“Really? Wow, that sounds so interesting!” he said, and winked. “I mean, that sounds so cool!”

What the heck, I wondered? Don’t lots of people in New York work for financial institutions? “Well, you know, it’s a job,” I said. “It’s O.K. …. I guess.”

“I’ll bet!” the man hooted, sort of shaking his head. I looked down at my drink for a moment and furrowed my brow, confused and slightly saddened. After a minute I had to ask: “Sorry, why exactly does my job seem so interesting to you?”

He did a kind of Groucho Marx thing with his eyebrows.

“Well, I’ve never met anyone before who works in a head shop.”

I definitely felt I was letting him down when I explained that no, in fact, I am not a head-shop shopgirl dusting off glass bongs and restocking the Bamboo rolling papers. Rather, I am an employee at a midtown hedge fund, working in the back office. I suppose I could have then divulged that I am also a poet, but I felt this second job description was too much to explain. Why would a poet work at a hedge fund? I don’t quite understand how it had happened myself.

The exchange depressed me. Too demoralized to continue, I slipped off my stool and made my way home, wondering who was I anyway—and where did I work?

Another hedge-fund poet, Katy Lederer, and I had argued back and forth for years over how best to protect the poetic soul while simultaneously sustaining house and home. For months we sparred, each offering up our own predictable arguments.

“You must be free!” I said, in my terrifying, exhausting poverty. “Poets are meant to be afraid in body and spirit! How else are we to access elemental states of being?”

Katy said: “You are so wrong. Get a steady job and you’ll be freer to write more.”

I hissed back: “Don’t you know that the bourgeois life makes one selfish and weak? You want to be a cappuccino-guzzling, complacent scribbler beholden to society’s most punishing and artificial scale: the accruement of legal tender?”

“You’ll see,” she said.

Katy was right: Turns out one can’t make edible pies from the fruits of one’s imagination. Real life eventually crowded in, and even my best attempts at denial began to fail: how to keep up with that pesky mosquito cloud of monthly bills, for example? Who was going to wave away credit-card debt so old it had turned to hard fat? How was a body to get her hands on one of those gorgeous three-inch-thick Ralph Lauren Italian harness leather belts?

As I contemplated actually living the dream of solvency, I wondered if it might not be an interesting state to investigate poetically. So I signed on and waited for something to happen. As the steady income began to blunt some of my metaphysical terrors, I realized that, in fact, interesting corporate, technical and financial terminology had begun to creep into my poems: terms like arbitrage, efficient frontier, extreme value and standard deviation. These terms sounded so “human condition.” But how far had I now “deviated” from an understanding of my own “extreme value?” Was “solvency” a more “efficient frontier” than the backwaters of my creative class’ terminal case of “distressed debt?”

The other day I met another poet friend, Geoffrey Nutter (or “My Cat Geoffrey,” as I always think of him, this term of affection coming from the title of a poem called “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey,” written by the quite insane but delightful 18th-century poet Christopher Smart), at the Edison lunchroom on 47th Street. We convene once a month in this time capsule of a luncheonette to talk about beauty, suffering and poetry-world gossip, never in that order. This man is, without a doubt, one of the finest young poets writing in America. He works 9 to 5 in the heart of Times Square at a media company that once trafficked in rock ’n’ roll videos.

After our matzo-ball soup, we walked out onto 42nd Street; I was holding his newest book and Geoffrey was clutching my chapbook, each artifact the result of years of work, loving attention to each syllable. We were dwarfed by the towering screens and billboards and the giant tap-dancing Mr. Peanut with his monocle and top hat—all evidence of the “real” world for which we labor, yet about which we feel so ambivalent. What does any of this have to do with us, we wondered?

We parted under the giant Toys “R” Us big-eyed, blinking, celluloid baby giraffe, promising to meet again the following week. In our good-bye send-off, I said: “Ah, Geoffrey! Some page of figures to be filed away; / —Till elevators drop us from our day!” (Hart Crane.) My Cat Geoffrey countered: “ The world is too much with us!” (Wordsworth.) Then we both wove our way through the midtown crowds, back to our office buildings to take the elevators up, up, up. We both returned to our jobs, but not to our work.

The other day, a woman I had just met asked that question I find so hard to answer, at least clearly: What kind of work do I do?

Again with many marbles in my mouth, I answered: “Hedge fund.”

“Lucky you,” she said with a smirk. “That must be nice.”

“Nice? “ I asked, sensing something coming.

“Well, maybe having a trust fund comes with its disadvantages, but I’ve always been jealous of people who don’t have to work.”

Next time I’m going to just tell an inquisitor that I’m a poet and see what kind of reaction that elicits. Something tells me it won’t be jealousy—or unbridled enthusiasm. But despite the negligible compensation, I truly believe that poets have the best job, better than any Trump apprentice or Goldman Sachs V.P. could ever dream of. I refer to William Butler Yeats and his great poem “Adam’s Curse,” which was framed and hung in my family’s kitchen: “ … to articulate sweet sounds together / Is to work harder than all these, and yet / Be thought an idler by the noisy set / Of bankers, schoolmasters and clergymen / The martyrs call the world.”

“Really? Wow, that sounds so interesting!” he said, and winked. “I mean, that sounds so cool!”

What the heck, I wondered? Don’t lots of people in New York work for financial institutions? “Well, you know, it’s a job,” I said. “It’s O.K. …. I guess.”

“I’ll bet!” the man hooted, sort of shaking his head. I looked down at my drink for a moment and furrowed my brow, confused and slightly saddened. After a minute I had to ask: “Sorry, why exactly does my job seem so interesting to you?”

He did a kind of Groucho Marx thing with his eyebrows.

“Well, I’ve never met anyone before who works in a head shop.”

I definitely felt I was letting him down when I explained that no, in fact, I am not a head-shop shopgirl dusting off glass bongs and restocking the Bamboo rolling papers. Rather, I am an employee at a midtown hedge fund, working in the back office. I suppose I could have then divulged that I am also a poet, but I felt this second job description was too much to explain. Why would a poet work at a hedge fund? I don’t quite understand how it had happened myself.

The exchange depressed me. Too demoralized to continue, I slipped off my stool and made my way home, wondering who was I anyway—and where did I work?

Another hedge-fund poet, Katy Lederer, and I had argued back and forth for years over how best to protect the poetic soul while simultaneously sustaining house and home. For months we sparred, each offering up our own predictable arguments.

“You must be free!” I said, in my terrifying, exhausting poverty. “Poets are meant to be afraid in body and spirit! How else are we to access elemental states of being?”

Katy said: “You are so wrong. Get a steady job and you’ll be freer to write more.”

I hissed back: “Don’t you know that the bourgeois life makes one selfish and weak? You want to be a cappuccino-guzzling, complacent scribbler beholden to society’s most punishing and artificial scale: the accruement of legal tender?”

