Up a stair, down a stair, Gérard declined to go

Of course we couldn't help but notice this in crew practice, when it came time to run the stadium steps. Spontaneously, there was no Gérard; and if you know anything about rowing, you know it won't do for a seat to be vacant. Steps needed to be taken, and we took turns in hauling him with us. To this day we couldn't measure how greatly this perfected our co-ordination, to say nothing of our reach.

He drew the same limit when it came to attending lectures on different floors. He tasked a spaniel, Alistair, to keep him in the know. Such was the condition of his rural habitation with an English dog, that Gérard seldom saw any paintings, given their claim of time between Alistair’s hours of exercise. To these considerations, moreover, was added his awe toward the tedium and expense of dressing. These all have to be cited as complications, for an Art major. Gérard did always wonder which foulard would go best with Kandinsky, whence he acquired some drawings, only to find he adored Cassatt. So we began to remark on Michelangelo to him, and his catch and stroke were much im-proved, almost burnished, one could say.

If all of this should sound as if Gérard had inculcated in us a kind of expectation, of having to go to him, it couldn't be said that a reluctance played any part in that endeavour. He was infallibly present for all our banquets, but not merely for the reason that he was the one who gave them. If we smile, in retrospect, on his aversion to staircases or his odd but surpassing sensibility in dress, it isn't to make him out to be some figure in Waugh. To a man, I know none of us would have expected to discover the proper age for the ingredients in a service of frogs legs; and I doubt very much if such an understanding were not worth any amount of deference. Every sinew has its season, he would say, and plate the beast accordingly.

It wasn't, indeed, until Gérard made known an insistence on his own coxswain that his separation from our boat ever did begin to cross anyone's mind. To be fair, he had gone to scrupulous lengths to co-ordinate his choice with the requisite weight, loudness, and adamancy. No, and it was not even the novelty of one of us, asserting that prerogative. It was, of course, that all the seats were taken, as finally began to dawn even on Gérard, who never associ-ated a circumstance with some kind of constraint. This made us quite endlessly grateful to be educated with him, but it did take its toll on our recruitment of his presence in our boat, and that of Alistair.

In the end, had Gérard ever really been cut out for crew?

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

Gérard did spend a strenuous springtime with us, practicing the pos-tures of rowing. There can be no gainsaying his mastery of the canted foot, the lofted knee, the open-shouldered setting of the gaze at what's behind. No one exhibited a finer zeal for our colours, dicing orange into underlying hues.

I guess we'll never know what sort of stroke he might have made. He fell upon some Wittgenstein at home on Easter break, and suddenly Philosophy was all he'd entertain. Into that valley of wit Gérard did ride, determined to perfect his mentor's seat by error if not by trial, heuristically testing the steed by the pommel, not the flank, flouting every chance to settle in one place.

It was like Wittgenstein, to ride a horse for what it is, not what it could be; while, Gérard had a way of persuading us to believe almost anything. It's hard to be sure his flair for colour didn't play some useful part in his conceptions, not that we really grasped them, he was so very quick.








Ludwig Wittgenstein
1939
Culture and Value
Diaries published posthumously
Peter Winch, translator
University of Chicago Press, 1980©

Gérard, who knows his way around a conundrum

Of all the associates who have enlisted in the sustenance of rmbl as the Reform Club lark that it is - from this position - certainly Gérard has shown himself to lack none of Dickie Hakluyt's gall, Naughty Witt's cheek, Hercule and Auguste's obliviousness, and dear Thorny's genius for the strategic doze so much as he, and in this observation we include his plodding little editor. You can imagine with what relief, then, we greeted his solution to our recuperation's tiresome insomnia, tricky leg and spiking pain, which is to take an hour every day in his Maserati Infamnia, as revenge. It had been wasted on his present proving ground anyway, his uncle's breakwater.

Gérard is infallibly too polite to ask a thing to be practical, if he likes the looks of it. We, too, treasure a barometer from Hermès, of impeccable uselessness, because it's such a handsome little caricature of a ship's portal. The Infamnia pleased Gérard in his piercing days, and we set our barometer to say what we want. 

Not that this sentimental aesthetic indulgence extends to his choice of companions, all gifted in some way, for performing some thing; and it was nothing for him to flip through his rolodex under "Feet, Agile, Exemplar of," to make his remedy as elegant as it is. Lacking adult passenger legroom and headroom, the Infamnia acts as a kind of global compression bandage, not merely upon the imagination of the young, but upon the propinquity of its occupants. Driven, then, at that breakneck velocity at which even the reflexes are gulpingly obliterated, the Infamnia delivers a fearsomely accelerated massage, of which an hour seems to drain every complaint.

          

          Well, you know someone'll
          take this seriously, Hercule.
          Guys will line up for an
          Infamnia, and it doesn't 
          exist.


          Oh, I hear that it might
          very well, Auguste.

