She opened the door slowly to reveal the kind of vintage murky lighting and stale cigarette smoke that I thought only existed in movies, or midwestern kitchens in the 1980’s. She gazed at what seemed to be by clavicle, lower than I expected her to be looking. I almost couldn’t tell if she could see me at all. She was tiny, one of the smallest people I’d ever seen. She paused, as if there were any moments in which she didn’t seem paused. She almost conjured enough energy to lift her hand as high as her naval and she almost gestured for me to enter with a single wave and her one word greeting, “Joan.”
Jenn Kim was my first agent for hair and makeup. She was tough as nails, which matched us from the beginning. “She is major,” her email insisted. Sure. She’s major, they all are. By that point in my young career, I’d already worked on some of the most famous faces in the world. I was not phased by celebrity, money, nor the illusion of glamour that the power of fame seemed to offer. I had my own powers. This woman was of no interest to me. The paycheck was editorial, and from what I could tell, this was not going to be useful in my portfolio. I knew about these things. But that time- I was wrong.
As I crossed Central Park, heading East in a yellow cab, I looked down and thumb-typed the name into google on my blackberry. Writer. Author. Sagittarius, 1934. Shit, she’s old. But we have the same birthday! That’s odd- but also, enough. I put my phone away for the duration of the ride and shortly thereafter, arrived at the residence of one of the greatest writers of all time. It was an opportunity to spend an afternoon with one of the most genius and creative minds alive. I had no idea what I was walking into.
I slowly followed her through the abnormally enormous apartment, which didn’t surprise me, given its location, just East of Central Park. Large rooms sprawled in every direction of the old home. It wasn’t fancy. It resembled a home that had been lived in for a very long time. The walls spoke through layers of nicotine stains as I opened my kit to set up.
She sat on the edge of her bed as I began to lightly paint and shape her face. I felt like a giant, manhandling the frail, one hundred year old woman. She was so delicate. I polished her skin with a cream blush and softly applied black mascara. She wore her own shear red lipstick. Her hair had been freshly blown out, so I gently brushed it into its perfect bob. The association a hair or makeup person shares with his client, no matter the setting nor specimen, is a very vulnerable space. Energy is shared, stored, contorted, and sometimes formed. In this space lies the opportunity for magic to occur.
I stared deeply into her eyes, checking for signs of life, then I looked around. “Your apartment is beautiful. How long have you lived here?” She was so slow to respond, I thought she might not respond. She stared off into the distance with glazed eyes and studied her surroundings as if she was seeing them for the first, or maybe the last time. “Since the early 80’s, I think.” She finally spoke. Then she launched a grenade in the room, and the pin would remain inside, until removed by the pain that her writing revealed to me later. “I know it needs to be updated.” Long. Pause. “But I’m not going to.” I told her I like it the way it is. “It looks like a home.”
I wish I could say she told me all about her life, and I told her about mine. But we didn’t. We were strangers in the moment and being similar enough in personality, neither of us cared to forcefully dig deeper. “We have the same birthday,” I tried to bond with her. She looked me dead in the eye for once. She may have felt a small amount of shock, but to me, she morphed into momentarily coherent. “December?” She asked. “Yes. December 5th.” She shared her awe with an almost silent, “huh,” and her eyes wandered off, away from me.
I wondered who the woman was, why Newsweek was coming to photograph her in her home, and why they hired me to do her hair and makeup. Sometimes freelance jobs offer too much information, and some offered none at all. That was one of the latter. It turned out that Joan had a new book coming out, and the press was coming to photograph her for an article about it. The photographer arrived, immediately started shooting, and then released me. I was no longer needed. The likeliness of Joan moving around and messing up her hair was nil, so I left.
My work changes weekly; daily. I’ve always worked. That’s what we do in New York. We work. So when I sat down with friends at their dining table in the Upper West Side to catch up, the questions around the table were, as always, pertaining to… work. “Rob what have you been doing? What were you shooting this week? Where are you off to next?” I hate these questions because they feel like small talk and I hate that the questions force me to small talk. But I play along, because I am, after all, human. “I was at Wicked a few days this week. I did a commercial job with Jenn Kim. I shot this woman for Newsweek named Joan Didion…” I was cut off by the gay gasps around the table. I remember dramatic fists slamming while being scolded by candlelight. I couldn’t tell if they were impressed or mortified. They were both. They were impressed by my encounter, and they were mortified by my ignorance. Joan’s husband had dropped dead in front of her at her own dining table. She wrote a book about it. My fingernails fondled the carvings etched into the side of the wooden table before me as the talk grew out of its smallness and swung deep into that place near the diaphragm. That place where love and art and God comes from.
Joan was a legend. She’d written everything from essays to novels, short stories to screenplays. She was even a journalist. She had done it all. She was iconic enough to be commissioned as the face of Celine, wearing a pair of giant black sunglasses atop her tiny self, solidifying them as one of the top luxury brands in the world. Joan did things like no one else. She was deep. She was dark. She was mysterious, and I needed to know more. I couldn’t wait to dig into Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album and Blue Nights. But first, The Year of Magical Thinking.
I immediately got her. Or so I thought. She’s sad. That’s why she was so quiet. Then I read more. And more. She’s not sad, I decided. She’s more than that. She’s many things. I saw her as torn, then shredded. I kept reading, sorting through all of her shards of pain and kaleidoscope of fantasy. I was an artist at work deciphering another artist’s work through coded layers of prose and poetry. I began to see her as a woman who was gifted with a mind so brilliant and complex that she likely never felt human. For her to communicate on a human level, she required structure, and maybe she could only find that through her writing. Maybe that was the only way she knew she could speak. She knew she would be heard.
What I learned that afternoon in Joan’s apartment was nil. But then I did what I intuitively do, and I dug deeper. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to update her apartment. She couldn’t. She couldn’t let go of the only thing remaining that connected her to her life before. Her home was the only thing that remained unchanged after she acquired and then became engulfed in the prerequisite pain that induced The Year of Magical Thinking. That was the part of her I identified with most. I think we all, as humans, appreciate the things in life that never change, the things we rely on to stay the same, whether we realize it or not. There are few things in life that comfort us by simply being what they are. And not betray us by changing.
Today, I sit at the dining table in the Upper West Side, in the same room, in the same apartment, that still smells the same. I know this home. Every inch of it is familiar to me. And the painful yearning desire for things to be as they were is deeply rooted in absence. The room is arranged the same, and the candles still burn. But the home has lost half of its occupants to old age. There are two less fists to slam, and one less excited gasp to be heard. My love for the way things used to be is real. It is palpable. It is heavy.
Maybe Joan wasn’t as strange as we think. Maybe she was just an artist who was forced to face the fact that some things she can hold onto, and some things she simply cannot. She was combating the same multidimensional dilemma we all are. At least I am. But Joan’s was on an extraordinarily persistent basis.
The ultimate question remains: “What the hell do I do with all of this pain?”
Rob Harmon 