Read Online Love Me by Garrison Keillor - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Garrison Keillor
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maybe a few swimmers will penetrate the harbor defenses and paddle upstream through the marshes to the royal egg and dive into it head-first-and she swings her hips forward and back a few times and she groans with pleasure! Oh my God! Yes! Yes! Yes! But even in her bliss, she thinks about leaving St. Paul and feels bad and sits down on me, dreading New York, not realizing that sitting on Mr. Penis turns him into Mr. Penis, Jr. The guy is not a weight lifter.
“I don’t know why we can’t be happy right where we are,” she cries.
I tell her, “You are a fabulous lover,” and try to raise her up with my knees so we can resume the lovely thing we were doing.
She sighs. Words of praise don’t rest easily on my Minnesota wife: she brushes compliments away like deerflies. She says, “How many other women have you said that to?”
I wish she’d get off the poor guy and let him breathe. A moment ago he was James Joyce and now she is turning him into a local writer.
She looks down and sees him, shriven, hanging his head. “What’s the matter?” she says. “You lose interest?”
How to tell her? Praise inflates Mr. Penis, and a critical review is deflating. One more reason to go to New York. There’s more hype. Hype works. Minnesotans don’t think so but it does. The surest way to give a guy a powerful hard-on is to gasp in amazement and say, “My gosh, I haven’t seen anything that big since the circus came to town! That is the Beethoven Ninth of all erections. What on earth has gotten into you? You been taking kryptonite or what? That is the Giants in the Earth and the Woody Herman Big Band and the Peterbilt Tractor of penises.” This is how you turn a cocktail weenie to a foot-long bratwurst. Advertising. In Minnesota, they sit down on you hard and you deflate and they say, “Oh, well. Some other time.”
It violates Iris’s principles to tell a lie. So she slips off me and disappears into the bathroom, and Mr. Penis is all done for today.
We met as two kids in choir, locked in the majesty of the St. Matthew Passion, and I fell in love with her slender neck and sang the low note in the chord and she turned and smiled and that launched a marriage. If she hadn’t smiled, we’d be nothing. It was a case of sympathetic vibration. Like two birds, we mated by ear, we asked no questions. We got married with less discussion than most people devote to choosing a restaurant. We married in the blink of an eye and walked down the primrose path and into the deep woods like everybody else.
One day I was a guy typing in an upstairs bedroom and the next day I was interviewed on The CBS Evening News (“What do you say to those who claim that the novel has become irrelevant to the fast-paced life that most of us lead today, Mr. Wyler?”) and I came home in a daze and walked into the kitchen and Iris says, “I’m going over to Target if you want to come with. They’ve got cloth napkins marked down fifty percent. And wine glasses for ninety-five cents apiece.”
“Did you see me on TV?” I say.
She shakes her head.
I slosh some Scotch in a glass with ice cubes.
“Your husband just spoke to twenty million on TV, and I come home and you ask me if I want to go to Target?”
“Well, if you don’t want to go, just say so. Don’t get your undies in a bunch over it.”
And she goes off to Target and buys napkins on sale. My novel is bursting in the sky like fireworks, the gates are swinging open. The apartment at the Bel Noir awaits.
I am not going to live in a stucco house on the flats, on Sturgis Avenue behind the Burger King, and wait for the cloth napkins to go on sale. I want to go to New York and find the most expensive linens in town and buy those.
I went to the liquor store and when I came home Iris was in the backyard chopping weeds out of the flowerbeds. I had a bottle of Dom Pérignon. She crinkled up her face. “Sheesh. What’s the big deal?”
“Our ship has come in, Iris. Time to
“I don’t know why we can’t be happy right where we are,” she cries.
I tell her, “You are a fabulous lover,” and try to raise her up with my knees so we can resume the lovely thing we were doing.
She sighs. Words of praise don’t rest easily on my Minnesota wife: she brushes compliments away like deerflies. She says, “How many other women have you said that to?”
I wish she’d get off the poor guy and let him breathe. A moment ago he was James Joyce and now she is turning him into a local writer.
She looks down and sees him, shriven, hanging his head. “What’s the matter?” she says. “You lose interest?”
How to tell her? Praise inflates Mr. Penis, and a critical review is deflating. One more reason to go to New York. There’s more hype. Hype works. Minnesotans don’t think so but it does. The surest way to give a guy a powerful hard-on is to gasp in amazement and say, “My gosh, I haven’t seen anything that big since the circus came to town! That is the Beethoven Ninth of all erections. What on earth has gotten into you? You been taking kryptonite or what? That is the Giants in the Earth and the Woody Herman Big Band and the Peterbilt Tractor of penises.” This is how you turn a cocktail weenie to a foot-long bratwurst. Advertising. In Minnesota, they sit down on you hard and you deflate and they say, “Oh, well. Some other time.”
It violates Iris’s principles to tell a lie. So she slips off me and disappears into the bathroom, and Mr. Penis is all done for today.
We met as two kids in choir, locked in the majesty of the St. Matthew Passion, and I fell in love with her slender neck and sang the low note in the chord and she turned and smiled and that launched a marriage. If she hadn’t smiled, we’d be nothing. It was a case of sympathetic vibration. Like two birds, we mated by ear, we asked no questions. We got married with less discussion than most people devote to choosing a restaurant. We married in the blink of an eye and walked down the primrose path and into the deep woods like everybody else.
One day I was a guy typing in an upstairs bedroom and the next day I was interviewed on The CBS Evening News (“What do you say to those who claim that the novel has become irrelevant to the fast-paced life that most of us lead today, Mr. Wyler?”) and I came home in a daze and walked into the kitchen and Iris says, “I’m going over to Target if you want to come with. They’ve got cloth napkins marked down fifty percent. And wine glasses for ninety-five cents apiece.”
“Did you see me on TV?” I say.
She shakes her head.
I slosh some Scotch in a glass with ice cubes.
“Your husband just spoke to twenty million on TV, and I come home and you ask me if I want to go to Target?”
“Well, if you don’t want to go, just say so. Don’t get your undies in a bunch over it.”
And she goes off to Target and buys napkins on sale. My novel is bursting in the sky like fireworks, the gates are swinging open. The apartment at the Bel Noir awaits.
I am not going to live in a stucco house on the flats, on Sturgis Avenue behind the Burger King, and wait for the cloth napkins to go on sale. I want to go to New York and find the most expensive linens in town and buy those.
I went to the liquor store and when I came home Iris was in the backyard chopping weeds out of the flowerbeds. I had a bottle of Dom Pérignon. She crinkled up her face. “Sheesh. What’s the big deal?”
“Our ship has come in, Iris. Time to
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