Disquiet, Please!

by David Remnick

  Who is right?

  UNHAPPY FRED

  Evanston, Illinois

  Call yourself lucky, Fred, for you have a model wife and two thoughtful, very “with it” kids. They are right, of course, and the real wonder of your case is that you could have gone along for as long as you did, worrying and troubling yourself over such an insignificant matter, when a little reading in your local library or a plain question in the right quarter could have settled your doubts once and for all. Today, we have finally come to understand that there is no such thing as a “normal” size for an organ. Perhaps, like many older persons, your judgment of acceptable dimensions was heavily influenced by youthful impressions formed in church or at the theatre. Yet for every gigantic organ, such as the memorable installation at the Radio City Music Hall or the massive unit at some great place of worship (the organ at Winchester Cathedral, installed in 950 A.D., had four hundred pipes and required seventy men to operate the bellows), there are today scores of serviceable bijou household instruments that are modest in price and excellently pleasing in tone. You may recall that the late Albert Schweitzer was able to continue his daily sessions at the key- and footboards even in the primitive musical surroundings of Lambaréné. The current trend in organ building is away from awesome size and power and toward the modest ideals of Gottfried Silbermann (1683–1753), the Dresden genius whose instruments produced a light, transparent tone, in perfect keeping with the polyphonics of the high Baroque. Vox humana (Dig it, Fred!) vox Dei!

  GREENHORN

  Dear Advisor:

  I am a healthy adult male, with a healthy sex drive. My evenings always end up in the sack, even on a first date, and I am in the habit of conducting four or five meaningful affairs at the same time, often with chicks who happen to be roommates. Right now, I am hooked up with two beautiful sisters who almost surely know that they are sharing me, but I don’t think they have guessed that I am also on intimate terms with their old lady, a mature and very appreciative woman in her sixties—with the bod of a mellow thirty-year-old! I am not averse to occasional homosexual adventures, if the ambience is right, and of course I groove on the new bisexual scene as well. I am what you would call a sexual athlete, and nothing in nature is alien to me. Okay, fine—so why is it I can’t seem to score with a plant? All my friends here in northern California are way into plant relationships. They read to their avocados, repeat mantras with their geraniums and grape ivies, pass weekends of meditation with a wandering Jew or a Dracaena marginata, and sleep over with yuccas. They tell me there is no trip like the achievement of a deep one-to-one understanding with a member of the flora. I have tried to follow their lead, but so far without success. Indeed, whenever I find myself alone in a room with a young plant or vegetable, I am overcome with shyness. I find myself stammering and sweating with embarrassment, and I “don’t know where to look.” The last time I tried, an office friend of mine had fixed me up with a pair of delicious-looking rutabagas. I arrived wearing my new suede high-rise bells, sandals, and a liberal splash of Brut. We settled down together in a corner of the patio, all in readiness for a memorable new friendship—and I froze. Striving for my customary aplomb, I lit up a joint and then fell into a strangling paroxysm of coughing. I sprang up from the lanai, upsetting my glass of sangria, mumbled some excuse about an overdue algebra paper, and fled, leaving my buxom young companions speechless. This sort of repeated failure has begun to sap my confidence, and I find myself spending more and more nights at home alone. What’s the matter with me anyway?

  J.F.W.

  San Leandro, California

  Probably your only mistake is trying to rush things. Accustomed to swift success in other quarters, you are not quite at ease with the more laggard emotional cycle and lower motor responses of our green friends. With plants (especially with drupes and the smaller legumes), the motto must always be “Take your time!” Keep your mind off the ultimate relationship desired. Try, rather, to deal with the whole vegetable. Examine your unconscious for signs of repressed taboos, remembering that, as you yourself suggest, nothing in nature is kinky, unless you think it is. Hold in your mind the image of a cultured Japanese gentleman deep in contemplation of his stony garden or miniature bonsai plant (the Japs, as you know, are way ahead of us in the sensual ballgame). You might even memorize Andrew Marvell’s “My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow.” There is nothing new about plant love, no matter what your neighbors say. Indeed, the best of advice in this area comes to us from the British sexologists Gilbert and Sullivan, who prescribed:

  An attachment à la Plato for a bashful young potato,

  or a not-too-French French bean!