Saturday commute xcvii: Gérard goes underground

  Not since his all-nighter 

  in the loading dock of the 

  Pierre Hotel has Gérard so 

  mystified us, as when he ac-

  cepted a chum's invitation 

  to spend Christmas at Guan-

  tánamo, that exclusive thumb

  of Cuba where our very most         distinguished guests are dom-

  iciled, their distance from 

  our shores renewed in this 

  week's shining Budget Deal, 

  hailed far and wide as the 

  very model, given the alter-

  native, of how to govern.

  And we thought Cromwell's

  New Model Army was austere.

  Probably ours is hiring?

But now, already Gérard succumbs to a whiff of good cop/bad cop conster-nation, such as can beset the best of us, subjected to any instrumentality of protection by our State, whence now and then he ventures to the infir-mary, taking counsel with Abdulaziz, who'd just graduated from Riyadh when we brought him to our beach.

That was 12 years ago.
Here is what he told Gérard:

  Praise God, who placed

  a garden and an orchard

  in my bosom

  so they will be with me

  always.

Abdulaziz

I Shall Not Complain

Marc Falkoff, editor

Poems from Guantánamo

  The Detainees Speak

op. cit.

The morning Gérard balked

To our great friend Gérard, you will remember, had been given that assurance of breeding which his habits exuded so fragrantly that none of us ever attributed it to anything so commonplace as scent. But this morning we must concern ourselves less with his mode than with his assurance, as he unaccountably found himself awakening in the loading dock of the Pierre Hotel, at an hour he was deprived of guessing, in a place which bore no semblance to his experience, even as a reader of Solzhenitsyn. To a man who hasn't had to give any thought to his scent since his christening, it wasn't merely the context of his awakening which lacked those dozen or so external clues for his bearing. It was, rather, that the full force of the unexpected struck him then and there, that there truly could be a setting that didn't suggest to him Impériale.

It need hardly be said, that for a man as superbly grounded as Gérard there was no hasard of being seduced by the extraordinary, and so it wasn't with shock that he entertained this speculation. With the composed stance of the calm surveyor of the passing scene, he noted first that there wasn't any: that the more he looked, not only was Christopher Robin out, but so, in a sense, was he. It was this genius for the assimilation of a first impression which, we would say, distinguished Gérard always from the flâneurs of his generation and before, whose invention of the petty would always get them a lunch. Had he known he was at the Pierre, of course - had he, for that matter, any reason to suppose he could have been at the Pierre, with his own club so nearby - he might have rung down for a plate of eggs and a bathrobe, but something told him there was no down for ringing from this place.

The cascade of logic which coursed through his mind upon this flicker of dispensing with Impériale soon suffused enough of his consciousness to spread something very like a smile across his face, as he relished the absence of whole tributaries of everyday assumption which flowed so consequentially from that thought, and embraced his present condition with such immaculateness. Far from contemplating any exit from this estate, he took it into his mind as he took it into his eye, that he made as much of a difference to it as it did to him, and it wasn't merely the novelty of this concep-tion which moved him. 

Mark Rothko

Untitled, 1949

National Gallery

  of Art

Washington

i  another country

Summer home theatricals

Having made the decision that all his guests this Summer would assist in choreographing the theatricals of the final weekend, Gérard had rather hoped to recreate his heroic morning in the loading dock of the Pierre, starkers, when Betty Commilfaux pointed out the narrative deficiency of nothing having happened, until the great 61st Street portcullis shudderingly rose to admit the neighborhood rodents, which she categorically refused to portray. But Gérard, having dined out all season on the story of his nakedness, spontaneous and pristine as it had been, observed that perhaps she had overlooked its valiant existential side.

Quietly enough, it fell to Thorny to broker a triumphal niche for Betty, having been seeing to that necessity for her, ever since his childhood inheritance of the leeward side of Commilfaux Point presented her with a Summer playmate some 10 years her junior, a part for which recruitment had not grown any easier. Inevitably, as Thorny saw it, there would be a meter maid, for Betty to reprise her girlhood Clara to his dashing trucker Prince, tripping Gérard's Grétrian car alarm to frighten the Knickerbocker's porters into the hotel dock, Clara ethereal in Alice Bradian oblivion, as Thorny and Gérard unobtrusively shared civilities and saw to his basics: Petipa's own manuscript and a ribbon for its keeping.

And yet, of Thornhill, what? Ever the guest to pull his neighbor's fat from the fire, for every host they met; of a gravity specific enough to touch base with ground but assuring flotation by the mildest exertion; and yet, of promise, too, as Betty more than once alluded, of the entire crapshoot of Noggin's Neck with one shrewd matrimonial stroke, of self-evident facility. Commilfaux Point was scarcely the half of it; but take it, for are its altitudes and slope not impervious to damp, and its microclimate abjectly panting for Chablisienne development, the occasional anachronistic riding easement no more than an air right's swap away, between gentlemen in town?

