by STEVE MARTIN
This time, however, while waiting for the buyer’s inevitable yes, Lolita was experiencing a nagging pull at her psyche: she felt a desire to work. This was a monumental shift in her thinking, as Lolita had never worked a day in her life, except at being Lolita. I’m husbanded out, she thought. I wouldn’t mind strolling into some boutique around ten and strolling out around three, after a nice long lunch that’s paid for by the shop. I would love to pop down off a stool whenever a customer came in. I’m good at that. She also thought it would be fun to set the timers at a tanning salon. Hell, she’d already learned to set her own at Christophe’s; why not get paid for it? Yet standing in the kitchen, tugged by opposing ... forces would be too strong a word; nouns is perhaps better-lethargy and boredom—she just couldn’t muster enough energy to pick up the phone and make some inquiries in the job market. However, a few seconds later, when her cordless coincidentally rang, the sensory jolt provided her with enough current to get her arms moving, and she answered the phone.
“Don’t you hula hoop?” It was her friend Christine from the beauty salon, calling to say that one of her clients was looking for someone to teach hula hoop to a child star for a movie that was set in the sixties. “To get the job, you have to meet a guy named Laszlo for an interview. Here’s his number.” It was the perfect moment, and the suggestion electro-charged the dormant section of her brain called “work.” In the time it took the phone to travel from her ear to its cradle, Lolita had decided to put on her other yellow mini and drive into Burbank for an appointment with Laszlo.
Laszlo, who looked more like a Morty, sat in what was a surprisingly dingy office for someone who must be such a big movie executive. Lolita responded to his first no-eye-contact question: “Name?”
“Lo-lee-tah.” She spoke her name like a steam radiator with consonants.
“Last name?”
“Lolita Rooney-Burton-WinnFortensky-Guccioni,” she said, omitting a few names for time and adding a few to jazz it up.
“Education?”
Uncomfortable, Lolita squeaked in her seat as the polyester of her dress skidded in the shellacked chair. “Couldn’t we do this on the golf course?” she asked. Laszlo squinched his face into a question mark, glanced up at Lolita for the first time, looked over at his wall clock, then snapped his chin once, signifying, Let’s go.
Lolita’s body was particularly suited for golf, whereas her interlocutor’s wasn’t. Laszlo swung his three wood as though he were using it to drive a nail into a garden. Sometimes Laszlo’s ball would accidentally squirt forward; sometimes it would be driven into the dirt, where it looked like a buried eyeball. Lolita’s swing, on the other hand, was a beautiful thing even to hear: a long accelerating whoosh, broken by a bullwhip crack in its fat center. There was also the three-act stage play of Lolita setting the ball down on the tee. Only this time it wasn’t box boys and checkout girls watching; it was money managers and stock traders—all embryo husbands, waiting to be born. In her yellow mini, she looked like a small sun rolling from green to green. By the end of the game, not only had Lolita won the job; she had also sold her house to the pro.
When the money came in, three months later, Lolita bought a two-story California-style in West Hollywood and nestled herself between the clink of Beverly Hills gold plate on one side and a self-reliant gay enclave on the other. The only negative consequence of the move was that her supermarket forays no longer had the desired effect. Box boys, instead of giving her the once-over, would now simply spot-check her for an Adam’s apple.
Lolita’s new location, only seventeen miles from her old one, was a total reformation in lifestyle. She had a string of dates, some of them with the deeply smitten Laszlo, and she conducted her hula hoop class on an almost regular basis, which brought in extra money for facials and massages. Her fourth husband, Leo, the one she really loved, would pop over occasionally, bringing a gift basket from a Beverly Hills bath shop, and sometimes she would smooch with him in return, but that was all. She was invited to premieres and gallery openings, and she could walk into Beverly Hills to the Pay-Less for the autobronzing cream she now favored over the tanning salons. Lolita’s life had metamorphosed, as it always did, with an easy glide and a minimum of effort.
