windows open. candles on. headphones on to shut out the noise from the kids and the fighting neighbors. it’s been even warmer and sunnier than yesterday, people walking around coat- and sleeveless. the moon’s up over the backyard.
for reasons that would take too long to explain elaine is moving into my office. earlier this week we’ve been redecorating it, that is, we got new furniture and brushed up the place. the great thing was : cologne has got a design school, and a friend of one of our linguistic professors is a famous designer from the states : carl farbman. and he is teaching at the design school for a semester. and the other day he came to visit our professor, and the two of them were standing in the corridor when elaine and i were carrying the bookshelves out of the office door. prof. g. and farbman saw us sweating and swearing, and we were a little surprised because we hadn’t really noticed them so the situation was a little awkward, but finally prof. g. introduced us. farbman was very polite and asked what we were working on. and when i mentioned cohen’s name, his face lit up:
“i love leonard cohen!” he said and so we talked a little about leonard’s latest cd and then suddenly he looked over my shoulder and into the office and he asked:
“what are you doing there, anyway? is this the kind of furniture the university provides you with?” and he was pointing at the bookshelves.
“eh, yes…” elaine said.
“really…!” he said “they’re neither functionally nor aesthetically pleasing. really, g. …” he said to prof g. “you know what, let me help you out with some of my designs!” and before we could even answer he had pulled out his cell phone and was talking to his assistant:
“listen brad, can you send over three bookshelves from the gamma-series to the english seminar? yes, yes, they need them right away!”
so now elaine and i have three very stylish carl farbman bookshelves in the office, and they look great!
just when i was going to leave the house to meet jane yesterday night the phone rang. it was princess superstar and she was calling from montreal, but her voice sounded so clear and near as if she was calling from the apartment next door. there wasn’t even any time delay in the conversation, even though she was talking to me from the other side of the earth. and for a very short moment i was convinced that she was *not* in montreal, that she didn’t even move there, that the whole story of her emigrating was made up and that she instead had found herself a small apartment in cologne-nippes and is playing a practical joke on me. so we talked about this and that, and maybe, when the time has come i will tell you more about this and about that.
so i was a little late when i headed off to the bar where jane and i wanted to meet. it was just starting to get dark while i walked down the street, and the moon was hanging high in the sky just like tonight. i turned on the walk-man, and suzanne’s “ironbound” was starting to play. with the onset of the music, the real world fell away and felt fake, as if i was walking through a movie, a muffled, unreal scenery. the streets were crowded, but because of the twilight you could only make out the details of people’s faces when they had gotten very close to you, only in the very moment of them passing you by and vanishing behind you. the avenue went straight on for miles, and suddenly the streetlights flashed on automatically : first the ones right by my side and then, in a continuous wave, the light jumped from one post to the next, traveling down the street. and with suzanne’s voice came the memory of each time i’d heard the song, from back in 1987 to today. twenty years. and the sound of the instrument and the words sparked a spatial feeling, a kind of mirage of a blurry, flickering place : home. and even though the music took me there it was always just beyond reach, even though i kept walking on, it didn’t get any nearer. and suddenly i had this impulse of walking straight down the road forever instead of turning right into the lane that lead to the bar. just walking on and on and on.
i had too much beer then. while jane and i were sitting on the old-fashioned sofa of the “hanging gardens” [which is kind of an overstatement because the only thing that justifies the allusion to a world wonder are countless plastic roses that are hanging head down from the ceiling, their buds in an indefinable color of faded red and nicotine yellow. but it's actually quite a good bar, very unpretentious and they always play good music! and in fact yesterday night they played belle & sebastian, nick drake, björk and blumfeld, among others] … i forgot how i started the sentence. so we were sitting there, drinking our becks and our conversation was very entertaining; we chatted about silly and notsosilly things, and jane pressed me to “tell me more about your life!” but since there aren’t really many fascinating occurances going on i was trying to tell her that all kinds of weird things are happening in my life that make me think that i’m taking part in some kind of absurd play when all of a sudden cohen’s “so long, marianne” started to play. and of course “marianne” was s.’s alias in the old journal.
shortly before the song had ended i went to the bar to get another round of beer and when the waitress handed me the bottles i said: “good music!” – as if *she* cared about my opinion! – and she said “the two guys at the end of the bar had asked for the song…” and she nodded down the counter but there was only a half-finished cigarette slowly burning away in an ash-tray and i swear that i saw the dubini brothers passing by outside!
at about one we decided that it was time to get going. i don’t know. first of all i think it’s not a good sign when you’re with somebody and still you catch yourself smiling at the girl across the room. jane is very witty and funny and sarcastic and pretty and attractive but there’s my old problem : i seem to be falling in love just not easily enough. there are so few people that i seem to be attracted to. one in a million. as if i had some docking deficiency, or just a very rare blood type compatible with only a handful of people, oridontknow. i think i sensed two or three times that she was looking at me as if she was interested in going either to my or to her place. but i might also just be flattering myself.
anyway, we left the bar and walked up to the crossing where she had to turn left and i had to turn right. “so, this was a very nice evening!” she said. “yes, it really was.” i replied. “good night, then” and she went up, and i went down the avenue.
when i passed the café i saw that jodie was just closing the place, so i popped in and she mumbled: “look who’s here! mr. i’m-too-fancy-to-have-a-beer!” and we sat by the counter in the empty café (all the guests had gone already and the chairs were placed upside down onto the tables) and talked until half past two. jodie wasn’t feeling very well because a close friend of hers from bielefeld had committed suicide earlier this week. so we sat there, both sad, both kind of alone, both haunted and heavy hearted, both looking like figures from a hopper painting, only without the grace and dignity.
Written by: MJ
Comment text: do i have an idea about who this jane could be?
hm, i don’t know. if you’re in any way connected to where i am working you might have met her, but she’s not someone who has appeared in this journal before. in fact, she *is* a completely new character.
Written by: libertine
Comment text: … You should establish that you want to be friends right away rather than having the “I just want to be friends” talk later when it could be hurtful to someone’s ego.
Written by: libertè toujours
Comment text: libertine, I don’t agree. Why should one know this from the beginning?…
kids, calm down! who would have thought that the introduction of a new character will lead to such a sudden, surprising accumulation of commentaries? ;o)
i think libertine is right, actually. i’m pretty sure about my feelings. or at least i’m pretty sure that there wasn’t anything like a ‘haeccetic moment’. no ‘magic’ [using cohen's terminology now]. and perhaps it would only be fair to say this right away. even if this implies that i’m assuming that she might be more interested in me than i am in her. and how do you say something like this, anyway? sigh.
had a very weird moment this afternoon when i checked alice’s journal and she had quoted an entire paragraph from my march 12 entry. wow. who would have thought this is quote-worthy. and who would have thought that someone can relate.
“so you’re better learning your latin now!” elaine must have admonished me about fifteen times today on the phone. in the past weeks we’ve been calling each other about three or four times a day, usually trying to prevent some kind of impending chaos or looming catastrophe caused by avoidable miscommunication, bitchy magistrates in the university administration or by the general annoying refusal of the rest of the world’s population to use their brain (not to mention those who are not very well equiped in the brain department in the first place, like certain people who take a two weeks holiday leave without informing anybody beforehand). we’ve been so busy lately trying to compensate other people’s incompetence that we had hardly time to make up for our own. our frustration is occasionally exploding in fits of hysterical, desperate laughter that leave other people puzzled and scared.
he he. sometimes i forget how funny i can be 
