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Show Motherlunge a novel 39 7. Humiliation As A Near Rhyme On the oldies station someday-the oldies podcast-you'll eventually hear about the fifty ways to leave your lover. They rhyme: Hop on the bus, Gus. Make a new plan, Stan. Slip out the back, Jack. In life, of course, they don't rhyme. They are unmusical, anti-musical, like the sound of a needle skipping across the record, which for you will be just another artifact, another oldie. Imagine it therefore as the sound of something being unzipped. Or ripped. In the big city that fall, I had a Quebecois boyfriend for ten days. With him, I practiced my elementary French and my library-researched sex moves, those that were Gallic-seeming, rough, slightly unhygienic. And at my prompting one night, he-let's call him Gilles-confessed his private pensees, namely his desir for ultra fun. Ultra fun? Fun? For a moment, I felt silly, frilly, rhymy. Moi? "Autre femme! Another woman!" Gilles finally hissed between his beautiful, if smoke-stained, teeth. "I want to be with her, not you!" Not me. Pas moi. See? That's the one that rhymes. |