Not Exactly What I Had in Mind (11 page)

I’ll let you know if I can see

How we can cheat mortality.

I hate mortality, don’t you?

You do? You’ll
say
you do? You’ll do.

H
EY, TO ME, ALL
women are sexy. Right? All breathing women. If they want to be. As far as I’m concerned.

I mean where do I get off, picking and choosing, setting standards? What gives me the right?

Just because everyone is abuzz about my head-turning cameo in the ground-breaking new movie
Plough,
with what’s-her-name who looks so much like Jessica Lange? Just because I am built like a damn moose? Just because my wavy pepper-and-salt hair cascades down my back to where, if it went one quarter-inch further, you’d have to say I was a poof (but it doesn’t)? Just because the person whom I retain to keep that cascade precisely
au point
with tiny tungsten scissors is (her own idea) a lapsed, monokinied Shiite woman who weeps with shame? Just because it has come out recently that I share a small but elegantly appointed motor home with (the Iranian aside) three not only mouth-watering but also constantly (in a sophisticated way) salivating honeybunches (if the term offends, I withdraw it), one of whom has been known to sport pince-nez but no pants and the other two of whom are teenaged Polynesian twins, Awanna and M’tou, who raise and fight bulldogs on the side?

Just for these and many other reasons, you expect me to put myself in the awkward position of sitting down and taking pen in hand and laying my heart bare in order to tell you “What Makes a Woman Sexy”?

Well, all right. But not for those reasons.

I am going to do it — and I am going to do it with candor, and I am going to do it unflinchingly, and I am going to do it feelingly and straight — because I will do anything.

Well, anything I want to. Within reason. You never know these days what people think you mean, when you say “anything.” I don’t mean anything faithless, trashy, or painful.

So okay. Here are the 39 things that make a woman sexy:

1. If she has barbecue sauce on her mouth.
   
2. If she looks like she will do anything. That she wants to. That isn’t faithless, trashy, or painful.
   
3. You’d be hard put to say exactly where one part of her body leaves off and the next begins. You can put your hand on her waist and it feels like all of her is going to pass through there eventually.
   
4. If her name is Rita. Think about it. Rita Hayworth, Rita Moreno, Rita Gam, Lovely Rita Meter Maid, Rita in the movie
   Educating Rita.
   And, what the heck (say you’re a congressman or something), Rita Jenrette.
   
5. I’m going to skip over a few obvious ones here.
   
6. If she can make gravy.
   
7. If she appears to have a lot of sense. You know what I mean? Maybe what I mean is, if she knows what I mean. But no, it’s more than that. You look at her and before you even get to know her you feel a certain gratitude, a certain peace. You feel that she is not going to spring some kind of unfairly inexplicable notion on you that you will never make any sense out of and that will wind up being your fault. You feel that she knows where the keys are. You feel that the two of you could give each other little looks to the effect that ah, yeah,
   unh,
   that’s life.
   
8. If she appears not to have a lick of sense.
   
9. Some intriguing combination of a lot and not a lick.
   
10. If she is securely hooked up with a good friend of yours. With such a woman you can kid around and bump hips and even take a nip at each other’s neck, in plain view or
    not
    in plain view, all the while feeling very good about knowing (a) that neither of you is going to do anything disloyal to your friend, and (b) that you will never have to get in an argument with this woman over why neither of you knows where the keys are. Then too, you never know, your friend might die.
    
11. By the same token, sort of: If she is a good friend of the woman you are securely hooked up with. Here again you can bump around guiltlessly, and in this case you are favoring the woman you are securely hooked up with by showing her friend that the woman you are securely hooked up with is not securely hooked up with some schlump.
    
12. Lips.
    
13. If she is not too thin and not too rich, “You can never be too thin or too rich” is the most self-serving remark of recent times except for “That camera doesn’t lie” (Ronald Reagan). You can be so thin that you haven’t got any sugar on you. (As a southern American white man, I am resigned to accepting blame for just about anything, but not by God anorexia.) And you can be so rich that nobody ever tells you that everybody thinks you are silly.
    
