Bette Midler as Sue Mengers

NEW YORK—Life is definitely beautiful…as long as one can see, that is, which for two miserable days last week I couldn’t. Having had a glaucoma operation on my eyes two months ago, I needed to use drops for a while but didn’t pay attention—too many girls in their summer dresses, and things like that. The next thing I knew, a pain started in one eye, I ignored it and went out and smoked and drank, then woke up the next day, opened my bleary eyes, and felt nothing but extreme pain in both. I quickly shut them and the pain went away. I tried opening them again, and it got worse.

It was the weekend and no one was around to help. Despite the pain I tried to telephone Switzerland and the mother of my children but couldn’t see the numbers on the dial. After a Herculean effort I got through and she told me that an ophthalmic emergency hospital was open on 2nd Avenue and 14th Street, but I didn’t like the sound of it.

Through a friend, Donna Acquavella of the well-known art gallery, an appointment was made with the numero uno doctor in New York, Stanley Chang, not David Tang, for Monday morning. I decided to ride it out and stayed in bed with my eyes shut. For 48 hours it was a bit like being blindfolded by the Taliban, but without their horrible smells, music, and religious slogans.

Like Dr. Johnson said, imminent death, or blindness in my case, concentrates the mind, so I lay around with my eyes closed and the brain working overtime. I tried to think of the beauty of women—past and present—but it was too frustrating. So I switched to art. Edward Hopper and Childe Hassam, to be exact. No one captured American life like Hopper, the loneliness and loveliness of the seaside and its haunting aesthetic. Hopper’s stillness is art at its finest. It engages the viewer’s psyche and imagination, the latter as necessary to appreciate the artist as the eye. While his contemporaries were switching to abstract bullshit, Hopper continues to be a true painter, churning out tranquil vacation spots, gritty city scenes, and hauntingly beautiful and poignant scenes of everyday life.

Childe Hassam, who died a year before I was born, is my second-favorite artist. His Impressionist style is just right, depicting gardens, nature, and—the picture I’d give forty of the best Picassos for—5th Avenue on Easter Sunday, the very same canvas that got Brooke Astor’s son in trouble with the Feds. She had it hanging in her drawing room, but she was gaga and thought she was Agamemnon. Her son sold it for little and helped himself to some of the moolah that was coming to him anyway. Now he’s facing two years, which I find disgraceful. He’s an 85-year-old gentleman who served in World War II with distinction and a man who has never broken the law. The streets are full of vicious criminals and bombers, and the state is sending a gent to jail because his mother was a socialite and gave some of the Astor money away.