The Naughty Bits (16 page)

Through the fading afternoon light the airliners moved across our heads along the east-west runways of the airport. The pleasant surgical odour from Gabrielle’s body, the tang of the mustard leatherette, hung in the air. The chromium controls reared in the shadows like the heads of silver snakes, the fauna of a metal dream. Gabrielle placed a drop of spit on my right nipple and stroked it mechanically, keeping up the small pretence of this nominal sexual link. In return, I stroked her pubis, feeling for the inert nub of her clitoris. Around us the silver controls of the car seemed a tour de force of technology and kinaesthetic systems. Gabrielle’s hand moved across my chest. Her fingers found the small scars below my left collar bone, the imprint of the outer quadrant of the instrument binnacle. As she began to explore this circular crevice with her lips I for the first time felt my penis thickening. She took it from my trousers, then began to explore the other wound-scars on my chest and abdomen, running the tip of her tongue into each one. In turn, one by one, she endorsed each of these signatures, inscribed on my body by the dashboard and surfaces of my car. As she stroked my penis I moved my hand from her pubis to the scars on her thighs, feeling the tender causeways driven through her flesh by the handbrake of the car in which she had crashed. My right arm held her shoulders, feeling the impress of the contoured leather, the meeting points of hemispherical and rectilinear geometries. I explored the scars on her thighs and arms, feeling for the wound areas under her left breast as she in turn explored mine, deciphering together these codes of sexuality made possible by our two car crashes.

My first orgasm, within the deep wound on her thigh, jolted my semen along this channel, irrigating its corrugated ditch. Holding the semen in her hand, she wiped it against the silver controls of the clutch treadle. My mouth was fastened on the scar below her left breast, exploring its sickle-shaped trough. Gabrielle turned in her seat, revolving her body around me, so that I could explore the wounds of her right hip. For the first time I felt no trace of pity for this crippled woman . . .

from
The Canterbury Tales

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Consider this an open challenge: I defy anyone to show me a more raucous, spirited, spicy rant on marriage than the Wife of Bath’s monologue in
The Canterbury
Tales.
We’ve had over six hundred years to improve on Chaucer’s triumphant creation, but it’s never been done. Not even Shakespeare’s shrewish Kate (before her taming) can hold a candle to Chaucer’s Alison. She’s a kind of Mae West of the Middle Ages—loud, lusty, and eminently lovable (though, some might add murderous, as there are suggestions that she killed off her husbands).

In her celebrated
Prologue,
Dame Alison holds forth on how to get the upper hand in marriage, both in and out of the sack. Her philosophy is simple: women should have complete sovereignty over their men. And her tactics are sure-fire: “Until he paid his ransom to me, I wouldn’t give him my nicety.” Alison’s is a manifesto of a certain pro-sex, pro-power, pro-marriage feminism—on her terms, of course—whose wit and enthusiasm more than make up for its sometimes dubious ethics. After reminding men that “with an empty hand, you may no hawks lure,” she concludes with a prayer on behalf of women for “husbands meek, young, and fresh in the bed.” A final note: I modernized the following passage to remove the difficulties of Chaucer’s medieval English, but you should definitely read it in the original and in its entirety. This is but a taste.

Experience, even if it were no authority
In this world is right enough for me
To speak of the woe that is in marriage.
For, gentlemen, since I was twelve years of age
Thank the Lord who in Heaven does live
Husbands at church I’ve had me five . . .

God bade us to grow and multiply,
And that good teaching well know I! . . .
That wise king Solomon
He had more wives than one
Ah, would that God let me,
Be as oft refreshed as he!
But that gift of God he gave all his wives
Has no man one such that is now alive . . .

To make the perfect student, you must go to many schools,
And to make the perfect work, you must use a lot of tools,
Five husbands later, you know I am no fool!
So bring on the sixth, wherever he may be
For some keep chaste, but they sure are not me! . . .

