Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife (29 page)

I like to think that I never completely disappear down the pike. I like to think that I had a lot of miles to go before I got to the point where I was as consumed by the topic as, say, William Masters was. Masters is dead, but I met a St. Louis social worker who used to work in the same building with him. This man told a story about a particularly troubling case he was working on. The father in the case had told him, that morning, that he wasn’t all that concerned about his wife gaining custody of their children, because if it happened, he would go and slit their throats. The case was being decided in court the following Monday. The social worker wanted to call the police, but worried that it would be a violation of confidentiality. Distraught, he consulted the only other professional he could find in the building that morning. (It happened to be Thanksgiving.) It was Dr. Masters.

Masters directed the social worker to take a seat on the other side of his enormous rosewood desk, and the man unrolled his dilemma. Masters listened intently, staring at the man from beneath a hedge of chaotic white eyebrows. When the social worker finished talking, there was a moment of quiet. At last Masters spoke: “Have you asked this man whether he has difficulty achieving or maintaining an erection?”

Years ago I wrote for a health magazine that tolerated the wanton use of first person among writers such as myself. One month they ran a first-person piece written by a young woman
who was suffering from vaginismus. I was acquainted with this woman – I’ll call her Vicki – and her piece was tastefully and competently written. Nonetheless I could not read it without cringing. I did not want to know about Vicki and her boyfriend and their travails with Vicki’s clamping vagina.
*
I would be seeing her at the magazine’s holiday party in a few weeks, and now I’d be thinking
clamping vagina, clamping vagina,
clamping vagina
as we dipped celery sticks and chatted about our work.

Sex is one of those rare topics wherein the desire for others to keep the nitty-gritty of their experiences private is stronger even than the wish to keep mum on one’s own nittygritty. I would rather have disclosed to my own mother, in full detail and four-part harmony, the events of a certain summer spent sleeping my way through the backpacker hotels of South America, than to have heard her, at the age of 78, say to me, “Your father always had trouble keeping an erection.” I remember the moment clearly. I felt like Woody Allen in
Annie
Hall
, where he’s standing on a Manhattan sidewalk talking to an elderly couple about how they manage to keep the spark in their marriage, and the old man leans over the microphone and says, “We use a large, vibrating egg.”

I’ve been tripping over the cringe factor all year. It is my habit and preference, as a writer, to go on the scene and report things as they happen. When those things are happening to subjects in sex research labs, this is sometimes impossible. The subjects are queasy about it or the researchers or the university’s human subjects review board, and sometimes all three. There are times when the only way to gain entry into the world of laboratory sex is to be the queasy one yourself: to volunteer.
These passages make up a tiny sliver of the book, but writing them was a challenge. All the more so for having dragged my husband into the fray. My solution was to apply the in-law test. I imagined Ed’s parents (my own are dead) reading these passages, and I tried to write in a way that would not make them slam shut the book as though a silverfish had crawled onto the page. “
Oh, for god’s sake, Billy, she’s taking off her pants!”
If they don’t cringe, hopefully you won’t either.

I promise, no vibrating eggs.