Mimi (14 page)

Within a year she had her first solo show in a one-room gallery in New Jersey somewhere: round, flattened disks of fired clay that formed paths all over the floor. They looked like individual pieces of dried-up desert soil, about a foot wide, cracking around the edges, and people were supposed to take their shoes off and
walk
on them. The show got closed down pretty fast for safety reasons—big outbreak of athlete's foot, sprained ankles, who knows? But I think of those crazy cowpats now like Beethoven's “Heiliger Dankgesang”: Bee's stepping-stones out of the abyss.

 

I hung up on her reluctantly, but I really did have another call, and thought it might be Mimi. It wasn't. It was Gertrude, probably phoning to find out if I was wearing my days-of-the-week socks on the right day. Even though she called less now, she still had a knack of calling at just the wrong time. Lately I'd managed to avoid a lot of these Gertrusions by being at Mimi's, or being
in
flagrante delicto
and not answering, but she'd caught me off-guard this time. What was she after?

I tried to be kind, and was able to listen to her news of Claude with genuine interest. He was starting kindergarten, but Gertrude wasn't worried about his being ostracized. She was more concerned about how to get him straight from there into Yale. She'd already bought a duplex in New Haven in anticipation.

“But what if he ends up wanting to go to Columbia?” I asked.

So then she finally came out with it (the real reason for calling): “I really just wanted to say Happy Valentine's Day, Harrison!”

Oh, jeez.

“Happy Valentine's Day, Gertrude,” I replied.

Talk about damsels in distress!

 

Later on, Mimi and I shunned all the pink-menued restaurants to eat at home. She was starting to make good use of my kitchen, and that night cooked me her specialty: Amatriciana, a matriarchal dish, she claimed, made from guanciale, chili and tomatoes, or “love-apples.” Tomatoes are an aphrodisiac. (My mother never said!)

I hadn't gotten Mimi a Valentine's Day present. “I'd give you the moon,” I told her apologetically. But it turned out she already owned it.

Mimi on the moon landing:
“Women were in tune with the moon from the start. Menstruation's a lunar cycle. Prehistoric women invented the first calendar, a
lunar
calendar with thirteen months. You
have
to understand the moon if you're gonna
farm
, or fish. Or follow the tides and stuff. Then men turned the moon into a
bad
thing, trashing the lunar calendars, and adding all that
leap year
crap. The lunar calendar is much more exact: there really are thirteen months in a year! They even turned the number thirteen into an unlucky number! And then they go bouncing around on the moon itsel
f
? Get of
f
! That place belongs to us!”

“Don't go to the moon, Mimi.”

As Mimi stirred her sauce, which, despite her disdain for corniness looked like a pretty classic Valentine's Day dish to me—rich, red, and velvety—I started telling her about Bee and her English patrons, and how she never wanted to go to England in the first place.

“What does Bee stand for anyway?” Mimi asked.

“Bee? Bridget.”

“Ah ha, ancient goddess of springs and waters.”

“A goddess? My sister? Well, what about Harrison then?” I asked winningly. “What does
that
mean?”

“Patrilineal, sorry. Doesn't mean anything except Harry's son. Retrograde.”

“Tell that to Harrison Ford!”

We ate in the dining room, looking out at the sparkling lights of other Valentine's Day celebrations in a million other apartments, then went into the living room with another bottle of wine. Mimi sat on the window seat patting Bubbles's head in a way I vaguely envied, while I played Scarlatti on the piano. During a melancholic Scarlattian pause, Mimi suddenly said, “Why don't you help her?” My thoughts raced involuntarily to
Gertrude
, whose phone call had left a shadow over my evening, but Mimi wasn't interested in Gertrude. She must mean Bubbles.

“Bubbles?” I asked. “What's wrong with her?”

“No. Bee,” she said firmly. “Why don't you give her some money?”

“Huh?!”

“She's a struggling artist,” Mimi went on. “You've got some spare cash, I take it. Why don't you help her out?”

The idea had never really occurred to me—Bee was my big sister, after all, always one step ahead of me in the world. Sure, I'd buy lunch, or a sculpture now and then (and put it straight into storage), but that was about it.

“I guess I thought she might find it. . . sort of patronizing,” I mumbled feebly. “Bee's
older
than me. It might, uh, change the dynamic.”

“Aw, she'll get over it,” said Mimi.

And then she did come pat my head, as I'd wanted her to, and soon I had her on my lap, in my power, with my hand in her pussy, exploring her, imploring her,
possessing
her, making her go limp in my arms.

PRESIDENTS' DAY

 

Mimi on the male
conspiracy to deny, betray, and confuse women:
Mimi had an unsettling theory that men routinely deny women what they want. “They're always criticizing what women do, what they eat, what they read,” she felt, “and depriving them of sex!” This sometimes influenced her take on movies.

Mimi on
Now, Voyager: “The thing is, underneath the dowdy dress and the fat suit, she's all raring to go. She doesn't want to carve ivory boxes, she wants sex! She's thought about it a lot, and she's all for it.”

Mimi on
Deception: “Bette's just trying to be with the man she loves, and all she gets are these two guys
angry
at her the whole time.
They
get to decide her fate. If they'd only let Bette choose.”

“Then what? A
ménage à trois
?”

“Nah, she wants the cellist. Claude's a stop-gap.”

Mimi on
Ryan's Daughter: “All that sea and space and sky, and
still
no room for female sexuality. Sarah Miles can't get laid without being called a whore and having her hair shorn of
f
!”

