I’ve been accused of being heartless, because only a bitch walks away from a man pinning his heart to her sleeve. I think, therefore I am unrepentant. To my critics, I say: please read more books, paying particular attention to the supporting characters. Remember the story of Odysseus and the enchantress Circe? He was on an odyssey, but for a year, Circe delayed his heroic journey by fulfilling his every need. She was deeply in love with the man of her dreams. He was having a fabulous island vacation with a real sex goddess! Inconveniently, she also turned all his men into swine. In one version of the story, she fed them to him every night. He dumped her, and resumed voyaging home to his wife.
Why is this a bad story? Oh, but it’s not. Because he’s the hero, Odysseus kept on running into gorgeous sirens who fell madly in love with him, and they unleashed all their feminine wiles trying to get him to stay home with them. They’re soul mates! They belong together! Why else would a gorgeous, rich man with excellent table manners land in their laps, out of the blue, bringing shiploads of fresh food? The women are loamy of thigh with fertile wombs bearing many fruits, and the little bastards are never resentful when their father heroically abandons them. This is called Great Literature. My love story is terrible because I’m the one doing the running, and I look like a startled koala in spectacles. That’s the part that confuses everyone. Given the men I’ve left behind, I should look like Lucy Liu trussed in thigh-high black leather boots. Instead, I’m Margaret Cho wearing thrift-shop sweatpants on a bad hair day. It simply does not compute. I’m too short to be fashionable, too fat to be chic, and too tarnished to be a trophy. Makeup artists cry when confronted by my face. My eyeballs eject contact lenses—it’s something about “tight lids.” I’m allergic to mascara, rouge, and hairspray. Common sense says I should be grateful that men want to marry me. Instead, I’m uncommonly aggravated. I mean what I say, and it isn’t a ruse: I don’t want to. The very fact that men ask for my hand in marriage—the hand being the wrong bit to try to persuade, by the way—means it would be a giant mistake. It’s a perfect Catch-22.
To my secret glee, John won’t fly to Paris for a weekend rendezvous with a perfect stranger, even if the perfect stranger is moi. “I have soccer practice on Sundays,” he growled. Plus, he knew that I was moving to Boston for reasons settled long before our conversation began, and he didn’t mind waiting for me to come to him. Was he seeing other women? I sincerely hoped so. To each other, we were big cumulus clouds drifting on wind. He did not inhabit my reality. I neither trusted nor distrusted him, for he was a character on an electronic page, more fiction than fact, writing himself into my consciousness but disappearing when I dreamed. A fickle proposition at best. It helped that he was painfully honest, answering every question I posed with a direct answer. He also drove a pickup truck, drank regular beer, and liked declarative sentences, all of which hinted that he was that elusive beast known as the Abominable Straight Man. I asked for a picture, and he sent me a photo of a blurry humanoid skulking in deep snow. He’s the Sasquatch? My hypothesis was confirmed! Now I was really interested, because I’m allergic to everything else with fur.
“Sasquatches don’t exist,” Rose snipped, waggling her elegant finger in my face as we sat at an ordinary bistro near the Louvre. “Why don’t you fall in love with a Frenchman and just stay here?” That’s what she did, except her Frenchman was Dutch. An American stock broker who’d spent a few years working in the City (London’s equivalent of Wall Street), Rose had had an exceedingly good year and decided to celebrate by divorcing her gay French husband. Gilles was one of her very best friends, and she’d agreed to marry him because he had ultra-conservative Catholic parents who strongly disapproved of 1) Hollywood movies, 2) margarine, and 3) gay men. He hoped they’d die deluded and happy, swept into their graves by old age and too much confit de canard. And they did! Is there a better time to end a fake marriage than after a real funeral? So she took the Eurostar train from London to Paris, and headed to town hall in order to file her divorce papers. As she stood in line, impatiently tapping her toes, she found herself being stared at by a gorgeous man in the next line. Pierre invited her to a party that same night. She agreed to go. They had sex in the coat closet. Once her divorce was final, Pierre proposed. They now have two absurdly beautiful children being raised as citizens of Paris.
This story makes Parisians jealous, because hardly any apartments in Paris have coat closets.
We sat down to green beans, giblet salad, and crème brulée, a classic lunch special available anywhere in the city. Years ago, I’d told myself I should do exactly as Rose suggested, since it was as obvious as the subliminal sequence of our meal. But I never did. Why not? There are lots of reasons, some of which even sound reasonable, but in the end, my not-so-good explanation is this: it’s because I look grotesque when I eat. I’m not one of those women that can look all sultry when they swallow asparagus. It’s beyond my powers to transform the licking of an ice cream cone into an erotic experience, as advised by The Sensuous Woman on tape. Published in 1969 and written by “J” (predictably, as “O” was already taken), it was a revolutionary sex manual at the time, teaching women how to please their men in bed. Today, it’s pure comedy gold. Fast-forward a half-century later, the ice cream cone is now a raisin, and the focus is on women pleasing themselves. “I’d like you to start by examining your raisin,” psychologist Lori Brotto advises her female clientele after passing around a bowl of Sunkist fruits. “Touch the raisin with a finger. Look into the valleys and peaks, the highlights and dark crevasses. Lift the raisin to your lips . . .” This sort of hilarity has become so mainstream that I read about Brotto’s work in The New York Times Magazine. Nowadays, no scarlet letters are required; the analysis of orgasms has become a clinical exercise in head-shrinkage. Conclusion: It’s not the woman’s fault if penises make her laugh because female sexuality is “complex.”
I dislike raisins. They’re chewy and dried up. They happen to give me the runs, which is sort of beside the point, but what woman wants to think of her lady parts as shriveled black fruits? And lifting the raisin to your lips . . . well, if you extend the metaphor here, which is pretty much necessary for this exercise to work, it’s teaching women how to become lesbians. Penises are funny/ Raisins are yummy/ Eat some today!
To which I say: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and a vagina isn’t a raisin unless you’re in therapy.
Clearly, I am no fun. When it comes to love, I’m literal. To me, all romance is fiction, too remote from real life to be anything but silly. Sweet nothings curdle my ears. I’m not interested in how things seem. I want to know what they are. The only way I can figure stuff out is by taking it apart and going back in time, all the way back to the Middle Ages when “romance” meant a story about pointy hats and disembowelments. When I chew on liver and giblets, my lips tell tales of blood and guts without me saying a word. Alas, chic women who carry tiny dogs in Hermès handbags don’t want to know about the shit in the silver lining. This is why Rose and I are friends, because she’s not ladylike in the least. Rose got married because she’s American, but she lives in Paris because she’s a flirt. “I’m a little in love with all my friends,” she admits breathlessly. “Why shouldn’t I seduce them?” And she bats her eyes at me.
She believes, profoundly, in love. Wherefore her version of what she shares with Pierre is terrifyingly X-rated.
“Let’s go to the Louvre,” Rose suggested as she sopped up the remains of her lunch.
“Why?” I asked in surprise, because we’d both been there hundreds of times.
“I need toilet paper.”
Swathed in couture, she likes to go the W/C, apply a fresh coat of lipstick, smile dreamily at the face in the mirror and abscond with a giant roll of TP. Crabbily, I’ve told her that it’s people like her that force people like me to carry their own stash in their pockets. She just laughs, and swipes the toilet paper anyway.
To this day, I don’t know why she wanted it, but I suspect she was using the cardboard rings for an art project. The Louvre is very inspiring.
There is an old physics problem: If a train is traveling at 100 miles an hour and a fly is hovering above your soup, how