UnderWoman

What follows is too much to condense into one post, but it makes for GREAT late night television.

Apparently Brian had applied Wildlife Research Center’s® 2009 Special Golden Estrus® behind his ears, on the soles of his boots…and elsewhere…for his solo game expedition to North Salem, New York.

Within an hour of being in the woods, he was accosted by a rowdy young buck who found him irresistible.

He did not have time to lay arrow into bow.  And  so they tussled “mano-a-mano.”

He’s not sure when or how he went unconscious, or what happened to him while he was out.

But he came to with absolutely no memory of the incident…or of himself for that matter.

His head ached.  He was badly bruised.  Vague emotions of shame, humiliation, uneasy satisfaction and perverse curiosity were wreaking havoc on him.  The only things he could recall fully was…poetry!

He was trying to piece all this together, when a man, seemingly with myasthenia gravis, stumbled upon him.

The man asked some questions.

Brian gave the same answer to all:

“The buck didn’t stop there!”

“The buck didn’t stop there!”

The man, who we later learn is David Letterman, at first thought to call the police, or an ambulance.

But after sharing a few Single Malt Scotches with Brian, he became enamored of the man….For even if he had only one line — “The buck didn’t stop there!” – at least it was a good one!

Now, Brian, Dr. Granfeld and UnderWoman begin weaving together some of the missing pieces:

David Letterman brings Brian back to the city, and wants to have him on the Late Show as a special guest.

But Brian “spooks” and runs off into the city, which, although once his home, is now utterly unfamiliar to him.

It is only in the Central Park Zoo that Brian finds some level of comfort.

What prompts him to still dab Special Golden Estrus® behind his ears, we can only guess.

But UnderWoman is pretty sure of this — that the David Letterman who found Brian Liebman in the woods was not myasthenic (indeed, the incident had predated Brian’s myasthenic moments with UnderWoman in Central Park), but rather, inebriated…symptoms of which are sometimes mistaken for myasthenia gravis.

Brian considers this carefully.  Thinks for a moment.  And then asks, to everyone’s surprise:

“Dr. Granfeld, have you ever considered working with large animals?”

UnderWoman and Brian are “of the same school” so to speak:

Each is armed with an impressive array and depth and knowledge in their chosen fields….And those fields range far!

They also tend towards a “selective” daftness that amuses some, befuddles many, and can be downright dangerous to self and others.

For example, UnderWoman manages her own “medical adventure” with the unflinching astuteness of a physician and the prowess of a film producer.

She coalesces and severs medical communities via lectures, stand-up comedy routines and her blog, Trephinations, which drills down on health issues and serves up solutions.

Last week, when her primary care practice had troubles deciphering the extensive blood workup requested by one of her specialists, she got on the Internet and coached the team to and through Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate and the lavender-topped test tube it should be taken in.

But when she bought Pig-It to her PET scan and Hunter to her CAT scan, people wondered….

Likewise, Brian has been lauded for the gene-altering breakthrough that allowed Kandel’s lab to induce schizophrenia in mice…thereby enabling researchers to better understand and treat this refractory condition.

Yet all were shocked when he showed up for work one day in full cammo gear, armed with bow and arrows, and announcing that he would be off in search of “big game” over the weekend.

We kind of know what happened next….

Both UnderWoman and Brian have a bit of an obsession with underwear…especially LONG UNDERWEAR.

To begin with, they LOVE to layer.

UnderWoman is prone to starting with silk and/or very fine, thin cotton.

Brian tends towards synthetics and high tech.

UnderWoman adores winter for its crisp cold; for the occasional scent of pure ozone cracking the air; for snow, in all its forms; for cross-country skiing, vensison stew, red wine…and for the ability to lavish layers of cashmere, feathers and fur on top of cotton and silk.

Brian finds her look intriguing: With marauder boots, black silk Under Armour splashed with restrained camo accents and long lynx coat, she appears to be both hunter and the hunted at once.

UnderWoman finds Brian to be a synesthetic study in contrast: His polypopylene underlayers hold the body odor in. His Goretex outerwear still hints of wood smoke and doe urine. And there’s something peaty, musky, heady about him: Dried fruit undertones from custom-blended pipe tobacco? Islay Single Malt? Civet?

At any rate, while they refuse to call it “a date,” on this day, without entourage, Brian and UnderWoman head to Burton Boards of SoHo, where they take inspiration from the company’s hard-core credo:

“We stand sideways. We sleep on floors in cramped resort hotel rooms. We get up early and go to sleep late. We’ve been mocked. We’ve been turned away from resorts that won’t have us. We are relentless. We dream it, we make it, we break it, we fix it. We create. We destroy. We wreck ourselves day in and day out and yet we stomp that one trick or find that one line that keeps us coming back. We progress.”

