It’s remarkable the logic we’ll build around a misapprehension. I used to think that to pass muster was to “pass mustard” and logic grew like a bonsai tree around my version to accommodate it. I figured the idiom had something to do with a yellow condiment being successfully tendered over a picnic table. Don’t get me started on “intensive purposes.” These things seem silly now, mostly because it’s difficult to remember how we thought about the unknown before it became known. If people visit you at work and can’t find their way to the right elevator bank, it seems strange. You find old flash cards with vocabulary words like “militia” and “loquacious” on them. You learn the globe, learn that Madagascar is nowhere near South America and never was. Suddenly the island is fixed in the bitch seat next to Africa, where it will stay from now on.
Such innocent confusions are like cognitive magic-eye posters. Most of the time it’s impossible to go back to the jumbled mess once you’ve registered the picture. Sex is the exception. So natural and universal is a child’s curiosity about sex and so long are we conscious of it before we do it, that our original impressions of it leave an indelible mark.
It’s a point of fascination for adults that when it comes to sex, children are so adorably off base. At least Madagascar and South America are both landmasses; Lord knows what blowing on a penis has to do with a blow job. Or what jumping on a bed has to do with ejaculation. I never asked my mother where babies came from but I remember clearly the day she volunteered the information. My sister was taking a nap, my father was out back developing an elaborate pulley system for firewood using a laundry basket, and my mother called me to set the table for dinner. She sat me down in the kitchen and, under the classic caveat of “loving each other very, very much,” explained that when a man and a woman hug tightly, the man plants a seed in the woman. The seed grows into a baby. Then she sent me to the pantry to get place mats.
As a direct result of this conversation, I wouldn’t hug my father for two months.
As I grew older, sex became less clear but more fascinating. I knew I was being exposed to more of the song, but each note made my prior version sound less and less like the real thing. Never so bold as to volunteer my curiosity, I would receive sporadic information about sex, like encoded messages from the planet Libido. Once I tried to sneak into an NC-17 movie with my sister (NC-17, “not admitted without parent”—a fascinating warning since the idea of seeing a dirty movie with my parents was the most unappealing experience I could think of ). We never made it past the popcorn stand. Dirty movies are like roller coasters: you have to be tall enough to ride them. Another time, in fifth grade art class, I was making something out of papier-mâché and googly eyes and a girl across the crafts table was amazed that I had not yet “done it.”
“Who would I have ‘done it’ with?” I became defensive and tacked on the lie of, “Obviously I’ve made out with a boy before.”
“I did it with my cousin last year.”
That was the end of that conversation.
When I was fourteen, a camp counselor explained what “eating out” was and I vowed to never have it done to me. It seemed cannibalistic and unhygienic. I also remember that she claimed—in front of an entire cabin of girls—to have been “eaten out” by one of the maintenance men in a hot tub. Under hot water. Either something is amiss in my memory of this conversation or she found the most talented man on the planet and all hope is lost for the rest of us.
Then came a brief but vivid fascination with rape. Or what I thought rape was, before I understood that it didn’t have a whole lot to do with sex. Likely, this is because I watched too much TV. On TV, when two people were about to have sex, they kissed and the lights faded and then they went into a room to do the horizontal tango. In the next scene, the woman came out of the bedroom in a terry cloth robe and the man had made a breakfast that included orange juice. Fresh squeezed. On occasion I saw a woman’s breast or a naked man’s back shifting on top of the woman like there was a skateboard between them. The only time I saw some actual nudity was in the after-school specials on sexual harassment, or in the extremely traumatic The Accused. In place of terry cloth robes and dimmer switches, which suggested sex was going to happen in a scene edited out between this one and the next—rape scenes by definition had to show some version of the actual act.
Gradually, I was gathering more and more information that might one day facilitate a one-night stand of my own. I knew that the underwear had to come off. I knew that if the woman wasn’t turned on, sex could be pretty damn uncomfortable. I knew that alcohol didn’t just make you happy. I knew that rape specifically was very bad and something to watch out for like broken glass and electrical outlets. But I also knew that before it strayed into a heinous caveman crime, sex was one of the ways in which people needed each other.
“Dolphins,” my sister once informed me, “are the only other animals besides humans that have sex for fun.”
The veracity of this was of no concern to me. I could only deal with one species’ privates at a time and even that was proving difficult. With this deluge of images—between the maintenance men and the dolphins and Jodie Foster—it was only natural that my bouncing martini was getting lost. And the further my dream of innocence slipped, the tighter I tried to hold on to it.
I suppose it didn’t help that around this time I was watching a shitload of Twin Peaks.
