Mimi

by Lucy Ellmann

  This one, I immediately detected, was a Manhattan art-world person in the Gertrude tradition. In fact I might even have met her at one of Gertrude’s Dohnányi parties. The woman had never whittled anything in her life and clearly had no time for us because we’d never whittled anything either. After a few unpleasant pleasantries, Leggy whispered something in her ear—but before the Director started interrogating us, Mimi took charge.

  “We’ve come for the Firefly Quilt,” she announced to my surprise.

  “Yes, I see,” the Director replied. “Would you prefer a slide of it, or do you need a digital reproduction?” She really was not on the ball.

  “Reproduction?!” Mimi turned red with fury. I thought I’d better intervene.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “And you are… ?”

  “Hanafan. Harrison Hanafan. Ms. Fortune’s attorney.” The Director seemed to soften, either awed by my shaky Bond act, or by the idea of lawyers. “We would like to discuss your recent acquisition of the Firefly Quilt,” I continued.

  “I believe we acquired the Firefly only about a week ago,” she proudly began. “It’s a fine example of quilt-making of the period, with finer materials than is customary. It shows an astonishing awareness of quilting traditions, Amish and Ohio influences in particular—”

  “Madam,” I broke in. “We are not concerned right now with the item’s place in history. We have a more urgent purpose: to restore it to its rightful owner. The article in question was never knowingly sold by my client, to whom it belonged. It is stolen property. Did you establish the quilt’s provenance before you bought it, may I ask?”

  Flustered, the Director replied, “Well… the man said his aunt made it! Quilt provenances are notoriously difficult to… I think he said her name was Sophia—”

  “It’s Phoebe, and she was my aunt,” Mimi broke in. “Not his!”

  “I can assure you,” said the Director to me, as if she only wanted to deal directly with Bond, “we bought the quilt from the bona fide owner. I have the paperwork here… somewhere… ” She now glanced anxiously at Leggy, and began to shift piles of papers around on a desk that was beyond folksy: it was chaos! Leggy raised a leggy eyebrow and went over to assist her, but you could tell they were never going to come up with any document relating to the quilt; not fast anyway.

  I barged in. “What you’ve got there, madam, is a hot quilt.”

  The Director and Leggy looked at each other, then stepped outside the room to confer. This was a moment of great danger for us—because of the temptation to guffaw. Mimi and I studiously avoided eye contact. The two women came back, with an offer.

  “We have decided that in fairness, subject of course to official clearance… we should consider selling you the quilt,” said the Director stiffly, fearful of admitting (to a lawyer) any failure in the museum’s procedures. “We will only require you to meet the price the museum paid for it.” Success!

  “How much?” asked Mimi, suspiciously.

  “Twenty-five,” answered Leggy.

  “Twenty-five dollars?! Trust John to sell it for—”

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars,” Leggy corrected, the eyebrow rising ominously again before she and the Director shared a classic Laurel and Hardy nod of mutual approbation.

  Next thing I knew, we were in the museum shop, where a reddened Mimi bought ten bucks’ worth of postcards, her mouth a tiny dot of fury. To cool us both down, I took her to MoMA to see Matisse: to MoMA with MiMI! She studied one of his odalisques for some time before saying, “Was that Sherlock Holmes you were trying for in there?”

  “Sherlock Holmes!? I’m wounded. That, Mimi, was my best James Bond impression! I thought I’d never get a chance to use it.”

  Then we did crack up.

  We went back to her place in Grove Street afterwards, to her cramped kitchen with its view of a brick wall opposite. Mimi fixed us huge Scotch and sodas and we sat at her bashed-up kitchen table, talking shyly about things. I think profiteroles came up, and their (debatable) relation to vol-au-vents. After a while she said she had to go have a shower, and left me sitting there all alone, making whirly patterns on the table with my wet glass. When I got tired of that, I wandered around the apartment, a funky little place with an unexpected sunken living room that must have seemed the hottest thing in about 1964. The bedroom was surprisingly spacious. It seemed dark and calm in there. Hours passed, or so it felt. “Mimi?” I called out, but she couldn’t hear me over the sound of running water. I went back to the kitchen and poured myself another whiskey and wandered with it into the bathroom.

