Slow Hand (2 page)

In this collection there are stories by many sorts of women; I know what very few of them look like. There are contributions by women barely out of their teens and those by women past their half-century mark. Quite a few of the pieces are about seductions of one sort or another, but others are about love, and there are some about lust. A few deal with the secrets we keep, as well as those we don’t. Some of the stories are about characters who are strangers to each other, while others feature familiar lovers known all too well. One or two selections are angry, and a couple are startling. What they have in common, though, is the impression of honesty they leave, whether the mood is realism or fantasy or some area in between. And, for me, what’s so truly wonderful is that all I had to do was ask, in order to summon most of these stories into being.

The contributors selected also represent a fairly good cross section of women: American, Canadian, English, Asian, straight, gay, bisexual, urban and rural, teachers and journalists, novelists and poets, actresses and athletes, students and mothers, women divorced, separated, and single. But I did not start out with a pretested recipe that called for including a teaspoon of this kind of person or a half-cup of that kind. There were, however, some very general guidelines with which I approached individual women, and also networks of women, both here and abroad asking them to give it a try. What I said was this:

“The stories can be long or short. They can be about heterosexual or lesbian sex, about old women or young, middle-, or teenaged, about couples, groups, or solitary pleasure. They can also be true, or based upon true-to-life experience, or even upon such experience as you might have preferred it, with a few adjustments for fantasy. The main goal, as I see it, is that the stories, each and every one, tickle my senses, make me feel sensuous or sensual, sexier, in fact, for having read them.”

If my mailman had only known! But once the stacks he left at my door started getting higher, it was hard not to notice with what alacrity many women—most of them strangers to me—took to the task. Even more rewarding was the way a great number of my correspondents warmly thanked me for allowing them the opportunity to try this New Thing: being given an invitation, that is, unexpected license, to examine their sexual attitudes or express their sexual preferences or fantasies or to explore an erotic memory long stored away. “I don’t know if it’s any good, but I’m having fun,” one woman wrote me back. (Her story was later accepted.) Said another, “I send it to show I tried, but I also had fun doing it so you needn’t feel bad about sending it back.” (This one made it into the finished book, too.)

Similar sentiments, with “fun” the word most frequently used, were echoed by women thousands of miles apart, and quite a few, as well, stated their belief that such a project was an all-too-needed antidote to the “fearful, conservative” mood with which we were closing the century. “A lot of us have been writing, or dying to write, more erotically for some time now,” another contributor informed me, and, indeed, of the nineteen selections, half are by women for whom this was not their “first time.”

Anyway, drawing upon the enveloping camaraderie I soon began to feel, I’d like to point out once again that women, by and large,
do
know what they want in the way of erotic stimulation and satisfaction; it’s only feeling strong and confident enough to express it and
then
getting someone to pay attention that’s the problem! For my part, I’ve tried to keep all earnestness and moralizing at bay, for to listen is to learn, and to hear these disparate voices is to realize that there is not—that there
cannot
be—one politically or aesthetically correct single way to inhabit fully our female sexual selves. Ever. But, with more and more women revealing what they want, be it a slower hand or a quicker one, we will increasingly be able to check our own instincts against those of other women and gain strength in the process… and, perhaps, better orgasms, as well.

In this book, as I’ve intimated, I gave the writers no formulas to follow, no party line to adhere to; at the same time, I recognize a very real responsibility to acknowledge that the need for “safe sex” exists at every level throughout our society today. (Make that civilization: there is nowhere to run.) But I could not bring myself, even in the face of this appalling knowledge, to edit a cautionary safe-sex passage into each and every story. I am not the surgeon-general, and while fiction can indeed be influential as well as be a type of drug, its effect cannot be monitored nor should its content be regulated. While it is potentially informative, it is also a place of refuge, and I firmly believe it simply need not be connected to
absolute
reality at every juncture. Perhaps I can ask you, then, to consider the erotica you find here to be “interactive” and to imagine a condom in every relevant scene.

