Intercourse

You're never more alone than when you're coupling.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robert Olen Butler imagines the

thoughts of the famous engaged in the act

Santa Claus, 471, philanthropist Ingebirgitta, 826, elf

in a back room of Santa's workshop, North Pole, 2007

Santa: well well well ho ho ho I am a naughty boy no doubt about it, but she understands, my overstuffed Christmas turkey of a Mrs. Claus, with her hair bunned up tight, the color of Stockholm street slush, and I'm happy to put a lump of coal in my own stocking for the sake of this sweet elf's hair unfurled and floating all about us, filling the room, covering us over, the undulant red of the bottom fringe of an auroral curtain At least she's an older woman my plump pudding of a Mrs. Claus says, and it's sad really how she can take comfort from that technicality, for this is our 252nd January, my elf and I, and she still looks as young as Barbie, and after my wild night of plunging into chimneys and clothes-drier vents and pussycat doors and keyholes I must—even if only from the sympathetic magic of it —fly through the dark passage of my elf and give her gifts You need to unwind my bloated-to-bursting goose of a Mrs. Claus says I'll just bake some cookies and I am dashing and dancing and cometing and vixening but my Christmas wish once again is that I could just do this and stop thinking about my wife

Ingebirgitta: he's been in too many human houses: he is so like them now, he is so distracted, he is indeed so like a bowl full of jelly, where has my good Father Christmas gone, before he got this jolly image and before he got his livestock and his fan mail and his 3.5 million Google hits—twice as many as the Easter Bunny, he loves to say—but if only you knew, my dear, how often I think I'd prefer the bunny—though you are a kindly one and you are a merry one and you are a droll one, these are trivial things to me, I am an elf, I am of forest duff and I am of tree-bark dew and I am of quaking top-leaves and I am always of this trembling yearning body and I can dance a man to death, but you are managed now and you are spun and. worst of all. you think too much, and all I really want from you, dear Santa, is a Dirty Decadence 12-Speed Rabbit-Wand Double-Dip Flex-O-Pulse Vibrator.

Hillary Diane Rodham, 23, law student

William Jefferson Clinton, 24, law student

in his second-floor bedroom at a rented beach house in Milford, Connecticut, late spring 1971

Hillary: this had to be done eventually and the personal is political all right and if your underwear and your armpits and your hairdo and your shoes are political then choosing to fuck a specific man in a specific bed on a specific day is political and it's merely political and he's the one all right because everything we talk about makes it clear: McGovern next year and somebody after that and somebody after that and somebody after that and then he and I may choose to fuck in Lincoln's bed or on the eagle on the floor in the Oval Office, and I don't care if that's the next time we do this, to be honest with myself, but I choose this time and I will choose some others in between because one day we'll be fucking on the eagle and there's a soft knock at the door and the secretary knows not to barge in and she says Madame President, the Soviet premier is on the phone

Bill: this has to be done at this point, though I miss the surprise, I miss the gasp from a grab of their tits or the drop­ping of my pants when they least expect it, but there are plenty of others for that, this one's not in her body yet, which is cute enough in spite of her severe qualms, but at least I did get her to shave her legs pretty quick and I can sometimes surprise her into a brief silence with some line of reasoning—McGovern's chances for the nomination or ping-pong as metaphor for Chinese-American relations or some other thing that comes to my lips as quick as kisses— and I did at least rip those red-frame glasses off her face, and Coltrane is playing in my head—A Love Supreme—and my lips go itchy and not for Hillary's mouth on mine but for an abandoned ambition, me on the sax forever, though the twinge passes quickly now because Coltrane's power is detached from his own moment-to-moment life, even in the clubs, the ones he's got hold of are out beyond the glare of lights, beyond his direct touch, I was right to let that go. let go of being a surgeon, too, where you exercise your ultimate power only when they don't even know it from the anesthetics. I know the path for me and this girl knows it too, better than anybody else—I can see crowds, great large crowds to wade into and to touch—she's smart and she's tough and I know she won't put up with certain things from me and I don't want to lose her but before she's done here I've got to figure out how to get on top

George W. Bush, president of the United States

Laura Bush, first lady in the master bedroom of the White House, March 2004

Laura: the Nancy Reagan wallpaper here is very nice, actually—all the peacocks and roosters and bluebirds hand-painted on Chinese paper—she was a good strong Republican woman—is that my cell phone?—no, just a ringing in my ears—I'll have to hold my nostrils and blow when I get a chance, which won't be long—wallpaper, wallpaper—I'm not sure about the wallpaper design in the Lincoln Bedroom, but that pallid lemon stuff will go and also the carpet, with those flowers so pale they look dead—a diamond-grid English Wilton's the thing for the floor, bold Victorian greens and purples and yellows like the sunlight—and a new mattress for the bed, though I better not let Mother Bush know or she'll have one of her conniptions, since it was she who finally replaced the horsehair, but her mattress is lumpy and always was—everybody says so, including Jeb—and it has to go—and I guess I'll leave the Lincoln Bathroom alone for now. it has a quaint 1950s air about it and it'll make George happy to keep it the same—he does have his own sense of history, with his project of peeing in all 35 of the White House bathrooms and he wants them to be just like they've always been George: so I should have said to Pretty Boy from the National Public Radio today that I meant what I said when I said the tar on wearer instead of the war on terror cause I had on my new boots down in Crawford, see, and the county was resurfacing Mill Road and I got tar on those boots, walking along, so I said what I meant and I meant what I said: I regret the necessity to have tar on the wearer but you got to walk on the road to get someplace in Iraq cause over there they die with their boots on, I should have said that and Pretty Boy would've just scratched his pointy head and I'd've given him my special little knowing smile which I have given to plenty of these pencilheads and they don't even have a clue what that smile means, which is when I'm out of office I'll have each of you that got that smile down to Crawford, one at a time, and you think it's to get a story about the doofus back on his ranch, but when you get there, I'll make you a proposi­tion, each one of you, which is: admit it, you've dreamed about punching me in the nose, you figure I ain't so tough without my presidential war powers and you figure I'm plenty stupid and you'd like to whip my ass, well now's your chance, just real private, we'll go out to the clearing by Rainey Creek and take off our jackets and we will have it out like real men and I will kick your ass unremittlessly till you're crying for your white-haired little old mama even though she slapped you around pretty good when you were a boy cause that's who you're dealing with. Not the mama. The guy who can whip your ass. (continued on page 166)

