Ann disagreed with this man and said so. His name was Alex, and she’d been told he was a well-respected maker of medieval instruments with a studio in a converted warehouse not far from where she lives. She suspected he had been invited for her sake—it happened all the time, the well-intentioned matchmaking of her coupled friends. And so here they were, a single man, a divorced woman, the two of them seated next to each other, at the long, festive dinner table. Ann thought Alex’s phrase “commands of the blood” was silly and old-fashioned, like certain kinds of poetry she remembered from school.
“Which is why,” Alex continued, “we have had to develop the awful institution of the birds-and-bees talk between parents and children. Otherwise new generations could miss the whole thing, the mechanics, as it were, of what is required.”
“That seems impossible,” someone across the table said. “People don’t grow to adulthood without knowing they’re sexual animals.”
Alex was adamant. He leaned his long arm forward so that the hairs on the back of his gesticulating hand were whitened by the twin circles of candlelight. “Individual children feel sexual urges, of course, but they don’t necessarily know that other people do.”
“You only have to turn on the TV—”
“And in prime time too!”
“—the new play at the Playhouse, I mean, talk about graphic—”
“Couldn’t be more explicit.”
“When I asked my mother about sex, she just wrung her hands and said, ‘Don’t you already know!’ ”
“More people than we think are locked in a circle of innocence,” Alex said, nodding in a way that Ann thought was pretentious. “They resist. They block.”
“All they have to do is read the newspaper.”
“—spells out the whole whammy.”
“—it doesn’t quite, you know.”
“Desire,” said the woman whose dinner party it was. She stared deeply into her glass of red wine and said it again. “Desire.”
The subject turned to Victorian brides who went to their marriage beds uninformed, how shocking that must have been, how perverse they must have found their husbands’ expectations. Now, my precious love, there is something I’m going to have to poke between your legs, but I promise to be gentle . . .
“Maybe it did happen occasionally,” Ann said, “but only someone terribly stupid could arrive at marriage age without adding up the perfectly obvious evidence all around them.”
“You mean,” someone said, “observing farm animals and the like?”
“Well, yes. And common everyday romance, which has always been out in the open. Kissing, touching. Erotic glances. You have to know something’s going on, that men and women have more happening between them than polite conversation and domestic convenience.”
“Some people aren’t particularly observant,” Alex said, which suggested to Ann that he might be one of those people. “And some people aren’t good at connecting the dots even when they see them.”
A woman called Nancy Doyen mentioned a story she’d read in a newspaper. An Alabama couple had been married for a period of three years, at which time they visited a doctor, wondering why they had not been blessed with a baby. The doctor asked a few tactful questions, and soon established the fact that the couple had not had sexual relations. They had believed that sharing a bed—sleeping together—was all that was required.
“My point exactly!” Alex cried out. His voice was excited.
Ann gave him a long sideways look. He was the only man at the table who was not wearing a jacket and tie. Instead he wore a soft-looking woolen sweater in a deep shade of blue. Indigo, she supposed it would be called. The knit was particularly small and smooth for a man’s sweater, and Ann reached forward and placed her hand lightly on the ribbing that formed the sweater’s cuff. She had the idea that she must somehow restrain this person from making a fool of himself. He was looking into the candlelight with a Zenlike concentration, and Ann knew how, after a certain amount of wine, Zen talk leads straight to embarrassment.
He continued, though, her hand still resting on his wrist, to talk about the complicated notion of human sexuality, its secret nature and hidden surprises, its unlikelihood, in fact. As he talked he covered Ann’s hand with his own, and then with one slow, almost absent-minded gesture he swept her hand into the shadows of his lap. She could feel the rough linen of the table napkin, then the abrupt soft corduroy of his trousers. She flexed her fingers, an involuntary movement, and a moment later found her hand resting against human flesh, the testicles laughably loose in their envelope of fine skin, and a penis, flaccid and small, curled up like a blind animal. Meat and two veg was how she and her girlfriends once described this part of the male body.
At first she thought she might laugh, and then she decided she might faint. She had never fainted in all her life, but this could be the moment. No one would blame her, especially those who knew about her recent surgery and chemo treatments.
Couldn’t the others at the table hear the gasp gathering in her throat? She made a motion to pull her hand away from Alex’s lap, but he pressed his fingers more firmly on hers. The thought came to her that these were the same fingers that constructed intricate lutes and lyres and handled small, probably beautiful tools. She moved her fingers slightly, playfully, seeing what experiments she might invent. Even so small a movement had the effect of sucking the air out of the room, though no one seemed to notice.
“Desire,” the hostess said once again. She probed her salad greens gently, then put down her fork and peered around the table of guests, a long visual arc of inquiry, of solicitude. Her wineglass was empty. Her look was loving and also proprietorial. She appeared pleased with every single one of them.
When Ann was four years old she was taken to stay for a few days with a married cousin who lived in the country. She has no idea how the arrangement came about. What could it have meant—a gesture of hospitality extended to a very young child? She does remember that she considered the visit a thrilling adventure.
