I MET HER AT the airport while we were waiting for a flight home at the end of the school year. I had noticed her around campus. She always wore a sweatshirt and jeans, and looked – with her short compact body, her curly black hair cut short – a little like a boy. She also carried herself like a boy, shoulders hunched and hands stuffed into her pockets, a funny little swagger to her walk. She had a beautiful olive tint to her skin, a hopeful expression in her wide brown eyes. In a crowd she would always be gazing around, as if hopeful of finding a friend, but if somebody met her gaze she always looked down. She was gazing around that day at the airport, but was wearing – somewhat to my surprise – a bright red jumper. She looked like a different person. We got to talking, and arranged to sit together on the plane.
She told me she had just broken up with a guy, a graduate student in her field – studio art – who had been a mentor for her but had treated her badly. He’d had several other girlfriends while he saw her and was very condescending and controlling. He’d fool around with her when he felt like it but would never actually screw her because she was a virgin and he was afraid she’d get hopelessly attached to him. (There was an old sexual myth to that effect.) Finally she had given up. Her ambition now was to learn about sex and become a great lover, go back and give him a taste of what might have been, then dump on the stupid bastard. She seemed genuinely unhappy about what had happened – I realized now that she had looked crestfallen around campus in recent weeks – but she had such a whimsical way of talking about it that you had to laugh. I told her I would be writing stories that summer, working in a factory to make some money. She said she was going off to California to live with some friends and find a summer job.
It occurred to me to wonder if I might be able to help her in her ambition.
In August, before school started, she called and told me her father had given her a car over the summer, asked if I wanted a ride down with her. I said I did, and asked her out to dinner. That was the night of the kisses on Mellon Square, spray from the fountains blowing over us in a gusting wind.
Back at her house, we built a fire against the early autumn chill, then sat and watched it, her head on my shoulder. Her hair, after a while, smelled like smoke. Her face got all ruddy and hot. She smiled and closed her eyes as I covered it with kisses.
My dorm room was a tiny single, virtually filled by a bed, a desk, and a dresser. Sara and I had to sneak in, since women weren’t allowed in men’s dorms, but my room was on the first floor, next to the entrance. At night, with all the lights off, we could open the curtains and illumine the room by the lights on the quad. Nobody could see in. We would latch the door and ignore what went on around us. We didn’t even answer a knock.
My only real sexual experience at that point had been with that blowsy, boozy woman poet, who had taken me back to her motel room after her reading. Her body was saggy, her kisses wet and tonguey, tasting of scotch and tobacco. She had been very funny, made me suck her tits for what seemed like an endless time, gave me explicit and detailed instructions in oral sex, but we’d had only the most perfunctory of couplings. She must have sensed it was my first time but was nice enough not to say anything. She praised my performance and my body, told me I was a beautiful boy. “You know, lovey,” she said. “I really do like tongues better than cocks. And girls better than boys. But it’s so hard to pick up a girl at a place like this. They’re all so uptight. They don’t know what you mean.”
She’s telling me.
My night with the poet had done nothing to prepare me for the experience of Sara’s body.
For a long time Sara would get naked only down to the tights she wore under her jumpers. She liked what we were doing but didn’t want to hurry the process. After seeing her only in a sweatshirt and jeans, or in one of the shapeless jumpers she wore on our dates, I couldn’t believe what a beautiful body she had, with that olive tone to her skin, the smooth shapely muscles in her shoulders and arms, her flat taut belly, small breasts that were nevertheless beautifully shaped, with lovely brown nipples. She looked like a ballerina in her tights. We would hug and kiss for hours, bare skin to bare skin. I would kiss her breasts, but gently, because her nipples were extremely tender.
It was all right for me to get as naked as I wanted. She loved bare flesh, and had a particular thing for my penis, an organ with which she hadn’t had much experience but that she liked for its novelty. She must have thought for a while that they were perpetually erect, because in those days my cock stayed that way – a huge red throbbing erection – by the hour. She was skittish about being asked to do anything in particular with a penis. She wanted to do what she liked. One night, when we were locked in an embrace, I started to move rhythmically against her tights. I couldn’t help myself. “Is this all right?” I said, and she said it was, though I don’t think she knew what I meant. In a few minutes I had the kind of copious gushing orgasm that you have when you’re twenty. I got up and fumbled around for a towel.
