Fear of Fifty (19 page)

The Germans got their wish, I realized: They obliterated their Jews and their men at the same time. And the women went on. Alone, bitter, yet supremely in control, they scrubbed the plants and the floors. Amazons in frumpy hats and moth-eaten furs, they raised the children, tended the gardens, and gave birth to the next Germany, the Germany we know today. Now there is another generation of German men. Now trouble is brewing again.

Virginia Woolf, who understood the problems of women's creativity perhaps better than any writer, speaks of

She is conjuring the huge part of women's lives untouched by intercourse with men. This part—and it is the greater part—is presumed to be unimportant, no fit subject for literature. As long as men set the literary agenda, this will continue to be the case. Only love—whether romance or adultery—will be thought to be fit matter for literature.

Why? Because men are at the center of it, and men do not like to be reminded that there is any part of a woman's life they are not central to. As a consequence, many women still make literature in the mode that men consider important. Hence the literary focus on “love.”

What would happen if we wrote of our own lives, without reference to the male sex? Can we even imagine such heresies? Think of the derision that has greeted Violette le Duc, Monique Wittig, Anaïs Nin, May Sarton. After “love” is through with you, there is plenty of life left, says Colette, stating the central heresy. She was also punished for stating it—refused the funeral she deserved (the funeral that any man of her stature would have had), and the rosettes, ribbons, and medals. I doubt she cared.

Happy solitude, the happiness of two women who live together as friends or lovers, the happiness of a mother and a daughter, sharing a bed, talking all night; the happiness of two sisters when their husbands are gone, dead, away; the happiness of work; of gardening; of caring for children; of shopping; of walking; of running a house—all these are heresies.

Most of our lives occur alone, or with other women, yet we are asked to shine a spotlight on the narrow part of our lives shared with men. It is not as if female life is all darkness except for that, but we are asked to pretend it is and write of love, love, love—until it bores even us.

This is what it really means to be the second sex. All your pleasures and pains are considered secondary to those you share with the other sex.

Are men really so interesting? To themselves they are. Yet, lately, I find women far more interesting. I have lived for men so much of my life that this comes as something of a shock to me. Have I been so bound by the conventions that I, the supposed rebel, am as conventional as any woman of my time? Or have I been transfixed by sex because I always knew it was the primary way to seduce the muse? If I am to be honest with myself, I must answer this question.

Feminine sexual excitement can reach an intensity unknown to man. Male sexual excitement is keen but localized, and—except perhaps at the moment of orgasm—it leaves a man quite in possession of himself; woman, on the contrary, really loses her mind; for many this effect marks the definite and voluptuous moment of the love-affair, but it also has a magical and fearsome quality.

—Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Either we were a million perverts clutching our grimy handbooks in shame, or these sexual fantasies were as normal as apple pie.

—Susie Bright,
Sexual
Reality: A
Virtual
Sex World Reader

Women of any sense know better, after all these centuries, than to interrupt when men start telling them how they feel about sex.

—Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

 

 

“I had a dream, which was not all a dream,” Byron said. And I, too, lived an idyll one perfect summer in my life. When people say “eros,” I know what they mean—though they may not. And when I need a fantasy to evoke the most passion a woman can bear, this is my reference point.

I was unmarried at the time—somewhere between my third and fourth marriage—and I had fallen in love with a man who looked to me like Pan, smelled brownly of summer and sex, and sailed his sloop in the lagoon of Venice and on the Adriatic Sea.

Our affair had begun a year before—we fell in love on his boat, waited a full year in anticipation, and then, when I came back to Venice the following summer, snatched perfect hours in the house he shared with the woman of his life. We continued by phone and fax for years after that, meeting as often as we could. I wore two watches so I always knew what time it was in Venice, and we had lovers' phone dates, when we put each other to sleep describing what we would do, had done, to each other.

“I am exploding, full of stars...” he would say (in Italian), coming. Everything was planetary metaphor. Sex was cosmic—by optical fiber.

I would go to Venice and stay in a beautiful suite in the Gritti (where the water rippled on the ceiling) and he would come to visit morning and evening.

But one summer (was it the second or the third? I can't remember), I decided to rent the piano
nobile
of a palazzo for three months—to give us unlimited time to explore this connection and see if it could become permanent. What I learned was that eros is never permanent, or rather the conditions of its permanence are impermanence.

I arrived alone at the end of June, settled into my rented palazzo—with its windows overlooking the Giudecca canal, ships with Cyrillic lettering sliding past, its walled garden filled with old roses and one amazingly fruitful pear tree
(pero)
in the center, which was heavy with ripening pears.

Piero (let us call him) came at eleven o'clock the first morning to say hello (per salutarti), he said. He said hello to my nipples, my neck, my lips, my tongue, took me by the hand and walked me into the bedroom, where he uncovered my body slowly, exclaiming at the beauty of each part, and entered me on the bed, holding firm inside me for what seemed like forever, while I filled with juice like the pears on the pear tree and began to throb as if a storm were shaking them onto the ground.

Filled by his smell, his words, his tongue, his incredibly unhurried penis, all of me rose up to him as if the cells of my body were being taken apart and put back together. It was a sort of transubstantiation—blood and body becoming bread and wine instead of the other way around. I looked up at his faunlike brown eyes, his curly reddish-gold hair, and said,
“Mio dio del bosco”
—my forest god—for that was how it felt. It was like being possessed by a very gentle grandmaster of the coven, a stagman, a horned god, the god of the witches, the greenman. It was like being possessed by all of nature, giving up my intellectuality, my will, my separateness, to the green fuse that drives the flower.