  There was Mimi, in a towel, reaching up for something, one breast exposed. She looked just like Delacroix’s Liberty leading the people! A brave, sturdy dame with freedom on the brain—bayonet rifle in one hand (or, in Mimi’s case, a damp towel), French flag in the other (comb), a load of dead supporters or enemies at her heels (pile of discarded clothing), and one big foot peeking out like the Statue of Liberty’s (minus the questionable sandal). If I didn’t shave, I could have been the Abe Lincoln lookalike, standing protectively by with a gun my own (glass of whiskey). There was none of the fragility of Gertrude about this gal. Nor were those the delicate flower-sewing hands of Puccini’s Mimì. This Mimi was no vulnerable waif or stray, no flower-girl. In fact, she wasn’t my type.

  It was really that bathroom of hers I first fell in love with! The one thing my apartment lacked, a great old-fashioned New York bathroom with white hexagonal floor tiles, squared black towel rails, black-and-white tiling around the walls, a white china toilet-paper recess, and that great wide square sink with its mammoth X-shaped faucets. Mimi had it all!

  She’d now gone into the bedroom, and I thought I heard her say, “Why don’t you kiss me?” This request seemed highly unlikely, so I went back into the kitchen, but there were too many circles in there. A few fireflies too. So I went to join Mimi instead, walked right up to her in her towel in her dark bedroom and her miasma of mayhem, and suddenly thought, I must kiss this woman before one of us dies.

  Our four lips met, like the four corners of the earth, the four elements, a foregone conclusion. I didn’t see stars but there were skyscrapers and my mother’s raspberry jam and bulldozers and dachshunds. Some Matisse odalisques too, and cops, news flashes of politicians and flood victims, a quilt or two, Schubert, a Grecian pillar… and Gertrude. Yes, some lingering guilt toward Gertrude tried to throw me—misplaced, an error, a reflex, a shield against the unknown, the last refuge of the unadventurous. I pushed it aside. I think I saw tall pines waving against an evening sky, baskets, some chair I used to own: I ricocheted off all these obstacles in search of Mimi. Her towel slipped down, which distracted me, and I suddenly wondered if I might have jumped the gun, forced myself on her, offended in some way. Maybe she hadn’t suggested kissing at all, only said something like, “Where’s the Kleenex?”

  She smiled though, that smile that always got me, and all my hesitancy dissolved: I wanted to kiss her whole being, every kooky thing she’d ever done, every thought in her crazy head. I had to be near that womanly softness of her, to hell with the exact qualities of her body that I was overtrained in noticing. Jumping hurdles of my own prejudices—too tall, too big, too old, too bold?—I kissed her hot temple, her hot temper, her neck, her hair, her warmth, her alienness. I wanted to know her everything. I ran my thumb down her unfamiliar belly until she moaned.

  A kiss is a big step, an opening, an honesty, a transgression. There’s something equal about it, this mutual penetration, a relaxation (if only temporary) of self-love. Forget dualism—in the midst of a kiss you’re neither male nor female, yin nor yang. You’re not yourself! I only paused to ask, “You don’t embroider, do you?” before Ant and Bee painted the tire the color called RED, and we went to bed.

  VALENTINE’S DAY

  “Why do you look at my hands?”

  “Because they charm me,” I answered, kissing them, and it was true. I was now an advocate of Mimi’s large
hands and strong feet, and the well-rounded calves that sloped dramatically down to her unsprainable ankles. Mimi’s feet seemed heroic to me, the kind of feet Liberty would need to man those barricades. A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame was the imprisoned lightning.

  Mimi was heroic: heroic in the grocery store sniffing out the bargains, heroic on the subway pushing her way onto crowded trains, heroic when eating, when drinking, when sleeping, when laughing, just heroic all the time! Heroic in her beliefs, her angers and upsets, heroic when she dropped to her knees and took my cock in her mouth, heroic when I turned her to fuck her standing up, heroic coming and coming under the ceiling fan in her wide square bedroom. Heroic lying spoon-style behind me afterwards, calling me darling.

