Another Insane Devotion (5 page)

Well, he must have had an inkling. On an average, male cats roam some three times farther than females, and given that both genders need roughly the same amount of food, one assumes it's because the males are looking for sex. This is borne out by a study by Olof Liberg, in which dominant—that is, breeding—male house cats were found to have an average roaming range of 350 to 380 hectares versus 80 for nonbreeding “subordinates.” You don't have to travel very far if you're only going out for carton of milk.

Of course, those roaming cats were acting on the same imperative that made Biscuit stalk through the house presenting her swollen genitals for somebody to do something with: they were acting on instinct. What I'd like to know is how they experienced that instinct, whether it was just a blind hormonal goading or was accompanied by thought, or some version of thought. Did those dominant males have an internal schema of sex that summoned them out of their houses, made them cross yards and slink under hedges, skitter up trees, creep into culverts, dart across roads where cars shot past in sprays of dust and exhaust, avid, tireless, pausing only to sniff and twitch
their ears? Did they know what they were after? Not in words, I mean, but in pictures—say, the silhouette of a lordotic female—or as an archetypal scent they had been born knowing and whose corporeal traces they kept seeking in the fragrant air?

I have in mind something like the sexual theories of young children, those murky ideas of sticking one part into another part that used to trouble me when I was six or seven, referring as they did to something I already wanted to do without being at all clear as to what it was. The indeterminacy is suggested by the first dirty joke I remember learning. John Wayne meets Marilyn Monroe and asks her, “You want to come to my house?” Marilyn Monroe says, “Sure.” They go to his house, and he asks her, “Can I go to bed with you?” and Marilyn Monroe says, “Okay, but don't get any ideas.” So John Wayne gets into bed with Marilyn Monroe. “This is nice,” he says. “Don't you think it's nice?” Marilyn Monroe says, “It's okay, I guess. But don't get any ideas.” Then he asks her, “Can I feel your boobies?” She says, “Sure, but don't get any ideas.” So Marilyn Monroe shows John Wayne her boobies, and he feels them with his hands. Then John Wayne says, “Hey, can I put my finger in your belly button?” And Marilyn Monroe says, “Oh, okay, but don't get any ideas.” After a while, Marilyn Monroe says, “Hey, that's not my belly button.” John Wayne says, “That's okay. That's not my finger.”

I heard this joke in my first year of grade school, from the boy sitting at the desk next to mine. I don't remember anything about him, but I can still remember the sweet voltage that tore
through me as I got his meaning. “That's not my finger.” For a moment, I was almost too shocked to laugh. Then I did, out of the same shock that had struck me dumb a moment before. I can't imagine how I kept it quiet, but I must have, or else Mrs. Mehrer would have been on top of me, wanting to know what was so funny and if I'd like to share it with the other children. This was what the entire world knew. Now I did too.

 

In the months before F. and I got married, I was unexpectedly haunted by thoughts of the women I would never have sex with. I thought about women I knew and women I walked past on the street or sat across from in the subway, women I glimpsed in movie lines, women who bumped me with their shopping carts in the narrow aisles of the discount gourmet. I'd turn, readying my most ferocious glare, but the moment I saw their eyes burning back at me, it was all I could do not to swoon onto the cheese counter. I was like the teenaged St. Augustine, blinded by “the mists of passion that steamed up,” as one translation puts it, “out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh.” But I was in my forties. I pined for women I eavesdropped on in restaurants. How guilty I felt for listening to them! Their fragmentary conversations were so hot. Even their toughness was flirtatious. Their flirting was like a punch in the mouth. “He says, $850, take it or leave it. I say I'll leave it.” “Uh oh, you're getting the oysters. Does that mean I'm in trouble?” It drove me crazy. F. could have said the same things, and I would barely have noticed. She's not coy that way, and she wouldn't ask if she was in trouble unless she'd gotten a letter from the IRS.

In the first sentence of the preceding paragraph, the operative word, the word that lends it force, is “never.” The women I would never have sex with. Had any of those women been available to me—had I been available to them—I doubt I would have felt much of anything. I could have overheard them talking about their orgasms. Their charge was the charge of the forbidden. In an earlier time, I might have spoken of those women as forbidden fruit, in keeping with the tradition that links sexual transgression to the prototypical transgression of the first human beings. A difference is that in Genesis, the prohibition against eating from the Tree of Knowledge is not in itself arousing. God warns Adam against eating its fruit, and Adam doesn't think about it; he's too busy naming the animals. Not even slutty Eve would have conceived a yen for that fruit if not for the serpent telling her how delicious it was, and so rich in antioxidants. Only in the erotic sphere do prohibitions have the opposite effect, giving their objects the sheen and perfume of the most wonderful fruit that ever hung from a branch—not the hackneyed apple, which is so often woody or mushy and whose hard core gouges the palate, but the grape, as is written in the Zohar, or the fig, which when split open so resembles a woman's sex. What you can't have is what you want. Because I knew their outcome—because I knew they
would have
no outcome—my encounters—or, more accurately, my sightings—always had an elegiac quality. It may not have been that different from what the very ill and the very old feel as they do things for what they suspect will be the last time: the last time they walk through the park; the last time they sit beneath a chestnut tree and watch the sunlight streaming through its leaves; the last cup of
strong coffee; the last time someone they love combs their hair. What I felt for those women wasn't just desire, which by itself may not be enough to make you sag against the cheese counter at the Fairway; it was mourning.