  SOUTHPAW

  Dear Advisor:

  I think I am obsessed. I am a foot fetishist, and over the years I have come to accept this quirk of nature without fear or self-loathing; it is simply a fact about me, like the color of my eyes (hazel, with glints of green) or my hat size (7⅜). No problem there. My hangup is that out of all the millions and millions of feet in the world, there is only one single, solitary foot that means anything to me. Have you ever heard of anything so silly? Yes? Well, what do you say when I add that the foot in question, the Foot Supreme, is one of my own—i.e., the left? Advisor, I love my left foot with a devotion that is beyond my powers of description. Each morning when I awake, I draw Li’l Tootsie (as I call him) gently out of the covers to see how he has fared during the long night hours. During the day, I often glance down to admire his perky stride, his stylish recovery, his lithe, almost Indian feel for the ground. At home in the evening, I usually go around half barefoot, in order to give my friend a taste of freedom and relaxation. In my younger days, I confess, I would sometimes secretly remove my left shoe and sock while in the office and conduct business (I am a Certified Public Accountant) in perfectly normal fashion—with my playmate shamelessly naked beneath my desk!

  To anticipate your questions, I feel nothing of this nature for my other foot. I cannot explain why this starboard extremity, apparently the mirror image of my heart’s delight, occasions no response in me beyond the rather tepid attention with which we all regard our various sets of physiological baggage. Truly, le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point! Nor can I explain my dogged (no pun intended) faithfulness, sustained over the decades, to this one and only foot. How often have I told myself that a bit of adventuring—a brief, lighthearted tickle with some of the countless attractive and obviously willing young feet that one glimpses on all sides—would only bring me back to my life’s companion with a refreshed appreciation. But when the moment comes I always refrain.

  In truth, it is probably too late for such forays now. I am sixty-two, and troubled with arthritis, and Li’l Tootsie also looks his age—not a pretty sight, I’ll wager, to anyone but me. No matter. I keep his photograph on my bureau—a perfect likeness of him as he used to be in his high-arching youth—and this is the image that is always in my heart. We are content to potter along together through the evening of our life, cracking our joints as we warm ourselves before the hearth and finding pictures in the firelight.

  I feel pretty good most of the time, but I reckon I must need help.

  E. McC.

  Salt Lake City

  No, dear sir, you do not need any advice. It is we, rather—all of us, everywhere—who should help ourselves by reading your gentle and happy tale and taking it to heart. Many of our subscribers may feel revulsion or a cynical contempt for your homespun passion, but we defy them. Freedom is finding joy wherever it may fall and clasping it to one’s bosom. Thanks, E. McC., and Tootsie, for the beautiful reminder!

  ALL TIED UP

  Dear Advisor:

  I am in need of sartorial first aid. Six or seven years ago, I suffered a heavy setback in my fashionable self-esteem, and since that time I rarely venture from the house at night. My frau tells me that I am turning into some kind of weirdo hermit and says for me to give my story to your sophisticated editors a
nd let them handle it.

  It all began when we got this invitation from a famous film actor, asking us to come to a New Year’s Eve party at his Manhattan town house. (Never mind his name; this wasn’t his fault, and I don’t want to embarrass him.) I should explain that I am in industrial-freezer parts and I don’t usually hang out with celebrities. The way I happened to meet him was that we sat next to each other on a Cleveland-to-Kennedy flight that got hung up in a weather-stack over Pennsylvania for three hours; when we landed, we wrote our names down and promised to look each other up someday, but I frankly never expected he’d take me up on it, until we got the invite in the mail. At first, Molly and I thought, sure, what a gas, we’ll go. Then I looked again and saw that down in the corner of the invitation it said “Dress: Mod, or what you will,” and my heart sank. You see, I didn’t own any Mod clothes, and I thought, well, better forget the party, we’ll just stay home New Year’s Eve and maybe get a bottle of champagne in, like always. But my wife was dying to go, of course, and she said, look, no problem, we’ll just go to one of those boutiques and pick you out a wild tie, right?