We were obsessed with the series as a family. Some families have Scrabble night; we had David Lynch night. My sister had a paperback copy of Laura Palmer’s Diary. We unfolded the liner notes to the soundtrack (which showed thumbnail photos of every character) and stuck it on the side of the fridge. I kept a piece of fireplace wood as a pet until my mother reclaimed it in the middle of the night, citing the potential of ground dirt and bark on her freshly cleaned carpets. Recently, I became nostalgic for that profoundly piney northwest community and borrowed the first season of Twin Peaks on DVD from a coworker. I would have been about twelve when it aired, and watching it now, I was horrified at all the S&M references, sexual abuse, spousal abuse, midget abuse, owl abuse—the list went on. The corpse of a blond and blue and defiled Laura Palmer is wrapped in plastic and washed up on a riverbank in the first scene of the first episode.
I called my mother immediately to inform her that she was a bad parent.
“I can’t believe you let us watch this. We ate dinner in front of this.”
“Everyone watched Twin Peaks,” was her response.
“So, if everyone jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it, too?”
“Don’t be silly,” she laughed, “of course I would, honey. There’d be no one left on the planet. It would be a very lonely place.”
“Mom, do you know what happened the night of Laura Palmer’s death?”
“I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
“Before she got killed, some guys tied her up and screwed her while a parrot pecked bloody holes in her shoulder.”
My mother was silent, contemplating this. She had a certain memory of Twin Peaks and parrot sex didn’t factor into it.
“Huh.” I could hear her shrug. “Well, I thought that show was a riot.”
With enough Twin Peaks watching, I realized that bouncing on hotel beds was only “sexual” in teenybopper movies and short stories. I now saw one-night stands for what they were: a strange penis and a strange vagina getting to know each other fairly well, very quickly. But my original fascination with the one-night stand remained intact, even if the logistics had changed. And why not? Here was one last thing I could single-handily save from being muddied by adulthood. Here was one small innocent dream from my childhood brain. A dream there was no harm in believing (provided one kept their wits and prophylactics about them). It is so rare that we get to realize as adults what we imagined ourselves doing as children. Granted, this rule is generally applied to more wholesome activities like, say, intergalactic space travel or a career in the ballet. Nevertheless, I suspect this is why I hung
on to my one-night stand dreams.
But by now, time was running out. Another decade and my invitation to the reckless sex-and-drug-abuse club would get revoked. Then people would be compelled to spit words like “floozy” into my face and they would have every right. It was suggested that perhaps I was not trying hard enough. That’s probably true. It’s not as if I had chronic bad breath or a neck goiter or other blatant physical obstacles to overcome. A couple of guy friends generously offered to help me remedy the situation, but their candidacy was null by virtue of the fact that they’d met me. And I wasn’t about to walk into a crowded sports bar and scream, “I’ve got twenty minutes and one expired condom. Who’s in?” Adventure within reason was key. Still, it seemed that it shouldn’t be this hard. Who do you have to sleep with to get laid in this town?
My first legitimate attempt came during the spring of my freshman year of college. Armed with the knowledge that oral sex had nothing to do with talking, I met a prep school–issued member of the sailing team at a keg party. It was such a small college that the simple fact that we had never seen each other before was enough to get the conversation going. After eliminating all the telltale TV signs that he was a potential rapist, I went back to his dorm room. It was below freezing that night, and I had decided to wear taupe-colored stockings beneath my jeans and flannel socks over that. This is not a look that lends itself to a sexy undraping. It’s also supermodel-proof, meaning that even a supermodel would look unappetizing in taupe-colored stockings and jeans. I tried to keep my new friend busy by kissing him while he began unzipping, but nothing gets past the human hand these days. He put a massive callused paw on my synthetically silky thigh, stopped, said “huh,” and excused himself to the bathroom where he vomited (presumably from alcohol). Then we both crawled into bed and he passed out, drooling on my arm as it went numb from the weight of his head.
I felt relieved that he had gotten sick. Now the social scales of mortification were even. I watched him until six A.M. at which point I felt I had put in my time. I got up and wrote him a Post-it Note, apologizing for leaving. When I realized I had crammed in all I could on one yellow square, I grabbed another and filled that one with more witty remarks about seeing him around for some delectable cafeteria cuisine. Though one consisted of just my signature, in the end I filled six Post-it Notes, which I stuck on his computer monitor over a screen saver of rotating catamarans.
This was before Swingers. I would like to say that I crumpled them all up, making a delete key of my fist, and took them with me. I didn’t. I was still blinded with embarrassment. In my one-night stand fantasies, there were never ever stockings. Or flannel socks for that matter. Garter belts, maybe, but not a pair of control-top stockings that left red indents around my belly button. Three months later, he graduated and I purchased my first pair of candy red high heels.
I realized that I had to be a little bolder if I was going to have a suitable one-night stand and that it wasn’t going to be handed to me on a silver keg. My second attempt came during a semester I spent at Columbia University. Columbia seemed like a hotbed of people and options compared to my small and cloistered New England college. For one thing, it had grad schools. We didn’t have grad schools. We didn’t even have a football team. There were certain similarities, however, including the way the floors of the library became progressively less social as you worked your way up. The first floor was a meat market. The top was monkish. This architectural layering of academic intent seems widespread. But at Columbia, if I really wanted to get some studying done, I had to bust out of the building altogether and study in the law library.