There, Brian and UnderWoman enter the sub-zero Cold Room — arrayed in their own regalia and trying on paraphernalia from Burton’s new Analog line as ruse.

UnderWoman recites from Burton’s “Love Letters to a Mountain” campaign a few years back, in which snowboarders wrote postcards to the Sierra Nevadas, Rockies and Alps — how they bought their passions to the peaks…and were sometimes given hard knocks and crushed bones in return, and yet, took it in stride.

Brian synthesizes from Mark Helrin’s Winter’s Tale — a 700-page tome that UnderWoman knows by heart.

She LIVES this book in fact — savoring the snow and the ice as she does; her thermoses, thick blankets and headlamp always at the ready for a fresh fall; living out of doors…dawn, dusk, daylight, night; with friends and loved ones or alone; tracking animals; reading and writing poetry; watching old movies (Dr. Zhivago is a favorite for these occasions) in the Pinetum of Central Park; surveying snow people; seeing stars; casting shadows.

Does she say it aloud, or not? All the raccoons who have come to her side. The raccoon who traversed her windowsill one sunset. The fox family. Her relationship with Pale Male and other birds of prey. The significance of animals in her life….Even alabaster animals as they emerged from the backs of alabaster women, children and men as seen at a Chelsea art show last week. And like the spirit-guide animals of The Golden Compass (even if that film was too light on physics for her taste). And the boy at Green Chimneys who called her “princess” and recognized her…and himself…as every animal in the Native American wheel.

It is almost too much to bear!

She pours ice water on Brian.

They wait a while.

Wetness does not penetrate.

Dryness holds.

They are warm despite deep freeze.

They will be fine! They will be more than fine….

For their remaining moments in Burton’s Cold Room, UnderWoman and Brian make plans:

They will go next door to The Evolution Store, with its A – Z of animals and minerals ranging from anatomic human models and thousands of iridescent butterfly wings to taxidermy tools and juvenile zebra skulls.

They will head north to the Bergdorf Goodman Men’s Store, where trophy heads sport Burberry scarves and where the windows are dressed with “Fantastic Mr. Fox” sets.

And all of this is just south of the Central Park Zoo and the Alice in Wonderland statue. And….

UnderWoman is thinking she will get a line like “Let us go then, you and I” from Brian.

But instead there is a WILD — afraid, agonizing, despairing, determined — look in his eyes.

She takes off his Analog outerwear and rushes him outside.

He can hardly catch his breath.

She stewards him from the busy streets of SoHo to the relative calm of Freeman Alley, and into the sanctuary of Freemans, with its hunting lodge decor and hearty menu.

“Listen, UnderWoman,” says Brian. “This is really too much for me….The vague, horrific memories I suffer; the unfettered hope I feel; the way these memories and hopes wreak real, physical havoc on my heart and brain.

“I know it will sound odd, but I was watching a House episode on Sunday night. A firefighter had undergone so many physical and mental traumas that even the ‘idea’ of work or women put him into such a state that….Well, they decided that it was too extreme to induce a medical coma of indeterminate length. So they opted instead for a form of electroshock that would wipe his whole slate clean….

“I called Dr. Gregory House yesterday. He will be meeting me at Dr. Rich Granfeld’s next week. He thinks that erasing the traumatic memories might be my best, my only way out. But there is the risk that this will erase all of my memories.

“From my studies of, and in experience with and experiments with memory, I do believe that there are types of memories…and ways of making, storing and retrieving memories…that render them indelible. I think it’s possible that these kinds of memories live on…in cellular ways…and in all ways.

“UnderWoman, I want you to take this the right way.  Will help me make these kinds of memory today.”

What can UnderWoman say?

It is the best proposition she has gotten in a LONG TIME.

As she and Brian stroll north on Fifth Avenue, the Fanstastic Mr. Fox figures in the windows of Bergdorf Men’s seem to be cheering them on….

Never has a trip north through the park been so well narrated through the senses.

They DO gather moss…and pine needles and cones.

They kneel in a knoll.

UnderWoman shows Brian the sexiest thing she knows:

Nestled between the breasts of the Romeo and Juliet sculpture at Delacorte Theater, robins had built their nest last Spring.

It was an odd thing, because the nest was at eye level for most New Yorkers.

There had been intense debate about whether to remove or protect it.

In the end, protection prevailed. And many stood guard until the babies fledged and the nest could be moved to higher ground.

“THIS is my home town,” UnderWoman gestures to the park and to the city at large.

She references a recent Smithsonian article that presents New Yorkers as a highly involved species of people — people pre-selected for higher energy and ambition.

She quotes Helen Keller: “Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.”

And she recites from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem, Recuerdo (Memory):

“We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.“

Brian closes his eyes….

Central Park’s Reservoir is a sundial, if ever there was one.

