Being in Nothingness

Am Told there are men--and women--who do not much care for lingerie. They don't even like the fairly simple stuff women use primarily to sleep in, such as a camisole and tap pants, a chemise or a teddy. And to such people the notion of a satin bustier with black garters holding black silk stockings is cause for stroke-country blood pressure. The main quarrel these people have with lingerie, as I've been able to understand it, is that it smacks of fantasy.

Good enough. If these people have no fantasy life, or prefer to think they don't, that's righteous with me. But I'm here to say that Mrs. Crews' baby boy, Harry, does. Always has. Fantasy has been the stuff of my life. I want to be moved and grooved and taken where I've never been before. And so do the women given us here on these pages, wearing fine mesh (text concluded on page 148)Being in Nothingness(continued from page 129) on their fine flesh. Believe me when I tell you they are ready to take you with them on their trip. You've got a ticket to ride in the limitless, unrestrained world of your imagination.

Nobody will ever sell me the proposition that this is a one-way street, either. That is to say, these women are not doing anything for men or to men that they are not doing for themselves and to themselves. The joy and wonder and mad blood rush women cause finally comes back to them, fulfilling their own needs and desires and the longings of their own secret hearts.

Item: I was recently in a fine restaurant at the top of a tall building in Miami, just the sort of place that anybody who knows me would never have expected to find me. I'll say only that I was there because it was business, and I felt I had to have dinner wherever the man who was paying the tab took me. He was trying to buy some work I'd done (steal it, more precisely), and while I rather desperately needed to sell it, my desperation was not keen enough to submit to robbery. And the voice in my head--it talks entirely too much--started screaming, "What in the name of God are you doing here?"

The answer immediately presented itself from all the way across the restaurant. Stepping from the elevator came a woman with impossibly long legs; she carried herself with the kind of balance only the greatest athletes and dancers have. She was tall and dressed in black with just as plash of red on the right hip of her dress and a tiny touch of red in her low-crowned, wide-brimmed hat. And immediately the voice in my head, which is not always wrong, paraphrased a line of James Dickey's: "There must be a God because only a divine imagination could have conceived of woman."

Yes, Lord, so say we all.

She was unescorted and coming straight toward me down the long, wide aisle that split the enormous room into two parts. She brushed past the maître d'--who was dressed like a Latin American dictator--as if she had not seen him. Seeing her advance, the fool across the table from me finally stopped talking. A good many other people, both women and men, also stopped talking.

I could have got up and cheered, but of course I did no such thing. I was back at her elegant apartment, filled with more than a little awe and wonder as she came naked from her bath and stepped into, stretched over, snapped together and buckled down the marvelous undergarments she expertly maneuvered herself into. For reasons I cannot name, I knew she was applying this mysterious apparel to herself not because she planned later to step out of her loose, flowing and lovely dress and show off that which cleaved most intimately to her flawless body in all the imagined and unimagined ways. No, she had put on what none of us could see or would ever see because it pleased her, because it brought her femininity to an ice-pick point of perfection. She had done it to allow herself to walk through the world as the woman she knew herself to be.

And for me, her mere presence utterly destroyed--if only for a few moments--the gritty, grasping world that I have to live and die in. As she passed our table, nearly close enough to touch and yet light-years away, I saw in the light of her fine-boned face, the tilt of her chin and the steady focus of her dark eyes a message that was as clear as if she had stopped and said directly to me: "Eat your heart out. Bleed for my can-tilevered breasts and the jacked-up curve of my ass, but there is no way you will ever taste a crumb of this banquet of a woman."

Do my fantasy and the lovely sneering words I have put into her mouth--a sneer made lovely only by the impossible loveliness of that mouth--make me bad? No, they only make me human. And if, in fact, she had put on all her undergarments for the sole purpose of allowing someone else the beatific joy of shucking her naked down to the skin, would that make her bad?

I would give you my answer, but you already know it.

"She came naked from her bath and snapped together and buckled the marvelous undergarments."