Though my life you might well want to scold
Well you know that no household
Has every vessel made all of gold.
Some are wood, but have their place,
God loves us all in different ways . . .
So I’ll bestow the flower of my age
In the acts and fruit of marriage.
Tell me, to what other conclusion
Were members made of generation?
And so perfectly were they wrought?
It could not all have been for nought . . .

And why in all the books is it said
That the husband must pay his wife in bed?
And what should he use for the payment
If he doesn’t use his privy instrument? . . .

In wifehood I will use my instrument
As freely as the Lord it hath me sent.
If I hurt anyone, Lord give me sorrow,
My husband will have it both eve and morrow.
When I find one ready to pay the debt
I’ll marry that man, that you can bet.
He’ll be my debtor and my slave
And all his suffering he will have
Upon his flesh, while I’m his wife
I have the power for all my life . . .

I say in true, five husbands I had
And three were good, and two were bad.
The three good men were rich and old
But to the bond of marriage could hardly hold
And you know what I mean, without it told!
And help me God, I laugh when I consider,
How much I asked them to deliver! . . .

Now of my fifth husband I will tell
May God never send his soul to Hell,
And yet he was to me most severe
And made me pay a price so dear
That my ribs will feel it till my dying day.
But in our bed he was fresh and gay
And could me so truly understand
That when he wanted my belle chose at hand
Though he beat my every bone to pain
He could win my love again and again . . .

He was, in truth, but twenty years of age
And I was forty, and lust within me raged! . . .
And truly, as my husbands told me,
I had the nicest little thing that ever might be! . . .
So I followed my inclination
By virtue of my constellation
That made me never want to forgo
Giving my chamber of Venus to a good fellow.

—modernized by Jack Murnighan

from
Justine

MARQUIS DE SADE

A few years ago, I excerpted from the Marquis de Sade’s
Justine
for a
Nerve
article on banned books. Soon thereafter, a reader wrote in to express her concern that Sade “glorifies sexual abuse and rape.” I wrote back indicating that I agreed and did not take such issues lightly. Why, then, would I include a passage of literature that glorified these things?

Here I have to admit that I tend to put aesthetic over ethical criteria in the assessment of fiction. If the writing is brilliant I am likely to forgive (if not be intrigued by) portrayals of even the most extreme evil. Cormac McCarthy’s novel
Blood Meridian,
for example, contains unspeakable violence, yet is among the greatest novels of the last twenty years. But I would also argue that it is art’s responsibility to acknowledge and explore humanity at its best and its worst. Perhaps the foremost of ethical imperatives is honesty, for only the honest and unblinking eye can expose us to the totality of experience and allow us to make the most informed ethical judgments.

My point in excerpting Sade both in the banned-book article and here is to say, Hey, look what literature can do. Books are banned because they affect people, and, to that extent, they show the power that great writing has. Sade, monster that he was, showed more than almost anyone else precisely how disturbing and intense literature can be. That, in my mind, makes his books both great and defensible.

Thérèse, you realize that there is no power which could possibly deliver you out of our hands, and there is neither . . . any sort of means which might . . . prevent you from becoming, in every sense and in every manner, the prey of the libidinous excesses to which we, all four of us, are going to abandon ourselves with you . . .

I fall at Dom Sévérino’s feet . . . Great God, what’s the use? Could I have not known that tears merely enhance the object of libertine’s coveting? Everything I attempted in my efforts to sway those savages had the unique effect of arousing them . . .

A circle is formed immediately. I am placed in its center and there, for more than two hours, I am inspected, considered, handled by those four monks who pronounce either encomiums or criticisms.

“Let’s to it,” says Sévérino, whose prodigiously exalted desires will brook no further restraint and who in this dreadful state gives the impression of a tiger about to devour its prey. “Let each of us advance to take his favorite pleasure.” Placing me on a couch in the posture expected by his execrable projects and causing me to be held by two of his monks, the infamous man attempts to satisfy himself in that criminal and perverse fashion which makes us to resemble the sex we do not possess while degrading the one we have. But either the shameless creature is too strongly proportioned, or Nature revolts in me at the mere suspicion of these pleasures. Sévérino cannot overcome the obstacles. He presents himself, and is repulsed immediately. He spreads, he presses, thrusts, tears; all his efforts are in vain. In his fury the monster lashes out at the altar at which he cannot speak his prayers. He strikes it, he pinches it, he bites it. These brutalities are succeeded by renewed challenges. The chastened flesh yields, the gate cedes, the ram bursts through, terrible screams rise from my throat. The entire mass is swiftly engulfed and darts its venom the next moment. Sévérino weeps with rage.

—translated by Richard Seaver
and Austryn Wainhouse

from
The Death of the Novel

RONALD SUKENICK

I’m listening to Bob Dylan and reading Ron Sukenick; I think I might be on to something. I’m sure that most of you have listened to Dylan, know how his tuneless gravel eases you back to a kind of stalled moment in time, hovering somewhere about 1974. Some cultural artifacts are so bound in their present that they become preposterous the minute culture shifts. Others somehow distill their moments, giving us access to little anachronistic havens, allowing us to perform the trick of inserting our present selves in the synchrony of events long past. Dylan has always been in this second category for me, and it’s one of the reasons I love him so.

Reading Ron Sukenick is having the same effect and evokes pretty much the same time period. My first exposure to Sukenick’s consummate sex-and-drug-decade prose was
Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues,
his great unpunctuated po-mo dithyramb. Then came
The Death of the Novel
and Other Stories,
an excerpt of which follows. The title story is about Sukenick’s teaching a course on the death throes of a genre he worked in, only to find himself smoking dope and having unapologetic sex with his students and various other girls less than half his age. The passage begins with a description of one object of Professor Sukenick’s fancy, his student Betty, and ends with them having sex in an East Village piedà-terre. And although the politically dubious student-teacher fantasy sticks fast in the craw of many of us (especially us former instructors), Sukenick’s professor finds the tables of sexual power curiously turned on him by a young lover in a borrowed bed.

When I get nervous sometimes I get a little pompous. Especially with students. Especially with students who I want to seduce. The kids at the table smiled at one another indulgently. They liked me. They thought I was hip. For my age. They knew I wanted to make it with Betty. They probably wished me luck . . . their attitude was that it didn’t mean that much whether I wanted to fuck Betty, or if I didn’t want to fuck Betty, or if in fact I did fuck Betty. That seemed to be pretty much Betty’s attitude too. She was a cheerleader type, one of those auburn straight-haired round-cheeked dolls right out of a Coca-Cola ad . . . she was pretty as apples and bland as Uneeda biscuits. Her thighs were like white bread . . . She was America, and I wanted her. In any case she was my smartest student, and I wanted her the way a teacher always wants his smartest student, especially if she’s a nice piece of ass. Not that she ever did any work. I gave her A’s for her ideas, for her conversation, for her presence maybe, for her pussy, and because getting A’s didn’t mean a thing to her . . .

Where we going? She asked. I shrugged.

Why don’t we go to the city, she said. I know an apartment we can use on the East Side . . .

We walked in and very cool she took off her clothes. Smiling, she lay down on a mattress on the floor and stared up at the ceiling.

I want a drink, I said. She made a face. She never touched alcohol.

There’s nothing here, she said. There’s some pot in the drawer. I rolled a joint and sat down next to her on the mattress and we smoked it while I caressed her. She stared at the ceiling. I was in a kind of pink revery of which her body was part. I went and pissed, came back, undressed, and lay down next to her. My cock was very impersonal, an animated hose with a life of its own, jumping around between her sensitive and very knowing fingers.

I think of you as Miss America, I said. She smiled. I slid in like a dirigible sliding into a cloud in a beautiful dream. Her body began churning like a bump and grind dancer. She was staring at the ceiling. Suddenly I got the feeling that this was all staged, some kind of routine, a movie maybe, or a cheap story. Her pussy felt like a moist sack of warm membrane, totally physiological. I had something like a sudden Hindenburg disaster. Shit, she said after a while. I flopped out, my penis a dead fish, my heart an empty reservoir.