Now, sublimely niched into her new life, with all her powers working utterly, having applied a light touch of makeup in case of an early postal delivery, she slides into the puff pastry that is her bed and glances over at the newly antique photo of a middle-aged man named Humbert, which she has resurrected from the back of a dresser drawer during the move. She looks around the bedroom, which is high enough and secure enough to let her sleep with the window open, and bathes herself in two fine thoughts: that all her lovers have been true, and that her life keeps getting better and better.
A Word from the Words
First, let me say how much I enjoy being one of the words in this book and how grateful I am for this opportunity to speak for the whole group. Often we’re so busy speaking for others that we never get to speak for ourselves, or directly to you, the reader. I guess it’s redundant to say “you, the reader,” but we’re not used to writing, and it sounds better to my ear than, say, “you, the two giant fists that are holding me” or “you, the large, heavy mass of protoplasm.”
There’s also a nice variety of words in this book, and that always makes it fun. We can hang around with the tough utilitarian words, like the, and have a few beers, or we can wander over and visit the lofty perambulate, who turned out to be a very nice verb with a very lovely wife, tutu. Fuzzy also turned out to be a lot of fun; she had a great sense of humor and a welcoming manner that we all learned from. I can never decide whether I’d like to be proletariat or bourgeois in this world of words. The common words, such as the pronouns and the transitive verbs, get used a lot, but they’re tired (you should see them running around here, carrying their objects). The exciting words, like fo’c’sle, make a lot of impact but aren’t frequently called into service. I’m lucky. I’m underpants. Sometimes I’m used innocuously, but other times I get to be in very racy sentences in some pretty damn good books. Of course, some usages I find shocking. Which is a point I’d like to make: When you read something that disgusts you, don’t blame the word. Scrotum goes around here like someone just shot his best friend, but really he’s a legitimate guy who gets used in ugly ways by a lot of cheeseballs. Likewise pimple. I was there when he got used as “a pimple on the face of humanity.” The poor guy was blue for a month. He walked around here with a hangdog look and even tried to be friends with hangdog look, but around here, a phrase won’t mingle with a word; they just won’t. It also irks me that two ordinary words can be given a hyphen and suddenly they’re all-important. Me? Of course I would love to be a proper noun, but I’m not, so that’s that. Even with the current fad of giving children unusual names, it’s unlikely that any couple will call a newborn Underpants.
This is also my first experience being on a page, since my typing on January 23 (birthday coming up!). When I was a computer word, things were great. I could blast through cyberspace, scroll across screens, travel to India. Now that I’m on the page, I’m worried that it’s going to be mostly dark. My request to you, the person above me, with the two gigantic lenses over your eyes, is that you occasionally open the book after you have finished reading it and give all of us a little air. A simple thumbing through will do. Not that I’m unhappy in here. There are enough diverse words that our little civilization can keep itself amused for the twenty or so years we expect to be on a shelf, or stacked in a corner, or sold in a garage.
I’d also like to say something to you budding writers. Believe me, I do understand that sometimes it’s essential to use incorrect grammar. That is fine with me, and the words who are in those sentences are aware of their lot in life. But it’s difficult to even hang around an incomplete sentence, much less be in one. I imagine it’s like talking to a person whose head is missing. It just doesn’t feel right. A friend of mine has been misspell
ed in a computer file for over fourteen years, and it doesn’t look like he’s ever going to be spell-checked.
There are a couple of individuals who would like to speak:
I’m the word sidle, and it was fun to be in that story about the dog (i couldn’t see the title from where I was).
Greetings. I’m scummy, and I’d like to mention that you are a lowlife.
Hello. I’m hello, and I’d like to say myself.
And now we’d like to hear from a group of individuals without whom none of the work we do would be possible:
Hi. We’re the letters, and we’d just like to say that we enjoy being a part of the very fine words on this page. Thank you.
And last but not least, someone very special to the whole crew here in Pure Drivel would like to end this book:
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