"You have a fleck of pastry on your lip. Do you want me to flick it off, or kiss it off?"
This question occurred to me as I washed my sticky hands in the men's room at the local bakery Saturday morning. I could see in the mirror that I had a fleck of glazed blueberry turnover on my parafiltrum.
The possibility of asking a woman a question like that (whether she had a fleck on her lip or not) might have been suggested by the image of the strawberry-blond young woman (twenty-two or so) who had served me the turnover. Her eyes were big and blue, her face freckled and tan, her bones and muscles good. Maybe I fantasized
her lips applying the proposed remedy?
I had eaten the pastry and drunk coffee in a little alcove whose entrance through the wall from the main part of the bakery I had at first taken for a mirror. But the trio sitting in front of it weren't being reflected, and neither was I. How often had I been in this bakery and not noticed the alcove?
Question: If a woman proposes the flick or kiss alternative to a man, how likely is it he'll opt for the kiss? And if a man proposes it to a woman...?
And how would the likelihood be affected by factors such as the perceived attractiveness of the proposer, the proposer's smile or tone of voice, the time of day, the light?
I left the bakery and went back to the auto spa, where they were washing and inspecting my wife's car. I asked the even prettier, dark-haired woman behind the counter there (eighteen to twenty-two, I guessed) if she would give me some paper and lend me a pen.
There was only one unoccupied chair inside, at a tall round table at which a blond-haired woman of about thirty-five was already sitting and reading a magazine. "Is this chair available?"
She said it was, so I sat down and started writing. I quickly filled the front and back of a sheet, and stopped to relax. The magazine was now lying on the table, and I could see on its cover the up-side-down photograph of two shapely young women in skimpy bathing suits.
"Do you mind if I look at the magazine." I pointed at the figures on the cover. "I've got to check this out."
"Ha, it's not real," she said.
"The photo's been touched up, you mean?" I said.
"I'm sure it has. Blemishes removed. Even pounds taken off. The swimsuit section is discouraging. They shouldn't publish something like that just as we real people who have children and no time to work out anymore are about to start going swimming ourselves....No," she said, nodding at the cover of the magazine, which still lay where she'd left it, "real people aren't like that."
I stood up and pointed across the road. "Say, have you ever been to that bakery over there?"
She didn't even know there was one.
"Straight across, the first shop with an awning."
I told her about the fleck of pastry I'd seen on my face.
"Anyway," I said, "it got me to thinking...Could I read you something?"
She listened, then observed, "A man asked the question by a woman would be much more likely to choose a kiss than would a woman asked it by a man. But you never know...."
My wife's car was ready first, and as I was leaving I touched my table companion on the back with the tips of two fingers. She turned around, smiled, and said, "Nice talking to you...."
I thought I heard her say, "...honey."
Karen Pryor's wonderful book previously cited, Reaching the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What It Teaches Us about the Animal Mind, asks in Chapter 9, "Why is the click so much fun?" (She's referring to the fun manifested by animals during clicker training.)
Having borrowed a copy of Panksepp's 1998 textbook, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, from a UNC library, I began reading it yesterday as I waited to be seen by my neuro-ophthalmologist. Chapter 8 is about "SEEKING systems and anticipatory states of the nervous system." It begins with a striking quotation (which I only vaguely remembered) from Oliver Sacks's 1973 book, Awakenings:
