THE COUCH CONCH

A night of passion is a hard thing to remember (no pun intended). The moments blur into a warm blush on your brain, from which it’s hard to extract the details later, if you want to brood over them and confirm just how he did what. So it’s lovely to find a Couch Conch in your bedroom, the morning after.

You know when a Couch Conch is spending the night from the atmosphere it diffuses. Your limbs loosen; you have the most marvelous sense of relaxing on some sandy bottom, among beds of warm sea grass in tropical waters. Your lover tastes like fresh oysters and tart wine; his kisses are iridescent, plentiful, while your toes fan apart and wave hungrily. Gravity is suspended for the night as you spiral deeper into spellbound synchrony, warm and wet. His looks are swimming with love, his hand tangles in your hair, his navel is adorable, like a blister pearl, and swells toward your smiling face with each deep breath sounding like the sea, which is the sound of “pink noise” . . . as it’s well named, since the pink lips of conches waft that same noise to our eardrums.

But, as I said, you find your Couch Conch in the morning, after all the delights are past, perched beside the clock radio. And unlike the souvenir shell held to your head in an airport gift shop, the Couch Conch isn’t empty. It is bowing on its foot. You might say hello, or something.

Like all conches, a Couch Conch seems the symbol of a perfect union. Its feminine, rosy lip is borne along in eager leaps by its foot, which my dictionary describes as “pointed and horny,” and this hot foot obtrudes from an operculum, which is Latin for “lid.” Gazing at your Couch Conch, you hear Nature saying in her peremptory way that every pot has its lid, so get busy and find yours! As if that weren’t enough of a hint, most conches unfurl their gorgeous, pouting lips—so reminiscent of our bodies at sexual maturity—at their sexual maturity.

That’s when a Couch Conch pays its visit to your boudoir. As you gently lift the Couch Conch from your nightstand, careful not to jar its squirming foot—which probes your wrist for plankton, pathetically—you see what makes this creature unique. Its gleaming lip sports ornate and delicate carvings; in the film of pale shell that overlays its radiant pink, there’s an ecstatic face with tousled locks, framed by a pair of hands. In a rondure of magenta, standing nudes, white with passion, dig fingers into each other’s rumps. Two lovers are glued in a leggy X, staring at each other. They look like naughty Victorian cameos. In fact the Couch Conch’s cameos, which it acquires at puberty, are a natural enhancement to attract mates, much as body piercings or tattoos mark our own debuts. But there’s another surprise in store. Slipping on your glasses, the better to scrutinize, you bend closer to your kelp-smelling visitor and gasp. You’ve just seen what you look like upside down, in the buff.

Fortunately for your dignity, the Couch Conch is not a camera. The cameos are made by another process, requiring heat rather than light (see below) and possess a personal aura, the je ne sais quoi of a genuine artwork. A camera shows naked bodies that you see: the Couch Conch shows naked moments that you recognize. There’s the moment, stunning, when his finger traced your tense lower lip, which unfairly makes you look thin-lipped because it holds back an avalanche of worries about how you aren’t young enough, thin enough, rich enough, smart enough, and just plain not enough. Your lover saw, laughed, touched, and your poor mouth relaxed. You thought you had been smiling, but only at his magic touch did a smile unfold that you could feel. What a full lip is silhouetted here, in your smile! Now you can put your finger on the memory.

It’s wonderful that mollusks, who don’t care about us, can show us what our bodies express. But mollusks are full of lessons. They know all about the balance of hard and soft, rigidity and acceptance, firmness and flexibility, from the way in which they compose their nacre, the iridescent glaze that makes pearls precious and conches beautiful. We don’t think of beauty in terms of incredible toughness, but it so happens that nacre, that angelic gloss, is damn near unbreakable. It’s made of hard crystals and gooey, soft protein. If a crack starts running through the rigid crystals, it stops dead in the yielding goo. Isn’t that worth studying if you’re a human couple?

We humans make an inferior commercial copy of nacre, by sintering. I’m guessing you don’t sinter much. It requires temperatures of around two thousand degrees Celsius. Conches make the real article, which we can’t imitate, while lolling in beds of sea grass with no more heat than puberty calls for, and with no more wasted effort than the lilies whose folded white genitals trumped Solomon in all his glory.

Now, as for the naughty cameos, nothing could be simpler. The Couch Conch’s protein goo is heat sensitive, like infrared film. Our body heat impresses itself on this protein, and as the Couch Conch completes its shell lip, the goo “develops” the heat images of our ecstasies three dimensionally, by contracting and expanding various layers of crystals. This isn’t hard to grasp. It’s exactly as if a three-D digital modeling program were a marine life form with a slimy foot that hung out in people’s bedrooms while they canoodled, then mysteriously vanished around nine in the morning, leaving a fishy whiff and a smear of sand, on its way to find a bodacious Strombus gigas and spawn some glutinous egg strands.