by Lucy Ellmann
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“The future of the species depends much more on the female orgasm. That’s just the way it is. Even female fruit flies expect to be given a good time!”
“Are we fruit flies?” I asked, remembering Eugene Wrayburn’s objections to being equated to a bee.
“This is what we’re made for, that’s all. But fidelity—that’s a side issue. Sometimes you have to share! As long as males are serving female pleasure, that’s what counts. Of course, if men freak women out by being unfaithful, that isn’t going to increase female pleasure either. It all has to be weighed up.” Mimi’s rhetorical momentum was building towards some sort of climax of its own. She was glorious!
“In nature, male animals are all out there courting females, protecting females, feeding females, and giving them orgasms. Only people have given this whole happy system up and turned sex into something just for men to enjoy.”
“I do,” I admitted.
“We’ve got it all ass-backward!” she exclaimed, contradictorily fondling me at the same time. “Men are off the beam! They’ve ignored female sexuality for centuries and deprived women of billions of orgasms they should have had!”
“Get your ass in there then!” I ordered, dragging her back to bed, where I matched my thrusts to the drilling and hammering going on outside. She went crazy for it. There were at least three more female orgasms in the world that day (but who’s counting?), and it was my avowed intention to make up for those centuries of omission whenever I could.
By Mimi’s prehistoric reckoning, we’d now been together four full moons (moons, or lunar months, were the only thing she considered worth marking). By my calculations, we’d been together five, having been in synch, on some metaphysical plane or other, ever since we first met: we’d made it through Christmas, New Year’s, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Groundhog Day, Valentine’s Day, Presidents’ Day, a non-Leap Year, the Ides of March, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, the British Royal Wedding, World Asthma Day and Mother’s Day.
We were way past my usual three-week cut-off point, as well as the tricky two-month juncture. And still there wasn’t a sign of any waning (except the moon’s). What was mine was hers, and hers mine: by osmosis we had become happy occupants of each other’s apartments, happy as long as we were together there. Mimi was fascinated by the showroom opposite my place, full of cardboard boxes; I was fond of The Little Owl, the pretty restaurant on her corner. So what if you sometimes run out of socks? I was working on getting much more relaxed about sock issues.
I had the day off, Mimi didn’t: she had some photocopying to do before a seminar she was giving that afternoon. I played her the Appassionata while she got ready to go. But I really didn’t want her to leave, and suddenly became much less relaxed. Maybe it was Beethoven’s fault—he’s good at raising your anxiety level (not all classical music is as soothing as Gertrude’s musical pals made out). The thought of Mimi alone on the streets of New York with her big bags of photocopying began to unnerve me. I usually tried to keep a lid on my protectiveness and jealousy but, you know, in between their crackpot ideas and their huffs and their puffs (and their muffs), their bold declarations that they have the right to go where they please, their tirades, their tantrums, their intransigence (I sound like my father), not to mention their “incorrigibility” (his favorite putdown), plus all the hot flashes, pmt, pnd and vpl, women are vulnerable out there—and it makes a man feel vulnerable too, if he’s in love with one. But when I mentioned to Mimi I was worried about her going out alone, she said it was the dog shit that worried her.
Mimi on dog shit: “Anybody allowed to shit wherever they want obviously owns the place!”
All I could do was tug at her skirt hem like a puppy myself, and race ahead of her into the bedroom, where I flung myself naked across the bed as further enticement for her to stay. I just wanted to roll in my sweet baby’s arms all day! No dice. She left, promising bagels on her return.
So I lay on the bed watching Bubbles dream, her paws and muzzle twitching heroically as she ran wild somewhere, hunting, eating, or escaping something. I was wondering dozily if there was a Big Sleep after the Big Bang—the universe sure seems to like its shut-eye (even plants slumber: it’s amazing we all have to be out of it half our lives, it seems such a waste of time and resources!)—when I heard a knock on the front door. Maybe Mimi had relented, and/or forgotten her keys. I threw on her kimono (just in case five builders were out there instead, wanting to get access to the roof) and headed for the door. I was fond of this kimono. It bore no resemblance in my opinion to a bathrobe. It was too silky, too exotic, too erotic, and too short to be a bathrobe, and had an elaborate floral design on it instead of the classic bathrobe’s trad plaid. So I cheerfully opened the front door, flung it open in fact, flung wide my arms and my kimono to receive Mimi—but it wasn’t Mimi, it was Gertrude. If only the Japanese had shown more empathy when constructing their kimono! I primly wrapped the flimsy thing around me, and let her in: one cannot stand on too much ceremony with old flames. She wasn’t wearing all that much either, just some thin shapeless vintage hippy number—for which she’d probably coughed up about a thousand bucks.
