“Why do you look at my hands?”
“Because they charm me,” I answered, kissing them, and it was true. I was now an advocate of Mimi’s large hands and strong feet, and the well-rounded calves that sloped dramatically down to her unsprainable ankles. Mimi’s feet seemed heroic to me, the kind of feet Liberty would need to man those barricades. A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame was the imprisoned lightning.
Mimi was heroic: heroic in the grocery store sniffing out the bargains, heroic on the subway pushing her way onto crowded trains, heroic when eating, when drinking, when sleeping, when laughing, just heroic all the time! Heroic in her beliefs, her angers and upsets, heroic when she dropped to her knees and took my cock in her mouth, heroic when I turned her to fuck her standing up, heroic coming and coming under the ceiling fan in her wide square bedroom. Heroic lying spoon-style behind me afterwards, calling me darling.
Is this not love?
When you first get together with someone, you hammer out a cosmos—through moments of discord as well as contentment. It’s your Big Bang period. From then on, the way you interact has been established. Things evolve, sure, you can refine it. But the major accommodations have been made and met, parameters set, no-go zones delineated, and you’ll pause before disturbing these balances and tilting the whole thing off course.
Mimi turned out to have a lot to say, but not in Gertrude’s meandering megalomaniacal manner. Mimi had firm views, clear enemies, and battles to fight. None of it seemed aimed directly at me. It was exhilarating to watch, and had a strange erotic charge. Mimi was brash, she was brazen, I wasn’t even sure she was completely civilized. And sometimes she’d lash out at me too, like a cornered animal: I was communing with nature at last.
“Where there’s life, we can rail!” she declared one morning out on the roof, with the wind in her hair.
“Okay, but don’t lean on the railing.”
Mimi on power suits: “Power suits don’t work. Power works.”
Mimi on jobs: “Work’s bad for you. It drives everybody nuts in the end! That’s why I went freelance. If I wanna stay in bed, I stay there.”
This wasn’t exactly true—despite her fantasy of flexibility, Mimi always seemed to have to email somebody or Xerox something, frustrating all my endeavors to keep my own workload down to a minimum in order to be with her!
Mimi on parenthood: “You share your genetic defects with somebody, and then they get your crappy furniture when you die? Some deal.” We were in total agreement on procreation: its unnecessariness.
Mimi on male bonuses: “They earn five times what women do, and still expect you to chip in for dinner!”
Mimi on sports: “What good’s an Olympian to me?”
Mimi on guys on the subway who spread their legs and their newspapers far and wide: “We all paid the price of a ticket. And I like opening my legs too!” This she then demonstrated to me, in the most beguiling way.
Mimi on the Hadron Collider (which she insisted on calling the Hard-on Collider): “Who needs a big machine to re-create the chaos at the beginning of the universe? Chaos we got!”
“How about a Tippi Hedren Collider instead then?” I suggested. “You just throw birds at her until she flips.”
Mimi on the guy who claimed to have started an extramarital affair with a complete stranger, involuntarily, while sleepwalking as a result of taking an antidepressant: “Yeah, sure.”
Mimi on a beer company promotion prize of a whole “caveman” weekend for five guys—free beer, video games, sports channels, and room service: “Five drunks in a cheap hotel.”
Mimi on breast cancer campaigns: “Them and their pink ribbons. It’s sexual harassment! They never let you forget your breasts are a liability.”
Mimi on bras: “Tit prisons. Who decided tits have to be this stiff and high anyway? The UN?”
“But without bras,” I argued, “I’d have even more boob-jobs to do and I’m sick of them!”
“I didn’t know men could get sick of breasts.”
“Not of breasts maybe, but of altering them in accordance with their owner’s latest caprice, or her husband’s.”
Mimi was pretty suspicious of my profession. We battled it out one day over Yankee bean soup and borscht at B & H Dairy on 2nd Avenue (even when you’re in love, you still need soup!). I was admiring her lips, and made the mistake of saying they were beautiful.
“They’re just my lips. Don’t separate ’em off and compare them to other lips. You’re not at work now, buddy.”
“Well, shut up and kiss me then!”
She did, then resumed her rant. “Who decides what’s beautiful anyway? It’s all a matter of opinion, right?”
“Well, according to my partner Henry, beauty was decided for us by evolution. Hairiness in men, for instance, hairlessness in women. Sexual characteristics got exaggerated over time, since the people most universally recognized as desirable were the most likely to find mates. Youthfulness is another widely accepted beauty trait, because it implies fertility. Evolution decided it, and we just help it along.”
“That’s bullshit,” declared Mimi.
“Look, Mimi. Imagine nature is the tailor, as a teacher of mine put it, and we’re the invisible menders when the suit gets a bit worn out.”
“Hmmm.”
“Honey, it’s just a job.”
“Hmmm.”
Those “hmmms” of hers.
“Some people really need help, Mimi, or their lives would be ruined! I had a woman in once who’d grown a horn on her forehead! Just an excess of keratin, easily removed—but in the Middle Ages she would have been dragged from town to town as an emblem of cuckoldry or something!”
“Or burnt as a witch,” said Mimi, taking a big bite of challah bread. “But come on, Harrison—most people’s lives aren’t in danger if they don’t have a nose-job.”
“All I know is, a lot of middle-aged women come to me complaining they feel invisible.”
“But being invisible’s great!” Mimi said. “You can do whatever you want and nobody notices.”
“I have this sudden twitch in my neck.”
“That’s ’cause you’re talkin’ through your hat!”
I quickly changed the subject to Haydn. “You know how Haydn was taught to play the drum? When he was three years old, they hung a drum on a hunchback’s back and Haydn walked behind him with his drumsticks, tapping away. Later, he got the full drum kit with high hat and cymbal, requiring six hunchbacks and a midget who played the kazoo.”
Mimi almost spat her borscht everywhere, something it’s important not to do in such a small space. At B & H, you try to avoid any sudden movements, so as not to upset lethal quantities of hot soup. I moved on from midgets to a confession of my midget–maniac problem in childhood. Mimi had had similar mix-ups: she’d thought cirrus clouds were serious, and for a long time, to her mother’s shame, called water “agooya”, ravioli “ravaloli” and beef bouillon “Beef William.”
“Did you know they’ve just invented a way of manufacturing sperm artificially?” I asked next, just to get a rise out of her.
“Isn’t there enough of it around already?”
“Yeah, the thing would be to de-invent it,” I said. “Everybody talks about recycling and hybrid cars but they never think seriously about overpopulation! If we could just stop having babies, we wouldn’t need all these apocalypse scenarios.” (Another bugbear of Mimi’s.)
“But what would Hollywood do, without the end of the world?” she mused. “They aren’t happy unless people are looting and drowning every place. And then a guy gets into his SUV and somehow saves the day, or at least his own stupid skin.”
Mimi on Cormac McCarthy: “He writes about cowboys and the apocalypse. Enough said.”
Mimi on Branwell Brontë: “Who cares?”
She got mad about a million different things! But she could be easily charmed too.
Mimi on generosity: “Some people are so generous it breaks your heart. Pavarotti’s generous. And that guy who had to land his plane in the Hudson. When they were all standing in the cold out on the wings, he gave his shirt to one of the freezing passengers. The shirt off his back! You’re generous too. You’re generous with your cock.”
Forget the soup, cancel my appointments! Taxi!
Bubbles and Mimi had formed an instant rapport—almost as if they knew each other already. There was occasional competition between Bubbles and me over who got to sleep on top of Mimi. But most of the time our ménage à trois worked very well. When we all woke up entangled together on Valentine’s Day, I started telling Mimi about the way my parents had incarcerated me in my bed as a kid, thereby putting me off bedtime for life (until now). She found my Berlioz problem funny so, getting bolder, I stood up to declaim, “It was in fact during those sleepless nights that I, like Edison, came up with my best stuff.” Then I gave her some examples of my youthful “inventions” (so far unpatented):
1. Every sidewalk a conveyor belt.
2. Every basement a swimming pool.
3. Every attic a planetarium.
Mimi had invented the same stuff herself. Still, I had more!
4. Aquarium bathtub: translucent sides so you could have real fish in there—octopuses, sharks, baby alligators, whatever you want (Bee always wanted sea horses).
5. The Tornado Room-Tidier: a machine you place in the middle of your room and it spins faster and faster, blowing all your toys and clothes and shit into the corners and under the bed. Instant appearance of order.
6. The Yuck-Suck Machine: this consists of a pump, a disposable “reservoir” (plastic baggie), and a tube going down your sleeve, ending in a discreet nozzle. When you’re presented with unfamiliar food at a friend’s house (like Beef William, for instance), the Yuck-Suck secretly siphons it all up. Particularly good on cabbage and gravy.
