Fear of Fifty (20 page)

Sex is something I have always fought. It works so strongly on me that I have to battle it to keep my life my own. When I was a teenager and discovered masturbation I would say to myself: “I am keeping myself free from men.”

I wanted men sexually but I did not want them to have power over me. This was something men could not accept. Most men like power better than they like sex, and if you give them one without the other, they eventually rebel.

That is why the greatest lovers tend to disappear. They don't want to be at your beck and call. They don't want to be predictable. As soon as you find your lunar mate, prepare to lose him. He doesn't like the heat of the sun.

There are all kinds of other loves—satisfying in all kinds of other ways. There is talking love, cuddling love, cooking love—and some of these are accompanied by great thumping orgasms. That's not the point.

In every woman's heart, there's a god of the woods. And this god is not available for marriage, or for home improvement, or for parenthood.

Men, no doubt, have the equivalent: Lilith, not Eve. But there have been enough books about men. I don't need to add to the literature. The point is: You're always a bigamist. Married to one in your heart and another in your womb. Sometimes the heart and the womb come together for a night or two. Then they separate again.

My fantasy is a menage à trois: moon-husband, sun-husband, and me. I haven't yet figured how we can live together. But when I get it worked out, I'll tell you. I know that plenty of women long for this too. And only fear and compulsion toward useless niceness make them claim that they don't.

In all the books that have been poured out about love and sex, there is seldom any sense of that mystery. Sometimes, at night, switching channels, I come upon the sex shows. Dial 1-900-BOOBS or 1-900-STUDS or 1-900-BALLS. The men look cynical and crude and the women all talk with Bronx accents. The men are in love with themselves and have no room for anyone else. These are not my fantasies.

Once, my third husband and I went to Plato's Retreat. We went as sexual reporters, with little spiral notebooks. We kept our clothes on at first, and then we took them off, wanting verisimilitude.

We wandered from the spa room (scummy water, pimply bodies) to the snack room (peanut butter and jelly, bologna and mustard—as at some very déclassé kids' party), to the mat room (dentists from New Jersey hydraulically screwing their hygienists). Finally, detumescence set in and we went home. Again the fantasy wasn't mine. My fantasy would have included Beluga, not bologna, but that wasn't all. I wanted an orgy that approximated those dreams that haunt you through the day. Plato's Retreat was not my dream.

Oh, the things that have been done in Plato's name! Chaste love has come to be called “Platonic love.” But it is really
ideal
love that we seek—like the courtly lovers of the Provençal south. Physical consummation is the least important thing here. It is the ideal of
yearning
—the lover who can never be possessed—that makes for Provençal perfection.

Perhaps the lover can never be possessed because he runs away. Perhaps he can never be possessed because time intrudes on timeless-ness. Or perhaps the rest of our life is promised to another. And only in dreams can we participate in this menage à trois.

Impossibility is part of its essence. Impossibility alone makes it possible. Or maybe I only tell myself this because I am a coward. Maybe I don't want to risk the limits of experience.

 

The tall redheaded boy and I never touched. But when I was fourteen or fifteen, I was chosen as an inamorata by a someone less immaterial: His name was Robbie and he was tall and brown haired, with a bumpy, slightly lopsided nose and a big beautiful cock.

“Maybe someday you'll take it in your mouth,” he said tentatively, knowing it was against the “rules.” And did we have rules in 1955! Outside or inside the bra, outside or inside the panties, inside or outside the jockey shorts. If writing rhymed poetry is tennis with a net (to paraphrase Robert Frost), then “making out” in 1955 was a tournament with its own elaborate rules. One false move and you could be out. Until then, you delicately went as far as you could—avoiding, of course, penetration of either the oral or the vaginal kind.

