it soon emerges that Ant’s got a better color sense than Bee. Ant paints his ping-pong bat VIOLET, while Bee paints his a hideous BROWN! A brown bat hardly compares with a violet one, but nobody says anything.
I learned most of what I know about mixing colors from this book. But you have to feel sorry for Angela Banner. The woman never saw sunshine in her life! England had continuous cloud cover, according to Bee. No wonder Banner knew nothing about color—you’ve got to go to the French Riviera like Matisse, or just be Italian . The lack of sun explains the melancholy muted light in all Ant and Bee books—and why Ant and Bee have to create their own rainbow in the first place, painting that tire they find half-buried in the unreal earth.
GROUNDHOG DAY
LIST OF MELANCHOLY
– the pigeon couple on the parapet outside, one dying, the other standing helplessly by
– continuous cloud cover
– the penny-pinching English, who wouldn’t give Bee her art deco lamp
– artist-in-residence posts
– phonebooks
– the word, “churlish”—Bee had giggled when I said it might be churlish of me to refuse Chevron High’s invitation
– people who attempt to dissuade other people from using words like “churlish”
– balloon animals
– self-conscious ten-year-olds
– accordions
– crapholes of the famous (Bee had given me a coffee-table book for Christmas)
– whale eyes, cow eyes, elephant eyes
– Velcro
– returning to work after a period of intense inactivity
Living in New York you cannot fail to notice millions of people heading godknowswhere, and this cannot fail to fill you with melancholy. They eat, they sleep, they shit, they stink, they speak. Some speak only to themselves , and I was getting like that too. It was time to go back to work.
The girls in the office made a big fuss of me and my limp and my cane, and cooed over all my other assorted ailments too—I spared them the burned tongue but owned up to the sore thumb. Cheryl, our trainee nurse, said just thinking about my thumb injury made her feel faint. Some nurse! (In her defense, her professionalism was compromised by infatuation: she had a wholly unrequited crush on me.) Soon it felt like I hadn’t been away for a month at all, like I hadn’t been away for a moment . The receptionists, Jean and Cathy, saw me as a welcome depository for all the office gossip they’d been stewing over alone, and kept rushing into my office every ten minutes with a new ice pack and tidbit of news, keen to get me up to speed on my colleagues’ every bout of public drunkenness, their displays of impatience, the sniping, the griping, the fits of crying, the secretiveness. . . One intern had seen about ten patients in a row with his fly open, but it seemed to have been a genuine mistake, not a sign of some poignant aberration. Jean told me which patients had croaked, either before or after treatment; Cathy, that a sweet doorman had died in my absence, shot dead near his home trying to stop a fight; a fund had been set up for his wife and kids. Some workman had slipped on the newly waxed floor by the elevator, surfed on his stomach down the hallway and broken his nose, but he’d been offered a free nose-job to stop him suing.
All the stuff of office life. If it weren’t for the adoring Cheryl though, I might never have heard about the antics of Jed Stockton, MD, a preppy junior doctor who’d not only participated in a weekend of tag-teaming with a bunch of fellow med students, but filmed the whole episode on his cell phone, and was now offering to show it around the office to anyone who’d look. I asked Stockton to come into my office—but not in order to check out his directorial debut.
“How you doing, Harrison?”
“Who was the girl involved, Jed, may I ask?”
“You heard, huh?” He seemed pretty pleased with himself. “She’s a nurse. You know what they’re like. She doesn’t mind, she likes it! We’re always going over to
I learned most of what I know about mixing colors from this book. But you have to feel sorry for Angela Banner. The woman never saw sunshine in her life! England had continuous cloud cover, according to Bee. No wonder Banner knew nothing about color—you’ve got to go to the French Riviera like Matisse, or just be Italian . The lack of sun explains the melancholy muted light in all Ant and Bee books—and why Ant and Bee have to create their own rainbow in the first place, painting that tire they find half-buried in the unreal earth.
GROUNDHOG DAY
LIST OF MELANCHOLY
– the pigeon couple on the parapet outside, one dying, the other standing helplessly by
– continuous cloud cover
– the penny-pinching English, who wouldn’t give Bee her art deco lamp
– artist-in-residence posts
– phonebooks
– the word, “churlish”—Bee had giggled when I said it might be churlish of me to refuse Chevron High’s invitation
– people who attempt to dissuade other people from using words like “churlish”
– balloon animals
– self-conscious ten-year-olds
– accordions
– crapholes of the famous (Bee had given me a coffee-table book for Christmas)
– whale eyes, cow eyes, elephant eyes
– Velcro
– returning to work after a period of intense inactivity
Living in New York you cannot fail to notice millions of people heading godknowswhere, and this cannot fail to fill you with melancholy. They eat, they sleep, they shit, they stink, they speak. Some speak only to themselves , and I was getting like that too. It was time to go back to work.
The girls in the office made a big fuss of me and my limp and my cane, and cooed over all my other assorted ailments too—I spared them the burned tongue but owned up to the sore thumb. Cheryl, our trainee nurse, said just thinking about my thumb injury made her feel faint. Some nurse! (In her defense, her professionalism was compromised by infatuation: she had a wholly unrequited crush on me.) Soon it felt like I hadn’t been away for a month at all, like I hadn’t been away for a moment . The receptionists, Jean and Cathy, saw me as a welcome depository for all the office gossip they’d been stewing over alone, and kept rushing into my office every ten minutes with a new ice pack and tidbit of news, keen to get me up to speed on my colleagues’ every bout of public drunkenness, their displays of impatience, the sniping, the griping, the fits of crying, the secretiveness. . . One intern had seen about ten patients in a row with his fly open, but it seemed to have been a genuine mistake, not a sign of some poignant aberration. Jean told me which patients had croaked, either before or after treatment; Cathy, that a sweet doorman had died in my absence, shot dead near his home trying to stop a fight; a fund had been set up for his wife and kids. Some workman had slipped on the newly waxed floor by the elevator, surfed on his stomach down the hallway and broken his nose, but he’d been offered a free nose-job to stop him suing.
All the stuff of office life. If it weren’t for the adoring Cheryl though, I might never have heard about the antics of Jed Stockton, MD, a preppy junior doctor who’d not only participated in a weekend of tag-teaming with a bunch of fellow med students, but filmed the whole episode on his cell phone, and was now offering to show it around the office to anyone who’d look. I asked Stockton to come into my office—but not in order to check out his directorial debut.
“How you doing, Harrison?”
“Who was the girl involved, Jed, may I ask?”
“You heard, huh?” He seemed pretty pleased with himself. “She’s a nurse. You know what they’re like. She doesn’t mind, she likes it! We’re always going over to
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