Nothing You Desire EXCERPT
Living abroad is a good thing. No, really it is. It teaches you so much, Del reminded herself firmly as she gazed down at the acceptance letter from Ramath Lehi Artists Colony (though at thirty-nine—she’d turn forty on March 25--she should know better than to want to attempt living abroad again). She’d done a semester in Spain as an energetic college student studying art history, whose mind at the time was as open as her eyes. Not to mention her legs--though the Spaniards she’d slept with had been, to a man (if in fact they should be called such a thing), pathetic lovers. Enric had wanted only to be on the bottom; Andreu couldn’t get excited unless he pretended to slap her; and Jordi and Guillem had been consistently unable to maintain an erection, young and fit though they appeared to be. (She especially wondered what Enric’s deal was; not only did he always want her on top, but he also peed sitting down on the toilet.) After them, Del gave up, writing off any future Spanish men as potential lovers, no matter how handsome, no matter how dazzling the dark eyes, no matter how seductive the smell they all seemed to give off.
This seemingly uniquely Spanish-man odor was, as far as she could tell, a combination of no deodorant, potent cologne, and special Spanish pheromones. Whatever it was, it worked astoundingly well, drawing her in again and again, like a skittish animal seeking to quench its thirst at the water, needfully ignoring the lurking lions. But Del’s continuing disappointment with them in matters of lovemaking finally made her decide to ignore their charms. It was, she thought, like smelling coffee as a child: the aroma was so much more pleasing than the actual consumption. Too, she found the foreskin—something she’d never seen before outside of sex manuals—a repulsive, caterpillar-like thing. She was particularly disgusted by the way there was a little extra bit of flesh, with its wavy entrance hole, dangling over the head of the penis, so like the tip of an elephant’s trunk. By the end of her semester, though she never tired of their tight pleated pants and real leather shoes with small hard heels (these were no U.S. males in jeans and tennis shoes!), she had begun to tire of their incessant smoking and swearing, and the way they rarely changed their sweaty clothes. And the fact that they all lived with their mothers, who still prepared their meals for them and daily hung their strange bikini underpants on an indoor-courtyard line to dry in the smoggy air. Not to mention Del was sick of their disgusting littering; trash cans, though occasionally present, went unrespected (once, Del had noticed her own American oatmeal-bar wrapper, still perfectly visible, at the bottom of the same canister on the same street where she had deposited it one week previous). Observing their habits, Del pondered the chicken-or-egg question: did Spaniards learn to casually toss their garbage into the public streets because the custom was to drop one’s trash onto the bar floors (anything from cigarette packets to oyster shells to a piece of bad fish violently spit out)…or was it the other way around?