7. The Nickel-Stick Shooter: this contraption divides your Kraft Karamel Nickel Stick into individual pieces, or shoots them at your friends in a mild, harmless way your mother can’t object to—your mother who, by banning you from all toy-gun ownership, even water pistols, has relegated you to a life of insecurity and social ostracism.
“The musings of a kid who felt trapped in his bed, in his room, in his family, in his town, in his universe,” I said in summation, before noticing I was much too far away from Mimi and rejoining her on the bed. “I was imprisoned at school too. Locked in the playpen: a sort of solitary confinement for hardened class scapegoats. I had to eat my lunch in there all on my own!. . . Unless Bee came.”
“Bee got into trouble too?” asked Mimi, reaching over to stroke my thigh.
“No, she just came to keep me company. She never got caught for anything. But she was a bit of an outlaw too. It was Bee who taught me how to squirt toothpaste at people from the top floor of the library. They thought it was bird shit. That was great! Later, she became the town’s only graffiti artist.”
I grabbed Mimi and forced her to bestraddle me so I could caress her hips and stomach and look up at her breasts while we talked. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Mimi.”
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” she returned, and bent to kiss me.
Possessiveness suddenly struck me as the sexiest thing in the world. I held her tight. “Be mine,” I said, and meant it.
She was mine.
“Tell me you love me.”
“I love you,” she murmured. I already knew it. The girl was crazy about me!
Mimi wasn’t crazy about Valentine’s Day though: she considered it only a shadow of its former glory, a fake and faded version of ancient fertility rites or something. “The only reminder of its real purpose is all the vulvas,” she told me.
“Huh?”
“Yeah, all the pink valentine hearts. Those aren’t hearts, Harrison. You’re a doctor. Hearts don’t look like that, vulvas do! Open vulvas. They’re all a throwback to prehistoric vulva worship, that’s what those heart shapes are.”
“HUH?”
“Prehistory. You know, before the Bronze Age.”
“Before the Bronze Age? Before the Bronze Age, missy, there was nothing. Nada. Zilch. Niente.”
“Before the Bronze Age, mister,” Mimi said, “we had two hundred thousand years of peace, music, dance, arts, agriculture, and goddess worship!”
“. . . Any cuckoo clocks?”
“People still act like the whole human race cracked out of an egg about five thousand years ago,” Mimi said, getting up and putting on her purple kimono. “They totally forget about prehistory.”
“I’m getting the feeling prehistory’s your favorite bit of history.”
“Sure,” she said, brushing her hair.
“But you can’t just pick and choose the bit of history you like best, can you?” I asked her.
She turned on me. “Why not? Men have!”
“Well. . . ”
“I always knew there was something fishy going on, the way history’s taught in school. And then I realized: they leave out the first two hundred thousand years, and they leave out women! All they care about is male history, patriarchy—but that’s only been going maybe five thousand years. Five thousand years of teenage boy hissy fits, with sulks in between. What a mess.”
“Well, that’s an interesting perspective on the whole of Western Civ—”
“Everything was going swell, you know. Matriarchy worked! Then men took over metalworking and used it to make more and more powerful weapons. . . And then they domesticated the horse. . .”
“Gotta domesticate that horse!”
“Yup. It’s not horses’ fault, but from then on it was just rape, rape, rape, war, war, war, colonizing everybody and wrecking stuff. Everything became about men and their death wish. They colonized us too! We don’t even know what women are anymore, they’ve been suppressed for so long!”
I liked this dirty talk. I went over to colonize her, and we ended up back in bed, where she started to tell me about “pockets of matriarchy,” which at first I took to be a euphemism for vulvas—I was exploring her pocket of matriarchy as we spoke. But no, “pockets of matriarchy” turned out to be islands and other isolated, peripheral places in ancient Europe, where vestiges of prehistoric, female-centered cultures survived a bit longer than elsewhere, with remnants still apparently detectable now. Places like Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, Orkney, Ireland. . .
“Yeah? That’s nice,” I said, not fully concentrating (my head under the blankets, my tongue seeking out her peripheral spots).
“There are still signs of it,” Mimi said, “um. . . in folklore and customs, and ceramics. . . mmmm, Harrison. . . And there are these big bulbous Venus sculptures. . . in Malta and places. . . And vulvas, paintings and. . . Oh!”
“Any quilting?” I asked, mounting her.
“No. . . But. . . ahhh. . . cave paintings. . . Women did all the cave paintings, Harrison. . . ” And then there was no more talk for a while.
