The woman with three breasts stopped to look at the card, and even picked it up. It was one of those all-occasion greeting cards done in mock retro style. On the front was a fifties-style illustration of a prim but sexy and curvaceous housewife. She wore the dress you always see, that very domestic dress that doesn’t show much skin but really makes the point that the wearer has an hourglass figure. Her lips were big and red and smiling widely, but something about the smile was ironic. The housewife was poised behind a big easy chair, and she had both of her hands on the top of the chair-back, hovering over it lovingly and protectively. The most noticeable feature of the easy chair was that it was empty. Clean as a whistle and not a single crease or bump in the cushion. And the message, in a retro typeface, made it clear what she was smiling about. It said: Sometimes the best man is an imaginary man.
Although the woman with three breasts didn’t purchase the card, she lingered over it, because the card said so much to her. She was killing time in a shop in a big urban mall, one that was near a major museum. Imaginary men were of the utmost importance to the woman with three breasts. Since her early teens she had run into them or conjured them up wherever she went, and by now she was quite the connoisseur. Very early on, her few experiences with non-imaginary men – cruel to say the least - had convinced her that the imaginary route was the way to go. The only way, if she wanted a life free from the torture of ridicule and rejection.
Once the woman with three breasts had crossed the line, had utterly and totally put the possibility of non-imaginary men behind her, the rest of what the modern world has to offer opened up to her, on a more or less equal playing field. She was bright, well-educated and attractive – some would even say beautiful. Her face had certain features that could rival those of the housewife in the greeting card, especially its bone structure. From chin to scalp she possessed precisely what models and actresses covet, the skeletal prominence that keeps skin youthful and glowing well into maturity.
After musing over the card, the woman went deeper into the mall to do an errand. There was enough time; she still had a good half hour before the museum opened. She entered a fabric store and carefully inspected the new goods that had arrived. She picked out a bolt of this and a bolt of that, added in some sundries, arranged for delivery and paid by card. The woman with three breasts was a virtuoso with a sewing machine. Soon after puberty she learned to sew for survival, to avoid the mortification of entering a clothing store. She created her own patterns and developed crude designs for tops and dresses that would mask and even flatter her upper physique. But her natural talent and intelligence led her even further - into the realm of fabric artistry. She bought books and taught herself how to cut, with proficiency and a bold flair. She was so adept she became a top seamstress, doing complex repairs and alterations for the most demanding clientele. She was sought after by bridal shops and fine boutiques. They wanted her to work on premises but she refused, insisting that the garments be sent to her apartment, where her at-home workshop had grown from an alcove to two large rooms.
For quite a while, the woman with three breasts flirted with becoming a bona fide fashion designer. Now she was pursuing this goal in earnest. She had found a rep who would handle all the client and supplier contact, allowing her to keep working inside the walls of her home. She had come upon an ancient floral pattern based on the Narcissus, and she began adapting it to various accessories, such as fabric belts and handbags cut out of rare hand-dyed goods she’d located in the south of France. She called her brand just that, Narcissus, and designed her own logo. The name gave her a chuckle. To her female customers it would mean a flower. But to her it would mean the ideal imaginary male. The legendary male so taken with his own beauty he can’t help staring at its reflection.
The act of naming her brand caused the woman with three breasts to take a new look at her own name - Sandra. Her decision, in the end, was to re-style it, and she began calling herself Alessandra. In her view, the name was still the one she’d been born with. All she was doing was using its superlative form.
From the fabric store, Alessandra hurried towards the mall walkway that opened onto the museum gardens. She had to pass right in front of a splashy lingerie store, an experience that made her physically and emotionally ill. Her legs shook and the sweat poured out of her. Every tart of a window mannequin was a reminder of the cross she had to bear – her lifelong dread of ever stepping over the threshold of such a store, of ever going near any retail counter anywhere to acquire a bra. All of hers were home-made, and it goes without saying that the quality and workmanship of these pieces exceeded anything sold in stores. But the real coup was the innovative construction she had devised, a system of rigging and cupping and cinching that, so long as she stayed fully dressed, made her unique abundance seem to be nothing more than normally opulent curves.
After the terror of the lingerie windows came the joy of the walkway, the relief of escaping her monsters and the thrill of entering a domain of soothing pleasures, a true oasis. First came the canopy of open sky, then the fountains and topiary and colonnades, and then the museum itself, timeless and palatial. She walked the huge halls resolutely, buoyed by the sharp echo of her footsteps. She hurried by the queue forming at the café, without so much as a thought about stopping for lunch. This was the first day of a new exhibit, a major showing of classical sculpture, not a day to let a croissant and salad steal time from what really mattered.
