Mimi (16 page)

It works! Sexual partnership. It's not compulsory, it's not involuntary or inevitable, it's not painful or difficult or confining or monotonous either—don't put up with it if it is! It's the bee's knees.
And
you're no longer solely responsible for the success or failure of your cocktail parties.

DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME

To my great joy, Mimi let me sit in on a few of her seminars for firemen. I proudly watched her spruce up their talks on salary scales and training plans into gems of piquancy, humor, and historical relevance (no
pre
history though, I noticed—that she saved for
me
). In return, I made Mimi endure an entire Friday evening with my partner, Henry, one of the original co-founders of the practice, and the twenty-ninth-best earlobe man in the business. He and I had had our differences—we once had a fistfight in a bar over medical ethics (I was in favor of them). But I now tentatively regarded him as a harmless roué and buffoon.
All he could talk about was women and female beauty. The guy sure loved his job! It gave him a chance to look at women all day, and to credit himself with making them more beautiful, though that was a pretty dubious boast. His wife didn’t seem to mind his locker-room chatter about all the beautiful women he’d ever seen or helped, or the ones he couldn’t help because they sadly hadn’t asked for help—but Mimi got a bellyful that night, and finally suggested Henry check out a few other things women might have done besides being beautiful.

“But what?” he chortled. “Where are the female composers and artists, the female scientists and philosophers?”

“They’re around, they’re just ignored!” Mimi replied.

“Oh no,” Henry cried, with a boisterousness I thought ill-advised. “You’re not one of those feminists, are you?”

“You’re not one of those misogynists, are you?” she replied.

He glanced my way, pityingly, and I could have clobbered him, given him a good punch on that double chin of his (formed from years of looking down on people) that no surgeon had yet been able to correct. He revved up the charm. “Tell me, my dear, what do you have against us poor men? We really try our best, you know—”

Without a pause, Mimi replied, “War, racism, injustice, destruction, tyranny, feudalism, monarchies, mercenaries, pirates, despots, the slave trade, the Ku Klux Klan, global warming, capitalism, corrupt bankers, wife-beating, the Freemasons, monotheism, radioactive waste, ugly architecture, animal extinctions, toga parties, pubic hair removal, sniper rifles that can shoot people a mile away, and failure to do the dishes.”

“Ah, war,” mused Henry, caressing his double chin protectively, as if sensing it was in some kind of danger. “But isn’t that a small price to pay for getting things
done
?”

Mimi yelped. “
Women
are the ones who get stuff done! Not least, raising children. Do you know how much work it takes to get a single person up and running, from birth to adulthood? And then to have to watch them get raped, exploited. . . killed! Every person men murder is some poor woman’s child!” She was magnificent.

“Oh, my dear, I see you take the
little
view. Are
you
a mother?”

I stood up. “When you’re goofy, Henry, you’re goofy,” I told him. “But when you’re idiotic and goofy, it’s offensive.” And I swept Mimi out of there before he could think up a riposte.

When we got outside, she flung herself at me, kissing me passionately in the cold night air. “You’re a hero!” she claimed.

“Hey, maybe I should have made you meet Henry sooner!” I joked.

We kept kissing along the street as we walked back to my apartment.

“
‘People don’t do this in New York,
’
” I said, quoting Bette Davis in
Deception
(when she and Paul Henreid embrace all the way back to
her
apartment).

“But
we
do,” murmured Mimi, with just the right intonation: she even got my movie references! What a doll.

A little further on, she erupted. “What is
with
that guy?”

“Henry?”

“He seems to think he’s some kind of woman-worshipper. Goes on and on about women all evening, like he’s really into us or something. But the truth is, he spends his whole life callously
comparing
women’s looks. That’s all he does! He’s like the President of Female Attractiveness or something! I bet he keeps a chart.”

“I think I saw it floating around the office. They take bets.”

“He talked about beauty all goddam night! It’s so. . . annoying! And insulting. ’Cause, either he thinks
I’m
beautiful, and therefore the subject of female beauty must be endlessly fascinating to me, which it ain’t, or he
doesn’t
think I’m beautiful, and thinks I oughta try harder, which I won’t. But just who does he think he is? Does he really think we’re here to please
him
?! That doofus?”

A small “shaddap!” came from an upper window.

“It’s. . . a sort of hobby with him,” was all I could offer as an explanation.

“That guy,” she resumed, “makes millions persuading women they’ll be more fuckworthy after he’s sliced off some bit of them or added something. But everybody’s fuckworthy! We’d all fuck anybody in an
emergency
. . . ”

“TAKE IT SOME PLACE ELSE, LADY!”

Mimi was not so easily silenced. “WE’RE ALL FUCKWORTHY!” she yelled back. I hurried her away before something fell on our heads, but after a few blocks we slowed down and she said more soberly, “All this pressure on women to be beautiful. It’s just plain mean.”

“I know. And because of it, men have to spend their whole lives
reassuring
women that they’re beautiful!”

“Yeah, life is tough all over,” she laughed.

“
You’re
beautiful, Mimi.”

“So are you, and let that be the end of it!”

I was intrigued by Mimi’s complete lack of faith in the value of plastic surgery. I was beginning to agree with her. Some “specialism” this was, working with a prick like Henry all day, and poking around remodelling healthy tissue for a living. What good was it? But then I remembered my successes, the sad sacks who had really needed my help.

