Saturday, October 15, 2005

The Early Bird Catches the Towel

The Early Bird Catches the Towel


The cockroaches slept; I could not. I tried Chinese medicine, and bought a hot water bottle, but I didn’t have a decent night’s sleep until I bought a space heater. By then it was nearly spring. I wish I’d bought it three months earlier – Susan might have slept with me then. That’s how cold it was.

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Art and Artifice

“Susan, you can stay here as long as you want. Really, it’s no problem.” At this point most hot women I’ve met would frown and call me ‘creepy’. But Susan smiled and said, “Oh, that’s so sweet!” She spoke with a Dutch accent. She was sexy and beautiful. She had long hair, was tall, and wore a blue scuba diving outfit. “You must be Andrew," she said. I’d only been obsessed with her for two minutes and she already knew I existed. I was making tremendous progress.

She got into the bed next to me, and Dani got in next to her. They didn’t like the movie I was watching, so they talked. Dani said she had slept with a Chinese girl in Beijing, and the Chinese girl had worn paper underwear. Susan squirmed with delight. To understand the word ‘squirmed’ in this context, imagine seductive dancing as a reflex action. “Paper underwear! Paper underwear!” I said, trying to make her do it again.

As Susan talked, I stared at her. Her hair was burnt umber, she had an earring in the top of her ear as well as the bottom, and one tress of hair liked to fall in front of her right eye, which was the equal of the left for perfection. Her lips were suggestive; cameras dreamed about her cheek bones. Her tight scuba outfit left little, and yet so much, to the imagination. Imagine the most perfect woman you have ever seen, and then know that Susan makes her look like a bored child’s drawing on a balloon.

I asked if she had a job. She said she ‘made art.’ “Oh good,” I said, switching to a low, sincere voice, “Art is really important to me. I think art speaks to me about my life. Art helps to show me how to live. It tells me about who I am and where I am going. I really try to make time to think about art and what art means to me.” Susan was moved. “That’s how I feel about art!”

Dani changed the subject so she could complain about Martin. She was annoyed that he was pretending to be a gentleman instead of ravishing her. Susan said, “So he never even tried to kiss you, you just watched DVDs together, he never said, ‘Oh we’ve been doing this for some time now, I think we can be more than friends,’ or something like that?” “No.”

I realised my 20-minute relationship with Susan had developed along similar lines to Dani and Martin’s, i.e. we watched DVDs together but didn’t talk about our feelings. I drew myself up and turned to look into Susan’s eyes. “Susan, there’s something I’d like to tell you,” I said. “We’ve been doing this for some time, and I’d like to express my true feelings for you.” “Do you mean ‘express’, or ‘tell’?” She was leading me on! I had lost the element of surprise. “Er… tell. Please allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and respect you, as a woman and as an artist.” She giggled. Dani shook her head at me. “Andrew, you’re not interested in art. I’ve never heard you mention art, ever. Why are you being so weird?”

Dani hadn’t seen me flirting before so she didn’t know that’s what it was.