Not at all. Not at all. I felt very clear inside. I knew what connections I was making. This Eastern European man with the beautiful eyes and the sweet impulse to make excuses for the woman who was causing him trouble: I saw him rising from a bath towel on the shore of the Adriatic Sea and he was naked.
“He doesn’t have a medallion,” a whiny man’s voice said.
“Please, mister,” dark eyes said, not angry even at this buttinsky. “I will do what’s right.”
“Is it true?” I asked him.
He turned his face to me again.
“What?”
“About what you are?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice violining into a whisper. “I am gypsy.”
“I think I’m all right,” I said. “Take me somewhere.”
Later, in a room at the Hotel Dixie, he kissed me gently all around the edge of the massive bruise from his grill. And he was naked. Though the roar around us was not the surf on the Adriatic but the traffic from Times Square, he was as gentle in his hands and in his maleness as he was in his excuse-making.
“What thing was it you dream today?” he asked after our bodies had pulled softly apart.
“That’s not the question to ask,” I said and I found myself sitting up and bending near and looking at that male part of him. I was a little surprised to find myself doing this. I had never really looked at a man there before, only by accident, only out of the corner of my eye, more or less unwillingly. Now I wanted to see this man, this Anatole, and it came from his interest in my dreams, his unexpected gentleness, I knew. I had a sense of him in these unseeable things: like I see the shape of a violin and feel that it seems just right for the sweet and sad sounds it makes, I looked at this man’s body to see his inner self. It was turning from a taut young man into a wrinkled old codger. Doddering now and incapable of response as it was, I grew tender for it, in a certain way, tender as if for a beloved father who doesn’t recognize you anymore, wanting only the best for him, in somebody else’s care.
“What am I to ask?” he said.
“What’s that?”
“If I am not asking what you dream when my cab hit upon you.”
I smiled at him. “Ask what I will dream from that moment on.”
“And so? Yes?”
I realized that I could not shape an answer to that, though something in me knew what to expect.
Is this nymphomania? I think not. I went to my apartment that night and I wanted nothing to do with my boyfriend. He’s a very good-looking man but he reviews books anonymously for a pre-publication newsletter and he’s got execrable taste and he’s working on a novel about the Trojan War because he learned Greek at Notre Dame and I think it was the idea of a man who looks like this that made me take up with him in my life before the accident. But I know him. We rent a car now and then and go to the Hamptons and whenever anybody makes the slightest mistake in their driving near him, he honks his horn furiously and curses them and when I walked into my apartment and he was lounging in his distressed Levi’s and flannel shirt on my couch and he looked up at me with what I know he intended as a sexy smile, I clearly saw his angry self-righteousness as a driver sculpted into his square jaw and curling up in his chest hair from the open shirt. And I had not seen this ever before in his body. I kept taking that body to bed and I never really saw it till that day when I was hit by a cab. Is that a symptom of nymphomania?
To myself I’m sounding entirely convinced about this. But perhaps not. Perhaps I’ve asked that rhetorical question about nymphomania too many times now and you’re thinking the lady protests too much. It is true that I’ve been to bed with quite a few men since that day in the spring. But each of them was naked with me as an individual. I insist that’s true. I know the alternative.
I was in a bar in Chelsea a few weeks ago. I’d been to a reading at Barnes and Noble by one of my authors, a first novelist, and I didn’t want to go home. The boyfriend was thrown out and starting to savage all my authors in his reviews and I hate to admit it, but that was a trade-off I could easily live with. But there was no one else in my apartment that night either. The bar was small and the neon beer names burned coldly in the smoky air and a man sat down on the stool next to me. He was handsome and the sly wobble of his head and his little pucker-smile said he knew it. If you’ve heard too much protest in me so far and suspect the tabloid story of being accurate, then you’d have to expect this man and I would get along just fine.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” I said.
“I just came over here to tell you how good you’re looking tonight,” he said.
“You appreciate women, do you?” I made my voice behave. No sarcasm. A straight question.
“It’s what I am,” he said and he leaned nearer. “Ontologically, I appreciate women.”
I kept my face composed and I said, “If that’s true, I’ll do whatever you want.”
His eyes widened and his eyelids fluttered like a silent film heroine. “Well,” he said. “Well. We’re going to have some fun, darling.”
“But you have to prove it first.”
“What?”
“Tell me about the last woman you slept with.”
He furrowed his brow. “I don’t understand.”
“Do you want to go to bed with me?” I was still sounding sweet, but it was a firm question.
“That’s why I sat down beside you,” he said.
“Good. Then prove your appreciation. Tell me when was the last time you made love to a woman.”
“Okay,” he said. “Whatever turns you on. Two nights ago.”
“What does her most intimate sexual part look like?”
“Look like?”
“Tell me all the details of it.” He hesitated and I put my hand on his and said with a voice slick as K-Y jelly, “It turns me on.” This was a lie, but it was his language.
He set his mouth and narrowed his eyes and cocked his head in an effort to remember. “It was . . . you know, an opening.” He stopped. I waited. There was no more.