In conclusion, I want to quote the late Bruce Chatwin, English novelist, essayist, and adventurer extraordinaire, who once wrote the following: “Descriptions of the sexual act are as boring as descriptions of landscape seen from the air—and as flat: whereas Flaubert’s description of Emma Bovary’s room in a
hôtel de passe
in Rouen before and after, but not
during
the sexual act is surely the most erotic passage in modern literature.” There is room for disagreement here, naturally, but if you believe you yourself to be of a similarly inclined disposition and prefer the fade-to-black school of erotic entertainment, be aware that the stories in this collection—which you surely must already suspect—are frankly carnal, full of explicit language, deeds, and thoughts of the sort that some people may term “pornographic” (“intended primarily to arouse sexual desire,” according to my Webster’s) and others dismiss as “dirty.”

This may please some and offend others, but my main hope is that readers new to the audacious genre of women’s erotica—readers
both
female and male—who pick up
slow hand
out of curiosity will enjoy and appreciate the sensual/sexual explorations they encounter here. All responses are legitimate, backgrounds and natures differing as they do, yet I can’t help but hope that the book I’ve assembled will turn out to be the best kind of seducer. Whether for those who step forward eagerly to embrace it, knowing already that they will like what they find, or for those less certain but willing to allow themselves be caught up in its compelling rhythm and its surprises,
slow hand
exists to reflect the needs and desires of its audience.

We admire dome stories for the dazzle of their artifice; others, however, may win our hearts with their naturalness, Susan Dooley’s “In the Prick of Time” embodies, I think, everything that is splendid about being a Grown-Up Woman, yet it reminds us also that we are the sum of our experienced, that our sensuality can grow and flourish only if we accept and nurture it.

“T
oo fat.”

The mirror was an old one, its oak frame holding glass that was wavy and dappled with dark spots. It could distort image, she thought, just as earlier she had muttered about how her jeans had shrunk in the wash.

“Too fat,” this time she sighed and accepted it.

“Just right.” He had come up behind her in the bathroom where she stood, her body still wet from the shower. He put his arms around her and nuzzled his face into her neck. She watched in the mirror as he slid one hand up her body and cupped her breast. He played with her nipple, running a finger
back and forth until the flesh hardened beneath his hand. Then he moved until he was between her and the mirror. She watched as the back of his head ducked forward and felt the slight pressure as his mouth began a soft sucking at her breast.

The man in the mirror curved his hand over her hip. His fingers pressed in for a minute and then continued on until he had shoved his hand between her legs. She could feel his tongue teasing the inside of her mouth, and she felt a warmth and an urgency even as she watched, detached, the two strangers who slid awkwardly to the floor and began to press themselves together in the shifting light.

She could no longer see the mirror. There was only the pressure of him, hip to hip, tongue to tongue, as he pushed himself inside of her.

The telephone rang.

She tried to ignore it, but both of them had gone still, waiting for it to stop. The noise had broken their connection, and though they rocked together for a minute more, she felt him ebbing away.

Mary raised herself on an elbow. In the wavy glass she saw two people who had passed their moment of passion. The woman had wet hair. The man had on his shoes.

“What are you writing?”

“An erotic memoir,” she said, turning around and placing the flat of her hand on the front of his jeans. She felt him move at her touch, and she smiled up at him. “I’m going to call it
In the Prick of Time.”

She was sitting at the long pine table, having cleared a small space between a stack of books and a large gray cat, and was writing out the grocery list. He put one hand on her shoulder and leaned forward to read what she had written.

“Oatmeal?” he asked. “I thought this was supposed to be erotic.”

“Well, it’s not the
most
erotic thing I could think of,” she conceded, wiggling her eyebrows in what she hoped was a Groucho Marx leer. “But once a long time ago I stood and
watched a pot of oatmeal boil for ten minutes. It was a very sensual experience. Voluptuous. It sort of …” She was remembering that time when she had eaten oatmeal six days a week, saving all her money to have one glorious meal on the seventh, and of how she had often gotten mesmerized by the sight of the bubbling oatmeal. “It sort of erupts at you. Oatmeal has orgasms.”

