Read Online Mimi by Lucy Ellmann - Free Book Online

her place when there’s nothing else happening. She’s keen. Well, you know, keen on me , and if she wants me, she’s got to put up with my crowd. That’s the deal.”
    “Refer to the manual, Jed,” I suggested, when he finally shut up. “This isn’t how doctors are supposed to behave.” He seemed truly perplexed: never had his camera work been received with so little enthusiasm. “Jed, I’m afraid you’ll have to take your questionable bedside manner elsewhere. I’m letting you go.”
    Sure, there were plenty of ties hung on the doorknob when I was a med student, the stuff you do to prove you’re a red-blooded American male. And cadaver fun of course—finding body parts in your bed or your beer. But we did draw the line at gang rape. I even got over my little propofol habit pretty fast—I didn’t need Michael Jackson to die of it to know I had to stop (or did he die of plastic surgery?): I got tired of waking up not knowing who or where I was (and I was priapic enough, I felt, without any help from “milk of amnesia”). Martinis, Bloody Marys and sleep became my chosen forms of oblivion from then on.
    None of us was particularly focused on chivalry at the time. Until Rosemary, my first love, my policy had been to dump (or be dumped) before anything got too serious (a strategy, come to think of it, that I immediately resumed, post -Rosemary). Three weeks was my standard contract, two months tops, sooner if there was any sign of sexual waning in either party. I developed a fine technique for keeping women at bay: always imply there’s something much more important than them going on, even if it’s just gloating over your mechanical pencils or attending yet another HMO meeting. What matters is that you Keep the Supremacy .
    I had no trouble finding women (everybody likes a doctor), and I don’t think I ever hurt anyone—though I feel some chagrin over the girl I dropped because her mother got cancer (after I’d badgered the kid for months to go out with me and screwed her silly several times). A real operator.
    But everything changed when I met Rosemary. She had the most beautiful curvy shape but didn’t know it: the girls all hated their bodies according to the requirements of our era (self-doubt from which my profession has infinitely benefited). Rosemary came over one night for a party my roommates were throwing and she never left. We talked and walked and ate and slept with each other for the next three years. This was the first time the whole male–female combo made sense to me. Sex had a purpose at last: pleasing Rosemary! I relished her softness, her smoothness, her curves, her verticals and horizontals. She made sense of New York for me, its verticals and horizontals, its highs and lows. Everything suddenly became sensual, the heat on the street, birds, shade, rain, reflections, strange liquors: for some reason, Rosemary and I took to ordering side-cars (the first to do so since the 1940s).
    The essence of a thing runs through it: tomato leaves smell of tomato, coriander seeds smell of cilantro. Every mouse smells of mouse, every house of house. What I loved about Rosemary was her smell—not a rosemary smell, though that would have been apt. No, she was no plant, she was my honey. And yet—those eggs of hers! Rosemary had an obsession with eggs, real or fake, eggs of all shapes and sizes: ceramic eggs, china eggs, glass eggs, marble, wooden, paper, plastic, gold or silver eggs, eggs with scenic views inside, tiny eggs, enormous eggs, eggs that wouldn’t open, eggs that wouldn’t shut, furry eggs, flowery eggs, feathery eggs, eggs in glass cases, voodoo eggs, comical eggs with flashing lights and steam coming out, a big cloth egg she liked to take to bed with her, egg earrings, egg mobiles, egg-shaped place mats, egg-shaped egg timers! She collected every picture of an egg she could find. She even had a large ornamental egg covered in opals and rubies, and I tolerated it. But, really, what is