The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  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 three decades ago, to feel cramped with longing, something dropping deep inside me. That was also the summer I was introduced to a kind of sex I hadn’t yet let myself in for, either because it wasn’t available or because I 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 pushed me into new positions, and new submissions as well, not overtly of the S&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 his studiously pretending not to watch me from where he lay on his towel, 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 ripe for the taking in a black one-piece; I’ve always preferred the subtle eroticism of a one-piece to the soft porn of a bikini, but sometimes I wonder if these were the kinds of preferences 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 feel madly in need of sustenance, like a hungry baby groping 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 and 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, stroked, warmed in preparation for what would come next. I also liked that neither of us saw the other’s face, which is often taken to be intrinsically demeaning and developmentally arrested but which I found to be the best way of getting past the endlessly scrutinizing aspect of sex. For a while after we parted (the final time we parted, I should say, because 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, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. You had to jump through various bureaucratic hoops in order to be accepted to the place, which prided itself on its pedigreed history of guests, and I guess I should have been flattered that it took me, someone in her early twenties with only a sheaf of book reviews and two published short stories under her belt. But what hope did Yaddo have, with its mosquitoes and its self-conscious poets and networking novelists, of holding my attention when he (I’ll resort to the slightly French affectation of using initials and call him JC) was back in New York City? I wanted his fingers on my breasts, his hands 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 with my notes and tried to write. I think in all that time, when I wasn’t lying by the pool or talking with other Yaddo residents at dinner about suitably bookish things, I managed to finish the second half of a book review I had started back in the city. Mostly, I was lost in visions of JC’s playing with his rubber duckie in the bath, JC’s tracing and retracing his long fingers around first one of my nipples and then the other, JC’s 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 than why—for the sole purpose of improving my standing in the colony’s tacit but very obvious hierarchy of talent—X was so inexplicably overrated as a novelist when Y was so clearly the one with the better prose style.

  On the second Friday, I gave up on the charade. I first booked a round-trip train ticket, so as not to lose my blinding sense of intention, and then explained to the writer who ran the colony with his much older (and more famous) wife that a dire family emergency had suddenly burst over the horizon and required my immediate but short-lived attendance back home. I was torn, I assured the director, about whether to go and interrupt this extraordinary opportunity to convene with the woods à la Thoreau, but I would make it as quick a stay as I could. He bought into my bald excuses with utmost grace. How was he to know that under my serious-seeming writerly self was a creature deranged by sexual longing, an updated and less provincial version of Madame Bovary, dying to escape her small-town existence and have another fling with the callous Rodolphe?

  I was back in the city and in JC’s low, not particularly comfortable bed by Friday evening, basking in an almost bovine sense of sexual well-being. Yet by the next day something had gone wrong: I might have said something mocking but affectionate that he took to be merely snide during the trip to Fire Island, I can’t remember anymore. I only know that by the time I walked out of the ocean, we were no longer on speaking terms. JC ignored me as I settled myself back on the beach towel he had brought, and he continued to lie silently on his side of the towel, his arms folded behind his head and his eyes closed as he gave himself up to the peak rays. I lay on my stomach, staring out onto the crowded beach that seemed to shimmer in the heat, wondering why I had ever succumbed to a man who must have disliked me as much as he lusted after me right from the start.

  For the next hour or two, as the afternoon grew cooler and my skin took on the crunchy texture of sand mixed with tanning cream, we continued to coexist without a word passing between us. As I wildly scrambled to find a foothold in the chaotic intermittency of JC’s affections, I made several firm decisions in my head. The only one worth noting here was the decision to bring this day to a close without getting teary or angry—and then, calling on whatever lingering strength of character I had, to put JC and his bedroom skills behind me forever.

  Somewhere between leaving the beach and getting on the ferry, we started talking again. JC’s relational style was to act as if nothing had ever gone awry—no icy walls put up between us—once he decided he had been punitive or distancing enough. By this point, I was so reduced by his ability to leave me behind like a used tissue that I leaped at the chance to be part of a couple again, my girlfriend to his boyfriend.

  It was in this abject state that I went back to his apartment. He warmed up some uninspired leftovers, and we sat at the small half circle of a table in his minimalist studio apartment and made desultory conversation. At some point I gathered up my few remaining shreds of dignity and murmured unconvincingly that I had to make the last train back to Saratoga Springs. As if on cue, JC got up and sauntered over to his bed, which was all of a few feet away, and lay down on it. “Come over here,” he said. “You don’t really want to go now, do you? I bet I know what you want.”

