Eunuchs and Nymphomaniacs Read online

  He literally turned up his nose.

  An unbidden thought arrived in me: If it feels that good on your feet … One day after a grueling trudge around the block in ninety-degree heat we arrived back up the stairs and as was customary for me in such conditions I shrugged off my sweaty shorts, sneakers, and T-shirt and made straight for the air conditioner. But on this day I decided to try something new. I stripped off as usual but this time I lay on the couch. I didn’t need to invite Barney to join me since he was already licking my feet before they were even out of their socks.

  The scent drove him crazy.

  I would tease him by drawing the sock back and forth over the dizzying fumes. He’d scrape at the sock hoping it would just fall away but he had to learn that carnal desire is all the more satisfying when it is denied. Barney would know the anguish I had had to endure in my pursuit of human honey. But who among us can refuse the repeated attempts of such persistent passion? To be the custodian of so much joy was in itself intoxicating. In the end I acquiesced and yes, he would have his wicked, stinky-tongued way with me. After a mind-cooling minute of this sort of wanton bacchanalia (Barney never quite stopped, he just slowed down) the frenzy gave way to a more methodical, less intense tongue and slurp. He had already consumed the cream and was now merely mopping up. Soon he would lose interest and begin licking what there was left on his lips. Reason would restore itself and he’d resume his hunt for a perfect nesting place around my apartment, scraping crazily at cushions as if they were mounds of earth. This was when I opened my thighs. He actually looked at me. I blushed. Would he growl? I had obviously crossed a yet-to-be-drawn line between the animal and human kingdoms. Surely something instinctive would intervene, some genealogical cock-block that prevented the birth of unspeakable creatures. Barney didn’t have a word for what was happening and neither did I.

  But it was happening.

  * * *

  People strode past with such regularity their passing vertical forms created a strobing effect. It caused an illusion where my table appeared to be moving. It made me queasy. Or maybe I was just sick with myself for being out on the street trying to sell books to cliff-faced New Yorkers. Eye contact was tantamount to physical assault so apart from the occasional sad sympathetic smile, I was completely ignored. How embarrassing for them to have to acknowledge the vagrant behind his table. Why should they be subjected to this? The sidewalk would be that much wider without me. I repositioned my sign.

  NOT SO MUCH A MEMOIR AS A LITERARY SELFIE

  #TheOxygenThiefDiaries

  They could have given a fuck. Just as well I’d brought along some alternatives.

  HAVING TROUBLE GIVING A FUCK?

  #TheOxygenThiefDiaries

  This got some wry smiles and one girl even crouched and took a photo but still nobody stopped. Someone shouted behind me and the queasiness blossomed into paranoia. I’d be stabbed in the spleen by the street vendor whose spot I had surely stolen. Looking nervously around while at the same time trying to induce passersby to stop was dizzying. Man Stabbed on Prince Street. I’d be on the evening news. Would Marian see it? At least she’d realize I was serious about getting her back. What photo would they use? Would they show the book? I’d be okay with losing a kidney if the book got a mention on national TV. But I could be lying dead in a pool of blood and these fuckers still wouldn’t stop. They’d probably quicken their pace. This was now my life? I selected my most philosophical sign. I’d been of two minds about using it since it wasn’t exactly the most cheery of my quotes but they were leaving me no choice. I placed it in front of the others.

  SPOILER ALERT, WE ALL DIE AT THE END

  #TheOxygenThiefDiaries

  If nothing else, I had plenty of time to think.

  How lucky I’d been to have Marian. How stupid I was to lose her. How tolerant she’d been of me when in fact I’d thought I was the one tolerating her.

  A graphic example came to mind.

  The day she gave me the table, she escorted me to Prince Street, partly, I thought, to see if I really was going to go through with it. Unloading my repurposed laundry cart, I became aware, as she read my signs for the first time, that she had noticed something on one of them. Half-raising her arm she looked like she was about to point it out but then seemed to think better of it.

