'Bred Crumbs

"Making Love" in the Street

It's an intersection, in more than one sense. You cross the street. Others cross the street, in reverse of your direction. You cross paths. If they're talking, on a phone or to a companion, you get maybe a one-sentence window into their life.

Today. Two men, one tall, one short, converge with me. And when I reach that moment of opportunity, this is what the short one says to his friend:

"Did you make love with her?"

The tone was matter-of-fact, a point mid-conversation. The same pitch, volume, and energy could have applied to a discussion of the Giants, a fender bender, or a sandwich. But what got me was the word choice. "Have sex with" would not have fazed me; the F word would have been maybe less of a shock. But who in real life, in 2005, uses "make love"? If it's the 1970s, and you're a Southern California singer-songwriter, or a game-show host trying to be naughty within limits of the censors, then you say "make love." That's not what anyone says now, even if that's what they do.

It was charmingly quaint, made more so by the unusual choice of preposition afterward. "Make love with," not to. A rare allusion to a collaborative act. Make love to, the ancient idiom, always sounds like a one-way transaction. You might as well say make love upon, or at.

So many questions now — not just, Well, did you? but also: What is the nature of this downtown friendship, where "making love" is asked about at lunchtime so publicly and casually, yet carefully? How did the questioner come to hone this particular manner of speaking? And does his friend match it?

But the window was closed, our separate lives again a street apart, the answers falling out of earshot.

It's not the most intriguing random one-line dropped eave ever to reach my ears; that prize is still clutched confidently by The West Hollywood Incident, where Dewayne and I passed by an outdoor table and were delighted to overhear: "But 'whore' doesn't start with an h." Still, it has its place.

Send e-mail