Pages from a Cold Island (13 page)

Although I
’
d fucked before, I had my first affair in the summer of 1950, when I was a sophomore at USC. I was twenty, contracted double pneumonia, and after ignoring it for days was at last taken by ambulance to the Queen of Angels Hospital. For sevent
y-two hours I recall hardly any
thing but being wakened every three hours to receive a shot in the buttocks, after which I
’
d roll over and go back into the feverish chatter that h
ad become more or less my condi
tion. When finally I beg
an coming out of it—and I remem
ber having to be told where I was and how long I
’
d been there—I struck the acquaintance of the nurse on the grave yard shift who gave me my penicillin at midnight, three and six a.m. Her name was G
retchen, she was thirty and mar
ried to a top sergeant in the First Marine Division, then fighting in Korea.

I do not know how it started with Gretchen and me. I had been at the brink of the abyss, so to speak, I owned that peculiar and exaggerated affection for life people acquire having just looked into a te
ar in the heavens and seen noth
ing, nothing at all, and in brimming desperate gratitude to everything and everybody on earth my hands started going unctuously out to Gretchen and I touched her on the hands and on the wrists and on the forearms and on the hips and on the waist—there was on my part this terrifying need to make human contact and I felt myself as helpless and cuddly as a bunny rabbit. Presently Gretchen and I were kissing. This led to a more refined and passionate kissing. One night Gretchen grew alarmed at the immediacy of my state and obliged me with a rather bored hand job. From that night on, without any discussion on the matter whatever, Gretchen began obliging me with fellatio, on some nights having to relieve me on the occasions of all three of her penicillin ministrations.

On the day I was discharged from the hospital, Gretchen began a week
’
s vacation at her beach house, a quaint little dump on stilts at Malibu, and she asked me to come along, rest up, and make sure I was okay before re turning to classes. She was going to use the week trying to rent the beach house, getting her clothes in shape, and packing. She had taken a job at the Tripler Army Hospital in Honolulu, and though she would still be thousands of miles from her Marine sergeant—she called him Dicky
—
she drew comfort from knowing she
’
d be at least that much closer to him and I recall her constantly dreaming aloud of being reunited with Dicky in idyllic Hawaii when finally he came back from Korea.

As I say, I
’
d fucked before but my partners had in variably been my age and as inexperienced and as inept as I and hence neither the girl nor I had anything against which to measure the worth of our performances. Worse, this was at the very top of that monstrously oppressive decade that for some reason has now become sentimentalized into The Quaint Fifties, and I remember that all my relations with girls up until this point had
been furtive, deceitful, disap
pointing and shoddy. It goes without saying that Gretchen was different. Since she was nineteen and still a student nurse, she
’
d been married to her Marine and had had all sorts of other men besides, affairs Dicky condoned when he was off on his various tours of duty. Dicky
’
s only real con
dition was that he not be subjected to the details.

“
Dicky said I could fuck anybody I want so long as the guy wasn
’
t military and so long as I spared him the mush.
”

To say that in 1950, at twenty, I wasn
’
t shocked— utterly so—by the worldliness of Gretchen and Dicky
’
s connubial arrangements would be so much nonsense, but as it was I who was now installed in that rickety stilted beach house and the legatee of Dicky
’
s sophistication, copulating with the wonderful impunity of knowing Gretchen had been ordered by good old wordly and heroic Dicky not to bother him with anything as mundane as my name— especially my name!—I couldn
’
t help accepting their rela
tionship as an eminently sensible and fair one and for a week Gretchen and I took her dresses to the cleaners, her skivvies to the laundromat, interviewed people who wanted to rent the beach house, lay on the sand, ate, slept, showered, and copulated. It was the first time I
’
d been to bed with a Woman, with a capital W, and as I badly needed assurance of my manhood and prowess and as Gretchen was wonderfully kind and sexually acute
and loved the lan
guage of fucking—as opposed to the endearments of what we had in that long-ago time straight-facedly called love— she never ceased giving me that assurance.

To my initial horror, which I soon overcame and easily fell into the delici
ously obscene and forbidden lan
guage of sex, Gretchen, doubtless having received her training at the hands of a Marine sergeant, said things like,
“
Come back to the beach house and fuck my face,
”
or,
“
Forget about cooking those fucking hamburgers now; get into this bed and diddle my ass off.
”
Astride Gretchen, breathing like only a twenty-year-old still in the drooling masturbatory state and trying to cleanse himself of his pus-infested pimples can breathe, which is to say like a wounded boar,
uh, uh, uh, uh,
amon
g this awful, adolescent and em
barrassing bleating I whistled out frightfully breathless things like
“
Am I okay?
”
and
“
Am I all right?
”
and the wise and wonderful Gretchen a
ssured me I had the most marvel
ous, unique, adorable prick in Christendom and was besides the greatest—oh, hyperbolically!—she
’
d ever had.

Alas
. On the last night Gretchen and I spent together we had a long earnest talk and Gretchen set me straight not only as to her generous white lie about my bacchanalian expertise but to all sorts of other sexual matters from which Dong and Mums had sheltered me. Cautioning me not to take what she had to say wrongly, least of all personally, Gretchen assured me that what she had to tell me would in time future hold me in good stead or post position. She then proceeded to tell me how childlike every man she
’
d ever had was in his asinine need
invariably to seek verbal affi
davits as to his genius in bed and how astonishingly little he understood that though atmosphere, penis s
ize, and per
formance all counted for something to a woman, compared with her need to be attracted to her partner all these things fell into some twilighted area out yonder there in that land bordering on indifference.

