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 arithmetic 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.