The Devil Tree
Karen once said that it’s one thing if a guy is making it with a girl and she really doesn’t know how far she wants to go and then begins to be afraid and draws the line. But it’s another when a girl sets out to get finger-fucked and gives nothing in return. “Suppose you didn’t want to get laid by a particular guy,” I asked. “Would you still want him to finger you?”
“Why not?” Karen answered. “If I can get an orgasm out of it, I don’t need any real fucking.” She told me she was embarrassed and frightened by me only once, on our first night near the beach, but as soon as she felt my fingers inside her she felt only pleasure. It was the night of her first orgasm.
• • •
I remember a night we spent in a motel. Karen, who had downed a glass of straight vodka, was particularly free and abandoned, demanding to be made love to, trailing me even into the bathroom. She insisted on saying aloud all that we did to each other, all that she wanted me to do, and all that she suspected I never would do. Her onslaught left me, at first, excited, then deflated, too quickly spent. Annoyed with my embarrassment and my reluctance to satisfy her with my hand and mouth, Karen suddenly pushed me away. “You’re hiding something from me, your lordship,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“A fossil in a glass case: yourself.” Smiling despicably, she went on. “Do you recall, sir, how you died? Was it in a battle, in a victory, or were you taken prisoner and tortured to death? Better yet, did you die of an inherited malaise?”
This was my first defeat at her hands, and I’ve never recovered from it. After that, everything seemed to lack spontaneity, as if it were premeditated by an emotionally dead child. Unable to respond, I felt she had infected me with her own deadness.
I began to wonder: why did I choose a woman who cannot give of herself, whose love triggers in me a sense of competition and then makes me want to retreat? I see a ludicrous picture: it is after midnight; Jonathan James Whalen, the gray-haired, prematurely aged scion of Wealth, Health, Power, & Freedom Unlimited, is lying alone in his bedroom in his palatial home. Earlier in the day he has bragged to his psychiatrist that he has never conceded to a woman, yet Karen, his wife and the only woman he has ever desired, has for years preferred to sleep in a separate bedroom.
At one of Karen’s parties, I talked to an attractive middle-aged woman, a contributing editor of Branching Out, a women’s magazine. After telling me that she was in charge of her magazine’s weekly report on sexual relationships, she said, “I’m going to stay away from you; otherwise Karen will think you’ve fucked me.” About an hour later, in the hall, she brushed against me, kissed my cheek, and said, “I think you ought to know that I want you just for sex; let’s leave the high life to Karen—she’s so good at it!” She didn’t attract me at all, but the notion that I attracted her aroused me. As I kissed her on the mouth, Karen walked in, took one look at the two of us, and turned away.
The guests wouldn’t leave, so we drank beer and told stories until two in the morning. Karen ignored me the entire time. When everyone else had finally left, she turned to me and said, “Go ahead, fuck the bitch.”
In bed, I was confident that I could change her mood. I hugged her. Sitting up, she slapped my face. “Cut it out,” she shouted, “or I’ll kick the shit out of you! Let me sleep.” I felt humiliated. Karen’s slap reminded me of a whore who once hit me when I told her she wasn’t good enough for the price she was asking. In her tough, fuck-the-world way, she gained sexual control over me as a compliant woman never could, and I desired her even more.
The next day on the phone Karen said she wondered whether she should keep on seeing me, since obviously I had something serious going with the woman editor. To make my life seem as eventful as hers, I lied and told her she was right. When she asked if I was in love with that woman, I said, “No, but I’m not detached. To be with her and inside her, to have her all over me—it’s impossible for me to screw and remain detached.” I went on and on.
• • •
Before I left America, there were other men around Karen; among them was David, an actor with a larger-than-life quality. Stick your dick out the window and screw them all, on the table, on the carpet, against a wall, hump and jump and kick and lick—that was David. Once, in front of me, Karen, who was high on pot, said to him loudly enough for me to hear, “I would like to fuck you, sweetheart, until, until. . .” Then half joking, she dragged him into the bathroom and slammed the door. After a few minutes the two of them came out laughing, and when she asked him, “Will I see you again?” he answered, “I don’t know. That depends on how bad you want it.” I stood there—watching.
• • •
As a boy I had once received a note from my father on the subject of feelings.
You’ve apparently told your governess, Jonathan, that your feelings were hurt when I refused to let you travel on the company plane to see me in Washington. You and I both know that “hurt feelings” is nothing but a dodge for imposing one’s will on another person. Your feelings are no more easily hurt than the feelings of anyone else.
When Karen fucked David practically in front of me, that was evil, but according to some theologians evil is the raw material of spirituality. Was Karen’s act a way of prompting my rage and humiliating me for my self-control, or was she counting me out by deadening me even more? Was she giving in to desire, or to despair?
• • •
From the back seat of my limo I spotted Karen walking along Madison Avenue. I asked the driver to slow down and I watched her for a while. Casting quick glances at her reflection in the shop windows, she walked without a trace of slouch, her stride even, shoulders square, chest up, weight forward, arms and hands at ease, at times brushing her hair off her forehead and neck. As long as I have known her, Karen has been checking and rechecking the state of her image, as if it had a will of its own and could one day leave her. Equally on the street, at home, in a disco, or at a photographer’s studio, Karen is fascinated by her own surface. She is a perfect symbol of our visual age.
