Rosemary Daniell
You were wild once. Don’t let them tame you.
—ISADORA DUNCAN
Recently, a friend suggested that I cleanse myself—as she had—of former lovers by burning a candle for everyone I’d ever slept with, and then writing prayers for them and scattering or burning the ashes. “You must do it!” she exhorted, her face glowing. “It’s so freeing—and until you do, they’re still zapping your energy, taking up room inside your head!”
“I couldn’t possibly do that—there would be too many,” I said, recalling the period in the late 1970s and early 1980s after my third divorce when I spread my legs and my affections, briefly, to many. What I didn’t add was that I liked their spirits inside me—it’s cozy in there, a delicious mush, and getting rid of them would feel like losing riches.
Call me a slut—and I’m sure many have—but I’m one of those women who literally can’t remember all the men I’ve slept with (and barely all the women). And that, on reflection, should cause me to flush with shame. But it doesn’t. Instead, when I do—rarely—look back on my many lovers, I’m suffused instead with a feeling of wealth—of having won the memory jackpot; like an aquarium full of exotic fish, I see them swimming, a school of beautiful creatures, flashing by so fast I can hardly catch a glimpse of any certain one.
So instead, considering myself, as actress Catherine Deneuve said, to be “too young for regrets,” I stick to my credo that says it’s the things we don’t do we regret. Guilt is one of those useless emotions I refuse to indulge. Nor was I one of those women who repents, giving up freedom for the security of home and hearth. During that period between my third and fourth marriages, I got a lot of “strange,” as we say in the South. And, as southern men always chivalrously add, “The worst I ever had was wonderful.”
On those occasions today when I actually run into one of my former lovers—the literary community is a small town—I feel the flash of our special bond. When I hear that one or another of them has died, I experience a sudden sadness, a pang that goes deep. We shared something real—even if not “love.”
In addition to sleeping with men, I’ve also married a lot of them. I married for the first time at sixteen, my excuse being that I had to escape my abusive, alcoholic father. At sixteen, I didn’t notice that I was exchanging one raging man for another. Next came the staid-to-the-point-of-boring young architect my grandmother called “good husband material.” He excelled at laying neat squares of zoysia grass in our suburban front yard. The third, an Ivy league-educated poet-cum-Boston Jewish Prince, could turn his back in bed with the best of them.
At first, during the years following my third divorce—my three kids had left home and I was living alone for the first time—the men I chose were artists, with an occasional psychologist thrown in, men I thought reflected my interests in truth and beauty, but who, I quickly learned, were also skilled at wounding me. (Once, a psychiatrist canceled our date, saying that after reading my first book, which was full of feminist rage and sexuality, he was afraid to go out with me. After our failed rendezvous, a semi-famous poet said he couldn’t get it up because of my “rhetoric.” I was tired of the clash of egos, the competition, among my male peers. Indeed I was discovering the truth of biographer Judith Thurman’s statement about Colette, that “a man who was worthy of her would have been the road to perdition.” It would have led to submission.
I left the so-called spiritually evolved men behind, and with the one goal of getting laid, began choosing from among the Others—those totally outside my class and experience. They were Too Young. They were like the decades-younger man who heard my adult daughter call me Mother and asked if that were my nickname. Or Too Dumb—like the hunky oil rigger who had seduced me on my second night aboard the oil rig where I had gone to work and clearly to get laid. Too Incomprehensible, as in the Yugoslavian ship captain with whom I learned it wasn’t really necessary to be able to exchange a word of English. When I took him to a gay women’s bar, he exclaimed: “Just like Yugoslavia!” Too Shady, too outside the law, like The Pirate, who conducted strange business in Belize and sometimes showed up with Hispanic bodyguards. Too Uneducated, like the swarthy younger man, exotic as a black orchid, who worked in a porn shop by day and as a male stripper at night, then sweetly cooked me meals, waiting for my approval—the one my women friends scorned, then went to see perform, stuffing dollar bills into his G-string.