  To make a long story short, that’s just what we did. We ended up at a place called Paraphernalia, on Madison Avenue (it’s gone now, I think), and a helpful young fellow helped me pick out a wide, wide one, in cherry-colored silk, that looked like an effect out of Star Trek. Came the night, and I put it on (after a lot of wrestling with all that material in the knot) and wore my old chalk-stripe suit, and the getup was pretty crazy, if I do say so. Around ten-thirty, the wife and I hop a cab and go down to the actor’s house for the big blast. There are all kinds of people crowding in the front door, wearing more kinds of clothes (and no clothes) than I’ve ever seen before, and there are even Pinkertons there, to keep out the crashers. But we have our invitation, and after somebody looks us over we are let in. Upstairs, there are two rock bands going, one at each end of the house, and the place is wall-to-wall people and noise. We stand there, jammed by the stairs, and pretty soon along comes my friend the host, smiling at everybody. I put out my hand and say, “This is a whole lot better than ten thousand feet over McKeesport, isn’t it?” and he looks at us in sort of a startled way, and then shakes my hand and kisses Molly on the cheek (ruining her for life), and says, “It’s just marvelous you could come. Look, the bar is way over there somewhere, or there’s another one back down that way. Get yourself anything you want, and when I come back we’ll have magic time. ’Bye, dears.”

  Well, I finally did get up to the bar after a lot of elbowing and being pushed and spilled on, and after a while I got us a couple of double Scotches, and the wife and I found a sort of corner, and stood there and sipped and began looking over the roaring mob. What we did was, we pretended to be having this very animated conversation, leaning toward each other to listen and then laughing a lot, but all the time we were both really rolling our eyes back and forth across the room looking for somebody, anybody, we knew. You know how it is sometimes. The trouble was that this beginning part of the party didn’t end, the way it usually does. We looked and we talked and laughed and we looked some more, and though there were plenty of faces we had seen on the Merv Griffin Show and places like that, there was nobody we knew. I was about to try the old bar-fight again, when all of a sudden way across the room I saw this man’s face that I recognized. Just as I spotted him, he saw me, too, and he sort of raised his eyebrows in a friendly, surprised way, and then I saw him starting to come through the mob to say hello.

  “Here comes a friend of mine,” I said to Molly out of the corner of my mouth.

  “Who?” she said. “Who is it?”

  “Tell you in a minute,” I said.

  But the trouble was I couldn’t remember him. The name was right on the tip of my tongue. He was a young-looking fellow, sort of handsome, and his smile got bigger and bigger as he sidled his way through the guests and finally came up to us.

  “Well,” he said, “I never thought I’d find you here! How are you, anyway?”

  “Fine and dandy,” I said. “You remember Molly, don’t you?” I was fighting for time.

  “You’re looking terrific,” he said. “I knew you would.” Then there was a pause, and he said, “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  I said, “Sure I do. I recognized you way across the room there, didn’t I? Just give me a second here. You’re … You’re—”

  “I sold you that tie at Paraphernalia yesterday,” he said.

  That’s about all there is to it. We got out of there just after midnight (our host never did come back), and ever since then I have sort of given up going to big parties. I have also given up small parties. To tell the truth, for these past six years I have just stayed home. Sometimes I have got up my nerve to go to a show or out to dinner with business friends, but when I go up to my tie rack to pick out the evening cravat, I begin to sway and this gray mist forms in front of my eyes. So I give up, and the evening ends with me in front of the old television again, in my undershirt.

  Molly has told me she will leave home for good, no fooling, unless I wrote this letter and asked you where I can get myself some decent, stylish neckties—not too bright, no wild designs—so I can start getting back in the swim.

  Now it’s your move.

