Love Me (21 page)

 

 

 

Dear Curious, Go ahead and write that novel, but put it aside for three years and then have your wife check and make sure it’s okay. The plot you describe sounds like a snooze fest to me so be sure to put some shooting and rassling in there and maybe heavy drug usage and incest. People nowadays want a book that makes beads of perspiration pop out on their foreheads, and dang it, it’s getting harder and harder to accomplish that, what with all the weird stuff on television.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Moonflower, Tidy housekeeping is not where romance begins. And many wonderful tidy men are already in relationships with other tidy men. Mr. Turkey never learned to be a good roommate, I guess. Some men learn this in the monastery but I guess he wasn’t there long enough. And standards of housekeeping do vary. Some people feel that sheets should be washed every week; others feel that if the bed smells a little, hey, we’re asleep, what’s the problem? Most women like curtains or drapes, some men prefer tinfoil taped to the windows. Why fight over it? Dismiss him, if you like, but remember: there is no relationship between two people that does not include considerable irritation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Turkey, She wrote that poem about something that happened a long time ago. Be happy, move forward, live memorably, etc.

 

 

 

 

Dear Alone, Gladly. Here you go.

Read the following ten items and circle the ones that apply to you.

Circle the items that apply to you. Circle any that ring a chord, even if not accurate in every jot or tittle. Face up to what’s really going on in your life. Be honest.

If you circled fewer than four (4) items, you’re doing pretty darn good. If you circled two (2) or fewer, I’d say you’re definitely happy. If you circled none, I’d call you a big fat liar.

 

 

 

The Happiness Quiz drew more mail than Mr. Blue ever got before. Even when I told Incredulous to forget about the uncle who “accidentally” left the bathroom door open and exposed himself to her as a child, which, thirty years later, she uncovered in therapy and told her family and none of them was interested in hearing about the self-loathing she suffered by having seen Uncle Ted’s thing or accepting what he did to her—the quiz drew more mail than that. It drew more mail than my dismissive reply to Suspicious.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Suspicious, Who cares about your stupid cat? Not me. I’ve got real problems. Go soak your head.

 

 

 

A torrent of abuse rained down on me from cat lovers, but the quiz drew even more mail. More, even, than my ill-tempered diatribe against Republicans as “bullet-headed ideologues devoted to prisons and sterile office parks and McMansion developments and pumping oil and destroying the Alaska wilderness to power their SUV’s while taking away funds for homeless children sleeping in doorways to pay millions to fat-cat farmers and ranchers firmly attached to the right hind teat of federal welfare.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Defeated, A man should not enter into matrimony if he doesn’t wish to be known. The woman of his dreams, the light of his life, is also an authority on him, his best critic. Go home and purge yourself of ill feeling by doing something useful such as cleaning the bathroom. Fill a bucket with soapy hot water and get a mop and a stiff brush and twenty minutes later you’ll feel better. Guaranteed. Tomorrow is a new day.

Trillin’s novel No
Parking
was on the
Times
list of “Twenty Most Significant Books of The Past Two Years” and Updike was all over the place with his
Collected Notes
while I sat in Deadwood Gulch watching the dust motes fall through the sunbeams, hearing Time slip away, feeling sour and jowly and snappish, a real pill to be around. Jesus wanted me for a sunbeam and I felt like a major storm front.

One night, in the grip of whiskey, I called Katherine in St. Paul and told her I was depressed and her mood brightened instantly. “How awful for you,” she said with real interest. “I wonder if I have long to live,” I said. “I’ve been unfaithful to Iris, unfaithful to myself, seduced by money and fame and now I’m involved with the Mafia and could wind up with a bullet in the head.” She thanked me for confiding in her. I told her that I wished my remains to be returned to Minnesota and my friends to hold an appropriate memorial service. No eulogy. But maybe something from the
St. Matthew Passion, “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,”
and
maybe “Jesu, meine Freude,”
and read from Ecclesiastes and maybe something from
Life on the Mississippi
about floating on a raft—we both broke down and cried at the thought of it. I asked her if she had a boyfriend, and she said yes and they were thinking of getting married, as soon as they could figure out the ceremony.

