Sugar in My Bowl (11 page)

But his near-death experience also precipitated a new round of drinking—this time, with a suicidal vengeance. For the next eight years, he drank and drank and drank—and often raged—as I lay in another room and read books and wrote. I traveled to writers’ colonies and conferences, and led Zona Rosa, the series of writing-and-living groups I founded for women just before we met. When problems with my kids came up, I dealt with them alone. And sometimes, when I wasn’t too furious, we had great sex despite the booze. Like most alcoholics, he was a master manipulator, good at promising me what I wanted—from tango lessons to an immediate end to all this chaos. Nor did he lose his sardonic sense of humor: When a gas heater exploded in the garage (where he’d taken to hanging out to drink and watch TV) and burned his beautiful penis, he called the scar his Aztec Surgical Modification, claiming that it added to his prowess.

Why I was faithful to him during this period, I don’t know, yet I was. In truth, during those years, I frequently yearned for those times of easy, indiscriminate sex, when I didn’t have to take care of anyone’s feelings but my own. When Zane and I separated, as eventually happened in 2008, when he left for rehab for the last time, I had fun looking guys up on the Internet, but none of them sounded quite as interesting to me as Zane. When I saw a hunky man on the street, my next thought was almost always
but he doesn’t punch my buttons like Zane
. “She liked imaginary men best of all” read a retro package of tissues that lay beside my bed with my vibrator. And while I kept thinking I would revert to my wild ways, I didn’t. Also, when I did find a man attractive, it was now for different reasons—reasons that were almost protective of my relationship with Zane. These men were, inevitably, spiritually evolved, intellectual men—always married—with whom I formed deep friendships, but with whom my former behavior would have been out of the question.

Nor do I know why I didn’t divorce him—after all, I’d lived through that particular scenario three times before. I was far from my grandmother, who knew she would be with the man she had married until the end of one of their lives. And then there was my shame: was I really as strong or as smart as I thought I was? And if I was, wouldn’t I have left him long before? “I would have kicked him out in three weeks!” a friend said when I told her of Zane sitting for four months in what had once been my study, drinking, smoking, and watching TV with the blinds down, and occasionally saying he was going out for cigarettes, then coming back after eight hours at a bar—this, just before his last stint at a rehab and over two years spent in recovery.

The only thing I did to protect myself was to buy his half of the house from him, so that it now belongs solely to me. After all, he’s the man for whom I’ve written the half-dozen love poems framed in my dining room, complete with my drawings of hearts, flowers, birds, ribbons. Indeed, there is homage to our love everywhere—from the photos beneath magnets on the refrigerator to the deliriously happy-looking portraits taken of us together by Bud Lee, the photographer who took the famous
Life
magazine cover of the child inadvertently hit by a policeman’s bullet during the Newark, New Jersey, riots in 1967. In Savannah in the 1980s, as photos for a feature I was writing for
Mother Jones,
Bud, taken by the radiance of my and Zane’s passion, had snapped the pictures.

“Sex and death are the only two things worth writing about,” wrote the great poet William Butler Yeats. And when I was asked to write this essay, I was immersed in the latter. It was 2009, and my adult son, David, had just died at my home after a ten-month illness during which I had held my breath, praying every day for his healing, but also knowing it wasn’t likely to happen. As I held him in my arms just after his breath expired, I placed my hands in his still-warm armpits, seeking to will him back to life, and embracing him in a way he, as an adult man, wouldn’t have permitted. My most recent writing had been the memorial letter I had sent to friends everywhere.

Thus the request felt almost jarring, as though it had come from another planet. At first the idea of thinking—especially at that time—about what had been the best sex of my life seemed foreign. Then, suddenly, it seemed apropos. Hasn’t my love for both of them—from the first moment I looked into my son’s Cherokee-brown eyes, a dimple indenting his olive cheek as he sucked his little thumb, to the instant when Zane’s steel blue eyes met mine across that bar—been undeniably of the visceral, of the flesh? “Skin,” the Spanish call the first time we see one another. And hadn’t I experienced the whole of my relationship with each of them in that moment?