The rules of seduction with these men were simple—look good, smell good—perfume, a low-necked blouse, a flower in my hair would do it—and listen, endlessly listen. It should have made my feminist heart cringe but it didn’t. (Though recently, viewing The Girl Friend Experience, in which real-life escort and porn star Sasha Grey listens, and listens and listens to one man after another, never revealing anything about herself, I winced. I remembered myself listening to endless talk about Vietnam, Iraq, vengeful ex-wives, and ungrateful children, my eyes riveted on theirs in order meet my ends.)
After all, I wasn’t looking for a relationship, I didn’t have to live with them; I didn’t even have to make them dinner, and being a good dancer was right up there on my list with great sex. Indeed I considered my new approach to be a form of simplification. Besides, as a writer, I could chalk it up to “research,” just like the gig on the oil rig. During that period, I said I was a schoolteacher instead of a writer, not wanting to intimidate them. And even when they did find out about my rarefied occupation, they appeared unfazed. It was as though they didn’t even know what a writer was—I could have said I was a peacock or from Mars—or better yet, a stripper—and they would have remained as undeterred as I was.
And believe me—some of those who were best, the most imaginative, in bed had none of the qualities a more sensible woman might look for in a man. But that didn’t matter—in fact, the more inappropriate they were, the better. Besides retaining my personal freedom, my one goal was excitement. Without even meaning to, I had become a risk taker, a camoufleur. My erotic life was my own Mount Everest, and I wanted adventure above all.
But in the midst of these escapades, something strange happened. The delectable lifestyle I had devised for myself began to feel wearing, repetitive. Unbelievably—this was something I had never imagined—I began to feel an ennui setting in during sex with each new man.
Then, as the Goddess would have it, along came Zane.
Zane was also one of the “inappropriate” ones—a sexy, hard-drinking paratrooper fifteen years my junior. When our gaze met across a bar in 1981, I was riveted by his steel blue eyes, the Marlboro Man crinkles around them, his happy, inebriated grin. With his red-gold hair, he looked like a bronze god, or one of the muscular angels on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. His ragged T-shirt and cutoffs, his flip-flops, only enhanced his masculine charm, and as we talked, then danced, my hand caressing his hard, tattooed bicep, he sang “When a man loves a woman” in my ear. I quickly sized him up as a great one-night stand. When he invited me to go to his nearby apartment, where he could change in order to take me somewhere nicer, I murmured yes into his warm chest. Once there, I lay back on the waterbed, and he fell on top of me, where, with variations, he stayed until morning.
The next day, Zane visited my little Victorian flat and, wandering into my study, found the title page for my next book, Sleeping with Soldiers, stuck into my Hermes manual typewriter. I considered the title to be metaphorical, a play on the men I’d met—and fucked—on the oil rig. But now, it was about to be made manifest.
That night we sat on my couch, drinking Jamaican rum and talking without turning on the lights. He told me about his pending divorce, his psychotherapy, how much he loved his family in North Carolina. He had been the star football player in high school. He described his desire to join the French Foreign Legion, but he had become a paratrooper instead, and how he had wanted to go to Vietnam, only to be talked out of it by his dad—something he still regretted, and that was unimaginable to me, a war protester. A week later, he called to say he’d read my memoir, Fatal Flowers, the book I’d written about my southern mother’s life and suicide, and my own life as an unrepentant rebel. It was a book that had scared the pants off lesser men—but not Zane. And though I still believed that whatever happened between us, I would be able to keep him at arm’s length, something in my armored heart moved.
Little did I know that I’d just met a man with at least as much, if not more, determination than I had, as well as the one who would teach me just how powerless I really was.
First came his desire to live with me, whether or not I wanted a man around. We were already sleeping with each other every night, he reasoned, and within weeks, when he said he didn’t want to sign another year’s lease on his place, I gave in, still in the first flush of our passion.