14. If her attitude toward her own physical presence is, “Hey, for whatever anybody else may think it’s worth, I
    got
    it. And I can shake it. And if you’re not interested who asked you?” Why in the world do women say things like, “Oh, I’m too droopy in the hiney and got hardly any chest and my legs are just
    sticks”?
    Unless they manage to say it provocatively. Sparkle goes a long way.
    
15. If she looks shapely in shapeless clothes.
    
16. If her hair looks like it looks naturally good without thousands of dollars’ worth of treatments.
    
17. If she is naked as a jaybird. Okay, call me old-fashioned.
    
18. If she is a good sport but doesn’t take any shit. (I realize this is a fine line.)
    
19. Fine lines. I mean, fine in simultaneously the sense of “exquisite” and “she’s so fine.” Not brittle lines. Flexible fine lines. (See 3, above.)
    
20. If she’s barefooted. (“Barefoot” is cute, but “barefooted” is more down-to-earth.) It may be objected that this was covered by point 17, above, “naked as a jaybird,” but it wasn’t. “Barefooted” focuses on the whole matter of padding around. Ever listen to a woman’s bare feet padding around upstairs? (Not slapping, not stomping, not dragging, but padding. Around.)
    
21. A sweetly robust way of laughing. And of sneezing.
    
22. I am going to skip over some more obvious ones here.
    
23. If she can have a good rowdy time engaging in dialectic. Doesn’t want to be thesis continually nor indefatigably antithesis, but likes to mix it up with you and come out with something fresh.
    
24. There’s a lot in how she pets a dog.
    
25. Good hands, generally.
    
26. When she’s wet. Ideally with sweat, or with something else (gravy, for instance) involving an element of slickum. Swimming-pool or saltwater wetness is not fluid enough: the hand catches on it.
    
27. If she’d like to go run out into any available body of water right now, though.
    
28. If she looks like she is built for dancing but would just as soon kid around.
    
29. If there is nothing on God’s green earth that would convince her to become a Republican. If she’s already Republican, if she was raised that way, well, I don’t have to know everything. I guess.
    
30. If she is slightly cross-eyed. Maybe I’m kinky. Maybe I don’t like to be focused on too intensely. I don’t know. But you know how Karen Black’s eyes, and Lauren Hutton’s, and to a lesser extent Ellen Barkin’s, seem just out of true?
    
31. If she looks like she could go like Valerie Brisco-Hooks if she weren’t so languorous.
    
32. If she’s just naturally got coloring all over.
    
33. Or, on the other hand, if she’s so pellucid beneath her clothes that it’s like the beginning of time under there.
    
34. If she responds with informed warmth to at least ten of the following names: Dwight Gooden, Robert Montgomery, Patsy Cline, Earl Long, Christopher Smart, Willis Reed, Candy Barr, Les Paul, Judy Holliday, Dock Ellis, Cole Younger, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Mr. Kitzel, Grace Paley, Maynard G. Krebs, Nellie Fox, Myles Na Gopaleen, Mary Worth, Claudette Colbert, Grundoon, Zora Neale Hurston, Butch Thompson, Jeanette MacDonald, Keela the Outcast Indian Maiden, L. C. Greenwood, and Joel McCrea.
    
35. One of those T-shirts with the big, big armholes. You know what I mean? You keep hoping the flag will come along and she’ll salute? Of course I realize that from a respect-for-women point of view those shirts are worn only for purposes of mobility and air-conditioning. Uh-huh.
    
36. If her slip is showing. Remember slips? Whatever happened to slips? It’s such a great term: slip. Not too froufrou, not too stern.
    
