by J. D. Landis
I did not make love to Cosima ever again. Nor did I make love to anyone else during my remaining undergraduate years, or during the numerous years of my formal postgraduate studies, or for all the eleven years until my wedding night. Such abstinence was the result not of any trauma or shame but rather of my being unable to make any sense of what I had done. I had enjoyed myself, or at least a part of my body had, until it had been fucked and sucked and slapped and pulled and pushed to the degree that it had stopped feeling anything and fallen cold upon my thigh. Even then Cosima was encouraging, as she slipped her hand beneath it and said, “If Yale’s endowment matched yours, we wouldn’t have to pay tuition,” and I found her words arousing and my cock recalescent. But for what? This might be life; but it wasn’t art. This might be living for the moment; but I, like every thinker, wanted to live for the fortnight, if not eternity. Let all the other randy, red-blooded American boys follow what they believed to be their biologic destiny, treating the mons Veneris like Mont Blanc and having sex as often as possible with as many partners as possible. And then let them swagger and jactate among their fellow barbarians. To me this was nonsense. I was simply—and now I could speak from experience—not interested.
As for Cosima, her value to me was not in her blandiloquy or even her skillful and ultimately good-humored initiation of me into what I then believed was the meaninglessness of sex. It was, instead, in her introducing me to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. By calling me an ascetic priest, Cosima had begun the process of getting me to have sex with her. By answering my questions about just where she had come up with the notion of the ascetic priest, she unwittingly opened the door for me into my entire future and closed the door for herself into my trousers.
I had always been a studious, inactive boy. But with my discovery of Nietzsche, I became a true ascetic. I wanted to be one of the “great, fruitful, inventive spirits” he wrote about in On the Genealogy of Morals. When he said that in such spirits you always encounter asceticism, that was for me.
I was in the perfect position to practice the three ascetic ideals: chastity, because I had now experienced, and found incongruous, its opposite and was perfectly content to embark upon “that melancholy sexual perversion known as continence”; humility, because I had been rendered humble by my father and was truly humble in my confrontation with the body of knowledge it was my ambition to unclothe; and poverty, which it was simple for me to practice because the wealth of my family had taught me to want nothing but what was abstract, like knowledge itself, and I was about to become, as George Steiner would years later describe the brilliant wife-murderer Louis Althusser, “inebriated with abstraction.”
I even decided that I would follow Nietzsche to the extent of becoming a student of the uses and power of language, specifically a rhetorician, because Nietzsche’s first job had been to teach rhetoric. I would master the Einreden, the power of rhetoric, what Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen calls “the whole domain of suggestion, of mimetico-affective contagion, of the magical power of words.”
Words became my life, words in the search of truth, and it was through words that I would rise above the brutes or sink to the level of the demons. Nietzsche said in Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense that we possess nothing but the metaphors of things. Though he warned often enough of the terrible threat to one’s sanity in seeking the truth, the truth is what I sought, even as I sat in the shade of the leaning tower of Wimsatt and was taught that dualism, conflict, the clash of desires, are the key to the truth in art as in life. Is that not what every intelligent young person is striving for, or should be, before the illusions of life on the outside of the mind take over? Is that not what every old person, slipping feet first into death, desires? To know. The truth.
The connection between my obsession with Nietzsche and what might seem my obsession with the use of safeties is not as tenuous as it may seem. I had been raised at a time when safeties were seen as a means more of birth control than of inhibiting disease. And if there was anything that frightened me from the time I learned from my mother how babies came to be, it was the idea that I might have a child. I must have known intuitively what I was to learn under the tutelage of my friend and seducer, Cosima, who that very same night of my seduction gave me that most popular book of Nietzsche among undergraduates, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It was at dawn the next morning, when I was back in my dorm room, nursing my sore member and feeling quite at peace with myself for having experienced and disposed of sex in a single encounter, that among Nietzsche’s “great fugues of thought” I came upon these words: “In your children you shall make up for being the children of your father; thus you shall redeem all that is past.”
I knew then that having a child would be for me the most meaningful act of my life and perhaps the only real act in a life devoted not to action but to contemplation. Is it any wonder, then, that I became celibate and would no longer even consider depositing my seed into the reinforced reservoir of what today has become a virtual symbol of enlightened sexuality, the condom?