  I wanted her to believe that the only reason I was out there was to demonstrate my willingness to generate sales without using photos of her ass. That shutting down the fake profile was the only option open to me because doing right by her was more important than booksales. This was bookselling at its most self-flagellatory. I wanted her to watch as I humiliated myself trying to get New Yorkers to give a shit about my brutally honest memoir. Surely any man willing to prostrate himself thusly was worthy of a second chance.

  But the truth was datemedotcom had shut me down.

  Someone complained.

  Actually a lot of people complained. And the yacht-owning entrepreneur who had initially acknowledged my brilliance as a marketer disappeared when he realized he wasn’t going to meet the beautiful Françoise. That, in fact, she didn’t exist.

  Marian retrieved her hand and instead made a comment about it looking like rain. This was an explosive enough subject to distract a fledgling street vendor like myself from remembering to ask what she was going to say. Rain had taken on new significance, representing, as it now did, the urgent need to pack up my wares and seek shelter. But as her hand returned to her side and I sacrificed what little dignity I had left to the frenzy of packing up, I forgot all about it until some months later when a would-be wag in a tweed suit and a flat cap took enormous pleasure in pointing out a typo located in exactly the same spot Marian had decided not to draw attention to.

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD FOR THE IPAD GERNERATION

  —Richard Nash, Soft Skull Publishing

  Tipping his pretentious thirties-style James Joyce cap, he bade me adieu and strode away, shaking his head at the good of it. I was humiliated of course. Especially since I had just spent ten minutes trying to convince him that Lars von Trier’s production company was looking at a treatment of the book. But even more humbling was the realization that Marian had considered our relationship so irreparable there was no point in bringing the error to my attention. I’d only accuse her of enjoying my misfortune or of kicking me when I was down. Or had she decided it was more satisfying to let me stand out there represented by typos?

  She’d already told me that when we’d split the bill in restaurants she secretly accepted less than half the full amount since I objected when the total came to even a penny more than the menu price. Being European I conveniently ignored the need to factor in tax and tips. To keep the peace she paid the extra dollars without telling me. Really? Charming wonderful me? The advertising hotshot who once thought nothing of buying hundred-dollar dinners for his dates.

  FROM MIDAS TO TIGHT-ASS

  #TheOxygenThiefDiaries

  I would soon learn there was only one trustworthy indicator of rain on Prince Street and that his name was Stone Cold Joe. A Korean jewelry vendor who read the surrounding environs like an Aborigine. Three droplets of moisture on the surface of his table was tantamount to exfiltration. And he wasn’t fooled by artificial rain from air conditioners or the jettisoned contents of airline toilets. He’d been doing this for twenty-five years. In fact if you googled Prince Street you’d see him and his table from three different angles on Street View. He was as much a part of the street as the hydrants. No surprise then that the moment he began to disassemble his table the rest of the vendors followed. Within seconds, two, three, sometimes more Asian men appeared out of nowhere pushing shopping trolleys stuffed with every imaginable sort of umbrella, racing for the best spots on Broadway. They were already giddy with excitement since the sight of Stone Cold Joe packing up meant they were about to make a killing.

  “You wan a yellow?”

  This was what he called a banana. Presumably if the concept worked for an orange t
hen it was worth extending. I must have looked downhearted because he offered me one now.

  He had inherited the wife of a friend, another Korean vendor, who had died some years earlier. The street vending license passed to her. Every day at noon he helped Mrs. Lee set up shop next to me. They were the closest thing to a couple we had out there. They’d argue pleasantly over who should pay for the disgusting trays of slop silently delivered to them by a fallow Asian on an electric bicycle. He waited patiently while Mrs. Lee, who was regularly mistaken for Yoko Ono, and Stone Cold Joe went through the charade of trying to secure from the other the privilege of paying.

  Stone Cold usually won. But not without a fight.

