“Sorry to have imposed,” I hedged.
She smiled ever so slightly. “Fine French cuisine is no imposition at all.”
“Does it bother you to have your ears discussed?”
“Not really. It depends on the angle of discussion.” She shook her head as she lifted her fork to her mouth. “Tell me straight, because that’s my favorite angle.”
We silently sipped our wine and continued our meal.
“I turn a corner,” I offered, “just as someone ahead of me turns the next corner. I can’t see what that person looks like. All I can make out is a flash of white coattails. But the whiteness of the coattails is indelibly etched in my consciousness. Ever get that feeling?”
“I suppose so.”
“Well, that’s the feeling I get from your ears.”
Again, we ate in silence. I poured wine for her, then for myself.
“It’s not the scene that comes into your head,” she asked, “but the feeling, right?”
“Right.”
“Ever have that feeling before?”
I gave it some thought, then shook my head. “No, I guess not.”
“Which means it’s all on account of my ears.”
“I couldn’t swear to it. There’s no way I could be that sure. I’ve never heard of the shape of someone’s ears arousing anyone this way.”
“I know someone who sneezed every time he saw Farrah Fawcett’s nose. There’s a big psychological element to sneezing, you know. Once cause and effect link up, there’s no escape.”
“I’m no expert on Farrah Fawcett’s nose,” I said, taking a sip of wine. Then I forgot what I was about to say.
“That’s not quite what you meant, is it?” she said.
“No, not quite,” I said. “The feeling I get is terribly unfocused, yet very solid.” I demonstrated, holding my hands a yard apart, then compressing the span to two inches. “I’m not explaining this well, I’m afraid.”
“A concentrated phenomenon based on vague motives.”
“Exactly,” I said. “You’re seven times smarter than I am.”
“I take correspondence courses.”
“Correspondence courses?”
“That’s right, psychology by mail.”
We split the last of the
“You still haven’t gotten it? The relationship between my ears and your feelings?”
“In a word, no,” said I. “That is, I have no firm grasp on whether your ears appeal to me directly, or whether something else in you appeals to me through your ears.”
She placed both her hands on the table and shook her head gently. “Is this feeling of yours of the good variety or the bad variety?”
“Neither. Or both. I can’t tell.”
She pinioned her wineglass between her palms and looked me straight in the face. “It seems you need more study in the means of expressing emotions.”
“Can’t say I’m too good at describing them either,” I said.
At that she smiled. “Never mind. I think I have a good idea of what you mean.”
“Well then, what should I do?”
She said nothing for the longest while. She seemed to be thinking of something else entirely. Five dishes lay empty on the table, a constellation of five extinct planets.
“Listen,” she ended the silence. “I think we ought to become friends. That is, of course, if it’s all right with you.”
“Of course it’s all right with me,” I said.
“And I mean very close friends,” she said.
I nodded.
So it was we became very close friends. Not thirty minutes after we’d first met.
“As a close friend, there’re a couple things I want to ask you,” I said.
“Go right ahead.”
“First of all, why is it you don’t show your ears? Second, have your ears ever exerted any special power over anyone besides me?”
Without a word, she trained her eyes on her hands resting on the table.
“Some, yes,” she said quietly.
“Some?”
“Sure. But to put it another way, I’m more accustomed to the self who doesn’t show her ears.”
“Which is to say that the you when you show your ears is different from the you when you don’t show your ears.”
“Right enough.”
Two waiters cleared away our dishes and brought the soup.
“Would you mind telling me about the you who shows her ears.”
“That’s so long ago I doubt I can tell it very well. The truth is, I haven’t shown my ears once since I was twelve.”
“But when you did that modeling job, you showed your ears, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, “but not my real ears.”
“Not your real ears?”
“Those were blocked ears.”
I had two spoonfuls of soup and looked up at her.
“Tell me more about your ‘blocked ears.’”
“Blocked ears are dead ears. I killed my own ears. That is, I consciously cut off the passageway…. Do you follow me?”
No, I didn’t follow her.
“Ask me, then,” she said.
“By killing your ears, do you mean you made yourself deaf?”
“No, I can hear quite fine. But even so, my ears are dead. You can probably do it too.”
She set her soupspoon back down, straightened her back, raised her shoulders two inches, thrust her jaw full out, held that posture for all of ten seconds, and suddenly dropped her shoulders.
“There. My ears are dead. Now you try.”
Three times I repeated the movements she’d made. Slowly, carefully, but nothing left me with the impression that my ears had died. The wine was rapidly circulating through my system.
“I do believe that my ears aren’t dying properly,” I said, disappointed.
She shook her head. “That’s okay. If your ears don’t need to die, there’s nothing wrong with them not dying.”
“May I ask you something else?”
“Go right ahead.”
“If I add up everything you’ve told me, it seems to come down to this: that up to age twelve you showed your ears. Then one day you hid your ears. And from that day on, not once have you shown your ears. But at such times that you must show your ears, you block off the passageway between your ears and your consciousness. Is that correct?”
A winsome smile came to her face. “That is correct.”
“What happened to your ears at age twelve?”
“Don’t rush things,” she said, reaching her right hand across the table, lightly touching the fingers of my left hand. “Please.”
I poured out the rest of the wine into our glasses and slowly drank mine.
“First, I want to know more about you,” she started.