The excuse then was babies. Pregnancy was an irreversible condition. Or was perceived as such—as AIDS is today. The lust to break the taboo was not nearly as strong as the need to have a safety net. So we invented all kinds of expedients: finger fucking, jerking off with various handy lubricants, dry humping. You wanted to have your cake and eat it too. You wanted “technical virginity.” Later in my life, in an unhappy marriage, I would allow myself adultery with a condom—so no skins or fluids touched. Or have oral sex, but stop short of intercourse. These limitations mattered. Human beings are always bigger on form than content.

The melting pleasure I experienced with Robbie had its dues. I got anorexic from my guilt and literally stopped eating, stopped even drinking water. Symbolically, I must have thought all my orifices were one.

So if I could stop taking things in my mouth, perhaps it would make up for what I had taken in my vagina. I remember the terror and obsession, the passion to undo what I had done! What had I done? I didn't even have a name for it! I thought we had invented it!

Will there ever be a Trobriand Island adolescence where sex is free and children can refrain from such doing and undoing? I don't anticipate it.

The sex we have in books, in movies, and on television is so devoid of mystery that it frightens me. Mystery is the essence of our humanity. It is what makes us who we are.

 

Sometime in my forties, a famous poet about a decade older fell madly in love with me. We had lunch in my house in New York and kissed and cuddled somewhat tentatively. Then he went home to Ireland and I went to my house in Connecticut for the summer. The letters flew across the Atlantic. They were full of black garter belts, black silk stockings, lines of poetry, double entendres. They were the beginning of an erotic novel.

We waited for each other's letters. Then we answered as cleverly as we could.

After a couple of months of this, I flew to Venice, planning to meet him in London a few weeks later. In Venice, there was a complication. I remet Piero and we began our fierce love affair.

Suddenly the Irish poet went cold for me. Yet he had moved heaven and earth with the lady of his life to come and meet me in London.

He came to my posh hotel with a pasteboard suitcase and two cartons of cigarettes (he really planned to stay!). He looked around my oval suite overlooking the park and said snidely: “Your books must be doing well.”

His hands were shaking and he lit cigarette after cigarette and paced. At last, he said, “Let's read poetry to each other, because it's through poetry that we met.”

We tried. This did not calm us either.

Finally, we went out to dinner at a greasy pub where he felt comfortable. He tried to drink himself silly, but he remained every bit as nervous. I found the plonk he'd ordered unpotable.

Back at the hotel, I wondered how to get rid of him. The last train to the unfashionable shire where he was staying had already left. I hadn't the heart to make him sleep in some awful station hotel. I vanished into the bathroom, as I often do when perplexed.

When I came out I found him installed in my bed, smoking his twenty-eighth cigarette.

“We might as well sleep together for
warmth,”
he said, and smiled a snaggle-toothed smile. His letters had been far more appealing.

Reader: I put a rubber on him and fucked him. Then I went out to the living room and slept on the couch, wrapped in a satin comforter.

In the morning I gave him a wonderful breakfast, which he mocked for its elegance, before he went his way. I had discovered he was vain, snobbish, anti-Semitic, and not very nice.

But I still have the letters. Sometimes, I take them out and read them, pretending I don't know the ending. The story is better without it.

 

Sex, by definition, is something you have with someone other than a spouse—which doesn't mean the other isn't good. It's simply in another category. Call it conjugal anything and the mystery withers. Sex has mystery, magic, a hint of the forbidden.

It isn't practical. It has nothing to do with money. That's why those 900 numbers couldn't get me off even if they did click with my fantasies. Pay for it and you are out of the realm of mystery. It becomes a transaction, a part of the gross national product, something to enter our anesthetizing national dialogue about whether or not porn is good for women's equality. We are out of the realm of money and politics here. We are into the realm of myth, fairy tale, and dream.

 

In another myth I loved as a child, Princess Langwidere of Oz had thirty heads, one for every day of the month. Some were good and some were bad, but she could never remember which until she wore them—and by then, it was too late.

The good girl could not be blamed for being bad. The bad girl was really a good girl with her heads mixed up!