“I’m sorry I got your tights wet,” I said.
No I wasn’t.
“It’s all right,” she said. While I wiped her off she looked at me and smiled. “It got small.”
“Yes.” Not for long.
“It’s cute.”
Not the word I would have chosen myself, but I’d take it.
“You know,” she said, “I didn’t really get all this before. How it was done, exactly. But now I do.”
“It’s kind of a mess,” I said.
“It is. But I like it.”
In time the tights came off. Her ass was as smooth and shapely and firm as her breasts. The hair between her legs was a brilliant black, shiny and abundant. I taught her to touch me with her hand, so it was my belly, not hers, that got splattered with semen. (Mine was used to it.) We waited to do more until she felt perfectly ready, and until it was a good time of the month. I couldn’t believe, when the night finally came, the incredible intensity of entering her. I came in about five strokes, one of the most satisfying orgasms I’d ever had. She could feel it happen, she said, in my back. Where her hands rested on my back.
“It’s so powerful,” she said.
“Is it?”
“It’s amazing. I’ve never felt anything like it.” She was wearing a huge smile. “So manly.” I lay on my back, and she traced her fingertips across my chest. “I loved it,” she said. “It didn’t hurt or anything.” She laid her head on my chest. “I can’t believe we finally did it.”
I had not had much experience with sex, but I’d read up on the subject avidly and with great interest. Probably no one my age in the world had a greater theoretical knowledge of sex than I, though, as any student of biology knows, theory and practice can be far apart. I knew about the magic little button of flesh on a woman (“The good feeling spot,” as a little girl of my acquaintance once described it), and I would gently touch that place with a finger during foreplay, to make Sara wet. One evening when I was touching her, before we made love, she said, “That really feels good tonight. It really feels good. I want you to do it for a long time.”
Up until then, when we had made love, I would sometimes feel a little flutter in her, or a brief contraction, and say, “Is that an orgasm?” She’d say, “I don’t know. I guess so.” I knew that this phenomenon existed. I had read about it in any number of places (though some of the older books claimed that, while a man had a spine-snapping orgasm during intercourse, a woman just got a “warm glow” out of the experience).
On this particular evening, while I was touching Sara in a relaxed and desultory way, I could tell that something more was happening than had ever happened before. She was going to a deeper place. Her eyes were closed, and she seemed to be less present with me, more inside herself. She seemed, in fact, to be utterly oblivious of me, making quiet little moans and groans. Her cunt was flooded with moisture. It was all over my hand. Her body seemed to grow tense, like a spring that is being wound tighter and tighter. It felt as if she would snap. Suddenly she went into convulsions. Her hips bucked off the bed; her body jerked all over the place; every muscle she had seemed to be expanding and contracting at once. She had shouted when it started, now made a muffled shrieking sound. I got scared and took my hand away, but she shouted, “Don’t stop!” The convulsions went on – though eventually growing milder – for twenty or thirty seconds. Finally they ended. Sara’s face was drained, and she was breathless. She looked at me with startled eyes.
“I don’t think those other things were orgasms,” I said.
“No”
“Because I think that was one.”
“Yes.”
It sure as hell wasn’t a warm glow.
A man’s orgasm to that was like a pop gun to a cannon. And she had told me mine was powerful.
“What a neat thing,” she said.
Sara never did come to like the big wet raunchy kisses that I liked. Her ideal kiss was a gentle one, just the tips of our tongues touching. Her nipples were extremely tender, so it was only with great care that you could suck them. You couldn’t do it with passion. She didn’t like me to go down on her; she thought that was dirty, and didn’t like the sloppy wet feeling of a tongue down there. She didn’t like that smell on my face and mouth. She also didn’t like to blow me. She said my cock tasted like pee, and that the size of it gagged her. She wouldn’t think of letting me come in her mouth, but there was no chance of that anyway, since she would only suck me for a few seconds. She also said, repeatedly – in the kind of whimsical way that was meant to convey an important truth – that if I ever touched her asshole she would leave me.
We would often, in those days, have elaborate and lengthy dates on the weekends. We would go out for dinner and have an enormous meal, half a young spring chicken, fried, with french fries and biscuits. Cheesecake and coffee for dessert. We’d take in a nine o’clock movie. Then we’d go to my room and make love three or four times, with long conversations in between, and still get to her dorm for the two o’clock curfew. It was nothing for us to do all that. We often did it on Friday and Saturday nights. Six or seven acts of intercourse per weekend. By Monday we were ready to dash off to the dorm for a quick one.
