It’s a kind of provocation: I’ll hint at what you won’t dare to name. Children learn it early. Mario in sixth grade tormented the French teacher: “Miss Pozensky…do you like fruit? Do you like bananas?” Surely the separation of man from beast was marked not by the invention of language, but by the first moment when someone chose to suffer rather than utter a certain word. How mortified I was when I, with what goal I cannot say, told my mom about this exchange, and she just said, “Well, banana means penis.”
Forcing yourself to smile, they say, will trick your brain into feeling happier, and in that vein I’d like to recommend actively peppering your dialogue with suggestive allusions, which will trick your brain into thinking people are listening closely to what you have to say. I know I’ve told stories about you on here, and maybe it seems I did so rather nakedly—rest assured, no one else got it.
The man sitting across from me in the train compartment kept looking at me, mostly at my face, but sometimes, vaguely, elsewhere. This was in Morocco. I was maybe fifteen. It seemed important to act utterly normal, and I did, I was even proud of my unperturbancy, until I noticed with horror that one of my hands, which as part of my act I was holding very still, had settled on my khakis in such a way that my pointer finger was pointing rather explicitly to the heart of my crotch. Okay it’s a silly example, but I suspect it’s in these moments that innocence is lost, when we realize our body is not an extension of our mind, but a protean glyph liable to slip into suggestiveness if we don’t keep retracing it straight. Incidentally, the goal (laudable if somewhat quixotic) of Berlin’s kinkier nightlife, where people go dressed up in lingerie and fetish gear, is not to play along with this tension, but to destroy it through exaggeration—what would you want to suggest, the premise asks, if for once you suggested nothing by default?
It’s a real skill to be profusely, elusively allusive. Finding new ways of hinting at what you mean without saying it directly is the essence of poetry. Also religion. Also schizophrenia. I don’t know. I get impatient. I think myself daring for spilling the inkwell. I told her to stand under the statue of the angel, I took exactly nine paces away from her, I turned around, and then I retraced my steps, counting them aloud, this time from ten. I should have made it ten trillion.
Two beautiful women I knew travelled alone around Cuba at around the same time. One told me that she’d been subject to an endless parade of whistles, winks, googly eyes, chops-licking, lascivious drooling, waggly eyebrows, performative sniffing, grimaced panting, the ol’ spit-in-your-hands-and-rub-them-together, puerile finger theater, hoots, caws, clucks, snorts, grunts, coos, winnies, caterwauls, mock fainting, sensual sashays, virile strutting back-and-forth, delicate air pecks, puckered air kisses, full-on air licking, knuckle-biting, hair-smoothing, chin-pulling, chest-puffing, karate-chop crotch-prepping, requests for her cell phone, her hotel, her Zodiac sign, her preferred position, her patron saint, not to mention the man who crab-walked athwart her, his lips bleeding from the rose he’d impulsively crammed between his teeth. The other one said she experienced nothing of the sort. Maybe just because she was tall.
The word is itself a kind of innuendo. Something about the smooth ens and the gooey vowels in the middle, the louche cousin of a crescendo, a little after-hours minuet…when in fact it comes from old legal documents, where all it meant, technically, was “that is to say.”
In middle school two girls I didn’t know suddenly turned in line and began staring at me, to which I, in all the subtlety of that age, responded by shifting my gaze between the extreme upper-left and the extreme upper-right of my field of vision, as if inspecting the ceiling for cracks, a motion that they then sarcastically imitated. In Verona I was told that the only trick you need for getting a man to approach you is to hold his gaze long enough. I admit sometimes I play the game of lookaway with people on public transit, that strange pressure that builds up, as if at a certain point their pupils will pierce through my bodily envelope. Yes there’s probably some evolutionary drive to check pupil dilation, but it still surprises me that, of all the organs, it’s the staring eye that seems most suggestive, when it’s basically a fixed orb, so much less articulated or plastic than the hands or the lips. A glass eye is hardly less penetrating.
It seems counterintuitive, but the Platonic ideal of innuendo is kissing. Everything is implied during a kiss, but nothing is clarified, those lips being too busy to ask, these lips being too busy to answer, and so as long as they stay locked in their push and sway, really they just keep repeating a single refrain: that is to say, that is to say, that is to say…