“Hello, Harrison!” she sniggered.
“Hello, Gertrude. How’s it going?”
“Fine, fine,” she said as she stomped in, proprietorially throwing her coat down on the hall chair. She was peering this way and that, no doubt trying to see if there was a new woman around—I still hadn’t actually told her about Mimi, but I knew she suspected something was going on. Without a word, she headed for the kitchen.
“Uh, what do you want, Gertrude?”
“I came for my coffee machine,” she said. “I need it.”
“The coffee machine? Uh-huh.”
She didn’t need that coffee machine! She had a million of ’em. Was she genuinely fearful that my new woman, if I had one, might perform perversities on her percolator? I just wanted to get her out of there before Mimi came back. In aid of this, I helped Gertrude pack the stupid machine (and its manual) in its various boxes, and gathered up all the stray unused coffee capsules lying around. This wasn’t easy, since for modesty’s sake I had to hold the kimono together with one hand, and shove the capsules toward Gertrude with the other, one at a time. She milked the situation for all it was worth, taking her time and chatting about Claude while we worked, saying how well he was doing at kindergarten, how happy he was at home… Like hell he was. I didn’t believe a word of it. The kid must be going out of his mind! But he had his own ingenious methods of distancing himself from Gertrude. Sure enough, with the help of his nanny, Claude had just embarked on a huge new art project (which Gertrude, being pushy, was keen to support): he was painting a mural in the outside hallway. Get that? The outside hallway. Between this absorbing task and school, he probably only had to encounter Gertrude at suppertime. I felt a pang of remorse though, when she told me the subject of the mural: Yogi Bear. He was obviously missing me! This reinforced my fury with her, since it was her decision I shouldn’t visit the poor guy, or have him visit me.
But then I saw her frail back from behind, as she carried her enormous coffee machine out of the kitchen, and a wave of magnanimity came over me. I felt like a louse. I was the happy one after all, I had love, while Gertrude had nothing but her culinary contraptions and a kid she’d never understand. And that zoo, of course. Though never wholly convinced by her ardor for animals, I wanted to be affable, so I lamely told Gertrude I had a cat. She instantly threw down all the coffee paraphernalia and started that act she always puts on with pets, as if she alone is capable of bridging the species barrier. The transition from snoopy to soppy was surreal.
“Oh, can I see it?” she squealed. “Where is it?” (“It”?!)
Bubbles was probably still asleep in the bedroom, blissfully unaware of what was coming her way, but when I called her she trotted into the living room with her usual politeness, and rubbed against my leg.
“Uh, Bubs, this is… Gertrude,” I said reluctantly.
Bubbles recoiled from Gertrude’s hand. If I were a cat, I wouldn’t want to be scratched by those pointy claws either. Hell, I wouldn’t want to be touched by Gertrude, whatever I was! She sure knew how to wreck my day. She timed her Gertrusions so well. But she couldn’t have found a good moment to come over to my apartment, because there was never going to be one. Now she was chasing poor Bubbles around the room. They were over by the window, where Gertrude was making hissing, supposedly kissing, sounds at her, calling her Bubs—a name only Mimi and I were allowed to use! Bubbles slid underneath the window seat and stayed there, clever cat. Undaunted, Gertrude hitched up that dopey diaphanous dress, squatted down, and started to paw pointlessly in Bubbles’s direction.
“Here, Pussy, here, Pussy!” she cried.
I was now worried that Bubbles might get stuck between the wall and the radiator, so felt I had to intervene. At first, I attempted to work around Gertrude, scrupulously avoiding any physical contact with her. But she wouldn’t budge from her spot in front of the radiator. The only way for me to get at Bubbles was to lean over Gertrude from behind (as if we were back doing it doggy-style, as in days of yore!). Gertrude kept inanely trying to help. “Here, Pussy,” she squealed.