37. Heart. My friend Jane Bell (see point 10, above), her husband, several other congenial people, and I were out lurching around happily one night in Nashville, having breakfast in a place with a greasy floor at 3:00
    A.M.
    I mention the floor because Jane slipped on it and fell flat on her face. Jane has elegant, delicate features. One of her front teeth broke right half in two on a diagonal line. All of a sudden Jane was snaggletoothed. It was a revelation! She looked wonderful! Not that there were any flies on her before, by any means; she always looked
    lovely;
    but, I don’t know, now she looked exotic, in a very down-home kind of way. A little bit evil, somehow; certainly a little bit trashy; all because of that slantwise gap in the middle of her mouth, which illumined the refinement of her features thereabout. We kept telling her how great she looked. But the admirable thing was how well she took it. Many women — and Jane is admittedly not the most absolutely laid-back person in America, even when her teeth are even — would have cried, or fumed, or pouted, or blamed someone, or insisted on going home. Jane just went right along with the course of the evening. Accepted compliments, did not demand commiseration, looked
    louche
    on request, and even joined in the discussion of topics quite unrelated to her mouth. We were back at her house around six, and when I got up a few hours later I found, with some regret, that she had already been to a dentist (rustled up by her husband on a Sunday morning) who had restored her to simple elegance. And she was ready for brunch. Incidentally, I want to say something now that for some reason I have never told Jane to her face: pound for pound, she can hold more gin without getting bleary than anybody else I know.
    
38. If you’ve been together through a lot of ups and downs. And there was always a firm bounce on the bottom.
    
39. If she eats
    all,
    every bit, of the meat off her chicken bones.
    

Okay? Are you satisfied? Now I got to get these bulldogs off my leg. I get
no
rest.

(A Recitation)

I entered that small Texas bar

For I had a mouthful of dust.

But I was so happy otherwise

I thought my heart would bust.

The public relations firm I owned

Had added two new clients.

And one sold plastic fishing worms,

The other a household appliance.

And I’d received a large bequest

From my old aunt, who’d died.

And though her passing touched us all;

I felt enhanced inside.

So I was in the mood to hear

Some easy-listening — a

Taste I shared with my new Swedish

Girl, whose name was Inge —

And other kinds of cheerful tunes,

And have some Scotch-and-waters.

So I approached the jukebox there

And jingled all my quarters.

I punched E-4, for “Loving You

Is Easy ’Cause You’re Beautiful.”

But what I heard was a country man’s

Lament, sung through a snootful.

I tried to play a disco tune,

Then Tijuana Brass.

But what that jukebox played instead

Was “There Stands the Glass.”

“Bartender!” I loudly cried,

“Your jukebox took my quarter,

But won’t play what I want it to.

It must be out of order.”

A look of sadness swept the face

Of that drink-serving man.

“Stranger,” he said, “I think that you

Had better look again.”

And when I turned my eyes back ’round,

Sad songs still filled the air.

My quarter, though, lay on the floor.

There was no jukebox there.

“Ten years ago tonight, you see,”

The genial barman sighed,

“The jukebox that we did have there

Played ‘Faded Love’ and died.

“The jukebox,” he informed me then,

In a voice that came near choking,

“Loved our cigarette machine

That must have frowned on smoking.

“For it would not sell cigarettes.

We had to send it back.

As it was dollied out the door,

We heard that jukebox crack.

“And every year about this time,

The old jukebox appears.

The only songs that it will play

Fill all our hearts with tears.

“And late at night ’round closing time

Comes echoing the sound

Of falling packs of cigarettes

That never touch the ground.”

The barman’s face, I noticed then,

Was careworn and bizarre

And so were all the faces of

The patrons at the bar.

Three long years ago that was,

In fact this very night.

And since then things have changed for me,

Just as for you they might.

I’ve lost my p.r. comp’ny now,

And seen the last of Inge.

My money’s gone, and old George Jones

Is now my favorite singer.

And all that I have left these days

Is country songs and woe —

Which I prefer to ecstasy

And Barry Manilow.

And when, at night, alone, I need

That old jukebox to hear,

All I have to do is drop

A quarter and a tear.

Observe the protozoan swim.

It’s not a her, it’s not a him.

Its income, outgo both are slim.

It has no school or home or gym,

Or tears or blood or bile or phlegm.

A long way down from seraphim —

And yet it fills the interim

Between prelude and closing hymn

More gainfully than you do, Jim.

For when it dies it’s two of them.

“It is true,” a great man once said, “that I also have to pee, but for quite different reasons.”

— Tommaso Landolfi