The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Please, Drew Barrymore, don't do a dating reality show! Plus: Christmas at 30 Rock, another Gossip Girl couple, and since when is Elisha Cuthbert 'sloppy seconds'?
The process of love is to give up control, frantically, and then spend the rest of the relationship trying to get it back. In our courtship, Dave threw my Keds in the garbage can because he thought they were ugly. It gave me a thrill. I wanted to him to make me over because I was in love with his (false) idea of me. I got him out of vests and mismatched polyester and into pressed shirts and ties because I never had someone like that before. And I was suffering a fierce case of business fetish at the time. Then he married me, moved to New Hampshire where it's cold, and bought a stupid red ski parka that makes a lot of noise and two-toned hiking boots. Two tones of tan. It was horrible. He wore the boots and parka every day, even around the house. Then one day he took off the parka, and underneath was a knit vest with sheep on the bottom and clouds
on the top! What would you do if someone you thought you knew suddenly did that to you? Well, I got my flowered Keds out of hiding (the ones he'd thrown away were black) and wore them with bright green socks. When he tried to get them off my feet and subject them to the same fate their brothers had suffered, I kicked and bit him, and pulled his sheep and cloud vest out of shape. We fell over the coffee table onto the couch, breaking the blue bottle we liked. "Take all your clothes off, now," Dave panted. He had my arm bent up behind my
back and my face in the couch. "I'd rather die than take my Keds off," I gasped. "No," he said. "Just your clothes. Leave the shoes on." He kept putting me in positions where he could fondle them during the act. In love, we try to regain control, but it's most exciting when we fail.
Stomach
I put an oversized sweatshirt and ugly flowered skirt over my new black bra and panties with silver buckles. Then, in front of the bay window where schizophrenics wander by (we live next to a group home), I ripped my sweatshirt up and my ugly skirt down, and flashed myself in the giant mirror to the left of the windows. My stomach looked long and extra naked, stretched between my ugly clothes. The mirror is from 1930s Italy; around the edges twine four gold
hissing lion-lizards. Anything looks good when it's inside that mirror.
It's so dirty to do something that crazy people might see, almost as wrong as with children, except I think it might be good for the schizophrenics.
Penis
My friend Rachel calls it a prick or dick or even a dink! She makes it sound like a thin and strained thing, like gruel. I've never seen gruel, nor have
I ever seen a penis I would describe as a prick. I picture Playdoe rolled
into a skinny, skinny, long snake. Fred Exley, writer and womanizer, called his "the frightful hog." I try to imagine someone saying that to me: "Lick the frightful hog." This is the difference, I've decided, between cock and dick: the cock is well-received. People are happy and waiting for it. It's not necessarily big, but probably. It puffs up with well-being, at least, because it is loved. It feels big, even if it's little. Whereas a dick gets forced on people. There's something desperate about the owner of a dick, and something disgusting and dreary about the dick itself. Note the expression "needledick." No one would ever say "needlecock."
Vagina
You can do anything with a penis, Dave claims — stick it in a sandwich,
beat people with it. The pussy, he says, is always the pussy. That's
all it is. I want to contradict him, but indeed — all mine does is lie in wait. It's like a lioness in the mouth of a cave, poised to leap . . . but always poised, never leaping. She's hungry.
There's a city in Oklahoma named Beaver City. It's just east of
Hooker.
Hands
Last night Dave and I became actors! An independent film was being shot in Dover; Dave played someone who beats up a guy for stealing a coat from a laundromat dryer, while I played somebody running by. The man Dave was supposed to beat up asked him to be careful of his hands, because he "makes his money with them." Unlike the rest of his body, which was rather slumpy and homely, the hands were muscular, meaty, very capable-looking. All three of us had the nagging impression we'd met before. When we got home, Dave remembered: he was the masseur! Dave's naked buttocks had lain under those very hands!
God I love werewolf hands. When I saw my financial advisor's furry, dark hands with hard, bent nails coming out of his sleeves and rustling serious papers, I couldn't concentrate on a word he was saying. All I could think of is how those werewolf hands might rip apart my maiden bosom. That must be why my finances are in such bad shape.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