This was a place where silence was platinum. One was glared at if one sneezed or shifted in one’s seat. I could have come in naked with nothing but a grand piano strapped to my back and my only chance of eye contact would have been if I had leaned on the keys. The law library became my sanctuary, my home away from a home that included a roommate who hung full-color posters of Audrey Hepburn on her wall, recited Shakespeare, and regularly flopped down naked and soaking on my bed and said things like: “Tell me, is there anything more glorious or decadent than a shower in the middle of the day?”
I wasn’t sure that there was. This was before I took up smoking, before I tried heavy drugs in any effective amount. This was a time before I bought myself flowers or clothing I didn’t need. This was also a time before regular sex. Somewhere in my head a new image of the one-night stand had formed. It had all the good clean fun of bed bouncing but was now informed by the fact that I had seen a couple of penises and got the gist of what would go down on such an evening.
The Columbia law library looked like one of those very expensive stores that you can tell are expensive by the amount of space between the clothing on the racks. Just replace the shirts with people. It was also open late. I spotted a guy in one of the modern-looking chairs. I was burned out from studying but I didn’t want to go home. God knows what show tune–heavy naked prancing was going on in my room. She also used to binge on Twix bars and pin the wrappers to her bulletin board. I packed up my things in case my encounter went poorly, marched over, and leaned in.
“Would you like to get out of here?”
“Why?” he asked with genuine confusion, and stared at me.
Unable to squeeze any more mileage out of my bravery, I said, “I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else,” masking my shame by pretending I was a spy. The right answer to my question would have been given in code, like, “I would like to get out of here but it’s raining on the plains.” And then one of us would slip the other one some microfiche. I ran out of the library and never went back.
The following year it looked like my time had finally come. I was traveling around Europe with my friend Justine and I decided to give it another go. We boarded a train bound for Venice and thought it would be a good idea to sneak into one of the first-class cabins. It was an overnight train and in first class the seats slid down on both sides of the cabin, making the room a solid block of cushions. We found what we thought was an empty cabin, but opened the door to discover a nineteen-year-old Italian rap artist, sans entourage, or however you say “sans entourage” in Italian. He had a wide forehead and spiky black hair and two tongue rings. He wore a black button-down T-shirt, black jeans, and shock-white sneakers. He was also foreign and his very existence jibed nicely with my fantasies of raising my children abroad learning how to make good coffee. Justine wrote in her journal while I chatted it up with our companion. In perfect English, he apologized profusely for his poor English. He said he wished he spoke better but “that’s the way it goes.” I was trying to imagine how I would say “that’s the way it goes” in Italian when a train cop knocked on the door with a couple of inexplicable German shepherds, checked our tickets, and booted my friend and me back to coach.
Hours upon hours later, unable to sleep from back pain, I remembered that the aisles of the first-class cabins were lined with a kind of nubby carpeting. I grabbed my book and lay on my back in the middle of the hall with my knees up. The lights flickered overhead as the train sped through the south of France. A hip-looking couple rolled cigarettes and smoked them with their arms out the window. People passing through stepped over me. Suddenly I saw the light in the rapper’s car turn on. The couple in the hall was immersed in some debate in a language I couldn’t understand. I knocked on the door and went in.
“Me again,” I said, sliding the door shut behind me.
We talked, he handed me headphones, and I listened to some of his rap. And then he kissed me. Which is pretty narcissistic, kissing someone while they’re listening to your music. The only thing that would have made it worse was if the song was about him kissing a girl on a train. Which it very well could have been.
The doors didn’t have locks on them.
“We can do everything but,” he said, and again, I marveled at his grasp of American phrases.
“Don’t worry about me,” I replied. And then, not wanting to look like
a slut but still gunning for my one-night stand, I said, “We can do whatever comes naturally.”
I felt like a guy.
“No, not naturally.” He ran the metal tip of his tongue around the inside edge of his teeth. “I’m Catholic.”
“Really? A Catholic rapper? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“That’s because you’re American and all Americans do is violence.”
And the Catholics are such pacifists? But I knew arguing would only lead to more chatter so I accepted his Euro-slap and we did everything but. He threw out his back, I threw out my neck. It was romantic. I kept thinking: How is it that I got the one moral rapper on the planet? And: I wish the doors on this train locked. I had to keep dislodging my ankles, which persisted in slipping into the crack between the pulled-out seats. Afterward he gave me a mix tape, which I wound up leaving in a Danish hostel two weeks later. I returned to my coach car and woke up Justine.
“We’re in Venice,” I said.
“Already? What time is it?” She yawned and winced when she moved her neck.
“Already. It’s seven in the morning.”
“We better hurry up then.” She stretched. “I hear it’s sinking.”
I never told her about what happened. When you travel for an extended time with someone, spending every moment together, knowing the location of each other’s passports, sharing a bar of soap—sometimes you need a little something for yourself. Plus, I had failed. There was something tawdry and cheap about the fact that we did so much but I never slept with him. Actually, there was everything tawdry and cheap about it.
I Was Told There'd Be Cake Page 9
