This too happens: waste not.
Yes. I plan on offering these waistbands to girls.
Whoa now.
Yes. To girls who come over. These old underwear waistbands will be given them and they will put them on as ur-bikinis, or strapless thongs, and be seduced by them.
I see.
I see that you hesitate to subscribe to the plan. There is a place in the plan for the skeptic: for a fee I will let you inhabit a closet and witness the seductions by waistband.
I will get in the closet and hold my breath.
Now you are coming along.
I have old underwear of my own.
Well join us on the outside, then. The scissors are in the proper drawer.
I’m there, dude. I am so there.
I told you that losing the mind is agreeable.
Who would fight it?
No one in his right mind would fight losing his mind.
Extremely well put. That epigram is evidence that our talk is not for naught. We come up with things, here and there.
As would, I think we admit, monkeys at a typewriter, but still, we type.
Do you know any girls to call?
No.
We will depend on the drop-in by kind stranger?
Apparently, yes. Unless you know some.
I fear I do not.
I didn’t think you did.
All right. I shall dismantle my underpants. I shall whittle them into magical charms. We’ll both be ready.
We are prepared. We are loquacious gentlemen with magic lingerie awaiting company. We should have a sideboard of liquor and a man to serve us. We should have important appointments we prefer not to keep. We should have vintage cars well garaged.
We should have a lot that we do not.
We have what we have. We are not to complain.
Complaint is unchristian, untenable, uninteresting, unadvised, undone underwater.
Undone underwater?
Correct. One should not complain underwater. It is less indicated than complaining above water.
And we live, figuratively speaking, if not literally, underwater.
So we do not complain.
We don’t.
&
This talk of specious lingerie has had an adverse effect on me.
How so?
I dreamed of a Japanese girl. She walked by me in a sheer peignoir, if that is the term for a short jacket. My bedroom French is not vast. Underneath were the obligatory bra and panties. They were embroidered with a perfect bold black Ottoman design. So that there was the likeness of a sultan’s signature on the mons.
What was adverse in this?
It was so striking that as she passed, without regard to me, of course, I was taken by a sigh of resignation, and then I nearly wept. I teared up. I thought of my wife.
You have a wife?
I had a wife.
Oh. Of course. We all had a wife. Wife is a synonym for past.
So I had a vision, inspired by this well-designed and well-positioned embroidery, of my wife in the perfect past, before it…
Became the past.
Yes.
And you cried.
I could have. I looked at the girl, who had walked by me and stopped on a gymnasium floor with padding on it for floor routines, and who stood there not thirty feet away still not regarding me, and I could have wept, but at this point I am offended by my sentimentality and getting everything in check, and finding fault with the girl. What is she doing in a serious gymnasium in high-fashion slut gear — you know, that kind of takedown.
Perfectly sensible defense. She looked good.
No. Delicious.
I feel your pain, dude.
Really striking underwear, I’m telling you.
&
Where would you like to go?
I would like to go to a place where there are orange fields and sweet young dogs to walk in them with. There is a small wind at all times, large wind at night. Things bud and decay in equilibrium, light and shade play together nicely. If things are named, the names are known but not used overmuch. Forgetting and remembering have shaken hands.
What would you do there?
I would play my little record player, a fabric-covered box for 45s with the fat spindle. I would be alert to birds. I would never hurt anyone’s feelings because I would never see anyone.
Would you not work?
Not at more than I have described.
Would you not eat, then?
It is entirely possible that I would not.
Obesity would not present unto you the challenge it presents to most.
No.
All right. I can see this place too. I could come with you.
No. You would need find your own.
I see that that is so. Would you do anything besides play the records and regard the birds?
I would write a book called The Ways in Which I Have Been a Coward.
A slim volume or—
No. Exhaustive, and exhausting. It troubles the prospect of my place, with my sweet dogs and old records and crisply singing birds. I might not write it. One more manifestation of the cowardice.
Well, what matter is but one more?
Exactly mine own sentiment. We are so d’accordo that if anyone could accompany another to a magic place, you could me.
Yes, and horndog reciprocal, I am sure. But we know better.
We know better.
&
Would you care to go—
I would care to go fishing in that orange light I was telling you about. Some green frondage, in a wind. Either a monkey or a boy who resembles a monkey.
That is all you need.
No. I want also a canteen full of water, a tidy bureau of clothes, a postcard in my bungalow sent to a previous occupant, a lamp, a broom, a skillet, a spider, and a storm.
That is all you need.
That is all I need. Yes.
&
You would wish to be a man?
God no. Why do you ask?
Perhaps I misunderstood a complaint…
I do not wish to be a man. What you may have heard was my wondering how it is that I am not one, and do not care. This was at least my position at an earlier date.
It has advanced?
Yes. Now that I have had time to reflect a bit, I see that the situation is really considerably worse. I am not merely not a man. I am not even properly a boy, a good boy. But I have affected the costume of a good boy.
And mien? Is this a place we can finally use that word?
I think so. Or countenance.
So you are not even a boy.
No. I am a coward, an ass, and something else that I had my finger on last night but have now conveniently again forgotten.
Again?
Yes, it is convenient to forget one is a coward and an ass and whatever egregious else one is as frequently, or a little more frequently, than one recalls.
Go get us some coffee. I feel already tired today.
Alas, perfect, you jog me well, you queer musketeer: I am a lazy coward and ass.
Were we born lazy or did we through industry of some kind, some noble force, get tired?
That is the hopeful way to look at it, but I fear not. Why dispute it? Why struggle? A coward struggles to not admit he is lazy, or an ass, or a coward. There is bravery in surrender.
If you surrender you are brave and not a coward. I think you are in a jam here. Or is it a jamb?
In a jam of logic or in a door jamb of… I’ll get the coffee.
&
We have need of adventure. Let us have one.
Summon Studio Becalmed.
From the dead?