  The real Yoko Ono lived around the corner in a loft on Greene Street and when, on the rare occasions, she walked among mortals our resident vendor of hats (in summer) and socks (in winter) filmed her on his phone and posted the results on @HatsAndSocksTom.

  Mrs. Lee sold onesies with the legend PARTY IN MY ROOM 4AM BRING A BOTTLE emblazoned across the front. People, women mostly, stopped, pointed, and went limp with laughter before taking a picture and making a purchase. The onesies sold steadily at $15 each but on more than one occasion I noticed an artsy type, usually a man, considering not just the onesies but Mrs. Lee herself. Before long, others stopped to stare at what he was staring at. This happened so often Mrs. Lee recognized the signs and in a bid to deflect the unwanted attention covered her table and sauntered off up the street in the hope that they’d lose interest and be gone by the time she returned. But the more she avoided them the more likely it seemed to the culturally astute that Yoko Ono was curating a sort of postmodern consumer-centric comment on the nature of capitalism.

  After all, such occurrences were not without precedent.

  Only a few blocks away the elusive and anonymous graffiti artist Banksy had hired an elderly actor to sit with his paintings and pose as an artist/vendor, and no one realized it until the story broke the next day and the man who paid $20 for a painting learned he was a millionaire. New York’s intellectual elite would not be caught out twice.

  Beginning with tentative nods of the head it evolved to finger-pointing and escalated to the taking of pictures. Before long, a crowd gathered around her table. The attention might have been welcome had they bought onesies but they were too busy trying to keep Mrs. Lee in focus. Having learned that the best thing to do was just walk away, thereby removing the temptation, she’d sometimes arrive at my table with her entourage in tow. I took photos of her holding my book and Tweeted it under the caption Cultural Icons. It was retweeted so much and attracted so many comments and likes I would have clarified that we shouldn’t confuse a widowed Korean vendor of onesies with the woman who broke up the Beatles, but such a complex idea was impossible to convey in less than two hundred and forty charac

  * * *

  Drinnggggg and Ping

  I’m outside

  Marian was about to take me on a road trip to New Paltz.

  She insisted I bring some laundry because she knew a cool fifties-style laundromat there. The trip had all the makings of a memorable outing. I knew I couldn’t overtly point to anything romantic but all the ingredients were in place should the opportunity arise.

  Fearful that she’d get honked at for holding up traffic I pummeled down the stairs and burst out the door to find her already out of the car and sauntering toward me. This was so unexpected I stopped in my tracks. She wore a tiny black cardigan buttoned over a black T-shirt and skintight black leggings that stopped just short of a pair of matte black ankle-high cowboy boots.

  It certainly didn’t help that she looked better than I’d ever seen her. Had she selected this outfit especially for me? It had to be for me because we were about to spend the day together.

  “Fucking hell!” I said.

  It was so uncharacteristic.

  She had never gotten out of her car like this in all the time we’d been together. She hated idling in the street because Manhattan’s drivers only allowed a few seconds’ grace before the honking began. I hoped it was because she wanted me to absorb the full, unfiltered force of her attraction before we set off. She met my hug halfway but stiffened on my approach like she was bracing herself against a chest-high wave. The result was an extremely awkward misdirected kiss to her neck.

  And as if to confirm my sense of alarm a car honked behind us. Having done such horrible things to her I was surprised she’d want to be with me under any heading and yet here she was. There was a luminous flash of calf above the short black cowboy boot as she turned to get back in the car, and her logic-melting ass made a momentary appearance before concealing itself in the driver’s seat. I stood in the street transfixed as she slammed her door and adjusted what looked like a new pair of Jackie O sunglasses helmeted by the oh-so-French-looking bangs.

  Another honk and then two more in quick succession.

