Nude Men

her life. It was indeed an unforgettable experience. She suddenly asks me how Laura is doing and how it feels to be living with her. I tell her it feels nice.
    “Do you spend lots of time together?” she asks.
    “Yes, when she’s home. But she often has to leave for a few days to perform in other cities.”
    “Is she away right now?” asks Sara.
    “Yes, actually. She’s in California for two days.”
    The fruit in Sara is starting to smell riper. It is more exquisite than ever, but closer to being less so.
     
    T hat night, Sara visits me, wearing her dress the color of the sun and her beard. She wants me to shave her beard. She says it’s important, meaningful, intimate, sensual, and romantic.
    “You won’t be able to resist me when you shave me,” she says.
    We go into the bathroom and I start shaving her beard, and I immediately and uncontrollably begin to cry. Then Sara cries. Our noses run over our mustaches, and our tears run into our beards. After I’ve shaved half her face, we start to kiss and to hug each other, still crying. Then Sara goes and lies down on my bed. I take out my little white elephant, slide it onto a gold chain, and hook it around Sara’s neck. She recognizes it from the story she read in my diary. She thanks me, squeezes the elephant in her palm, and makes a silent wish. I lie next to her and hold her. If at this point she were to ask me again to make love to her, I would not refuse, even though half her beard is still there. But she does not ask. We fall asleep crying.
    While we sleep, I dream a strange nightmare, in which Sara wants to handcuff me to the foot of the couch the following morning. At first I refuse, but she insists until I finally agree. She then changes her mind about the location and handcuffs me instead to the bottom drawer of one of the file cabinets Laura bought to make me feel more at home. I see that I will always be a slave to file cabinets. Sara then lowers my pants and sits on me and, still wearing her dress the color of the sun and her half beard, has sex with me. Then, still in the dream, the door to my apartment opens, and my friend Tommy comes in, at which point Sara stops moving and remains sitting on me.
    “The door was open, so I came in,” he says.
    Tommy has a special relationship with doors. They are never closed for him; they simply don’t treat him that way. They are always open, unless they’re locked. And I have forgotten to lock my door.
    “How’re you doing, man?” I ask him, trying to sound casual.
    “Fine. I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d stop by. Are you busy?”
    “No, not at all,” Sara and I both answer.
    “I don’t think we’ve met,” he says to Sara, and shakes her hand. He does not comment on her half beard.
    They do small talk, which I don’t listen to because I’m frantically trying to think of an explanation to give him as to why I’m handcuffed to the file cabinet with Sara sitting on me, in case he asks. But they keep talking, and I’m starting to feel vaguely like a couch: incidental.
    “What are you guys doing anyway?” Tommy finally asks.
    “We are acting out the famous fairy tale ‘The Princess and the Pea,’ ” I tell him. “I’m playing the mattress.”
    “And the pea,” Sara adds.
    “Is he any good?” Tommy asks her.
    “Yes, especially as the pea.”
    “And why the handcuffs?”
    “Because I’m an object,” I reply, glaring at Sara. “Mattresses and peas are helpless things.”
    Eventually Tommy leaves, telling us not to get up, he’ll let himself out. And that’s the end of the dream.
    In the morning, I half expect Sara to ask me if she can handcuff me to one of the file cabinets, but she doesn’t. She asks me to shave the rest of her beard, which I do, and then she requests me to escort her back home by subway, because she wants to be wearing her dress the color of the sun in the subway. This we do.
     
    W hen we arrive at Henrietta’s apartment, we find her in bed, the blankets up to her nose. Not even her fingers stick out. “What’s wrong?” we ask.
    “Nothing. I just have a slight cold.” She looks at Sara. “You shaved your beard.”
    “No. Jeremy shaved me. Don’t you think he did a good job?”
    “Yes. It looks nice.”
    “He’s better at it than we are. You shave me the way you shave your legs and armpits. I shave myself the way I’d shave a doll’s head. But Jeremy shaves me the way a real man shaves a real woman’s beard.”
    “Yes,”