Mimi on the male conspiracy to deny, betray, and confuse women: Mimi had an unsettling theory that men routinely deny women what they want. “They’re always criticizing what women do, what they eat, what they read,” she felt, “and depriving them of sex!” This sometimes influenced her take on movies.
Mimi on Now, Voyager: “The thing is, underneath the dowdy dress and the fat suit, she’s all raring to go. She doesn’t want to carve ivory boxes, she wants sex! She’s thought about it a lot, and she’s all for it.”
Mimi on Deception: “Bette’s just trying to be with the man she loves, and all she gets are these two guys angry at her the whole time. They get to decide her fate. If they’d only let Bette choose.”
“Then what? A ménage à trois?”
“Nah, she wants the cellist. Claude’s a stop-gap.”
Mimi on Ryan’s Daughter: “All that sea and space and sky, and still no room for female sexuality. Sarah Miles can’t get laid without being called a whore and having her hair shorn off!”
Mimi on Niagara: “She only kills Joseph Cotten because he’s getting in the way of her finding sex. He’s not fucking her. This is Marilyn Monroe we’re talking about! She doesn’t have to put up with that.”
Mimi was wary of me too, just waiting for signs that I wanted to deprive her. Like every woman I ever had, Mimi’d washed up battered on my shore, after enduring a collection of guys who neglected, cheated, bored, or irritated her, or stole from her, and she was highly sensitive to any sign of rejection. The first time I fell asleep without making love, she lambasted me the next day.
“Don’t stop fucking me,” she warned. “There are consequences to not fucking: less kissing, less touching, less talking, less nakedness, less intimacy, less sharing of the bathroom, less perfume, less lipstick, less—”
Bubbles, always eager to defuse tension with playful antics, now leapt onto a high shelf but lost her footing. She fell, bringing down a whole bunch of box files with her. I checked Bubbles over for injuries, while privately applauding her diversionary tactics, because Mimi was thoroughly distracted by the task of gathering papers that had fallen out of the box files. She thereby came across my most recent list of inventions. Yes, I’d never stopped inventing stuff.
“What’s this?” she asked.
So I read them out to her, giving fuller elucidation when necessary:
1. Music Pills: on the move and need some Rachmaninov pronto? Need your Beethoven fix? Forget the iPod. Swallow a sonata or two. Mozart lozenges, Schubert inhalers, and Shostakovich skin pads also available. Baroque music pills to put under the tongue after breakfast (when they always play baroque music on the radio).
2. The Soap-Cope: a soap dish that actually works. No more soap left sinking into its own slime. (How it would work, I didn’t yet know.)
3. The G-Spot Spotter: when the duties of manhood seem too onerous. . .
4. And its cousin, The Locator: this handy electronic screen maps where you leave all registered items around the house, throughout the day: watch, keys, cell, wallet, glasses, testicles, crackers, love letters, dog, cat, umbrella, cane, pastrami on rye, whatever you want to keep track of. Useful for quick exits.
“I know, I know,” I said, bashfully folding the piece of paper and stuffing it back in the box. “Men’s capacity to goof off knows no bounds.”
But instead of being disgusted with me and my silly inventions, Mimi was delighted! “I didn’t know you were still inventing things,” she said. “Invent some more!” She was tolerant of my List of Melancholy, but seemed to love my inventions.
So what had started out as a spat over my demoralizing her, ended with her encouraging me. All was not lost, in other words. This was something I had to tell myself occasionally, for I had old wounds too. Not just the scars of half a decade of incompatibility with Gertrude, but reverberations of mystification from an assortment of disappointed girlfriends, some of whom took their revenge by knocking me pitilessly (one even derided my choice of salad once—so I like arugula, what of it?). As a result, I had a deep fear of anything going wrong between Mimi and me, and tended to panic if we disagreed on anything. If she even went quiet, ghosts of Gertrude’s week-long sulks sprang to mind. I wasn’t really used to having arguments, or even discussions: with Gertrude, you never got a word in edgewise, and hardly ever wanted to.