“You’ll see,” she said.

Katy was right: Turns out one can’t make edible pies from the fruits of one’s imagination. Real life eventually crowded in, and even my best attempts at denial began to fail: how to keep up with that pesky mosquito cloud of monthly bills, for example? Who was going to wave away credit-card debt so old it had turned to hard fat? How was a body to get her hands on one of those gorgeous three-inch-thick Ralph Lauren Italian harness leather belts?

As I contemplated actually living the dream of solvency, I wondered if it might not be an interesting state to investigate poetically. So I signed on and waited for something to happen. As the steady income began to blunt some of my metaphysical terrors, I realized that, in fact, interesting corporate, technical and financial terminology had begun to creep into my poems: terms like arbitrage, efficient frontier, extreme value and standard deviation. These terms sounded so “human condition.” But how far had I now “deviated” from an understanding of my own “extreme value?” Was “solvency” a more “efficient frontier” than the backwaters of my creative class’ terminal case of “distressed debt?”

The other day I met another poet friend, Geoffrey Nutter (or “My Cat Geoffrey,” as I always think of him, this term of affection coming from the title of a poem called “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey,” written by the quite insane but delightful 18th-century poet Christopher Smart), at the Edison lunchroom on 47th Street. We convene once a month in this time capsule of a luncheonette to talk about beauty, suffering and poetry-world gossip, never in that order. This man is, without a doubt, one of the finest young poets writing in America. He works 9 to 5 in the heart of Times Square at a media company that once trafficked in rock ’n’ roll videos.

After our matzo-ball soup, we walked out onto 42nd Street; I was holding his newest book and Geoffrey was clutching my chapbook, each artifact the result of years of work, loving attention to each syllable. We were dwarfed by the towering screens and billboards and the giant tap-dancing Mr. Peanut with his monocle and top hat—all evidence of the “real” world for which we labor, yet about which we feel so ambivalent. What does any of this have to do with us, we wondered?

We parted under the giant Toys “R” Us big-eyed, blinking, celluloid baby giraffe, promising to meet again the following week. In our good-bye send-off, I said: “Ah, Geoffrey! Some page of figures to be filed away; / —Till elevators drop us from our day!” (Hart Crane.) My Cat Geoffrey countered: “The world is too much with us!” (Wordsworth.) Then we both wove our way through the midtown crowds, back to our office buildings to take the elevators up, up, up. We both returned to our jobs, but not to our work.

The other day, a woman I had just met asked that question I find so hard to answer, at least clearly: What kind of work do I do?

Again with many marbles in my mouth, I answered: “Hedge fund.”

“Lucky you,” she said with a smirk. “That must be nice.”

“Nice? “ I asked, sensing something coming.

“Well, maybe having a trust fund comes with its disadvantages, but I’ve always been jealous of people who don’t have to work.”

Next time I’m going to just tell an inquisitor that I’m a poet and see what kind of reaction that elicits. Something tells me it won’t be jealousy—or unbridled enthusiasm. But despite the negligible compensation, I truly believe that poets have the best job, better than any Trump apprentice or Goldman Sachs V.P. could ever dream of. I refer to William Butler Yeats and his great poem “Adam’s Curse,” which was framed and hung in my family’s kitchen: “ … to articulate sweet sounds together / Is to work harder than all these, and yet / Be thought an idler by the noisy set / Of bankers, schoolmasters and clergymen / The martyrs call the world.”

For the last six years, Nicolas and Louis have driven down from Montreal to set up their ephemeral tree sale outside the CVS on Ninth Street and spread their jostling wares across our otherwise dreary sidewalk. They come with no family associations, no sentimental hauntings from Christmases past. Rather, the two simply come bearing their slamming French-speaking selves and a sea of naked evergreens. Angels, rejoice!

Like the holidays themselves, the Canadians’ arrival always takes me by surprise. I was lucky this year and spotted them early. After attending a homeless-and-strays Thanksgiving gathering the night before, I had woken with a Beaujolais hangover and a full-blown case of holiday ennui. Venturing out, I saw that all municipal and retail Christmas decorations had gone up on Seventh Avenue overnight. Jesus Christ, I thought, without a moment to recover from Thanksgiving, here we go galloping straight towards the season’s gaudy heart. I trudged towards Fifth Avenue and then—miracle of miracles—I caught sight and scent of a freshly slaughtered keep of pines.

Nicolas and Louis, Canadians to the core, had rigged a hockey goal out of a bucket and were shooting perfect shots, filling the bucket up with random chips of bark. Neither had changed a jot since last year: Louis, tall and dark, a Colin Farrell type; and Nicolas (sigh) a dreamy combination of a young Harrison Ford and a manlier Jude Law.

“Bonjour!” I waved and quickly ran away.

“Bonjour!” they called after me.

Word quickly spread the two were back. I received an e-mail from my friend Todd that read: “My wife just told me the Canadians are back. Look out.”

My upstairs neighbor Tim bought a tree from them days later, and it was all he could do to hide his elation at having purchased his first-ever adult Christmas tree from such charming customer-service representatives.

“It’s insane. Why aren’t they Armani models? Those boys are in the wrong business,” he said.

“Let’s not give them any ideas. I want this tradition to last,” I said.

Nicolas and Louis have an agreement with CVS, and so the two have happily returned to the same spot year after year, like migrating ducks. They chose to set up in one of the less gentrified stretches of this otherwise tony neighborhood, sort of on the slippery slope downwards towards Fifth Avenue and, ultimately, the poisoned Gowanus Canal. But here the sidewalks are ample, and the stand acts as a cattle chute for shoppers frequenting C-town, one of the neighborhood’s larger supermarkets. I’d wager that legions of Park Slope moms get a secret shot of Christmas mirth as they push Junior in his S.U.V.-sized stroller towards C-town’s automatic doors. I know I do—nothing like the gentle visages of these Christmas angels to make picking up a quart of milk a minor cause for celebration.

Last Sunday was a busy tree-buying day, and Nicolas and Louis were in hot demand. Kids spun around, barely able to contain themselves. One little boy broke out into a very adult-looking rendition of air guitar when his family’s tree was finally roped to the roof of their car. All afternoon, the two woodsmen pulled out tree after tree, holding them at arm’s length, spinning them around like girls in Prada cocktail dresses. Satie played on the van’s radio. Some buyers opted to have their trees wrapped up in the scary Christmas-tree netting/bondage machine.

This year, I screwed up my courage to speak to the two directly instead of just stealing appreciative glances and trying to drum up questions about proper Christmas-tree care. I learned the answers to many of the questions we all had: Do you sleep in the van? How do you avoid dying of asphyxiation? How do you eat? Are you really open 24 hours? Do you grow these trees from seedlings yourselves in the great wild woods of Canada?