The woman with three breasts climbed the temple-like steps to the highest floor of the museum. She bought her ticket for the exhibit, titled “The Time of Heroes,” showed it to a seated guard and entered the exhibit hall. For a moment she stood perfectly still, just to let the cells of her body adjust to the sudden change. Only her eyes moved, and everywhere they darted they found the same thing. Men of stone. Perfect men. Men whose god-like limbs and torsos were unchanged after thousands of years.
Slowly, Alessandra began to move from figure to figure, circling each one like a cat. She paid no attention to the little plaques that explained whether the sculptor was Phidias or Polykleitos or Myron, or whether the sculpted male was a Herakles who had just killed a lion, a Dionysos on a bash, a Hermes about to take flight, or some unknown athlete scraping oil from his ribs. What she was after was a shoulder, a hip, a wrist that struck her as especially agile and powerful. Her mind and her eye worked together, feverishly, as photographer and camera, snapping prizes she could take home with her and keep, summoning them at will for her own physical pleasure. And just as soon as she had made her way through the ranks, she turned from the exit door and retraced her steps the entire length of the hall, once again letting her gaze spill ecstatically over every inch of stone skin. On her third and final trip, when she had reached her saturation point, she let out a small laugh, just audible enough to turn a guard’s head. She was recalling that line from the greeting card, and thinking how very right the line was.
The guard frowned and coughed sternly, and Alessandra rushed away from him and out of the hall. She was finally ready for a little food and drink. At this hour – well past lunch – they seated her promptly in the café, where she ordered a nicoise salad and tea. She slipped her toes out of the tight part of her shoes and attacked the food lustily, feeling her energy ramp up for everything that was to come, the rest of her museum day.
Over the years, she had become so taken with sculpture she had finally joined a basic sculpting class. It was taught in the basement of the museum, by a credible artist, a man who was good enough to place work in the better second-tier galleries. Today’s class was themed directly to the exhibit, “The Time of Heroes.” The students were to work from a live male model posing as an ancient Greek athlete. Ten minutes before class-time, the woman was outside the locked door, so eager to get her fingers into the wet clay she felt shock-waves running through them. And when the teacher ambled up the corridor and unlocked the door, she charged to the front and center, setting herself up as close as she could to the modeling stand.
The teacher made a few introductory remarks and brought him in, the human centerpiece - a young man with a discus thrower’s body but a back-alley swagger. He also had a strip-club smirk, which a glare from the teacher wiped away. The ripped young man knew how to stand like a statue, though, in perfect contraposto, torso twisted just so far to suggest explosive tension restrained by an even more muscular spirit. Alessandra worked feverishly, this time capturing her images in earthy handfuls of clay as well as camera flashes of her own mind. The cup supporter the model wore beneath his thong, the kind of jock used by modern athletes, left something to the imagination. But to the woman with three breasts this was not a problem. Anything male that was imaginary would not be squandered by her; her mind, bursting with pictures from “The Time of Heroes,” could fill in all gaps.
What the live model fed into her imagination, however, were properties that no piece of marble possessed. The glow of living skin, the sheen of sweat, and a scent so compelling the word that shot into her mind was something from the Greek myths: ambrosia, the liquid of the gods. The longer he posed the more it poured out of him, a reek that was half him and half the spray he had doused himself with. Alessandra found herself breathing faster just to get more of it into herself. At one point she even felt her nostrils had turned into a new form of eyes. Without realizing it, she was getting all her impressions from the air around her, applying the clay with the lids of her real eyes shut tight.
*******
Seven months after the class, the woman with three breasts stood up from her sewing machine and sat down at her computer. The smell of the model was as alive for her as it was on the day of the class, and it haunted her. Her business had begun to stumble from the effects. That powerful tool of hers – imagination – was so absorbed in the model it was running wild, with precious little left over for stitching and designing. Something had to be done, and finally she had acted. Unable to sleep or work, she had phoned the teacher of the sculpture class. She spoke in the coolest, most objective business voice she could muster, asking for the model’s name and contact information. It was all about opportunity, she said, opportunity for him. As a fashion designer, she said, she had thoughts now and then about a men’s line – a few choice pieces that fit the name Narcissus: a pocket scarf, a neckband, something bold on the wrist, whatever. For some reason, encountering the model had sharpened her focus on these musings. There was something about him, a je ne sais qua, that made her begin to see the finished pieces, their rhythm and flow. At any rate, she needed to see him again and have a personal session – for which she would pay well.