La Bohème, I found, is a comfort to all lovers who think they’ve messed things up: it’s full of worrying upsets and separations, but Rodolfo and Mimì love each other (I’m not so sure about Marcello and Musetta) and all is forgiven at the end. Puccini proves to you that this is the stuff that counts. Or, so it seemed at dusk on a rainy day, sitting canoe-style on the couch, with Mimi’s head nestled against my chest and water streaking down the windowpanes outside, as we listened to La Bohème. Puccini has to get everything in, in a very short space of time—anger, pain and passion, hope and desire—and he does it! Of course the story is tragic, but that day, with Mimi close at hand, it no longer seemed to be about death, only love. And sex. (Maybe you have to be in love to realize it.)
Mimi on La Bohème: “It’s a multiple orgasm in musical form!”
It was quite a contrast to going to see La Bohème with Gertrude in our box at the Met (Zeffirelli or no Zeffirelli). Then I couldn’t wait for Mimì to kick the bucket! The last scene was excruciating: she keeps reviving! I died a million times (or fell asleep anyway), only to find, again and again, that Mimì was still going strong. In Gertrude’s company, the whole opera struck me as goofy, phoney, pointless, and confused, a dumb duel between male high jinks and feminine melodrama: too many starving-student pranks (tricking the landlord, evading the bar bill) versus all that guff about bonnets and muffs. But now, with my Mimi in my arms, it did me in when Mimì gets her muff! Puccini’s one composer who knows how to end something: “Mimì! Mimì!”
Rodolfo would have given Mimì everything he had (if he’d had anything)—and I wouldn’t deprive my Mimi of anything either if I could help it, certainly not my body. She didn’t need to worry about that. How I loved to seek her out beneath her pubic bone, her mantel, her lintel, her window sill, her fire place. Blood and bone, blood and bone, that’s what women are!
Mimi was perimenopausal, hence the blushing, the sweating, the sudden showering, a mood swing here and there, and much flinging off of clothing (then having to put it all back on again a few seconds later). She often had to fling me off as well, unfortunately, when she got too hot. About once an hour, she would pull away from me in bed, or rush out on the roof to cool off, or start searching her purse for her forest of paper fans from Chinatown.
Mimi on fans: “It’s cheap, lightweight, handy technology, and it works! All thanks to the wind-chill factor.”
“Which my dad always said doesn’t really exist,” I told her. “He always objected when weather forecasters mentioned wind-chill factor.”
“No wind-chill factor?! That’s a goddam lie. How come fans work then?”
“Well, he’d say they don’t, that the energy you expend fanning yourself counteracts any cooling effect you think you’re getting. I know, he was a very tedious kind of guy. He said electric fans don’t work either. They’re self-defeating machines because the motor’s heating up the room: the fan gives an illusion of cooling the air, but doesn’t actually lower the temperature of the room.”
“You’re making me feel hot,” she mumbled.
“That was his take on electric fans. But I think he was just too stingy to buy us one.”
“On his advice, birds wouldn’t fly: it uses up too much energy!” fumed Mimi. She was getting steamed over my dad’s controversial wind-chill-factor-theory repudiation. And how cute she was when she tried to sound scientific. “Wind, or the breeze from a fan, maybe doesn’t lower the temperature. But see, it blows your surface heat off ya, so at least for a minute or two there’s nothing between you and the colder air around you. . . So you feel colder!” she concluded triumphantly. “Anyway, the wind-chill factor exists, and your father’s nuts.”
“I know.”
“Thousands of years of people fanning themselves can’t be wrong!”
“Yep.”
“Where is this guy? I’d like to talk to him.”
“Long gone,” I answered. “A real deadbeat dad. He abandoned us. Well, I was in college when he skedaddled, but my mom was left to fend for herself—and fend off the guys from the bank too, who wanted to repossess the house. All she ate were grilled cheese sandwiches for years, before I was able to help her out a bit.”
“Well, what was his game? What was he so messed up about?”
“We never knew! Just a card-carrying jackass.”
I loved the thought of Mimi telling my dad what was what. The only thing better than that was the fact that she would never have to meet the guy (if she had, she probably would’ve killed him in about five minutes).
What I began to notice about Mimi’s hot flashes was that they were often preceded by a cold spell: she’d move closer to any source of warmth, or gather blankets about her. Almost immediately, an anxious, flustered period ensued, during which she’d try various methods of cooling down, in a vain attempt to avert the hot flash that was on its way. It was kind of fascinating to watch! To get a feel for how severe the symptoms really were, I had (much to Mimi’s amusement) a special little notebook devoted to the subject:
MIMI’S HOT FLASHES
Time Suspected Cause
7:33 metabolic surge on waking
8:10 reaction to coffee (hot liquid and/or caffeine effect?)
