B007Q6XJAO EBOK (12 page)

Location, location, location

—
REAL ESTATE SLOGAN

Weeks before her wedding to a prominent lawyer, Allie Nelson, the heroine of Nicholas Sparks’
Notebook
, sees a photograph of an old boyfriend’s house in the paper and can’t help herself. She drives off to the North Carolina boondocks, where the power of place overcomes her. The low-country landscape brings back a “flood of memories,” and once she steps on Noah’s front porch, the setting works its magic and delivers her back to his arms. He serves her seasoned crabs in his cozy kitchen, and takes her the next day to a secret lagoon, where they’re drenched by a thunderstorm. They dry off before a fire and resist until they can resist no longer. She unbuttons his shirt and it’s all over, her marriage to the lawyer and her respectable life in Raleigh.

Ladies’ men are poets of what Roland Barthes calls “amorous space.” They shun clichés—romantic suites with rose-petal turndowns—and go for impact, a sensual skylift. “Passion,” writes critic Jeff Turrentine, “is catalyzed by the erotic pull of place,” such venues as a curio-filled “office” atop London with a bed concealed in the wall, or an abandoned bench in a garden maze, or an “otherworldly” castle of high-tech surprises. Passionate love sweeps us out of the mundane into a magical, exalted elsewhere, and location—artfully arranged—can help spirit us there.

Both genders are erotically susceptible to space, but women are especially sensitive to location. Biologist Richard Dawkins attributes this to a “domestic bliss” strategy in which our female ancestors sought secure nests and solid resources from mates. Women, though, may have been somewhat pickier. Geoffrey Miller thinks they also looked for beauty, prompting men to adorn the premises, “be they caves, huts, or palaces.” The embellishment of place in seduction is called “priming,” and it can be eerily effective. Psychiatrist Cynthia Watson tells of a patient who followed an unattractive man back to his apartment, where the elegant “highly charged environment” made her see him anew; by the end of the evening, she was smitten.

The erotic diablerie of setting may also well from the collective unconscious. We may retain memories of space as sacred and yearn for the time when cave-chapels served as shrines suffused with erotic images and the
mysterium tremendum
of divine lust. In 4000 BC Sumer, the king and priestess performed their ritual copulation in the holy of holies of the ziggurat, and the acolytes of Dionysus coupled each year in a secret sanctum, the “Bull House.” The mythological Adonis and Psyche wed in an alpine love temple filled with rare treasures and conceived with the “cunning of a god.”

Since tales were told, women have been transported by aphrodisiacal milieus. In
Paradise Lost
, Eve beds Adam in a “blissful bow’r” walled around with fragrant roses, jasmine, and irises. And Emma Bovary yields to Leon in a voluptuous hotel room softly lit “for the intimacies of passion.” Romance heroines have amorous sensors for settings and take in details like estate appraisers. When Ann Verlaine first sees Christy Morrell’s bedroom in Patricia Gaffney’s
To Love and To Cherish
, she catalogues the layout—the handsome fittings, flock wallpaper, and crochet-draped tester bed—and wonders, “Why was it, again, that she wasn’t marrying him?”

Gabriele D’Annunzio was a “born interior decorator” who mined poetry, myth, and drama for his settings and believed “love was nothing without the scenery.” When asked why he never went to “their place,” he replied, “[And] sacrifice my privileged position of sorcerer, surrounded by my philters and incantations?”

His apartments were calculated to intoxicate and levitate the senses. Tuberoses scented the rooms, shades muted the light, and the décor was late Djinn Palace: velvet cushions, arcane bibelots, and a red-brocaded boudoir furnished with silk kimonos and a wrought-iron bedstead. Later he dialed up the drama to elicit an “excitation transfer,” the erotic frisson of fear. At Lake Garda he built a villa designed to unnerve the boldest lady friends: warrens of claustral parlors, pillows stuffed with lovers’ hair, lugubrious war souvenirs, and a “Leper’s Room” lit by an oil lamp.