  Is this not love?

  When you first get together with someone, you hammer out a cosmos—through moments of discord as well as contentment. It’s your Big Bang period. From then on, the way you interact has been established. Things evolve, sure, you can refine it. But the major accommodations have been made and met, parameters set, no-go zones delineated, and you’ll pause before disturbing these balances and tilting the whole thing off course.

  Mimi turned out to have a lot to say, but not in Gertrude’s meandering megalomaniacal manner. Mimi had firm views, clear enemies, and battles to fight. None of it seemed aimed directly at me. It was exhilarating to watch, and had a strange erotic charge. Mimi was brash, she was brazen, I wasn’t even sure she was completely civilized. And sometimes she’d lash out at me too, like a cornered animal: I was communing with nature at last.

  “Where there’s life, we can rail!” she declared one morning out on the roof, with the wind in her hair.

  “Okay, but don’t lean on the railing.”

  Mimi on power suits: “Power suits don’t work. Power works.”

  Mimi on jobs: “Work’s bad for you. It drives everybody nuts in the end! That’s why I went freelance. If I wanna stay in bed, I stay there.”

  This wasn’t exactly true—despite her fantasy of flexibility, Mimi always seemed to have to email somebody or Xerox something, frustrating all my endeavors to keep my own workload down to a minimum in order to be with her!

  Mimi on parenthood: “You share your genetic defects with somebody, and then they get your crappy furniture when you die? Some deal.” We were in total agreement on procreation: its unnecessariness.

  Mimi on male bonuses: “They earn five times what women do, and still expect you to chip in for dinner!”

  Mimi on sports: “What good’s an Olympian to me?”

  Mimi on guys on the subway who spread their legs and their newspapers far and wide: “We all paid the price of a ticket. And I like opening my legs too!” This she then demonstrated to me, in the most beguiling way.

  Mimi on the Hadron Collider (which she insisted on calling the Hard-on Collider): “Who needs a big machine to re-create the chaos at the beginning of the universe? Chaos we got!”

  “How about a Tippi Hedren Collider instead then?” I suggested. “You just throw birds at her until she flips.”

  Mimi on the guy who claimed to have started an extramarital affair with a complete stranger, involuntarily, while sleepwalking as a result of taking an antidepressant: “Yeah, sure.”

  Mimi on a beer company promotion prize of a whole “caveman” weekend for five guys—free beer, video games, sports channels, and room service: “Five drunks in a cheap hotel.”

  Mimi on breast cancer campaigns: “Them and their pink ribbons. It’s sexual harassment! They never let you forget your breasts are a liability.”

  Mimi on bras: “Tit prisons. Who decided tits have to be this stiff and high anyway? The UN?”

  “But without bras,” I argued, “I’d have even more boob-jobs to do and I’m sick of them!”

  “I didn’t know men could get sick of breasts.”

  “Not of breasts maybe, but of altering them in accordance with their owner’s latest caprice, or her husband’s.”

  Mimi was pretty suspicious of my profession. We battled it out one day over Yankee bean soup and borscht at B & H Dairy on 2nd Avenue (even when you’re in love, you still need soup!). I was admiring her lips, and made the mistake of saying they were beautiful.

  “They’re just my lips. Don’t separate ’em off and compare them to other lips. You’re not at work now, buddy.”

  “Well, shut up and kiss me then!”

  She did, then resumed her rant. “Who decides what’s beautiful anyway? It’s all a matter of opinion, right?”

  “Well, according to my partner Henry, beauty was decided for us by evolution. Hairiness in men, for instance, hairlessness in women. Sexual characteristics got exaggerated over time, since the people most universally recognized as desirable were the most likely to find mates. Youthfulness is another widely accepted beauty trait, because it implies fertility. Evolution decided it, and we just help it along.”

  “That’s bullshit,” declared Mimi.

  “Look, Mimi. Imagine nature is the tailor, as a teacher of mine put it, and we’re the invisible menders when the suit gets a bit worn out.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Honey, it’s just a job.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Those “hmmms” of hers.