After a few glowing months, we embarked on what would become years of drinking, fucking, and rage. Our fights, which, fueled by the booze we both drank in quantity, were like World War III and were about everything from how he could possibly be in the U.S. military to whether I had insulted all the housewives in America—e.g, his mother—by abhorring the character Valerie Perrine played in The Border, whether I would wear the stockings and garter belts he preferred me in, and often our fights led to bruises and broken furniture. (When I took the footboard of my maple bed in to be repaired for the second time, the carpenter was tactful enough not to ask how this had happened again.)
No longer being able to fuck around felt weird, like an infringement on my personal bill of rights. But, on the other hand, I was as jealous of him as he was of me. Later, when he was deployed to Germany for three years, my sister Anne—privy to my previous life—was amazed that I was faithful to him. She didn’t know that he called me every Saturday morning at 9 A.M., undoubtedly thinking there was no way I was going to talk to him with another man in the room.
Then there was our mutual desire for sensation, even sleaze. When I visited him in Europe, we delighted in an uncensored exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s photographs, a live sex show in Hamburg, and visiting the red light district in Amsterdam, where he bought me a pair of red stilettos. Like me, he loved art, and we walked in awe through Käthe Kollwitz’s house in Berlin, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and the Musée D’Orsay in Paris.
And through it all we fought—on the Kurfurstendam in Berlin, on a street corner in Amsterdam, and on a boat ride up the Seine. Apparently, that night our eyes met in that bar we had seen the potential not only for great sex but also for venting the rage we had both brought into the relationship with us.
“If you ever want to marry again, you’d better do it before that book comes out,” a woman friend warned me in 1984, just before Sleeping with Soldiers, the story of my years of sexual freedom, was published. But Zane was unfazed, despite the fact that I had told the less-than-flattering truth about him and our relationship. Three years after the book came out, and six years into all this fun, like a snake coiled and ready to strike at the proper moment, he gave me the ultimatum: either marry or give up him, his beautiful body. So, despite my determination to remain free, I let him—after weeks of anxiety—put the ring on my finger. I even allowed him to lead me into a pretty little cottage no longer within walking distance of the bars where I once liked to hang out, and where I daily fought a losing battle against being domesticated. Soon I was thinking about what was in the refrigerator for dinner, looking out the window in amazement to see my sex objet mowing our lawn. I was losing every battle about visiting his blue-collar family in North Carolina, where the TVs in every room and the low ceilings made me realize almost to the point of nausea what I had gotten myself into.
Underlying all this—every argument, every separation—was the sex and rage to which we had both become addicted. Our relation-ship was like a postcard I had once read—Having you helps me deal with the problems you bring me. By then, I could no more think of doing without him or his passion for me, than cutting off my own hand.
Yet as all this was going on, another story was unfolding, one that, even more than our relationship, would wreak havoc on my treasured freedom: I discovered that my daughter Lily, living in New York, was addicted to heroin. A few years later I faced the fact that my son David was paranoid schizophrenic. For the next two decades—a period that will take another book to recount—not once did Zane protest my caring for them, taking them in when they needed us. A Taurus and a family animal, he became the one person in my family who supported my efforts to save them. Despite all, Zane had passed The Test, a test that was more important to me than any other.
Just when I thought I had a sex object for life—after all, he was fifteen years younger!—Zane’s hard-driving life began to take its toll. In 1991, he was an infantry platoon sergeant in Desert Storm, with friendly fire deaths and suicides in his unit. Back in Germany, he began the drinking unto oblivion that would lead to the first of four rehabs, and later, to inpatient treatment for PTSD. In 1999, at age forty-eight, he had a heart attack, and then, six months later, a quadruple bypass for a triple blockage called a Widow Maker. As I sat beside his hospital bed, the love I felt for him surpassed the simple passion we had known through the years. At one point, when a staph infection invaded the site of his incision, he lay for a week with his chest open, his heart exposed, the wound cleaned and the dressings changed every six hours. I would press my cheek against his when he called out to me, and sit beside him as he endured the claustrophobia of the hyperbaric chamber he was slid into to have his infection bombarded with pure oxygen. His body and soul were mine, and I wanted to protect, enfold them.