The teacher gave up the goods, and Alessandra began an email exchange with the model at once. His first name was Tom, which she assumed explained the first part of his email address – TMWFT – which was followed by the usual @ sign and internet provider name.
Today she had stitched next to nothing, but it was as much sewing as she could take. All the magic and promise was radiating from the computer, and she opened it like a banshee. She sat on tenterhooks while the screen filled, suffering the drone of the log-on process as though it were the grinding of centuries. The instant the buzzing stopped she opened her email, and there it was in the inbox, TMWFT re:today. He would stop by her place mid-afternoon, he accepted her financial offer, he would pose or be fitted, be sketched or photographed. He concluded, with an e-smile, that he was ready, willing and able to become the poster boy for Narcissus. Reading it, Alessandra’s head swam, as though the scent of the model was seeping through the emoticon and enveloping her.
And then it was there, really there, a dense cloud of it, as she opened her apartment door and let him in. The aura of him deepened and sharpened as he stripped down in the scant clearing of floor between the dress forms, fabric bolts and the racks of half-sewn garments. Once again he wore a cup and a thong, nothing else. Once again, the thong was blue. Alessandra wondered if it was the same thong as before, and the thought that it probably was – a live link to the day in the museum - hit her like a shot of absinthe, the banned lethal kind, dripping desire. She had to stand guard over every word that came out of her lips, to keep her real feelings from blowing the business façade to smithereens.
She showed him swatches and color samples and scribbled a few impressions on a sketch pad, just to give him a sense that there was a palette and a concept or two behind what they were doing. Today would be brainstorming, she said, just trying things. And then she asked him to stand with both arms raised and bent at the elbows, hands pressing the sides of his hair, as though he had just come up from the ocean or the bottom of a pool, soaking wet. He laughed and asked if that meant he was Narcissus, in which case he would be staring back at the pool, or a mer-man, in which case he would look wonder-struck finding himself in a world without water.
Alessandra seized the opportunity and said if he were a mer-man, and maybe even Narcissus too, he wouldn’t be wearing a mass-produced thong with a piece of athletic equipment stuck inside it. To say what she said was such a leap it made her sweat all over - but to hear her say it made Tom sweat even more. The windows of the room were shut tight and the thermostat was high, set that way on purpose by Alessandra, and now she had the exact moment she had wanted, the sense of being locked in a terrarium with some tropical man-plant, so pungent he had her in near delirium, and in the very next moment she would watch him step out of the thong…
He started to lower it - but suddenly he balked and hitched it back up. What she had caught at the museum, that strip-club bravado, it seemed to drain out of his face and even his limbs, just like that, dulling the skin tone.
This isn’t a class full of students, she said. It’s just me, it’s just us. What’s wrong?
But all he did was stand there, muscles and sinews frozen, haunches stalled like a horse spooked by a wolf howl. She felt the air change, become drier and cooler. Whatever it was that seized him was like a frost creeping onto his skin, killing the spicy sheen, and the ambrosia with it.
Alessandra offered to undress him herself, but this spooked him even more. He shied and stammered and finally came up with a way to defend himself. He turned the game of cat and mouse into a new sport: if you show me yours, I’ll show you mine.
He challenged her to drop the sketch pad – and more. From the waist up, he said, she was covered – there was blouse fabric from both wrists all the way to her neck. If she wanted him to show bottom the least she could do was show top.
Never, she said, because I’m paying you. And I can pay you more too. Is that what you want, Tom? Is that it?
His response was an icy stab cloaked in laughter, a verbal shiver. He told her she had no idea what she was asking for. And when she asked yet again he said, in a dark whisper, consider yourself warned.
With that he thumbed the cloth at both hips, yanked it down and stepped out. She saw it all, the man and the manhood. But there was something about the pouch and its contents. It was swollen with balls, it was abundant, but it was so much more abundant than Alessandra had ever expected.
TMWFT, he said, bitterly. The man with four testicles. Now you know why I’m the loneliest man in the world.
In the moments before she spoke, Alessandra considered the possibilities. Her brain spun with them. She could, and should, reveal herself. At last there was a man with whom she had common ground. He would understand her, they could be lovers. Their difference from the rest of humanity would be their bond. But the more she stared at him the more she wanted to turn away – and, in the end, the woman with three breasts scorned the man with four testicles. Everything that attracted her to the figures in “The Time of Heroes” – the utter physical perfection - made her repulsed by the figure that stood before her, this aberration in flesh and blood.
She dismissed him and shut the door in his face. She never, ever ventured again from the world of imaginary men.