And no one else (weighed it not upon Thorny to remember?), owned this environment-redeeming, Bet-ty-mollifying, intriguingly a-musingly complicating, even faintly ribaldly folkloric setting for his life, as no one else ever would. Thorny hadn't the time to sell things; they aggrandised, as it was, too speedily. All he could do, was to spend heroically, and hope for the best. Still, he figured himself in the mix, and was there time to be sure if he would not disappear, even to himself, in this elegant recon-ciliation of accidents of birth? Timing, he didn't read as a market player, but as one of many tonalities in time, itself: prejudicial, possibly, to dis-turb with untoward emphasis. Was it discernible then, that he was close to musing as any groom might 
do, thinking he could be thinking 
for himself?

Origins of Wednesday x: Gérard and the proof of jell-o

We can't have been alone in
noticing how doctrinaire our
gastronomic texts have turned.
Even in the matter of jell-o,
there are those who'll contend
that it's all in the mold, and
some, the hue, as others claim
weights are what make it true.

This last assertion struck our
Gérard as reflecting his own
experience, sufficiently to in-
sinuate itself into his mind un-
der the appealing pseudonym of
"logic." And little is so con-
soling as the mantle of that
mentality, where it already lies
so close at hand - and especial-
ly, in the intimidating court of
cuisine. 

Logic it was, then, that drove
Gérard to create his masterpiece,
a well-jelled swimming pool of a-
gave extract, to celebrate his
new aviators. Ours was not to rea-
son, against a slope of verdured
slime, but rise to praise how tea-
sin' was the rôle played by the 
lime.

               We have given the measurements for the 
               water for the jelly in grams, rather
               than millilitres. This is because, al-
               though millilitres and grams are equal,
               in recipes where precision is important
               you get a more accurate result if you
               weigh the liquid.


Honi soit
qui mal y
pense.

Jack Adair-Bevan

Paûla Zarate

Matthew Pennington

Iain Pennington

The Ethicurean Cookbook

  Recipes, Foods and Spirituous

  Liquors, from our Bounteous

  Walled Garden in the Several

  Seasons of the Year

  [The Mendips, Somerset]

    Summer:  Pineapple Weed Jelly

    220 grams caster sugar

    40 grams pineapple weed

    13 grams gelatine leaves

    Cherry Spoom to serve

Ebury Press

op. cit.

Gérard and the conservation of sport

      The sibilant grip of Keds

      on planks, their echo upon

      the humid tiles of scholas-

      tic gyms, and a well-tuned

      bounce of the precisely in-

      flated toy were nothing to

      Gérard, next to the fric-

      ative gasp of the net's de-

      light to disgorge a swish-

      ing dunk. But they were at-

      tuned completely to his

      pleasure. What drove Gé-

      rard to relocate basket-

      ball practice to the lobby

      was certainly not the cold

      comforts of its travertine.

It was, that with its lower baskets and shal-lower court distances, the lobby remedied the absurd eugenic descent of the game into a curiosity shop for hyped extrem-ities, now normalised in favor of everyone's dis-play of its underlying skills: playing fair. 

                  As in his all-nighter in the 

                  loading dock, Gérard's public-

                  spirited gesture was met with 

                  patronising bafflement, at his 

                  chronic maladjustment to decay.

  

Saturday commute lxxv: What to read, what to read today?

   Just how Gérard achieved his coup,

   of embodying possibilities drawn

   from a shelf, more than a rack of

   ideas, reserved in our experience

   to the repulsive or well-to-do -

   less commonly the same thing, back

   then - we would occasionally specu-

   late in merry, almost doting wonder.

   But then another round would be pro-

   posed and we'd move on to who had

   lately turned up missing from our

   gatherings. They didn't care if we 

   remembered, and by such attritions

   we all felt prettier to forget. Pos- 

   sibly Gérard demurred at this im-

   modesty, but no one could suspect

   him of wearing us, rhetorically.

  

Further improvisations of Gérard

Never one to have subscribed to the

new-fangled fetish for security in

travel, Gérard remembers when it was

perfectly reasonable to take a week-

end in Eleuthera in a well ordered

scholarly calendar, and still ex-

pect to be able to improve one's tan

between departures. In pondering his

way toward that remedial improvisa-

tion which he'd grown to trust he'd

fashion, given time, he did consid-

er himself fortunate to book an hour

in the gymnasium backstairs window.

Yet even there, delays were wilting.

Reasoning in the first principles 

of tanning, were it not probable 

that in their simplicity they bore

the answer to the new travel exper-

ience's abduction of time? Had it 

been, he wondered, for tanning's de-

light in its approximations of nu-

dity, or for such approximations'

residual benevolence of hue, that

people flew so fast to savour its

extractions of the clockface? What
part had temperature or humidity
played, without uv radiation? It

came to him, as night follows day,

that he might explore the compro-

mise of the mushroom in its flour-

ishing, even out of doors.