“We are open 24 hours, seven days a week,” verified Nicolas. “At night, someone has to watch the trees.” For showers, there is the nearby YMCA. Asphyxiation is avoided with a cracked window. The trees are grown in Nova Scotia by strangers, not in Quebec by Louis and Nicolas. For cuisine, there’s take-out and two conveniently located French or French-sounding establishments to stave off homesickness, Delices de Paris bakery and the neighborhood bar, Barbès.

As we chatted, a man walked by, punched his fist into the air and shouted:

“Vive la différence!”

“Oh, yes—and people come by to practice their French,” Nicolas smiled, giving the man a friendly nod.

It must be said that the Canadians’ tree stand is most lovely at night, when the bright lights strung overhead are turned on and the surrounding sidewalk is dark, blocking out the street’s gloomy pet shop, dental clinics and podiatrists’ offices. Over 300 Nova Scotian pines—albeit pines that are slowly dying and oozing gum from their stumps—create an enchanted forest of sorts right there on the pavement. While it may not be as picturesque as driving a horse-drawn sleigh through a living forest, Nicolas and Louis are there to add a dash of beauty to the tree-buying experience. As happens every year, my threats not to celebrate the holiday in any way, shape or form dissolve once I enter their magical woodland.

Last night, Louis helped me pick out one of the scragglier Charlie Brown Christmas–type trees available, one that might never have found a home otherwise. It was not entirely clear to me whether what I purchased was an actual tree or maybe the sawed-off top of one, but it smelled good and would hold a few bulbs. Nicolas helped secure the Christmas-tree stand with its impossibly complex system of screws and vices, a tool that comes with bad memories of my father cursing Christmas and Christmas-tree-stand makers and God knows who else as he succumbed to driving nails into the walls and stringing wires at random angles like a spider spinning a web on LSD. I lofted my little tree over my head and carried it home and up the stairs to my apartment. Once I had it in place, I noticed that the tree listed dementedly to one side and had a gaping wound between its lower branches. It looked a little bit like the piney offspring of two alcoholic parents. But with some white lights and a few ornaments, it became very beautiful very quickly.

Like St. Nick himself, our two Christmas-tree salesmen quietly steal away on Dec. 25 and drive back to their own families to celebrate the holiday. They’ll be flush from their month’s long, hard work jamming the Christmas spirit into our urban hearts. I could never tell them what part they play in keeping the holidays from being a blinding snowstorm of pain, or how they help prevent my fear of the holiday from separating me from its real pleasures. In fact, these last few evenings I’ve found myself humming, “O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, how lovely are your branches … ” to myself and my little deformed tree. Thank you, Nicolas and Louis, for bringing Christmas to Park Slope in a sane and sexy package. See you next year.

For the last six years, Nicolas and Louis have driven down from Montreal to set up their ephemeral tree sale outside the CVS on Ninth Street and spread their jostling wares across our otherwise dreary sidewalk. They come with no family associations, no sentimental hauntings from Christmases past. Rather, the two simply come bearing their slamming French-speaking selves and a sea of naked evergreens. Angels, rejoice!

Like the holidays themselves, the Canadians’ arrival always takes me by surprise. I was lucky this year and spotted them early. After attending a homeless-and-strays Thanksgiving gathering the night before, I had woken with a Beaujolais hangover and a full-blown case of holiday ennui. Venturing out, I saw that all municipal and retail Christmas decorations had gone up on Seventh Avenue overnight. Jesus Christ, I thought, without a moment to recover from Thanksgiving, here we go galloping straight towards the season’s gaudy heart. I trudged towards Fifth Avenue and then—miracle of miracles—I caught sight and scent of a freshly slaughtered keep of pines.

Nicolas and Louis, Canadians to the core, had rigged a hockey goal out of a bucket and were shooting perfect shots, filling the bucket up with random chips of bark. Neither had changed a jot since last year: Louis, tall and dark, a Colin Farrell type; and Nicolas (sigh) a dreamy combination of a young Harrison Ford and a manlier Jude Law.

“Bonjour!” I waved and quickly ran away.

“Bonjour!” they called after me.

Word quickly spread the two were back. I received an e-mail from my friend Todd that read: “My wife just told me the Canadians are back. Look out.”

My upstairs neighbor Tim bought a tree from them days later, and it was all he could do to hide his elation at having purchased his first-ever adult Christmas tree from such charming customer-service representatives.

“It’s insane. Why aren’t they Armani models? Those boys are in the wrong business,” he said.

“Let’s not give them any ideas. I want this tradition to last,” I said.

Nicolas and Louis have an agreement with CVS, and so the two have happily returned to the same spot year after year, like migrating ducks. They chose to set up in one of the less gentrified stretches of this otherwise tony neighborhood, sort of on the slippery slope downwards towards Fifth Avenue and, ultimately, the poisoned Gowanus Canal. But here the sidewalks are ample, and the stand acts as a cattle chute for shoppers frequenting C-town, one of the neighborhood’s larger supermarkets. I’d wager that legions of Park Slope moms get a secret shot of Christmas mirth as they push Junior in his S.U.V.-sized stroller towards C-town’s automatic doors. I know I do—nothing like the gentle visages of these Christmas angels to make picking up a quart of milk a minor cause for celebration.

Last Sunday was a busy tree-buying day, and Nicolas and Louis were in hot demand. Kids spun around, barely able to contain themselves. One little boy broke out into a very adult-looking rendition of air guitar when his family’s tree was finally roped to the roof of their car. All afternoon, the two woodsmen pulled out tree after tree, holding them at arm’s length, spinning them around like girls in Prada cocktail dresses. Satie played on the van’s radio. Some buyers opted to have their trees wrapped up in the scary Christmas-tree netting/bondage machine.

This year, I screwed up my courage to speak to the two directly instead of just stealing appreciative glances and trying to drum up questions about proper Christmas-tree care. I learned the answers to many of the questions we all had: Do you sleep in the van? How do you avoid dying of asphyxiation? How do you eat? Are you really open 24 hours? Do you grow these trees from seedlings yourselves in the great wild woods of Canada?

“We are open 24 hours, seven days a week,” verified Nicolas. “At night, someone has to watch the trees.” For showers, there is the nearby YMCA. Asphyxiation is avoided with a cracked window. The trees are grown in Nova Scotia by strangers, not in Quebec by Louis and Nicolas. For cuisine, there’s take-out and two conveniently located French or French-sounding establishments to stave off homesickness, Delices de Paris bakery and the neighborhood bar, Barbès.

As we chatted, a man walked by, punched his fist into the air and shouted:

“ Vive la différence!”

“Oh, yes—and people come by to practice their French,” Nicolas smiled, giving the man a friendly nod.

