Wednesday, July 13, 2016
Behold Your Newest Silver-Screen Sex Goddess, Jane Neighbor
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/behold-your-newest-silver-screen-sex-goddess-jane-neighbor?mbid=nl_TNY%20Template%20-%20With%20Photo%20(67)&CNDID=25315071&spMailingID=9195993&spUserID=MTA5MjQwMzgyNzkyS0&spJobID=961025057&spReportId=OTYxMDI1MDU3S0ly Shouts
Behold Your Newest Silver-Screen Sex Goddess, Jane Neighbor
In
America, we want our women to be girls and our girls to be sex fairies,
and for those sex fairies to live next door to us, for some reason.
This Sharktaugust, there is only one such radiant sex-fairy star to
watch. In fact, you should probably close your eyes when she’s offscreen
and sort of block out with your fingers the parts of the screen she’s
not on when she’s in a scene with someone else. Unless you are a
complete idiot, you already know this star’s name: Jane Neighbor.
Neighbor
is twenty-eight and twenty-two, at once. She is a kind of gorgeous that
can only be found in or very near rivers. She is blonde but also blond,
depending on the spelling. She is tall when she is on a ladder, and
medium-tall when she is halfway up the ladder. Her eyelashes spell
“glory.” Her naked hands can open wet jars, with just the strength of
her slender fingers. She can be sexy and pointy and things that aren’t
even adjectives, like glossary, or aren’t even words, like hilabrion.
Her voice sounds like a truck full of rain.
As
I said, she is from Portugaria. Or maybe I didn’t say that yet. Anyway,
that’s where she’s from. To understand her, you must take a plane to
where she is from, or read the Wikipedia page about it, or learn
Portugarian, or just speak decent English, because she’s fluent and
actually doesn’t even have much of an accent.
Portugaria
is America a few hours ago, because of the time difference. Its people
are a simple people, a throwback people, like Americans but a few hours
ago. In Portugaria, they watch
Portugarian “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,”
which is the exact same show as America’s “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” In
Portugaria, every young, ambitious actress dreams of Hollywood and its
mythic, faraway opportunities for stardom, and every other person just
has that dream where all of his teeth fall out.
Recently,
I met Jane under a bridge next to a defunct dentist’s office, on the
Lower North Side of somewhere in Queens. (It’s a celebrity haunt, in
that I think some famous people were maybe killed there.) I don’t
remember what she was wearing, but I think it was hair? Something was on
the front of her head—either glasses or a nose. I probably should have
taken notes. She made noises with the lower part of her face, and I was
mesmerized.
By now you know all
about Neighbor’s successes: summer blockbusters, winter barnbusters,
suppertime bustblockers, even movies. I asked her what it was like to be
the new face of Sheila, in the remake of the megahit “Sheila the
Exorbitant,” and she shrugged her delicate bones into a croissant-like
shape and laughed a tinkling laugh. Then she responded, but I wasn’t
listening.
The thing is, everyone
wants to author the story of Jane. The famous director Allan Harkness
called her “in one word, a French horn.” The less-famous director Alan
Hankress called her “in three words, a French horn.” But is she? Really?
Can we remove the girl from the nudity, and the actress from the horn?
At least for long enough to write about it?
Back
under the bridge, Jane was looking at me, and I was looking at her, and
we were both expectant—she, that I would ask her another question, and
I, that she would just kind of say something. The seconds passed, laden
with silence, her very presence a lie. (It is far smaller than it
appears on a large movie screen.)
I
asked what it was like to have her sexy parts mash up against famous
actors’ sexy parts. Her answer was both short and long, in turn: a sigh
and a string of syllables forming words that formed a sentence. I let it
hang there, laden with fragility and malaise. I thought about my
financial portfolio, and what I had and hadn’t eaten for dinner, and how
a large man might look in a short robe. I knew that, years later, I
would remember this moment—so lush with silence and yet so not full of
speaking.
Eventually, she said, “Oh,
I think that’s my Uber,” and picked her way back across the sands of
forgotten periodontics, her blondness effulgent, and then evaporating
into the night like the last pale crumbs of a Portugarian pastry, the
only evidence of her ever having done this interview a single, lonesome
note of a French horn.
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