Mimi (12 page)

 

“Why do you look at my hands?”

“Because they charm me,” I answered, kissing them, and it was true. I was now an advocate of Mimi's large hands and strong feet, and the well-rounded calves that sloped dramatically down to her unsprainable ankles. Mimi's feet seemed heroic to me, the kind of feet Liberty would
need
to man those barricades.
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame was the imprisoned lightning
.

Mimi
was
heroic: heroic in the grocery store sniffing out the bargains, heroic on the subway pushing her way onto crowded trains, heroic when eating, when drinking, when sleeping, when laughing, just heroic all the time! Heroic in her beliefs, her angers and upsets, heroic when she dropped to her knees and took my cock in her mouth, heroic when I turned her to fuck her standing up, heroic coming and coming under the ceiling fan in her wide square bedroom. Heroic lying spoon-style behind me afterwards, calling me darling.

Is this not love?

When you first get together with someone, you hammer out a cosmos—through moments of discord as well as contentment. It's your Big Bang period. From then on, the way you interact has been established. Things evolve, sure, you can refine it. But the major accommodations have been made and met, parameters set, no-go zones delineated, and you'll pause before disturbing these balances and tilting the whole thing off course.

Mimi turned out to have a lot to say, but not in Gertrude's meandering megalomaniacal manner. Mimi had firm views, clear enemies, and battles to fight. None of it seemed aimed directly at
me
. It was exhilarating to watch, and had a strange erotic charge. Mimi was brash, she was brazen, I wasn't even sure she was completely
civilized
. And sometimes she'd lash out at me too, like a cornered animal: I was communing with nature at last.

“Where there's life, we can rail!” she declared one morning out on the roof, with the wind in her hair.

“Okay, but don't lean on the railing.”

Mimi on power suits:
“Power suits don't work. Power works.”

Mimi on jobs:
“Work's bad for you. It drives everybody nuts in the end! That's why I went freelance. If I wanna stay in bed, I stay there.”

This wasn't exactly true—despite her fantasy of flexibility, Mimi always seemed to have to email somebody or Xerox something, frustrating all my endeavors to keep my own workload down to a minimum in order to be with her!

Mimi on parenthood:
“You share your genetic defects with somebody, and then they get your crappy furniture when you die? Some deal.” We were in total agreement on procreation: its unnecessariness.

Mimi on male bonuses:
“They earn five times what women do, and still expect you to chip in for dinner!”

Mimi on sports:
“What good's an Olympian to
me
?”

Mimi on guys on the subway who spread their legs and their newspapers far and wide:
“We all paid the price of a ticket. And I like opening my legs too!” This she then demonstrated to me, in the most beguiling way.

Mimi on the Hadron Collider
(which she insisted on calling the Hard-on Collider): “Who needs a big machine to re-create the chaos at the beginning of the universe? Chaos we got!”

“How about a Tippi Hedren Collider instead then?” I suggested. “You just throw birds at her until she flips.”

Mimi on the guy who claimed to have started an extramarital affair with a complete stranger, involuntarily, while sleepwalking as a result of taking an antidepressant:
“Yeah, sure.”

Mimi on a beer company promotion prize of a whole “caveman” weekend for five guys—free beer, video games, sports channels, and room service:
“Five drunks in a cheap hotel.”

Mimi on breast cancer campaigns:
“Them and their pink ribbons. It's sexual harassment! They never let you forget your breasts are a liability.”

Mimi on bras:
“Tit prisons. Who decided tits have to be this stiff and high anyway? The UN?”

“But without bras,” I argued, “I'd have even more boob-jobs to do and I'm sick of them!”

“I didn't know men could get sick of breasts.”

“Not of breasts maybe, but of altering them in accordance with their owner's latest caprice, or her husband's.”

Mimi was pretty suspicious of my profession. We battled it out one day over Yankee bean soup and borscht at B & H Dairy on 2nd Avenue (even when you're in love, you still need soup!). I was admiring her lips, and made the mistake of saying they were beautiful.

“They're just my lips. Don't separate 'em off and compare them to other lips. You're not at work now, buddy.”

“Well, shut up and kiss me then!”

She did, then resumed her rant. “Who decides what's beautiful anyway? It's all a matter of opinion, right?”

“Well, according to my partner Henry, beauty was decided
for
us by evolution. Hairiness in men, for instance, hairlessness in women. Sexual characteristics got exaggerated over time, since the people most universally recognized as desirable were the most likely to find mates. Youthfulness is another widely accepted beauty trait, because it implies fertility. Evolution decided it, and we just help it along.”

“That's bullshit,” declared Mimi.

“Look, Mimi. Imagine nature is the tailor, as a teacher of mine put it, and we're the invisible menders when the suit gets a bit worn out.”

“Hmmm.”

“Honey, it's just a job.”

“Hmmm.”

Those “hmmms” of hers.

“Some people really need help, Mimi, or their lives would be ruined! I had a woman in once who'd grown a
horn
on her forehead! Just an excess of keratin, easily removed—but in the Middle Ages she would have been dragged from town to town as an emblem of cuckoldry or something!”

“Or burnt as a witch,” said Mimi, taking a big bite of challah bread. “But come on, Harrison—most people's lives aren't
in danger
if they don't have a nose-job.”

“All I know is, a lot of middle-aged women come to me complaining they feel invisible.”

“But being invisible's great!” Mimi said. “You can do whatever you want and nobody notices.”

“I have this sudden twitch in my neck.”