Back home we lived forty-five minutes apart, and it was much harder to find privacy. I would visit her house in the country, but in the daytime her mother was around, in the evening both her parents. We were always incredibly hot for each other, would get behind a door and kiss like a couple of maniacs, feel each other up. Once we went for an afternoon drive and stopped by a grassy meadow, perhaps a hundred yards long. It was an out-of-the-way spot, largely surrounded by trees, but the place we walked to was clearly visible from the road. Nevertheless, we took off our pants and did it, humping away fiercely, with only our pants as a blanket against the wet ground. Another time we lay down in the grass behind the garage at her house. The spot we picked wasn’t visible from the house, but if Sara’s mother had come out to get in her car she would have caught us in the act. She would have been about ten feet away. The long grass tickled our legs. The dog ran around us and yipped. Afterward we pulled on our pants and lay on our backs for a while, staring up at the sky.
We had gotten together as friends – barely acquaintances, actually – who wanted to fuck. Sara wanted to lose her virginity and become a virtuoso lover, and I was more than happy to fuck my brains out. But in the midst of all that fucking, something else happened. We spent all that time in bed, in intimate connection. We were also inseparable out of bed, eating our meals and studying together. We became vital parts of each other’s lives. Best friends. You wouldn’t have said we fell in love, but we came to love each other, and when it was time to step out and face the world, we wanted to do that together. We hardly had to talk about it. We just knew. I wasn’t the love of Sara’s life, and she probably wasn’t mine – that wasn’t a concept I’d given much thought to, since I’d never expected to be loved anyway – but in the world we saw around us, what we had was good. We didn’t want to lose it.
Married life was hard. Neither of us had any money from our families at that point, and I don’t think we would have used it if we had. We wanted to make it on our own. We lived in a tiny boxlike four-room house, with a cat. Sara worked in a restaurant, I at various places – a library, a bookstore, a bar – where I could keep odd hours and have my mornings for writing. Often at night we would hardly have seen each other by the time we got into bed. We were wrung out and exhausted, too tired to make love, too tense to go to sleep, so we got into the habit – a funny little habit, when you think of it – of just touching each other with our hands. It seemed an activity of about the right intensity for the shape we were in. I had gradually learned from Sara, and no longer touched that one little spot, with my finger, but slowly rubbed the whole area with three or four fingers, moving in a little circle. Sara had gotten as expert at handling a cock as a thirteen-year-old boy. She could stroke it smoothly, intensify what she was doing as she felt the pressure start to build, put pressure on the glans and release it just as I was about to explode. We did it almost every night, right after we went to bed, often without saying a word. It was a nice thing to do for each other, a friendly gesture, like a back rub. It was fun to lie on each other’s shoulder and feel the excitement start to build, hear the happy little gasp as it was released.
When I think of the early hard exhausted years of my marriage, I think of that one thing, lying in bed and making each other come so we could go to sleep.
When you are young you have so much energy, your dreams are so fresh and strong that they can take a terrific battering. They cannot take an endless battering. The realities of life wear you down over time. Time itself wears you down. I had written dozens of stories that had been rejected everywhere; I had written for that little newspaper that had a narrow prestige and almost no money; I had poured my heart into three hundred pages of a novel that wound up going nowhere. As I gradually, over the course of two or three months, saw that project dissolve in my hands, I found myself standing at the edge of an abyss. I looked into my future and saw an endless blackness. I felt tiny in the face of it. I felt it would swallow me up.
If you stare long enough into that abyss, you undergo a change. It isn’t that you see something emerge. It is that you accept the emptiness. You realize that the emptiness is what is. It isn’t supposed to be some other way. You really are tiny in the face of it. You are minuscule. But it doesn’t swallow you up. You remain what you are. A minuscule being in the face of an endless blackness.
The trick is not to go out of your mind before you have that realization.
I grew a knot in my chest, just beneath my breastbone. It felt as if someone had reached into my chest and gripped the muscles there, not terribly hard, but persistently. Sometimes, in moments of stress, it tightened into a burning. Sometimes it diminished until I could barely feel it, just one finger, or two, pressing beneath my breastbone. But it never ended.
