(The first time)
Some people reach for a post-coital cigarette. Lying in bed, spent and sated, legs tangled within the sheets, they take long, lazy puffs and blow out the smoke with lingering breaths, like characters in a grainy French movie.
Not me.
But I did reach for a pre-coital joint once, faking a long and hard drag to the best of my abilities because I, a forty-something mother of three, was clueless, completely and embarrassingly clueless when it came to smoking a joint properly, never mind a cigarette. And to think that I had a chimney for a mother. Derek Zoolander didn’t know how to turn right; I didn’t know how to smoke. I didn’t know how to suck in that swirl of tar and addiction into my mouth and down through my throat until it filled my lungs, and then blow it out smoothly, assuredly, nonchalantly, without coughing or choking or sputtering, as I’d seen my pothead cousins do all my life, Spicoli wannabes with glassy eyes, silly grins, and befuddled denials.
The pothead cousins tried to teach me how to smoke one New Year’s Eve, huddled at the far end of the garden in my uncle’s house, shielded by the shrubs and camouflaged by the haze of firecrackers exploding into a thousand shards of light all around us. But I was a pathetic student, incapable of learning. And so, just like Bill Clinton, I didn’t inhale.
“When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it. I didn't inhale and never tried it again.”
- Bill Clinton
I didn’t really care for weed much either, but there were occasions, rare as they were, that called for it. If you asked my friend Vanessa, anal sex was one such occasion.
My girlfriends and I had unanimously anointed Vanessa as our resident sex guru when we were all young wives and mothers in our late twenties and early thirties, who’d all been friends back home and found ourselves living the cushy expat life in Hong Kong, married to bankers (me) and tycoons in the making (everyone else).
Actually, the mantle of sexpert—in this case more Penthouse Forum than Dr Ruth—was a toss-up between Vanessa and Angie. Angie we knew, with the smug and slightly ruffled righteousness bestowed upon us by our bourgeois convent school upbringing, which a liberal university education overseas somehow failed to erode completely, had had a fairly wild past when she lived and worked in New York, fresh out of college. In fact, we were pretty sure that Angie, with her big brown eyes and pert, packed body, had even slept with a black man, though she neither admitted nor denied it, but we knew, from her sly smile and coy silence, we just knew that she did. While she bragged about but never offered details of her apparently active sex life with her husband, the video camera mounted on a tripod targeted toward the bed in their bedroom that we chanced upon one evening when we dropped by her house for a girls’ night confirmed that vanilla was too bland a flavor for them.
Vanessa, on the other hand, was the queen of too much information. She was tall and slender and graceful, with high cheekbones that made everyone assume she was a model. And she had long, beautiful light brown hair that fell seductively past her shoulders to the small of her back. With strangers, she was reserved, even aloof. But ensconced within the safety of our girls’ nights, she smoked and drank and cursed unabashedly and enjoyed shocking us with explicit accounts of sexual couplings, all with her husband, so much so that we were pretty sure they did “it” every single day in every conceivable position but missionary, which would have been too mundane. But then she had grown up in Philadelphia, so she was excused, as far as we were concerned. Their courtship was remarkable for its chasteness; she understood all too well that boys of our class—even if he were American—married good girls, not sluts. And Vanessa definitely knew how to play that game.
Until he slid, for starters, an engagement ring on her finger, Vanessa would only make out with Rick in the car, allowing him to kiss her and fondle her breasts while she stroked his penis tentatively through his jeans, getting him gloriously yet painfully aroused but never granting him access to infinity and beyond. Balls blue with frustration, Rick got the message loud and clear: only through marriage would he be automatically be given the VIP pass that guaranteed entry to all areas.
For all her adventurousness, however, Vanessa never expected the deal to include a back-door policy. Wasn’t it just a little bit too gay, she wondered, or Greek? Maybe it was the seven-year itch. But it wasn’t as if their sex life had stagnated; in fact, three children, including a set of twins, didn’t dampen their desire for drink, drugs, and doing it doggie-style.
Speaking of doggie-style, we’d never linked that particular position to liposuction before, until Vanessa made a candid confession during one of our regular girls-only get-togethers.
Once the twins had been born and the couple resumed their sex life, Vanessa found herself one night crouched on all fours while Rick pounded her from behind. She looked down and was dismayed to notice the wattle of loose skin hanging from her belly, flapping back and forth like a turkey’s gobble every time Rick pushed into her. Her breasts were still fine, they were bursting with milk, but her tummy swinging to and fro with abandon, like it had a life of its own, was simply intolerable.
“Fuck this,” she told herself. “I need a liposuction.”
Indeed, her tummy may be unmistakably flat and taut these days, but I can guarantee you that no one among our little group of girlfriends has been able to do it doggie-style since without thinking of Vanessa for the swiftest of seconds and wondering whether our own stomachs jiggled to the point of requiring surgical intervention.