The sun shone in squares on the bed, the canal water rippled on the painted ceiling (with its figures of Hera, Venus, Persephone, and assorted sibyls), motorboats puttered by, and in the wake of my oneness with the forest and the sea, I saw clearly what the life of a man and a woman was meant to be like, two halves fitting into each other, out of time, for eternity. I knew that people took drugs trying to simulate this, pursued money and power for this, tried to destroy it in others when they could not have it themselves. It was a very simple gift—but no less elusive for its simplicity—and most people had never known it. All their thrashing around was in its pursuit.

“I must go,” he said, and I followed him into the bathroom—laugh—ing, literally jumping for joy—while he washed under his arms and his crotch, put on his clothes, and fluttered a kiss between my breasts.

“I will call for you at five,” he said.

And I sat down to the day's writing, with his sap between my thighs, and his smell on my fingers and mouth.

I wrote till three, dressed in a bathing suit under a sundress, and walked the length of the Fondamenta to the swimming pool, where I swam laps in the sunlight, feeling my limbs heavy as water, bright as the air. Then I had something to eat and walked back down the Fondamenta, seeming to float over the stones.

At five he called. “Sei sola?” (Are you alone?) he asked.

Of course I was alone. And then we were back in bed, with the afternoon light, not the morning light, playing on the ceiling, with his rod and staff comforting me, with his salty kisses turning my mouth into the lagoon drowning the fiery pink sun.

Sometimes we'd walk together on the Fondamenta or stop for a glass of wine at Harry's Dolci—and then he was gone to his other life and I to my dinners with friends, concerts, operas, long walks in the city.

Sometimes, I'd see him puttering through the lagoon, squiring his other lady. Sometimes, I'd wonder where he was. But always with pleasure, not pain.

This went on for eight days. And on the evening of the eighth day he vanished without a word. He was at sea with people I did not know. He was gone, and I had no idea if he would ever return.

The days grew long. A suitor from home showed up and, later, one from Paris. They failed to banish him from my bed. Eventually my daughter came and my assistant, and I crammed the day with motherhood and work.

I was enraged with Piero, not for going, but for going without a word, and I vowed never to see him again. The summer dragged on, hot, humid, useless. Venice was like a cruise ship where I knew and was bored by all the people. Eventually my daughter had to see her father and my assistant had to see her lover. Friends arrived and took me on an endless round of parties—and then one morning, he rang as if nothing had happened.

“Sei sola?”
he asked.

“Cretino!”
I shouted. “Idiot!”

“I have to go to Murano in the boat—will you come?”

I flew out of the house to tear his eyes out.

In the boat, I hammered my fists at his chest.

“How could you leave me when I came here to be with you?”

“I had no choice—I
had
to.”

And his mouth was on my mouth, silencing me.

In a little while, we were parked behind a mud bank, thick with rushes, making love. And the boat rocked with us and the sun shone.

My houseguests were amused as I cursed him, then ran to him, then cursed him again. We would meet in the secret little studio near my walled garden, whose roses were over but whose pear tree still dropped fruit. We would make love morning and night, and then he would flee.

I forgave him because I had to. When he entered me, I felt complete. Yet when he left, I did not trust him to return.

There is no end to this story. If he appeared here today and touched me I would be drawn back into that forest, that lagoon, that whirling sabbath dance.

The sense of impermanence made his hold on me permanent, and his unreality also made him real. Some nights I go to sleep thinking I will wake up in that other country with that other husband. He is my husband on the moon, and when it is full, I think of him. He populates my dreams.

When people say “sex,” I think of him.

What would have happened if I joined my life with his?

I can only speculate. He claims he does not make love with the lady he lives with, and maybe this is true, maybe not. I only know that I would rather be the one he runs to than the one he escapes from, and somehow I have insured that situation by not sticking around. I would rather keep sex alive in my fantasy life than kill it by marrying it. But maybe I am deluding myself. Could I have lived with the god of the woods? Only part time. He was not willing to be there except part time. And I accepted his conditions and went on with my life.

When I was a little girl I loved the fairy tale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. The princesses went to sleep in their beds like good girls, but in the morning their shoe leather was all worn out because they had danced all night. My writing is like that. I may lead the most straitlaced life, but my books betray worn shoe leather, sun, sea, pear trees, sap between the thighs. I lived that way one summer—or rather two weeks out of one summer. I would live that way always, but I fear it is impossible.

The perfect fit, even when you find it, may not be the perfect companion. Passion has to stay untangled from ordinary life to stay passion. And ordinary life tends to take over and banish passion. Ordinary life is the toughest weed of all.

I first discovered sex in my dreams when I was thirteen. I lusted for a tall redheaded boy (whose name I never knew) who ran—wearing a Harvard scarf—to the subway station next to the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West. When he appeared in my dreams, my face would flush, my thighs grow damp, and my heart beat a fast double step. When I glimpsed him at a distance, these things happened again. I never learned his name, but I loved him anyway. He awakened my sexuality.

After freshman year in high school, I never even saw him again until once, in Bath, England, where I was doing research for Fanny
Hackabout-Jones,
my mock-eighteenth-century novel, a curly redheaded eighteenth-century bandit with slanting green eyes came into my four-poster bed and made perfect love to me. Was he a dream, a dybbuk, a prowler? I never knew. But I transformed him into Fanny's love, Lancelot, and made him the hero of my book.