Volume 16 ~ Spring 2004 ~ ISSN 1543-6063

DENISE DUHAMEL

    
FLIRT

Nick had food poisoning in Paris so he stayed in the hotel while I went to the French laundromat where I fiddled with the knobs on the unfamiliar machines and inserted big coins into airy slots. This guy kept trying to flirt with me, so I showed him my wedding ring and, when that didn’t work, Nick’s boxers. The stranger shrugged a Parisian why should I care if you’re married? shrug. I felt like a character in the background of Dorianne Laux’s great poem “The Laundromat” in which she uses the phrase “animal kindness.” In her poem, the speaker bends over to pick up her laundry and show some guy her ass at the same time. I’m the shy woman in a graying tee shirt, biting her nails, who no one in that poem even notices, who Dorianne Laux didn’t even bother to write in.

And what is the fun of being flirtatious anyway? Flirting is actually sort of scary to me. My theory is that it’s all about the ego of the flirter and almost nothing at all about the recipient of the flirtatiousness. And there’s even a shampoo commercial now that backs up my hypothesis—I only flirt when I look good—a woman checks herself out in a mirror as she comes into a room. And that’s sort of it, isn’t it? We flirt to make ourselves feel better or to try to make peace with our marriages or get our boyfriends/girlfriends jealous or whatever.

But I feel like a killjoy saying that because so many people get a kick out of flirting, and often it’s harmless. But so many things can go wrong, no? And what if you get in real trouble? I’m not even talking violence, but just hurt feelings. The one flirted with has to always reconcile with the fact that she’s been duped, that the flirter is taken, and the flirtation was nothing more than a little pick-me-up to make the flirter feel good. Know what I mean? And what if the person who flirts back—ooh la la—leads on the initiating flirter who, in this one instance, is actually serious?

It’s like that dry shampoo Pssst, popular in the seventies. Remember? It wasn’t really shampoo at all—it only made your hair look clean. Once when I was hemming a skirt at the beach, this old man came up to me and said my wife used to sew like that. Then the sad lull, the opposite of flirting. The waves crashed in Miami, the washing machines rumbled in Paris. The man I didn’t flirt with was offended and now I had no one to help show me how to use the dryer. I looked across the street where inside a tiny room my husband sweated and clutched his stomach. The romantic afternoon sunrays were butter pads melting into the hotel’s awning.

© Denise Duhamel 2004. All rights reserved.

Next by Denise Duhamel: MIAMI SNOWBALL & OF WHAT USE IS THE MONGOOSE

Duncan Hannah
www.jamesgrahamandsons.com

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