9:26 physical activity: sartorial (getting dressed)
10:04 emotional charge (concern about being late to work)
10:53 social interaction (talking to grocery cashier—mean guy)
11:12 change of environment (entering warm building)
11:25 phys. activity: sartorial (taking coat off)
12:38 phys. activity: sartorial (putting coat on to go out)
1:16 phys. activity: sartorial (taking coat off at crowded diner)
2:20 change of environment (warm taxicab)
2:41 no known cause (sitting still outside, in Wash. Sq., watching dogs)
3:39 emotional charge (some slight embarrassment)
4:47 sexual arousal (kissing me)
5:16 phys. activity (walking fast)
5:52 reaction to red wine (alcohol)
6:38 emotional charge (defending prehistoric society’s lack of a work ethic—“They worked when they pleased. Probably about three or four hours a day, tops! It’s much healthier. And there was plenty of time for fun.”)
7:24 phys. activity: sartorial (put coat on too soon in preparation for leaving bar, then got detained)
8:40 sexual arousal (proximity to lustful man: me)
She was pretty sick of these hot flashes, and I could see why, as I watched her rush from rooftop to radiator all day long. But she also firmly disapproved of the medicalization of natural female functions, and refused to see the menopause as another kind of Curse. Instead, she suspected the Change marked a new source of power—if only she could tap the energy her body was expending on getting hot and cold all the time (particulary during seminars!).
Mimi had to hold a seminar at a place near Columbia one day, and we met up afterwards at a joint called La Mirage. We ate their apple turnovers, but we weren’t happy with La Mirage. It should have been called Le Barrage (of Bullshit), it had been so effortfully filled with conversation pieces. You could barely get to your table to start the conversation! Your way would be barred by a floor lamp consisting of some mannequin legs in fishnet stockings, topped with a red lacy lampshade that was supposed to look like a corset from a New Orleans bordello, circa 1905. What is pleasing about seeing half a woman’s torso light a room? For no particular reason (this was no cordon bleu hangout) there were also a lot of big ugly shiny plaster figures of fat French chefs, complete with stripy shirts and berets, which made you want to get a sledgehammer and pound and pound them. A fake, purely ornamental version of the High Wheeler bicycle was used to hold flowerpots containing artificial plants. Perhaps worst of all, staring straight at us was a six-foot-high teddy-bear, the purpose of which was simply to look stupid. And a large tree took up all the space in the middle of the room, growing straight out of the floor. Fake, fake, fake, fake.
All of this made me mad and Mimi hot—she was fanning herself energetically, I assumed out of exasperation with the decor. She then remarked, “You know, thar’s gold in them thar hills.”
The Wild West accent was a bit of a surprise. “What hills, Maw?” I asked.
“Hot flashes! Somebody could make a fortune.”
“M. Z. Fortune by any chance?”
“Me?! I don’t know how to invent anything. I was thinking. . . you. Niche market! Think of the billions of women—they all reach the menopause eventually, and they need help! For about five or ten years, each!”
“Well, what about HRT?” I suggested. This was something I’d been meaning to broach with her.
“That just delays the symptoms! You still have them in the end. And anyway, hot flashes aren’t a disease. You shouldn’t have to take pills. Who wants to mess up their hormones and get cancer? Going through the menopause is kind of interesting, and not having to worry about pregnancy anymore is great! It’s not that the Change is so bad, it’s just. . . strange.”
“Not as strange as that stuffed bear,” I pointed out, gesturing at our dazed companion.
“What I really hate about it is having to explain the menopause to every damn fool I meet, whenever I get hot and sweaty. It’s embarrassing! Do you realize what it’s like in a seminar when I turn purple?! I feel like I’m about to explode about twenty times a day. Hey! Maybe it’s the menopause that’s responsible for global warming. . .”
“Well, what about cooling pads and stuff?” I feebly offered.
“Who wants a bright blue pad on your face in the middle of a meeting, or at a party? Or in bed? No, what women need is something inexpensive but reliable, harmless, inconspicuous, with no side effects, something you could just hold maybe, or grab when you need it.”