“The trouble is,” I said to Mimi as we tottered, entwined, towards home, “people are always trying to surpass each other in the youth and beauty stakes.”

“Nobody surpasses anybody,” said Mimi firmly. “We all die in the end.”

I loved that gal. I would give anything to be with her forever, give
her
anything. So later, sitting on the window seat together, drinking martinis (much better than the ones at Henry’s bar), I gave her my biggest secret, something I hadn’t told anyone since drunken days in my twenties: the real reason why I’d gone into plastic surgery. The fire.

We all love a hero, bad boys made good, ogres with a heart of gold, righteous spies (007), triumphant sportsmen, politicians unexpectedly proven honest, brave, sincere and humane, teenagers who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and survive, composers “on the verge of international fame.” Every
war
produces its ersatz heroes, a whole new jerk circle of the gallant and the good. But if you want real heroes, you need look no further than
beetles
, the most successful species on earth. Want to rise and prosper? Get yourself a hard undercarriage, enclosable wings, and a carapace.

Apart from my father’s claim to have gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel (something I
believed
for a while, even though I knew him to be a guy who had a hard time just getting out of Virtue and Chewing Gum), ours was not a family that displayed a lot of heroism. Our ancestors kept violent ends to a minimum. We had an uncle who could take his glass eye out at the dinner table. Some other ancient figurehead could only talk by holding an electrode to his throat (following cancer treatment), and there was a distant cousin who made balloon animals. But we hardly ever saw those guys. My dad must have alienated them like everyone else in the world, accused them of stealing a spoon or something. We were the classic American nuclear family, enacting our own private annihilation, with a dad who could not be figured out, and a mom whose bottled-up woe, like her tomatoes, we consumed daily.

All the neighbors were hypochondriacs, but one day Mom blew their angina, fainting fits, uterine prolapses, dandruff, and cyst scares right out of the water by coming down with a real disease: scoliosis. She had to have a metal rod inserted in her spine and spend a year in a cast.

I sat with her in the hospital after her operation, doing crossword puzzles and handing her the back-scratcher Dad had bought her—a long stick with a tiny hand carved on the end of it (a maniac’s hand!), with which she could get at itches inside the cast. Then Dad and I would drive home, picking up a few hot dogs on the way. These he chased down with some highballs in the den, and a lot of yelling. Bee had reached puberty, and the guy couldn’t stand it: the makeup, the phone calls, the hair-curling, the hair-straightening, the clothes, the colored pantyhose (for some unknown reason, he felt all pantyhose should be black), her cleavage, her bralessness, her “sloth,” her selfishness, her ingratitude, her incorrigibility. . . Everything
about
Bee irked him. And then she had the nerve to get involved with Cliff—how dare she kiss boys while her mother was sick in the hospital? When Dad came home from work one day to find Bee and Cliff making out in the dark in the living room, with
Lord of the Flies
on TV, he flipped.

“Take a chill pill,” Bee told him after he’d banished Cliff and ordered her to her room. She slammed the door and played her Laura Nyro records really loud.

Mom eventually returned, in a body cast that stretched from her neck to her ass, like the most unflattering girdle, and lay helpless on her high Victorian bed for months, eating ice cream and homemade strawberry compote. She
had
to eat it: if she gained or lost five pounds she’d have to go back to the hospital to get a new cast put on. She’d worked out exactly how much ice cream she had to eat to retain her original plumpitude. Bee’s services were now required, not just cooking and cleaning but helping Mom in unimaginable ways in the bathroom—while all I had to do was try to prevent anyone at school finding out what was going on. I was embarrassed by this mom in her carapace, and my drunken dad, always exploding. I was eleven: embarrassment was a guiding force!

Mom was almost ready to have the cast removed when Dad stomped in one day, announcing he’d quit his job at the gum company. Goodbye, golden pension. Mom cried, and Bee huddled over the phone in the den, talking to Cliff. I just hid in my bed.
O the brown and the yellow ale
—the shit and piss of family life! When I got to sleep, I dreamed about the balletic wrists of river weeds, waving goodbye all day and night to the river as it passes over them. On the surface of the Chevron, stuff sometimes got jammed up, but underneath there was constant flow, miles and miles and miles of it. Water is so determined.

I was dreaming about the guys, Gus, Chester, me, and Pete, wandering along the riverbank searching for older boys, hoping to cadge a cigarette—a favorite activity at the time. We didn’t just smoke them, we used them to singe holes in Styrofoam cups—pretty sophisticated, huh?—creating melted Styrofoam dot-to-dots that spelled out our names, or dirty words, or porno diagrams. But in my dream we couldn’t find any boys with cigarettes. Instead, we heard something approaching us through the bushes—a maniac? No, a lion! He made a terrible rumbling sound as he sprang into the tree above our heads. The other guys fled along the bank, but I thought I’d be safer in the river, and dove down deep. I knew I was safe down there and somehow managed to breathe for a while underwater, before I woke up, choking. I couldn’t see a thing, not even my night-light, because the room was full of smoke! I scrambled to the door, but when I opened it something huge and angry lunged at me: more smoke, combined with ferocious heat. I had to face it though, to get to the rest of my family. Once I was in the hall, through the smoke I could see the glow of a blazing fire in the kitchen.