But his near-death experience also precipitated a new round of drinking—this time, with a suicidal vengeance. For the next eight years, he drank and drank and drank—and often raged—as I lay in another room and read books and wrote. I traveled to writers’ colonies and conferences, and led Zona Rosa, the series of writing-and-living groups I founded for women just before we met. When problems with my kids came up, I dealt with them alone. And sometimes, when I wasn’t too furious, we had great sex despite the booze. Like most alcoholics, he was a master manipulator, good at promising me what I wanted—from tango lessons to an immediate end to all this chaos. Nor did he lose his sardonic sense of humor: When a gas heater exploded in the garage (where he’d taken to hanging out to drink and watch TV) and burned his beautiful penis, he called the scar his Aztec Surgical Modification, claiming that it added to his prowess.
Why I was faithful to him during this period, I don’t know, yet I was. In truth, during those years, I frequently yearned for those times of easy, indiscriminate sex, when I didn’t have to take care of anyone’s feelings but my own. When Zane and I separated, as eventually happened in 2008, when he left for rehab for the last time, I had fun looking guys up on the Internet, but none of them sounded quite as interesting to me as Zane. When I saw a hunky man on the street, my next thought was almost always but he doesn’t punch my buttons like Zane. “She liked imaginary men best of all” read a retro package of tissues that lay beside my bed with my vibrator. And while I kept thinking I would revert to my wild ways, I didn’t. Also, when I did find a man attractive, it was now for different reasons—reasons that were almost protective of my relationship with Zane. These men were, inevitably, spiritually evolved, intellectual men—always married—with whom I formed deep friendships, but with whom my former behavior would have been out of the question.
Nor do I know why I didn’t divorce him—after all, I’d lived through that particular scenario three times before. I was far from my grandmother, who knew she would be with the man she had married until the end of one of their lives. And then there was my shame: was I really as strong or as smart as I thought I was? And if I was, wouldn’t I have left him long before? “I would have kicked him out in three weeks!” a friend said when I told her of Zane sitting for four months in what had once been my study, drinking, smoking, and watching TV with the blinds down, and occasionally saying he was going out for cigarettes, then coming back after eight hours at a bar—this, just before his last stint at a rehab and over two years spent in recovery.
The only thing I did to protect myself was to buy his half of the house from him, so that it now belongs solely to me. After all, he’s the man for whom I’ve written the half-dozen love poems framed in my dining room, complete with my drawings of hearts, flowers, birds, ribbons. Indeed, there is homage to our love everywhere—from the photos beneath magnets on the refrigerator to the deliriously happy-looking portraits taken of us together by Bud Lee, the photographer who took the famous Life magazine cover of the child inadvertently hit by a policeman’s bullet during the Newark, New Jersey, riots in 1967. In Savannah in the 1980s, as photos for a feature I was writing for Mother Jones, Bud, taken by the radiance of my and Zane’s passion, had snapped the pictures.
“Sex and death are the only two things worth writing about,” wrote the great poet William Butler Yeats. And when I was asked to write this essay, I was immersed in the latter. It was 2009, and my adult son, David, had just died at my home after a ten-month illness during which I had held my breath, praying every day for his healing, but also knowing it wasn’t likely to happen. As I held him in my arms just after his breath expired, I placed my hands in his still-warm armpits, seeking to will him back to life, and embracing him in a way he, as an adult man, wouldn’t have permitted. My most recent writing had been the memorial letter I had sent to friends everywhere.