“I’ll deal with the pussy, Gertrude,” I said sternly, groping around on both sides of her. “If you’d just move a little to the right… ”
“But Harrison, it’s so big, I think it’s stuck!” Gertrude giggled, squirming under my weight as I felt my way blindly toward Bubbles.
“Yes, it’s getting bigger and bigger,” I admitted: Bubbles had lost all her initial scrawniness and was now turning into a fine matronly cat (I’d have to start cutting back on the Fancy Feast). But why was I calling her “it”? She’d been “he” for a while, then “she”, never “it”! The only explanation was that I wasn’t myself, thanks to the aggravations of being with Gertrude again, and being with her in a kimono. And now I was getting down and dirty with her on the floor! I couldn’t take any more of this. “C’mon!” I said in sudden exasperation and, clutching the woman around the middle, I yanked her bodily up from the floor, meaning to deposit her a few feet away. I realized too late that the silkiness of the kimono, combined with a Pavlovian reaction to my close proximity to this familiar body, was rousing base instincts in me. Gertrude interpreted this as a come-on!
“Oh, Harrison, I’ve missed you so,” she murmured delightedly.
For godsake, didn’t she know no m.o., no intentionality, no Plan of Action, can be attributed to that organ? Plenty of rhymes, maybe, but no reason. It goes up, it goes down. Big deal. It doesn’t know what’s going on! Having high hopes of me now, Gertrude somehow wound her snakelike arms around my legs. My only chance of escape lay in making a dash for the bedroom; but it was no good, she held fast and floored me! (She’s stronger than she looks.) I fell flat on my face. She flipped me over, and now she was all over me, slithering and sliding, muttering all kinds of indecencies, and undulating like there was no tomorrow.
I grabbed hold of a piano leg to use as leverage, but she wasn’t going to let me go. I seem to remember biting the piano leg at one point, in my efforts to avoid a fate worse than death. Who knows what outrage would have been perpetrated in another second or two, if a whole bunch of soft round objects hadn’t started raining down on us from above. I got biffed by one in the face and looked up… and there was Mimi, clutching a bag of bagels. How long had she been there??
Gertrude jumped off me and ran towards the front door, the coward. But Mimi kept pelting her with bagels (the perfect matriarchal missile: soft and round, with that vaginal hole), until Gertrude got angry and retaliated with coffee capsules.
CAT FIGHT!!!
Mimì! Mimì!
I phoned again and again but she wasn’t answering. This filled me with irritation. Come on, girl, what do you take me for? Do you really think I’d be banging that bore while you were out buying bagels? boy, that made me mad!
And I thought she loved me! Just the day before, we’d sat canoe-style on the couch, Mimi in my arms, me nuzzling her brown curls—the epitome of coziness and peace! For Mimi, I’d run down ten flights of stairs, hoping to beat the elevator, but she was too fast for me, and gone by the time I got there. For Mimi, I’d stood barefoot on 36th Street in a kimono, enduring the whistles of workmen! For Mimi, I’d suffered the slings and arrows and outrageous misfortune of Gertrude, who passed me out there on the street a few minutes later, her arms full of her priceless coffee machine.
“You look ridiculous, Harrison,” she’d said in triumph.
“I am ridiculous,” I’d replied, before plodding back upstairs to my disheveled apartment and discomfited cat.
“Well, Bubs, how about some coffee and bagels?”
Instead of the Appassionata, I played the Tempest for the next few hours. Both pieces are for the heartbroken, but the Tempest is full of blood and flood and fire… This is what rejection does to you: you lose all resistance to crass ideas about music! And the more I played it, the more I took the whole débâcle out on Mimi. Your feet’s too big! Women are always complaining about the size of men’s feet, but Mimi’s! Sure, they might be useful when manning barricades, but this was Manhattan in a period of relative calm!
Absence, combined with guilt and shame, made Mimi seem alien, not my mate but some kind of interloper who didn’t suit me after all. I had never worried about her physical peculiarities when she was by my side, kissing me and sassing me around; but in retrospect, she had her flaws. Was it really necessary to be so plump? I knew I was dating a middle-aged woman, I’d accepted that, but those bulges under her bra straps at the back—this was new territory for me. For Delacroix, it wasn’t a problem. Liberty’s wearing loose-fitting clothing, sans bra. But in an age of more or less universal bra use, a man can indulge only so much bulge before starting to wonder if he doesn’t deserve better. Female flesh is supposed to be smooth and soft and curvy, not all furrowed, dented, and squeezed, like a ball of rubber bands. In fact, Delacroix could keep his feisty flat-footed weirdsmobile for all I cared!
Going out with Mimi now seemed a mockery of what I did for a living—and she’d have been the first to admit it! She was none too kind about my sorry profession. The point was, how was I supposed to turn up at plastic surgery conventions with Mimi on my arm? All the other guys used their women as ads for their talents with Botox or the scalpel; the women were works-in-progress. Henry always brought his patients, convinced that they were proof of his beautifying skills. Aw, screw him too, and his beauty addiction.
And then I thought of that night on the street, after Henry drove us nuts, how Mimi called me a hero, and kissed me… and the Tempest gradually subsided. I just wanted Mimi back! So what, if I was trained to disapprove of some of her physical flaws? What’s a love affair without a little ugliness? You need some counterpart to heady joy or you’d conk out! It gave love gravitas, like in Ant and Bee and the Rainbow, when you get that scary cross-section of the old buried tire. The top half, above-ground, can be laboriously painted to look (a bit) like a fake rainbow, but the other half’s stuck in the cracked earth, lonely and unreachable, with stones sticking painfully into its sides: a memento mori. “We all die in the end.”
My next move was to go howl like a hound-dog outside Mimi’s building, also pound on the door and ring the bell, but Mimi wasn’t there or wasn’t answering. Mimì! Mimì!
So I went home and called my sister, who found the whole thing funny!
“You said what?!”
“I said I’d deal with the pussy… or something like that. Aw jeez. I don’t know what I said, but it wasn’t good.”
“Gertrude must have been pleased with herself after.”
“She did look pretty happy.”
“Just give Mimi a little time. She’ll get over it.”
Gertrude phoned later to apologize.
“Yeah, well, thanks to your little cameo appearance the
re, Gertrude,” I said unforgivingly, “my girlfriend isn’t speaking to me. And we were planning to get married.” (I’d just decided.)
“Married!?”
So then I had to comfort Gertrude!
Despite Cheryl’s vain hope that I was newly available, only Bubbles helped fill the gap left by Mimi. Bubbles was the better purrer, but I ached for Mimi. Rodolfo’s cry of Mimì! Mimì! went through my head a million times a day—though, when I got home from work I swallowed rom-coms by the dozen, not Puccini. Sleepless in Seattle made me cry! My List of Melancholy, which had lain dormant for a while, began to spiral out of control.
LIST OF MELANCHOLY
– the “Ready” bell on microwaves
– beeps of all types
– truck-reversing sirens and recorded messages
– car alarms
– alarm clocks
– xylophones
– glockenspiels
– this pain in my temple!
– Roman centurion sandals
– Kentucky-fried-chicken-kickers, and the chickens they kick
– barn dances
– my mother’s raspberry jam (no longer available)
– upholstery, especially those buttons that hold it all together
– Dick Cheney
– data fraud
– adultery
– Boy Scouts
– Girl Scouts
– linoleum
– women all over the world, stretching their arms up over their heads
– Mimi’s flattened straw hat
That straw hat of hers turned up in my bedroom closet (a Mimi minefield), and I remembered Mimi admiring it, saying, “Look at the work that went into this, Harrison! So intricate! Look how it’s woven. See how rounded it is at the top? That’s an art!”—a remark that entangled me, wove me, and entitled me to make a grab—for Mimi, not the hat. The hat was caught in the fray and got crushed.
Intimately examining it now, sitting on the floor of my closet, I had an idea—EUREKA!—a solution to my present predicament that went well beyond the usual roses, chocolates, or chocolate roses, of other two-timing bastards. In my capacity as Mimi’s attorney I gave the museum of annoying folksiness a call, and offered to buy the Firefly Quilt back from them after all. Humble Pie was consumed. After some toing and froing with the director and her aloof assistants, a price was settled on. It had gone up (practically double) and, given that I’d never spent that much on household decor before, it took some strength of purpose to blow it on a blanket. But I was by then too pleased with my cunning plan to backtrack. They said I could pick the thing up on Monday.