Tabloid Dreams by Robert Olen Butler Page A

he said.
    â€œHello,” I said.
    â€œI just came over here to tell you how good you’re looking tonight,” he said.
    â€œYou appreciate women, do you?” I made my voice behave. No sarcasm. A straight question.
    â€œIt’s what I am,” he said and he leaned nearer. “Ontologically, I appreciate women.”
    I kept my face composed and I said, “If that’s true, I’ll do whatever you want.”
    His eyes widened and his eyelids fluttered like a silent film heroine. “Well,” he said. “Well. We’re going to have some fun, darling.”
    â€œBut you have to prove it first.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œTell me about the last woman you slept with.”
    He furrowed his brow. “I don’t understand.”
    â€œDo you want to go to bed with me?” I was still sounding sweet, but it was a firm question.
    â€œThat’s why I sat down beside you,” he said.
    â€œGood. Then prove your appreciation. Tell me when was the last time you made love to a woman.”
    â€œOkay,” he said. “Whatever turns you on. Two nights ago.”
    â€œWhat does her most intimate sexual part look like?”
    â€œLook like?”
    â€œTell me all the details of it.” He hesitated and I put my hand on his and said with a voice slick as K-Y jelly, “It turns me on.” This was a lie, but it was his language.
    He set his mouth and narrowed his eyes and cocked his head in an effort to remember. “It was . . . you know, an opening.” He stopped. I waited. There was no more.
    â€œThat’s all you remember?”
    â€œSure. What else is there?”
    â€œI said you had to prove this.”
    He was getting pissed. “They’re all basically alike,” he said. “Any guy’ll tell you that.”
    â€œSorry, stud,” I said. “You flunked the test.”
    I turned away and he went off cursing, and the fact is I can tell you the contours, the textures, the sweet little blue tracings of veins on the secret part of each man I’ve touched since the spring and they are each as different as their voices, as their minds, as all the subtle intricacies of their personalities. And they are precious to me, in their variety. When I lay on the hood of that cab and looked at the clouds, I knew that this would be so.
    And it wasn’t new to me, somehow, though it was something I’d left behind long ago. When I was a little girl I would lie in the field on my grandfather’s farm in Connecticut and I would look at the clouds and I would see the usual things, of course, castles and horses and swans. But there were also faces in the clouds. Boys. These were boys that would appear over me as I lay on my back feeling the sun on my legs and opening to the life that awaited me, all the years ahead. The faces of boys would come to me in the sky and for a while I took them to be premonitions of boys who would one day love me, visions of their faces with wonderful, delicate varieties of brows and jaws and noses. And I loved them all, and each one loved a different aspect of me. This boy with a great pug nose was clearly a sports hero. I could ride horses with him. That one was a delicate boy with a weak chin, a poet; we would lie beneath the water oaks along my grandfather’s stream and he would read poems to me. Another one with a high forehead was a banker and he and I would sit at night beside a fire and do my arithmetic together—I loved arithmetic and I thought I would always have these little puzzles to do. There were so many boys. Somewhere along the way, all that dreaming was lost and I just stopped expecting anything, really, from my sexuality. But as a child, I didn’t think that one day I would have to choose just one of these boys in the sky. There were too many parts to me, you see.
    The mistake I made was to talk about the change in my life to my masturbation therapy author. She was a