 

In my fantasy, I am Princess Langwidere with my simple flowing white chiffon dress and the ruby key I wear at my wrist to open the cupboards where my heads are kept. I open the cupboard, put on the tousled, Medusa-like black head, and suddenly I am screaming at the Irish poet: “Get out! How dare you bring that pasteboard suitcase in my room!”

I do not fuck him. I send him home to his long-suffering wife and luxuriate in my big hotel bed alone.

The enemy is niceness, manners, trying to be good.

Whenever I feel that way, I say to myself: Change heads!

Good daughter, good sister, good niece, good wife, good mother—and the only place I am honest is in the adulterous bed. Forbidden sex gives us ourselves because selfhood is still forbidden to women. Sex is the root of all this, sex is the key. Sex is the catalyst for metamorphosis. That is why we cannot give it up.

 

And so I sit in the palazzo watching the boats go by.

The telephone is about to ring.

Of course I will say yes.

 

There is nothing more discouraging than a woman who has given up sex. She reminds you of Oscar Wilde's line: “Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her look like a public monument.”

Here is the difference between Oscar Wilde and me. For all the tortures he suffered, for all the ugliness of being punished for loving men, nobody read his lines and asked him: “What does your husband think of that?” Jail, exile—these were his lot. But never “What does your husband think?”

Women may have the vote, but they are not free as long as that reaction erupts. Even those without husbands are judged as if they had offended them merely by writing the truth.

So immovable is the wall around a woman's freedom that she can't do a thing without being asked to think of its effect upon some man who is presumed to be more important than she.

So it is with women's sexuality. It is always put at the disposal of the species. For this reason, it is hard even to locate your fantasy—let alone express it. Even the dream world is hedged about with prohibitions.

 

I am a method writer. I need to experience the things I write about. Are they horrific? So much the better. Deep into Any
Woman's Blues,
my novel about an artist in eighties New York, I decided that sadomasochism was a part of my story. I knew nothing about its official side—bondage parlors, chains, whips—all I knew about sadomasochism came from my family. But I decided to learn. I used the journalist's ploy. I went to “interview” a dominatrix.

She was thrilled to be interviewed. She had only one request: that I use her real name in anything I wrote. That was the one request I couldn't fulfill. Was this the beginning of our sadomasochistic relationship?

Of course she opened her “studio” to me and let me observe. And of course she told me everything about herself. But there was more she wanted. She wanted me involved in her life.

“I am sending my personal slave to get you and bring you to my studio,” she said on the phone one day.

And sure enough, a smiling girl in black tights and a black sweater arrived in a black radio cab to take me to the mirrored midtown high-rise where Madame X worked. I had never been with a “personal slave” before, and I wondered what the etiquette was.

The girl's body language said, “Abuse me.” She cowered. She was a girl, not a woman. How I knew this I cannot say.

At the studio—a three-bedroom apartment on the thirty-ninth floor—there were three mistresses ready for action. One was model-slim, red-haired, and wore a black rubber jumpsuit, one was blonde and elegant, with razor cheekbones and a red velvet dress that unzipped everywhere, and one was black-haired, with a gamine face and legs, in black velvet boots, that went on forever. All of them were students. One was getting a Ph.D. in English.

Disguised in a rubber face mask with zippered mouth, I had free run of the fantasies. I wandered at my will from room to room.

How clichéd they all were! Enemas, racks, nooses, stocks. And how repetitive were the postures of subjugation. Flat on your back, on your belly, or kneeling like a submissive shoe salesman. The main thing was—nobody touched. The main thing was—to be out of control.

If you are chained and subjected to sexual fantasies against your will, you have both pleasure and a total absence of responsibility. It is a little like my twelve dancing princesses. You are doing it in a dream, therefore you are not doing it.

Is my waiting at the palazzo a version of the same thing? I, too, am out of control. I, too, long for the lover who may let me just kiss his shoe.