Whatever you’re thinking, whatever evidence to the contrary, this book is not about sex.
I remember fighting on the phone when I was maybe nine or ten with the girl who lived across the street from us in Detroit, the girl my sister and I vied for throughout elementary school. I don’t remember what I’d done, but she yelled at me, said I was schizophrenic and I needed help. Though she was probably just throwing out a word she’d heard somewhere, I was shocked at what I thought was her clairvoyance. I was so changeable, I was a danger to myself, to others. She had seen through me. I thought I knew what she meant—that I was a different person to every person. That I tried to carefully control my image, make myself what I thought someone needed me to be in the moment. I have been, all of my life, a private person, secretive even, consulting a baroque manual to see what’s safe to say or do. This one might like me if she knows this snippet but not that one; he will smirk at this gesture but grin at that. Though I have said too much already, I want you to see me as unassailable. So let me get close, because I want to tell you and I want you to believe that this is not about sex, none of it. There are things at stake hère for which sex is a poor substitute, and I am whispering this in your ear.
When do we have sex? When we’re happy, sad? When we can turn our bedrooms into a stage? When our hormones lead us to it almost entirely of their own accord? When we feel that the noises of our bodies, the texture of our arches and thrusts, are too precious to escape the notice of another? When we are bored and can’t think of a good reason to say no? When we are trying to prove to ourselves that we are, in fact, beautiful, powerful, alive; or, conversely, bruised, careless, and expendable? When we find someone with whom, for whatever reason, we are willing to take the greatest risk: the risk of realizing mid-act that he or she is not it. You may love this person so that you daily weep with adoration; still, he or she will never be the real object of sex. The real object is a nonobject. No matter the position we take, we will never possess what we desire. We will never even embody it, because what we desire is something beyond our skins, beyond the skins of our partners. And since we take this risk, we must also be ready to hate them—in fact, we must already hate them just a little bit so that we might someday discard them—saying, You, you have failed to make me happy, failed to make me rise above myself for more than a moment at a time—and then forget our own failures, our inability to make our moans give noise to every feeling for which sex is a substitute.
And just as we are disappointed, so must we disappoint. We should be sleepless with the fear of laying our fingers—however briefly, slightly—on the tender spot, the intersection of every fiber that tells people who they want to be. We should, none of us, have this power. As our bodies know nothing but decay, so our desires are malignant—they cannot hover, feather-light, around such sacred spots; we sink heavily, we press down our thumbs in their opposable brutality.
I’m suggesting that, evolutionarily speaking, sex for humans has become (beyond its peripheral reproductive function), roughly, only the response to some mixture of sadness, joy, love, anger, impatience, ambition, and melancholia bubbling over. Can an action, an embodiment, truly be a metaphor? Certainly, think of a salute, a wink, a hand slamming a door. But this particular action falls prey to the same foibles and failings as any tuft of words: imprecision, opacity, double entendre. In fact, sex is not even a metaphor—it is merely a simile. It is endlessly “like” something, “as if” something else. For me, almost three years completely single, heading into my thirties, teaching in a small town, sex with anyone, really, would be both too much and not enough. It doesn’t seem worth the enormous risks. I would like to say this is what it’s like to be single, but I think this is just what it’s like to be when every gesture risks untold losses. My biggest fear is choosing wrongly and having regrets from which I cannot recover. Everything is very, very heavy when you’re alone and ponderous and wary and you don’t know anymore whom to please or how to do it.
Of course, I fear that I may have gone off—turned rancid like a bottle of olive oil. Imagine, if you will, the genes of a hyena perishing because the act of sex itself could not adequately embody the desire behind it, and the partner of the sex act could not be expected to be responsible for such inspiration. Imagine the hyena paralyzed, abstinent, plagued by visions of passionate kisses, unable to follow up on her momentary impulses. She pours her excess energies into activities for which she will not be remembered—oil paintings of sunsets, long walks through the desiccated grasses. I will, perhaps, think differently about sex someday. It is only a matter of time before I trade in one idealization for another. For can one actually have sex and not want to believe in it, however briefly? But for now, I will have friends and not lovers. I will idealize the almost of love, passion, envy, respect, the longings more exquisite for their inertia.
I am never far from the sparkling-eyed boy when speaking of these things. I am well aware that, whatever else he may be, the sparkling-eyed boy is still eighteen and the lover I will not let myself have. I conjure his dear, distant self preserved in the glow of an arrested summer sun that has the power neither to warm nor irritate me, his self that I cannot disappoint and with whom I cannot be disappointed, the perfect elsewhere on which I might dwell.
I can hardly believe what I’ve said already, not knowing how to please you. Yet I can tell you this because it is so innocent. Who is harmed? To what could anyone object? I was wrong about the greatest risk. It is not disillusionment or regret. The greatest risk is being known, fully, by anyone else. Which will not happen.