Who is this guy who has a hold of me? I thought. What does he want?
I saw several doctors, who had various names for what I had, various remedies. They filled me with medicines and put me on diets. One went so far as to take an X-ray, which involved elaborate machinery and hours of time. I lay strapped to a motorized table that moved around, tilted me at all kinds of bizarre angles, while doctors in another room looked at my insides on a screen. They sat forward in their seats and stared, looking for what was wrong. They saw nothing.
I was suffering from rage at the world. It doesn’t show up in an X-ray. I’d had a dream of the way my life was supposed to be, and the world had betrayed me. It had broken my heart. What I needed was to roar and breathe fire, shout out my rage, beat the living piss out of the world. I could have used a shovel or something. It wouldn’t have done the world much harm, and it would have done me a great deal of good. But I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know I was full of rage. I thought I just had a stomachache. I thought I had no right to be angry (anger doesn’t ask about its rights), that I was just another lousy writer with delusions of grandeur. In order to quiet my rage, which was boiling beneath the surface like a volcano, I had to hold it in. I had to cut it off precisely at the spot where it would emerge, at the top of my stomach, beneath the breastbone.
I was the person doing the gripping. I was gripping myself.
Why didn’t I let go?
The knot in my chest sometimes kept me from sleeping. It woke me up early (which left me tired and increased my stress and tightened the knot). One morning, as I lay beside Sara with all the ease and flexibility of a concrete slab, she opened her eyes and was immediately awake. I had been awake for hours. She had just had an incredibly sexy dream, which she proceeded to tell me in glowing detail while she threw off her nightgown and turned my way. We often made love in the morning. It was in many ways our favorite time. Sara felt so good in my arms, and the morning felt so good – a spring breeze drifting in the window – and I wanted so much to feel good, that I pretended I did. I pretended I was there in my body, which I wasn’t (I had retreated up into my head, away from the pain). As I rolled over on Sara, I pretended that my three-quarters erect penis, which looked roughly like a real erection, actually had some feeling in it, which it didn’t. I wouldn’t have wanted to disappoint her, after all. I wouldn’t have wanted to let her down sexually. I wouldn’t have wanted her to know how much pain I was in. That might have scared her. (I tried to spare my wife from the pain I was going through. I felt I should be able to take it by myself. I thereby cut her off from the deepest part of my life.) So when I slipped inside her and felt myself immediately start to come, when I felt myself coming and getting smaller at the same time, I thought, What is this? I came not with that enormous surge that roars through your body, like a wave crashing against the shore, but with a tiny little ripple, way off in some distant part of my body (did a pin drop?). As I hovered above Sara, I felt myself flush, sweat popping out all over my body. I wanted to hide my head. I wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere. I felt shame.
“What’s wrong?” Sara said, an air of concern in her eyes.
She meant, What’s wrong with you? With your spirit? What’s this sudden flush, sweat popping out on your body?
I thought she meant, What the hell happened to your cock?
I collapsed beside her. “I don’t know.”
This phenomenon is what the world calls premature ejaculation. It is about two steps up from the basement floor. The basement floor is impotence.
I thought: I can’t write, I can’t eat what I want, I can’t sleep. Now I can’t even fuck.
A man in this situation thinks, What happened to my penis? The answer is: Nothing. Your penis is the center of your body, and your body has a wisdom that your brain doesn’t. It knows things that your brain hasn’t noticed. (“He thinks with his dick” should not be an insult, if a man is whole.) My rage was coming between me and my cock, and I kept trying to go around it, function as if the rage didn’t exist. My cock was saying, You can’t do that anymore. I won’t let you do it. I don’t need the whole person with me to function, but I sure as hell need more than this. I can’t do anything when you’re huddled off in your head, hiding from your pain and your rage.
Accept your rage, my body was saying. Acknowledge it. Let yourself feel it. But I was afraid to do that. It felt like pain, for one thing. Nobody wants to feel pain. I was also afraid of what it might lead me to. I was afraid of what I might do. I was afraid that if I started to roar I would never stop.