 

 

 

I tried to write for
The New Yorker.
I sat in diners on Eighth Avenue and drank oil-slick coffee and eavesdropped on conversations (“You heading home?” “No, not yet.”) and took notes on people (“fat man 50 bleached hair reading
Vanity
Fair & eating sugar doughnuts”) and tried to think of how to use this in a story but mainly I hated being alone. A jeweled city at night and how it calls to you but you venture out alone down Columbus Avenue past the sidewalk cafés and little bars around the Museum of Natural History, you yearn to be a couple. How sweet it would be to be a couple—to have a faithful companion to see and hear the same things you do—
and
how
this would assist you as a writer!

I could imagine Iris and me, holding hands, walking down Columbus and suddenly Placido Domingo strolls into view—and
because I am with her, everything is more vivid to me—
the great tenor in his black silk shirt and blue blazer and gray fedora, towed by a black poodle, and we stop by a stationery store, pretending to window-shop, meanwhile eyeballing the maestro as the pooch stops to sniff around a NO PARKING sign for a spot to make its deposit. A tall dame stops and speaks to Domingo: Who is she? I know her. She was in a movie. I can’t think of her name but Iris does. “It’s Clover Williams,” she says. We watch the great man unfold his charm, touching the actress’s sleeve and flashing his fabulous smile like a carpet salesman, all the wattage that has lit up
Carmen
and
Parsifal
now bestowed on one lady in a green-and-white jogging suit—yes! Clover herself, luminous, slightly tousled, playing a scene of romantic comedy before our eyes! And the dog, knowing what the comedian is meant to do, squats and looks lovingly up at the lady and shits magnificently, a fine steaming pile of greenish poop. And the hero, with a gallant smile and great verve, picks up the shit in a Baggie and tosses it in a trash basket, with no diminution of his charm. And now she gazes into his face with her special radiant look and the story is clear: she knows he is Placido Domingo and he thinks she is just another leggy American beauty and she knows he thinks this and—she doesn’t mind! Clover is happy to put stardom aside and enjoy flirting with a grand master. She would rather be flirted with than fawned over. A man’s unabashed interest is reassuring to her. His accent is thick as clotted cream. She touches his arm now and speaks in an urgent voice and suddenly his charm dims slightly. She has complimented him, but the compliment was the wrong color or was one size too small or maybe he thinks she thinks he’s Pavarotti, a real deal breaker. That’s it. She says how great he was as Marco in Les
Moins Chères
and that isn’t a role he sings. Pavarotti does. A faint chill descends, propriety takes hold, he bows slightly and prepares to move on. She senses her mistake, leans toward him on tiptoes, speaks softly and urgently. The dog, done with its low comedy, sniffs her in the very place that Domingo might want to sniff her as well, and she puts her hand on the dog’s head but does not shove it away. The dog is saying, “Come home with us. He’s a wonderful lover. It’d be a night you’d remember. The guy is slick. And I’d get to watch.” And now you understand why a man goes into opera: it’s not only for the music but also for what can happen afterward. A tenor stands onstage advertising his tenacity and prowess and ladies line up at the stage door. Sex. The great steaming mystery. The love of being naked in a dark room with another and the cool sheets and lying down and the hundreds of ways there are to lie together. The whole vocabulary of nakedness. This is what Puccini was thinking about, and Mozart, and Strauss. All the time they pretended to address God or death or the soul, they were showing off their legs. A little scene on Columbus Avenue can illuminate so much of Western art. And now a third party enters. An aging lady—a lady Domingo’s age—a real turnoff, a stout lady in a black cape and pointy boots, a shock of gray ponytail, she looks as if she might be the opera critic of
The Nation,
she steps up and addresses Domingo as a fan, mincing, ducking her head, like a lowly serf curtsying before the count, and now the great tenor makes his escape. With a grand beneficent smile and a sweep of his hand that includes both women, he speaks his final line and tugs on the comedian, and they turn, and with a little backward wave of his hand, he flees south to the safety of his apartment. The aging lady attempts to speak to the star, who looks at her with such hauteur as could stuff a toilet and stalks east and the poor lady heads north, and Iris and I turn to the west, witnesses to a priceless little play, and being two, we can savor the thing and replay it a couple times from separate angles, whereas when it’s just me myself alone, as it is tonight, I leave the scene desperate to tell someone, but who cares? If it were the two of us, we could talk about this scene all evening. Alone: What’s the point?