29. The White Uniform, continued (2021)
It was delivered by some derelict messenger. January didn’t know what to make of the uniform, but the card that Shrimp had enclosed tickled her pink. She showed it to the people at work, to the Lighthalls, who always enjoyed a good joke, to her brother Ned, and all of them got a chuckle out of it. The outside showed a blithe, vulgar little sparrow. Written underneath in music was the melody he was chirping:
The lyrics of the song were on the inside: Wanna fuck? Wanna fuck? I do! I do!
At first January was embarrassed playing nurse. She was a largish girl, and the uniform, even though Shrimp had guessed her size correctly, didn’t want to move the way her body moved. Putting it on, she would always feel, as she hadn’t for a long time, ashamed of her real job.
As they got to know each other more deeply, January found ways of combining the abstract qualities of Shrimp’s fantasies with the mechanics of ordinary sex. She would begin with a lengthy “examination.” Shrimp would lie in bed, limp, her eyes closed or lightly bandaged, while January’s fingers took her pulse, palpated her breasts, spread her legs, explored her sex. Deeper and deeper the fingers, and the “Instruments” probed. January eventually was able to find a medical supply store willing to sell her an authentic pipette that could be attached to an ordinary syringe. The pipette tickled morbidly. She would pretend that Shrimp was too tight or too nervous and had to be opened wider by one of the other instruments. Once the scenario was perfected, it wasn’t that much different from any other kind of sex.
Shrimp, while all this was going on, would oscillate between an excruciating pleasure and a no less excruciating guilt. The pleasure was simple and absolute, the guilt was complex. For she loved January and she wanted to perform with her all the acts that any ordinary pair of women would have performed. And, regularly, they did: cunnilingus this way and that, dildos here and there, lips, fingers, tongues, every orifice and artifice. But she knew, and January knew, that these were readings from some textbook called Health and Sex, not the actual erotic lightning bolt of a fantasy that can connect the ankle bone to the shin bone, the shin bone to the leg bone, the leg bone to the thigh bone, the thigh bone to the pelvis, the pelvis to the spine, and onward and upward to that source of all desire and all thought, the head. Shrimp went through the motions, but all the while her poor head sat through yet another screening of those old classics, Ambulance Story, The White Uniform, The Lady and the Needle, and Artsem Baby. They weren’t as exciting as she remembered them but nothing else was playing, anywhere.
30. Beauty and the Beast (2021)
Shrimp thought of herself as basically an artist. Her eyes saw colors the way a painter’s eyes see colors. As an observer of the human comedy she considered herself to be on a par with Deb Potter or Oscar Stevenson. A seemingly offhand remark overheard on the street could trigger her imagination to produce the plot for a whole movie. She was sensitive, intelligent (her Regents scores proved that), and up-to-date. The only thing she was conscious of lacking was a direction, and what was that but a matter of pointing a finger?
Artistry ran in the Hanson family. Jimmie Tom had been well on the way to becoming a singer. Boz, though unfocused as Shrimp herself, was a verbal genius. Amparo, at age eight, was doing such incredibly detailed and psychological drawings at her school that she might grow up to be the real thing.
And not just her family. Many if not most of her closest friends were artists one way or another: Charlotte Blethen had published poems; Kiri Johns knew all the grand operas inside out; Mona Rosen and Patrick Shawn had both acted in plays. And others. But her proudest alliance was with Richard M. Williken, whose photographs had been seen all over the world.
Art was the air she breathed, the sidewalk she walked on to the secret garden of her soul, and living with January was like having a dog constantly shitting on that sidewalk. An innocent, adorable, cuddly puppy—you had to love the little fellow but oh my.
If January had simply been indifferent to art, Shrimp wouldn’t have minded. In a way she’d have liked that. But alas, January had her own horrendous tastes in everything and she expected Shrimp to share them. She brought home library tapes the like of which Shrimp had never suspected: scraps of pop songs and snatches of symphonies were strung together with sound effects to tell such creaky tales as “Vermont Holiday” or “Cleopatra on the Nile.”
January accepted Shrimp’s snubs and snide remarks in the spirit of tolerance and good humor in which she thought they were intended. Shrimp joked because she was a Hanson and all the Hansons were sarcastic. She couldn’t believe that anything she enjoyed so much herself could be abhorrent to another person. She could see that Shrimp’s music was a better kind of music and she liked listening to it when it was on, but all of the time and nothing else? You’d go nuts.
Her eyes were like her ears. She would inflict well-meaning barbarities of jewelry and clothes on Shrimp, who wore them as tokens of her bondage and abasement. The walls of her room were one great mural of unspeakable, sickly-cute junk and sententious propaganda posters, like this jewel from the lips of a black Spartacus: “A Nation of Slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their Master, who, in the abuse of Absolute Power, does not proceed to the last extremes of Injustice and Oppression.” Bow-wow-wow. But what could Shrimp do? Walk in and rip them from the walls? January valued her crap.
What do you do when you love a slob? What she did—try and become a slob herself. Shrimp wallowed diligently, losing most of her old friends in the process. She more than made up for her losses by the friendships January brought with her as a dowry. Not that she ever came to like any of them, but gradually through their eyes she learned that her lover had virtues as well as charms, problems as well as virtues, a mind with its own thoughts, memories, projects, and a personal history as poignant as anything by Chopin or Liszt. In fact, she was a human being, and though it took a day of the very clearest air and brightest sunshine for this feature of January’s landscape to be visible, it was such a fine and heartening sight that when it came it was worth every other inconvenience of being, and remaining, in love.