Nino and Cecily, of shirts and of symphonies.

Cecily: Verdi is incredible. To wake up to, with coffee and crêpes and windows flung open and a white shirt. I am an adventurous traditionalist splaying my dreams out across a crisp mis en scène.

Nino: As long as you are not cheesy, it is fine with me.

Cecily: Cheesy would be Bach, not Verdi.

Nino: Shame on you! Bach is one of the most transcendental musicians on earth.

Cecily: Of course, but waking up in a white shirt to Bach seems a little trite, don’t you think?

Nino: We should make a list of the connections between white shirts and music.

Cecily: It would be indispensable to the modern man.

Nino: I have a crunchy one: a white shirt with Mahler sounds like a rough night with a young boy.

Cecily: Symphony number 1 is indeed perfect for a rough night with a shiny stripling. It is of course simply Frère Jacques in minor, with black shirts and red roses and amaretto. Prokofiev is to be consumed with galliano, orchids and millefeuille.

Nino: Excellent! An easy one: Beethoven’s 9th with a white shirt, a glass of milk and your compadrés. And a historical one: Wagner’s Walkürenritt with a green shirt and the invasion of Poland.

Cecily: Rachmaninoff’s violin concerto in G minor with Vienna coffee and a lace dress, in light rain with a useless sun parasol.

Nino: Berg violin concerto “à la mémoire d’un ange” would be better, if I may.

Cecily: That was quick, sir. But I disagree.

Nino: If I may, sir, this parrot IS dead. It is deceased. It has ceased to LIVE.

Cecily: Berg requires white, or at least cream, and I imagined the lace dress in black. Maybe I should have included more detail. The western wind is blowing fair, across the dark Aegean Sea. So take your dead parrot, sir, and raise me a whole sky, with a sea below and a shore within sight.

Sisters, doing it for themselves.

Cecily: Would you like to hear a story?

Delilah: I am sure some part of me would like the opportunity to find you as exhausting and supercilious as you find me, but it’s eleven at night and I’d like to lull myself into my own polite oblivion so I am able to sleep.

Cecily: Is that a “yes” then?

Cecily, meditations after dinner.

Cecily: I spent my evening with a famous architect and a very famous French writer whose name eludes me now that I am ridiculously drunk. We spoke in French of love and lost love. And I now have thirty-two roses. One for every woman the famous writer ever loved and one for me.

Alexander: Thirty-one seems to be an awfully large number; were I to fall in love with thirty-one men I would not know who I was, much less how to find my creativity again.

Cecily: He is ninety-two years old.

Cecily, on sublimation.

Alexander: I think that you’re in love with his ways, and with his intellect. However, it is my belief that one is not truly in love until one has grown to appreciate the negative aspects and various neuroses of a lover as one does the positive aspects. Perhaps temporarily removing him would allow you to gain the perspective necessary to determine whether or not he is in fact “the one”, or whether your affections for him are simply a sublimation of your own insecurities.

Cecily: You’re right of course. But right now, my sublimated insecurities need stoking.

Two friends, on eggs.

Cecily: Why don’t I have things in my fridge? I am a failure of a human.

Alexander: I have eggs that expired, Camembert, and a bottle of Captain Morgan. I am out of herbal refreshment, I am that much of a mess today.

Cecily: Eggs that have actually expired or have a “used by” date that you need not adhere to?

Alexander: I daren’t find out. They’ve been in there since the last time I cooked breakfast for a man.