Gretchen said that as a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore back in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she had lived next-door to the star senior fullback. Because his mother had made him do so out of courtesy, he had at every high school dance asked her to dance once and once only, and that though the jock had been as indifferent to her as if she
’
d been an ugly-bugly pain-in-the-ass cousin, Gretchen
’
s attraction to him had been so overwhelming that that single dance had never failed to i
nduce in her such profoundly em
barrassing orgasms she eventually began lining her panties with toilet paper before even starting out for the dance.

“
Let me tell you something, Exley. My relationship with Dicky is such that he doesn
’
t even have to touch me. Say, if I go down on him? He comes,
I
come
. Sometimes repeatedly. That
’
s attraction!
”

I did not say,
“
Carrying
your thesis to its logical con
clusion, Miss Gretchen, I
’
d guess that if you just thought long enough and hard en
ough about such activity the re
sults would be the same
”
b
ecause at twenty I did not pref
ace my remarks with portentousness like
“
carrying your thesis to its logical conclusion.
”
Even so, in my awkwardly ignorant way I did manage to make my way through to this point.

“
But of course, Exley! You
’
re marvelous! Not only could I do so, I have done so. Many times!
”
Gretchen paused. Her voice took on an air of furtiveness.
“
Can I tell you something awful?
The first three days you were out here with me, I didn
’
t make love to you, I made love to Dicky. You know what changed all that? It was the day we did all the errands getting ready for my trip, how you did three baskets of laundry for me while I drove to the airport for my ticket, made arrangements to sell my car, and picked up my dry cleaning and all. I mean, when we got home and I saw how neatly you
’
d folded up every
thing and all, I started thinking what a douche bag I was for using you in this way and from that moment on I made love to you, not him. I mean, if a guy is nice enough to wash your crumby bloomers for you, you ought to be generous enough to fuck him and not somebody else. You know what I mean, Exley? Let
’
s face it, Errol Flynn you
’
re not, Exley. But that doesn
’
t mean a goddam thing to a woman. You know what I
’
m telling you, Exley?
”

I have put all this down by way of saying that if at twelve or thirteen, up in the cow country of Watertown, I had from the suave bemuscled Dong learned all about the button or the man in the boat and how to make a woman go into a death coma and evacuate her bowels, and if at twenty I had had that week with Gretchen (and I here must add not only that I wept profusely on putting Gretchen on the plane to Oahu and her Dicky, but that in many ways my quarter of a century of lif
e since that day had been a pil
grimage in search of some other, some unattached, some Dickyless Gretchen) and
been the heir of her earthy wis
dom, I did not twenty-five years after the fact need to be told by Masters and Johnson or the ladies of the movement the clitoral function or that a big prick—least of all my rather sorry specimen—was not in the least necessary to their well-being.

If Gretchen had given me nothing else, I was ready to concede a woman the right to employ the pharmaceutical equipage of the good doctors, to take into herself a huge rubberized and pimpled dildo strapped to the crotch of a broad-shouldered bull dyke, to put her pet Great Dane Hamlet to work if that
’
s what turned her on, or, like Gretchen herself, simply to define mentally the limits of her sexual paradise and by steadily envisioning that Elysium to think herself through to shuddering orgasms. As long as she did not try to tell me she was into something special, as long as she would allow Gretchen and me the right to wet our pants at someone
’
s being kind enough to do our laundry for us, I was buying everything she was telling me.

In my reading of Friedan, Millett, Greer, et al., I
’
d spent ninety percent of my time nodding my head in a vigorous accord that I was nothing less than the chauvinist pig and the scum to whom and to which they made constant and biting reference. Behind me someplace out there in the republic are two ex-wives—and I take this occasion to salute them both wherever they are. Hi, Fran! Hi, Nan! How
’
s it goin
’
?—who had left me for many of the reasons these women had so corrosively articulated and for that reason I bought not only the obvious, boring and neo-proletarian tenets like equal pay for equal work and state-sponsored day-care centers for the children of working mothers but even the trickier mental areas like a woman
’
s right to abort herself any bloody time she chose or her right to eliminate her female function utterly by having her fetus nourished in a bell jar. At least women were thinking in a grandly bold and adventurous way, and though I was sure it was this kind of boldness that sent men to an early grave, I
’
d be damned if I
’
d deny a woman the right to conquer or be vanquished on the epic scale, whether she croaked in the process or not.

No, though I
’
d have to approach Ms. Steinem as though I really cared a shit about the movement, I was in fact so in accord with her that I did not see any hope of getting a middlingly interesting dialogue going on a subject that was not only as obvious as dammit to Gloria but equally as obvious to me. What I wanted from Ms. Steinem was something quite else. We had as I say both been born to the Depression, had gone through the public school system under what one used to call straitened circumstances, had managed to fake our
way through to something resem
bling a
“
higher education
”
and without any evidence to the contrary I stood prepared to bet that ninety-nine point nine percent of our contemporaries who had managed to escape similar milieus had in reaction to those dark uncomfortable beginnings ended up in Old Greenwich, a member of the Round Hill Club, and a devotee of P.T.A. meetings. Well, Steinem had not, and I had not, and other than the obviously metaphorical comparisons of female with male, beauty with beast, dutifulness with hedonism, courage with cravenliness, sobriety with drunkenness, and so forth, and so forth, I thought if I could look right through that lovely placid mask and understand why Steinem so
cared
—and as I
’
ve indicated it made no difference to me whether her cause was Women
’
s Liberation or the Women
’
s Chri
stian Tem
perance Union, only that she cared—I might then intro duce her into the pile of desolation I called
Pages from a Cold Island
, stacked now as neatly as ever on the dementedly waxed thirty-two-by eighty-inch door, and thereby lift the pages into those heady regions I felt worthy of offering to my peers.