“Pockets of matriarchy, huh?” I said later, getting dressed. “Sounds like pussy to me. No, not you, Bubbles!” And I grabbed Bubbles, holding her belly up like a babe in arms. She loved that. Some tickling was involved.
“Matriarchy’s a much more natural way to organize things,” said Mimi dreamily from the bed. “Without mothers no mammal would survive. Meerkats are matriarchal.”
“You want me to be a meerkat?!”
“Bubbles is a mere cat.”
“Well, I’m sure there’s a lot to be said for the Stone Age, Mimi, but all I know is, I wouldn’t want to have been born before Bach. And aspirin.”
When we eventually went out, the streets of New York were full of vulvas, just as Mimi had predicted: vulvas in every window, vulvas painted on the buses, vulva-shaped balloons outside restaurants, dogs with flashing vulvas on their collars, taxis sporting ads for vulva-related events. And every corny heart shape made me horny again for Mimi. I would never tire of this feisty gal.
We walked the High Line all the way down to the Village, so Mimi could pick up a few things from her apartment, then on to Washington Square to sit on a park bench. Things seemed a little less capitalistic and warlike there than in the rest of New York, if only for the moment. Some buskers were taking turns playing a baby grand they’d somehow wheeled into the square, and a bunch of students were standing stock-still in the middle of a path, never flinching, for reasons unexplained (a very strict form of Simon Says?). Washington Square was our new spot—we were middle-aged after all, and liked looking at dogs! (From afar that is—neither of us wanted to own one.)
“So, if women handled everything in the Stone Age,” I began, “and men took over in the Bronze Age—”
“Iron Age,” she corrected.
“Then what Age are we in now? I guess it must be the Nuclear Age. . . ”
“Nah, the Diet Age,” Mimi decided, as a huge, fluffy, perfectly white Samoyed puppy rode by in a small shopping cart. “All anybody wants to conquer now is their stomach.”
Next, a basset hound lumbered valiantly by. How do they manage to walk at all? Four marvelous black standard poodles came the other way—curly-haired and not overly trimmed: true urbanites.
“I think it’s the Front Age,” I grumbled, “with all the boob-jobs I have to do.”
“This is big, Harry. It’s just like Rear Window!” Bee exclaimed when I called her later to tell her about Mimi. “You know, when Jimmy Stewart can’t decide about Grace Kelly—”
“Nobody can decide about Grace Kelly.”
“And Thelma Ritter says a man and a woman should come together like a couple of taxis on Broadway: wham!”
“Yep. wham!”
“Well, I knew something was up.” Bee always knew when I fell in love with somebody, because I’d forget to call her. But we had to talk on Valentine’s Day, no matter what. Bee and I had a thing about official public holidays and how stupid they are—especially since Nixon changed all the dates around (what a nerd). But we made an exception for Valentine’s Day, because Bee had claimed it as her own, reclaimed it from all the marketers, greeting card companies, restaurants, and anonymous stalkers. Bee wanted to get Valentine’s Day back to the friendly affair it was in childhood—when you’d send cards to everyone in your class, stuffing them into a communal cardboard mailbox, and chosen pupils got to do the deliveries—back when Valentine’s Day was fun. So over the last twenty years, Bee had turned Valentine’s Day into her own personal art project, and every year sent out hundreds of valentines that were really little works of art. She used a lot of found materials. One year, just a bus ticket (she must have saved them up for decades) with the message, “Come up and see me some time, Valentine!” Another year, all you got was a stick of Virtue gum: “Stick with me, Valentine.” Or a little packet of cloves: “I clove to you.” One of my favorites was a wilted petunia stuck on paper inscribed with the pun, “Bee-mine.” This year, she’d sent out tea bags, with a note saying, “For you to keep or steep, Valentine.” Given the recent shooting in Tucson by a guy inflamed by right-wing propaganda, I told Bee the note should have said, “Some Tea Party this is!” But that wasn’t Bee’s style. Her valentines were sweet and quirky, not bitingly satirical.
She wanted to return to the subject of Mimi, and when I told her that at a crucial stage in our courtship I took Mimi to see some Matisse, Bee said, “Well, of course! The guy’s an aphrodisiac. All pattern, light, and color. The artist of the middle-aged—”
“The Middle Ages? I don’t think so.”
