Nude Men (23 page)

D
on’t think my mother’s agents have stopped coming up to me. Certainly not. But I’ve learned how to deal with them. Actually, I’m quite proud of myself, because I don’t merely
deal
with them, I fluster them. It’s quite fun: the same sort of fun children have when they set insects on fire.

One of these annoying little bugs reveals himself to me one evening at Défense d’y Voir, during Laura’s show. He’s an elegant man, with white hair, sitting at a nearby table. He leans back in his chair and asks me if I have a match. Even though neither Laura nor I smoke, I do happen to have a lighter on me, for reasons too complicated to get into right now. Actually, if you must know, I saw a scary movie recently in which a man got buried alive in a coffin, and I decided a lighter could come in handy in a life-or-death situation. The buried man had a lighter and was therefore able to see where he was and to understand what he was going to die of. And then he died.

The elegant man lights his cigarette with my lighter and says, forgot mine at home, because I left the house in a rush, very upset. My eleven-year-old granddaughter drives me mad. She—”

“Really, she’s eleven?” I interrupt him.

“Yes. She—”

“That’s such a wonderful age. They still love their parents at that age. And they make lots of friends,” I ramble. “They start throwing parties, becoming conscious of fashion—”

“Yes, actually that’s part of the problem,” he interrupts. “They start becoming attracted to the opposite sex, and unfortunately, the opposite sex becomes attracted to them. Even older members of the opposite sex, if you catch my meaning.”

“Oh, exactly. And then they start fighting with their parents, and the parents become unreasonable, and the problems don’t quit, you know, even as the years pass. And then sometimes the parents send agents to pester their children.”

The insect is on fire. The elegant man is flustered. He takes a long drag on his cigarette, nodding and frowning, probably racking his brain for something to say or do.

“Yes, exactly,” he says, and turns his back to me.

I put my hand on his shoulder and add, “But what the parents don’t realize is that the children love it when the agents come to them. It’s so much fun. Someone should let the parents know that.”

The agent clears his throat and says, “I’ll keep that in mind.” He gets up and leaves the restaurant.

A
nother time, I’m in a video store, picking out a movie for Laura and me to watch that evening, cuddled up cozily in her bed. A middle-aged woman is standing next to me, also looking through the movie boxes. She pulls one off the shelf, turns to me, and asks, “Have you seen this movie?”

The movie she’s holding in my face is
Lolita.
How unsubtle can one get? I almost burst out laughing.

“I think I did, a few years ago,” I reply.

“What did you think of it?”

I try to come up with the best possible answer to this delicious question. I could tell her, “I think you should tell my mother to stop pestering me.”

Or I could turn to her and say, “I thought it was the most romantic movie I’ve ever seen.” (Which, in case you’re interested, isn’t true; it actually left me quite indifferent.)

Or I could tell her she’s ugly, that she has no sense of fashion, that one should not wear one’s collar
up,
the way she wears hers. I could tell her
anything
in the whole world. Because one can take liberties with fake strangers. One can be delirious, unrespectable, ridiculous. My answer must be outrageous.

I puff out my chest and say, “It’s a monstrosity! It should be banned. I was so shocked I don’t think I ever recovered.”

“I see,” she says. “I have a daughter—”

“Eleven?”

“Yes. She—”

“Absolutely. Eleven-year-old daughters definitely have a tendency to sleep with dirty old twenty-nine-year-old men who constantly try to seduce them. I myself start drooling when I see one of those eleven-year-old nymphs. Exactly like the big bad wolf. I want to tweak their fannies.”

“That’s not good. You should—”

“Well, I’m not
only
interested in your daughter; I also find
you
very attractive. I love the way you wear your collar up. Raised collars excite me.” I slide my hand behind her neck and start stroking the back of her collar. “Would you like to come to my apartment? We could watch
Lolita
together. You could describe your daughter to me. Is she well developed? They should not be
too
developed, or it defeats the whole point, you see, and then one might as well settle for a big girl like yourself,” I say, looking at her chest.

She blinks at me and says, “I was warned that you’d be a tough one. Tom was very upset. He’s a gentle and sensitive man, and he still talks about how obnoxious you were to him, when all he did was ask you for a light. And then you touched him on the shoulder. And now you’re touching my neck. You have a tendency to touch. You take liberties. We don’t like that. You should be kinder to strangers.”

T
he following day I call my mother, because I haven’t spoken to her in quite some time, ever since I changed my phone number. I want to try once more to convince her to stop sending me her insects.

The first thing she says after I say hello is: “You are pestering my agents. I want you to stop pestering my agents. They cost a lot of money to hire, and you are ruining their work.”

“But they are so charming, I can’t help myself.”

“It’s not gonna work.”

“What’s not?”

“Telling me you’re enjoying it, telling my agents to tell me this. It’s not gonna make me stop.”

“Good, because I really
am
enjoying it. Please don’t stop. If you stop, I’ll hire my own agents to come and talk to me in the street.”

She hangs up.

M
y relationship with Laura continues to develop and deepen. I think she is as in love with me as I am with her. Not only is she so normal, within her strangeness, but she’s good-natured, natural, and cheerful. Very compassionate. She often gives money to beggars.

About a month has passed since I “quit” my job, and I haven’t yet started looking for another one. I’m enjoying life so much right now that it seems a shame to change it in any way. My savings are not being depleted very quickly, since Laura insists on paying for things whenever we’re together, “Because I’m rich,” she says, “and you’re not, and I love you, so it’s only normal.” If my savings do run out, she says she’ll support me until I feel like going back to work.