Safe sex? There is no such thing. No sex is safe. And the sex in marriage, even if both of you are virgins when you meet (hardly the case with Clara, thank goodness, though almost with me) and remain faithful all your lives, is the most dangerous sex of all. Sex in marriage is always threatening, in and of itself, to renounce its own powers in mockery of your commitment and to leave you in perpetual grief and mourning. The ravages of AIDS to the body cannot compare to the devastation to the mind wrought by the slow evaporation of passion. AIDS kills you; marriage, mercilessly, lets you live.
Clara and I do not use condoms. We have never used any form of birth control. We are not “trying to have a baby.” We are simply mixing our lives, which is what marriage should be and is a vastly better definition of it than the “joining” of lives, which implies a mere hitching of people rather than a coalescing of their beings. Concinnity is our goal in life precisely as it must be for the rhetorician in his discourse, that logic and harmony out of whose enactment come tranquility and beauty.
Our sex itself is redemptive. And if a child issues forth from it, as I hope a child will, that child shall redeem not only all that is past but also all that is to come.
Though I know for certain that I have had no children and that Clara has had no children, I have no idea how many men she might have had a child with, except that there were many. I have more than once asked her to tell me in detail about her past, but she has demurred. “I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong impression of me,” she has answered on more than one occasion. And once I responded, “What you don’t understand is that there could be no wrong impression of you for me. There is nothing you might have done that could turn me against you. And I want to know everything. Down to the last detail.” But still she refused. “You’ll just have to imagine it,” she said, because she knows me so well as to know that I do imagine it. Vividly. “If you won’t tell me, then I’ll just have to read your diaries,” I threatened. “Oh, please,” she scoffed.
I have found myself longing to know everything about her. You cannot love someone until you love her whole life—every moment, every passion, every cry of pleasure or pain in the aphotic, inaccessible night of the past. The great injustice of love is that it arrives encumbered with unimaginable loss. I have never understood those people who say they would rather not know. You might as well marry some piece of statuary in a graveyard, cold, dead, and silent, from whom the very abrasions of lust have faded. Or is that not what most husbands and wives become to one another, while still alive?
Not we. I shall not let that happen. If marriage is a gradual opening up of one mate to the other, then surely all the secrets of the past will be revealed.
I do not know what thrills me more: knowing that there are secrets or knowing that I must someday learn those secrets.
At the moment I am balanced between the two. My imagination feeds me equally well from Column A or Column B.
IT IS AN apt metaphor, for I am
planning to order in Chinese food this very evening. I can even now picture myself lifting the chopsticks to my mouth, surrounding with my lips a dumpling or more likely some culinary general’s chicken, sucking a sesame-pasted noodle through them like a child whose manners are in suspension because he thinks no one is looking at him.
However, the metaphor does break down in its specifics. In our neighborhood, where we live among the artists and their dealers and their austere watering holes, there are no surviving Cantonese or Mandarin restaurants where you can actually order from Column A or Column B, as we used to when I was a child and my parents would summon their driver and we would travel from Park Avenue to the wild West Side of Manhattan as if it were another civilization and sit down in a booth in what my father called a Chinks establishment and create a dinner for ourselves by ordering, literally, from Column A or Column B, “expense be damned,” as my father would say with a smirk, the whole meal costing so little in fact that he always made it a point to leave a tip that was larger than the tab itself, though it perpetually annoyed him that even this extreme munificence never got him recognized the next time we would show up at the same restaurant on our culinary excursions to what he called Immigrant Alley or Junkies’ Junction—Broadway in the Nineties—and he would excuse this discourtesy, which he would never experience from an East Side maître d’, by telling me and my mother that Oriental people had destroyed their memories through opium, interbreeding, collectivization, and an unwillingness to open fully their tiny, belligerent slits of eyes.
But am I hungry?
Not yet.
Even when I get hungry, I want to get hungrier still. After all, I ceased being an ascetic priest when I married Clara. And if the most radical form of the ascetic ideal demands a desire even to stop desiring, a will to terminate willing, then I want to overthrow that ideal tonight. I want to let all my senses drift through the entire cavalcade of desire until I am stretched to the very edge of desperation, and only then to fulfill them. I want for myself what Steiner names that “particular effect of musical resolution—unreconciled energy inside repose.” I want to become orectic without, as it were, becoming erect.
