Seducing the Demon (8 page)

It’s so easy to make fun of Lawrence (which I have done myself) and so hard to be open to his grasp of ecstasy. His gerunds were not old hat then (Joyce got all gerundy too, in Molly Bloom’s voice) and his sea anemones were not yet clichés. His deliberate repetitions had not yet been parodied. If you can overlook all that in
Chatterley
and appreciate his depiction of sexless, lifeless marriage, you will see that he is one of the great novelists of marriage. He understood the longing for ecstasy. He was not afraid to give sex its due. We have fallen a long way since then. Sex is everywhere in media, but ecstasy is absent. Many literary novelists shy away from sex because it’s become a pornographic cliché. But it doesn’t need to be. In Philip Roth’s repellently brilliant novel
Sabbath’s Theater
, Mickey Sabbath’s rape of the cleaning lady at his friend’s New York co-op becomes a powerful signal of his decline into chaos. First he rampages through his friend’s wife’s lingerie drawers. Then he desecrates his friend’s daughter’s belongings. Finally, in case we have any doubt about what kind of guest Sabbath is, he sodomizes the cleaning lady. Sometimes only a character’s sexuality will give us the interior view.

I tried to write about the role of sex in my life in Fear
of Fifty
, but I realize now, in my sixties, that I didn’t know the half of it. Until you get wise enough (or old enough) to understand sex as a whole-body experience, you know nothing. All my life I had heard about tantric sex and I thought it was utter bullshit—raising the kundalini, yoga poses in tandem, mysteries of the East and all that rot. Most of our sexuality is so focused on the stiff prick that we have no idea what to do when that becomes occasionally problematic as it does with age. You can become a Viagra junkie or you can create other ways of making love. The deliciousness of skin, of oral sex, of sex without homage to the divine Lawrentian “phallos” can be a revelation. Is this what it means to become androgynous—that buzzword of the seventies? Is this what it means to be bisexual? There’s a great deal to be said for both androgyny and bisexuality, then. Whatever breaks our fixation on the genitals and turns us into entire bodies linked to entire minds enhances sex. The best Italian lover I ever had could practically make me come by stroking my neck.

The married poet who shook with fear, then fucked me with a stiff cock, was no sort of lover at all. A lover makes love with words, with stroking, with laughter. Anxiety ruins sex. Which may be why married people can have great sex—as can longtime lovers, or longtime friends. Music, stroking, scent, poetry—these things are far more important than a stiff prick.

I realized only when my husband had to take heart medication and could not tolerate Viagra that we were able to discover things we never knew before. He could have a whole-body orgasm while giving oral sex—his orgasm triggered by mine. He could feel electric shocks down his spine—as if the kundalini were rising. And I could feel them in my spine too—so connected are we. When we were able to have genital sex after that, he said, “It feels so localized compared to before.” Intercourse produces an orgasm in the pelvic area, but other kinds of sex produce it all over the body—and mind. Or maybe it is just our desire to merge that is so strong. In bed we laugh and argue and have fun. We talk about everything. He provokes me with his jokes. I provoke him with mine. By the time we go skin to skin, we are so close already that we have no boundaries.

We need to take days out of our “normal” lives. We need to go to Venice or India or Machu Picchu. We need to dock our sailboat in an unknown port. We need to touch each other riding on waves.

Before Martha Stewart was a convicted felon or had sprouted synthetic angel wings from going to jail for a few months, she was a college classmate of mine who became a caterer who became a conglomerate and who was famous in Connecticut for treating her employees like disposable paper plates. I have no idea whether she still goes around telling everyone I ruined her marriage, but I do wish I had the sexual power she attributes to me. Actually, I believe I had very little to do with the problems in her marriage. I was just a pawn in a power struggle, a spear-carrier in her opera.

Simone de Beauvoir, one of my literary heroines, once wrote that when she embarked on writing about her life, she felt she had begun “a somewhat rash adventure.” It cannot be otherwise. One’s life is full of mortifications, blind fumblings in the dark. It is terrible to have to write them down—especially when you have pledged honesty—to the point of embarrassment.

Martha Kostyra was very pretty when I first saw her at Barnard. I knew she “had made”
Glamour
magazine’s college issue, an envied desideratum of my day. She was blond and tall and had married while still in school. Like most Barnard girls, she was fiercely independent and had a life apart from the college. Barnard was no bubble. In those days it was a commuter college. Lots of students were married and some had kids. It was a college for smart outsiders—which is probably why it has produced so many writers.

I didn’t meet her again until she had become a caterer in Connecticut. I was living in the next town, and we had several friends in common whose sons’ bar mitzvahs she catered, with elegant hors d’oeuvres like caviar wasted on thirteen-year-olds. She had a rare attention to detail. Her food was delicious. It was also extremely expensive.