“That's 'cause you're talkin' through your hat!”

I quickly changed the subject to Haydn. “You know how Haydn was taught to play the drum? When he was three years old, they hung a drum on a hunchback's back and Haydn walked behind him with his drumsticks, tapping away. Later, he got the full drum kit with high hat and cymbal, requiring six hunchbacks and a midget who played the kazoo.”

Mimi almost spat her borscht everywhere, something it's important not to do in such a small space. At B & H, you try to avoid any sudden movements, so as not to upset lethal quantities of hot soup. I moved on from midgets to a confession of my midget–maniac problem in childhood. Mimi had had similar mix-ups: she'd thought cirrus clouds were serious, and for a long time, to her mother's shame, called water “agooya”, ravioli “ravaloli” and beef bouillon “Beef
William.”

“Did you know they've just invented a way of manufacturing sperm artificially?” I asked next, just to get a rise out of her.

“Isn't there enough of it around already?”

“Yeah, the thing would be to
de
-invent it,” I said. “Everybody talks about recycling and hybrid cars but they never think seriously about overpopulation! If we could just stop having babies, we wouldn't need all these apocalypse scenarios.” (Another bugbear of Mimi's.)

“But what would Hollywood do, without the end of the world?” she mused. “They aren't happy unless people are looting and drowning every place. And then a guy gets into his SUV and somehow saves the day, or at least his own stupid skin.”

Mimi on Cormac McCarthy:
“He writes about cowboys and the apocalypse. Enough said.”

Mimi on Branwell Brontë:
“Who cares?”

She got mad about a million different things! But she could be easily charmed too.

Mimi on generosity:
“Some people are so generous it breaks your heart. Pavarotti's generous. And that guy who had to land his plane in the Hudson. When they were all standing in the cold out on the wings, he gave his shirt to one of the freezing passengers. The shirt off his back!
You're
generous too. You're generous with your cock.”

Forget the soup, cancel my appointments! Taxi!

 

Bubbles and Mimi had formed an instant rapport—almost as if they knew each other already. There was occasional competition between Bubbles and me over who got to sleep on top of Mimi. But most of the time our
ménage à trois
worked very well. When we all woke up entangled together on Valentine's Day, I started telling Mimi about the way my parents had incarcerated me in my bed as a kid, thereby putting me off bedtime for life (until now). She found my Berlioz problem funny so, getting bolder, I stood up to declaim, “It was in fact during those sleepless nights that I, like Edison, came up with my best stuff.” Then I gave her some examples of my youthful “inventions” (so far unpatented):

 

1. Every sidewalk a conveyor belt.

2. Every basement a swimming pool.

3. Every attic a planetarium.

 

Mimi had invented the same stuff herself. Still, I had more!

 

4. Aquarium bathtub: translucent sides so you could have real fish in there—octopuses, sharks, baby alligators, whatever you want (Bee always wanted sea horses).

5. The Tornado Room-Tidier: a machine you place in the middle of your room and it spins faster and faster, blowing all your toys and clothes and shit into the corners and under the bed. Instant appearance of order.

6. The Yuck-Suck Machine: this consists of a pump, a disposable “reservoir” (plastic baggie), and a tube going down your sleeve, ending in a discreet nozzle. When you're presented with unfamiliar food at a friend's house (like Beef
William, for instance), the Yuck-Suck secretly siphons it all up. Particularly good on cabbage and gravy.

7. The Nickel-Stick Shooter: this contraption divides your Kraft Karamel Nickel Stick into individual pieces, or shoots them at your friends in a mild, harmless way your mother can't object to—your mother who, by banning you from all toy-gun ownership, even water pistols, has relegated you to a life of insecurity and social ostracism.

 

“The musings of a kid who felt trapped in his bed, in his room, in his family, in his town, in his universe,” I said in summation, before noticing I was much too far away from Mimi and rejoining her on the bed. “I was imprisoned at
school
too. Locked in the playpen: a sort of solitary confinement for hardened class scapegoats. I had to eat my lunch in there all on my own!. . . Unless Bee came.”

“Bee got into trouble too?” asked Mimi, reaching over to stroke my thigh.

“No, she just came to keep me company. She never got caught for anything. But she was a bit of an outlaw too. It was Bee who taught me how to squirt toothpaste at people from the top floor of the library. They thought it was bird shit. That was great! Later, she became the town's only graffiti artist.”

I grabbed Mimi and forced her to bestraddle me so I could caress her hips and stomach and look up at her breasts while we talked. “Happy Valentine's Day, Mimi.”

“Happy Valentine's Day,” she returned, and bent to kiss me.

Possessiveness suddenly struck me as the sexiest thing in the world. I held her tight. “Be mine,” I said, and meant it.

She
was
mine.

“Tell me you love me.”

“I love you,” she murmured. I already knew it. The girl was crazy about me!

 

Mimi wasn't crazy about Valentine's Day though: she considered it only a shadow of its former glory, a fake and faded version of ancient fertility rites or something. “The only reminder of its real purpose is all the vulvas,” she told me.

“Huh?”

“Yeah, all the pink valentine hearts. Those aren't
hearts
, Harrison.
You're
a doctor. Hearts don't look like that, vulvas do!
Open
vulvas. They're all a throwback to prehistoric vulva worship, that's what those heart shapes are.”

“HUH?”

“Prehistory. You know, before the Bronze Age.”

“Before the Bronze Age? Before the Bronze Age, missy, there was nothing. Nada. Zilch. Niente.”