OR WOULD VALMONT EVER DO THIS?
Lest you worry I am beneath a bridge somewhere with my Louis Vuitton duffle under my head for a pillow, I am in Puerto Rico with Kim. Thank God for Kim (and her husband Claudio). She is the kind of true blue friend who comes to the penitentiary just before the execution and implores the guards, “She was such a good person… please let her go – she didn’t do it…” She seems to see the best part of me: the tenderness beneath the cold, ironic, cruel-ish surface I oftentimes show the world.
I woke in PR (that’s what the cool people call it) yesterday with the oddest feeling. If I were a drinker, I’d say it was a hangover. I was still sore in the unexpected places from the move, I had a headache and I was so exhausted I rolled onto my stomach and slithered off the extremely high mattress like someone without arms would have to do…
We went to church. It was a broken English, uninspired affair and about the time I was to greet strangers with, “Peace be with you,” I realized that if I didn’t take a nap I would probably faint or throw up of do one of those ghastly, bodily embarrassments clinically exhausted people do in public.
I know I shouldn’t make fun of people in comas. I read all about them in KidsHealth.org this morning. But when we got home I looked at Kim and said the words she probably never expected to hear me say at noon in a vacation spot, when I was a guest in someone’s home, “I need to take a nap.”
And it was more like a coma. It is my only excuse.
You see, I believe a house guest should behave like Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons when he’s visiting his Aunt at her country estate. One should be attractive, and charming and well versed and slightly mysterious at dinners. It is even appropriate to make knowing eye contact with other visitors, leave poison pen letters in drawers or under pillows or seduce someone inappropriate.
But to fall asleep.
Without benefit of too much wine or a long, garrulous night on the town.
Is just not done.