In a disco, at her every step, mirrors split, enlarge, and multiply her image. If she adores disco dancing, it is only because it allows her to exhibit herself and observe herself at the same time. No matter that the endless beat deadens conversation, for her partner is usually as involved with his image as she is with hers. For me, dancing is an expression of elementary courtship, a crude pretense of sexual restraint, a publicly approved opportunity for exhibitionism. I have always hated dancing, and now I simply refuse to engage in it, although I don’t mind watching others—particularly Karen—throwing themselves all over the place for my amusement.
My governess allowed me to watch TV for no more than five hours a week, and I spent my adolescence almost entirely without seeing it. Most of my American contemporaries, however, by the time they graduate from high school, have watched about twenty thousand hours of television, an equivalent of nine years on the job. As a result they’re poor talkers and are easily fatigued by conversation. In constant need of adolescent distraction and entertainment, they find silence, reading, and solitary reflection synonymous with boredom. The disco, that noisy grave of human interaction, becomes the clinic for their never-ending withdrawal from an incurable addiction to television. The disco is their ideal playground: it kills language, it shrinks time, and it chops up awareness.
• • •
Many of my friends in India were mystics who believed that only by physical, moral, and emotional experiments can one discover one’s intimate nature—and the nature of intimacy.
From them I learned that as a man can ejaculate without having an orgasm, and have an orgasm without ejaculating, so is he also capable of reaching one orgasm after another. To obtain such freedom and control, I mastered a technique of tightening and relaxing my pelvic muscles; I learned to cut off the flow of semen at the point of orgasm, allowing the pleasurable release of the climax to take place freely yet sustaining the tension and rigidity needed to maint
ain my excitement.
Later, my friends volunteered another revelation. A man who knows what he is after, they said, should never rely on pleasing his woman by just playing with her clitoris and fucking her. He must be able to keep his woman lying on her back while he, placed between her thighs, slowly pokes his hand, palm upward, inside her, and with his fingers following the delicate curves of her vagina, probes for the secret love-spot hidden on the abdominal side of her canal, between the pubic bone and the lump of the cervix. Through forceful squeezing and tapping of that love-spot the man can cause his woman to secrete a milky love-juice, which, during an all-powerful orgasm, she will ejaculate—as a man ejaculates—through her urethra. To many Indian mystics that juice is the woman’s own semen, not much different in its substance from the semen of a man.
On dozens of occasions Karen has willingly submitted to my bringing her to this type of orgasm; on many other occasions she has reached spontaneous climaxes without, as I once crudely told her, lifting a finger off herself. In response, she said that a man who comes but cannot go is hardly her idea of a perfect lover; that, in fact, she considers my ability to hold off my orgasms, or to go through a series of them, a hang-up as morbid as the control it requires.
Now that I no longer depend on opium to slow me down sexually, I regret that I left India before learning how to deaden or—should I wish it—even eradicate my sexual urge. For even though sex is a veritable well inside me that drains me as I draw from it, ever since boyhood I have allowed it, several times every day, to absorb most of my energy.
One night she slid her hand along the inside of my thigh, and when, uncertain of her need, I didn’t react, she turned away and said, “Good night, ice cube, maybe we’ll clink against each other during the night.” It was as though she’d forgotten how many times she had turned me down, as though, despite her apparent abandon, she weren’t the most self-controlled and self-absorbed being I have ever known.
Another time, at the peak of our lovemaking, just before her orgasm, when with every fiber of my being I hung on to her and whispered I loved her, she pushed me away. “You’ve distracted me again,” she snarled. “I’d better do it myself.” And she propped herself against the wall, her legs spread wide, her hands buried between her thighs, probing her flesh. With her face flushed, her eyes vacant, her lips parted, she looked as if she were posing for a photographer, isolated from him only by the floodlights. Her fingers speeded up their frenetic search, her hands probed deeper, a grimace appeared suddenly on her face; gasping and moaning, she brought herself to orgasm, curled up into herself.
• • •
You might be pleased to know, Jonathan, that this week two of our board members and your former trustees have been called to high posts in Washington. James Abbott has been chosen to be Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, and Charles Sothern has been nominated by the President to be Secretary of the Treasury. Other members of the board have also had changes in their lives. Walter William Howmet, once your father’s closest associate and an architect of our corporate growth, who has been until now chairman of the board, has also assumed the responsibilities of chief executive officer. Stanley Kenneth Clavin, another close friend of your father’s and a member of the board, has decided to retire from his post as company president. Mr. Clavin says that with younger leadership emerging in almost every major division of the company, the new management should be free to work as a team. His place will be taken by Peter Baudley Macauley.
Is the above letter from Walter Howmet’s secretary intended to keep me at bay, or is it intended to involve me in the company’s doings? Either way, here I am, true royalty, the crown prince of American dreams, with power to effect changes in the lives of hundreds of thousands of men and women.
