Mimi by Lucy Ellmann Page B

going to steal that too, are you?” I asked. “First my cane, now—”
    “I can’t steal it. It’s mine.”
    “What!?”
    She leaned forward again and whispered, “I wrote it,” before turning a deep pink once more. “So I guess you’re my client!”
    “Huh?” Wait a minute. This was the person I’d enlisted to help me calm down about giving a speech? This whirling dervish? With the blushes, with the blankets, with the boyfriends. . .
    “You’re Harrison Hanafan, right?”
    “You’re M. Z. Fortune?”
    Why I’d assumed M. Z. Fortune was a man I don’t know, but I had. I even had a firm image of him in my head, and he didn’t look anything like Mimi (didn’t have her bone structure).
    “That’s not my real name, ya know,” she was saying. “I took it for professional reasons. The M ’s real though: that’s for Mimi.”
    “What’s the Z for?” I asked, trying to recover my equanimity. “Zsa Zsa?”
    “Nada. Business people just expect to see a middle initial. It makes ’em feel safe.”
    “Well, how about the Fortune?”
    “Yeah, that’s what I say ! ‘Fortune’ is there to help me make one. You know, like Johnny Cash. Or Neil Diamond, and Goldie Hawn. Goldman Sachs. State your claim in your name, that’s my motto. It doesn’t hurt to remind people you want money!”
    “I’ve met some pretty destitute Goldbergs in my time,” I argued. “And Adrienne Rich isn’t rich. . . I don’t think.”
    “Bet she wants to be though,” Mimi said, chomping on a piece of duck. “Anyway, can’t hurt.”
    I noodled around in my noodles, wondering what I was getting myself into. Yet, at the same time, I had a feeling this Mimi person would make a fine public-speaking coach: she was so weird and unpredictable, she’d make giving a speech seem a breeze!
    “Maybe you should aim higher,” I told her, “call yourself Fort Knox, or Priceless Gems. Cadillac Chevrolet. . . Unmarked Fifties. . .”
    “Yeah, I like that one. President Unmarked Fifties, ladies and gentlemen.”
    “But what about my name? Too much alliteration, right? And no outright begging.”
    “What, Harrison Hanafan? I love your name! That’s why I agreed to meet you! I don’t usually teach people privately. My work’s mostly seminars.” She added with a tinge of gloom, “I help businessmen.”
    “Tough crowd?”
    “You wanna live in New York, you gotta do something for assholes,” she said.
    I nodded. “My work’s pretty reliant on assholes too.”
    Then Mimi grabbed my arm and said, “Hey, do me a favor, will ya? It wouldn’t take very long. . . ”
    I didn’t know what to say. This woman had after all saved me from an inglorious fate on Christmas Eve. I owed her! And I liked the feel of her hand on my arm.
    “See, I’ve gotta find my quilt,” she pleaded, “at the museum, and I don’t want to go alone!”
    Ingratitude was not mentioned (this wasn’t Gertrude I was dealing with) but without much further coaxing I canceled my appointments and soon we were in a taxi (the first we ever shared), and there was something about the pull of the meal and the wheels and the woman, or maybe just the combo of taxi upholstery and afternoon off, that made it feel like a date. You hit that taxi interior, tucked into your own cozy little nest back there, and it’s Pavlovian: a kiss seemed imminent.
    But we’d already reached the museum. First we trailed through the Tinware Room.
    “I guess I should’ve been saving up my tinfoil,” I said to Mimi. “I’d probably have enough for a sundial by now. Or a commemorative tea set.”
    “Or a magic, healing nose,” she said, studying some fine Mexican examples of legs, arms and organs cut out of flat pieces of tin.
    The Weathercock Room was full of long-immobilized, formerly revolving emblems in wood and metal—some political, some ironic, some abstract, some figurative, some painfully fragmentary and weatherworn.
    “Look at that mermaid!” Mimi called out, dragging me