Mimi (22 page)

But I needed a better name. Meno wasn’t great—
women
-o would make more sense. And Balls was
all wrong
: it seemed to imply penis envy. They weren’t necessarily going to be
balls
anyway: they could be just about any shape, as long as they were rounded, palm-sized, pleasant and easy to hold, with no sharp edges, and unobtrusive in a pocket. I thought of calling them Pockets of Matriarchy™, but that was too long and convoluted: who wants to go to the drugstore and ask for
Pockets of Matriarchy
™? Even if the woman lived in an actual pocket of matriarchy herself, like Malta, it would still be a mouthful! In the end I fixed on Pocket Change™, a pun I felt I could just about bear.

At the office I was facing a backlog of my least favorite customers: men, with their penile dysfunction and Berlusconi revamps: nose-jobs, eye-jobs, facelifts, hair transplants, collagen, Botox, even boob-jobs.
I
blamed Berlusconi; my colleagues
loved
him, and followed his surgical schedule with great attention, since whenever Berlusconi got his eyelids done, our patients wanted theirs done too—not to look younger, I was beginning to think, just to look like Berlusconi!

I didn’t see the point in fixing men up. Sure, I could turn a guy’s crow’s feet into hummingbird talons, but there’s no getting rid of his
deep soul ache
, is there? They were on their own with their erections too—not my problem, man. Take Viagra, or get a hobby, baseball cards, Lego, Bridge, mechanical pencils, just leave me out of it. We don’t all have to be Casanova, you know, or even Berlusconi. I had enough trouble with my own cock.

You think it’s easy being in charge of a penis? It’s a full-time job! This is how you first learn responsibility, as a boy.
You have to keep this vulnerable piece of wandery flesh from getting
squashed
. Every bout of roughhousing is a threat—this is why these games must be practiced again and again! That’s all sport is for: the honing of prick-protection skills. The thing’s just
hanging off you
, in constant danger of injury or excision. If it’s true everybody wants a piece of you, this is probably the piece. Dogs are at just the right level to snatch it in one gulp. Chairs, desks, tables, car doors, and doorknobs all seem designed to gouge it. A hundred times a day you have to check on the darn thing, not just to guide it when peeing, but to execute many little sartorial adjustments.

The only way to handle such a responsibility is to make your cock the core of your being, so that you never forget about it,
ever
. You make a pet of it, give it a name, fondle, pat, and feed it, even try to
train
it—though it’s like training a stick insect. Every time you take a piss you attempt to discipline it. Hell, just whipping the thing out
in time
takes practice. And in winter, you teach it to write dirty words in the snow.

Your dick has a nocturnal existence of its own that you can’t take responsibility for, but both its conscious and unconscious eruptions demand study and assessment, its spasms and jisms dutifully graded from the humdrum to the rum-a-dum-dum. You are your penis’s protector and advocate, its 24-hour carer, its slave and its supervisor, its bodyguard and its biggest fan. When necessary, your fist provides the services of a concubine. You learn your prick’s needs, its desires, and how to encase it in comfort behind a million historic fastenings, from gentle buttons to the more perilous zipper (that might at any time turn on the item it’s supposed to guard). Behind these flaps, your cock is left to nestle cozily in its jockeys or its jockstrap, or its
leopardskin posing pouch
(I speak as I find). Through barriers of cloth, and mind control, you attempt to restrain it, and only let it loose when you’ve checked the coast is clear.

But do you really trust your old play-pal there an inch? The thing’s an enigma! It’s not just the snap decisions to quadruple in size. Any minute now it’ll go down and stay down, and your whole life will be over—you’ll become one of those guys who give blowjobs, gratis, at gas stations. You’re plagued by fears of plague too, the possibility that your cock might be too cocky some day and bring home a disease, come over all cankerous, unappealing to mouths and cunts alike.
Or
that you’ll just get prostate trouble like all the other poor zhlubs and that’ll be the end of you. For this is the most important relationship of your life, and not to be trifled with! You clear space for your cock, make room in society for your cock. Cocks demand territory (ask any dog).

ALL YOU REALLY WANT IS FOR THE WHOLE WORLD TO BE NICE TO YOUR COCK.

Playground joke of my youth: This guy has such a big dick he has to wind it around his neck like a tie. He goes to the theater one night and his date keeps playing with his tie (as women always do). Suddenly, the lights come up and the manager comes out on stage and says, “Could the gentleman in the third row please stop throwing ice cream onto the stage?”

We killed ourselves over that one.

Being in love means you’re
not
in sole charge of your prick anymore—someone else is looking out for it too! And I was pretty pissed at having lost my little assistant. Surely Mimi would be drawn back to me by the miraculous magnetic pull of my cock? Apparently not.

But Quilt Day at last arrived. The money had gone through in daily installments of $10,000, and Leggy finally called me to announce that the Firefly Quilt was ready for collection. I had a drink on the way, just to gather my faculties, then moseyed on over to the museum, where I was coldly handed a big brown-paper parcel tied up with string—a lot like the ones Ant receives from the whole of England and Kind Dog, when he’s sick in bed, except mine was labeled “Harrison Hanafan”, not “Ant”, and had cost me $48,000. And for something that cost me $48,000, it sure wasn’t very well wrapped! Maybe Leggy had wrenched it peevishly off the wall at the last possible minute.

I was planning to rush straight over to Mimi’s and lay it at her feet. If she wasn’t there, I’d use my keys and (in
reverse
of that kleptomaniac scuzzball, John) leave the quilt there as a love offering, my own act of vulva-worship. But the absolute necessity of getting this operation right made me nervous. I was trembling, dizzy, I was nauseous: I was having a hot flash! (It felt almost as bad as giving a speech.) So I took that old quilt to a place in the Village I knew called Milady’s, where the Bloody Marys are perfect—and pint-sized. The quilt and I had a couple of them, toasting Aunt Phoebe the while, before setting off again for Grove Street. But I forgot the quilt, had to go back for it, and naturally had another Bloody Mary while I was there. Then I got cold feet again (a kind of post-hot-flash cold spell). Deciding I must be drunk(!), I ducked into a grocery store to see if I could get some coffee.

I wasn’t actually unraveling any faster than the quilt, which was beginning to curl hazardously out of its packaging. The store was crowded and people kept jolting me. I protested a bit. Half hatched from its cocoon, the quilt was beginning to reveal its most admirable qualities: its silky smoothness, and the dazzling colors. The perfect opportunity, I suddenly realized, to compare the thing to actual
Epicure
cans! So I went to see if they had any on the shelves. But on my way down the aisle some jerk jerked me, I backed into a whole row of Pepperidge Farm cookies, tripped over the loose corner of the quilt that was dragging on the ground, and ended up rolling across the floor! I came to a stop fully wrapped in the quilt.

A security guy peered down at me and said, “What’s the story, Grandma Moses?”

Well, I paid for the cookies I crushed and got the hell out. That quilt had now cost me $48,028
.
56, and it had better work! But on closer inspection outside, by the light of the setting sun, I noticed my poignant offering appeared to have sustained some damage: a few faint stains, a rip or two. quilt guilt. Now Mimi would
never
forgive me! I’d not only wrecked her life, but her aunt’s masterpiece too. $48,028.56 down, and no closer to rolling in my sweet baby’s arms! If I didn’t want to be alone with my expensive new bedspread for the rest of my life, I would have to put it in the hands of the dry cleaners and invisible menders around the corner from me on 8th Avenue. So I cabbed it uptown and relinquished my Mimi-bait into their, I hoped, capable hands.

Keenly disappointed by this delay in the resumption of romance, I rode the elevator glumly up to my apartment, intending to drown myself yet again in the
Tempest
. But when I got in, my phone was blinking. A message from Mimi?
Mimì! Mimì!
She had relented, she couldn’t stay mad at me forever. I leapt to the phone,
crazy ’bout my baby. . .

But the message wasn’t from Mimi. It was from an English policeman, telling me Bee was dead.

CATASTROBURY

I was met at the station in Canterbury, the
West
Station (the one that’s further
East
), by the same cop who’d left the message on my answering machine the day before. He apologized for that now, but I was in no mood for a discussion of police etiquette. What would be a good way to hear your sister’s dead? Sherry on the veranda, moats, deer, skylarks, ha-has, and him whispering in my ear, “I’m afraid I have something a little awkward to tell you”?

He asked me if I wanted to go to my hotel first, but I wanted to see Bee, so he took me to the half-assed English morgue they’d set up in a hurry at the hospital, to cater for all the bodies. For Bee was among many—you can really kill a lot of people if you put your mind to it. We wove our way through a crush of journalists, who stuck their long-lens cameras right in my face. (As James Joyce said, all journalists are heartless.)

The
gunman
liked shooting people in the face too. The cop warned me of this as we approached Bee on her stretcher. Then the sheet was pulled back so that I could formally identify her. They hadn’t even bothered to wipe the blood of
f
! Maybe it was “evidence” or something. She was all messed up, but it was Bee.

All the way over I’d clung to the idea that they were wrong. Not my sister. Not
that
sculptress. Please, someone else. That ignoble hope gone, I searched her face for an explanation. What did she
think
when he came running at her with a gun? Did she have a
chance
to think? I pulled Bee to me and hugged her for a long time.

When I first got the news, I assumed she’d been run over on that stupid bike of hers, or stabbed trying to intervene in another street fight. Unbearable, but at least an
accident
. How was I supposed to come to terms with the fact that some creep had spotted my sister across a field by chance, and (whether with nonchalance or insane glee) gone out of his way to shoot her?

I must have signed some forms, but all I remember is wandering the hospital corridors, pestered by policewomen trying to give me sandwiches and cups of tea. Tea: the English answer to all emergencies. They really seem to think it helps! But this tea had
scum
floating on the top, the scum Bee told me about.

My personal, po-faced policeman asked me periodically if I had any questions. Yeah! What’ll I do without her? But I said nothing. When he tired of this, he offered a change of scene: would I like to see the place where Bee had died? But I’d had enough by then and asked to be taken to the hotel.

It was one of the tiniest hotel rooms I’ve ever seen, with a toilet that didn’t flush. I tried calling Mimi but got no answer, then attempted to achieve temporary oblivion with the help of airline miniatures, and tranquilizers provided by the hospital. I fell asleep staring at the green shiny curtain cords that held the ugly curtains apart: yet another futile fabric fiasco. Why must we have all this disgusting decor? I was perturbed by how tightly wound those cords were. What angry twisted mind had created these angry twisted ropes? They didn’t even go with the stupid curtains, which were yellow, with a kindergartenish peach pattern. It’s all so
arbitrary
, our decor. We decide a million things arbitrarily. But arbitrariness would never seem innocent to me again: people get murdered arbitrarily.