City Desk: Breast Hors d'[pound]uvres - exhibitionism - Brief Article

The unusually hot summer has disturbed animal populations throughout New York. Upstate, bears leave their mountain homes to forage for berries that have not withered, and mosquito eggs laid in dried-up puddles and ponds do not hatch. In the city, foraging and reproducing men and women bare even more of themselves than usual. What do we see as a result?

Breast hors d'[pound]uvres. The breast hors d'[pound]uvre is the female bosom, supported and exposed, like little mounds of goat cheese and black bread on a waiter's tray. "Take one!" the look says, sincerely, though you are expected to go through preliminaries, and the hors d'[pound]uvre has right of refusal. Where youth and muscle tone cannot achieve the desired effect (that is to say, 90 percent of the time), lycra is called in for assistance. If Forties cigarette girls had carried their trays a few inches higher, and if the trays had been part of their torsos, they would have had the look exactly.

What you see is close communion. What kind? Neither a lover's embrace nor the marriage of true minds, but the fusion of form and fabric. Joggers, and women on their way to and from workouts, are typically dipped in spandex, though this is unattractive material, which makes them look as if they have escaped from an aquarium. More arresting are the natural fibers, silk or cotton, seemingly applied with a painter's brush. This summer women have surrendered a millennia-old weapon in fashion's arsenal: deceit. In these outfits they have nowhere to hide, and nothing to hide behind.

The great bake-off is not all pleasant, for it also gives us aging narcissists. What looks fresh at 20 looks less so at 45 or 60. But even when the sun-tanned skin starts to resemble burned scrambled eggs, or the back of a toad, it still gets displayed. Worse even than the failures of preservation are the successes-the thighs that are the same size they were in the Kennedy era; the flesh furrows that, in defiance of the season, have not been plowed. These victories take as much effort as Cold War containment-and to less purpose, for Communism, unlike time, could ultimately be beaten.

Then there are the young narcissists. Twenty-year-old exhibitionists, though, are no more appealing. The only thing worse than a man showing off his washboard abs anywhere but the beach is a man showing them off while rollerblading. Going shirtless, and in-line skating, are almost sure signs of psychopathy. When they appear together, the diagnosis is certain. Add a headset, and the narcissist is in Narcissist Heaven- observed by everybody, aware of no one.

All in all, I am of two minds about the summer flowering that covers the city's sidewalks in July and August. Mindful of the American imperium, and the world's resentment, the patriot in me defends these displays of flesh. Why should a great American city heed the fashion sense of Osama bin Laden? Besides, the ultramodest of the world, who profess to be shocked at our mores, are hypocrites: The lands of the veil are the lands of lust, harems, child brides, and, here and there, slaves (who perform more services than floor-scrubbing). People who worry about the deranging effect of a strand of a woman's hair worry too much. American brazenness, by contrast, can be a sign of indifference.

But, but. When the sexual switch goes to the ON position, there is quite a power surge. It jolts me most at the neighborhood high school, named for Washington Irving. A bust of the author sits on a pillar outside the main entrance, watching the scene, as I do. The girls taking summer sessions, almost all black and Puerto Rican, come out with their colors (teak to walnut) flying. They pour themselves on their slouching swains, who wear reversed caps and pouts. One afternoon, a young lady, lolling on a stoop, even called to an old white man, "Wanna lay me on my back, sweet boy?" With offers like that, how can any boy be sweet?

The other day I was having lunch in a Brazilian restaurant on Union Square. One of the waitresses this summer happens to be the daughter of a colleague of my wife's. I have known this girl since she was a fetus. This fall she is going to art school in California, and she has blue toenails. As I rose to leave, she was bending to take an order from the next table, and I found myself face to face with the gap between her waistline and blouse. It did not expose her cheeks, but it showed a lot more than her back. It was a little encounter of Summer '99. Nice to meet you. When you turn around, and I get out of here, we will behave as if this never happened.

COPYRIGHT 1999 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group