Thus the request felt almost jarring, as though it had come from another planet. At first the idea of thinking—especially at that time—about what had been the best sex of my life seemed foreign. Then, suddenly, it seemed apropos. Hasn’t my love for both of them—from the first moment I looked into my son’s Cherokee-brown eyes, a dimple indenting his olive cheek as he sucked his little thumb, to the instant when Zane’s steel blue eyes met mine across that bar—been undeniably of the visceral, of the flesh? “Skin,” the Spanish call the first time we see one another. And hadn’t I experienced the whole of my relationship with each of them in that moment?
Tonight, almost thirty years after we first laid eyes on each other, Zane and I sit at the Starbucks near my house. He, cigarette in hand, tells me that the only way he can live is not to care about anything—sex included, and even if he lives or dies. “That’s evident,” I say in a conversation we’ve had many times before: “Otherwise you wouldn’t be smoking that cigarette.” Once I would have argued further with him about this. But now, since we don’t live together anymore, I just sit and listen.
Also, there’s what we both accept as fact: to lead the simple, peaceful life he now leads—so different from his years as a paratrooper, then over-the-road trucker, outdoing himself physically every day of his life, he’s had to change, giving up the rage that had fueled him for so long. He now takes Wellbutrin for depression, Depakote and lithium for bipolar, other pills for high blood pressure and for high cholesterol—sixteen each morning and eight at night. Over the past few years, he’s lost his father, his mother, and his brother, so there’s nobody left but me and my two daughters.
This information hangs in the air between us as we sip our lattes, talk about his latest story. Zane is writing now, too, and because he didn’t come out of an MFA program, he has a lot to write about. In a few minutes, he’ll leave for his AA meeting, and I mention my son, David. Because of both of them, I’ve seen suffering beyond what I’ve known myself, and I’ve watched their sheer male bravery in the face of it. In response, Zane quotes the Tao Te Ching—“ ‘just stay at the center of the circle and let all things take their course.’ ” As he speaks, I recall reading that in the Tao, both hedonism and asceticism can lead to enlightenment, and I remember how, at one time, the former had worked for me.
And suddenly, I feel a deep peace. Can it be that this man—the one who once drove me mad with his stubbornness, his need to dominate—the one I once considered the almost unmovable obstacle to my personal freedom—has become my unlikely spiritual guide?
Also, there is our separation of over two years, which has led us to see each other with new eyes. “Don’t think I take any of this for granted,” he said the other night as we cooked dinner together in my kitchen. And yes, while our earlier relationship had been rife with passion, the price had been a rage that would have put Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to shame. But the ardor that moves us now is no longer fueled by fury. As Eckhart Tolle writes, when we observe and let go of the pain body—all that we previously blamed on the people around us—we are free to either separate with love or to enjoy an ever-deepening relationship.
As I run my fingertips over the now-even-deeper grooves beside his eyes, I sense that something delightful is about to happen—that my sensual life is about to begin again. Once again everything is open-ended—I don’t quite know what will happen next—and along with the moments of anxiety that causes, I like it that way. So am I—as I’m now free to do—about to pull a Jane Juska, go wild once more, reverting to my old ways? Or am I simply about to share something new with this stranger I’ve known for so long?
And whether what is to come will be with Zane, or with some other man (or even woman), I know that it will be different. Zane, along with my kids, has taught me suffering, and suffering has changed me. His healing and Lily’s, along with David’s death and our closeness to my older daughter, Christine, has made us a family. What I want now is to be moved, as I was recently by the psychotherapist in my writing workshop in Santa Fe who was in tears as he read his piece about having to tell his wife she had cancer.
As I think about these things, Zane gives me that lazy grin I love so much—being bipolar has its perks, just as in our first, tempestuous years, when he would wake beside me, smiling and pulling me close, no matter how bad our fight the night before—and places my hand beneath the table and on the crotch of his jeans. And I think of the times we’ve had in bed lately—as seamless, as smooth and delicious as melting French chocolate.
Yes, at this moment, Zane is still the one who breaks my heart. Can it be that, at last free of doubt, I’m about to have—the best sex I’ve ever had?