A Love Note from Murmur Lee Harp to Lawrence Fairhope Davis, Written Eight Months After Her Divorce and During Her Brief Employment at the Catholic Day School Located in St. Augustine’s Old City ( It Should Be Noted That the Affair Ended Shortly After Murmur Sent This Epistolary Rumination on the Nature of Love)
Dearest Larry,
Consider this a message from on high, a message not necessarily aimed at you—perhaps any male from the Midwest will do—but since you’re the only person from the Midwest I’ve ever been intimate with, well, you know:
TEN THINGS MIDWESTERN BOYS DON’T KNOW
1. Girls are sensitive.
2. Girls innately demand that a handful of very specific situations be honored with a plethora of ancient, indelible protocol—protocol (some might call it “ritual”) that has been handed down from one womb to the next since the rise of Eve. Example: If a boy and a girl have recently spent three hours exploring, licking, sucking, and penetrating each other’s bodies, then the very next time they lay eyes on one another? Well, this encounter is very important to the girl.
3. After lovemaking—especially lovemaking for the first time—the girl is apt to feel mighty happy but also a tad vulnerable. It is proper—essential, even—for the boy to help her feel pretty about herself the next time they see each other. This is especially true if something has prevented them from seeing each other in the days immediately following the lovemaking (say a horrible illness—the flu, the plague, mono—has struck them down).
4. If ardent, erotic notes are sent to and fro in campus mail (dangerous) in the wake of the lovemaking, rather than a missive in which one of them explains that the encounter was one big horrible mistake and mustn’t ever be thought of again—well then, once in each other’s presence, a sweet acknowledgment of their tenderness is quite necessary.
5. Girls who have recently been ravished by someone with whom they are smitten require this: When the girl and boy see each other for the first time after lovemaking (fifteen seconds of running in and out of a house as if all asses are on fire, with barely a nod of a hello, does not count), the girl needs the boy to send some ardent signal, even a subtle one, that she—and their shared passion—is valued.
6. After seeing a boy for the first time after lovemaking, the girl does not want to be made to feel as if she is simply one more haggard colleague passing in the hall. The girl does not want to feel that in order to have a conversation with the boy (Hello. How have you been? What’s new in your life?), she must do something stupid or dramatic, like run her car into a tree. If the girl feels this way, it will inevitably cause her to spend yet even more money with her therapist.
7. When a boy sees a girl for the first time after they have made love, the following actions are considered good form. The boy should tell her hello and that it’s really nice to see her. The boy should give her a hug—even if it’s only an aw-shucks midwestern hug. The boy should tell her she’s pretty, even if she looks like she is in the throes of the flu. When the boy and girl first come back into their shared orbit, the boy should be sure to take five minutes out to sit down with her and have a pleasant chat.
8. All these things are important because they convey to the girl that what they shared in her bedroom while they were all slick and erect and wanting was something the boy does not regret.
9. The boy should not make the girl do all the work.
10. If a boy makes any or all of the aforementioned blunders, he usually has a chance to undo the damage. But it must be done quickly. In fact, it should be rectified no later than the following day. If blunders are allowed to stand longer than that, the girl will decide that the boy deeply regrets having ravished her, that the coupling meant nothing to him, and that she must chalk it up to simply one more mistake. She will also decide that in the future, the boy is to be given nary a nod.