Directors I Would Sleep With

I couldn't deface that body with my carnal desires. I'd sit at his feet and let him talk into the fire, his face ageless with the bone-weary wisdom of a hundred desert nomads. I might stroke his shoulder. He wouldn't look at me.

Cerebral sex. All he'd have to do was talk.

"Whit, darling," I'd ask him, as he sprawled on the bed next to me, feet crossed, arms behind his head, staring at the Annie Hall poster opposite with a post-modern-ironic quirk on his lips, complacently musing on how much quality he's made up for against Woody Allen's quantity. "Do you want some Koolaid?"

"That’s what’s so great about tap dancing. You are a percussive instrument," he'd say, with the casual voice of someone dropping pearls to a churning moaning adoring mob. FOR CHARITY.

Me, trembling: "Oh yes. YES. What else, my Witty Whit? What other vaguely satirical, ironically earnest little bon mot has flitted across your fecund razor-sharp Harvard boy brain? A little disaffection and perfect grammar and you'll push me right over the edge.....please....."

Whit: "I think there’s a weird human attraction to jumping, some sort of sick, whimsical, craziness. It’s not all suicide; in addition, it’s something else. You give people a platform to jump from, some will jump. It’s not entirely thought out or suicidal, I think there’s some sort of craziness going on. A void is created and the void attracts something. If the Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t there, would all those people kill themselves? I think some people wouldn’t if it wasn’t there."

Me: P;SJDFPWIEREPWNV-W3598WJN-IDVNWKA['PROQ=0WEHTUJPIN

Whit, starting as if from a daze, hair flopping endearingly onto a well-fed cheek the texture of uncooked bacon fat, would glance at me: "Oh, you're still here. Did you get the New York Times for me?"

Me: "6 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE I HAVE."

fin

80s hunk. Poofy leather jacket, poofy hair, poofy eyebrows, poofy jeans, and those creepy uncle glasses. I'd wear leggings, nothing else. He'd wear white knee socks...nothing else. The Thompson Twins would play in the background. He'd take my knickers and my heart and never call me again.

It would be stupidly worth it.

French. Smarmy. Receding hairline. Small, coffee-cigarette-stained teeth. Neat, slightly irregular features. Funny ears. BEAUTIFUL AESTHETIC, BEAUTIFUL HEART.

HE WOULDN'T LIKE, F--- ME, UNLESS I WAS HIS MUSE AND HAD SHORT HAIR AND I WOULD DEDICATE THE REST OF MY LIFE TO BECOMING CATHERINE DENEUVE JUST FOR HIM, AND HIDE MY UGLY CRIES IN MY CROISSANT AND NESQUIK IN THE MORNING BEFORE HE WENT TO WORK.

I'd watch him pad around our small chintzy Paris flat, with languorous ease, in an old bathrobe opening up on a soft pudgy hairy wine belly, and non-existent chest, and somehow I'd find his delicacy erotic, especially when he wore shirtsleeves and pushed them up with casual charm on those strong expressive arms all French men have, and I'd chafe his warm leathery hands and look up at him from a squashy divan, and bring him his black coffee and Gauloise every morning, and he would pat me on the shoulder with a remote dreamy affection, and muse about his day as I took off his satin slippers on my knees, always on my knees for my little Truffle.

This is where it'd all go deliciously, surreally wrong. I don't know what would happen, but I'm up for finding out.

Those eyes alone would finish me.

I'd close my eyes and think about blue and sodium yellow streetlight, and frozen cigarette smoke, and yearning. And Tony Leung.

She'd know her way around a bi-curious budding feminist's body.

What's not to scream for? The Santa exterior is just a foil for a heart as big and full as a dog's. All dat humanity.

I'd Stand By That.

Oh yes. Those masochistic eyebrows, that glossy bald pate, those mad-tramp eyes, the miserly beard? When he was young all those things made him sexy, sexy, sexy.