But we were talking about her foray into anal sex. After years of, well, prodding, Vanessa, as she described it, toning down her usual risqué reportage when she saw our pinched and pained faces, especially Janna’s, the most recent bride among us, who was on the verge of throwing up, lay prone on the bed with her eyes closed and her fingers clenching the pillows as Rick slowly, gently, tenderly entered the final frontier. But she puffed the hell out of a motherfucking giant joint first.
I puffed the hell out of a motherfucking joint just to have normal, conventional sex, for heaven’s sake. But then again I would think that sex for the first time in more than fifteen years with someone other than Dex more than justified my flirtation with cannabis for the night.
Imagine fifteen years of sexual relations with someone who made you want to grit your teeth every time he touched you, who made you want to throw up every time he pulled your head down toward his cock, and not because of the size of it, who made you want to just lie there, limp with indifference, until he was spent, in all of five minutes, if you were lucky.
And then he called you frigid.
If only the doctors had prescribed medical marijuana instead of K-Y Jelly all those years ago …
So I could be forgiven for feeling like a born-again virgin with Felipe. After all, it had been ages since I’d experienced consensual, as opposed to just-grin-and-bear-it sex and, I had to admit, I was nervous, the lip-trembling, take-a-deep-breath, oh-my-God-am-I-really-doing-this kind of nervous. But tonight was the night, and it was inevitable. After four weeks of what used to be quaintly called “group dates” when I was a teenager, I’d invited Felipe over to my Johannesburg home for dinner, just him and me, without any of his friends and their families forming an entourage. On the menu was Thai beef salad, followed by prawns in a coconut and ginger sauce, with a molten chocolate lavender cake for dessert. It went without saying that sex—or the unspoken promise of it—really was the main course.
But only if he didn’t show up with a shirt that clung to his muscles and opened up to his waist, and with turquoise and tiger’s eye beads strung around his wrists like he’d just staggered in from a Rolling Stones concert circa 1975.
If you start me up I'll never stop,
Never stop, never stop, never stop …
Well, he did. To be precise, he came dressed as a Rolling Stones groupie on his way to a safari, if not a border war with Angola: khaki clothing, combat boots, tanned skin. And a lion’s tooth encased in gold dangling on a chain around his neck, to complement his leonine mane of hair, perhaps? It was Born Free in the flesh and I was Holly Golightly in a little black lace slip of a dress, silk underwear, scarlet lips, hair tied back, and a joint in my hand.
On the sound dock, Fergie was breathlessly cooing “G-L-A-M-O-R-O-U-S.”
Dinner and the pleasant, if not exactly free-flowing, conversation was a kind of bumbling foreplay. The evening was hot and sticky, the lights were too bright in my apartment and I needed another hit of weed. Felipe, who despite the faded rock star meets Disco Daktari get-up, was adamantly anti-narcotics, seemed just as nervous as I was. I found that endearing, considering his reputation as a Don Juan of sorts whose preferred accessory after the chains, beads, and animal trophies slung around his neck, was a leggy, barely legal blonde. The blondes perched upon his arm at one time or another, I would find out later, were his real trophies, captured in provocative poses and forever immortalized in poster-sized photographs all over his house.
Predictably—and disappointingly—Felipe wanted to know why I’d left my husband, a topic that I’d bored even myself talking about for a whole year and a half, plopped on my therapist’s leather sofa. My therapist was endlessly fascinated. How much lower could a man go, she’d wonder every week. Well, with Dex it was a bottomless pit. As they say, you never know the true character of a man until you leave him.
Felipe’s questions—they were part of the dance, I understood. The part where we circled each other with a mix of wariness and hope: he, wondering if hysterical tendencies lurked underneath the black lace and I, wondering if his brain was as muscular as his biceps, both of us sizing up the other’s relationship potential. At his age, he was tired of fucking around; he was looking for the love that would see him through to his dying days. At my age, I didn’t worry that he wasn’t going to respect me in the morning. But would this tryst herald the beginning of something or the conclusion to a holiday fling? I wasn’t looking for anything, not really, and especially not with someone who lived a continent away. Yet, until then, I’d never not been in a relationship; my fallow stretches had always been short-lived, although, my three pregnancies aside, my marriage was one long fallow stretch. Which reminded me that legally, at least, I was still in a relationship, separated but not quite divorced. Dex had sought yet another postponement in court; it would take a couple more years before I would officially and gleefully become Dex’s ex.
This was what we could be certain of thus far: after this dinner, Felipe knew I could cook. After this dinner, I knew that he was into me. I also knew that, although he was gallant, with old-world manners, I could never introduce him to any of my friends, at least not in that outfit. But the real question doing cartwheels in our heads was, were we going to end up having sex tonight?
So why did he keep asking about my marriage?
“Why did I leave? Things just didn’t work out,” I shrugged, leaning out of the graceful French windows of my apartment to cool myself on this starless night, heavy with the lack of wind. “Different values, different paths. Happens.”
He joined me by the windows, and I noticed how sweat had plastered the fabric of his shirt even more obscenely to his muscled chest and biceps. I turned to stare at the curtained lights of the apartments in the building across mine, then gazed down at the street, watching a neighbor slide her car into the guest parking, get out, slam the door, lock the car, unlock it again, get in, then get out, slam the door, and lock the car again and walk away. Then came a single short, shrill tweet. She’d activated the car alarm.