Mimi on
Niagara: “She only kills Joseph Cotten because he's getting in the way of her finding sex. He's not fucking her. This is
Marilyn Monroe
we're talking about! She doesn't have to put up with that.”

Mimi was wary of me too, just waiting for signs that
I
wanted to deprive her. Like every woman I ever had, Mimi'd washed up battered on my shore, after enduring a collection of guys who neglected, cheated, bored, or irritated her, or
stole
from her, and she was highly sensitive to any sign of rejection. The first time I fell asleep without making love, she lambasted me the next day.

“Don't stop fucking me,” she warned. “There are consequences to not fucking: less kissing, less touching, less talking, less nakedness, less intimacy, less sharing of the bathroom, less perfume, less lipstick, less—”

Bubbles, always eager to defuse tension with playful antics, now leapt onto a high shelf but lost her footing. She fell, bringing down a whole bunch of box files with her. I checked Bubbles over for injuries, while privately applauding her diversionary tactics, because Mimi was thoroughly distracted by the task of gathering papers that had fallen out of the box files. She thereby came across my most recent list of inventions. Yes, I'd never stopped inventing stuff.

“What's this?” she asked.

So I read them out to her, giving fuller elucidation when necessary:

 

1. Music Pills: on the move and need some Rachmaninov pronto? Need your Beethoven fix? Forget the iPod.
Swallow
a sonata or two. Mozart lozenges, Schubert inhalers, and Shostakovich skin pads also available. Baroque music pills to put under the tongue after breakfast (when they always play baroque music on the radio).

2. The Soap-Cope: a soap dish that actually works. No more soap left sinking into its own slime. (
How
it would work, I didn't yet know.)

3. The G-Spot Spotter: when the duties of manhood seem too onerous. . .

4. And its cousin, The Locator: this handy electronic screen maps where you leave all registered items around the house, throughout the day: watch, keys, cell, wallet, glasses, testicles, crackers, love letters, dog, cat, umbrella, cane, pastrami on rye, whatever you want to keep track of. Useful for quick exits.

 

“I know, I know,” I said, bashfully folding the piece of paper and stuffing it back in the box. “Men's capacity to goof off knows no bounds.”

But instead of being disgusted with me and my silly inventions, Mimi was delighted! “I didn't know you were still inventing things,” she said. “Invent some more!” She was tolerant of my List of Melancholy, but seemed to
love
my inventions.

So what had started out as a spat over
my
demoralizing
her
, ended with
her
encouraging
me
. All was not lost, in other words. This was something I had to tell myself occasionally, for I had old wounds too. Not just the scars of half a decade of incompatibility with Gertrude, but reverberations of mystification from an assortment of disappointed girlfriends, some of whom took their revenge by knocking me pitilessly (one even derided my choice of salad once—so I like arugula, what of it?). As a result, I had a deep fear of anything going wrong between Mimi and me, and tended to panic if we disagreed on anything. If she even went quiet, ghosts of Gertrude's week-long sulks sprang to mind. I wasn't really used to having arguments, or even discussions: with Gertrude, you never got a word in edgewise, and hardly ever wanted to.

La Bohème
, I found, is a comfort to all lovers who think they've messed things up: it's full of worrying upsets and separations, but Rodolfo and Mimì love each other (I'm not so sure about Marcello and Musetta) and all is forgiven at the end. Puccini proves to you that this is the stuff that counts. Or, so it seemed at dusk on a rainy day, sitting canoe-style on the couch, with Mimi's head nestled against my chest and water streaking down the windowpanes outside, as we listened to
La Bohème
. Puccini has to get everything in, in a very short space of time—anger, pain and passion, hope and desire—and he does it! Of course the story is tragic, but that day, with Mimi close at hand, it no longer seemed to be about death, only
love
. And sex. (Maybe you have to be in love to realize it.)

Mimi on
La Bohème: “It's a multiple orgasm in musical form!”

It was quite a contrast to going to see
La Bohème
with Gertrude in our box at the Met (Zeffirelli or no Zeffirelli).
Then
I couldn't wait for Mimì to kick the bucket! The last scene was excruciating: she keeps reviving!
I
died a million times (or fell asleep anyway), only to find, again and again, that Mimì was still going strong. In Gertrude's company, the whole opera struck me as goofy, phoney, pointless, and confused, a dumb duel between male high jinks and feminine melodrama: too many starving-student pranks (tricking the landlord, evading the bar bill) versus all that guff about bonnets and muffs. But now, with my Mimi in my arms, it
did me in
when Mimì gets her muf
f
! Puccini's one composer who knows how to end something: “
Mimì! Mimì!
”

Rodolfo would have given Mimì everything he had (if he'd had anything)—and I wouldn't deprive my Mimi of anything either if I could help it, certainly not my body. She didn't need to worry about that. How I
loved
to seek her out beneath her pubic bone, her mantel, her lintel, her window sill, her fire place. Blood and bone, blood and bone, that's what women are!

 

Mimi was perimenopausal, hence the blushing, the sweating, the sudden showering, a mood swing here and there, and much flinging off of clothing (then having to put it all back on again a few seconds later). She often had to fling
me
off as well, unfortunately, when she got too hot. About once an hour, she would pull away from me in bed, or rush out on the roof to cool off, or start searching her purse for her forest of paper fans from Chinatown.

Mimi on fans:
“It's cheap, lightweight, handy technology, and it works! All thanks to the wind-chill factor.”