D’Annunzio utilized another potent scenic spell: nature. Dancer Isadora Duncan recalled a rendezvous with him in the forest that—perhaps evoking Dionysian rites in the wild—lifted her spirit “from this earth to the divine region.” D. H. Lawrence, no stranger to sexual myth, has Lady Chatterley experience her erotic awakening with Milord in the woods where everything is “alive and still.”

One of America’s most noted architects and ladykillers put this erotic charge of nature to spectacular amorous ends. A short elfin man with neither looks nor wealth, Frank Lloyd Wright married three times and had numerous affairs. Women found him irresistibly magnetic, and none, writes his biographer, “ever wanted to let him go.”

Although gallant and charming, his chief attraction was his revolutionary-design genius. Deliberately invoking the numinous aspect of setting, he brought the natural world within. In his pioneering structures he opened a room to the outside so that it resembled a “woodland chapel.”

His female clients who saw these “artful, enchanted” places were entranced—and often with the creator himself. Mamah Cheney, a cultured Chicagoan, went further and abandoned her children and husband, running off with Wright (then married with six children) to Europe. They returned a year later, and he built a sanctuary for Cheney on two hundred acres of Wisconsin wilderness called Taliesin, named after the Welsh bard and fertility god.

When a crazed servant burned Taliesin to the ground three years later, killing Cheney, her two children, and four workers, women flocked to console Wright. Miriam Noel, a glamorous aesthete with a monocle, led the pack. Finding Wright “unprepossessing” at first, she changed her mind after she saw one of his houses—“as lovely as a miniature Palace of Baghdad.” They married, and for seven years thereafter she alternately “kissed his feet” and tore his eyes out in jealous rages until they divorced in 1928. Wright then married a third time, a young Russian who consecrated herself to the “master” and his architectural vision for the rest of his long life.

Setting isn’t everything; a real romance, as the song goes, doesn’t need a designer “hideaway” or “blue lagoon.” Some ladykillers such as Jimi Hendrix, Warren Beatty, and Picasso operated out of distinctly unsavory settings in their early years. Picasso’s Bateau Lavoir studio in Paris was a squalid, cold-water dump littered with garbage and half-squeezed paint tubes. A true ladies’ man upstages any stage set—regardless of the trappings.

Nevertheless, as anthropologists say, “space speaks.” And when it functions erotically, it doesn’t need to follow formulas—deluxe spreads with expensive toys or couples’ retreats with beachfront villas and travertine soaking tubs. Instead, settings that seduce are the work of artists of ambiance—charmed sanctums designed to ravish women and raise the roof.

Music

A sweet voice and music are powerful enticers.

—R
OBERT
B
URTON
,
The Anatomy of Melancholy

In the late 1950s a Massachusetts resort town had the envied reputation as a safe haven for teenagers; they sailed, danced to society bandleader Lester Lanin, and had good clean fun. Mothers used to say—justifiably—there was no sex at The Point. That is, until Bordy appeared. A Harvard freshman and poor relation of an old family, he had been given a fisherman’s shack on a cousin’s private beach for the summer. He arrived on a Vespa dressed in sandals and jeans, with bed hair, a baby face, and most lethally, a guitar on his back.

Suddenly there were beach parties, with Bordy playing licks on his Gibson and leading the group in “Bye Bye Love” in his cashmere baritone. Nice girls clustered around and began to behave not so nicely with him behind the dunes. The yacht club lost its luster. The place to be was Bordy’s shack, listening to his walking bass versions of “Crawlin’ King Snake,” and “doing it” for the first time. He didn’t make it through Labor Day. A jealous Miss Porter’s senior made trouble, and Bordy was sent packing to the Cape to continue his sing-along seductions elsewhere.

Music assaults the mind and torches the libido like nothing else. It’s “the most ecstatic of the arts” and inseparable from love and sex. Although a ladies’ man can manage without music, he’s passing up a prime aphrodisiac. Women have a keener, more refined sense of hearing—a subtler ear for higher tones and auditory nuances—and have been serenaded into bed since the dawn of culture. In studies they rank men sexier after listening to rock anthems. Music
is
“the food of love”—an entrée laced with deep elixirs.

