Afterburn

by Colin Harrison

  He'd also gone to the trouble of walking the eight blocks to Martha's office because her private investigator, a Mr. Towers, never saw anyone outside the offices of the law firm. He would be the one who poked into the candidates' credit histories and medical files. She'd used him on dozens of insurance and divorce cases, she said, the best in the business.

  "There they are," Martha announced as they entered one of the firm's conference rooms, waving her thick arm, "your pile of yearning." The stack included letters, photographs, résumés, even a few videotapes. "Told Ellie yet?"

  He ignored her and eased himself into a chair.

  "I'm going to leave you alone with your fantasies, Charlie." Martha put her hand on the doorknob. "Please don't make too much of a mess."

  "You do this to most of your clients?"

  "Most of my clients are trying to avoid trouble."

  She pulled the door shut before he could respond, so he opened the file of letters. They were typewritten, handwritten, word-processed. He marked two folders maybe and no. What was he looking for? Intelligence and character, of course. Health and vigor. Something special. It was not necessary to like the woman, he told himself; more important that she be a strong person. He would choose strength over niceness any day. Niceness could go to hell. Nice people lost market share. Strength and intelligence. Give me someone healthy and intelligent and resolute, he thought. And stable, and drug-free. Pretty eyes and good teeth would be a plus. Here was a woman who was a lawyer for the poor. Here was a woman who danced in a ballet company but had recently injured her knee and saw the end of her performance career coming. Another was a counselor for battered children. Another was a lesbian who thought such an arm's-length arrangement would be best for her since she wanted a child but had "issues with men." Didn't everyone born without testicles have issues with men? Here was a woman who owned a dairy farm in upstate New York. Her young husband had been killed when his tractor tipped over, crushing him, she said, and now she had a beautiful piece of land, a dog, nice neighbors, and plenty of time, because she was renting out the acreage to another farmer. She and her husband had been planning to have a child. Charlie put her letter in the maybe folder. What next? A woman who had three children but her husband was terminally ill. Thirty-seven years old. The chance of birth defects was one in three hundred, he knew, too high. He put her letter in the no file. The next letter was from a gay man who asked that Charlie sponsor the man's adoption of a Third World child. "Of course, you may be put off by this request," said the letter. "But my partner and I, both in our late forties, have been together for eleven years. We are both HIV-negative. We are sincere and committed to each other. We are looking for a girl from China, Korea, or Malaysia. Most overseas adoption agencies are wary of gay male couples, and we may have to accept a severely damaged child. But we are willing to do this. We are frankly appalled by the behavior of many gay men, who mock straight people without really contemplating the effort it takes to raise a child. We believe we have the sufficient humility and dedication to do this. Please help."

  I should, Charlie thought, I really should. But I'm not going to. He inspected the next letter, which was from a sixty-two-year-old woman who'd read Charlie's "beautiful notice" and wanted to nominate her daughter Sophia, who had been disappointed in love many times but would make a wonderful mother. The letter digressed at length about the difficulties that young women faced in finding eligible young men. The so-called sexual revolution in the sixties and women's liberation, the mother claimed, had changed male behavior for the worse. She herself had two sons whose behavior she'd watched for fifteen years. After the advent of the birth-control pill and abortion on demand, young unmarried men could have sex with many women, even accidentally impregnating them, and not be held maritally accountable. Biology and societally acceptable behavior had been uncoupled for the first time in the history of human civilization. Women, moreover, could have all the sex they wanted and, freed from pregnancy, compete for men's jobs. Although women had benefited from these changes, the mother wrote, they also didn't want to acknowledge that one of the results of the Pill was a surfeit of sexually well-traveled but somewhat discouraged women in their thirties looking for the few still-available men who had decent jobs. "I've seen this in my daughters and nieces," wrote the woman. "The basic structures have broken down. I don't know what to do about it. Perhaps nothing. But a letter like yours is remarkable. Some young woman will be very lucky, luckier than she will ever know. I showed your notice to my daughter and asked if she would mind if I wrote to you. She is shy about it. I don't think she minds, because she was intrigued. I could tell by the way she read it. I suppose I'm just an old mother worried about her daughter. But I want the best for her, and the young men who are left over after age thirty-five are really the bottom of the barrel. Losers, one way or another. All the good men get snapped up quickly. That's a harsh truth, but there it is. An arrangement like yours would set my daughter free. And give me a granddaughter!"

  no. Mother too involved.

  The next letter was from a Vietnamese-American woman who deduced from the reference in the ad to Charlie's age and military duty that he might have been involved in the Vietnam War. "We share a deep spiritual bond," her letter began, "and only by our union can we begin to create the symbolic healing between cultures." A pretty idea, he thought, but she has no idea how many of her countrymen I blew up. He kept reading. The next letter was from a talk-show producer who said she'd seen Charlie's advertisement and would like to invite him onto the show, along with several women who'd answered his ad. "I think I can get you the whole show," she wrote, "because this is the next big thing!" The show's home viewers, most of whom were married women between the ages of thirty and fifty-five, would find the situation fascinating, and she "absolutely promised" that—who cared? Into the no. The next letter read:

  Your letter is the latest proof that the patriarchal structures of our society remain undamaged by thirty years of the women's movement. What are women to you? You are seeking a woman to hire for breeding purposes? Do you really think women will wish to answer your advertisement? thinking women will see through your pathetic attempt to gain dominion over yet another woman's body. That is what your advertisement is about. Power over a woman, power over her womb. You, the man, pay a little money and squirt yourself for a minute and thereby gain control over a woman. How easy that must seem to you. Have you no awareness? Men like you represent a form of retrograde evil. Little do you know, however, that your advertisement is already of great interest to my students in the Womyn's Studies Department. We plan to . . .