  “Some people really need help, Mimi, or their lives would be ruined! I had a woman in once who’d grown a horn on her forehead! Just an excess of keratin, easily removed—but in the Middle Ages she would have been dragged from town to town as an emblem of cuckoldry or something!”

  “Or burnt as a witch,” said Mimi, taking a big bite of challah bread. “But come on, Harrison—most people’s lives aren’t in danger if they don’t have a nose-job.”

  “All I know is, a lot of middle-aged women come to me complaining they feel invisible.”

  “But being invisible’s great!” Mimi said. “You can do whatever you want and nobody notices.”

  “I have this sudden twitch in my neck.”

  “That’s ’cause you’re talkin’ through your hat!”

  I quickly changed the subject to Haydn. “You know how Haydn was taught to play the drum? When he was three years old, they hung a drum on a hunchback’s back and Haydn walked behind him with his drumsticks, tapping away. Later, he got the full drum kit with high hat and cymbal, requiring six hunchbacks and a midget who played the kazoo.”

  Mimi almost spat her borscht everywhere, something it’s important not to do in such a small space. At B & H, you try to avoid any sudden movements, so as not to upset lethal quantities of hot soup. I moved on from midgets to a confession of my midget–maniac problem in childhood. Mimi had had similar mix-ups: she’d thought cirrus clouds were serious, and for a long time, to her mother’s shame, called water “agooya”, ravioli “ravaloli” and beef bouillon “Beef William.”

  “Did you know they’ve just invented a way of manufacturing sperm artificially?” I asked next, just to get a rise out of her.

  “Isn’t there enough of it around already?”

  “Yeah, the thing would be to de-invent it,” I said. “Everybody talks about recycling and hybrid cars but they never think seriously about overpopulation! If we could just stop having babies, we wouldn’t need all these apocalypse scenarios.” (Another bugbear of Mimi’s.)

  “But what would Hollywood do, without the end of the world?” she mused. “They aren’t happy unless people are looting and drowning every place. And then a guy gets into his SUV and somehow saves the day, or at least his own stupid skin.”

  Mimi on Cormac McCarthy: “He writes about cowboys and the apocalypse. Enough said.”

  Mimi on Branwell Brontë: “Who cares?”

  She got mad about a million different things! But she could be easily charmed too.

  Mimi on generosity: “Some people are so generous it breaks your heart. Pavarotti’s generous. And that guy who had to land his plane in the Hudson. When they were all standing in the cold out on the wings, he gave his shirt to one of the freezing passenger
s. The shirt off his back! You’re generous too. You’re generous with your cock.”

  Forget the soup, cancel my appointments! Taxi!

  Bubbles and Mimi had formed an instant rapport—almost as if they knew each other already. There was occasional competition between Bubbles and me over who got to sleep on top of Mimi. But most of the time our ménage à trois worked very well. When we all woke up entangled together on Valentine’s Day, I started telling Mimi about the way my parents had incarcerated me in my bed as a kid, thereby putting me off bedtime for life (until now). She found my Berlioz problem funny so, getting bolder, I stood up to declaim, “It was in fact during those sleepless nights that I, like Edison, came up with my best stuff.” Then I gave her some examples of my youthful “inventions” (so far unpatented):

  1. Every sidewalk a conveyor belt.

  2. Every basement a swimming pool.

  3. Every attic a planetarium.

  Mimi had invented the same stuff herself. Still, I had more!

  4. Aquarium bathtub: translucent sides so you could have real fish in there—octopuses, sharks, baby alligators, whatever you want (Bee always wanted sea horses).

  5. The Tornado Room-Tidier: a machine you place in the middle of your room and it spins faster and faster, blowing all your toys and clothes and shit into the corners and under the bed. Instant appearance of order.

  6. The Yuck-Suck Machine: this consists of a pump, a disposable “reservoir” (plastic baggie), and a tube going down your sleeve, ending in a discreet nozzle. When you’re presented with unfamiliar food at a friend’s house (like Beef William, for instance), the Yuck-Suck secretly siphons it all up. Particularly good on cabbage and gravy.