Her husband was a publisher of illustrated books, who was just then enjoying a great success with a book called
Gnomes.
It had humorous illustrations of all sorts of little creatures—gnomes, elves, sprites and fairies. Each of these creatures satirized a recognizable contemporary creature complete with his or her accoutrements.

Gnomes
was the sort of book no one could have predicted would be a blockbuster. Both the author and the illustrator were obscure, but somehow the satire and fantasy worked. And now there were gnome dolls, gnome cereals, gnome clothes, gnome pop-up books.

One night Martha, her husband, Andy Stewart, and my third husband, Jonathan Fast, and I were at the same dinner party in the country. Her husband began talking about doing a sequel to
Gnomes
—
a
book about witches. I had just published
Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones,
in which Fanny becomes a witch, a pirate, a highwaywoman and a high-class eighteenth-century London hooker. I had steeped myself in research about witchcraft and paganism for Fanny. I was convinced that most of the things written about witches and witch hunts were dead wrong. In my research notebook for
Fanny,
I’d written:

The publisher was intrigued. Here I was, an author ready to write—and passionate. The research was done. Publishers love that. They always suspect we will be dilatory in writing books and usually they are right. We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate. Here was a quick book by a famous writer.

Of course we both overlooked the fact that gnomes were fantasy creatures and witches were real. Nobody had been burned for being a gnome. Women had been burned all over Europe and America for being witches.

From then on, the Stewarts wooed me and Jon, sent us beautiful books, baby gifts (Molly was two) and invitations to dinner. Their dinners were spectacular theatricals—vodka bottles encased in flower-filled blocks of ice, hand-dipped candles, roses from their own bushes, eggs from their own hens. There were plenty of rich people in Connecticut then as now, but nobody lived like that—but the Stewarts.

Andy Stewart often spoke of his “chores”—collecting the eggs, cleaning the henhouse, weeding the vegetable patch. He seemed somewhat bitter. And he was extremely flirtatious with me.

Then it happened that he and I were both due to be at the Frankfurt Book Fair at the same time, and when I arrived I found a note from him saying, “I can’t wait to see you.” I thought nothing of it. I had a hellish schedule ahead. Both my German and Italian publishers had paid for my trip, and my French and Dutch publishers also had claims on my time. I spent the five long days in the lobby of the Frankfurter Hof giving interviews, literally not leaving the hotel till after sundown. My mailbox was stuffed with requests from journalists, but there were also messages from Andy urging “Call me!” and giving his room number.

“Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe,” says Tom Stoppard in
Night and Day.
The same should be said of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Nothing said or done there should morally count. Everyone is exhausted, sure they are missing the best parties and anxious about their futures. Hell will be the Frankfurt Book Fair. You’ll know it’s hell because you’ll never be able to leave. And desperate authors and exhausted publishers will surround you.

What happened next is not hard to imagine. I got many romantic missives from the Andy of my classmate and found myself in his room one night. (We were staying in the same hotel, the Frankfurter Hof.) In his room, I got to hear endlessly about Martha.

“She doesn’t only want to control everything everyone
eats
but what everyone
thinks
at every moment,” he said. “When I’m home, I have endless farm duties and household duties. I have no life of my own. Everything is about
her.
”

And in my view, everything was indeed about her. His romancing me was about her, his conversation about her, his rage about her. Rage is not a good basis for sex. Nor is revenge. He was getting his revenge for his chores. He was getting even with her about things I couldn’t even imagine.

I remember him as big and blond and enthusiastic. I know he pulled the comforters to the floor and it was there that we tangled. Whatever people may say of the delights of adultery, there are always these extra people in the room observing. You are playing to them more than to your partner. And all the while your demon is mocking you.

“You couldn’t be happy with me—you had to drag this big blond one to bed? You’ll live to regret it. The wife’s a problematic enemy—or soon will be. What a pathetically easy lay you are—a few handwritten notes and you fall into bed? Or onto the floor? What’s the matter with you?”

“But isn’t he cute?”

“Cute and a token will get you on the subway. Besides he’s not cute enough for all the trouble this will cause! You and Jonathan may have an ‘open marriage’—if such a thing exists—but the Stewarts are thoroughly bourgeois. He cheats and she pretends not to know. They live in Westport, after all. Wait and see! You just wanted to show her who’s boss. But she’ll
get
you.”

This demon sounds suspiciously like my father, but he is always, alas, right.

 

 

Right before I left for summer school in Florence, when I was nineteen, my father said, “I have one piece of advice for you: Never drink grappa with an Italian man.”

Of course that was the very first thing I proceeded to do after Italian literature class at the Torre di Bellosguardo. In fact, I defiantly drank grappa with every Italian man I met. I drank grappa on trains, on motorcycles, in little bars along the Arno. Later on, when I was older, I drank grappa on vintage sailboats and in grand hotels. I am not sorry for my defiance—only grateful I survived it without catching any communicable diseases. And what was I looking for in that glass of grappa? An old-fashioned cordial: love. I never found it there.