  And she was being so chatty. Again this was unusual for her. Since we were en route to the town where she’d gone to college, every hydrant, road sign, and storefront evoked memories and stories only half-related before the next prompt arrived around a bend. It was as if her better self waited for us in the town ahead and she couldn’t wait to introduce me. She looked like a pale East European art student, amazed at everything. I felt fortunate to be in the car with her, to be allowed to look at her. This was not the girl I had so cynically gotten rid of. This was the beauty I’d felt unworthy of when we first met.

  She wanted to revisit a forest trail that led to the ruins of an old mill she’d explored years before. The denuded forest stood ankle-deep in brown and yellow leaves and blushed in the deepening orange of the setting sun. I couldn’t decide how to behave. Weren’t we supposed to be just friends now? Was she showing me this secret place so I could get to know her better?

  To see new sides of her? Or was I just castrated company on a trip down memory lane?

  Astonishingly, she posed for pictures.

  She wasn’t afraid I’d use them for another fake profile? This was a good sign. She even tolerated a minor adjustment to one of her poses. Surely there had to be some feeling left over from our three years together. I decided to behave like we were still together. It was all I knew how to do. If nothing else it’d remind her of what she was missing: the lighthearted, witty, confident, easygoing, self-effacing Irishman.

  She smiled, acknowledging the effort from the perspective of a detached observer. It was as if she could see how well it would work on someone else. This went on for longer than I would have thought bearable. For the most part she said nothing, only breaking her silence to correct me. I had just referred to the sunset as being azure and pronounced the word with as much of a French accent as I could muster. There was a time when she would have loved this.

  “Yeah, azure is blue,” she said matter-of-factly.

  No apology, no concern for my feelings. She might as well have been out for a walk with someone with Alzheimer’s. As if she knew the correction wouldn’t register but she was duty-bound to make it. The sky was so orange now it tinted us. I tried to alleviate the tension by offering to take her picture in this light and she immediately folded her arms in a playful gangsta pose. She looked incredibly beautiful in that instant but she was gone again as soon as the picture was taken. I had until that moment always imagined that azure meant orange. It was shameful for an award-winning art director to be humbled by this glowingly lit girl.

  “Will you send me those pictures?” she said, regretting the need to have to ask me for something.

  We managed to get our laundry loaded into the washers and with an hour to kill as the machines churned we decided to get something to eat. But as soon as we sat down in the cute little blue-and-white café serving Greek gyros I gave in to an urge to blurt. She was keeping me at a distance and it wasn’t fair. Surely we needed to clarify what was going on.

  She looked embarrassed. For me, not for herself.

  “I’m in the same place,” she said, which
I immediately mistook to mean we were on the same page—that she agreed with me. But hang on. In the same place? Meaning the same place she was when she said no the last time. And yet she didn’t seem at all sure of what she was saying.

  I began to cry.

  It wasn’t something I had planned.

  She looked so good and loving through my tears. She even kissed one or two away, which only encouraged me to emote all the more. If tears got me kissed then tears it would be. She held my hand over the table and smiled kindly, more comfortable now in the role of nurse.

  But she was nurse and malady in one.

  She seemed more relieved than I was. Did she need to see me in tears before she could believe anything I said? Maybe she was just enjoying the sight of me suffering. I had been a complete cunt to her while we were together, but I felt justified since I was sure she just wanted to trap me into cohabitation, marriage, and baby-rearing. She was extra sweet to me now almost as if she approved of the crying. I would have been mortified if she had been the one crying in a café with other people around but she actually seemed proud of me. It was the first time since I’d known her that she wanted to show me off.

  But since I now had her full attention I ventured further out onto the ice. I told her that I now found myself in the position where I was yearning for a text or an email from her and that when we met I was all trembly about what she was going to say next and that when I was away from her again I was obsessively checking my email.

  “That’s how I was when I was with you.”

  I’d lost her again. In the car on the way back to New York she held my hand tightly like she was afraid I’d drift out the window into the passing trees. She pretty much drove with one hand all the way back to New York and I pretty much cried all the way, partly from necessity and partly because I knew she liked it.

  When we arrived back in New York she turned to me.