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Now reading
The Chaste Stranger
All the sexually active people in Westport look so clean and certain, I wonder if they’re dead. Their lives are tennis without end, the avocado-green Mercedes waiting calm as you please. Perhaps it is my brain that is unplugged, and these shadow-people don’t know how to drink martinis anymore. They are suddenly and mysteriously not in the least interested in fornicating with strangers. Well, there are a lot of unanswered questions here, and certainly no dinner invitations where a fella could probe Buffy‘s inner- mush, a really complicated adventure, in a 1930ish train station, outlandish bouquets, a poisonous insect found burrowing its way through the walls of the special restaurant and into one of her perfect nostrils—she was reading Meetings with Remarkable Men, needing succor, dreaming of a village near Bosnia, when a clattering of carts broke her thoughts— “Those billy goats and piglets, they are all so ephemeral ...” But now, in Westport Connecticut, a boy, a young man really, looking as if he had just come through a carwash, and dressed for the kind of success that made her girlfriends froth and lather, can be overheard speaking to no one in particular: “That Paris Review crowd, I couldn’t tell if they were bright or just overbred.” Whereupon Buffy swings into action, pinning him to the floor: “I will unglue your very being from this planet, if ever ...” He could appreciate her sincerity, not to mention her spiffy togs. Didymus the Blind has put three dollars on Total Departure, and I am tired of pumping my own gas. I’m Lewis your aluminum man, and we are whirling in a spangled frenzy toward a riddle and a doom—here’s looking up your old address.