“The middle-aged. I don’t mean he got mellow or soft or something. I just mean he’s got the preoccupations of the middle-aged, like plants, warmth, comfort. . . Why else does everybody get obsessed with cooking and gardening in middle age? And art. All the stuff you’re too busy to appreciate when you’re young. Luxe, calme et volupté. You finally know what really matters in life. Nature. Love. Food. Flowers. Sex. . . ”
“Sex! Those goldfish? Come off it!”
“The odalisques, Harry, the odalisques! All those half-dressed women, lounging around taking it easy. Stretching their arms up over their heads. Those women are sex on wheels! And this is what you realize in middle age, that life is about pleasure, that’s what it’s for.”
“Jeez, all I get are people worried about their jowls!”
I tried out Mimi’s valentine-vulva theory on her: Bee said she’d keep it in mind for next year’s valentine. “It’ll be a doozy!” she declared. Bee was thrilled I’d finally found someone I could laugh with. “But Mimi? Isn’t it a bit like dating Tosca, or Violetta, or some other doomed damsel of stage and screen? She doesn’t run around in a nightgown, does she, looking all hollow-eyed?”
“No sign of any nightgown yet,” I said proudly. “Though she does have a kimono. . . ”
“Ah, Madame Butterfly then!”
“Sorry Bee, gotta go. Call waiting.”
“Aw.”
Sometimes Bee did anything to keep me on the phone. She was lonely over there, I guess. I didn’t ask her about her sex life—Bee’s amorous activities since her disastrous marriage to Hunter had been pretty minimal or, like her valentines, ephemeral: none of her men seemed to last more than a couple of weeks.
When she met Hunter, she was a few years out of art school and, like most art graduates, doing art in her spare time while waitressing. It’s amazing how many women stick with waitressing as a career, women probably as talented as my sister, women yearning to paint or dance or act, but nobody’ll let them (or pay them) so they’re stuck carrying plates, announcing specials, and getting goosed the rest of their days. But Bee must have been pretty desperate to think marrying a cop was the answer! The marriage reeked of self-delusion from the start. She gave up art completely to be with that jerk and live on Staten Island within yelling range of his entire family. The time had come to either get serious about art or run for the hills. She ran. There was nothing I could do about it; those were my propofol days, followed by my Rosemary days. None of us knew what we were doing, we were in our twenties for godsake. And Bee didn’t seem to want anything to do with me anyway, which I interpreted as a sign that she was deeply in love, so I left her to it. Rosemary and I only went out to Bee’s place once, for a barbecue with all the family. Hunter was in charge of the food.
“Who wants a hot dog?” he kept asking. “Nobody?”
Yes, nobody. Hunter’s nephew was there, this tiny little kid just starting to talk. I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up and the kid said he wanted to be a girl. So Hunter whirled around from his manly post at the grill and said he’d break the kid’s leg, which his whole family seemed to find remarkably funny. Apart from the nephew, who started crying. Rosemary and I left as soon as we could—left Hunter to his hot dogs, and Bee to her blinkers. I never saw the creep again. A few weeks after the barbecue, Bee called me up and admitted Hunter had been hitting her for months, under the approving gaze of his barbaric relatives—while I’d attributed her strange muteness to love. But why, when my work at the ER brought me into daily contact with women with that same blank look, who’d all been beaten to a pulp by guys like Hunter? And she was still defending him (those women did too): “He has a tough job,” Bee told me over the phone. It was only the incident with the nephew that had brought her to her senses.
I took the day off and rushed over to Staten Island to help her get out of there before Hunter got back from his “tough job” pushing papers. After that, she seemed to sit for weeks at my little kitchen table, telling me things he’d done that I still can’t bear to think about, like the time he picked her up by her heels and threw her against a wall. I wanted to kill the asshole, but Bee wouldn’t even report him. Cops don’t like accusations against cops, she said—my big strong sister who was now scared of going outside, scared of crowds of people and big spaces and loud noises. I had to content myself with the fact that she was safe at least, since the jerk never showed any interest in hunting her down, content to despise her from afar I guess.
For the first few months she was quiet, too quiet. But then she started up with the Bach solo violin partitas that got her through adolescence, and the more three-dimensional they became, the better I knew Bee was. Soon she was sculpting clay monsters. Then she started making these very artful arrangements of junk. They filled my whole apartment (a smaller place than I have now). I never knew why she did those things, but I bought a few pieces off her anyway, just to cheer her up, and eventually she was able to get a studio in Queens, where she could live and do art. And once she was there, she got to work proving all her old teachers and her dissatisfied father and her asshole of a husband WRONG, WRONG, WRONG about Bee.
