Mimi (20 page)

Gaddafi’s rambling speeches outdistanced even Khrushchev’s. Some of them could go on all day and night! But Mimi was lenient: we looked at one that was a mere four hours, and we really just skimmed it, paying particular attention to the ways in which the technique of repetition can go
wrong
.

“The guy’s trying to hang onto power by boring everybody to death,” Mimi said. “Like, giving a never-ending speech will somehow save him.”

“Yeah, who does he think he is? Scheherazade?”

It now occurred to Mimi that it might take
me
about four hours to explain my sex camp idea: unlike those guys, I’d only have about twenty minutes to get my message across at the graduation ceremony. “Not all audiences have the patience of Gaddafi’s crowd,” she warned. Aw, phooey, back to the ol’ drawing board! Now I had no topic, no skills, and I was no Churchill.

“I’m no Churchill,” I said to Mimi.

“Yes, you are,” Mimi said, with a confidence I found absurd, even from my loving speech coach. To make up for it all, she came out with me afterwards to buy a state-of-the-art toolkit.

“Why do you need it?” was her only question.

“I don’t know. I just always felt it was something I should have.”

FULL MOON, MAY 17TH

Mimi was standing on the roof terrace one morning, looking down at a debate going on below between three cops, some trash collectors, several construction workers, and a mailman or two. She suddenly turned to me and asked, “Why is it men need a uniform for every occasion?”

“To remind them what they’re supposed to be doing.”

“Yeah, they don’t multitask.”

“Nope, we’re very single-minded. It’s written into our DNA: men hunted, while women did
everything else
.”

She leaned over the railing and yelled down at the fracas (I hoped inaudibly), “WHY DON’T YOU ALL JUST GO HOME AND PLEASURE YOUR WOMEN?” Then she sat down next to me and elaborated on her theory that nature is based on female pleasure.

“Females are more
capable
of sexual pleasure than males,” she proclaimed. “They have more erogenous tissue. The clitoris is actually bigger than the penis, ya know. And the vagina isn’t just a tube or something, for releasing babies and receiving sperm. It’s a sperm sorting station! The vagina decides
everything
. See, if the male doesn’t please the female, his sperm’s less likely to be seen by the vagina as suitable fathering material. That’s why it’s up to the male to
please
the female. It ain’t just about banging beaver all the time.”

“Unless you’re a beaver,” I said, kissing her palm. But she retrieved it soon after, so that she could pound the arm of her chair for emphasis.

“This is why prostitution sucks. It’s the exact opposite of what should be happening. Female pleasure is what matters,
biologically
. This is why
courtship
exists in nature!” Mimi said. (She pronounced it “naytcha,” which I loved.) “And foreplay. Otherwise, it would just be rape, rape, rape all summer long. But it isn’t! Rape isn’t common in nature. Most male animals go to a hell of a lot of trouble to
please
the female. Male birds have the best feathers. Hey, you better tell Henry: it’s the
male
birds that have to put on the beauty show.”

“Yes, the show must go on!”

“So ya see, Harrison, the penis is a pleasuring tool designed for
female
pleasure, not male. The female orgasm is the important one, the male orgasm’s no big deal.”

“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 roo
f
) 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.