INTERCOURSE

(continued from page 102)

Marcus Antonius, 41, general

and member of

Rome's ruling triumvirate

Cleopatra VII, 29, queen of Egypt

on her royal barge in the river Cydnus at Tarsus, 41 B.C.

Marcus: the sound of flutes and harps and lyres and, in their paus­ing, the sound of water lapping at the barge and 1 am an ambitious man and I am a man of battle and my head always has sounds on its horizon—the clanging of swords and the grunting of men and even, to an ear attuned to it, the sucking sound of sword in flesh, and this sound is the same, inside me and out: that soft sucking sound, now beneath me, my mansword and the flesh of a queen, but these other sounds are in me, as well, of the music and of the river in this floating world, where she waited for me tonight amidst a thousand torches, beneath a golden canopy, the queen reclining on her couch draped in an azure peplos fallen off her shoulder to bare her breasts, her hair braided all about her head, she was the very vision of Venus, opening wide for Marcus Antonius, and I am an ambitious man and I can overcome Octavian and rule Rome and perhaps I will, but what higher ambition is there than to fuck a goddess and I might well choose to float on her river for­ever in peace

Cleopatra: how simple it was. how nakedly alluring, me rolled into a carpet like the womb and I rolled out with no sounding of trumpets no scuffle of subjects going prostrate and with no perfumes or jewels or silks upon me but I rolled in a thin swaddling of linen as a newborn child onto the floor and the great Julius Caesar rose in surprise from his chair and my breasts had gone bare and my loins as well and I very slowly covered them and spun and folded my legs under me and 1 lifted my face to him and it began, and Caesar touched me quite gently—unlike this stone-fingered Antony—and he gave me my throne over my brother, who he had drowned in the Nile, and my sister, who he had pursued into exile in the temple at Ephesus, and he took me to his Rome where he exalted me, and then he died on my

behalf on the steps of the Forum, and now with riches and pomp and music it begins again, and though this one touches me roughly, it will do, and the first thing I will ask of him is that he kill my sister

Elvis Presley, 42, singer Holly Singleton, 20, admirer

in his dressing room at the

Market Square Arena,

Indianapolis, Indiana, after

what would be his last public

performance, June 26, 1977

Holly: he was singing all in white in this kind of jumpsuit with a big golden something on him, like the sun, but it

was split in half by his bare chest and it was about driving me crazy to see that, and now listen to me, I'm naked with him and 1 should be memoriz­ing his body but instead I'm trying to remember him from the stage even though he's right here with me in his own private dressing room and he's touching me and I can look at what I've always dreamed about seeing but I can't stop thinking about seeing him instead oi actually opening my darn eyes and seeing, like what if you had 10 minutes with Jesus and you kept thinking Wow here I am with Jesus, Wow God's chosen son is sitting right in front of me instead of going Jesus, is it okay to use my tongue when I kiss my boyfriend and Please Jesus, my mama's about drill­ing me crazy with her criticism, is it dis­honoring her to tell her to stop even if I don't actually say "shut up" and look what I'm doing now, I'm thinking

about talking to Jesus when Elvis is right here, and my head is so full of stupid thoughts that I'm not even seeing him, and even thinking about how my thoughts are stupid is stupid because it's still more of not seeing him, but really, if I do see him, if I do actually look at Elvis Presley's naked body, how will I ever go on with the rest of my life

Elvis: you're how it used to be, pretty lady, me singing like it's just for some new girl in the front row. but all this goes way back, Mama and me sitting in chairs in the little patch of grass at the Lauderdale Courts and she's been waiting up for me and she's past being mad, she knows I been on Beale Street, at dusk I went on and walked out of Pinchgut and down Lauderdale to Beale, and like I do, I'm moving from door to door at the clubs, listening, and somewhere along the way somebody who knew to see me finally says Let that white boy in and I go in trembling and it's Arthur Crudup singing and he is singing to me and he is singing about

me, this colored man with his dark angel voice who knows every pain in the world, and I come back and before Mama can say anything I sit down alongside her, and behind us and above us there's voices shouting at each other and there's a dog barking somewhere and there's a woman's crying, too, com­ing from a window and a boat whistle from the river and I lean to Mama and I touch her arm, and this is just for her. and though I'm feeling already that someday I'll do this for everybody and I'll do it with a beat and I'll move my body to the life of it, for now I sing just to her, real soft and slow Thai's all right now, Mama, anyway you do

.Wimes, places, characters and incidents are

products of the author's imagination or are used fictionally.

If I do actually look at Elvis Presley's naked body, how will I ever go on with the rest of my life?