Mimi (21 page)

“Here, Pussy, here, Pussy!” she cried.

I was now worried that Bubbles might get stuck between the wall and the radiator, so felt I had to intervene. At first, I attempted to work
around
Gertrude, scrupulously avoiding any physical contact with her. But she wouldn’t budge from her spot in front of the radiator. The only way for me to get at Bubbles was to lean over Gertrude from behind (as if we were back doing it doggy-style, as in days of yore!). Gertrude kept inanely trying to help. “Here, Pussy,” she squealed.

“
I’ll
deal with the pussy, Gertrude,” I said sternly, groping around on both sides of her. “If you’d just move a little to the right. . . ”

“But Harrison, it’s so big, I think it’s stuck!” Gertrude giggled, squirming under my weight as I felt my way blindly toward Bubbles.

“Yes, it’s getting bigger and bigger,” I admitted: Bubbles had lost all her initial scrawniness and was now turning into a fine matronly cat (I’d have to start cutting back on the Fancy Feast). But why was I calling her “it”? She’d been “he” for a while, then “she”, never “it”! The only explanation was that I wasn’t myself, thanks to the aggravations of being with Gertrude again, and being with her
in a kimono
. And now I was getting down and dirty with her on the floor! I couldn’t take any more of this. “C’mon!” I said in sudden exasperation and, clutching the woman around the middle, I yanked her bodily up from the floor, meaning to deposit her a few feet away. I realized too late that the silkiness of the kimono, combined with a Pavlovian reaction to my close proximity to this familiar body, was rousing base instincts in me. Gertrude interpreted this as a come-on!

“Oh, Harrison, I’ve missed you so,” she murmured delightedly.

For godsake, didn’t she know no m.o., no intentionality, no Plan of Action, can be attributed to that organ? Plenty of rhymes, maybe, but no reason. It goes up, it goes down. Big deal.
It doesn’t know what’s going on!
Having high hopes of me now, Gertrude somehow wound her snakelike arms around my legs. My only chance of escape lay in making a dash for the bedroom; but it was no good, she held fast and
floored
me! (She’s stronger than she looks.) I fell flat on my face. She flipped me over, and now she was all over me, slithering and sliding, muttering all kinds of indecencies, and
undulating
like there was no tomorrow.

I grabbed hold of a piano leg to use as leverage, but she wasn’t going to let me go. I seem to remember
biting
the piano leg at one point, in my efforts to avoid a fate worse than death. Who knows what outrage would have been perpetrated in another second or two, if a whole bunch of soft round objects hadn’t started raining down on us from above. I got biffed by one in the face and looked up. . . and there was
Mimi
, clutching a bag of bagels. How long had she been there??

Gertrude jumped off me and ran towards the front door, the coward. But Mimi kept pelting her with bagels (the perfect matriarchal missile: soft and round, with that vaginal hole), until Gertrude got angry and retaliated with coffee capsules.

CAT FIGHT!!!

Mimì! Mimì!

I phoned again and again but she wasn’t answering. This filled me with irritation. Come on, girl, what do you take me for? Do you really think I’d be banging that bore while you were out buying bagels? boy, that made me mad!

And I thought she loved me! Just the day before, we’d sat canoe-style on the couch, Mimi in my arms, me nuzzling her brown curls—the epitome of coziness and peace! For Mimi, I’d run down ten flights of stairs, hoping to beat the elevator, but she was too fast for me, and gone by the time I got there. For Mimi, I’d stood barefoot on 36th Street
in a kimono
, enduring the whistles of workmen! For Mimi, I’d suffered the slings and arrows and outrageous misfortune of Gertrude, who passed me out there on the street a few minutes later, her arms full of her priceless coffee machine.

“You look ridiculous, Harrison,” she’d said in triumph.

“I
am
ridiculous,” I’d replied, before plodding back upstairs to my disheveled apartment and discomfited cat.

“Well, Bubs, how about some coffee and bagels?”

Instead of the
Appassionata
, I played the
Tempest
for the next few hours. Both pieces are for the heartbroken, but the
Tempest
is full of blood and flood and fire. . .
This
is what rejection does to you: you lose all resistance to crass ideas about music! And the more I played it, the more I took the whole débâcle out on Mimi.
Your feet’s too big
! Women are always complaining about the size of
men’s
feet, but Mimi’s! Sure, they might be useful when manning barricades, but this was
Manhattan
in a period of relative calm!

Absence, combined with guilt and shame, made Mimi seem alien, not my
mate
but some kind of interloper who didn’t suit me after all. I had never worried about her physical peculiarities when she was by my side, kissing me and sassing me around; but in retrospect, she had her flaws. Was it really necessary to be so plump? I knew I was dating a middle-aged woman, I’d
accepted
that, but those bulges under her bra straps at the back—this was new territory for me. For Delacroix, it wasn’t a problem. Liberty’s wearing loose-fitting clothing, sans bra. But in an age of more or less universal bra use, a man can indulge only so much
bulge
before starting to wonder if he doesn’t deserve better. Female flesh is supposed to be smooth and soft and curvy, not all furrowed, dented, and squeezed, like a ball of rubber bands. In fact, Delacroix could
keep
his feisty flat-footed weirdsmobile for all I cared!

Going out with Mimi now seemed a mockery of what I did for a living—and she’d have been the first to admit it! She was none too kind about my sorry profession. The point was, how was I supposed to turn up at plastic surgery conventions with
Mimi
on my arm? All the other guys used their women as
ads
for their talents with Botox or the scalpel; the women were works-in-progress. Henry always brought his patients, convinced that they were proof of his beautifying skills. Aw, screw him too,
and
his beauty addiction.

And then I thought of that night on the street, after Henry drove us nuts, how Mimi called me a hero, and kissed me. . . and the
Tempest
gradually subsided. I just wanted Mimi back! So what, if I was trained to disapprove of some of her physical flaws? What’s a love affair without a little ugliness? You need some counterpart to heady joy or you’d conk out! It gave love
gravitas
, like in
Ant and Bee and the Rainbow
, when you get that scary cross-section of the old buried tire. The top half, above-ground, can be laboriously painted to look (a bit) like a fake rainbow, but the other half’s stuck in the cracked earth, lonely and unreachable, with stones sticking painfully into its sides: a
memento mori
. “We all die in the end.”

My next move was to go howl like a hound-dog outside Mimi’s building, also pound on the door and ring the bell, but Mimi wasn’t there or wasn’t answering.
Mimì! Mimì!

So I went home and called my sister, who found the whole thing funny!

“You said what?!”

“I said I’d deal with the pussy. . . or something like that. Aw jeez. I don’t know what I said, but it wasn’t good.”

“Gertrude must have been pleased with herself after.”

“She did look pretty happy.”

“Just give Mimi a little time. She’ll get over it.”

Gertrude phoned later to apologize.

“Yeah, well, thanks to your little cameo appearance there, Gertrude,” I said unforgivingly, “my girlfriend isn’t speaking to me. And we were planning to get
married
.” (I’d just decided.)

“Married!?”

So then I had to comfort Gertrude!

Despite Cheryl’s vain hope that I was newly available, only Bubbles helped fill the gap left by Mimi. Bubbles was the better purrer, but I ached for Mimi. Rodolfo’s cry of
Mimì! Mimì!
went through my head a million times a day—though, when I got home from work I swallowed rom-coms by the dozen, not Puccini.
Sleepless in Seattle
made me cry! My List of Melancholy, which had lain dormant for a while, began to spiral out of control.

LIST OF MELANCHOLY

– the “Ready” bell on microwaves

– beeps of all types

– truck-reversing sirens and recorded messages

– car alarms

– alarm clocks

– xylophones

– glockenspiels

– this pain in my temple!

– Roman centurion sandals

– Kentucky-fried-chicken-kickers, and the chickens they kick

– barn dances

– my mother’s raspberry jam (no longer available)

– upholstery, especially those
buttons
that hold it all together

– Dick Cheney

– data fraud

– adultery

– Boy Scouts

– Girl Scouts

– linoleum

– women all over the world, stretching their arms up over their heads

– Mimi’s flattened straw hat

That straw hat of hers turned up in my bedroom closet (a Mimi minefield), and I remembered Mimi admiring it, saying, “Look at the work that went into this, Harrison! So intricate! Look how it’s woven. See how rounded it is at the top? That’s an art!”—a remark that entangled
me
, wove
me
, and entitled me to make a grab—for Mimi, not the hat. The hat was caught in the fray and got crushed.

Intimately examining it now, sitting on the floor of my closet, I had an idea—EUREKA!—a solution to my present predicament that went well beyond the usual roses, chocolates, or chocolate roses, of other two-timing bastards. In my capacity as Mimi’s attorney I gave the museum of annoying folksiness a call, and offered to buy the Firefly Quilt back from them after all. Humble Pie was consumed. After some toing and froing with the director and her aloof assistants, a price was settled on. It had gone up (practically double) and, given that I’d never spent that much on household decor before, it took some strength of purpose to blow it on a blanket. But I was by then too pleased with my cunning plan to backtrack. They said I could pick the thing up on Monday.

I filled the time by getting all sentimental over my notes on Mimi’s hot flashes, and then—in direct defiance of my arse of an arsonist dad and his disparagement of my early inventions—I got to work inventing the hot flash remedy: Meno-Balls™! I made quick progress during my lonely nights without Mimi, and soon the Meno-Balls™ had progressed from being a whim to a fully formed concept. I’d need a little development help from technicians, chemists, engineers, chemical engineers, and chemical-engineering technicians, before I could patent it—making the things
cold
was the problem. But I had one little breakthrough all on my own: Space Shuttle tiles. These I thought might offer just the right kind of heat resistance necessary for the cold version of the Meno-Balls™, allowing them to retain their low temperature despite the influence of the woman’s own body heat.

The Meno-Balls™ were based on letting dualism work
for
us for once, not against us. They would consist of two separate “balls,” or flattened disks, one red, one blue, or one square, one round (the exact distinction didn’t matter, as long as the woman could quickly differentiate between them in a hot flash emergency). They would be lightweight, rounded, compact, and easily held in the palm of the hand. The woman could keep them in her pockets, on her desk, or under her pillow; one to heat her up, one to cool her down. Perhaps she’d have one in a left-hand pocket, the other in the right, so that she could grab them surreptitiously to offset whichever unpleasant sensation (heat or cold) was currently impending, without anyone else having to know (thus avoiding all the questions that so aggravated Mimi).

By gripping the ball, she activates the mechanism that heats the ball up or cools it down. It may have been a case of Inventor’s Euphoria Syndrome (a condition I just made up) but I had a hunch that simply knowing these devices were readily available would alleviate many of the symptoms. No more panting, sweating, blushing, nausea, or palpitations with Meno-Balls™! I could hear the jingles already:
Feeling hot or feeling cold, now in silver and in gold. . . Meno-Balls!
and
Don’t you cry, Don’t be shy, This is why: Meno-Balls!

The main thing was that the balls would be harmless and non-invasive, with no side effects whatsoever, thereby complying with Mimi’s insistence that the menopause is not a disease. They might even have other applications. Handy for hikers and fishermen, or children with fevers, people stuck in snowdrifts or in the subway in August, who knows? All I really cared about though, was pleasing Mimi.