The Remote Island by Bryan Christian The burning question of the day: Life on Mars or Eleventh Hour? Plus: Britney goes on the record, USA may not renew Monk, and our Grey's Anatomy recap.
In the mostly unsurprising repertoire of my fantasy life, I have several one-act classics. By far, A Clean Shave is the one I'd credit with the highest production values, every detail stage-managed down to the smallest nuance: the tiniest pair of pointy moustache scissors glint like teeth, a long-haired lover (Cherokee) and a steaming, footed tub complete the scene.
But when the long-imagined shave finally occurred, it appeared that everyone in casting, wardrobe and props had fallen down on the job. A very pale, balding thirty-year-old Londoner used his mother's pair of eight-inch Fiskars. I propped myself unsteadily, perched on the chilly curved edge of a tub (unfooted), crotch thrust to his nose while he snipped. I had imagined a salacious bodice-ripper. I got a Monty Python skit.
F. and I had met once before, then spent a week in his mother's bed while his parents toured Italy. Tired of lolling after five days, we needed diversion. I sent him off in search of scissors. I suppose I'm lucky his mother sewed instead of cooked. He might have come back with poultry shears.
The Fiskars, with their chunky, orange handles and thick, workman-like blades, were actually the only kind of scissors up to the job. The cuticle on pubic hair is thicker and stiffer than hair on the head, so first I stewed in the tub for half an hour to soften the wiry vines. The whorls, once stretched out in length for easier trimming, measured almost two inches. As he began to cut, my inner Samson quaked. Without its kinky curls, the clitoris poked its head up from the newly manicured lawn like a baby field mouse. I watched the blades bite through strands, half-shocked that I didn't feel a thing.
Preliminary pruning left an inch-long military cut. Then he lathered me up with shaving foam and pulled out the razor with a new pair of twin blades (necessary for this kind of procedure). Still some strands evaded us. We eventually found a strategy that worked: my left foot on the soap dish, me hunching over the handiwork, while he sat in the tub and two pairs of hands stretched folds of skin to expose them to the blades.
We stopped twice: once to resoak skin and hair, once to let F. greet the unexpected visitor who was leaning on the doorbell downstairs. As F. stood dripping in a towel, a proper gentlemen explained that he had taken aerial photographs of all the houses in the neighborhood. Would he care to purchase one?
Almost an hour later, my fingers and toes had drawn up into small pink walnuts but elsewhere I was smooth, sensitive and whistle-clean. F. leaned in to kiss the newly exposed flesh, and I levitated. As his tongue wandered and flicked and, later, when he slid smoothly inside me, I wondered how I'd ever really enjoyed sex before. Forget about the showering-in-raincoat analogy. Had I ever been in the same room before? I felt him in me, around me, outside me, all at the same time.
F. and I broke up months later. I tried to shave myself a couple of times, but the undignified experiments with slippery shaving foam and three brands of razor hardly merit mentioning. On the bright side, none of the ingrown hairs had to be lanced.
And then I discovered just how rebellious my bald sexuality actually was — or wasn't. "Oh yeah, I did that with the Hawaiian surfer," one friend told me. "It's fun, but kind of a hassle to keep up." "I keep a ribbon of hair just on top," explained another, "kind of like a little Hitler moustache, although that's a terrible analogy."
I started to feel my transgressive act had all the inspiration of a senior-year lesbian affair or navel piercing. Yet while nobody else would want my version of this fantasy with its slapstick, less-than-dignified details, nobody else could have it either. The razor, its red handle dulled from hard-water stains and its black cushioned grip. The same insipid Elton John tune rotating on the radio every fifteen minutes. The backache from the bending. My scripted fantasy pales next to this ad-libbed reality. The Cherokee has been cast in a new role. Now I prefer F. taking curtain calls with his Wilkinson Sword. If only I had gotten an aerial photograph as a souvenir.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
