saw a few plumes of soft black smoke and cluster bombs quietly exterminating stragglers.

Together they got down from the bed and walked to the window. They saw a Hassidic Jew screaming down the street. Over to the far right he thought he saw the Lenin memorial go up in flames. Curtus imagined it was John, the beetle, not the Russian one.

They remembered that there were still several macarons in the fridge and that they hadn’t yet gotten to the bottom of that jeroboam of Pol Roget. Turning toward Phyllis and fitting his naked white body into her naked white body, Curtus remembered Voltaire’s famous words: We live in the best of all possible worlds.

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Next: ⏳ AD / BC

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