During this time I got an assignment from a tony sex magazine to write a story about a woman who goes around the city looking for a zipless fuck. It was basically an occasion for a photographer to take pictures—I mean good pictures, suitable for
National Geographic
—of half-dressed models pretending to have sex in different semipublic locations. There was no real reason for me to be there. I just liked the leggy photographer. She specialized in rockers, and she treated me as if I were Wayne Coyne, an aging, second-tier celebrity whose second-tierness was exactly what made him hip. We met in what was nominally a strip club. Under a recent city ordinance, however, it had become illegal for women to show their nipples in public, so all the venue could offer was some sad girls in bras jogging dully in place on a platform behind the bar, ignored by everybody. “Do you know what the chicks who work in these places call them?” the photographer asked me. It'd been years since I'd heard anyone use the word “chicks.” “Stopless bars.”

“Not tipless bars?”

She laughed in my ear. “That's good. I'm going to tell that to somebody.”

We collected the female model, who was a friend of hers, and took taxis from one location to the next. At each stop, our protagonist would pose with a different partner, a waxy corporate mannequin, a bike messenger with a mane of tumbling black curls, a bouncy exotic dancer who kept snapping off
backbends. The night got hotter and more humid until, as we were hauling our gear between locations, the sky burst with a biblical roar, and we were pummeled with what might have been lead shot. For the rest of the night, we did our work to the drumming of falling water. We went from the photographer's apartment building to a boutique hotel on the Upper East Side and back to her apartment. By then it was early morning, and we were all exhausted. The model could barely prop herself up on some pillows to fondle the exotic dancer. When the photographer told her she could get dressed, she let out a groan of relief and called her boyfriend to come pick her up. I stayed behind to help with the lights. Outside it was still raining. “You're never going to get a taxi,” the photographer told me. We looked at each other. Her eyes were blue but looked black because of her makeup. I don't remember whether F. was down in the city that night. She may have been traveling. Regardless of where she was, she'd put no pressure on me to come home and would be unlikely to question me too closely even if I were to walk in while the neighborhood parents were seeing their kids off to preschool in the street below. This reticence is one of her most attractive features, and also one of her most unnerving. In somebody else, it might indicate a fear of learning something unpleasant, but I think F.'s reticence has more to do with her sense of dignity, her fear of debasing yours or sacrificing her own. In either case, I wouldn't have to lie.

Still, I left. I could say that I was thinking of the vows I was supposed to recite in another few months or that between the photographer and F. there was no choice. But, really, who was asking me to make a choice? (The allure of infidelity—one of
the allures—is the allure of not choosing. You can have both.) It may be more correct to say that I had too vivid a picture of how I'd feel on waking up next to the photographer, how anxious I'd be to get away, and how anxious I'd be not to seem too eager about it, which would—I knew this from earlier occasions, before I met F.—make me stay later and later, until she'd either gotten the wrong impression or was good and sick of me. It may be that much of my loyalty to F. arises from my sense that she is the only person I wouldn't, to one extent or another, want to get away from when I woke beside her in the morning, not because she's the person I'm sanctioned to wake beside but because of all the people I might wake or have woken up beside, she is the only one with whom I can feel alone, as in the Frank O'Hara poem that ends, “You are emptying the world so we can be alone.”

It may also be that I realized that the photographer wasn't sending me sexual signals so much as observing professional etiquette. Feature reporters have to pretend they're fascinated by everybody they interview, and maybe people who photograph rock stars have to keep up the impression that they're aroused by everybody on a shoot, even extending the courtesy to writers. I could say that being present on a sex shoot had an effect opposite to that of looking at the resulting photographs. It was too much process. When I think back to what I saw through the photographer's viewfinder, I recall the highlights on a man's pecs, the inky Möbius of a twisted bra strap, the fraught synapse between an upright nipple and a suppliant tongue. How many angels might waltz in that gap. When I think back to what I saw in front of me, though, I remember the
photographer making her model friend sit up for a shot rather than lie back because if she lay back her tits would pancake to the side. The model was tired, and she complained, but I could see the photographer was right.

She was right about taxis too. The whole way home, one after another skidded past me, stuffed with grateful passengers or with its “Off Duty” sign burning like a brand. I had to walk blocks before I found an empty one, and by then I was so wet I might as well have saved myself the ten bucks.

 

In both cats and humans, it's mostly the male that roams in pursuit of sex. The rule, however, isn't ironclad. Many years ago I had a friend whom a teenaged diving accident had left a paraplegic. He couldn't get hard-ons. He once came to me upset because he'd learned that just before they got married, his wife had had sex with another man. She'd wanted to know if she could bear to go the rest of her life without fucking, and she knew of no way to be sure without actually doing it, as it turned out, with a neighbor in their apartment complex. She'd decided she could. Somebody else might have treated this as grounds for divorce. My friend stayed with his wife. A few years later, he was surgically outfitted with a penis pump that enabled him to have intercourse as often and as long as he wanted. He and his wife were happy for many years until he died from complications from his old injury.

 

At some point on the night of September 29, I went into my office and tried Skyping F. at the residency, which was how we'd been talking. The phone, or I guess the computer, rang in that strange, wet way, as if each ring were a bubble rising through hundreds of feet of green-black water from the hold of a ship sunken on the sea floor. In my mind, the horizontal distance between us translated into a vertical distance. I was the one at the bottom. No one answered. Well, where F. was, it was long after midnight. She'd probably shut down her laptop for the night.