[APPLAUSE]
I'm going to read one very short piece, and that'll be the end.
And this is called "The Bullet-Stopper."
"Most men have certain notions of femaleness
derived from movies they saw in their youth.
No matter how cockeyed some of these archetypes are,
and no matter how manfully I struggle
to assimilate the truth that women are as valuable, real,
and complex as men are, a part of me
continues to want to match up the actual women in my life
with the celluloid temptresses and saints in my imagination.
I grew up in the post-war era of dangerous brunettes
and redheads like Rita Hayworth, Yvonne De Carlo, Jane Greer,
and Jean Simmons, who would no sooner look at a Robert Mitchum
or Glenn Ford than they would begin to seduce him and stab
him in the back.
Double-crossing came as easily to these femme fatales
as smoking a cigarette.
Yet you had to sympathize with the survival tactic of what we
were told was the weaker sex.
It was a mystery to me how this supposedly frailer sex could
rise not only to a tortuously complicated duplicity
but also to a level of selfless heroism
that seemed outside the compass or capacity
of masculine experience.
I am particularly fascinated with one convention of older,
melodramatic films that seems to have disappeared, the woman who
stops a bullet for her man.
She was usually, in classic triangle terms,
the redundant woman, say, the native mistress
of a man stationed in the Orient,
a rival of the newly-met, supposedly more
suitable white lady.
The mistress is beautiful, she is faithful, she loves her man,
and she has a deeper understanding
of life than the white lady.
So, the audience wonders restlessly,
how can the hero reject her?
But because her love for her man is so deep,
it transcends self-preservation, as maternal love is often
alleged to do.
Maybe such passionate romantic devotion
exists only in the backwaters of civilization
among colonial or underworld women
who have gone beyond the ladylike.
Did I mention that sometimes, vice takes the place of race?
A gangster's moll or a bar girl with a tarnished past,
an Ida Lupino, Gloria Grahame type,
may also administer the reproachful lesson
about how far a woman's love may go for her man.
Now, just try to imagine a love so powerful
that it would cause a woman to hurl herself
in front of gunshots when most of us would hit the ground.
Such love no longer exists, you say.
We live in a more calculating age, or, to put the matter
optimistically, a more progressive age in which women
are less dependent on men, less masochistic.
Am I sorry to see the convention disappear?
To be frank, I don't know whether to pray for such a love
or be terrified by it.
I try to imagine a man pointing a gun at me.
As he starts to pull the trigger,
my Chinese girlfriend blankets me with her body.
She takes the bullet.
As grateful as I am, I cannot help feeling there is a certain
presumptuousness in someone stealing the death that was
meant for me.
I am so stunned by her act that I
forget to knock the gun from the killer's hand.
Now, he's pointing it at me again.
And she has already given her life for me.
Would it be cowardly to prop her in front of me?
[LAUGHTER]
Or would that be a way of honoring
her original intention?
[LAUGHTER]
In any case, how will I shove her limp body forward
at the precise moment the gun is fired?
My respect for this woman is growing,
not only because stopping the bullet was a noble thing to do,
but because it required incredible athletic timing,
like a basketball player leaping to block a shot.
My own reflexes are rustier.
Even if I was quick enough to stop the next two
bullets with her as a shield, the gunman,
always assuming he had six bullets to begin with,
might get angry at the waste of ammunition.
He might change his tactics, rush behind me,
and shoot me in the back.
How awful to be shot in the back.
Why doesn't my other girlfriend arrive?
[LAUGHTER]
Isn't she supposed to bring the policemen who will knock down
the door and save me?
All my life, I have trusted in the eternal feminine
to save me from disaster, which does not keep me in the least
from suspecting all women of being betrayers.
So it is inevitable that I start to think
that my fiancee, my other girlfriend,
may be in league with the killer.
But why does she want me dead?
I would have bowed out if she had asked me to.
It dawns on me that she is an avenger,
and that I am about to be punished for my unfaithfulness
to the good mistress, she who gave her life for me.
Of course, it is idiotic to expect women to die for me.
The very idea might be a ghost remnant of the child's wholly
unrealistic expectation that his mother will love him
unconditionally, no matter how meanly he tests her
or how sadly he disappoints her.
And yet, when I look over at my wife playing
with our orange Abyssinian cat on the couch,
I can't help wondering to what lengths she would go
to protect me in a fusillade.
I hope she would have the good sense to duck.
I know she would.
Nevertheless, these movie fantasies
of Oriental mistresses die hard.
I now begin to understand why I bought
my wife, on a recent trip to China, a red silk brocade
robe with dragon couchant and why I
keep pestering her to wear it."
[LAUGHTER]