“That’s all you remember?”
“Sure. What else is there?”
“I said you had to prove this.”
He was getting pissed. “They’re all basically alike,” he said. “Any guy’ll tell you that.”
“Sorry, stud,” I said. “You flunked the test.”
I turned away and he went off cursing, and the fact is I can tell you the contours, the textures, the sweet little blue tracings of veins on the secret part of each man I’ve touched since the spring and they are each as different as their voices, as their minds, as all the subtle intricacies of their personalities. And they are precious to me, in their variety. When I lay on the hood of that cab and looked at the clouds, I knew that this would be so.
And it wasn’t new to me, somehow, though it was something I’d left behind long ago. When I was a little girl I would lie in the field on my grandfather’s farm in Connecticut and I would look at the clouds and I would see the usual things, of course, castles and horses and swans. But there were also faces in the clouds. Boys. These were boys that would appear over me as I lay on my back feeling the sun on my legs and opening to the life that awaited me, all the years ahead. The faces of boys would come to me in the sky and for a while I took them to be premonitions of boys who would one day love me, visions of their faces with wonderful, delicate varieties of brows and jaws and noses. And I loved them all, and each one loved a different aspect of me. This boy with a great pug nose was clearly a sports hero. I could ride horses with him. That one was a delicate boy with a weak chin, a poet; we would lie beneath the water oaks along my grandfather’s stream and he would read poems to me. Another one with a high forehead was a banker and he and I would sit at night beside a fire and do my arithmetic together—I loved arithm
etic and I thought I would always have these little puzzles to do. There were so many boys. Somewhere along the way, all that dreaming was lost and I just stopped expecting anything, really, from my sexuality. But as a child, I didn’t think that one day I would have to choose just one of these boys in the sky. There were too many parts to me, you see.
The mistake I made was to talk about the change in my life to my masturbation therapy author. She was a psychologist, after all. And it was just conversation at lunch before the taping of Jenny Jones. I guess there was an implicit criticism about what she was saying in her book. You close the loop with yourself and it’s not going to lead to healing. I didn’t say it that way to her, but what else could she conclude? She was sitting across from me and eating red snapper and really enjoying it and it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her left hand come up from beneath the table for a while and I could see her vision of things: all the women of the world dining with their hands under their linen napkins and that’s all they would ever need. So it was a mistake to tell her.
Then yesterday I saw the tabloid headline as I stood in a checkout lane at Gristede’s and I looked at the story. They’d changed my name but every other detail was mine, and I knew I’d been betrayed. I abandoned my grocery cart and called my author. “What have you done?” I demanded. “Isn’t that privileged information or something?”
“No,” she said. “I’ve only got a master’s degree in psychology.”
“Are you sleeping with the tabloid editor?”
There was only silence on the other end of the line.
“Hypocrite,” I said.
Then when I saw him last night on the television and when my hand rose before the screen to touch him, I knew what was next. My butt burned for him.
The offices of Real World Weekly were in a recently gentrified brownstone in the East Village and I showed up this morning in a silk shift and I’d combed my hair out long and put a rose behind my ear. “Who shall I say is here to see him?” his mouse of a secretary said.
“Tell him I’m the woman from this week’s front page.”
She narrowed her eyes at me.
“Tell him I saw him on TV and I hear a taxi’s horn blaring in my ears and only he can make it stop.”
She gulped at this and turned her back to me and spoke low into the intercom.
He was there moments later, out of breath. He took one look at me and shot me that half smile with the dimple and he led me to his office at the back of the first floor. The room was stacked with newspapers and the clippings were all over his desk, and holding down a pile was a grapefruit-sized rock—dark and pocked—and on another pile was a brass stand with what looked like a shrunken head hanging on it. The little guy actually struck me as pretty cute.
“It’s real,” he said.
“Who was he?”
“Some Amazonian. He can predict the future. We did a story.”
“And the rock?”
“Piece of a meteor.”
I looked at the editor, and his sea gray eyes were intent on me.
“Like the one hurtling toward the earth?” I asked.
He smiled and the dimple appeared.
“Don’t move,” I said. “Keep the smile.”
But he said, “Coming to kill us all,” and the dimple went away.
“The smile.”
He looked at me closely. “Are you really her?”
“I edited Touch Yourself, Cure Yourself.”
“Holy shit.”
“The smile,” I said.
“Are you here as outraged victim or as . . .” He hesitated.
“As nympho?”
“Ah . . . yes.”
“Nympho.”
That brought the smile back and I reached out and put the tip of my forefinger, just briefly, in that little spot. It was a sweet little soft place, this tuck in the face of a handsome man who was full of irony about the way our world was considering itself at the end of the millennium. That made me run hot for the secrets of his body. But his question was very interesting to me, really. That part of me born in the crosswalk was starting to blur the boundaries the editor was suggesting. Victim or nympho. Rage or lust.
After I drew my hand back, I said, “Men in the imperial Chinese court bound their women’s feet. Did you know that?”
“I bet there are modern footbinders,” he said with a rising in his voice like he’d just gotten a great new idea.
