Welcome to the weekend!
It’s damp and cold, so let’s talk about lookers in the summertime. Good-looking women are the best, especially those who know it and dress to accentuate the fact. I like them so much that I married one — gorgeous, blonde, and wonderfully feminine. The trouble is, the remaining billions of women don’t become unattractive just because a man twists on a wedding ring. Instead, willpower and self-discipline must be developed to appreciate beauty while not permitting it to become a distracting, embarrassing vice.
Easy words, middlingly successful in practice.
For instance, it’s not fun explaining to one’s wife why your cranium has mimicked the great horned owl in the grocery store cereal aisle as some lady in her Sunday best has strolled past to fetch Special K. The wife is rightly a bit miffed and bemused — she can’t seem to understand why you are the way you are. Meanwhile, you yourself are wondering what happened; after all, you were just a moment ago fixed on the pros and cons of the various permutations of Honey Bunches of Oats. How did an alien set of hips’ magnetism arrest the gaze without conscious authorization from HQ (that blob of sclerotic grey matter behind the eyes)?
Irwin Shaw’s “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” captures this fraught dynamic between the sexes well. The tale is dry, painfully cogent, and brief. The conclusion is worth considering, as I disagree with its findings but admit to all of its observations of the male psyche.
Shaw begins:
Fifth Avenue was shining in the sun when they left the Brevoort and started walking toward Washington Square. The sun was warm, even though it was November, and everything looked like Sunday morning–the buses, and the well-dressed people walking slowly in couples and the quiet buildings with the windows closed.
Michael held Frances’ arm tightly as they walked downtown in the sunlight. They walked lightly, almost smiling, because they had slept late and had a good breakfast and it was Sunday. Michael unbuttoned his coat and let it flap around him in the mild wind. They walked, without saying anything, among the young and pleasant-looking people who somehow seem to make up most of the population of that section of New York City.
“Look out,” Frances said, as they crossed Eighth Street. “You’ll break your neck.”
Michael laughed and Frances laughed with him.
“She’s not so pretty, anyway,” Frances said. “Anyway, not pretty enough to take a chance breaking your neck looking at her.”
Michael laughed again. He laughed louder this time, but not as solidly. “She wasn’t a bad-looking girl. She had a nice complexion. Country-girl complexion. How did you know I was looking at her?” Frances cocked her head to one side and smiled at her husband under the tip-tilted brim of her hat. “Mike, darling . . .” she said.
Michael laughed, just a little laugh this time. “Okay,” he said. “The evidence is in. Excuse me. It was the complexion. It’s not the sort of complexion you see much in New York. Excuse me.”
Frances patted his arm lightly and pulled him along a little faster toward Washington Square.
“This is a nice morning,” she said. “This is a wonderful morning. When I have breakfast with you it makes me feel good all day.”
“Tonic,” Michael said. “Morning pickup. Rolls and coffee with Mike and you’re on the alkali side, guaranteed.”
“That’s the story. Also, I slept all night, wound around you like a rope.”
“Saturday night,” he said. “I permit such liberties only when the week’s work is done.”
“You’re getting fat,” she said.
“Isn’t it the truth? The lean man from Ohio.”
“I love it,” she said, “an extra five pounds of husband.”
“I love it, too,” Michael said gravely.
You can read the rest here.
Ultimately, we get to the end (most stories have them), wherein the former love birds discuss Michael’s inability to control either his eyes or imagination — which will seemingly lead to his abandoning Frances:
She began to cry, silently, into her handkerchief, bent over just enough so that nobody else in the bar would notice. “Someday,” she said, crying, “you’re going to make a move . . .”
Michael didn’t say anything. He sat watching the bartender slowly peel a lemon.
“Aren’t you?” Frances asked harshly. “Come on, tell me. Talk. Aren’t you?”
“Maybe,” Michael said. He moved his chair back again. “How the hell do I know?”
“You know,” Frances persisted. “Don’t you know?”
“Yes,” Michael said after a while. “I know.”
Frances stopped crying then. Two or three snuffles into the handkerchief and she put it away and her face didn’t tell anything to anybody. “At least do me one favor,” she said.
“Sure.”
“Stop talking about how pretty this woman is, or that one. Nice eyes, nice breasts, a pretty figure, good voice,” she mimicked his voice. “Keep it to yourself. I’m not interested.”
“Excuse me.” Michael waved to the waiter. “I’ll keep it to myself.”
Frances flicked the corner of her eyes. “Another brandy,” she told the waiter.
“Two,” Michael said.
“Yes, ma’am, yes, sir,” said the waiter, backing away.
Frances regarded him coolly across the table. “Do you want me to call the Stevensons?” she asked. “It’ll be nice in the country.”
“Sure,” Michael said. “Call them up.”
She got up from the table and walked across the room toward the telephone. Michael watched her walk, thinking, What a pretty girl, what nice legs.
We can read the conclusion as sympathetic hyperrealism, similar to Joyce’s ultimate chapter in Ulysses, “Penelope,” where the protagonist’s wife, Molly, toys with a host of extra-marital sexual fantasies. The structure therein is a stream of her consciousness, and the reader is left unsure of how seriously to take the products of her sweaty midnight musings. But Michael says all of his dirt aloud to his wife, who he knows will be grievously hurt. He’s despicable, even if much of what he says is true of our own selfish and momentary flights of fancy.
Michael’s most egregious sin is never viewing his wife Frances as anything but another woman on the New York City sidewalk. Men like to look at women — most all of the time. Women like men to look at them — on occasion, depending on the man and how she’s feeling about herself. Men are not beasts and should acknowledge their impulses and restrain them while elevating their wives to more than a set of shapely legs.
A man can’t control his perception of the beauty of other women, but he can decide that his lady is the most beautiful of the lot — and then make that decision every day. It’s the difference between a teenage boy with a Victoria’s Secret catalogue and a patriarch; a peruser and progenitor.
Cue Joe Dolan:
