Fear of Fifty (21 page)

It is a game of abstinence: You are teaching yourself to live on air. It is minimalist sex. You get so little that you think you've had enough.

I had had enough of S&M from this visit, but Madame X had not. She wanted me back for more. She wanted to introduce me to friends in Paris, in Milan, in Rome, who did Black Sabbaths and were looking for new blood. The world of S&M was international. Its denizens had frequent-flyer miles.

In Paris, I met the wife of a famous opera singer who was reputed to be the founder of a celebrated dungeon of love. We sat in the Crillon lobby at teatime and talked about Proust. The lady was so demure. I didn't even believe she had a body, let alone a body in bondage. She was off to a music festival in Prague. She did not give me the key to her love-dungeon.

I admit my research has not been very deep, but I have not been awed by the S&M I've seen.

“My” dominatrix wants fame more than she wants sex. She has hired a flack. Open any glossy magazine and you will see her picture. She has blown her secret to the world. Once that happens, she can never evoke forbiddenness again. She can only have call-in shows like Dr. Ruth, advertise condoms, douches, and eventually adult diapers on TV. She has joined the world of commerce, and when you do that, Pan deserts you. All the rubber suits in the world cannot save you then.

My heart flies into my mouth when I hear a motorboat on a canal. My erotic gear are: sailboats, the Mediterranean sun, a lover I would never in a million years take as a husband.

I don't believe you can standardize fantasy. By its nature, fantasy is unique. I have thumbed through books of fantasies, looking for my own, and I cannot find them. Madame X says she will set up “scenes” for me in foreign cities. It is not because of AIDS that I refuse or even because of what my husband might think. I refuse because I am afraid of the loneliness. When you exit the S&M studio and go out into the blinding sunlight, having seen what you have seen, you are more alone than ever. That's the terrible secret O
⁹
knew.

 

Boats are erotic, so are cars, so are trains. On a rocking train, going through a mountain tunnel, you can make love to the man opposite you, part, then rearrange your clothes as if nothing has happened. In the wink of an eye, you are taken and given back. This is the lightning flash of sex under the eyelid. Is it the tempter who tempts you, that dybbuk, yourself?

 

Why won't the Royals give us some royal sex? It's nice to think of queens and princesses without knickers, but must they cavort with such moldering, moth-eaten men? And must they always pretend to need them for other reasons? Financial advisor? Groom? Wouldn't it be better to say Groom of Her Majesty's Pudenda?

If I were queen, I would have as many beautiful men as I wanted. Kill or castrate them later—or even marry them off. For centuries men did these things, and their cast-off consorts (Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard) went to their bloody deaths singing the king's praises. Let women so much as say they won't do the dishes—and we are called bitches or whores. But admit to a fantasy like this and all hell breaks loose. Say it, ladies: You want to fuck them, then kill them, having had your way.

Unnatural monsters. Goneril, Regan, Lady Macbeth. What are they but women with the primal rage put back? And without that primal rage there is no sex. My personal slave would have to be male.

 

Years ago, there used to be a book in paperback racks called The Power of
Sexual
Surrender. What a démodé title by today's standards. Never having read the book, I can't comment on the contents. It was supposedly written by “Marie Robinson, M.D.” Important to have M.D.s involved with sex books then. In actual fact, it was penned by a male writer and his psychiatrist wife. I met that writer later, when he married a poet friend of mine.

She was in love. She had surrendered. She told me that all of sex was surrender. She pointed to the title of the book. It was true, she said. She'd lived it and she knew.

Now, there are surrenders and surrenders. Surrendering to someone who embodies your fantasy is one thing. But surrendering to a rapist is another.

The possibility of sex is the possibility of surrender. Some people need costumes, faraway places, different languages, chains—and some people can get there quicker and with less fuss—but the fact of surrender is the same. Story of 0 works for me as no other book of erotica does because it captures that surrender. It doesn't tell you how to lead your life. It acknowledges that eros is something
apart
from, maybe even antithetical to life. So naturally it is condemned by those who want practical handbooks above all else. America has no place for fantasy. Books have to be didactic here—or else.

But fantasy can't be kept down completely. It will surface in romance novels, in horror, in thrillers.

Take us away, make us surrender! we cry. Give us a place where all bets are off. Give us a place where we can just relax! For centuries men have had brothels, but has there ever been a women's brothel? A cross between a health club and a beauty parlor, but staffed with beautiful, compliant men? (They would be AIDS-tested, of course.) You could go there for two hours between the office and home. No snitching to husbands. No snitching to kids. No good works. No fund-raising or volunteering. No career benefits. No networking. No interviews with Oprah or Sally Jessy. Why does this fantasy seem suspect?

Because some woman who saw you there and fancied your husband would blow the whistle on you, and the place would be raided.

Women don't protect each other's pleasures. They have so few of their own, they want other women to suffer too.

And then there is the question of transport. And I don't mean wheels. A woman in love nearly loses her mind. She cannot compartmentalize her sexuality in a place. After a while she would blow the system up. Just to prove the explosiveness of love. Women in groups tend to become puritanical. You won't find the Bacchae at your country club, the garden club, the wedding shower, the Girl Scouts! Even whores become puritanical in groups. What is more controlling and controlled than a harem?

What is this urge toward puritanism in women? Sex means too much to us. We lose ourselves. For generations, this was literally true: death in childbirth, death in compulsory pregnancy, and all the other travails of women's lot. We still have a racial memory of that lostness. We still are too much stirred by sex to let it be free.

That is why it is so hard to take male sexual fantasies and apply them to women. They just don't seem to fit. The anatomy is different, but so is the context of sex. A man compartmentalizes his cock. A woman's cunt is a metaphor for her being. She wants to be taken. She wants to be carried away.

 

For a number of years I was in group therapy. The members all were stars—artists, writers, actors, dancers. Some were straight, some gay, some bi—and all had sexual problems with their mate.

Not always. Sometimes. The more they loved, the more elusive sex became. It was not the lack of love that made for this, but the overabundance of it. And the fear of abandonment that overabundance wrought.

One man loved his wife too much to fuck her. When she went out of town, he always called his ex-girlfriend, the one he
hadn't
married. He would get hard just dialing her number. When he arrived at her apartment, his cock would be erect and there would be a wet spot on the front of his jeans.

One of the group members was an older gay man who had chosen to be celibate. He would bring home beautiful boys to befriend and mentor. While they slept in his son's room (the son had left for college), he'd fantasize about them and jerk off explosively. He never touched any of these boys, nor his wife, who was his best friend.

So it went around the circle. The actor became impotent with his wife when she had a hit movie and he didn't. The artist left his wife and moved to the mountains of Colorado with a ski instructor. Sex seemed a conundrum to one and all—mated sex, that is. Yet mating was what they all longed for—especially when single.

The therapist was a woman who believed in marriage. Her husband was the other therapist, who drowsed through the sessions, drowsed through all her brilliant interpretations.

As the evidence piled up that mated sex is an oxymoron, she analyzed and analyzed, analyzing this sexual anesthesia as fear.

At the time of the group, I was single. I was spreading my sexual life among three suitors, including Piero, and though it was often anarchic and not always satisfying, it was never dull.

Why did these people get married, I wondered, if marriage banished sex? They pitied me my single state. I was contemptuous of their married state. Yet I was also jealous. I longed for a mate, a partner, a best friend. I knew that marriage was a search for that.

Some members of the group parted from their mates, had affairs, remarried, got restless again. I eventually remarried too, finding great comfort in being able to blossom rooted in one place, great comfort in having that one best friend.

And yet the wildness doesn't go away. And the yearning doesn't go away. In dreams, in fantasies, it surfaces, provoking our most passionate thoughts.

