She probably already lives in your very own building. She is always smiling in your direction—or haven’t you noticed?—walking her heavily betesticled mucho masculine dog. You certainly have noticed in passing her tall dark and handsome sartorial elegance. You avert your eyes in the hallway, you show no apparent interest. You dare not even make deliberate eye contact. You study instead the slightly worn taper of her custom made lizard boots walking toward you like you are busy gathering information, like it is really of scientific interest. Hmm, you note, modified cowboy style, roughly embossed, heels about two inches high, and you notice that they are remarkably shiny. Her boots are remarkably shiny and they are very large also and you sneak a glance at her hands.

O her boots are very large also! And so are her hands! That means Ms. Wonderful is hung like a race horse! She must be. Ms. Wonderful always is! And so is her dog. The very thought flushes your cheekbones a feverish scarlet. You look up and she is smiling your way. Even now she is smiling your way, grinning widely gleaming, projecting all Dominant Butch energy and Yang sensibility, so many smooth white even teeth set in a row like close set Corinthian columns. There is a shadow on the planes of her cheek, a strong claiming shadow there like a promise of shelter despite all chill of winter or sweltering heat. She is smiling at you still but you know it could never be a legitimate interest. O no, not she, with her doubtless pick of the whole tall willowy late supermodel lot, no, she could never possibly love a plain girl like you. It is a cruel Darwinian process, the dating game is; the mating game is a heartless process like natural selection.

Face it, girlfriend: Ms. Wonderful will never choose you for good and for ever. She will merely Tease, and Top, and Domme hither and thither and whither and yon, she will trifle and toy with your affections, and her dog too, then leave you seduced and abandoned and utterly heartbroken. She will dash the cup from your lips overflowing and you will draw your curtains against the whole vicious world then, you will feel like a zilch, you will take to isolate drinking, you will crawl into a bottle like a tiny ship sinking, you will take to interior monologue, to sobbing into the draperies, to plotting creative revenges, you hope she lays down and dies, you hope she chokes on a hairball, you will scribble philosophies, you will take to wringing your heart out, to isolate hobbies, to watching only the most gruesome horror movies because they make real life seem so much kinder, to eating entire cheesecakes in each frenzied sitting, to making the beast with only one back in the company of mirrors, you will study the lines of the hard city pavement beckoning twenty seductive stories below as it slowly explodes well beyond this “simple” low grade depression and you will know that you just cannot go on.

Yes, she’s a louse, that Ms. Wonderful is. But right now she is smiling at you and the next thing you know you are both out to dinner in a small trattoria with a glass of chilled wine in your hand. The power of her gaze, it’s an animal thing, it’s a bare necessity, it’s a strip search in the hot glare of her eyes like a spotlight. Your face goes slack, your lower jaw droops. You keep your legs crossed tight but it is only a matter of time because animal nature abhors every last vacuum. The look of true love slouches down, leans forward, and clasps wide open its knees. You can hardly believe it, the way she affects you. Suddenly you are like Gidget on Spanish Fly. True love becomes you a wanton, a deliberate woman. You excuse yourself sometime during dessert to floss your teeth, born again brazen hussy, all carefully bent on seduction, as if you have any control in the matter. You gargle once, twice, and again, a sweet cinnamint flavor. Later you move gracefully toward her, with the bold sweeping flat footed gesture of a ballet dancer walking. Your heart beats out staccato in leaps and in bounds. Your spirit soars the equivalent of ten city blocks. You want to submit. You already have.

The first kiss before it happens already exists like a palpable thing. It hangs in the air like you share an invisible halo. The moment before the first kiss lasts nearly forever. O and the look of your face then, it is so like an attitude of prayer. You ask God for a sign and of course it says, YIELD. And that Ms. Wonderful, she most certainly loves you, O yes, even with the light on. She loves you every line, fold, and crevice, every pit, every scar, every ingrown swell, every renegade hair curling. Down, down, down that Ms. Wonderful takes you, then back up again as you quake and sob in the comforting muscular strength of her arms. You are all heightened perception, all brightening colors. That Ms. Wonderful decorates your soul. She is a wonder of nature. Ms. Wonderful, she proves the very existence of God. She makes it sweet for you and quite nasty, too, with such gentle madness, with such rogue emotion. You have multiple orgasms simultaneously that very first time and you know that you always will. It is a Her-storic moment.

You think to register a china pattern. You recall blissfully that swans mate for life. Sex changes everything, it does. It is like an entirely new position on the food chain. Sex and more sex, a sibilance of rain falling. Yes, Vagina, there is a Santa Claus! There is true love deaf dumb and blindfolded and she sure isn’t complaining! What a picnic of flesh, what an Edible Complex, like “Nine and a Half Weeks” only better, and O-so palpably so. It is so like the movies, except very much more to your mind and your aching vessel of palpating flesh: you channel the very essence of Kim Basinger and there you lie prone, pouting backward in surrender, bound on a solid ebony table, your wide open trembling mouth. She takes you and stakes you full with all hands and uncovers each kernel. She savors, you flavor. There is not a dry eye or lip in the house nor a dry seat neither. You simply cannot stop treating each other like food. Just crazy about her, that Ms. Wonderful, but it will only last several years or maybe even a measly decade or two before it is over.

Now you see it, you do: it is doomed from the start. SO WHY EVEN BOTHER? You look up now and she is smiling your way, she is, is Ms. Wonderful, her remarkably large boots shiny and clicking. Even now she is smiling your way in the hallway. You look right through her and her mas macho dog,too, smiling inwardly as you contemplate the possibilities of a two for one discount on neutering.

Go, girl! Just walk right on by!

© 2010-2012 THE LOVE CHILDE WALLIS STERN: A THINLY VEILED AUTOBIOGRAPHY