I walked up to the coffee shop counter, ordered my usual grande dark roast coffee. The girl behind the counter, who always comments about how she knows what I order, asks me, “Two grandes?” I reflexively reply, “Yep” before thinking. I’m so used to clerks repeating my order back to me and me confirming the order that I didn’t catch the mistake. When I realized the mistake it seemed too late. I sit here with two grande coffees. I am a fool.

I have moved onto the last of the Proust novels, “Time Regained,” but before leaving “The Fugitive” behind, there are a few things to note. Saint Loop, the dashing young nobleman and friend of Marcel, the sensitive man of culture, once devoted to the actress and whore Rachel, has been revealed as a gay. Toward the end of “The Fugitive” he marries Gilberte, Marcel’s old girlfriend. Proust makes some interesting comments about gays who marry. “People whose own hearts are not directly involved always regard unfortunate entanglements, disastrous marriages, as though one were free to choose whom one loves, and do not take into account the exquisite mirage which love projects and which envelopes so entirely and so uniquely the person with whom one is in love that the ‘folly’ a man commits by marrying his cook or the mistress of his best friend is as a rule the only poetical action that he performs in the course of his existence.”

This is true—as if one were free to choose whom one loves. And how often we see couples and think, “What was he or she thinking? What does he or she see in that person?” You look at the “lesser” of the pair and think that he or she is lucky; there’s nothing poetic about that person’s position. Of the other we think, “They could do so much better.” And perhaps they could, but they don’t want better—they’ve found in the “lesser” whatever they desire. But I guess we regard living below one’s means as poetic. When I think of Ann and me, I imagine my gay friends thinking, “Dan should find a nice successful gay guy.” And I imagine Ann’s friends thinking, “Why is Ann settling for damages goods, some sexually confused guy who will inevitably leave her unhappy.” Perhaps they’re both right, but nevertheless, we don’t always behave as we should. And maybe we’re both a little poetic in our life choices.

Gilberte has no idea that Saint Loop likes men. He speaks to no one but his wife. “The rest of the hotel appeared not to exist for him; but whenever a waiter came to take an order, and stood close beside him, he swiftly raised his blue eyes and darted a glance at him which did not last for more than two seconds, but in its limpid penetration seemed to indicate a kind of investigative curiosity entirely different from that which might have inspired any ordinary diner scrutinizing, even at greater length, a page or waiter with a view to making humorous or other observations about him which he would communicate to his friends. This little glance, brief, disinterested, showing that the waiter interested him in himself, would have revealed to anyone who intercepted it that this excellent husband, this once so passionate lover of Rachel, had another plane in his life, and one that seemed to him infinitely more interesting than the one on which he moved from a sense of duty. But it was not otherwise visible.”

Later Proust notes, “Homosexuals would be the best husbands if they did not put on an act of loving other women.”

“Personally, I found it absolutely immaterial from a moral point of view whether one took one’s pleasure with a man or with a woman, and only too natural and human that one should take it where one could find it.” Indeed.

Proust on what an artist is: “It is not the man with the liveliest mind, the most well-informed, the best supplied with friends and acquaintances, but the one who knows how to become a mirror and in this way can reflect his life, commonplace though it may be, who becomes a Bergotte . . . and could one not say as much, and with better reason, of a painter’s models? The artist may paint anything in the world that he chooses, but when beauty is awakened within him, the model for that elegance in which he will find themes of beauty will be provided for him by people a little richer than he is himself, in whose house he will find what is not normally to be seen in the studio of an unrecognized man of genius selling his canvases for fifty francs. . .”

The tone of “Time Regained” is quite different from the previous volumes. One gets a clear sense that the charm of the old world is gone, that the modern age has arrived. Proust talks of the war (WWI); he bemoans what he believes to be the new superficiality of society, more concerned with fashion than with art. He quotes or writes, with tongue in cheek, an article he imagines might be written in the time, “’We may even say that one of the happiest consequences of this sad war will be’—added the chronicler (and one expected: ‘the return of our lost provinces’ or ‘the reawakening of national sentiment’)—‘one of the happiest consequences of this sad war will be that we have achieved some charming results in the realm of fashion.’” Heheh Things become even more superficial as the decades pass, it seems.

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Lately I’ve been in the worst mood, though only when I’m at work. I just feel very mean, as if I might lash out at the most undeserving person crossing my path. I don’t know what it is. I think I’m becoming a mean old man . . . slowly. It’s beginning. I have no patience for nonsense. Must get to the point, down to business, hold the fluff. I think I may also be too much of a snob for my own good. I want to talk about substantive things—art, music, literature, history. All else bores me. Maybe I’m becoming Charlus—a blustery man with a bulbous nose and a waist that grows with the increasing liberties I take with the handsome boys. I’ll monopolize the conversation in an overly loud tone, unaware of my own captive audience except when it begins to abandon me, and stitch together a sequence of seemingly unrelated monologues, each one triggered by the concluding phrase of the previous. After finally tiring of the dull company around me and becoming fuzzy-headed with drink, I’ll push myself out of my chair with both arms and great effort, and find my way to the door. Having abruptly abandoned my already forgotten, and by now, bemused, company, I open the door and, with head down, move forward in the wind tunnel of my own drunken solipsism. Voices and images swirl about me, but none finds footing enough to stir me from the contempt I feel for all the world. People and things seem to part before me, not so much out of respect or obedience, as by mutual repulsion. I’ll find my way home, feeling self-satisfied while my drunkenness lasts, and thereafter alienated and angry. I live in this state much of the time. I know it’s my issue and not others, but I don’t tend to like people.

One of the consequences of the war for Charlus is that all the virile, handsome men have been drawn to the battlefield, and so he has had to re-orient his tastes to boys. The other day at the gym I happened to look up at one of the television sets and there was some footage of Ashton Kutchner as a boy, perhaps 17 or so. He was in a modeling contest, one of his first professional jobs. He came in second, losing to another young man who also later entered television. They showed the footage of him in various clothes on the runway, including him in some white underwear. Never have I seen anyone more beautiful. He seemed perfect, perfectly beautiful and good. I’m not sure I’d call him sexy for me, though. I mean, the very boyish, clean-cut, beauty does not necessarily arouse lust in me. I think I like the slightly flawed, or perhaps the rougher, young men. If I had that Ashton Kutchner in my bed, I’m not sure I’d be especially aroused. I’d probably find myself admiring his beauty, fingering his nude body, lightly kissing it in admiration, but not thrashing it about hungrily.