Disquiet, Please!

by David Remnick

  He returned with a tape recorder and switched it on.

  “Okay,” he said. “You state your name and I’ll state mine. I think it’s best if we both agree on the date and where we are, that we are both consenting adults, that we intend each other no harm, that the activities we are about to engage in are forms of mutually gratifying playacting, and …”

  Twenty minutes later we had agreed that while my saying “No” would still mean “No,” it wouldn’t mean “No,” not really, not the way the word we designated, “Artichoke,” would mean “No.” And while “Artichoke” would mean “Serious no,” it wouldn’t mean quite as serious a “No” as “Serious artichoke.”

  I could tell that Howard and I had relationship potential.

  1992

  JIM WIND OLF

  MY SEXUAL FANTASIES

  It’s no fun when people tell you their dreams. But sexual fantasies are a different story. Even writing the words “sexual fantasies” sort of puts me in a “sexy” mood. With that in mind, I’ve decided to share a few of mine. Here goes!

  THE LADY GOLFERS

  It’s summertime and I’m caddying again, carrying bags for Mrs. Thomas, a blonde, and Mrs. Bunch, a redhead. We’re in the woods along the eighth hole, and we’re looking for a lost ball. We’re far from the civilizing influence of the clubhouse (oh, this is going to be good) and the air is crackling with heat.

  “Do you see it? Do you see my ball?”

  “Not yet, Mrs. Bunch.”

  “Call me Carolyn. I don’t like losing these things, you know. They cost a dollar-fifty apiece.”

  I see something in the leaves—but it’s a 100-compression Titleist with a black number 3. A man’s ball. Mrs. Bunch is using a womanly Maxfli.

  “Now, where is that damn ball?” she says.

  (Let’s not waste too much time looking for the ball. It’s—what the hell time is it?—it’s one-thirteen, and you’ve got to be up at seven for that thing.)

  Now Mrs. Thomas, in yellow culottes with little green turtles on them, is coming toward Mrs. Bunch and me. I can hear the spiked undersides of her golf shoes on the leaves as she gets closer.

  “Can I just take the five-wood from my bag?” she says—and gives me a little smirk.

  (The smirk is nice, but Mrs. Thomas should be hot with lust by now. It’s one-sixteen. If we hit one-thirty, that means five and a half hours of sleep, and you know how you are when you don’t get your six.)

  The sunlight is slanting through the branches. (Not a bad touch: helps set the scene, makes it real.) A crow sails into my line of vision and lands on a branch. (The crow’s a bit much.) The crow caws: “Caw! Caw!” (Lose crow.) The crow flies off. Now Mrs. Thomas is standing right beside me—I feel the heat of her body—and she slips the five-wood out of its knit cover.

  “I can’t hit the irons for some reason. I’m all right on the practice range, but I’m a basket case on the course. Why do you think that is?”

  “Probably mental,” I say.

  “Is that so?”

  (Do we really need this? Let’s get it on already.)

  Swat!

  “Damn bugs!” Mrs. Bunch says. “Some gnat got me on the upper thigh.”

  (Yeah, right, like she would be so specific in describing where it had bitten her.)

  “Let me see it,” says Mrs. Thomas.

  (As if Mrs. Thomas would care. This is ludicrous—a gnat bite as a sexual catalyst? You can do better than this. What time is it now? One-twenty-four. Shit!)

  “It’s right here,” says Mrs. Bunch, lifting her pink skirt a little.

  Mrs. Thomas kneels down on the ground, her bare kneecaps hitting the leaves. (What’s she going to do—scratch it? This is not good. Think, think! You’ve got yourself into a sexual-fantasy corner!) She takes the hem of Mrs. Bunch’s skirt between her fingers. (I don’t know where you’re going with this, counselor, but I’ll allow it.)

  Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! (The hell?) It’s the greenskeeper, riding a lawn tractor nearby. (He does not need to be here.) The tractor speeds off toward the horizon. I look over at the ladies again and see what I’ve been hoping to see for so long. The Maxfli.