One day I tell her what happened at Disney World. She says she knows about it; Lady Henrietta told her. She says it does not change her feelings toward me, and that although she does not think it was a wonderful thing, I am not completely to blame, considering the circumstances, and Sara is obviously mature for her age. What Laura disapproves of is the way Lady Henrietta and Sara manipulated me into it, without explaining anything to me beforehand.

I
am her boyfriend. Yes, I am her boyfriend. You are right to look at me. She probably wouldn’t have become famous if it wasn’t for me. She told me so herself that first night, when she said, “Maybe it’s you, maybe you bring me luck.”

I’m very happy and content. I am a happy doggy, as one of my mother’s friends would say. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so well balanced in my life. Notice that I’m not talking to my cat anymore. Nor does she talk to me. This does not mean she’s not happy- No, she’s as affectionate as ever, but she simply stares at me dumbly most of the time, which makes me feel intelligent, normal, and sane. My greatest wish right now is for things to remain exactly as they are, and I do make that wish on my little white elephant. I’ve never made such a passive wish before, such an easy wish for you to accomplish. I’m not asking you to
do
anything. Rather, I’m sort of asking you not to do anything. Of course, there is the little cloud of Henrietta and Sara being unfriendly to me, but who cares? It’ll probably get cleared up by itself.

At Laura’s shows, I sit in my chair and prop my feet up on another chair, to be supercomfortable. I’m the only one in the entire room who dares to do this. I even bring a nice little flat mushy pillow from home for my back, and it feels almost as if I’m in bed. My body tingles with warmth and comfort, and I sometimes fall asleep, which is why I always sit in a dark corner, to be less conspicuous. I drink Shirley Temples, hot chocolate, ginger ale, eat Jell-O. I don’t drink alcohol because I don’t like it, and I feel too comfortable to care what people think. If they ask me why I drink those childish sweet things, I can always say I’m an alcoholic and must abstain, which I think is more respectable than saying you just don’t like alcohol. I don’t like very prickly bubbles either, so I don’t drink Coke. I am basking: I think that’s the perfect word. Yes, I am basking.

I look at the people to see if they are looking at me. I wonder if they know who I am, that I am the lover of the woman they love. I’m not jealous of her success. The pretension of the whole thing baffles me. I don’t feel she deserves her success, which makes it all the more wonderful. What could be better than getting something you don’t deserve?

Her show has become a sort of cult, like
The Rocky Horror Show,
only infinitely more intellectual and dignified. Her magic is ever changing, ever improving, ever metamorphosing. She introduces tricks whose effect lies not in secondary function, as opposed to primary function, but rather in simple and slight unusualness. For example, she takes off her boots, and her feet are bare. She has spurned the expectation that one wears socks under boots. She pushes the top hat off her head and lets it dangle down her back like a cowboy hat. If not quite startling, this effect is at least uncommon.

Laura also adds frills to her show. She comes down to the audience and takes things from people. The interest here lies in the fact that she chooses the one thing that each person will miss least, like a pack of cigarettes, a pen, a plastic lighter, a handkerchief, a shoelace, a button. And she is always right in her choice. The problem is that even the thing they will miss least is sometimes something that they will miss too much. Therefore, people start bringing wrapped presents for Laura, which they place on their tables for her to take, which she does. After the show, Laura and I unwrap the presents and find a nut, a pebble, a thimble, a coin. People often give her nice presents too, like silver lighters, gold earrings, silk scarves, makeup, tickets to musicals, because they love her. Sometimes the presents are bribes. One evening, accompanying a pretty pendant, there was a letter: “I am a middle-aged man with gray hair. At your next show I will be wearing a yellow tie so that you can easily recognize me. I would be grateful if you would do tricks that no one would normally clap at. I will clap at them enthusiastically, and you will smile in approval to make people think that I’m a talented and perceptive clapper. I need this boost in my social life right now. There’s plenty more where this necklace came from.” There’s an address and phone number at the bottom of the card. Laura does not accept bribes. She returns the pendant.

One evening, among the presents, we find a diamond ring with a note that says, “Marry me,” signed by a certain Paul Tops. The following night she asks the audience, “Is Paul Tops here?” A man’s hand shoots up. She goes to him, returns the ring in its box, and says, “No. I’m sorry, I love
him
.” And she points to me, sitting in my dark corner, with my legs propped up on the other chair, a Shirley Temple in my hand and a dish of green Jell-O jiggle on my table, and everyone looks at me, and I am caught off guard, and I try to straighten up a little and look less as if I’m in bed, but it’s hard because of those feet of mine propped up on that chair. I smile at the people, and they clap at me. When their attention goes back to Laura, I sink back in my dark corner and sigh with relief.

Another frill she adds to her show is to answer people’s thoughts. She asks everyone to think of a question that is important to them. She then comes down in the audience and plays fortune cookie. She stands in front of someone and says, “It all depends on if you’re healthy,” or “You would have to be more intelligent,” or “Don’t be in such a hurry,” or “Sometimes in life you can’t do that,” or “Okay, but first go to the hairdresser.” Although people do not seem displeased with her answers, one day I ask her to answer one of
my
silent questions, to see how good she really is. She accepts. I think: Will Henrietta ever love me?

Not that I want her to. Just asking out of curiosity, out of lack of imagination, out of my inability to think of a more interesting question. “Not as long as I live,” Laura answers.

Hmm. Interesting response. But it doesn’t prove her authenticity one iota.

In her frilliest gimmick, Laura comes down to the audience and touches faces. She’ll stand in front of people, her face very close to theirs, squinting, scrutinizing their features while breathing softly on their nose, and finally, with the tip of her index finger, she’ll touch a particular spot on their face. It is the most aesthetically pleasing spot to touch on that particular person, on that particular day, at that particular moment.