Winona looked sexy last night in her bathrobe and, fully aware of her seductivity, she sat down at the table across from me and placed a steaming teapot in the middle of it. I had never seen the teapot before. It was like no other teapot. It was a stoneware identity crisis. It was constructed by the same natural force that puts Hollywood movies on big screens in third world countries so that raggy children can eat hotdogs and hold the divine knowledge that Tom Cruise can play the role of a Nazi. It is a strange natural force of form and contradiction, of chow-mein and green M&Ms, of loin cloths and Wranglers, of question and authority. When one melts this natural force and spits it out with the power of expression, it turns out to be something along the lines of home cooked acorns, or garage band recordings, or teapots.
Like American porn stars, the teapot had hot dogs on it. They balanced themselves a top the strange angles of the stoneware, and transposed themselves onto the painted kimono of the fierce, chiseled Asian woman that guarded its small handle. Her kimono was yellow, like mustard. Her expression held a certain hostility, implying that a great knowledge of tea rested behind it. This sacred knowledge was not to be tested but trusted, and she made that clear with the grip of her right hand that clenched an unlucky wiener tighter and tighter.
I thought this teapot odd. The Asian people have long been admired for their use of tea, but this unkosher geisha pressed her fierce expression upon this teapot that didn’t even look useful as a molatov cocktail for three.
“Aren’t teapots supposed to have handles that are wide enough for your index finger to fit through? So that you don’t burn yourself?”
Sniff. Blink. Winona unholstered two small tea cups from the pockets of her robe, eased one forward and its rough ceramic bottom scraped the wood of the tabletop, stopping right in front of me. I could closely see its pressed finger markings from hands that belonged to gripping eyes. The fingerprints micro-wormed all over the hard clay, networked into each other like a network of cyber squirms, until the eye could not know where the fingerprints began and ended. A shiny gloss sprawled over the clay, taking unfocused attention away from the fingerprints; a translucent curtain pulling itself over the mystery marks of its creator.
The spout was thin, just wide enough to fit a ballpoint pen through. It was pathetic, limply bent forward as the neck of a retired samurai warrior after he realizes that he must surrender to daily arthritis meds. But the spout could spit steam. It steamed in the name of tea knowledge. The wiener, bulging in the geishas grip, pleaded for mercy that its life be spared, but the geishas eyes held firm. Her yellow kimono was spicy mustard.
“Where did you get this?”
The postcolonial Asian world started booming in unison with laughter at my ridiculous question (Tom Cruise thought it a valid question, but his opinion was now null and void, considering his position in the neo-Third Reich). I should have known better. China made everything. Everyone knows that Chinese women have abducted the geisha in a noble leap to seize Japanese sex. Chinese. Japanese. Laotian. Geishan. The question reworked itself in my head as Winona’s eyes began to squint thinner and thinner.
The thing about Winona is that she is a difficult girlfriend to keep, which makes her that much more keepable. She is religious and scientific, and it opens up this whole middle world that we can communicate in for hours because it doesn’t make any sense. She says that my gears crunch to this same way of thinking (because I am a faithful Catholic and working on a dissertation in Zoology). I don’t believe her, though. I asked her one time, “Do you believe in God?” and she started laughing, saying that he was some guy that made epic pizzas on fourth street and that she figured I was already first in line to be one of his fat apostles.
Anyways, the point is that we crack jokes like these because we can. We crack them because we know that we have devoted so much time to reading the damn scriptures that we should have the liberty to laugh. We have devoted so much time to studying zoology and world culture that we should have the liberty to find them holy. Winona was a kleptomaniac and I raced cars out in the country for pink slips, and when we started hanging out she stopped her shit and I stopped mine - we were cured, because stealing is shady and racing cars is dangerous, though grotesquely fulfilling.
Steam continued to billow from the spout of the teapot, and Winona took in a breath. She started to look bored or something, I couldn’t tell. I hate when women try to talk to you without saying anything. It’s almost as shitty as stealing.
“I made tea, that’s all. Pizza God said that it was quote, ‘climactic,’ so I thought that might be pretty nice.” She let out a sigh and smiled. “It’s alright. Have some.”
The geisha woman was still frowning at me and puckering her lips like the dirty tea woman she was. She was disgustingly hot, concealed by her stoneware skin that glistened in its gloss. Her scowl was an icy invitation, but the mystery of her flavor held me crop-eared.
It was then out of my peripheral vision that I saw a towel, wrapped up in Winonas handbag about twenty feet away from us. It was a raggy beach towel with lettering that read, “Hawaii” in black lettering on blue fabric.
“I thought you didn’t keep beach towels in your handbag anymore.” I said.
“Just have some of this tea and forget about it, ,” she whispered, drinking her tea and wearing a wry smile.
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