Faux Pas No. 1 "White Sweater, Black Lungs"

Date: February 9, 2010
Author: Dalia Sofer
Venue: BookCourt
Neighborhood: Cobble Hill, Brooklyn
Free Drinks -- yes
Q & A -- no
Book signed -- no
UE Check Number -- 1245673

“I enjoyed your story. And that’s a lovely sweater," I said to the author Dalia Sofer after her reading.

Why should I be afraid to reveal myself as a sensual man? A man who noticed a white sweater with some kind of fuzz business going on, a nap, an understated sheen. A sweater whose allure had nothing to do with the woman wearing it.

Compared to my aesthetic reaction to the white sweater, the wearer’s beauty was an afterthought. If I was suddenly interrogated about my comment in a hastily convened court there in the bookstore, I would have total plausible deniability that Sofer's beauty had anything to do with my noticing and not being too timid to comment on, her white sweater.

I am a sensual man with an eye for beautiful sweaters who half the time when he notices them, they might as well be on a mannequin for all the difference it makes. Yes, possibly, once in a while, because of my total worldliness and lack of inhibition, I might compliment a beautiful woman about a white sweater. It seems unfair to discriminate against a beautiful woman just because a less worldly man might think better of complimenting her because he might lack the confidence to pull it off. He might be afraid that the woman wearing the white sweater would think that her beauty had something to do with his praise. He might worry that she would not understand the critical objectivity with which he regards clothing worn by women writers. He might fear that she could regard him as just another man drooling over her looks who could think of nothing better to say than "nice sweater."

Of all the faux pas, I committed during my readings project, the one with Dalia Sofer and her sweater was the sweetest, the most innocent. Instead of inadvertently insulting an author, I inadvertently complimented her.

Confronted with an attractive woman, thinking I was suave and masterful, I made a fool of myself. Usually when I do that the feedback is immediate, but with Sofer and her sweater, there was a few hours lag time.

My faux pas with Sofer and her sweater happened after she read from a novel she was working on at an event dedicated to the Sirenland Writers Conference. Every year the conference picks a promising young writer and awards her a fellowship. The reading at BookCourt was partly to celebrate the naming of the group's 2011 fellow, the writer Robin Black. Sofer was the 2007 winner.

Apparently, the Sirenland fellow designation is like a MacArthur in that you don't apply, they just pick you. You get to go to the $3,600, six-day conference in Positano, Italy, including airfare. The conference is in March probably because that is the off-season, although the hotel rates are still E400 per night. The hotel's management probably cut a deal with the conference organizers to fill some rooms in the off-season.

There was wine available after the reading and I got a glass and found myself talking to a writer from Brooklyn who I knew slightly and her friend. Before long, Sofer had joined our circle.

After I spoke my piece about her reading and her sweater, Sofer smiled and asked me which did I like more, her reading or her sweater? Although I was digging the hole of my eventual embarrassment even deeper, I didn't hesitate, but said, "There's no need to pick one or the other. They complement each other."

Before I paid my respects to Sofer's sweater, I did feel a moment of hesitation about complimenting an item of clothing worn by a woman I didn't know. But I mislead myself by figuring it's OK to express an aesthetic judgment, especially a positive one.

But when you are an attractive woman, you get used to being admired. You realize that when someone says you look good in a particular garment, what he or she is really saying is, yes, that white sweater looks good on you, as would the rattiest of T-shirts. Women complimenters may be more subtle, but especially if a man says something like what I said, a woman immediately translates it accurately to mean "God, you're gorgeous."

And as for the story she read, well, like I said the sweater didn't just lie there, there was a little puffiness to it, a well-bred aspiration to three-dimensionality that just looked excellent as she stood at the podium and read her story about refuges in rural France in World War II or something.

I might as well confess here, so as to not harp on it throughout my going to readings story, although perhaps it is a sort of spine, that in the Freudian formulation besides money and power, I want my beautiful lovers to be women writers.

What could be clearer than that I want a woman writer who lives uptown for a lover, or, really, all of them, and at Jimmie Atlas' Central Park West dining room table on Thanksgiving Day, the posh version of Broadway Danny Rose's turkey TV dinner, preferably. Uptown is like the suburbs in a good way compared to the assault on my senses, as if 9/11 just keeps happening, with none of the pluses, that the lower west side is.

Perhaps seducing every woman writer in New York with a Central or Riverside Park view is a little ambitious. Fine, I'm willing to compromise. Let me just get my stories into the magazines and they can just read my words, give them glowing reviews, invite me to their parties and that will be fine.

If only I had lived when men wrote books, I might have written books. That’s how I could have won the love of women writers with apartments that look out on Grant's Tomb or the reservoir and who have closets full of sweaters that range from beige to ivory.

How can I win the love of beautiful women writers without writing books, and, even if I was born in an appropriate era, how could I have been expected to write books without first having the love of beautiful women writers for whom the attack was miles away, who were able to sit outdoors at cafes on Madison Avenue by the Whitney and enjoy the fine weather on September 12? This is why I'm the geezer ingénue. Don't ask me why the leads never get so much as a sniffle, while we, downtowners, we carry the poison inside us.

Maybe the beautiful women writers from uptown can smell what is slowly mestatazing in my lungs as easily as they can see my rotted teeth. Maybe it is the stench emanating from my lungs. Maybe there isn't enough pixie dust drifting down from all the podiums in New York to tamp that smell down?

So I go to readings and they let me sit in the front row. The government checks keep coming. They change colors from time to time as if a different agency took over my account. I opened the account, I think, when the streets were always wet, when they were spraying them right after the attack to keep the evil from being sucked up into our lungs. It didn't work. The beautiful women writers who live uptown must know this.

It's a shame I never get to see the inside of their garments. It's a shame I will never know if the slight puffiness on the outside of the white sweater is matched by some attempt at extra dimensionality on the inside. Oh, how I envy that garment's dry cleaners with their shops along the long, clean, uptown boulevards around the parks that mock us downtowners, working as they do like healthy lungs, while ours will never be white again.