Tonight, almost thirty years after we first laid eyes on each other, Zane and I sit at the Starbucks near my house. He, cigarette in hand, tells me that the only way he can live is not to care about anything—sex included, and even if he lives or dies. “That’s evident,” I say in a conversation we’ve had many times before: “Otherwise you wouldn’t be smoking that cigarette.” Once I would have argued further with him about this. But now, since we don’t live together anymore, I just sit and listen.

Also, there’s what we both accept as fact: to lead the simple, peaceful life he now leads—so different from his years as a paratrooper, then over-the-road trucker, outdoing himself physically every day of his life, he’s had to change, giving up the rage that had fueled him for so long. He now takes Wellbutrin for depression, Depakote and lithium for bipolar, other pills for high blood pressure and for high cholesterol—sixteen each morning and eight at night. Over the past few years, he’s lost his father, his mother, and his brother, so there’s nobody left but me and my two daughters.

This information hangs in the air between us as we sip our lattes, talk about his latest story. Zane is writing now, too, and because he didn’t come out of an MFA program, he has a lot to write about. In a few minutes, he’ll leave for his AA meeting, and I mention my son, David. Because of both of them, I’ve seen suffering beyond what I’ve known myself, and I’ve watched their sheer male bravery in the face of it. In response, Zane quotes the Tao Te Ching—“ ‘just stay at the center of the circle and let all things take their course.’ ” As he speaks, I recall reading that in the Tao, both hedonism and asceticism can lead to enlightenment, and I remember how, at one time, the former had worked for me.

And suddenly, I feel a deep peace. Can it be that this man—the one who once drove me mad with his stubbornness, his need to dominate—the one I once considered the almost unmovable obstacle to my personal freedom—has become my unlikely spiritual guide?

Also, there is our separation of over two years, which has led us to see each other with new eyes. “Don’t think I take any of this for granted,” he said the other night as we cooked dinner together in my kitchen. And yes, while our earlier relationship had been rife with passion, the price had been a rage that would have put Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to shame. But the ardor that moves us now is no longer fueled by fury. As Eckhart Tolle writes, when we observe and let go of the pain body—all that we previously blamed on the people around us—we are free to either separate with love or to enjoy an ever-deepening relationship.

As I run my fingertips over the now-even-deeper grooves beside his eyes, I sense that something delightful is about to happen—that my sensual life is about to begin again. Once again everything is open-ended—I don’t quite know what will happen next—and along with the moments of anxiety that causes, I like it that way. So am I—as I’m now free to do—about to pull a Jane Juska, go wild once more, reverting to my old ways? Or am I simply about to share something new with this stranger I’ve known for so long?

And whether what is to come will be with Zane, or with some other man (or even woman), I know that it will be different. Zane, along with my kids, has taught me suffering, and suffering has changed me. His healing and Lily’s, along with David’s death and our closeness to my older daughter, Christine, has made us a family. What I want now is to be moved, as I was recently by the psychotherapist in my writing workshop in Santa Fe who was in tears as he read his piece about having to tell his wife she had cancer.

As I think about these things, Zane gives me that lazy grin I love so much—being bipolar has its perks, just as in our first, tempestuous years, when he would wake beside me, smiling and pulling me close, no matter how bad our fight the night before—and places my hand beneath the table and on the crotch of his jeans. And I think of the times we’ve had in bed lately—as seamless, as smooth and delicious as melting French chocolate.

Yes, at this moment, Zane is still the one who breaks my heart. Can it be that, at last free of doubt, I’m about to have—the best sex I’ve ever had?

Do I Own You Now?

Daphne Merkin

G
irls in their summer dresses we know about, but what about boys in their summer bathing trunks? Him, in particular, his long-legged body, not hideously six-packed in the current style, but elegantly constructed—beautiful even, in an antelope kind of way. His smooth olive-toned skin tanned to an almost non-Caucasian pitch, and my own much lighter skin burnished to a red-brown by incessant and patient exposure.