What could be less like marriage? Marriage replaces desperation, at least of one kind, with a fulfillment so regular that it threatens to become undeviating.
That is why I am grateful for this evening alone. I can let myself go, without having to go anywhere. I need not even leave this bed.
But I shall miss eating with Clara. We almost always have dinner together. It is not a ritual, our dinner, because there is nothing ceremonial about it. We might eat an elaborate dinner at home or a simple dinner out or an elaborate dinner out or a simple dinner at home. Regardless, it is at this time of day, when she has finished her work and I have finished mine, that we have come together, as darkness has slipped its hand into the glove of the day. It has been the time of our greatest sharing and consideration of one another, with the single exception of those later times, deeper in the night, upon this bed, on which, not in which, I lie.
I shall also miss talking with Clara. Discussion has always been an important part of our dining. Our whole marriage has been, I suppose, like Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s honeymoon, when, as she described it, “We talked incessantly for seven weeks and became chronically nomadic and monogamic,” though for Clara and me our wandering has been limited predominantly to the landscape of our bodies.
Whether we eat out or in, we talk to one another. Nothing (unless it was the image of separate beds) repelled me more about the idea of marriage than my fear of silence within it. I knew too well the lure of silence to the person alone and had given in to it myself quite dramatically. But to imagine silence within a partnership of woman and man was to imagine a living death.
Who among us, when young, has not had our vision of the future poisoned by seeing a man and a woman with the fabric at their knees touching beneath a restaurant table and not a word exchanged between them once the menu’s lifted like a script from their desolate hands?
I have often thought that the real reason people have children is not to redeem all that is past but to give themselves something to talk about or, if they have forgotten completely how to talk to one another, at least someone to talk to, a child held captive by the power of the language of loss.
Clara and I have always talked to one another. When I have been able to take my eyes from her eyes, as I was speaking, or from the wet haze of her lips, when she was speaking, I have seen other couples, silent, watching us as we spoke. I could almost see their ears bending toward us like wintery plants toward the sun. Our intimacy, in the privacy of our conversation, which sometimes unfolds in a kind of rutting stichomythia, could fill a room. And I knew that those people looking at us talk and trying to hear our words were imagining our sex life. They could see us locked together in the dioecious discourse of the flesh.
And what did we talk about? The menu, naturally. What to eat. What to drink. And shall we share. The prospect of children. Music. Literature. Sex. I was always after something. I was always willing to be taught. There is, for example, nothing about her that is more mysterious to me than her orgasms. And while it may be true, as Steiner says, that the ineffable lies beyond the frontiers of the word, I have always encouraged her to tell me about them. I might inform her, in our ongoing discussion about the Bell family, from whom she seems to like to pretend she is descended now that I have told her about them, that Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, wrote to her husband, Clive Bell, that Virginia “gets no pleasure from the act.” “Oh, how would they know that?” asks Clara, flying ingenuously into the scholar’s web. “Because,” I say, “Virginia herself wrote to a friend of hers: ‘I find the climax immensely exaggerated.’ And what about you, my dear?” I slyly suggest. Why am I so interested in this subject? Perhaps because it seems one thing about my wife that must remain forever mysterious, far more than the facts of her past that I might plumb merely through a reading of her diary, which I wholly expect to take place on my deathbed so I may go to my grave enlightened about the one human being I care to understand. But how ever might I enter that storm that breaks upon the fragile ambit of my being? I am there when it happens, of course, but that’s like saying one is present at the birth of a star. No one can tell me about this but her. No one can translate this explosion of knowledge and transcendence of self.
In a good marriage, it is impossible to separate sex from conversation. Dicacity, as much as venery, marks our evenings. No topic for us is interdicted, though neither tells the other all we know. We share a healthy respect for the dangers of depletion and the potential vacuity of the future. Nothing must diminish the ardor with which we live with one another. Familiarity must breed not some great contempt but, however paradoxically, renewal. I do not want Emerson’s complacent “friendship in possession.” I want the passion of pursuit; which is not, I trust, too much to ask when the woman I love seems forever beyond my grasp. Nothing must silence the song that is our marriage.
Another apt metaphor, that, since music has become, apart from Clara and after the betrayal of language, my life. I have found that sex and music are the only surviving divertissements into which I can dive through the crust of self, in which I can drown, and from which I can emerge inviolate.
