Frying Pans: Chapter 15

(Re)Making Love: a serial Memoir

Come in the middle? Here’re links to ➡️ Chapter One, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9 , Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14

Frying Pans

Charade: The Oxford English Dictionary (I own it: all seventeen volumes that include the supplements for my edition) notes that Thackeray (William Makepeace: don’t you love his middle name? A command to be taken to heart) used the word in Vanity Fair in 1848: The performers disappeared to get ready for the second charade-tableau.

After Becky Sharp has achieved the coup of marriage in chapter XVI, our narrator notes that the children dressed themselves and acted plays.

And so I dress myself and act in my play in search of a happy ending: I’m a sucker for wishing that does some good.

Becky Sharp’s story of social climbing struck me as particularly grim and nothing like the fairy tale she sought—or the one I’m after. One concludes she would have kissed anyone to get where she could be.

Are you wondering if the princess does not kiss the “Frog-Prince,” what then does she do? There are two versions, plus the one Disney has provided, the kiss fulfilled, but whose roots lie with those grim brothers.

In The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales that I own based on the translation by Margaret Hunt, the princess, ordered by her ethical father to honor her word, must take the frog to bed with her. Instead, she places him in the corner of her bedroom. The frog says, “I am tired, I want to sleep as well as you, lift me up or I will tell your father.” At this she was terribly angry, and took him up and threw him with all her might against the wall. “Now you be quiet, odious frog.”

And with this angry and aggressive act upon his being, the frog becomes the prince. But this is not the end of the story.

There is no end to the ways a woman may hit a man over the head with a frying pan.

Oh, how good I am at this. I write it.

I had been reading and re-reading Joyce’s Ulysses when a married man, w., who knows I am separated calls me.

I look at the rug in my condo through the bottom of my wine glass, watch the last of the wine slosh to the edge of the glass and through the glass see the blur of another rug that was the first thing D. and I’d bought and that he now owns. I see home distorted through the bottom of the glass.

The man who calls is a reader of Joyce. He tells me he would like to name my private part “Molly.” Here is the fantasy: Perhaps he will fall in love, leave his wife?

He says to me who has lost and who has waited and who wants sex, who wants to be cocked, cooked, corked by him who might be kind or not. I think I don’t care. I’d waited long and looked through the glass, through the wine darkly.

I meet him briefly during the day. He cannot meet me in the evening. He picks me up in his Jaguar, drives me to the Potomac River front.

When we walk along the river that afternoon he picks a penny from the grass and gives it to me after I show it to him lying there in the grass. I, speak of “seeing,” because I want to be seen. (“Penny-Jack”—an early version of the “Frog Prince”) He places the penny in my palm and now it is in my pocket, warm from his hand that he wanted between my legs, this man I resisted—but it’s getting harder to do.

Image by Gio Barlett on Unsplash

And penance and grief (Ulysses, 11.1031), misquoting Joyce and thinking of the penance I should do but I am unrepentant. I think, Free. His hand between my legs, a man who wants me, a man whose cock gets cocked for me. That’s the sin I want. I’m in grief but not penitent. A new experience.

And I have underwear.

After the D.-kissing-of-the-second-girlfriend—let us call it ‘the second incident’—I went to Neiman Marcus and spent 1500 bucks on La Perla underwear. And it wasn’t as hard as you might think to spend that much money on underwear and not as much underwear as you might think.

On underwear, I offer this probably apocryphal story about Florenz Ziegfeld and his Follies: When asked why he bought expensive silk underwear for all his chorus girls, underwear that never was seen by the audience, Flo answered, “The girls know.”

I told D. what I’d bought and how much I’d spent.

Many ways to hit a man over the head with a frying pan.

Ah, I am more aggressive than I pretend to be or like to think I am. In my shopping and most certainly in my fantasies.

I believe the girls may know, but that men care little for underwear because that’s what I’d learned. I now hope for men who would be boys. I think the dirty thought when I read Big Benaben. Big Benben. (Ulysses, 11.53) Time tolls for Bloom and me. Cocked not corked but easily cocked for me, I dream, while Bloom wanders and Molly and Blazes go at it.

The false priest. (Ulysses, 11.1016) What did that mean? Did she need a priest, a shrink? Virgin should say: or fingered only (Ulysses, 11.1086). I want to be fingered, not in despair but in the joy of being: A flute alive and I play the flute but didn’t want to be played the way I’d been played—with practiced touch. No. I want a man who would see me as a flute that has been waiting to be played.

Another version of the “Frog-Prince” can be found at Authorama:

[T]he king said to the young princess, ‘As you have given your word you must keep it; so go and let him in.’ She did so, and the frog hopped into the room, and then straight on–tap, tap–plash, plash–from the bottom of the room to the top, till he came up close to the table where the princess sat. ‘Pray lift me upon the chair,’ said he to the princess, ‘and let me sit next to you.’ As soon as she had done this, the frog said, ‘Put your plate nearer to me, that I may eat out of it.’ This she did, and when he had eaten as much as he could, he said, ‘Now I am tired; carry me upstairs, and put me into your bed.’ And the princess, though very unwilling, took him up in her hand, and put him upon the pillow of her own bed, where he slept all night long. As soon as it was light he jumped up, hopped downstairs, and went out of the house. ‘Now, then,’ thought the princess, ‘at last he is gone, and I shall be troubled with him no more.’

But she was mistaken; for when night came again she heard the same tapping at the door; and the frog came once more, and said:

‘Open the door, my princess dear,
Open the door to thy true love here!
And mind the words that thou and I said
By the fountain cool, in the greenwood shade.’

And when the princess opened the door the frog came in, and slept upon her pillow as before, till the morning broke. And the third night he did the same. But when the princess awoke on the following morning she was astonished to see, instead of the frog, a handsome prince, gazing on her with the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen, and standing at the head of her bed.

I am drawn to the toss-on-the-wall story perhaps because when wishing still did some good, I’d wished for the proverbial frying pan. More because that version ends with another anecdote about the prince’s servant Faithful Henry, so distraught at his master’s dilemma (turned into a frog) that he caused three iron bands to be laid around his heart.

I wish for Faithful Henry.

In the charade that continues here and that was my life, here is what happened:

And then I dated. And then I worried that I would become Becky Sharp, that I would find and give in to money and status over love, that I would not recognize the frog-prince.

Princess meets the frog by Liiga Karina

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Coming next Chapter 16 “Hypersensitive” Table of Contents

Love,