It must be said that the Canadians’ tree stand is most lovely at night, when the bright lights strung overhead are turned on and the surrounding sidewalk is dark, blocking out the street’s gloomy pet shop, dental clinics and podiatrists’ offices. Over 300 Nova Scotian pines—albeit pines that are slowly dying and oozing gum from their stumps—create an enchanted forest of sorts right there on the pavement. While it may not be as picturesque as driving a horse-drawn sleigh through a living forest, Nicolas and Louis are there to add a dash of beauty to the tree-buying experience. As happens every year, my threats not to celebrate the holiday in any way, shape or form dissolve once I enter their magical woodland.

Last night, Louis helped me pick out one of the scragglier Charlie Brown Christmas–type trees available, one that might never have found a home otherwise. It was not entirely clear to me whether what I purchased was an actual tree or maybe the sawed-off top of one, but it smelled good and would hold a few bulbs. Nicolas helped secure the Christmas-tree stand with its impossibly complex system of screws and vices, a tool that comes with bad memories of my father cursing Christmas and Christmas-tree-stand makers and God knows who else as he succumbed to driving nails into the walls and stringing wires at random angles like a spider spinning a web on LSD. I lofted my little tree over my head and carried it home and up the stairs to my apartment. Once I had it in place, I noticed that the tree listed dementedly to one side and had a gaping wound between its lower branches. It looked a little bit like the piney offspring of two alcoholic parents. But with some white lights and a few ornaments, it became very beautiful very quickly.

Like St. Nick himself, our two Christmas-tree salesmen quietly steal away on Dec. 25 and drive back to their own families to celebrate the holiday. They’ll be flush from their month’s long, hard work jamming the Christmas spirit into our urban hearts. I could never tell them what part they play in keeping the holidays from being a blinding snowstorm of pain, or how they help prevent my fear of the holiday from separating me from its real pleasures. In fact, these last few evenings I’ve found myself humming, “O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, how lovely are your branches … ” to myself and my little deformed tree. Thank you, Nicolas and Louis, for bringing Christmas to Park Slope in a sane and sexy package. See you next year.

“Excuse me,” I said. “That's cute, but what is it?”

“It's an aboriginal fox,” the man answered, trying to pull it closer to him. The fox dug its paws in and balked at the tug, twisting its head back and forth.

"He's not much fun to walk, though,” the man sighed as he continued tugging. “He's afraid of birds and trees and is constantly looking for cover.”

The fox was skulking as low as it could get to the ground, desperate to find a place to hide from the sky. It was hideous to see, really; the little fox in a sea of green, no hedges in sight, desperate for a way out.

"Where did you get him?” I asked, though I felt I already knew the answer.

There was only one place I could think of that would sell such a creature to a city dweller. I call that place the House of Horrors.

I first noticed the store one Easter about eight years ago, when its large window was verily dripping with pastel-colored, snail-faced parakeets. They hung upside down from the fluorescent light fixtures. They grouped and massed off each other in literal chains, piggybacking in long strings like bats do deep in the far reaches of dank caves. There were hundreds of them, possibly a thousand, crawling all over each other, squeaking and peeping, creating the illusion of a churning, kaleidoscopic pastel wall. That window held an image of reckless fecundity, of matter propagating matter to a meaningless result. It was simply and devastatingly a vision of a world without end. The brevity of their lives (pet-shop parakeets are a dime a dozen) underscored the larger thematic idea at play: the corruptibility of all flesh. It took my breath away.

The window was my first indication that the pet-shop owner was more than the keeper and purveyor of animals. I began to feel that, in fact, he may well be the leading dramaturge of post-postmodern window design, so powerful were the images of existential nausea and thwarted ambition he created. The dreary surroundings (the shop is located in the lower-rent section of Park Slope, where many things one sees are depressing) compounded the piece's power. The parakeet performance ran for weeks. Finally, in an effort to alleviate the pressure I felt carrying around this image alone, I brought my pal Levine there one night to act as witness and reality tester. I advised him first to brace himself; then together we turned to watch the small birds squirm under the unforgiving light.

“Have you ever seen anything like this in your whole life?” I asked, my eyes wide.

“Oh God,” Levine whispered beside me in the semi-dark.

“It's Swiftian,” I said.

“Beckettian,” added Levine. “Only more meaningless. Please, I need to go lie down now. I really wish you hadn't shown me that. De-press-ing.”

Later that spring, the owner upped the ante by posting a Day-Glo sign in the window that read: “Free Parakeet with Purchase of Every Cage.” Ah-ha! I liked this abrupt shift of attention to the cage itself. This was an ingenious move, really—a brilliant aid for the densest part of his audience, and for those who knew better, a cool nod to Kafka's line “A cage went in search of a bird.” Perhaps he was also playing with the Gnostic idea of the human soul imprisoned in the “cage” of the body, or was attempting a sociological comment on how contemporary man is “trapped” by the many confines he enters into willingly: run-of-the-mill enslavement to corporate structures, for example, or even (depending on the administration) the federal government. As in so much of conceptual art, this stuff could be unpacked in a variety of ways.

Depending on how you looked at it, the parakeets weren't the worst—or the best—of it. One fall, one stunning window offered up a single giant turtle. His water bowl was a mossy, scummy mess; a lump of desiccated, graying hamburger meat sat in his food bowl. He stood there, nobly, not moving. He was a mailed monster, a crusted, reptilian footstool, an elemental, amphibious Buddha. He looked like he'd crawled out of the center of the earth. When I looked closer, I saw that he had a glob of hamburger meat on his head that he could neither feel nor remove. Our eyes met. He looked back at me from the bottom of his decades-old heart. My God, I thought, this guy is a genius! A lesser artist would have mined the whole “essential loneliness of existence” idea, but not this one. The key was the placement of the meat. Who among us has not felt such a correlative sting of shame? How often do we look the fool to everyone but our own selves? Viewing this turtle felt like looking into a mirror. Bravo!

April is (and was again this year) the cruelest month at the House of Horrors. For Easter, the window was full of the most adorable dwarf bunnies you've ever seen. It was bunnies, bunnies, bunnies all day, all night: Bunnies sleeping on top each other in fuzzy heaps, bunnies snoozing in the pellet dish, bunnies kicking over the water bowl, bunnies cleaning their darling bunny faces with quickly licked paws, then glancing their short dwarf ears with rapid swipes. Famously susceptible to respiratory disease, bunnies for sale (like their fellow actors, the parakeets) have a short shelf life, and so it was with a mix of relief and concern that I watched their numbers dwindle, either by death or by purchase. As their numbers dropped, what had seemed like another ode to fecundity was subtly changing into something else. Like a masterpiece of earth art, I sensed that the idea of erosion and time were important to its meaning.

Just last week, as I walked past the place (with eyes averted, since I've learned my threshold), I ran smack into Levine humping his groceries up the slope of our neighborhood's name.

“Shall we?” he asked, and we moved closer to the window.

“Yeah, I've been watching this one unfold … its meaning is in flux—contingent on the needs of local shoppers and the integrity of the each rabbit's immune system,” I said.

One impossibly small bunny froze as we approached and now appeared to watch us out of the top corner of its beady eye. So paralyzed with fear was this rabbit that it seemed to be holding its breath.

"I think we're giving it a heart attack,” I said.

Levine's eyes had drifted to the sign, once again back up in the window, though there wasn't a bird in sight.

“He's got that sign up again,” he said. “I've been thinking it would make a great title for my memoir.”

Together, we grew silent and pensive in front of the window.

“So, honestly, what do you think he's after with this one?” I asked. “A play on ‘So many are called, but few are chosen'?”

But Levine was lost in thought. I felt he was suddenly very far away. He eyed one of the slumped-over critters closely.

“Have you tried the rabbit at Al di la?” he asked. He seemed to be talking to himself. “Braised in veal stock, served with black olives over a bed of polenta. Both a leg and a breast. Truly delicious.”

“Et tu, Brute?” I thought. “Ah, Levine! Ah, humanity!”

"Excuse me," I said. "That's cute, but what is it?"

"It's an aboriginal fox," the man answered, trying to pull it closer to him. The fox dug its paws in and balked at the tug, twisting its head back and forth.

"He's not much fun to walk, though," the man sighed as he continued tugging. "He's afraid of birds and trees and is constantly looking for cover."

The fox was skulking as low as it could get to the ground, desperate to find a place to hide from the sky. It was hideous to see, really; the little fox in a sea of green, no hedges in sight, desperate for a way out.

"Where did you get him?" I asked, though I felt I already knew the answer.

There was only one place I could think of that would sell such a creature to a city dweller. I call that place the House of Horrors.

I first noticed the store one Easter about eight years ago, when its large window was verily dripping with pastel-colored, snail-faced parakeets. They hung upside down from the fluorescent light fixtures. They grouped and massed off each other in literal chains, piggybacking in long strings like bats do deep in the far reaches of dank caves. There were hundreds of them, possibly a thousand, crawling all over each other, squeaking and peeping, creating the illusion of a churning, kaleidoscopic pastel wall. That window held an image of reckless fecundity, of matter propagating matter to a meaningless result. It was simply and devastatingly a vision of a world without end. The brevity of their lives (pet-shop parakeets are a dime a dozen) underscored the larger thematic idea at play: the corruptibility of all flesh. It took my breath away.

The window was my first indication that the pet-shop owner was more than the keeper and purveyor of animals. I began to feel that, in fact, he may well be the leading dramaturge of post-postmodern window design, so powerful were the images of existential nausea and thwarted ambition he created. The dreary surroundings (the shop is located in the lower-rent section of Park Slope, where many things one sees are depressing) compounded the piece's power. The parakeet performance ran for weeks. Finally, in an effort to alleviate the pressure I felt carrying around this image alone, I brought my pal Levine there one night to act as witness and reality tester. I advised him first to brace himself; then together we turned to watch the small birds squirm under the unforgiving light.

"Have you ever seen anything like this in your whole life?" I asked, my eyes wide.

"Oh God," Levine whispered beside me in the semi-dark.

"It's Swiftian," I said.

"Beckettian," added Levine. "Only more meaningless. Please, I need to go lie down now. I really wish you hadn't shown me that. De- press-ing."

Later that spring, the owner upped the ante by posting a Day-Glo sign in the window that read: "Free Parakeet with Purchase of Every Cage." Ah-ha! I liked this abrupt shift of attention to the cage itself. This was an ingenious move, really-a brilliant aid for the densest part of his audience, and for those who knew better, a cool nod to Kafka's line "A cage went in search of a bird." Perhaps he was also playing with the Gnostic idea of the human soul imprisoned in the "cage" of the body, or was attempting a sociological comment on how contemporary man is "trapped" by the many confines he enters into willingly: run-of-the-mill enslavement to corporate structures, for example, or even (depending on the administration) the federal government. As in so much of conceptual art, this stuff could be unpacked in a variety of ways.

Depending on how you looked at it, the parakeets weren't the worst-or the best-of it. One fall, one stunning window offered up a single giant turtle. His water bowl was a mossy, scummy mess; a lump of desiccated, graying hamburger meat sat in his food bowl. He stood there, nobly, not moving. He was a mailed monster, a crusted, reptilian footstool, an elemental, amphibious Buddha. He looked like he'd crawled out of the center of the earth. When I looked closer, I saw that he had a glob of hamburger meat on his head that he could neither feel nor remove. Our eyes met. He looked back at me from the bottom of his decades-old heart. My God, I thought, this guy is a genius! A lesser artist would have mined the whole "essential loneliness of existence" idea, but not this one. The key was the placement of the meat. Who among us has not felt such a correlative sting of shame? How often do we look the fool to everyone but our own selves? Viewing this turtle felt like looking into a mirror. Bravo!

April is (and was again this year) the cruelest month at the House of Horrors. For Easter, the window was full of the most adorable dwarf bunnies you've ever seen. It was bunnies, bunnies, bunnies all day, all night: Bunnies sleeping on top each other in fuzzy heaps, bunnies snoozing in the pellet dish, bunnies kicking over the water bowl, bunnies cleaning their darling bunny faces with quickly licked paws, then glancing their short dwarf ears with rapid swipes. Famously susceptible to respiratory disease, bunnies for sale (like their fellow actors, the parakeets) have a short shelf life, and so it was with a mix of relief and concern that I watched their numbers dwindle, either by death or by purchase. As their numbers dropped, what had seemed like another ode to fecundity was subtly changing into something else. Like a masterpiece of earth art, I sensed that the idea of erosion and time were important to its meaning.

Just last week, as I walked past the place (with eyes averted, since I've learned my threshold), I ran smack into Levine humping his groceries up the slope of our neighborhood's name.

"Shall we?" he asked, and we moved closer to the window.

"Yeah, I've been watching this one unfold … its meaning is in flux-contingent on the needs of local shoppers and the integrity of the each rabbit's immune system," I said.

One impossibly small bunny froze as we approached and now appeared to watch us out of the top corner of its beady eye. So paralyzed with fear was this rabbit that it seemed to be holding its breath.

"I think we're giving it a heart attack," I said.

Levine's eyes had drifted to the sign, once again back up in the window, though there wasn't a bird in sight.

"He's got that sign up again," he said. "I've been thinking it would make a great title for my memoir."

Together, we grew silent and pensive in front of the window.

"So, honestly, what do you think he's after with this one?" I asked. "A play on 'So many are called, but few are chosen'?"

But Levine was lost in thought. I felt he was suddenly very far away. He eyed one of the slumped-over critters closely.

"Have you tried the rabbit at Al di la?" he asked. He seemed to be talking to himself. "Braised in veal stock, served with black olives over a bed of polenta. Both a leg and a breast. Truly delicious."