Within a year she had her first solo show in a one-room gallery in New Jersey somewhere: round, flattened disks of fired clay that formed paths all over the floor. They looked like individual pieces of dried-up desert soil, about a foot wide, cracking around the edges, and people were supposed to take their shoes off and walk on them. The show got closed down pretty fast for safety reasons—big outbreak of athlete’s foot, sprained ankles, who knows? But I think of those crazy cowpats now like Beethoven’s “Heiliger Dankgesang”: Bee’s stepping-stones out of the abyss.
I hung up on her reluctantly, but I really did have another call, and thought it might be Mimi. It wasn’t. It was Gertrude, probably phoning to find out if I was wearing my days-of-the-week socks on the right day. Even though she called less now, she still had a knack of calling at just the wrong time. Lately I’d managed to avoid a lot of these Gertrusions by being at Mimi’s, or being in flagrante delicto and not answering, but she’d caught me off-guard this time. What was she after?
I tried to be kind, and was able to listen to her news of Claude with genuine interest. He was starting kindergarten, but Gertrude wasn’t worried about his being ostracized. She was more concerned about how to get him straight from there into Yale. She’d already bought a duplex in New Haven in anticipation.
“But what if he ends up wanting to go to Columbia?” I asked.
So then she finally came out with it (the real reason for calling): “I really just wanted to say Happy Valentine’s Day, Harrison!”
Oh, jeez.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, Gertrude,” I replied.
Talk about damsels in distress!
Later on, Mimi and I shunned all the pink-menued restaurants to eat at home. She was starting to make good use of my kitchen, and that night cooked me her specialty: Amatriciana, a matriarchal dish, she claimed, made from guanciale, chili and tomatoes, or “love-apples.” Tomatoes are an aphrodisiac. (My mother never said!)
I hadn’t gotten Mimi a Valentine’s Day present. “I’d give you the moon,” I told her apologetically. But it turned out she already owned it.
Mimi on the moon landing: “Women were in tune with the moon from the start. Menstruation’s a lunar cycle. Prehistoric women invented the first calendar, a lunar calendar with thirteen months. You have to understand the moon if you’re gonna farm, or fish. Or follow the tides and stuff. Then men turned the moon into a bad thing, trashing the lunar calendars, and adding all that leap year crap. The lunar calendar is much more exact: there really are thirteen months in a year! They even turned the number thirteen into an unlucky number! And then they go bouncing around on the moon itself? Get off! That place belongs to us!”
“Don’t go to the moon, Mimi.”
As Mimi stirred her sauce, which, despite her disdain for corniness looked like a pretty classic Valentine’s Day dish to me—rich, red, and velvety—I started telling her about Bee and her English patrons, and how she never wanted to go to England in the first place.
“What does Bee stand for anyway?” Mimi asked.
“Bee? Bridget.”
“Ah ha, ancient goddess of springs and waters.”
“A goddess? My sister? Well, what about Harrison then?” I asked winningly. “What does that mean?”
“Patrilineal, sorry. Doesn’t mean anything except Harry’s son. Retrograde.”
“Tell that to Harrison Ford!”
We ate in the dining room, looking out at the sparkling lights of other Valentine’s Day celebrations in a million other apartments, then went into the living room with another bottle of wine. Mimi sat on the window seat patting Bubbles’s head in a way I vaguely envied, while I played Scarlatti on the piano. During a melancholic Scarlattian pause, Mimi suddenly said, “Why don’t you help her?” My thoughts raced involuntarily to Gertrude, whose phone call had left a shadow over my evening, but Mimi wasn’t interested in Gertrude. She must mean Bubbles.
“Bubbles?” I asked. “What’s wrong with her?”
“No. Bee,” she said firmly. “Why don’t you give her some money?”
“Huh?!”
“She’s a struggling artist,” Mimi went on. “You’ve got some spare cash, I take it. Why don’t you help her out?”
The idea had never really occurred to me—Bee was my big sister, after all, always one step ahead of me in the world. Sure, I’d buy lunch, or a sculpture now and then (and put it straight into storage), but that was about it.
“I guess I thought she might find it. . . sort of patronizing,” I mumbled feebly. “Bee’s older than me. It might, uh, change the dynamic.”
“Aw, she’ll get over it,” said Mimi.
And then she did come pat my head, as I’d wanted her to, and soon I had her on my lap, in my power, with my hand in her pussy, exploring her, imploring her, possessing her, making her go limp in my arms.