I Saw Her Lips Quiver Like a Bow
I Saw Her Lips Quiver Like a Bow
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ShareA: Tonight I’m attracted to both genders. Don’t, do you often pass a gay man in a rainbow-striped vest?
J: Yes I’ve noticed that. It’s especially popular on the L-train.
A: Or do you think this girl’s a cellist?
J: Which?
A: You know the one.
J: Oh, I wouldn’t be surprised. Every bit of her exudes sophistication and grace.
A: I saw her lips quiver like a bow. [Silence] But now I’m wondering, Jonny, what happens next month? You’d expressed doubts on the phone last night. We spent our early twenties, you and I, catering, bussing and waiting tables—feeling, as you’ll say, on permanent vacation. Yet does that seem possible for…
J: It’s tough; I doubt I could go through… I don’t think I can undertake the, um, tasks involved with catering.
A: Most…
J: I couldn’t, I can’t imagine responding to a manager’s complaint about my shoes (how they resemble tennis shoes more than dress shoes) or concern about a belt buckle’s shininess. One silver buckle on a canvas belt always sparked controversy at catering companies.
A: Silver rather than gold or brass?
J: They’d call it flashy, but I considered it the least flashy of buckles. Nor could I imagine wheeling big tables across banquet rooms and maybe getting splinters.
A: I loved wheeling tables: not knowing which direction would come next.
J: Right.
A: I’ve just, I got drawn in by a couple’s glances. My chest lunged toward the napkin dispenser.
J: Wow.
A: I feel I’m on…
J: Should you go…
A: those spinning tables.
J: see Kristin tonight? Somebody needs…
A: This this is our…
J: to calm you down.
A: first night apart all week. Still you’d… we’ve discussed how hard it is to live in most of the country now—since television replaced not only vistas but, um, local sensibilit…
J: Yes Stephen Shore faced this, and…
A: Sure.
J: felt the strong urge to document those vanishing sensibilities.
A: Now I’ll wonder if humanity likewise gets blanded out, flattened out, so catering managers encounter predictable turf, rather than the variegated fields that we…
J: De Tocqueville makes a prediction that matches your hypothesis.
A: What does he say? The same…
J: Exactly.
A: In terms of land and human personality?
J: Yeah, how in a a democratic state people with eccentricities, people who develop what René Char calls their “legitimate strangeness”, don’t fit in or get properly employed.
A: You brought up De Tocqueville at a Rosh Hashanah party years ago, near Boston’s Porter Square. Can you…
J: No I don’t remember. Maybe I drank wine.
A: Later we punted apples at the host’s apartment, since no single girls came…
J: Oh I do remember. I’ve been reading this book on birds, learning that a hummingbird heart beats twelve-hundred times per minute…
A: Right with one-hundred-sixty-degree blood.
J: The hummingbird’s wings beat eighty times a second. Yet I’d also read about birds that use aeiri… that use complex aerial displays to attract mates; or they’ll flap up prominent crown feathers.
A: So the hat you’d designed…
J: Is just an experiment. Though girls seem turned on by the feathers, especially intelligent girls that look like birds.
A: You’ll find many bird-looking women in New York—the eccentrics, right? But can you picture the passport photo where I resembled a lion…
J: Yes.
A: when I was eighteen? [Cough] day of that photo the, um, Kinko’s clerk made it clear she felt intense desire for me, I think because of the lion’s mane.
J: We should examine…
A: I hope you hear me OK. Last night I burned my tongue tip on a microwave burrito.
J: I can hear you fine. Do you see how this guy carries his bag? That’s a bit of urban improv. He wove his umbrella through the handles and now uses an umbrella as…
A: You’ve never done that? I also put umbrellas (preferably a short umbrella) between my back and backpack, as brace. Or books wedged…
J: Kittens especially like that space.