" Et tu, Brute?" I thought. "Ah, Levine! Ah, humanity!"

So I have started dating, or trying to date, or trying to open my mind to the idea of dating. Because of my self-imposed solitude these last few years, a recent dating-related incident made it clear to me that I have lost all of my seductive techniques. Or that I have finally lost my mind. Either/or. In the confusion of first encounters, I've become a sort of compulsive blurter of my psyche's darkest realms. What my friends find amusing-my interest in bizarre birth defects and forensic crime shows-may be coming off as a behavioral problem to the men I meet.

For example, after meeting a man at a friend's art opening, I crafted an e-mail that I didn't send, for reasons that will become crystal clear in a moment. After we were introduced at the event, I was delighted to find out that this man was a doctor-a radiologist, to be specific-and so might possibly be knowledgeable about the weird medical things that interest me: vestigial tails, for example, or the full rainbow of craniofacial disorders. I quickly raised what I thought were promising conversational topics: a TV show I watched last year called 101 Things Found in the Human Body; a recent case of child abuse where the children were reduced to eating the windowsills; and the case of man who was considered "lucky" after falling from a roof holding a nail gun which shot six long nails into his head.

"Wow!" I said, "Imagine that C.A.T. scan!"

A sardonic half-smile indicated that the doctor was willing to play this game. This man knew the scientific names for my favorite medical oddities. Brainless babies? Anencephaly. The eating of non-nutritive matter? Pica.

During our conversation, the doctor kept looking over my head as I piled on the questions: "Are tumors of hair and teeth actually absorbed fetal twins?" and "Do you know anything about the connection between dwarfism and polydactylism?" At a certain point, I registered that he wasn't meeting my eye and thought: "How sweet! He doesn't want to appear interested. Men are such babies!" I chattered on: "What about the two-headed baby, where the second head's lips mimicked nursing and its eyes blinked? Really, what was Nature thinking?"

Finally he said, "Look, sorry, I'm 20 minutes late for dinner at my cousin's. Nice to meet you." He handed me his card-maybe in case I felt I ever needed a full body scan. After he edged away, I looked behind me and saw there was a clock on the back wall. He hadn't been blinded by my conversational effervescence; he had been waiting for a chance to break away.

When I mentioned this encounter and the tragic placement of the clock to my friend and confidant, Mark, he encouraged me to ask the doctor out for a drink anyway.

"Just ask him. Send an e-mail. What is there to lose?" He added, "I mean, at this point."

Here is the e-mail I did not send. Names have been changed to protect the identity of the participants-except, of course, for my own:

"Hello Bob,

It was nice to meet you a few weeks back at Mary's opening. I very much enjoyed our discussion of people who ingest pounds of nickels and Barbie doll heads and those tumors made of hair and teeth. I'd like to continue the conversation if you have the inclination. I actually looked at a C.A.T. scan of my father's brain last Saturday. He had a massive intracranial stroke (he did not survive, sadly, though in the end this is a merciful thing) and the E.R. doctor wanted to show it to me. You could explain to me how those images work. It was very beautiful-very run-of-the-mill as far as scans go, I am sure, but it was moving to see inside my father's brain, something I have been trying to do without the benefit of science for about 37 years.

"Let me know if you'd like to meet."

Interesting ploy, no? I sent the e-mail to Mark for vetting, and he called almost immediately (I had barely hit "send" before the phone rang) to say that under no circumstances was I to send that e-mail-not only did I sound disturbed, but it was also unclear if I was asking this man out for a date, consulting him for medical advice or requesting an interview.

"Darling," he said, "I had no idea you were so inept. How did this happen? You are an intelligent woman. Get a grip. Next time, don't launch into the full arsenal of morbid interests, O.K.?"

"But they aren't morbid interests," I said. "They are simply interesting anomalous situations that can occur at any time to anyone. Fetal-twin tumors are not a joke."

"Trust me. Now delete that thing and try again."

Mark was right. Forget Nature-what had I been thinking? What had compelled me to be so vocal about interests so obviously disturbing? In the face of a bona fide male prospect, why had I trotted out the image of that baby with the two heads? Why use my father's death to segue into my interest in the science behind medical imaging? Was I subconsciously trying to repel this man?

And what was really behind those interests, anyway?

After some thought, I deduced the following.

One: By consuming a steady diet of freakish news stories, I was clearly trying to inoculate myself against the many horrors the world has to offer. At an early age, I witnessed some bad juju, and I've been a scholar of the macabre ever since. With my predilections I am saying, "Dark things happen every day. Randomly. Without meaning."

Two: By talking about such things with a stranger, I was throwing up a wall. That was obvious. But bringing up ugly realities is also a bit of a cheeky challenge, a kind of Darwinian test: Can you deal with this much darkness? Either way, not inviting.

Three: While it may look like hiding, I am simultaneously doing the opposite. Talking about brainless babies is, in effect, a kind of radical self-exposure. I am flashing the red cape at the bull and daring him to really see me and my radical, ontological fears.

This all seems nearly healthy, right? No matter-No. 3 gives me faint hope.

So last night I crafted another e-mail. It's straightforward and light and sane; it merely mentions a drink and a meeting place. No intracranial-stroke digressions. No updates on the latest child abduction. If he says yes, we can start anew and talk about art openings, movies and N.Y.C. real estate, like other single people. I figure if things work out with the doctor, there'll be plenty of time to discuss the dark stuff later.

From this vantage, I am privy to a whole world that street pedestrians never see, a variation on Jane Jacobs' "eyes on the street." From where I work, I have my eyes on the upper floors of Manhattan's midtown office buildings. It's a sublime vista, one that can fill the viewer with the dizzy, expansive feeling for the glory of humankind or introduce darker thoughts of how city dwellers live and work in an elaborate system of cages. Depending on how you look at it, that charming jumble of buildings is really a charming collection of holding pens.

I am regularly startled anew to think that I work in this corporate environment, for what the poet John Berryman called the "funny moneyman." Still, for the past two years I've shown up-when I am not at home writing an article in my nightgown or at an artists' colony working on poems-to dip my toes in the waters of "the world" and bring home an honest paycheck. Soon after I started work at the hedge fund, I began sitting for spells at the window seat in the company elevator bank, moving the large leaves of the rubber plant aside to better my view. Situated thusly, I would gaze out at the Verizon Building and beyond, down the avenues toward Wall Street and the harbor, all the way clear to the Statue of Liberty-looking at the tugboats, the sturdy water towers, the darting yellow cabs in the streets. I would occasionally spot a bit of architectural whimsy created solely for the eyes of sky-dwelling office workers: a funny parfait-wafer-like fin on the top of one midtown roof, for example. Far above the Jumbotron in Times Square, companies advertise in the clouds. To the right, I could see the Reuters sign, a Discover sign and the TDK Corporation's pulsating, spinning neon bull's-eye. Occasionally, a plastic bag would come lofting up 30 stories in the air; sometimes a crazy, careening pigeon would zip by looking for a place to land.