  “Mrs. Bunch—Carolyn—I got it. I found your ball!” I say (unaware that I have fallen asleep).

  EXPLORER AND NATIVE GIRL

  I’m an explorer. (Yeah, good, something different.) It’s 1510 (good, 1510, long time ago), and I’m coming upon a new part of the world. (Well, new to me. To the people who’ve lived here for thousands of years, it’s old hat.) There she is, and she’s not even dressed, at least not by my European standards of habillement. She’s drinking from a pond, like an animal. (Wait a minute. Does this scenario show me to be some kind of sexual imperialist, intent on exploiting a girl from an indigenous culture?) I walk closer to the pond’s edge. Our eyes meet.

  She runs. Oh, how she runs.

  I give chase, following the nymph through the woods. She’s laughing delightfully—actually, it sounds like a scream. Yes, it’s a native cry for help. Here come the males, with spears. Back to the ship! Run! (This really isn’t going to work at all. Try something a little less … outdoorsy.)

  THE FLAPPERS

  The year is 1924, and we find ourselves in a grand Park Avenue dining room. I see her across the table, my sexual quarry—a saucy flapper with short black hair and possible sapphic tendencies. Her bare arm is even with the bare arm of the flapper seated next to her. The girls are buttering bread in tandem. I take a piece of bread from the silver dish and I, too, begin buttering. And so here we are, buttering and buttering in 1924.

  “I don’t believe I’ve made your acquaintance,” the first flapper says, still buttering. “Are you new to New York?”

  Light from the chandelier catches their painted lips. The flappers’ mouths shine as they … continue to butter their pieces of bread.

  I, too, continue buttering and buttering with gusto until I (fall dead asleep).

  ALL IN THE FAMILY

  “Awwww-chie! C’meeeya!”

  (No, no, please, not the Edith Bunker one.)

  “Awww-chie! I got ya bee-ya for ya just like ya like it!”

  (No, God in Heaven, please, no.)

  “Hello, dingbat. You’re my good dingbat.”

  “Aww, Aw-chie.”

  (Why? Why? Why this?)

  “Edith, you’re my little goyle.”

  (No! No! Cut! Make them sing on the piano bench.)

  “Didn’t need no welfare state.”

  “Everybody pulled his weight.”

  “Gee, our old La Salle ran great.”

  “Those were the days.”

  Archie puts the stogie back in his mouth. Edith gazes up at him lovingly. (Now get to sleep, God damn it.)

  ME AND MY GYM TEACHER

  Miss Lupree was a gym teacher at my school. She had curly black hair and wore a whistle around her neck. Her legs were tan and strong between black gym shorts and white high-tops. Today, it’s just the two of us in the gymnasium after school. The lights are out and I’ve come by to … (quick, a pretext, why would I be with her after school?) … to see if she’ll … donate money for the walkathon. (Oh, Jesus.)

  “Hey, Miss Lupree.”

  (What age am I? If it’s the present day, with me being almost forty, Miss Lupree would be about … sixty. Imagine that. Time is rolling over everybody. It is relentless. And to think of the bad stuff I’ve been through in that time—what if it was worse for her? Her parents are probably dead by now, some of her friends, too. So just be young. It’s high school again, and you’re seventeen and Miss Lupree is in her thirties. Simpler that way.)

  “What do you need?” Miss Lupree says.

  (“I need you”—tell her that!) Instead I say, “I’m in this walkathon on Saturday, and I need people to pledge money. Most people are giving a dollar a mile.”

  “A dollar a mile? You obviously have no idea what they pay us around here.”

  “If it’s too much you could—you could pledge
, like, a penny.”

  “I’m just joshing you. You want me to sign something?”

  “Yeah, just sign here.”

  “You got a pen?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Walking around with a signup sheet and you don’t have a pen?” (Oh, Freud would have a field day with this one. God, I hate it when people talk about Freud having afield day. As if Freud ever had afield day. What the hell is afield day, anyway? I think Marshall Crenshaw had an album called Field Day. Christ. Marshall Crenshaw. I think he was in Beatlemania. That’s the last play I remember being at the Winter Garden Theatre before Cats showed up. Now Cats has closed, after, like, eighteen years. Come on, back to Miss Lupree.) “Come to the office. I think I have a pen in my handbag.”