  HERBIE THE HERMIT

  Port Washington, New York

  Come on out, Herbie. You are in luck, you see, because nobody has been wearing neckties for years now. You can dress up in turtlenecks or splashy T-shirts or high-rise collars or even an occasional knotted foulard, but forget the tie. Better hurry, though. Old-timey looks are the growing mushroom cloud on the menswear horizon, and that means that the four-in-hand has probably turned the corner. The nostalgia boom has already shot right through the fifties, and at that rate we’ll be back to Mod in no time. Hope you saved that big-breakfast job from Paraphernalia. This time, why don’t you give the party?

  IN THE DARK

  Dear Advisor:

  I am a centerfold photographer. For years now, I have been talking bosomy young females out of their inhibitions and into instant (f/8 at 1/125th) four-color national celebrity. I am the dermal Steichen, the Fragonard of the furtive male fancy, the dream-master of Fraternity Row. The costume chest in my studio resembles the wardrobe department of an Edwardian bordel—a soft plethora of feather boas, filmy peignoirs, eight-foot-long necklaces, ribbed pink knee socks, Andalusian fans, inflatable lumbar pillows, wolfskin throws, Cecil Beaton chapeaux, filigreed back scratchers, transparent silk dolmans, polar-bear rugs, and peekaboo Alençon bellybands. With these and a few suitable props—a white wicker fauteuil, a bit of bedside Biedermeier, a distressed-fruitwood Empire cheval glass, or an Italianate water faucet—I can transform a Purdue Home Ec. major into a drug-dazed Trebizond houri, recast an adenoidal Atlantic City debutante into a randy Whistler’s Mother, or rejuvenate (with a dab of Vaseline on the lens) a matronly pornie-film star into a shyly ravening choir girl. Yes, the currently inflated national bare market is very much my doing, and I am proud of it.

  Now something has happened, however, that threatens my career and even my sanity. For the last six months, the quality of my work has taken a sharp downward turn. Editors complain that my pictures are often out of focus or oddly composed; many of my portraits center on an unexpected part of the model’s anatomy—an elbow, say, or the back of her head—and at times she and I seem to have missed connections altogether. This is a serious deviation in a genre that depends almost exclusively on the frontal, or head-on-collision, pose, and I have been forced to mumble evasions about a mechanical problem or darkroom misadventures. The terrible truth is that whenever I am in the presence of a naked woman now, my eyes remain tightly shut! I have berated myself sternly over this self-destructive and ridiculous aberration, reminding myself of my professional standards, my long experience with nude females, and my perfect objectivity. Nothing works. The moment my model kicks off her wedgies and begins to peel, this strange new feeling of embarrassment creeps ove
r me. My eyes flutter, attempt to avert their gaze, and then obdurately and resolutely close. As you can imagine, this presents problems. I wear dark glasses now, and sometimes I ask a model to “help the mood” of a shot by making loud humming noises while I am aiming the camera, or I invite my cleaning woman or the postman to stop in and focus the camera for me “for fun.” Still, they must know something is awry. I keep bumping into things, and last week I tripped over a floodlight cable and pitched headfirst into an already overcrowded bubble bath. My shrink is deeply interested, of course, and leans toward a tentative diagnosis of hysteria brought on by a long-repressed sense of old-fashioned gallantry or by some evanescent memory of personal privacy. (“You haff placed a lens cap over your id,” he said yesterday.) Recently, I have taken to taping my eyes open with strips of adhesive tape, giving me a startling resemblance to the late Warner Oland, but sooner or later my puritan peepers break their bonds and clang shut for the rest of the day.

  Now what?

  SAD SNAPPER

  Chicago

  Hard lines, Sad S. Yours is an almost classic example of an irremediable contemporary occupational injury, and it may be that you already qualify for some form of assistance from the Workmen’s Compensation Board. Meantime, you might begin to phase into landscapes or passport work. You can console yourself with the thought that clothed social congress is still the general norm, and that the vast majority of cheerful and memorable events involving women seem to take place when they have their clothes on. It was this discovery that impelled us to abandon our own celebrated centerfold section exactly forty-nine years ago last February.

  1974

  WOODY ALLEN

  THE WHORE OF MENSA