Farewell to Arms

Brother, sister, child and pet, do I mean the taut glory of the outer thigh? Do I mean the curves where it's all streamline and suggestion, where the promise is the faintest vapor on the air? Do I mean a neck? Take it from me, brother, necks are okay. Oh, and what about that meadowlike expanse across the back, from the shoulder line down, with its muscular tides, its shallows, its occasional pools of limpid viscosity. Do I mean that?

I know you do not read this kind of utterance regularly, as if it's some big secret that men look at women's parts, then women, then womankind, in primordial ways. But it's honest, and it is well rooted in the literature of men. Irwin Shaw wrote a famous short story called "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses," about a young, happily married guy with the all-American name of Mike who could not stop looking at the antecedents of the story's title, much to his wife's pain. Then there's a ditty from the '50s consecrating the eternal nature of the vision quest, with the fabulous lyric "Standing on the corner, watching all the girls go by." It sounds so innocent, yet it would probably cost you a career today. And you can go back even further to the Elizabethan age when Robert Herrick, contemplating his lady love and commenting for the ages on "the liquefaction of her clothes," meaning, of course, that in that pre-plastic age, he was watching gravity and musculature do their business as his Julia, in her silks, undulated by. Oh, brother, could this guy write a poem today or what?

What about the way they sit, legs crossed, one foot loose, its little ersatz shoelet all a-dangle, perhaps oblivious to the message the whole construction of bone and joint and dangle and tight knee and splurge of thigh is putting out.

If you'll allow me to continue as the kind policewoman adjusts my manacles, young man with no pulse, look at yon beauty and appreciate that we who came before yielded our ids and our libidos for your benefit. So that you would not even notice her, we were programmed to react strongly to certain stimuli, which would today make you laugh yourself sick. Or maybe not. Maybe our suffering wantonness had nothing to do with the generalized trend toward nudity today, but I have to say, it sure felt as if it did. It feels like we suffered in eternal frustration, crucified upon a cross of yearning, so that you, our benefactors, could not pay attention.

We were the rats in a Madison Avenue experiment meant to determine if temptation without consummation translated into surrogate trysts with unnecessary products. We proved the principle's accuracy: Show us a woman we could never have, and whatever you are selling, we will buy it.

So we were programmed. Capitalism bought our souls cheap. That's where the high heel comes in. The heel, the way it pressured her limbs by its torturous angle so that the calves were ripped; that, for years, was what we thought sex was about. Hmm, and if you sheathed that calf in a dark sheen of something retro called a nylon stocking, you sent EKGs V-2ing through the roof. Then it changed to a peppy blond California beach girl, so wholesome, so vivid, so unattainable. We couldn't have her, but we could buy her products and we did. We were numbed by an endless parade of the unattainable, each showing us a fraction more flesh. We bought it, we were seduced, we were bankrupted, morally, spiritually and financially. Lord, what fools these mortals be.

So pity us old men whose libidos were crippled and bent on the harsh anvil of the '50s. This is what we know. This is how we were designed. These are our lessons. This is our legacy.

Now they go by, the girls in their summer dresses, and we stand on the corner and watch and marvel at the liquefaction of their clothes and the glory of their flesh, and of course they don't even register us as authentic carbon-based life-forms. Serves us right, I guess. We look, we yearn, we remember, we hope and, as today, we can't help but wonder if we'll be around when April, the kindest month, finally arrives.