Isabella Feen was the kind of woman who could make men under 30 hail a cab, hop in, drive around the corner, get out, climb up a stranger’s steps, lean over, and begin to wheeze. Born in Cape Town and raised in Warrington, New Zealand — by the way: turns out there actually is a planet with the words “Universal” slowly circling it — that’s a live shot you see when you head to the movies, but more on that later — Isabella went to school in Paris and lined her apartment windows with photographs of when she and Cassie went to the beach as kids — “I want to see Pop carry a tiny pony like a set of barbells down the beach,” Cassie’s hard-lined jaw and Isabella’s red and rosy frazzle the prominent feature in this one, the rest of the faces on their towels (Isabella’s said, ‘Froopy,’ catching her mumble, Cassie’s a shapeless Seurat) — with polaroids — she would often yell at the camera, “I DARE YOU TO FREEZE ME IN TIME. I. DARE. YOU.” — and they would go up into the blinds with a bit of doubled-up tape, too, so when she pulled on the string, she had a makeshift peacock of the past – some of the aging tape wobbling and queen-waving after the pull, while — outside — the city would continue on as usual like the back of a restaurant displaced everywhere — the kid with the untucked shirt, one hand zeroed in on a cigarette, the other wrapped around the open mouth of the glass, turning to his friends seated on a bench a handful of yards behind him and announcing, “As much as I love Saul Bellow, I’d take Ladysmith Black Mambazo over Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata any day,” his friends laughing and shouting back, “Right, because that level of misogyny is so popular today,” her heart leaping at the mention of the name and the sentiment (the slow, sliding I-IV-V of “Unomathemba,” the Mother of Hope) — and don’t worry: I can only assume this sentence is going to end while we’re still alive — while a grocer in-between his customers tore through the skin of an orange like a typewriter that’d replaced its shimmying bell-ladden ribbon with alternating potato and carrot peelers, an English-language translation of Ralph “Where’s My Middle Name?” Emerson pinning down a copy of Le Monde on the empty chair next to him, fragments of the latter text hinting at things that may or may not be of interest — Feen’s vision was only so good from two floors up (20/25, she said — I told her that was Air Force quality, which surprised her) — the police announcing they were hot on the trail of members of Los Zetas (of interest), the suspension of some referee named Chapron (not of interest), Heydar Moslehi’s attempts to resign (of interest), and an article called, “This Mountain Has Climbed Mt. Washington,” which was a bit of deliberately coded nonsense cueing Isabella to pack her bags and head for Cuba.

  11:52 pm  |   April 30 2011   |  2 notes