Her cousin Sandra was a young woman, barely twenty, with a musical laugh and curls all over her head. She lived in a small brown house on an acre of land with her young husband, Gerald, and a tiny baby, Merry-Ann. There was about these arrangements the sense of a doll family afloat in a toy landscape, and this should have constituted a paradise for little Ann, whose own parents seemed immensely old and somber and without movement in their lives.
She was allowed to push Merry-Ann in her carriage, first covering her with a crocheted blanket and tucking in the edges. She was permitted to stand on a kitchen chair and mash potatoes with Cousin Sandra’s wooden masher. When Sandra and Gerald kissed, as they often did, Ann had the feeling of being inside the pages of a beautiful pop-up book with defined edges and dimensions and sudden, swallowed surprises and jokes.
Nevertheless, within a few days, three or four at the most, she grew anxious and miserable. She complained to her cousin of an earache, but the cousin identified the malady for what it was: severe homesickness. Her small suitcase was packed, and she was driven home.
She remembers that she was carried through the doorway of her own house—in whose arms she can never quite recall—and that she found the neutral, neglected rooms extraordinarily altered. In fact, only a few items had been changed. A leaf had been taken out of the breakfast table, and this smaller squarish table was now positioned at an angle under the window. Instead of the usual tan placemats there was a brightly flowered cloth, one Ann had never seen, and this too was placed at an angle. The scene was as jaunty and brave as a Rinso ad. Bright sunlight struck the edges of the plates and cups so that she had the sense of looking into a bowl of brilliant confetti, there were so many particles of color dancing before her eyes.
This transformation had occurred in the short time she’d been away. It seemed impossible.
And even more impossible was the idea that her parents had been here all along. They had not been frozen in time or whisked
out of sight. They had been alive, busily transforming the unalterable everyday surfaces, and here was the evidence. In her absence they had prevailed. They possessed, it seemed clear, an existence of their own.
And there was something else that folded and filled the air. Something disturbing, vivid. It had no taste or noise to it, but it bulked in the space between her aproned mother and her father with his loosened necktie and rolled-up sleeves. “It” was a charged force, not that she could have described it as such, from which she herself was excluded, and it connected as through an underground passage with Cousin Sandra and Gerald kissing by the kitchen window, their mouths so teasing against each other, and yet so purposeful.
But that was all right. She liked it that way, and even if she didn’t, she understood that this was the way things were and had, in fact, always been.
Yes, there was a thickening in the air, the spiked ether of unanswered questions.
But this was nothing new. Huge patches of mystery existed everywhere. How, for instance, to explain the halo around the head of baby Jesus? How did the voices get into the radio? That time when two neighborhood dogs got stuck together: how could such an unlikely thing happen?
Ann, age seven, was caught at school holding a note that was being passed from desk to desk. The teacher, Miss Sellers, snatched it away and quickly scanned its contents. “I’m surprised at you, Ann,” she said. “I’m very, very disappointed.”
The note said: “Nelly, put your belly up to mine and wiggle your behind.”
Ann was asked to stay in from recess until she had copied ten lines on a piece of paper: “I will not pass notes again.” Later, deeply ashamed and making her way out to the playground, she saw Miss Sellers in the stairwell. She was showing the note to two other teachers and they were laughing their heads off.
Aunt Alma and Uncle Ross came to visit every summer, and this visit was greatly anticipated, especially by Ann’s mother. Aunt Alma was her favorite sister and the most beautiful. She wore daringly cut cotton dresses she made herself and was lively in her manner, spilling gossip and laughter. She knew how to “go at a tear,” ripping through household tasks, the beds, the dishes, so that she and Ann’s mother could head off for a day of shopping or out to lunch at a place called the Spinning Wheel. Sometimes, when Aunt Alma thought Ann was out of earshot, she told slightly off-color jokes—but with a sense of wonderment in her voice, as though she herself with her elegant posture and thick coiled hair stood just outside the oxygen of these jokes, slightly bewildered rather than amused by the small, rough ironies of human bodies and the language that attended them.
Uncle Ross was tall, thin, and solemn. He spent the vacation days seated in a porch chair and going through a stack of Reader’s Digests he’d brought along. There was no time to read during the working year, he explained; he was kept so busy at the insurance company.
One evening at the dinner table Uncle Ross paused before taking his place next to Aunt Alma. It happened to be a particularly hot day, and Aunt Alma was wearing a backless sundress. He bent and kissed the back of her neck, a slow and courtly kiss, unhurried, serious, and private—never mind that the whole family was present and about to dig into their roast beef hash.
This kissed part of Aunt Alma’s neck was called the nape, which was something Ann didn’t know at the time.
Ann, who must have been nine or ten years old, watched the kiss from across the table, and it seemed to her the kiss fell on her neck too, on that same shivery spot. She felt her whole body stiffen into a kind of pleasurable yawn that went on and on. So this was it. Now she knew.