“Well, Mimi, you know, my inventions have pretty well all stalled at the planning stage,” I said, remembering my father’s contempt for our little endeavors, the constructions Bee and I made out of spare bits of stuff left hanging around the garage: we called them inventions, he called them a waste of wood and old nails. “I don’t even feel the need for the Locator now, you’re so good at finding things for me!” I told her. Mimi had an uncanny ability to find stuff for me in my apartment: missing socks, keys, combs, books, pencils, movies, music, ice cubes, cocktail shaker. “How do you do it anyway?” I asked her.
And she replied, “I eat it, then vomit it up when you ask for it”—a vicious mockery of my amazement about her magical traits, but maybe not so far from the truth. Women are demonic. Baba Yagas all! When I mentioned this Baba Yaga resemblance though, we were back in prehistory.
Mimi exclaimed happily, “Oh, Baba Yaga? She waxes and wanes like the moon. She’s got connections with seasons, harvests and decay, see, life and death, summer and winter, hot and cold. She’s both! Hey, come to think of it, she must be menopausal! The goddess of hot flashes! Baba Yaga’s got it all. . . And that house on chicken feet—”
“Oh no, not the house on chicken feet!” I pleaded, but she showed no mercy.
“Her house turns in a complete circle, Harrison, because she’s cyclical, like the seasons and the tides. Everything’s cyclical. . . ” she concluded, twirling the whorl of hair on my wrist with her finger, before attempting to wolf-whistle in appreciation of Baba Yaga. Nothing came out though. Forty-eight years old and the woman couldn’t whistle! A sort of tornado would sometimes gather in her mouth and she’d puff out her cheeks, pucker her lips, and say, “Hey, listen! I almost got it!” But she never had. She wasn’t even close.
So that night, once I was drunk enough, I decided to teach Mimi to whistle. “Make your mouth like an ocarina,” I said, and when that didn’t work, “Okay, like the fipple of a recorder.”
“Fipple!? Not nipple?”
“Fipple. The part just above the bulb at the top of a recorder. Now breathe in and out. Stop blowing!”
She kept heaving great gusts, with no sign of an audible note forming—all wind, no whistle.
“Forget your teeth!” I commanded. “Your mouth’s not open enough. You have a beautiful mouth. Don’t purse your lips like that. . . You make whistling noises in your sleep, so do it now!” (I was not the most patient of teachers.)
“I can never sleep with you again,” she answered, but she kept working on it, me demonstrating, Mimi copying. It went on for hours! At one point, I told her she owed me twenty-five bucks for the lesson. She didn’t reply, just kept effortfully inhaling and exhaling. And finally—she got it! One note soared, loud and clear and very, very high. I tried to get her to do a scale next, but she just stuck with her one note, like someone on a high wire who might fall off if you broke her concentration.
She was so pleased with her new ability to whistle that, later that night, when we were going to bed, she nearly cried with gratitude.
“That’ll be fifty bucks, in that case,” I told her.
She really loved me for getting that whistle out of her. I didn’t realize then, but that was really the beginning of Mimi trusting me. After that, she blossomed. She became more loving, more relaxed, more outspoken! Nobody had ever given Mimi enough of his time. Nobody ever did anything for Mimi. Her friends and family all wanted a piece of her, wanted her to listen to their problems and do stuff for them. The endless phone calls to her mom in the Bronx (whom I hadn’t yet met), that took Mimi away from me!
True love is a fact: it makes every reunion good, and separations troubling. Mimi would start to doubt me when we were apart, so I learned to egg up my demonstrations of devotion when we were together—who did it hurt? I suddenly had someone I couldn’t do enough for, that I would do anything for. Mimi shat, Mimi pissed, Mimi farted in her sleep and had hot flashes and zoned out during some of my best jokes—and I didn’t mind any of it! My beautiful lunging goddess who yelled in orgasm, to her own surprise.
Real love is ferocious. It will carry you along like a river and serve you for life, if you’re loved in return. It will succor you. You will have your truest friend, someone to share your wine and your birthday with, your apartment, your music, your politics, your trash, your heating, your wallpaper, your bathroom and all your secrets (or the more interesting ones anyway), your mind, your body, your sleeping and waking self, your dreams (if she’ll listen), your blender, your bills and taxes and taxis and movies, your skepticism, your optimism also, your complex coffee machine, the childhood experiences that fucked you up good, and all the joy and crumminess of life.
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.