And I’ve gained all my wealth and power without risking my life in a war or a rebellion, without bravery or cowardice, betrayal, suffering, or sacrifice. Thus, as a dramatic hero I have no roots in Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, or Stendhal. Am I merely an example of the banality of power and wealth in America?
• • •
A toothless old black man, unmistakably an addict, was sitting across from me on the subway. As two young policemen got on, he winked and mumbled, “I feel so good here, son, so good. You protect me.” He rocked back and forth, attracting the policemen’s attention. One of them came over and told him to get off at the next stop. “I’m just going home,” he protested, “just going home.” When the doors opened at the next stop and the man didn’t move, the policemen shoved him off the train. It was my stop, too, and I got off and followed them along the platform. The policemen jostled the man, and when he fell, insisting that he couldn’t get up again, they grabbed him by the arms and dragged him along the platform. I thought of coming to his defense, of placing myself between him and his oppressors, but I did not. It wouldn’t have helped: the policemen would have turned against both of us with renewed cruelty. The man’s shoe fell off, and one of the cops picked it up with the end of his nightstick and threw it onto the tracks. Only then did the other cop notice that I was behind them. He demanded to know what I wanted. “What did he do?” I asked them. “He threatened me,” said one of them, smiling coyly. Then they walked away, leaving the old man on his back, his face smeared with tears and blood.
I jumped down onto the subway tracks and retrieved the shoe from under the third rail. I returned it to him, but he wouldn’t move. “They won’t let me alone, they be waitin’ for me,” he cried. He was on his knees on the platform, rocking back and forth, staring at the blood on his hands.
It occurred to me that I should lodge a protest against the police, but in any court of law my own past of addiction and draft dodging would only make me seem unreliable as a witness. I thought of finding shelter for the addict and paying for his rehabilitation, but such a gesture would have been only a rich man’s arbitrary caprice, a further proof of injustice. Joining a political party devoted to the abolition of our unjust social order also crossed my mind, but it would have to be a Marxist party, I reasoned, and what did I, a penthouse resident and the ultimate scion of corporate democracy, have in common with Marxism, which, in the words of Marx himself, held private wealth to be nothing but “a eunuch of industry,” with “lack of moderation and intemperance” as its true standards and “fantasy, caprice, and infatuation” as its only ideals?
• • •
A photograph of Karen entitled American Champagne made the cover of Life. It was by far the best, the most alluring, the most seductive picture of Karen I have ever seen, embodying all the magnetism that made her a true handmaiden of communal lust. Soon after it appeared, a caterer from Celebrities Cuisine, who was also an amateur photographer, claimed that he had taken the photograph—not the man who was credited with taking it.
The photographer who took credit for the picture was Karen’s intimate friend. I had met him several times. In his mid-forties, widowed, he was an abrasive, restless, mean neurotic with the face of an angry hawk. He and Karen had known each other for quite some time, and it was obvious that he had been involved with her. What annoyed me more than that was that he treated her as if she were his protégée, and that Karen responded by treating him as if he were hers. He had once been a writer, but his paranoiacally gruesome novels—sexual quid pro quos concerning industrial society—had failed to secure a niche for him in the intellectual marketplace, so years ago he had turned for a living to his old hobby—female portrait and figure photography. As the retrospective exhibition of his photographs proved, he was undoubtedly a talented artist. When he first took up photography, he made a point of photographing ordinary women, often streetwalkers who were beaten down by poverty and misery. Many of them he photographed over long periods, up to twenty years, at two-to three-month intervals, starting when they were in their early teens. Owing to his obsession with these common women, he often managed with his camera to extract from them that uncommon beauty that sets each being apart from all others. Next, heralded by
newspapers and magazines as the Kafka of the portrait and the Gogol of the nude, he became a favorite among advertisers and art directors. After that his allegiance, and possibly his obsession, changed. Now he photographed only women of uncommon beauty, society’s supermodels and actresses. But as beautiful as they all were—and Karen was one of them—his art failed to discover what was unique about each of them; in his photographs they all looked flawless—but a bit alike, and common.
The caterer agreed to see me, but only after I had told him that I was a close friend of Karen’s. Born in Poland, he was a skinny, aging man who spoke with a staccato accent. His lifetime ambition was to become a professional photographer, but his wages did not allow him the extravagance of hiring professional models, and until he took the picture of Karen, all the women he had ever photographed—nude, exotic, large-breasted—were really men—transsexuals or transvestites who posed for him out of vanity. He had made an effort to exhibit, and initially his photographs had proved quite a success with viewers and critics alike. Just as three of his widely exhibited pictures, entitled Woman I, Woman II, and Woman III, were about to be reproduced by Century, the nation’s most prestigious art collectors’ magazine, someone—possibly one of the models—leaked the information that Women I, II, and III were, biologically, men. Fearing public ridicule, Century changed its plans and rejected the photographs, and the caterer’s chances of becoming a professional photographer sank once again to zero. Then one night when he was overseeing a dinner catered by Celebrities Cuisine, he saw Karen, who was one of the guests, being followed and photographed by the man on assignment from Life. At one point the Life photographer left the party for a few moments to try to find a parking place for his car, which he had double-parked in the street. As he dashed away, he left his loaded camera in the custody of the caterer.