The fourth-century author of the Indian
K
ā
ma S
ū
tra
was insistent on the subject. “It’s a matter of experience,” he preached, “that music reaches the center of female sexuality.” For that reason, men must prepare themselves accordingly—learn to sing, play string and percussion instruments, and master the “science of sounds.” One medieval caliph was so alarmed by the female weakness for music that he tried to ban it from the land: it loosened “self-control,” incited lust, and led to “unacceptable practices.”

Why music churns up such an erotic tumult is still uncertain. A melody or cadenza, for instance, can “rattle” us “to the core,” “raise gooseflesh,” and render us “almost defenseless.” One explanation is music’s ability to express the inexpressible emotional life; another is its whole-brain engagement and precision punch to the limbic nodes where we experience sex and cocaine highs.

Darwin proposed an evolutionary answer; music, he conjectured, originated to charm the opposite sex. Male rutting calls pervade the animal kingdom: whales sing to females miles away, frogs croak, cats caterwaul, crickets whirr, and fruit flies vibrate their wings like scrapers in a jug band. Very likely, Pleistocene men followed the same courtship strategy, staging drum, whistle, and clapstick jamborees to seduce women.

Music’s erotic force may also derive from the sacred. At the earliest rites, worshippers channeled cosmic sexual energy through concerts of bone flutes, rattles, tom-toms, and bull roarers. If we’re all alloys of our ancestral past, we may still hear subliminal echoes of the sex gods’ pipes and drums—Krishna’s flute that seduced nine hundred thousand cowgirls or Dionysus’s haunting aulos and tambourines. Orpheus, an avatar of Dionysus, charmed stones, beasts, and the beautiful Eurydice through the strains of his lyre.

The sorcery persists. Salman Rushdie’s Orpheus, Ormus Cama in
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
, maddens women and makes sidewalks sway with his music. An opera’s “diabolic” force drives the librettist of Doris Lessing’s
Love, Again
into a passion for two men, one half her age. And the “Kreutzer Sonata” of Tolstoy’s novella so enraptures a wife when she plays it with her violin teacher that her husband kills her in a jealous rage.

Music can be just as ecstatic in a mellower mode; a slow, steady womb-beat rhythm is intensely seductive. The fairy-tale Beast soothes Beauty with soft airs over dinner, and Nicholas woos the rich miller’s wife in
The Canterbury Tales
by playing a dulcet “Angelus” on his harp. Tea Cake’s largo blues piano lulls Janie into his arms in
Their Eyes Were Watching God
. However they do it—whether through easy-listening music or tempestuous pulse-racers—ladykillers bewitch women through their ears; one romance novel even comes with a CD by the “hero.”

Lovers have always been wise to the effect of music on women. During the reign of courtly love and throughout the Renaissance, a man was expected to be musically proficient to earn a woman’s regard. Men who can play anything—the violin like Casanova or the saxophone like Bill Clinton—hold a strong charm card. When Warren Beatty was a bit actor with acne, he won Hollywood beauty Joan Collins by improvising at a baby grand during a party.

Franz Liszt was one of the great musical seducers, a pianist and composer who touched off a “Lisztmania” throughout nineteenth-century Europe. At his concerts, this bravura showman performed with such soul-sizzling passion that women went wild. “Trembling like poor little larks,” they stalked him, fought over his discarded orange rinds, tucked his cigar butts in their cleavages, and swamped him with love letters. Too kind-hearted to decline, he took droves of lovers, two of whom left their husbands for him and forgave his many transgressions. In old age, women were still “perfectly crazy over him,” twice threatening him with loaded pistols to regain his favors.

His closest twentieth-century counterpart was conductor Leopold Stokowski. Tall, blond, and as handsome as a central-casting Viking, “Stoki” combined titanic musical gifts with torrid sex appeal. His prospects were not promising when he first appeared in New York City in 1905 as a poor organist at St. Bartholomew’s Church with just four years’ training at the Royal College of Music in London. He had only three assets: tremendous talent; a dramatic, virtuoso delivery; and a flair for women.