There’s always a key with a woman, isn’t there, or rather the conjunction of key and hole (so to speak), that brief window of light, the narrow opportunity to get inside, to get to really know her. In our crowded modern world and most of its institutions it’s imperative not to acknowledge everyone you see, but rather to cultivate the ability to ignore them. There’s so much stimulus, so many people around that we have to train ourselves to filter experience just to protect ourselves against sensory overload.
Women especially, I think, have to resist intimacy in order to guard against all the loonies, the psychic vampires, the predators and hyper-aggressive losers. I’m sure a woman like Virginia, for instance, has to keep herself indifferent, insensible even, to all the wolves, the leers and comments and clumsy pick-ups, has to deflect the unrelenting attention without even seeming to be aware of it. It must be second nature to her by now.
On the other hand someone like Kathy, say, who’s not so conventionally attractive has a different set of problems. Although they habitually ignore or dismiss them, guys think that when they do deign to engage a plain woman she should automatically be pathetically grateful for their attention. When the guy isn’t derisive or dismissive, he’s apt to be crude and frank, not willing to waste his usual bull on the kind of girl who’s the living punch line to the old gag about how much better she looks in the dim light of last call than in the harsh dawn when you wake up next to her.
And Kathy embodied a few myths and urban legends. Her face was frankly ugly, as ugly as a stepsister’s in a fairy tale — a helmet of coarse, wiry black hair looming around furry eyebrows, a big beaked nose, and a complexion mottled by way too many freckles. Her body, by contrast, was outstanding, with generous, shapely breasts, gently rounded stomach and womanly hips, all set on a pair of the most perfectly flawless legs, making her just the kind of woman the philosopher jerks of the barroom recommend be made love to with a bag over her head. As usual the wise guys were wrong — when I finally did make love to her, her face became as enchanting as the rest of her.
YR PAL,
UBU
A Leak In The Safe 