It took a few months of this sublime rhapsody before I realized that I was gazing out almost directly at 4 Times Square: the Condé Nast building, the Tiffany's of the magazine world. After months of enjoying the vast urban landscape, suddenly I had eyes for nothing else but that giant green 4.

"Nice view," said a co-worker on the day of my revelation, seeing me transfixed at the glass.

"Wha?" I asked, having lost interest in the waterways below and the slants of light and shadow in midtown's canyons.

"One of the best views in the city," he said. "You really get a sense of how the city is an island from up here. How New York is a port city. And look at all the styles of architecture! Just think of the complexity of the forms, how they work together to create this eclectic integument called midtown!"

Blah, blah, blah, I thought, what is this, a PBS special? "Yeah, right … midtown," I mumbled impolitely, totally and completely uninterested.

Suddenly, I couldn't look out the window without wondering what the hell was going on in that building. Whose pitch just got taken by which magazine, and why? Who was working on whose copy? Who had a piece in fact-checking? What poet had The New Yorker's Alice Quinn decided deserved the coveted poetic space that week? Some days, the view felt like reading The Times Book Review or the Arts and Anxiety section (as a friend calls Arts and Leisure). Other times, I'd just wonder what was for lunch in the Gehry cafeteria. Did Kim France's fashion closet need weeding? I'd get that panicky feeling that life was passing me by and that everyone else in the tristate area and beyond was happily, lucratively and successfully selling perfect pitches to editors whose language they knew better than I ever could.

Some weeks later, I was standing in 4 Times Square's actual lobby, waiting for a friend who works there as an editor to give the guards the O.K. for me to come up.

Next to me, a man was standing with a peregrine falcon balanced on his arm. (It was there, apparently, to meet the editors at Condé Nast Traveler.) The animal was wearing a spooky leather helmet, a sort of mini-executioner's hood, to cover its eyes and keep it calm.

Poor bird, I thought, what are you doing in midtown?

Despite the hood, the bird could sense that I was looking at it intently. It swiveled its head toward me in a way that made my blood run cold. The feathery leather embellishments of the top of the hood jiggled as it turned. I sensed the bird seething under its hood, as figures from the magazine milieu (women in smart pumps, art-department guys with ponytails) flowed through the mezzanine. The bird adjusted himself on his keeper's arm, briefly opening his wings to their full extension of five feet.

Babe, when I was free, I felt he was telling me, I could see for miles, and this building was just a tiny little splinter below my talons. The world is bigger than the perishable pulp of these magazines. Write your poems. Write your book. Fly, be free.

Just then the guards motioned, and I reluctantly put on my little guest-pass sticker and moved through the turnstile toward the elevators.

These days, from the 39th floor, I look past the 4 Times Square building to the harbor beyond. I am no longer fixated on the green tower behind the glass. The new construction site on 42nd for the Bank of America Building is fascinating-a veritable ant farm of excavation, an ephemeral system of roads and dump sites that will vanish when the bank's foundations are poured. I'm concerned that the building going up will ruin the view of the skinny Gothic sandstone Bush Tower (at 29 stories, one of the tallest buildings in Manhattan when it was built in 1917). The famous debt clock had to be moved to accommodate the bank building, though the national debt is still intact ($7,723,698,350,306.38 and counting; your portion: $26,118.49). I am optimistic that my days here at the hedge fund are also numbered.

The last time I brought home a kitten was when I lived in Iowa City (circa 1993), and it had been a disaster. The kitten peed on my then-husband's newly laundered shirts. Though I allowed my husband to believe he had broken my heart by insisting we return the kitten, I was secretly relieved. Unbeknownst to him, I had begun locking it in the basement when its incessant crying or pawing got on my nerves.

Now, living a much more hectic life in Brooklyn, I wagered that I was even less patient and more selfish than I had been a decade ago. Plus, visions of a cat box, cat-food smells, cat hair on my black everything, a cat constantly turning figure eights around my calves with its ingratiating flank-rubbing-well, none of it was appealing.

"How old is she?"

The rescue woman yanked open her mouth.

"Look at her teeth. She's three years old, not a kitten. She's a kind of midget or pygmy. She won't get any bigger."

Hmmm, I thought. Perfect size for a small N.Y.C. apartment. But still, not my apartment.

"Could you foster-mother her for a night, at least? She's afraid of the dogs."

That sounded safe enough. The dogs looked mangy and mean; the cat was clearly unhappy. In a moment of Angelina Jolie–like beneficence, I agreed.

A week later, she was still in my apartment, and now she had a name: Catbaby.

She had grown on me. She slept a lot, and the flank-rubbing was sort of sweet, up to a point. And she really was small-more like a teenager cat than a kitten, but still, fetchingly wee. During that first week, I looked down at my little Peter Pan and decided to name her after a race horse named Catbaby, whose picture I had cut out of an old issue of The New York Times Magazine.

"I'm not saying you're staying, but you have a name," I said to her. "Now go curl up into a ball and let me be."

Despite her darling sleeping poses and wonderful purring sessions, I was still experiencing those familiar moments of being extremely irritated. She was cute, but not so when she ran over my head at 7 o'clock in the morning to be fed, for example. I felt like some of my old boyfriends had felt about me: I liked having her around when I wanted her, but not 24/7. I put a note on the door of my building and figured I would offer her to the people closest to me first-my neighbors. A nice gay man from the fourth floor knocked on my door and, after some haggling (I had to promise him she wouldn't grow any bigger and that I would split the vet bills with him), we had a deal. It was understood that on weekends when Tim was on Fire Island or out of town, I would take Catbaby in. And nights when I needed an animal presence in my small apartment, he would graciously offer her to me for a night of cuddling.

"This is like a Hampton house-share," Tim said, "only we'll share the cat."

Eventually, I told my therapist about Catbaby and the custody situation.

"And why did you name her Catbaby?" she asked after a period of therapeutic silence.

"After a race horse," I said.

Silence.

"I mean, she's small, you know, like a baby. And she's a cat. I had a picture of the horse on my refrigerator. It seemed to fit."

Silence. Then the knowing smile and nod that I've come to understand means, "Analysand, you cannot fool me."

I sighed and continued: "Storm Cat is a famous stud, and there's a tradition of naming thoroughbred offspring using references to the sire's and mare's names. So, you know."

More silence, and then this:

"Have you thought that maybe she's a stand-in for a real baby?"

In fact, I had thought of it, and it scared me. Tim and Catbaby and I were mimicking a family. Tim and I talked of the cat as if it were our child. We sat around like giddy new parents, admiring our perfect little wide-eyed creature-only ours was covered with short hair and had claws.