A man whose penis isn’t working, who is cut off from his sexuality, will do anything to get that feeling back. He will go through any contortion. His penis is him, as he knows at some deep level. If he doesn’t have that, what does he have? A man also, at difficult moments in his life, has a way of getting things confused that don’t essentially have anything to do with each other. If he can’t succeed in this (his career), if all his hopes and dreams have been shattered, he will by God succeed in that (the sexual realm – he will become one of the great fuckers of women on earth). He takes energy from the one and uses it for the other. It is also the case that, if he is feeling rage in his body but doesn’t want to admit its true source – doesn’t want to admit (it’s so humiliating!) that the world has shattered his hopes – he may direct that rage toward other people. Writers who have succeeded, for example. Those crummy bastards who have kept him from getting what he wants. Or people who are close to him. Easily accessible objects of anger. His wife.
“I want to eat you,” he said.
In anger, in fatigue – for the thousandth time – she closed her eyes. “No.”
“Why can’t we at least try it?”
“Because I don’t like it. I’ve told you a million times I don’t like it.”
“I’m not everybody else.”
“I wish you were everybody else.”
How had he wound up with the one person in the world who wouldn’t do this thing he liked so much?
“When you want to do this,” she said, “you’re not really here with me. You’re off in your head with one of your dream women.. If you were really here with me, if you really wanted to be with me, you’d want to do what I want.”
“I want you to be my dream woman for a while. That would be so wonderful to me. I’d love you forever if you’d do that.”
“I’d like you to love me for what I am.”
“Couldn’t you do this for me? Out of love?”
“That wouldn’t be love. That would be make-believe. I’d be a whore.”
“What’s wrong with a little make-believe?”
“I want you to be here. With me. I never feel you here with me. If you could do that, if you could be more with me, it might be more like you want.”
Bullshit. It would never be like what he wanted.
“Besides,” she said. “If it weren’t this it would be something else. I’d do this and you’d go to the next thing. You’d find another thing I don’t want to do. And you’d harp on that. You’d keep going until you found something. You want to have something thing to be angry about.”
He honestly believed he would be happy if he got that one thing. Or maybe two things, on the outside. He couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t at least try. Was he never going to have anything in this world that he wanted?
A woman feels love and wants to have sex. A man has sex and comes to feel love. In the normal course of things, this delicate distinction gets blurred over. It all just kind of happens together, love and sex. But if a man and woman grow too far apart, the distinction looms larger. There is no way to get them back together. It is what you call a Mexican stand-off. Nobody moves.
You can’t suck her tits you can’t eat her pussy you can’t so much as brush by her asshole she won’t suck your cock. What else is there? What’s left?
Those long nights in the dorm room, the curtains open, moonlight streaming in on the rumpled bed, the endless conversions, quiet laughter, all that happy fucking. What happened?
When you are fucking a woman who no longer loves you, who doesn’t want to fuck you, who doesn’t want to be there beneath you, you can feel it. You can feel the boundaries on her body. Touch the wrong place and she goes dead. You can feel the body’s profound uneasiness beneath you. It squirms. It sweats. It would like to throw you off. It would like to throw you through the roof. You are using this body. You can feel that you are using it. You are not fucking a person. You are fucking a hole in the middle of a body. You work hard above it – sweating, groaning – trying to finish so you can get off and leave it alone. You have gotten the message. Finally you gasp at your climax, and you hear the body beneath you heave a large sigh. It is not a sigh of pleasure. It is a sigh of relief. It says, Thank God that’s over. I don’t have to do that anymore.
Such an act does not bring you closer to someone. It drives you further away. Until finally, one day, she is gone altogether.
When my marriage had ended, when Sara had been gone for about three months, I met my therapist late one afternoon when everyone else had left the building. I’d been seeing him at that point for almost a year. He closed the doors; I loosened my clothes; he handed me a foam-rubber encounter bat. For the next forty minutes, while he urged me on, I beat the living piss out of his office. I roared. I screamed. I stomped the floor. I shouted out all my irrational hatred and bitterness. I shouted at him. I shouted at the world. I tore into it. When I finally finished, my voice was gone, and every muscle in my body was exhausted – I could hardly stand – but I also felt, for the first time in years, utterly relaxed. I felt whole and together. My body was mine, in a way that it hadn’t been for as long as I could remember. And my cock felt heavy. Hanging there like a slab of meat. There was much more to do. There were many more feelings to explore, over a long period of grief. But they all started in that blind wordless rage.