“Maybe so,” I said.
“In Algeria, perhaps. Or right back in China. But that’s a little remote.”
“Would you like to understand them?” I said, and I was only just catching up, myself, with this turn in the conversation. I hadn’t even realized the footbinders were on my mind, much less that I had some insight into them.
He snapped his fingers. “Appalachia,” he said. “We’ll look there.”
“The men controlled their women this way,” I said. “But they also created this intensely secret part on the women’s bodies. The bound feet were supposed to be covered up always, but I think there were times, very rare, when, in the middle of the night, lit by candles, this secret of the body was shared.” I’d moved closer to him and his gray eyes had turned back to me, though I sensed Appalachia lingering behind them. “They were like superpussies,” I said.
Now I had his complete attention. “This is very interesting,” he said, hoarsely.
“And that was the woman’s control,” I said. “I bet a man in imperial China would do anything the woman would ask just for the privilege of seeing this secret thing.”
“I bet,” he whispered.
“Do you find a woman’s foot beautiful?” I drew my fingertips down his cheek.
“Yes,” he said. “Sure.” He was breathing heavily.
“Will you please start with mine?”
“Yes?”
“Please. As you know from reading your paper, I can’t wait.”
I took a step back and I slipped out of my shoes and I’ve got real good legs—I’ve had a lot of compliments in the past few months—and my feet are pretty, I keep my feet very nice. The editor-in-chief looked at them, and I could sense him trembling. Trembling and rising, in that secret part of him, a part which was hidden and bound until I chose to see it.
“Please,” I said. “Start there.” And I nodded to the floor, to my feet. “They’ve been covered up all day long. Nobody could see them.”
He wanted to. I could tell. But he was hesitating. “Down,” I said.
And he went down, onto his knees, and he bent to me and he began to kiss my toes and I thank my gypsy cab driver for teaching me how pleasurable all that can be and my hand was on the meteor and I picked it up and it was very heavy, very heavy indeed, and its heaviness sent a thrill through me, a sweet wet thrill, and I looked down at the straight white part in his hair, the very place where this meteor was about to strike, and I thought how sexy. How truly sexy is the secret shape of a man’s brain.
“Nine-Year-Old Boy Is World’s
Youngest Hit Man”
This guy Ivan over at the Black Sea Social Club on Sixth and Avenue A says that when he went shopping as a little boy with his mama in Moscow he’d go to the one big department store in town and he’d stand in line and sometimes it’d be for hours and they didn’t even know what it was they was waiting to buy. Then it’d turn out to be some shit like socks or suspenders or a rubber bowl. A Russian Tupperware party, he says, is four hours in a line with strangers to buy a rubber bowl. But they had so little, you just got what you could. That’s why he does the things he does now in America, because it’s the land of opportunity. And it’s never too early to get in on the action, he says, cause you never had to wait to suffer in Russia. There are no children in Russia, he says.
I like it when Ivan te
lls me that. Up to this morning. When I’m feeling bad about myself, I say to him, I maybe ain’t no child but I’m little, and he tells me it don’t make no difference. It gives you an edge, he says to me. I know what he means, but I’m always thinking I want my hands to be bigger. I want that right now. I like the Makarov nine millimeter okay and most of Ivan’s buddies at the social club use it, but it’s just a pound and a half and not even six and a half inches long. Just right for me, but that pisses me off. Like being a Yankees fan. It’s right there, up the subway line, but it’s not what you really want. Besides, Ivan and those guys aren’t real Americans yet, and I am, and the one thing I got off my long-gone daddy was his daddy’s Colt .45 pistol. The Model 1911A1. They started making this baby way back in 1911, that’s why they gave it that model number. And nobody’s done any better. My daddy told me that. I stole it from him a long time ago, long before I did these things for Ivan. It was when my daddy was too drunk to see and I got lucky because the next day he walked out and my mama and me never heard from him again and he didn’t even have his daddy’s gun. I did. And it’s like if Babe Ruth was still playing for the Yankees today and he was in his prime. Because this 1911 can still hit. I just can’t quite hold it yet to do the job. My goddamn hands aren’t big enough.
Last night I was sitting at our kitchen table and Mama was fussing around making it look like warming up Spaghetti Os was about a ten-step gourmet thing. She was still in her terry cloth dressing gown, my mama. She hasn’t got a man hanging around her these days. Hasn’t had for a while. And I was just looking at my little hands lying there on the table.
“Wally,” she says to me. “Why you’re always sitting around the kitchen in your undershirt.”
“I’m waiting for you to give me a beer,” I say.
She waves the can opener she’s been struggling with for five minutes. “What are you saying? I never gave you no beer.”
“I can wait.”
“You’re a little boy,” she says.
“Mama, you don’t know nothing about it.”
She goes a little crazy at this, since we’ve had this conversation a few times before and she thinks she knows something about me. “I got eyes,” she says. “I know you. I been around you for only nine years and at the start of that you was about twenty inches long. You don’t think I know what a little boy looks like?”
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