He always wore the plainest of business suits, black or navy, not a man to take sartorial chances—or risks of any sort, really, except in bed, where he kept leading me forward, closer to the precipice, that moment where you drop off the boundary of your own precarious identity and into someone else’s terrain.
Do I own you now?
he used to ask me breathlessly after some particularly entwined bout of lovemaking. Neither of us tended to speak much during sex, except for his habit of punctuating the silence with cursory yet infinitely flattering statements like
Someone should bottle you
after he rose up from below. So the ownership question came out with the force of a mission statement, one I signed off on. That summer, at least, he owned me. What was the point in pretending otherwise?

Who can forget a summer swimming in sex? Even now, far from those days and that sort of abandon, I have only to conjure up that time, more than two decades ago, to feel cramped with longing, a sensation of something dropping deep inside of me. That was also the summer I was introduced to a kind of sex I hadn’t yet let myself in for, either because I wasn’t available or it wasn’t. Nothing to do with nipple clamps or threesomes or licking honey off a prone and naked body—none of that would have appealed to me then, as it doesn’t now. No, it had to do with the way he took forever about gliding himself into me and the way he propelled me into new positions, and new submissions as well, not overtly of the S-and-M kind, but with a subtext that always hovered around the issue of power, intimating at the unspoken questions:
How much do you want this?
And,
What are you willing to do for it?

I can still recall, as though it happened the day before yesterday, walking out of the ocean that Saturday, aware of him studiously pretending not to watch me from where he lay on his towel. I was pleasantly conscious of the way the brief dip had made my already conspicuous nipples stand out and the way my wet, slicked-back hair brought out the angles of my face. That was the summer my body was quite something in a black one-piece. I’ve always preferred the subtle eroticism of one-pieces to the soft porn of bikinis, but sometimes I wonder if these were the kind of nuanced distinctions that drew us apart in the first place. That, and his wish to torture me, not in a good, tantalizing way—although he did that well too—but in a steely withholding style that made me madly in need of sustenance, like a hungry baby nuzzling for a nipple.

For a while, I was willing to do anything. Bend over with my head on the bed and my ass high in the air so that he could stick his finger way up in there and then enter me from underneath, like a ship coming into its berth, filling me out perfectly. I liked that part of my body paid attention to, warmed in preparation for what would come next. I also liked neither of us seeing the other’s face, which position is often taken to be intrinsically dehumanizing, but which I found to be the best way of freeing myself from the endlessly scrutinizing aspect of sex. For a while after we parted (the final time we parted, I should say, since by then parting itself had become a kind of coming together), I would lie on my bed and try to reenact this particular position in my mind—a monologue pretending to be a dialogue, bent over on my bed and envisioning him entering me from behind.

He took up all the available space in my head that summer, even though I was supposed to be busy pursuing my Higher Literary Calling. To which end I had gone off at the beginning of July to spend a month at Yaddo, a writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. You had to jump through various hoops in order to be accepted to the place—fill out an application, gather recommendations, and send off samples of your writing. I guess I should have been flattered that they took me, someone with only a sheaf of book reviews and two published short stories under her belt, but what hope did Yaddo, with its mosquitoes, its self-conscious poets and networking novelists, have of holding me when he (for want of anything else, I’ll resort to the slightly French affectation of using initials and call him J.C.) was back in New York City? I wanted his hands on my breasts and then sliding down my body, as though he were just discovering my contours all over again. I wanted him inside me, or lying, exhausted by exertion, next to me as we slept.

For ten days, I went dutifully to my studio in the woods and tried to write. I think in all that time I managed to finish only the second half of a book review I had started back in the city, when I wasn’t lying by the pool or talking with other Yaddo residents at dinner about suitably bookish things. Mostly, I was lost in visions of J.C. playing with his yellow rubber duck in the bath, J.C. tracing and re-tracing his long fingers around first one of my nipples and then the other, J.C. putting his mouth on mine as if he were planning to suck the air out of me, kissing me with consuming but unslobby ardor. What was it about the tip of his penis that so moved me when he began to put it between my legs, that soft velvety tip? This seemed far more important for me to parse out than why—for the sole purpose of improving my own standing in the colony’s tacit but very obvious hierarchy of talent—Walker Percy’s
The Moviegoer
was my favorite contemporary novel, or why X was so inexplicably overrated as a critic when Y’s was so clearly the better mind.