In what Neill DeGrasse Tyson has dubbed Manhattanhenge, on four days per year, equally straddling the Winter and Summer Solstices, the Sun’s rising and settings are on an exact east-west basis.

UnderWoman has never seen two risings and settings the same.

Each moment, each day, each subtly changing angle….

Once it had been said that no two irises were alike, either.

But Dr. Rodman claimed that Arher and Wendy Do-It shared the match-print mirror of eyes – hazel, shot through with orange and green, spiralling like sunflowers; Fibonacci in fact….

Archer and Wendy had started the Rod and Cone Club for themselves on account of this.  It was an adventure through which they better understood seeing and experimented with new ways of seeing.

UnderWoman has brought Brian to the Central Park Reservoir at sunrise.

She talks to him about the Sun, the Moon, Many Moons.  About Astronomical Applications.  About how she has always cemented memories through her senses, through time and space, through what she believes to be cellular imprints of a lifetime’s worth of Rising and Settings, New and Full Moons.

And him?

Brian laughs that the first letters he learned, from his scientist father, were ACGT. And it was drummed into him that every combination in the universe was writ in ACGT.  We were (as David Whyte had said about Wendy’s dear friend John), “love letters to humanity” written in ACGT and DNA.

BUT, Brian was clear to emphasize, his father seemed unable to use the word “love” outside his admiration and use of these four letters, whereas UnderWoman used the word “love” to cover an inscrutable range of inclinations and attractions that ranged from ceasar salads to soul mates.

Where and how did she differentiate?  What did she think of….

UnderWoman, consciously or not, cuts him off at this pass.

Did he know the names of the Full Moons?  Their origins — Gaelic, Native American, and in every culture.  She walks him through – Full Harvest, Full Hunter’s, Full Beaver, Full Long Nights, Full Cold Nights, Full Wolf, Full Flower Moons…

But the New Moons have no names.  Perhaps today, knowing what they know, learning what they will learn, feeling what they will  feel, and in preparation for what might come….Perhaps they can name the New Moons?

They begin a backwards journey of where and how they met.  Walk south from the Reservoir at sunrise to the Arthur Ross Pinetum.

What other pieces of poem and music had gone through his mind that night?

At Central Park Zoo, they see a squirrel feasting on madeleines as fed to him by a French couple who are cooing to him in French.

UnderWoman almost takes the Proustian path, but instead exclaims:

“My God!  Is it possible that even animals get Type 2 Diabetes in a city with food this plentiful and sumptuous?”

They laugh.

“I’ll look into it tomorrow,” says Brian. ”If I remember….”

They fall silent.  Neither breathes for a moment.

When they breathe again, their breaths form intersecting arcs of steam and ice.

“The day we met,” says UnderWoman,  “I was listening to Winter, by Tori Amos.”  She hands Brian her iPod, and they share the earbuds.  At appropriate points, UnderWoman sings the chorus — that of a father to his daughter:

“When you gonna make up your mind; when you gonna love you as much as I do?”

They say nothing, walk on….

Next, it is north to the Alice In Wonderland sculpture.

In her picnic bag, UW has a thermos of strong, fresh coffee that has remained remarkably warm.  And a flask of Jim Beam…just in case.

They toast the March Hare, and march on.

“And on your birthday?” asks UnderWoman.

“And in your deepest dreams?”

“And what was one thing you believed with all of your heart and every fiber of your being even before you had words to express it?

“And do you believe it still?”

“My God,” says Brian, silencing her.

“All I want to think of…and to feel…is this! But the closer I come to anything approaching a real emotion…much less an intoxicating cocktail of emotions…then the hunting accident rears its head, and I….”

He cannot continue.

UnderWoman waits patiently for what seems like a long time, and then:

“Seriously, Brian.  How many times do you have to dab doe urine behind your ears before it ceases to become ‘an accident?’

“I mean, maybe it’s time to start telling yourself a new story….”

They fall silent again.  He gives her the kind of look that she can feel as full sensation in her spine and throughout her body.

She takes his hand:

“Let us go then!  We have less than 72 hours….”

Remarkably, UnderWoman returns home to have a “hunting accident” of her own:

So many factors are at work here.  So many things known, seen, felt.  And so much more that remains unsaid, unseen, unknown….

Amidst all of the trackings of sun and moon, in the intimacy of morning coffee with March Hare, UnderWoman has not even told Brian that it is her birthday.  He has no idea (or does he?) that she is in the midst of a myasthenia flare, wherein Mestinon will keep her symptoms at bay early in the day, but by afternoon, she must return home for IVIG infusions, and by evening, her voice unravels, and she poses a choking hazard (to herself).

And while Brian and the officer had once “dropped her at the door,” she believes/hopes he has forgotten what door it is.  She is still unsure where or how he lives.  And she wants it to stay that way.

