A Very Short Note on Penguins
Seven years ago this week, I was as I am now: single and chaste. I had just had my heart broken by a much-too-young-for-me Oklahoma gal, and though I was a month away from meeting Victoria, I had no idea I would be ready for love again so swiftly. I wrote this on January 7, 2017, and Substack is a good place to deposit these brief snippets of not-quite-memoir.
I’m cleaning on a Saturday afternoon, door open to the cool sunshine. My landlord, Deva, pokes his head in, and we make small talk. I rent his tiny back house on Stanley Drive in the flats of Beverly Hills.
He pauses, then a query. "What happened to all the girls?"
Four months earlier, as I had handed him my September rent check, Deva warned me about the frequency, diversity, and volume of my nocturnal visitors. (I was having a busy summer, a season of frantic excess.) He wasn’t complaining about noise. He was concerned, he said, that I was depleting my essence.
"I'm taking a break." I will no more tell Deva why than I will this minute rise up en pointe and do Swan Lake in front of him.
My landlord nods. "Break? Break is good. Okay to take a long break."
I nod back at him, but in my mind, I'm taking a lovely walk alone far away.
"Penguins," he says. My landlord came to this country 40 years ago, but his Indian accent remains, and I don't quite understand him. I raise an eyebrow.
"You know, the penguins in the Antarctica? They only have the intercourse one time a year, just once, and that's enough."
This is a recommendation masquerading as observation, coated with empathy.
"I think I saw that in a movie," I reply, which isn't entirely true. I mean, I saw the Morgan Freeman-narrated documentary we all saw about penguins, but I don't remember anything about how often they copulated. I remember the heartbreak of the cracked egg.
Deva nods. "Yes. The sex once in a year, and then they are conserving their essence to fight the cold the rest of the time."
"That's good to know," I say. "Thank you." Los Angeles is not quite as cold as the Antarctic, but maybe he has a point.
We look at each other. The lovely walk in my head is now besides a nice river, where there are no penguins or exes or landlords.
Deva hesitates. One more thing. "I have extra lentils," he says; "you know, daal? You would like?"
"That would be wonderful," I say.