  We cross the gleaming hardwood floor. The movable bleachers are stacked against the wall. (Must we dwell on the movable bleachers just now?) Now we’re going into her office. (Where “it” will happen, no doubt!) At the desk … damn, it’s Coach Robb. Mustache, clipboard, whistle. He’s the man who benched me for a full season of junior-varsity basketball because of my (read, “his”) “attitude problem.”

  “Well, if it isn’t Dr. J.,” Coach Robb says, using his very own derisive nickname for me.

  “Hey, Coach.”

  “Just let me get a pen,” Miss Lupree says. “I know I have one around here somewhere.”

  (Oh, Christ, at least let her find a pen!)

  “What’s this guy up to, Donna?” Coach Robb asks.

  “I’m sponsoring him for the walkathon.”

  “Character like you involved in a charitable event?” he says. “What’s the catch, bud?”

  “You know, it’s, like, a walkathon thing,” I say.

  Miss Lupree signs my sheet of paper. I can smell her perfume—or is it soap? Does she shower in the girls’ locker room during the school day? (God almighty.)

  “There you go.”

  “Uh, thanks.”

  “Now get the hell outta here, mister, and don’t come back,” Coach Robb says, using his “rough” humor on me.

  I leave the office and end up wandering around in my old school, alone. It’s late in the school year, and there’s no air-conditioning. I can feel a heavy warmth in the hallways, and it’s dark and shady and strange. I get a whiff of methanol by the science lab and the smell of glue and paper near the yearbook room and the smell of cigarette smoke as I approach the faculty lounge, and I keep walking until I (just lie awake in bed, wondering if Miss Lupree really is old, or maybe even dead, and thinking of funerals I’ve gone to, and wondering when I will die, or if I’ll have to watch everyone else die, everyone I love, or almost everyone, one by one, before I go. What the hell is the point? No, no, don’t see it that way. Haven’t we been through this a million times? We live for a while and then we’re in the ground, and that should be enough. You would have to be ungrateful, or arrogant, or spoiled, or have no appreciation for life itself, to want more).

  2000

  FRANK GANNON

  ARISTOTLE ON RELATIONSHIPS

  Recently I read Aristotle’s Poetics. It made me reevaluate all of the things I thought I knew, and it really sparked a fire in me.… It made me realize that there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. Every emotion you’ll ever feel, everything you’re ever gonna do in your life has been done for thousands of years, you know, especially relationships.—Will Smith, in Book magazine

  I PROPOSE to treat of sexual relationships of various kinds, noting the essential qualities of each.

  Sexual relationships are of several types. They can be between a man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, or many people and many other people. These sexual relationships differ from one another in many respects. The highest form of sexual relationship, however, is generally believed to be that which exists between two people—at least, only two people at the same time. Let us discuss sexual relationships primarily between a man and a woman.

  Sex should be unified. Ideally, a sexual act should take the same amount of time for the man and the woman. The man and the woman should begin and end at the same time. If it takes the man ten minutes, it should take ten minutes for the woman. If a man takes longer than the woman, the woman may commence another sexual act (usually, but not always, with the same man) or she may just wander off. This is known by the common term short attention span.

  The man should not begin, or end, his sexual act before the woman is present. If the woman appears while the man is engaged in his sexual act alone, this becomes the basis of comedy, as is embodied in Aristophanes’ great work What Do You Think You’re Doing?

  If one woman and one man are taking part in an act of sex and the man’s sexual act takes less time than the woman’s sexual act, the woman may look at the man with a puzzled expression, as if to say, “Is that it?” Sometimes the woman may actually speak these words aloud, as occurs in Euripides’ early play Disappointment. This is classified as a lesser sexual act. It is unusual for this type of sexual act, consisting of the same two people, to be enacted more than once. A man who engages in a sexual act in this way with frequency may inspire the emotion known as pity, as in the case of Carsinius, although he denies that this is an issue. (I, however, have heard otherwise.)