We need a bacchanal, a Mardi Gras, a witches' sabbath, far more than we need all these divorces and remarriages. We need a place to dream, a place to meet the tempter under the eyelid. Video games won't do it. Not even virtual reality suits. They only condemn us to replay the video artist's cartoonish fantasies over and over again. We need corporeal fantasies, not fantasies embodied in film and chip. But we have outgrown the ancient mysteries of the vestal virgins, the corn goddess—or have we?

Last night, in the middle of this chapter, I went to sleep and dreamed. I dreamed I had a call from an old boyfriend named Laurence. He met me in Connecticut, near my house in the hemlock woods, and walked me through the underbrush and over the rock ledges. There in the New England woods was a formal garden I had known nothing of: arches, terraces, pastures, boxwood hedges in cunning Elizabethan forms—hearts, foxes, canopy beds. Through the garden we walked, looking for a private labyrinth in which to lie down.

Our families were pursuing us. There were shouts and giggles outside the hedges. But we pressed on, looking for sanctuary.

Then the scene shifted. I was walking up the stairs to a massage room high above the woods. Two women awaited me. One put special lenses inside my eyes to darken the room. Another took off my stockings and my bra. I was wearing no panties, but only a garter belt over my moist center. They laid me down on the table and began to lick me—therapeutically, of course. One licked my labia and sucked my clit while the other massaged my neck, my arms, my head, and licked my lips. The phone kept ringing, but I disregarded it. Laurence and Piero and my husband were all outside, knocking importunately on the door. Drowsily, I muttered, “Go away.”

I woke up with the dew of the dream still between my legs.

 

Always in my dreams, I am journeying, searching for some fulfillment that never comes. The dream is the quest and the quest is the dream. If there is orgasm in the dream, it is usually incomplete. What is fulfilled does not provoke our dreams. The best marriage is usually like dreamless sleep: unconflicted, innocent.

I wake up to a big, bearded man who hugs me and brings me orange juice. My thighs are wet with dream longings. Is this a paradox? No more than life is.

“Tell me your fantasy,” he says, “tell me.” He reaches down between my legs. “You're so wet,” he says.

“I was writing in my sleep,” I say.

 

As this chapter has unfolded on my desk—these fantasies, reveries, memories—my waking life with my husband has become more and more sexual. We find ourselves making love every night, laughing and kissing in the morning. I find myself telling him my dreams and fantasies, reading him pages which excite him, teasing him like a new lover. We have gone into a domestic idyll.

This astonishes me. Each day I write that married sex is impossible. Each night I disprove it.

Perhaps the truth is that it is the sharing of fantasy honestly that makes sex possible and that mating in captivity is usually antithetical to this honesty. We fall into marital roles. We impersonate our parents. We forget the dreams and fairy tales that heated our adolescence. We allow anger to build its Berlin Wall.

And then the sex is gone. In America, we divorce and remarry. In Europe, we stay married and have “adventures.” Nowhere do we confront the problem.

Marriage can only be free and sexual when it is not captivity. Marriage can only be sexual when the fantasy includes not being married. To be free in a marriage is perhaps the hardest challenge. We do not own each other's fantasies. All our closeness—sexual and otherwise—depends upon our knowing that.

Nor are we naturally monogamous. Whether we choose to act out our nonmonogamy or not, it resides in us and we eradicate it at our peril. A liberated woman is one who knows her own mind, and does not hide it. Her fantasies belong to her. She can share them if she chooses.

 

I know that sex in marriage comes and goes. Sometimes we bring our fantasies along and sometimes not. Sometimes we act out childish petulance, distance the person we depend on most, go to sleep and dream of others. That is only human. We are big-brained babies who have too much gray matter to be consistent. We would be happier if our frontal lobes were less busy—but we would also be less human. Humans are apes and angels both at the same time. That is why our sexuality is so complex. We dream things that are beyond our ken. We dream disturbing dreams.

Last night, I saw a film based on a friend's novel. In it, a man throws his whole life away for a few minutes of passion with a strangely beautiful, strangely sad girl who needs to disturb lives, inching them toward tragedy.