My Darling Clementine
“THIS APARTMENT IS MAGICAL,” Aunt Analea once said, sitting in her wingback chair the colour of a robin’s egg, her hair twisted up with a silver dagger hairpin. She told me with mischief in her eyes, as if daring me to ask her what she meant. I had just turned eight and thought I knew everything.
Of course this apartment was magical. My aunt lived in a century-old building on the Upper East Side, with stone lions on the eaves, half broken and clinging to the corners. Everything about it was magical—the way the light poured into the kitchen in the mornings, golden like egg yolk. The way the study seemed to fit more books than possible, pouring off the shelves and piled against the far window, so high they almost blocked out all the light. I charted foreign maps in the brick face of the far living room wall. The bathroom, with its perfect high window and frosted glass that reflected rainbows against the sky-coloured walls and ornate claw-foot tub, was the perfect place to paint. My watercolours came alive there, pigments dripping from my brushes as I imagined far-off places I’d never been. And in the evenings, the moon looked so close from her bedroom windows I could almost catch it.
The apartment was indeed magical. You couldn’t convince me otherwise. I just thought it was my aunt who made it magical—the way she lived, wide and wild, that infected everything she touched.
“No, no,” she said with a wave of her hand—the one holding a lit Marlboro cigarette. The smoke wafted out of the open window, ruffling the two pigeons cooing on the sill, and into the cloudless sky. “I don’t mean metaphorically, my darling Clementine. You might not believe me at first, but I promise it’s true.”
Then she leaned closer, and her mischief turned into a smile that shone in her glittery brown eyes, and she told me a secret.
Publishers Lunch
MY AUNT USED TO say, if you don’t fit in, fool everyone until you do.
She also said to keep your passport renewed, to pair red wines with meats and whites with everything else, to find work that is fulfilling to your heart as well as your head, to never forget to fall in love whenever you can find it because love is nothing if not a matter of timing, and to chase the moon.
Always, always chase the moon.
It must have worked for her, because it never mattered where she was in the world, she was home. She waltzed through life like she belonged at every party she was never invited to, fell in love with every lonely heart she found, and found luck in every adventure. She had that air about her— tourists asked her for directions when she went abroad, servers asked her opinion on wines and fine whiskeys, celebrities asked her about her life.
Once, when we were at the Tower of London, my aunt and I accidentally found ourselves at an exclusive party at the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula and managed to stay with a well-placed compliment and a knockoff statement necklace. There, we met a prince of Wales, or Norway or somewhere, moonlighting as the DJ. I didn’t remember much of the rest of that night since I overestimated my tolerance for too-expensive scotch.
But every adventure with my aunt was like that. She was the master of belonging.