"Did she eat today?" I'd ask.

"Did you notice that thing on her ear? Do you think it's normal?" Tim asked.

"Do you think she recognizes us?" I wondered.

"Isn't she precious? Look at her now. She's gotten inside the shopping bag!" Tim shrieked.

"Look what she's doing now!" I shrieked. "She's coming out of the bag!"

What was wrong with me, I wondered? Why, at 37, was I only able to handle a quarter of a cat? Had I become such a selfish, urban creature that I required absolute and total freedom in order to express myself? People all around me had children-one child, two children. Some of them even had cats and children. They lived in small apartments, too. Now confronted with this jerry-rigged familial concoction, I was horrified. Oh my God, I wondered, will I ever have kittens?

But, eventually, I came to a different conclusion (call it a rationalization) about Catbaby, reminding myself that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I decided that Catbaby is not a stand-in for a baby. Because, in fact, Catbaby is nothing like a human baby. For example, she'll never become more complex. She won't grow, acquire language or learn to stop crawling around on the floor. We'll never tearfully send her off to college. Catbaby is static. Most days, she stares into the bathtub drain for hours at a time. The same broom still scares her no matter how many times she sniffs it. The highlight of her life is when I turn on the kitchen faucet. I want more than that from a baby.

Catbaby is here, rather, to soften me up for motherhood, if not simply to break me in for some basic adult-on-adult cohabitation. Last fall, I dated someone totally inappropriate but cuddly enough. He wasn't interested in Catbaby. He got that glazed look when I mentioned her-the same look I got when he talked about baseball, in particular the Pine Tar Game of 1983. He didn't like cats and was far too young to think about having children. Yet I was more receptive to his subtle signals of interest than I might have been; with Catbaby purring in my lap two nights out of seven, I'd become more sensitive, perhaps even a bit more human. Though that relationship went nowhere, Catbaby is still here, both wearing me down and expanding my senses. In fact, she's sleeping right next to me as I type this, one paw draped over her plum-sized head, and I am filled with love.

The suit's original owner was my friend Jenny. For Jenny, the summer of 1986 was all about Chanel. She spoke about the brand as if it were a religious practice, a vision quest, a spiritual initiation. Like any truth seeker, she wanted to touch the Platonic originals. To buy the suit, she worked seven days a week at a health-food store in our hometown of Westport, Conn., filling her journal with interlocking Chanel CC doodles during breaks. With an additional, substantial monetary gift from her father, Jenny reached her target. One day in late August, she took the train into the city and returned that evening with armloads of thrilling, shiny packages: a Chanel suit, a Chanel silk shirt, a Chanel chain belt, a pair of Chanel shoes, Chanel pearl clip-on earrings, a Chanel quilted handbag, Chanel beret, Chanel gloves and a jar of white Chanel pancake makeup. She spent $5,000 in 45 minutes. I was both repulsed and fascinated.

Three years later, Jenny renounced the world of material things, left New York and moved to Norway to live off a remote fjord, in a town with a population of exactly five. (From this 400-year-old farm, she now orders all her clothes from an Amish catalog out of Pennsylvania.) I got the suit.

After 16 years of dragging the Chanel around, dutifully wrapping it in plastic wrap, sealing it shut in plastic garment boxes and garment bags, periodically conducting moth-hole checks and replenishing the cedar chips in the suit's pockets, I had never worn it once. Did I even want to be associated with a garment such as this, one that screams patrician upper-crustiness and blatant wretched excess?

When I pulled the jacket and skirt from my closet, I really saw red-Republican red. I saw, as if for the first time, that Karl Lagerfeld had been channeling the Reagan administration when he conceived of my suit's Social Darwinist silhouette. Slipping on the jacket and turning to the mirror, I saw that I looked like a majorette for a partisan marching band. With its large, lofted shoulder pads-at least four inches high-and double rows of military-looking gold buttons, the dark navy wool suit had always had a Sgt. Pepper feel to it. Now it seemed downright aggressive, even militaristic. I looked like the Headless Horseman, or a five-star general-or worse, a Republican First Lady. Better get rid of this thing now, I decided. Sell it, as a kind of political protest.

A dispiriting chat with vintage couture expert Clair Watson at Doyle New York's auction house dashed any hopes the thing could pay off a few credit-card bills; she assessed Chanel suits of that era at about $300 to $400. "You can see them offered on eBay," Ms. Watson said, a faint disdain in her voice.

I wasn't sure $300 was enough to make me part with the Chanel. But if I were going to keep it, I was going to have to wear it. That would mean it would have to be radically de-Republicanized, requiring drastic surgery. Whom to trust with such a task? Surely I couldn't bring a Chanel to my usual tailor in Brooklyn, who is also my dry cleaner? I called the Chanel boutique on 57th Street and was immediately connected with the "alterations manager," Gigi Farag. "Bring it in," she said. "We can fix anything!"

Lacking a proper garment bag, I poked the hanger's hook through the bottom of a black Hefty trash bag, flattened the fluttering plastic down around the suit and hopped on the F train.

The current collection on display at Chanel was nothing like the woolly uniform I had under my garbage bag. The new suits were lightweight, fresh and super-sexy. I felt a switch flip in my head. Could my dowdy Chanel possibly be salvaged, saved and sea-changed into a wearable hip garment for the 21st century?

Up in the third-floor dressing room, I explained to Gigi my fears and desires. After much pinning, she cocked her head and took a step back. "See, we take this in here," she said, indicating one nip. "We remove the shoulder pads and put in smaller ones. Reduce the extra room here; pull the collar in a bit. We can change the buttons to black. It will be perfect."

Not bad, I thought, gazing into the mirror. I didn't look like Kate Moss, but I didn't look like Lynne Cheney, either. I could almost forgive Coco Chanel her love affair with a Nazi in occupied Paris for the exquisite garment her couture had inspired. I loved the jacket's side vents and those flirty slits at the hip. One giant shoulder pad had been ripped out so I could see the rational, Democratic, human-sized shoulders emerging. The best part was, it was going to cost a mere $80 for the alterations and only $10 each for 12 genuine, 100 percent, double-interlocking CC buttons. "So, see, now for $200 dollars you get a new Chanel suit!" said Gigi, thinking like a true Yankee. "Come back next week to talk to Ms. Tobon and to pick out your buttons," she sang.

Back downstairs on the store's first floor, peering into the jewelry display case, I nearly crashed foreheads with a woman whose tiny dog was peeking out of her ample leather purse. There was plenty of shiny, cool stuff in these cases. My mercantile heart stirred, shamefully. A gold and diamond charm. Belts, bracelets, scarves, gloves. Oooh. I started to do what I do in the presence of luxury items: look for something small and beautiful that I can afford, maybe a small frippery to truly update my new little number?

No, no, no. I settled for a dab of No. 5 behind each ear and forced myself toward the door.