Or maybe I was just stoned.
“You look so beautiful, yet so soft, so fragile,” he said. “Como una niña. Must be hard to be on your own, raising three children.”
“Not really. I was on my own anyway even when I was married, if that makes sense.”
From the frown on his face, it seemed that it didn’t.
“Think of it this way,” I continued, trying to inject some levity into the discussion. “I was like a single mom with a joint bank account. Now I’m just a single mom.”
I'm still dancing on my own …
“So why didn’t you stay?”
Talk about a mood killer. Okay, he didn’t get the joke. Did we really have to have this conversation? I chose not to mention that the single life meant that I’d recently had to take a loan against a pair of diamond stud earrings, each stone a glittering half-carat. When I returned a month later to pay off the loan plus the obscenely high interest, the pawnshop had been mysteriously robbed, my diamonds were gone, and new burglar bars were being installed. Bloody Israeli mafia. “It’s just stuff,” I consoled myself. No, it was best not to tell Felipe that.
Marriage was a complex creature, I wanted to tell him, and if you’d never been married, you couldn’t ever understand. I stayed for as long as I did because I thought things would change, and it was the duty of the good girl, now the good wife, to try. Naïveté perhaps, or sheer stupidity, or both. There were some good moments, of course, but they never lasted enough to cancel out the dismal ones. Besides, there was always something, a new overseas assignment, which meant a new job, a new house, and a new school in a new country. Moving, then setting up house, then getting everyone settled, then falling into the rhythm of a new environment. In the frenetic pace of Hong Kong, the stultifying languor of Mauritius, the brisk hum of Singapore, the searing monotony of Dubai, the sun-spattered, paranoid cacophony of Johannesburg, there were far more pressing things to do than confront a marriage that had been sputtering to its death from the moment we exchanged vows.
But I wasn’t going to tell Felipe that either. This was a date, not Oprah.
“Because it was no longer an option for me and my girls. You stay until the differences drive you away.”
Perhaps he had stopped listening; somehow, he’d managed to dim the lights. I’d stubbed out my joint. He asked me to join him on the sofa.
“You can come closer,” he said with a wide, trying-to-be-cute smile, patting the space beside him. A freshman move from a senior citizen, true, but I’d had enough shallow puffs of weed to float in a who-gives-a-shit-anyway kind of recklessness despite my uncertainty.
He loosened my hair from its ponytail and fluffed it out so that it framed my face. “Much better,” he murmured. “Así me gustas. You shouldn’t wear your hair up, Maxine, you have a round face.”
“Excuse me?”
“And a tan, you would look even more beautiful with a tan.”
“What the—”
Before I could react, his lips were upon mine, soft and tentative at first, and then surer and more persistent, as were his hands, which had snaked their way under my dress and along my legs, trying to pry them open. I closed my eyes and allowed my mind to give in to the unfamiliar, yet not unpleasant sensation of another man’s tongue, strange and gooey and gentle, in my mouth; someone else’s hands, warm and weathered, on my breasts; someone else’s scent, masculine and oaky with a hint of spice, on my skin. In my head I wondered about a thousand things: did I have marijuana breath; should I have had a full Brazilian wax instead; what the hell did he mean, my face was round; but it had been quite a long while since I’d had sex, was I really going to go through with this without a commitment even if oh my God it felt so good and my body kept arching closer and closer to his? As he lifted my dress off my shoulders and stood up to unbuckle his pants, I panicked for a moment, mentally flailing about for the word for condom in Spanish.
“Tienes—tienes algo?” I whispered.
“Sí, sí,” he said, hurriedly tearing up a packet of foil and slipping a condom on. Belatedly I remembered the correct word was preservativo.
He positioned himself on top of me, sweaty and slithering in the muggy darkness. I tried to take deep breaths in between kisses, aware of what was coming next but not fighting it. There was nothing to fight, apart from my own nervousness. I was in the moment, my senses on edge, yet part of me felt disembodied, as if I were watching myself from above, pondering the possibility of being involved and detached at the same time. Trust me to turn a passionate encounter into a philosophical debate—cogito ergo sum or copulo ergo sum? How like a virgin to hesitate and ruminate.
When Felipe finally entered me, it felt strange, of course, and new, but nice, in fact very nice, and I felt my hips rising with each thrust of his penis inside me. Yet every time he pounded into me, the top of my head pounded against the thinly upholstered arm of the sofa like a ping-pong ball being tossed back and forth repeatedly, only it was neither calming nor agitating, just annoying. My body was exploding with rediscovered pleasures while my head was exploding with the blinding multi-colored shards of a migraine, thanks to the relentless banging against the sofa arm.
Back, back, forth and forth …
To be honest, I could have done with another joint. Instead, an hour later, after Felipe had gone, drowning my face with sweet little kisses, I stood under the shower and wept for the one man who had shattered my heart.