Nude Men

elephant, hold it tight in my hand, and make a wish on it. This may sound retarded, and I agree completely: it is, if you don’t know the details.
    Unlike normal people, I never got over my childhood obsession with magic. And I have a very good reason for that. When I was eleven, something happened to me that should never happen to children because it can mess up their minds forever.
    That summer, at the beach, I found an ivory elephant in the sand. A gold loop stuck out of its back. It was a pendant. I was rather pleased.
    I sat on a sandy hill and decided I would test the white elephant for magic powers, something I did about twenty times a day, with any object I happened to come across, perhaps because my mother was not religious and I was not brought up religiously. In fact, I was gently discouraged from getting interested in religion. I recall asking her, when I was nine, whether I could start attending Sunday school with my friends. She answered, “What would you prefer, to attend Sunday school or get a guitar?” I said a guitar, of course, but was a bit disappointed nevertheless. I was never even baptized, but I’m not complaining; I like it that way. However, I suppose most people crave belief in the supernatural in one form or another. Personally, I prefer to believe in little objects rather than in a big blurry thing. It’s more original, if nothing else.
    Despite their originality, my experiments never worked, so I went about testing the objects mechanically, without any real hope, which is how I proceeded that day, sitting on the sandy hill. I wanted to get this compulsive chore over with, so I held the elephant in my right fist and thought to it halfheartedly: If you are magic, I make a wish that when I put my hand in the sand, there will be a quarter.
    I wearily put my left hand in the sand, at my side, and there was a quarter. I raised it to my face and stared at it, while a hurricane of chills coursed through my body. And the thought I kept repeating to myself, was: I knew magic existed! I knew it. You see, I was right, I knew it all along.
    And then I thought: This is incredible. I will not tell anyone. I will not make another wish right away. I must think, first, what to do, how to go about it. I don’t want to ruin it.
    I was not able to wait more than ten minutes before making another wish, to test it again. I don’t remember what my second wish was, but it did not come true, and neither did any wish after that. I also wished on the quarter, on the chance the elephant had transferred its powers to it. But it had not. For a few months I kept both the quarter and the elephant sacredly, and then I neglected the quarter. I don’t know what became of it, hut I never lost the elephant. Could you imagine losing such a thing!
    So that explains my long-term psychological damage. The coincidence of finding a quarter under the sand on a beach, right where you put your fingers after having made a wish to find one, that coincidence is so enormous, how can it not mess you up?
    The result is that after all these years, I still keep my little white elephant on my night table and often make wishes on it before I go to sleep. These elephant wishes never come true, except maybe one in fifty, by coincidence, and those are the easy general wishes. Sometimes I wish on other curious objects that happen to strike my fancy, hoping I might find another source of magic, but those wishes don’t come more true than the elephant ones.
    Right now, sitting on my bed, I take the elephant out of its gray felt pouch, hold it tight in my fist, close my eyes, and think: If you are magic, I make a wish that Lady Henrietta finds me good-looking when I pose for her. In fact, I want her to find me the most beautiful man she has ever seen, and I want her to fall in love with me, if she hasn’t already.
    I breathe deeply, squeeze the elephant, and add: Please.
    I open my eyes, and methodically put the elephant back in its pouch.
    Making wishes on the elephant is emotionally dangerous, because inevitably one’s hopes rise abnormally high, unhealthily high, and when the wish does not come true, one’s high hopes get crushed more painfully than if one had not asked for the help of supernatural powers. Therefore, one should always try to make the wish casually and forget about it instantly after making it, which is what I try to do now.
    I make an appointment in a tanning salon for eight o’clock that night. In the meantime, I do