Maxine Kopsa:
Maybe this is the only way to sit down and write about Mardi: on the balcony of an overpriced villa overlooking the sea, with your own pool and deck chairs, naked.
The tiles of this pool are not soft, they don’t let your feet glide over them, covered by just the right amount of slime, these tiles are worn, the glaze is off most. It doesn’t hurt, it just feels tired.
If I look ahead of me, my glance avoiding the white stucco pillar holding up Mardi’s second floor terrace, I see, on the deck below our (our?) liver shaped pool a beige cement balcony–is it still a balcony if it’s so big?–with 3 blue adjustable lounge chairs, two greenish reclining bamboo fauteuils and a white plastic, nonadjustable recliner (the other 7 are piled on top of one another in the shadiest corner–we like sitting in the sun.)
Our neighbors have a better view. Mardi used to say: ‘They always do.’ I wonder: if one were able to purchase the most expensive villa here on the coast, money really no option, if on the day the deal closed one would sit satisfied on one’s very own pool deck and look right and see the pool deck of one’s new neighbor jutting out three extra feet and think, ‘I should have bought that one.’ Does everyone do that? Does everyone wonder as often as Mardi and I do, ‘have we made the right choice?’ Whenever we acquire something Mardi asks me: ‘Do we have the best one?’ And she plants a notion as beefy as viral advertising that squirms around in my brain forcing me to compare & evaluate –repeat–measure & gauge & resolve–repeat–Is there anything better out there? I wonder if it’s got to do with wanting to be not only own the best. I mean is it the same kind of habitual diligence that steers personal careers or is it different because when Mardi asks and I listen it’s applied to things?
Mardi tells anyone who will listen about routine diligence, ‘that skillful but slow moving “arranger” who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are nonetheless only too happy to discover at last.’ For without it, she warns, the klinking of the ice cubes in her sweaty gin and tonic harmoniously sounding along with her sneered counsel, ‘reduced to their own devices, our minds would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.’