Ann at fourteen spent hours at her desk practicing an elegant backhand, which she believed would move her life forward. Her daily life was fuzzy, composed of what felt like carpet lint and dust, when what she wanted was clarity, poignancy. She memorized a love sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and she and her friend Lorna recited it in low moony tones, making fun of the words and of their own elocutionary efforts. She stared at the khaki pants of the boys in her class and wondered what was there packed into the crotch and how it felt. Some boys she didn’t know stopped her on her way home from school and poked a tree branch between her legs, which frightened her and puzzled her too, so that she broke away and ran all the way to her house. She cried at the movies; in fact, she liked only those movies that made her cry; her tears were beautiful to her, so clear, fast-flowing, and willing, yet so detached from her consciousness that she could watch them and mock them and snort at how foolish they were and how they betrayed her. At a New Year’s Eve party a boy kissed her; it was part of a game, something he was obliged to do by the game’s rules, but nevertheless she relived the moment at least once each day as though it were a piece of high drama, the softness of his lips and the giggling, eager embarrassment he’d shown. All these unsorted events accumulated in the same pocket of her brain, breathing with their own warm set of lungs. She read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and what shocked her most was that she found the book under a chair in her mother’s bedroom.
Her mother knew; that was the terrible part. Her father knew too, he would have to know if her mother knew. Everyone knew this awful secret which was everywhere suggested but which for Ann lay, still, a quarter-inch out of reach. Even Bob Hope on the radio knew; you could tell by the way he talked about blondes and brunettes and redheads. Oh, he knew.
“Don’t ever let a boy touch your knee,” Ann’s mother told her. “It happened to me once when I was your age, but I knew that one thing could lead to another.”
“A climax is like a sneeze,” one of Ann’s girlfriends said. “And you know how much everyone loves to sneeze.”
“Boys love it if you put your finger in their ear. Not too hard, though. Just a tickle.”
“The Tantric secrets,” said an article Ann read in Esquire magazine, “can be easily mastered in a three-day course given on the shores of the beautiful Finger Lakes.”
“I hope he never touched you,” Ann’s father said about Mr. Eccles next door. “You’d tell us, wouldn’t you, if he touched you.”
High up on her inner thigh. That’s where Ann touched herself. Making a little circle with her thumb.
“Sex and death. They live in the same breath, can’t you feel that?” This from an English professor who detained Ann after class one day in order to discuss her essay on Byron.
“Be a nun and you get none,” said an actress in a play Ann attended. The woman pronounced it loudly from center stage, full of sly winks and meaningful shrugs.
“The body is a temple. Keep that temple sanctified for the man you are going to spend your life with. On the other hand, it’s usually better if the man has had a little prior experience.”
Molly Bloom. Yes, she said, yes, she said, yes. Something like that.
Ann married Benjamin. She had both her breasts in those days, and Benjamin adored those breasts. “You’d think they’d squeak when the nipple goes up,” he said with wonder. He toyed with them, sucked them, gnawed gently at the tender breast skin, saying, “Grrrrr.” The brown color of the twin aureoles astonished him, though. He had expected pink, like in a painting. Ann wondered if the brownness frightened him slightly.
They had a wedding night, the kind of wedding night no one gets anymore. Before that night there had been long, luscious sessions of kissing, accompanied by a carefully programmed fumbling with each other’s bodies: nothing below the waist, nothing under the clothes allowed, but nevertheless it was rapturous, those wet deep kisses and shy touches on her sweatered breasts.
Now here, suddenly, was Ann in a white silk nightgown with a lace yoke. Then the nightgown came quickly off, which seemed a shame considering its cost. Now his whole body was against hers; head to toe their warm young skin was in contact. This was the best part. The rest of the business hurt, and left a sticky, bloody puddle on the bedsheet, which worried Ann, how the hotel staff probably had to deal with such messes all the time.
She and Benjamin had read the marriage manual t
heir minister had given them, and in the chapter titled “Afterwards,” the author had described a feeling of vague melancholy which often visits couples after a session of satisfying sex. There was a reason for this, something chemical, the hormones plunging to the baseline flatness of everyday life, a necessary return to the reality that sustains us.
And, yes, Ann remembered that wedding night plunge. Her whole body trembled with the sadness of it, and Benjamin, mistaking the trembling for orgasm, was proud, and then exhilarated, and then almost immediately ready to go again. Grrrrr, he said against her chest wall.
Things got better, of course. Then they got worse. Then they dramatically dwindled. There were violent quarrels in the early years that made Ann think of cloth tearing behind her eyes, and reconciliations so tender that even today her throat fills with tears when she recalls them. Sex was either a healing or an exercise in blame. Once she made the mistake of telling Benjamin that she found something faintly hilarious about sex, about how a man’s penis suddenly blew up and wanted to stick itself in a woman’s vagina; it was so ungainly, such a curious and clumsy human mechanism. He had taken this confidence badly. He liked to think of sex as a beautiful form of communion, he said, but Ann knows that he would not find her beautiful at this moment, with her battleground of a chest, that slicing breast scar and the curious new cords of hard tissue that join her shoulder and arm. Alex, sitting next to her at a dinner table, with her thumb and forefinger on his penis, will not find it beautiful either, never mind the cheerful advice from the cancer booklets about the return of the libido and new forms of touching and holding.