  A sexual act, to be whole, must consist of a beginning, a middle, and an end. A well-constructed sexual act should contain nothing that does not relate directly to the sexual act. If a dog jumps on the bed during a well-constructed sexual act, the dog should become a part of the sexual act. This is, however, highly unusual, and could also be classified under the general term disgusting. The arrival of a dog usually merely interrupts the sexual act. This is characteristic of the worst type of sexual act, where the action stops and restarts. Sometimes it does not restart. This is called not in the mood anymore. The ending of this type of sexual act often involves the man and the woman sitting on the bed staring straight ahead. Sometimes a book or other reading material is used in the ending of this act. This is the worst type of sexual act, except, of course, the category “What Are You Doing?”

  The best type of sexual act is one between a man and a woman, but not a man and a woman who are both all good and entirely without flaws. It also does not consist in sex between an all-bad man and an all-good woman; or, by the same principle, between an all-good man and an all-bad woman. A sexual act of this type is never totally satisfying. A sexual act between an all-good man and an all-bad woman is highly unlikely, and a sexual act between an all-bad man and an all-good woman is a damn shame. A sexual act between an all-good man and an all-good woman is boring. All of these sexual acts are of the lesser sort.

  The emotions of pity and fear can be evoked by a sexual act involving a man and a woman who lie between the two extremes of good and bad. The highest form of fear occurs when a man who is not all good performs a sexual act with a woman who is also not all good, then another character who is also not all good—a character who has taken part in an earlier sexual act with the not all-good woman—enters before the end of the sexual act. This results in the downfall of the first not all-good man. A sexual act that ends with the catastrophe of the not all-good man evokes pity and fear. Aeschylus was the first to introduce lawyers into the scenario, which characters now routinely supply the ending to this type of sexual act.

  The foregoing thus must suffice concerning this matter. Sexual acts were once much different than they are now, and sexual acts have advanced by slow degrees as each new element was added over time. Having passed through many changes, sexual relations found their natural form, and there they stopped. Many people, however, myself included, miss the masks. And the harnesses. Those were good.

  2004

  PAUL SIMMS

  FOUR SHORT CRUSHES

  WELL, well, well.

  Just look at you, walking into this dreary bar and lighting the place up like the noonday sun at midnight, twirling a lock of your long auburn hair pensively as you search the room—for what?

  For a soul m
ate, perhaps?

  (I know, I know—I hate that phrase, too. Maybe that will end up being one of those things we both hate.) Maybe a few weeks from now, lying in your bed on a Sunday morning, I’ll ask you, “What’s your least favorite word or phrase?,” and you’ll say, “ ‘Soul mate,’ ” and I’ll laugh till you say, “What? Tell me!” and I’ll tell you how I knew that from the moment I first laid eyes on you, and then we’ll have sex again.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. You haven’t even noticed me yet. That’s okay. I can wait.

  Maybe when your gaze settles on me, and we lock eyes in that mutual Hitchcockian tunnel-vision effect where the camera is, like, pushing in at the same time it zooms out, or however they do that, you’ll come sit down next to me and we’ll—

  Now you’ve spotted the friends you came to meet. They look like good friends.

  Maybe they’ll be my friends, too.

  Our friends.

  Your eyes just came to life like emeralds lit by subterranean torches, and as you move across the room toward your friends you shriek at them, “What the fuck is up, yo?,” in a voice so piercing that the entire bar goes silent for a moment, and I have to check my glasses to make sure the lenses didn’t crack. You continue to bellow your every utterance (including the lines “Jägermeister is the bomb, dawg!” and “Just ’cause I’m a white girl don’t mean I don’t got some serious junk in the trunk!” and “Random! Random! Random!”), and the bartender leans in and whispers something to his bar back, and they look at you and laugh.

  You must be a regular here.

  (Duration of crush: seventeen seconds.)

  OH MY. What have we here? A rainy night in the city has cleared the sidewalks of all but the most intrepid pedestrians, and those who didn’t brave the elements have no idea what they’re missing.