  You bet he did. What’s the point of fighting the insinuating nature of desire when it won’t leave you alone, won’t shut up until you attend to it? I walked over to the far side of JC’s bed and stood there shyly, like a girl fresh off a Nebraska farm. I was wearing a long, flimsy skirt, circa the late 1970s, wondering how to move the scene forward without completely selling myself out. And then, in his deft, wordless way, he put his hand under my skirt and pulled down my underpants—not all the way, but somewhere in the vicinity of my ankles—as he continued to watch me closely.

  The frenzied feeling of being hundreds of miles away from him, followed by the thwarted day at the beach, followed now by the way he seemed to coax me into my own need for him, all worked in desire’s
favor. “You feel so milky,” he said, as he continued to keep his finger inside me. When he came inside me, smelling of Old Spice and the faintest whiff of something musky coming off his skin—he was the most excretion-less man I’ve ever been with, and I don’t think I ever saw him sweat—it all made sense again. “Do I own you now?” he asked, as though the whole point of our tortuous dance were to corral me like some undomesticated beast and lead me on a rope into the tent he had pitched against the encroaching darkness. “Yes,” I whispered, as I always did.

  I returned to Yaddo the next day, but by then it was already too late to pretend I was serious about becoming part of a writerly community. I was a carnal creature at heart, looking to be taken up by someone who understood that, under my barricaded demeanor, I was bursting to open my gates to the next proprietary male. It couldn’t last, of course, that kind of is-this-love-or-is-this-hate entanglement, but I swear it makes my brain smoke just to consider it all these years later.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to all the editors who’ve encouraged me, tweaked my prose, and tolerated my perfectionist predilections about everything from word choices to whether an em dash might make more sense than a comma. These include Tina Brown, David Remnick, Henry Finder, and Deborah Garrison at The New Yorker; Gerry Marzorati, Katherine Bouton, Megan Liberman, and Vera Titunik at The New York Times Magazine; and Stefano Tonchi at T Magazine. Andy Port went above and beyond the editor’s role at T, providing laughs and comfort as well as her unerring literary instincts. Chip McGrath gave me space to write my mind at The New York Times Book Review. Alana Newhouse provided a receptive ear at Tablet, as did Lucas Whitman at The Daily Beast and Abigail Walch at Vogue. I’d also like to express my deep appreciation to Robbie Myers, Laurie Abraham, Ben Dickinson, and Anne Slowey at Elle.

  Infinite thanks to Susan Squire, for decades of acute reading and inspired friendship. To Elaine Pfefferblit, for her discerning eye and unconditional encouragement. To Deborah Solomon, a witty co-conspirator lo these many years. To the friends who’ve offered various sorts of tea and sympathy: Anne Roiphe; Honor Moore; Brenda Wineapple; Dina Recanati and Michael Recanati. To Jorie Graham, for her generous advocacy; to Lev Mendes, for his intellectual enthusiasm; and to Ewa Cohen, for her nurturing presence.

  This book took a long time to pound into shape and would not exist without the input of some crucial first readers—including Alice Truax and Amy Hertz—and the ministrations of a bevy of assistants over the years, including Lila Feinberg, James Williams, Aniella Perold, and Sophia Harvey. My current assistant, Kristin Steele, has been invaluable in getting the book off my desk and to my publisher. Dan Simon of Seven Stories Press was the first supporter of this collection.

  I am also indebted to Markus Hoffman, my exemplary agent; to Ileene Smith, my steadfast and sage editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux; to Lottchen Shivers, for helping to spread the word; to John Knight, for all his assistance; and to Jonathan Galassi, for putting a writer’s roof over my head.

  Last but very much not least, this book would not have come into being without the support and encouragement of my daughter, Zoë, and of M.P.—both of whom, in their different ways, keep me going.

  ALSO BY DAPHNE MERKIN

  FICTION

  Enchantment

  NONFICTION

  Dreaming of Hitler: Passions & Provocations

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2014 by Daphne Merkin

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2014

  These essays originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in the following publications: Best Life, Bookforum, The Daily Beast, ELLE, Forward, The New Leader, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Reading Room, Slate, T Style, Tablet, and Vogue.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lyrics from “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee,” copyright © Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, courtesy of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Merkin, Daphne.

  [Essays. Selections]

  The fame lunches: on wounded icons, money, sex, the Brontës, and the importance of handbags / Daphne Merkin.

  pages cm

  Selected essays previously published in various periodicals and journals.

  ISBN 978-0-374-14037-3 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71192-4 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3563.E7412 A6 2014

  814'.54—dc23

  2013048986

  www.fsgbooks.com

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