Mimi by Lucy Ellmann Page A

last refuge of the unadventurous. I pushed it aside. I think I saw tall pines waving against an evening sky, baskets, some chair I used to own: I ricocheted off all these obstacles in search of Mimi. Her towel slipped down, which distracted me, and I suddenly wondered if I might have jumped the gun, forced myself on her, offended in some way. Maybe she hadn’t suggested kissing at all, only said something like, “Where’s the Kleenex?”
    She smiled though, that smile that always got me, and all my hesitancy dissolved: I wanted to kiss her whole being, every kooky thing she’d ever done, every thought in her crazy head. I had to be near that womanly softness of her, to hell with the exact qualities of her body that I was overtrained in noticing. Jumping hurdles of my own prejudices—too tall, too big, too old, too bold?—I kissed her hot temple, her hot temper, her neck, her hair, her warmth, her alienness. I wanted to know her everything. I ran my thumb down her unfamiliar belly until she moaned.
    A kiss is a big step, an opening, an honesty, a transgression. There’s something equal about it, this mutual penetration, a relaxation (if only temporary) of self-love. Forget dualism—in the midst of a kiss you’re neither male nor female, yin nor yang. You’re not yoursel f ! I only paused to ask, “You don’t embroider, do you?” before Ant and Bee painted the tire the color called RED, and we went to bed.

VALENTINE’S DAY
    Â 
    â€œWhy do you look at my hands?”
    â€œBecause they charm me,” I answered, kissing them, and it was true. I was now an advocate of Mimi’s large hands and strong feet, and the well-rounded calves that sloped dramatically down to her unsprainable ankles. Mimi’s feet seemed heroic to me, the kind of feet Liberty would need to man those barricades. A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame was the imprisoned lightning .
    Mimi was heroic: heroic in the grocery store sniffing out the bargains, heroic on the subway pushing her way onto crowded trains, heroic when eating, when drinking, when sleeping, when laughing, just heroic all the time! Heroic in her beliefs, her angers and upsets, heroic when she dropped to her knees and took my cock in her mouth, heroic when I turned her to fuck her standing up, heroic coming and coming under the ceiling fan in her wide square bedroom. Heroic lying spoon-style behind me afterwards, calling me darling.
    Is this not love?
    When you first get together with someone, you hammer out a cosmos—through moments of discord as well as contentment. It’s your Big Bang period. From then on, the way you interact has been established. Things evolve, sure, you can refine it. But the major accommodations have been made and met, parameters set, no-go zones delineated, and you’ll pause before disturbing these balances and tilting the whole thing off course.
    Mimi turned out to have a lot to say, but not in Gertrude’s meandering megalomaniacal manner. Mimi had firm views, clear enemies, and battles to fight. None of it seemed aimed directly at me . It was exhilarating to watch, and had a strange erotic charge. Mimi was brash, she was brazen, I wasn’t even sure she was completely civilized . And sometimes she’d lash out at me too, like a cornered animal: I was communing with nature at last.
    â€œWhere there’s life, we can rail!” she declared one morning out on the roof, with the wind in her hair.
    â€œOkay, but don’t lean on the railing.”
    Mimi on power suits: “Power suits don’t work. Power works.”
    Mimi on jobs: “Work’s bad for you. It drives everybody nuts in the end! That’s why I went freelance. If I wanna stay in bed, I stay there.”
    This wasn’t exactly true—despite her fantasy of flexibility, Mimi always seemed to have to email somebody or Xerox something, frustrating all my endeavors to keep my own workload down to a minimum in order to be with