“You must have been a very cheap date,” he said, going to the refrigerator to see what other erotic treats were on offer.

“Do you remember oleo orgies?” he asked, having found a piece of lemon pound cake.

“Did you ever go to one?” She put her pen down and turned expectantly—the magician about to pull a rabbit out of his past.

“Once in Ohio when I was in graduate school. It wasn’t oleo. It was some vegetable oil in a bottle, and we all got a little drunk and then smoked pot for courage. Then we took off our clothes. Except Nancy. We were still married then, and she insisted on keeping her underpants on. Everyone else looked innocent. Nancy in her underpants looked like a very dirty girl.

“We sat in a circle, willy nilly, except you couldn’t sit next to the person you came with.

“The man giving the party went around the circle, pouring out handsful of oil. He made it a priestly act. We began rubbing the oil on each other. I was sitting next to a woman with incredible breasts and a beautiful tan. I put my head in her lap so I could look up and watch the light gleam on her skin. She leaned over to rub oil on my chest and I caught her breast in my mouth to suck it. It tasted strange—almonds, vanilla—I can’t remember except that made it even more erotic.

“She didn’t seem to mind, but she didn’t seem aroused either. She kept rubbing me with oil in a very efficient fashion, and all around us everyone was doing the same thing. Suddenly I started to laugh. I felt like a leg of lamb.

“Everyone else began to laugh too, and the girl whose lap I was on would give these great hee-haws and my head would bounce up and down. It was silly, but at the same time it was very erotic.”

“What ever happened to her?” Mary asked. Her voice had gone cool.

“To who?” asked Paul.

“The woman you were bouncing about on.”

He looked at her curiously. “I have no idea. I never even knew her name.”

He got up. “I’m going into town. Do you want anything? Oatmeal?” He bent over and rubbed his chin against the top of her head and was gone.

She heard the rough cough of the car’s motor and watched Paul back the old station wagon out of the driveway. When she was sure he was gone, she pulled a fresh piece of paper off the pad and wrote his name.

“Paul.”

She tried to think what it was exactly that made her want him. Rationally, there were only so many spots the hand could touch, so many places the tongue could lick, and that made fucking finite in its possibilities.

Why was it that somehow lovers were not?

She folded the paper with Paul’s name and set it aside. Then she began again:

“Herbert.”

An erotic memoir should begin at the beginning. In the prick of time, when that first tentative tickle had come from the unlikely Herbert, a leering red-haired boy of eleven who had pushed his way through the children on the school bus to sit beside her. He had squeezed himself over onto her side of the cracked leather seat as the bus made its familiar and halting way down the highway, extruding children at each stop like some demon machine that had had its fill and now was belching out the leftovers.

Herbert had never actually put his hands on her. But he had leaned on her, and he had
looked
at her. It was frightening. It was exciting. Not like Jimmy Mason who had chased her through the orchard and knocked her to the ground to deliver a hasty kiss, his lips slamming to a halt on her cheek. The way Herbert had shoved and bumped her had made warmth start
between her legs and roll up her body until she could feel the heat turning her face red. It was uncomfortable. She hoped he wouldn’t stop.

“Carole.”

Carole had been her best friend in grade school. When the weather was too wet for the nuns to scatter the schoolchildren onto the playground, they would gather them together, march them into the auditorium, and show them a religious film. The ones that weren’t about the Virgin Mary hovering over some foreign meadow starred pretty nuns and handsome priests—none of them had warty cheeks like Sister Octavia or the smooth hairless skin of Sister Joyce, whose eyes had been popped naked into a face that lacked both lashes and brows. Mostly the movie priests were Irish and adorable. Not like Father O’Toole, the arrogant pastor who strode each week into every classroom to bellow damnation at any child who had been seen talking to a Protestant.