Nude Men

start picking up people, her presence gives me more courage, and makes me seem safer. In addition, two people give off an air of greater authority and credibility than one does.
    The man finally takes down a book entitled How to Break Your Addiction to a Person.
    My mother nudges me, her eyes wide open, and her mouth in the shape of an O. O as in “Oh! Look at what he’s reading.” Not O as in “O.I.M.,” for I haven’t told her about that, about what kind of man we’re looking for.
    I instantly decide that he’s a very good Optical Illusion Man. What an unlikely type of man to be addicted to a person. What type of person is she or he? Does she or he know?
    He’s about forty. He looks like he works in an office. He must have stopped at the bookstore after his job, to see if he could get some help in overcoming his infatuation with that woman, or man, perhaps.
    “Excuse me,” I say.
    The man turns around. He seems very self-conscious about the book he’s holding, the way he’s so aggressively not looking at it, but maybe I’m just projecting onto him the way I would feel in his place.
    “We were wondering if you’d be interested in posing for a painter.”
    The man licks his lips in confusion. He puckers his mouth, about to say something, but seems unsure of what to say. “I’m sorry?” he finally says.
    “We need a model, to pose for a painter, and we were wondering if you’d be interested. It’s just for an hour or two, today or tomorrow. And there’s a salary of fifty dollars an hour.”
    He asks us questions, which we answer. Then he says, “No, sorry.”
    He wanted to get as much information as possible, as many goodies of our weirdness, though knowing from the very beginning that he was going to say no. He wanted to hear all the juicy details, so that he’d have a wonderful story to tell his adored person, and maybe she or he would like him back after he told about so great an experience in such a clever, witty way, and how he looked down upon that weird man who pissed the hell out of him when he caught him reading How to Break Your Addiction to a Person.
    I would never have the guts to pick up such a book in public. And anyway, I don’t have an addiction to a person, thank God. I have had in the past, but at this point in my life I’m free.
    It’s not so hard to find O.I.M.s, I realize. Almost everyone is an Optical Illusion Person. Isn’t everyone almost a certain way, but not quite?
    We go to hardware stores. Big men with blond mustaches tell us no. Sometimes they don’t even speak, they droop their eyelids halfway down their eyes and slowly shake their heads. Sometimes they say “Hell no!”
    In bakeries, men say “Naah,” very nasally, while they are buying their pastries.
    In shoe stores, men try to be nicer. They’re more educated and more polite. They are elegant and seated. They are heads of famdies, those men, with wives and small children at home, in houses with chimneys that smoke only on rare occasions. Their socks smell like flowers, and after they tell us no, they tell the salesman, “Ouch, they’re a bit tight.”
    In the pet stores, the men are more surprised than anywhere else, I wonder why. And they express their surprise verbally, no mere lifts of the eyebrows. “Well, that’s mighty unusual,” they say. “I’ve never heard of this before. It’s original. Wowee. Well, well. But I’m sorry, pal”—slap on my arm—“I’d love to, but I’m very busy. Good luck, though.”
     
    “I don’t know if we’ll ever find an O.I.M. who’s interested,” I mutter, walking down the street.
    “What’s an oim?” asks my mother. “I didn’t know we were looking for an oim.”
    “Not oim. O.I.M. Optical Illusion Man. A man who is almost a certain way but not quite.” I don’t feel like getting into it deeper than that. Only one of us needs to know what we’re looking for.
    We enter a coffee shop.
    My mother points to a man sitting at a little table near the window. He’s alone, eating a chocolate crepe. I must admit she’s right. She is absolutely and completely right. She has an amazing talent for finding the best O.I.M. A great eye for it. It must be beginner’s luck.
    O.I.M.ness emanates from every shred of his person. He is even more extreme than I am. Exquisite choice. Superb specimen. He eats slowly and quickly at the same time; it’s hard to tell which. Two chews, swallow. One chew, swallow. Slow chews, but few chews. Even though the chews