Often, Brian and UnderWoman linger at park gates before saying goodbye.  When silence and a sense of longing overtake them, she turns the talk to park gates:  Most of them have names etched on their stone selves – names given to them by park designers Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux in the 1860s.

UnderWoman proposes that they meet at Hunters’ Gate the next sunrise.

He says nothing in words and everything with eyes, which she takes to mean YES.

“But I have to go, NOW!”  She pulls away.

Like Cinderella in reverse, the Mestinon is wearing off, and her voice catches in her throat as she makes her way home.

Upstairs, there are packages at the door and messages on the machine.

From Scoot and family:  A quilt of old socks.  Camouflage duck tape.  A wallet made of camouflage duck tape.  Camo gloves.  A camo hat.  A message that says: “Appy Irthday Endy!” – a salute to the fact that “Endy Ubit” has returned with the myasthenia.

Fom Merrie Do-It and EdLectric Seltzer, stunning flowers and this message:  “We love and miss you very much.  We will celebrate together soon.  Meantime, maybe Elmer Fudd will hire you? We saw him on a TV commercial last night… ‘hunting wabbits.’”

From Bro Grog — who somehow carries the guilt conjecture that Wendy was stricken with myasthenia as payback for all the times the three of them imitated “special people” in the back seat of their parents’ car — a LONG message that includes songs from his kids while he drives them to school.

UnderWoman feels lucky beyond words to be part of this family!

If her health and the weather had permitted, they would all be together now – singing badly and butchering the words to songs, eating heartily, drinking heavily.

But just as her myasthenia was flaring, blizzards were blanketing the southern and western states.

So this afternoon, UnderWoman will be alone with Nurse Helen for IVIG infusion # 3.

And at sunset, a handful of friends will arrive.   Wine and conversation will flow.  She might sound and look drunk even before she actually is.  But what of it?!

Mind you, UnderWoman’s apartment is SMALL…

When she says she is “going down to the wine cellar,” she ducks beneath the kitchen counter and comes up with a bottle.

Her “sewing room” is a miniature mending kit snagged from a spa trip with Merrie a few years back.

On the other hand, plants, garden tools and picnic baskets festoon the place in such a way as to form a promontory onto the park.  There is no separation…only invitation.

As always, her soirées are multi-sensory adventures.  Guests are savoring wines, fruits, flowers, cheeses, charcuteries, each other…and are passing the sock quilt amongst themselves.

When a squeamish friend-of-a-friend inquires whether the socks are dirty or clean, UnderWoman (who had already breathed deep of this gift’s fabric softener and wood smoke scents) urges the woman to sniff each sock separately and report back.

The olfactory heat gets turned up a notch….

Captain Quirk — who has come in smelling of vetiver, moss and sandalwood, — gifts UnderWoman with Luca Turin’s book, Perfumes, and pulls out vials of synthesized civet, castoreum, androstenedione, musk.

UnderWoman pulls out her collection of doe and buck urines and other big game attractants, as well as a book on the art of whitetail deer deception.

She brings up from under her sink some badly canned deer meet from a rogue hunter down south.  The ever-evolving fat globules and likelihood of botulism have relegated it to the “failed science experiment” section of her apartment.  But it serves as a failproof dividing line that determines who can stomach what….

Meantime, although Captain Quirk has promised not to open her Buck Bomb in the house, he of course locks himself in the bathroom and  “accidentally” sets it off.

Suddenly, 100 % Pure Doe in Estrus Whitetail Deer Urine (also called Doe P.) — under pressure adequate enough to assure a quarter mile of coverage in any direction — blasts forth.

It is as if 100 sweaty mares had urinated down their hind legs onto dirty stable floors and steeped in it; as if every horse-drawn carriage of Central Park had convened to combine and distill their droppings and to blast them forth through a fire hose….

Guests overturn wine glasses and bottles and hors d’oeuvres trays in an attempt at fast escape.

But it is too late!  The stench clings to and penetrates every thing and everyone.

Even her normally anosmic super, when the rowdy crowd returns from dinner, looks forlorn and tells UnderWoman that somebody…maybe even several people…have urinated in the halls and elevator.

At this point, with her voice unraveling significantly (myasthenia talking, or the wine?), UnderWoman tries to apologize, to take the blame, to explain the unexpected “hunting accident” in her home. The Super probably does not “understand,” but seems relieved.  For all the times this week that she has sternly lectured him on working heat, doors that stay on their hinges and dry feet,  he might have one on her….

Upstairs, even with the windows wide open and winter winds whipping in, UnderWoman’s apartment smells like the kind of high-rise stables you can still find in some city police precincts…and will unwittingly cross the streets to avoid odors from when you do.

She would not have planned it this way.  But HOORAY!

It is turning out to be one wonder of a birthday!