ourselves?”
“How?”
“By replacing the Duke with one of young Menaker’s hoodluminati bands.”
An inspired idea. Xavier visited The Mick’s room, riffled through his collection, and returned with the CD Subways by a group called Up Periscope.
Off the turntable came “Mood Indigo”; then, out of the player next to it, came a raucous love song, “Tickling the Man in the Boat,” followed by “Dangler’s Fandango,” “My Bleeding Beauty,” and “Sexual Secrets of the Higher Primates,” this last featuring the refrain “Hugga-mugga, hugga-mugga, / I always did think / I’d be in the pink / If I gave her a banana tonight.”
Xavier didn’t know if Up Periscope was a favorite of Mikhail’s, but scratches on the CD case suggested that the disk got a lot of play.
“Enough,” Bari pleaded.
“You see,” Xavier said, removing Subways and putting the Duke’s sophisticated swing back on, “despite what Alaïa claims, there is vulgarity, demoralizing vulgarity, and these yahoos”—waving the CD’s play list—“typify it.”
“Try another of Mikhail’s favorites, Xavier.”
“Another?”
“Try one by that band whose concert he took in. It has to be better than”—nodding at the Up Periscope disk—“ that .”
“It’s all gangsterish garbage, Bari. Why waste any more of our time on it?”
Acting on principle, he returned Subways to The Mick’s room and pointedly closed the door. Then, sitting on the carpet beside his coffee table, he and Bari ate. The candlelight dancing in Bari’s eyes flickered to the rhythms of “Solitude,” “Satin Doll,” and “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good.” Xavier felt that they had outwitted vulgarity, that the woman with him was an Eve without flaw, that the world was well-ordered and serene.
*
“Marry me, Bari,” said Xavier. His heart was pounding like the timpani section in an overture by Tchaikovsky. Despite the perfection of the evening thus far, he quite sensibly did not expect either a straight yes or an outright no. Bari was not a predictable quantity. Her unpredictability was part of the reason he’d fallen in love with her, but the part, yes, that most troubled, sometimes even dismayed, him.
“Why?” She put her plate into the dishwasher and turned on him eyes as large as Andalusian olives.
He took her hand and led her back to the sofa.
There, he used all the time-honored formulae for winning over a coy mistress, not forgetting heartfelt avowals of undying love and crafty updatings of the carpe diem snowjobs of Marvell, Lovelace, and Suckling.
“Xavier, Xavier,” Bari said. “We’ve already ‘sported’ us while we may and are ‘like’ to do so again.”
Xavier was glad to hear it, but assured her that it wasn’t only the slaking of his immediate lust that mattered, but also the forging of a permanent bond with the legal imprimatur of the state.
“Why?” she asked again.
Love, he began. Love, he continued. Love, he concluded. (Her questions were confusing him.)
“Look,” she said, putting her hands on his collarbones. “I’ve got this hunch that you see yourself as a superior specimen of Salonika’s maledom and me as your female counterpart. The First Man and First Lady, so to speak, of the Oconee intelligentsia cum Beautiful People.”
“Bari—”
“Forget that some would regard ‘Oconee intelligentsia’ as an oxymoron.”
“That’s not how I see us. I want you to marry me because of the exaltation I feel when I’m with you. But even if I did see us as a well-matched pair of superior specimens, what would be wrong with that? Maybe we are.”
Bari went to the antique secretary in Xavier’s living room and picked up his well-thumbed copy of Nietzsche. “Do you want me to be your partner in some egotistical eugenics experiment?”
“My partner in what?”
Opening the book and paging quickly through it, Bari said, “To quote your favorite German philosopher—or, that is, to take the words
“How?”
“By replacing the Duke with one of young Menaker’s hoodluminati bands.”
An inspired idea. Xavier visited The Mick’s room, riffled through his collection, and returned with the CD Subways by a group called Up Periscope.
Off the turntable came “Mood Indigo”; then, out of the player next to it, came a raucous love song, “Tickling the Man in the Boat,” followed by “Dangler’s Fandango,” “My Bleeding Beauty,” and “Sexual Secrets of the Higher Primates,” this last featuring the refrain “Hugga-mugga, hugga-mugga, / I always did think / I’d be in the pink / If I gave her a banana tonight.”
Xavier didn’t know if Up Periscope was a favorite of Mikhail’s, but scratches on the CD case suggested that the disk got a lot of play.
“Enough,” Bari pleaded.
“You see,” Xavier said, removing Subways and putting the Duke’s sophisticated swing back on, “despite what Alaïa claims, there is vulgarity, demoralizing vulgarity, and these yahoos”—waving the CD’s play list—“typify it.”
“Try another of Mikhail’s favorites, Xavier.”
“Another?”
“Try one by that band whose concert he took in. It has to be better than”—nodding at the Up Periscope disk—“ that .”
“It’s all gangsterish garbage, Bari. Why waste any more of our time on it?”
Acting on principle, he returned Subways to The Mick’s room and pointedly closed the door. Then, sitting on the carpet beside his coffee table, he and Bari ate. The candlelight dancing in Bari’s eyes flickered to the rhythms of “Solitude,” “Satin Doll,” and “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good.” Xavier felt that they had outwitted vulgarity, that the woman with him was an Eve without flaw, that the world was well-ordered and serene.
*
“Marry me, Bari,” said Xavier. His heart was pounding like the timpani section in an overture by Tchaikovsky. Despite the perfection of the evening thus far, he quite sensibly did not expect either a straight yes or an outright no. Bari was not a predictable quantity. Her unpredictability was part of the reason he’d fallen in love with her, but the part, yes, that most troubled, sometimes even dismayed, him.
“Why?” She put her plate into the dishwasher and turned on him eyes as large as Andalusian olives.
He took her hand and led her back to the sofa.
There, he used all the time-honored formulae for winning over a coy mistress, not forgetting heartfelt avowals of undying love and crafty updatings of the carpe diem snowjobs of Marvell, Lovelace, and Suckling.
“Xavier, Xavier,” Bari said. “We’ve already ‘sported’ us while we may and are ‘like’ to do so again.”
Xavier was glad to hear it, but assured her that it wasn’t only the slaking of his immediate lust that mattered, but also the forging of a permanent bond with the legal imprimatur of the state.
“Why?” she asked again.
Love, he began. Love, he continued. Love, he concluded. (Her questions were confusing him.)
“Look,” she said, putting her hands on his collarbones. “I’ve got this hunch that you see yourself as a superior specimen of Salonika’s maledom and me as your female counterpart. The First Man and First Lady, so to speak, of the Oconee intelligentsia cum Beautiful People.”
“Bari—”
“Forget that some would regard ‘Oconee intelligentsia’ as an oxymoron.”
“That’s not how I see us. I want you to marry me because of the exaltation I feel when I’m with you. But even if I did see us as a well-matched pair of superior specimens, what would be wrong with that? Maybe we are.”
Bari went to the antique secretary in Xavier’s living room and picked up his well-thumbed copy of Nietzsche. “Do you want me to be your partner in some egotistical eugenics experiment?”
“My partner in what?”
Opening the book and paging quickly through it, Bari said, “To quote your favorite German philosopher—or, that is, to take the words
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