Lucking Out - James Wolcott [52]
I felt myself becoming a prim prune when a film critic who aspired to the patriarchal status of Irving Howe or Moses the Lawgiver, apropos of nothing, began regaling me with how M., a former girlfriend whom I had met when they were still an item, had a pussy that was always piping hot—“she’s like an oven down there,” he said, “or an active volcano.” That was rather more vivid than necessity required, and I had nothing to offer in response, not wanting to imagine his frankfurter being grilled and having the uneasy sense that he was nudging me to take a temperature reading myself. Another member of the fraternity, let’s initial him S., was equally expansive about a woman who was one of my editors then, marveling over the milky slopes of her flesh, which was far more firm underneath than you anticipated from seeing her clothed. She had the muscles of a belly dancer, he said, and again I felt as if I were being encouraged to test the slopes myself and report back to my buddies at the lodge. Yet another offered me his girlfriend’s number before he moved to Los Angeles to pursue his dream of being the next Robert Towne, screenwriter-shaman-sage-seducer extraordinaire, saying I should give her a call. “She’s really into helicopter sex,” he said. “That’s when the woman wraps her legs around you while you’re dicking and you swing her around the room.” I had seen a similar scene in Five Easy Pieces, with Jack Nicholson giving Sally Ann Struthers the whirlybird, but I couldn’t see myself calling a stranger based on so specific a recommendation. So I demurred and of course kicked myself about it later, during those 3:00 a.m.’s of the soul when you know there’s a lot going on in the untamed night and you’re not doing any of it.
Some reviewers traded off girlfriends, or the young women in contention themselves decided to switch partners, which in itself was not unusual—similar roster moves went on in the rock-critic world, but rock critics, surprisingly perhaps, seemed less partial to anatomical shoptalk than the film critics I knew, who were more engaged in competitive jousting while showing off for Pauline. Pauline wasn’t a snob about intellect, nor did she crave yea-sayers; the young women she enjoyed were those who were pretty, sparkly, animated, pixieish—H.’s new girl is “darling,” she would say, or R.’s new girl was “such a doll.” But the dolls and darlings didn’t stick around long, replaced by other passing lights until the fella had acquired himself a serious girlfriend, which didn’t preclude bringing other new faces to screenings, a turnover that entertained Pauline because she liked new faces and seemed to get a spectatorish kick out of the rakish complications. Also because the Serious Girlfriend often became a serious drag, excess cargo, especially if matrimony ensued.
It wasn’t as if Pauline disapproved of every girlfriend and spouse. She was keen on Susan Cahill, the wife of Tom Cahill, who would go on to best-selling success with How the Irish Saved Civilization, and championed Susan’s Catholic schoolgirl novel, Earth Angels. She got a kick out of Joan Ackermann-Blount, the then wife of the humorist and Southern prodigy Roy Blount Jr., a neighbor of hers up in the Berkshires. Joan was an athletic spitfire who went on to become a playwright (The Batting Cage) and TV screenwriter (the HBO sports comedy Arli$$), and she and Roy would later divorce. But whenever there was trouble in Tahiti, to borrow the