Tonight I am taking my husband out for my birthday, but he doesn’t know where. Do you, darling? The urge to get all Smoove B about it is overwhelming. Baby, let me lay it down for you. Tonight, baby darling, I will pick you up at your office wearing the sandals that are both cute and comfortable enough for walking moderate distances, and an outfit I think is really appropriate. I will yell “Taxi” in the lustiest fashion possible, and will push ten to fifteen people out of the way to make it happen. Mmmhmm, you know I will. Then we will drive the most freakishly nauseating of rides to a totally undisclosed location, where I will bite my lip nervously and check my watch. Ohh, yeah. What happens next cannot be divulged to you, my sweetest of candies.

Oh, Smoove, it’s not as easy as it looks.

Yesterday, or else the day before, I called in to a number where they’re recording people’s fantasies about what they would find behind a secret door in their apartment. (You don’t have to have an apartment to call, just a fantasy.) What kind of extra space would there be? In my best public radio voice I said that behind my secret door I would want to find a smaller version of my apartment, with its own secret door that led to a smaller version of that apartment, and so on, smaller and smaller. Now I wonder if this is in fact a blueprint for all my fantasies, that they are smaller than the reality they started from, and get smaller as they go on. I had always thought it was the other way around.