  Was he as bad as the lady said? Probably. Worse, even. Because of the betrayal of Ellie and Julia. He looked at the next letter, from a performance artist who asserted that she wanted to document their union, including videotaping the fertilization in the doctor's office. She'd need to follow Charlie around in his life, to his place of work, to his home, in order to know his character so that she might render it in her performance. She imagined that it would be necessary for her to take photos of him, from head to toe, including nude shots, so that she could "ingest his physicality." I don't look so hot nude, he thought, I got chewed up pretty good. Took Ellie a few years to get used to seeing me without my underwear. The baby, the performance artist went on, would be understood as the fruit of this artistic endeavor, and she imagined she would reenact the act of labor in her one-woman shows, holding the baby aloft while gigantic naked photos of Charlie flashed on a screen overhead, as well as photos of the artist's own life and childhood, while "an expository voice-over" interwove the actual life utterations of the artist on the stage with a "thematic call and response, a rhythmic dialogue of levels of consciousness." The cry of the baby (taped) would be the final, rising, overwhelming sound, "the primal voice of human life itself."

  Nuts, Charlie thought, they're all nuts. Estrogen addicts. He wanted someone who actually wished to take care of a baby.

  The conference room door opened. A s
hort man with a red bow tie walked in. He stuck out his hand. "I'm Towers."

  Charlie shook his hand, then nodded at the stack of letters. "This is—"

  "Absolutely," Towers barked. "You don't need to say it. I understand the situation. You're going to make a short list and then I'll check them out. Turn the cookie jar upside down and see what we get."

  "I'll probably pick out two or three."

  "Absolutely. We'll check every record, we'll ask around, we'll measure their shadows. This is what I do, Charlie, and I always find the worm."

  "Does everyone have a worm?"

  "No." Towers smiled. "I don't."

  He shook Charlie's hand again, handed him a business card, and left.

  The next letter came from a graduate student in the NYU economics department who wanted to have a child but who also planned to finish her Ph.D. The woman expected that upon the completion of her degree she would be hired as an assistant professor at one of the country's major universities. She wanted Charlie to know that, although she was quite healthy, she had suffered a disfiguring auto accident as a child, and her face was badly scarred. "In the interests of honesty, I've included a photograph," she'd written. Indeed. It showed a woman with eyes downturned beneath a brutally bright light that revealed a thick and irregular scar that began at her temple and spiderwebbed down one cheek, across her forehead, across one eyelid, taking a tip of the nose, and crimping the lower lip. It's just a scar, Charlie thought. He had a few himself. He liked her honesty. She was his best candidate so far. He put a check at the top of the woman's letter and slipped it into the maybe file.

  The next letter read:

  Dear Sir,

  Please find, attached, my résumé and photograph. (I confess, the pictures are a bit out of date; I don't model swim suits anymore and am about six pounds heavier now than when the photos were taken.) Although your advertisement specifies that no sexual contact is necessary to achieve pregnancy, I would like to suggest that, if you choose me (and if I choose you), we make this baby the old-fashioned way. Why? Simply because it's nicer. At age thirty-three, I have enjoyed perhaps eighty or ninety lovers. Although you may not believe me, all that experience has not in any way deadened my appetite for sex; on the contrary, I think I want sex and know more about it than does the average woman. I know more about pleasure, too—pleasure taken, and pleasure given. Since you invite me to be the recipient of your financial largess, I would like to invite you to be the recipient of my sexual largess. As a woman I am capable of an unusual amount of pleasure, and I have found that it is the most intelligent man who enjoys giving pleasure to a woman as much as receiving her attentions.

  At the risk of offending your sensibilities, let me be rather frank here: I am talking about what occurs under rare but possible circumstances: The woman (in this case, me—and I don't have much modesty left, but for the rest of this letter I'll use the third-person singular) is sufficiently comfortable with herself (with her body, with the room, with her mood) and with the man (with his face and eyes and body, his voice, his smell, his consideration of her) that she is willing to abandon herself to the open-armed, open-legged, open-mouthed state of nearly continuous orgasm. She is one of those unusual women who are able to achieve orgasm not just by clitoral stimulation but also by vaginal stimulation alone, given sufficient rigidity of the man, his control of his ejaculation, and her wetness. For his part he is able to maintain genuine hardness for up to two hours while thrusting quickly and deeply, slowly and gently, maintaining a rhythm sufficient to provoke her orgasms but not to incur his own. He also uses his fingers and his tongue in ways that she likes. Under these circumstances, which are sometimes aided by smoking a cigarette or drinking small amounts of alcohol, the woman is capable of experiencing fifteen or twenty or even more orgasms. (My record is thirty-one.) Although the size of the man's penis probably needs to be at least average, far more important—and this point is always missed by people who obsess about these things—is the size of the sex act itself. There's a big difference between ten minutes of pleasure and two hours of pleasure. In the latter case, exhaustion and satiation are reached and then overrun; a kind of hallucinatory rapture is achieved after thirty or forty minutes, a state sustained for minute upon minute onward. The man must be sufficiently healthy that he can copulate vigorously during most of the two hours. (The woman interested in maximizing her lover's stamina will suggest that he drink a large glass of orange juice beforehand. Most optimal, in fact, is drinking 16-24 ounces of a staggered glucose exercise drink one half hour ahead of time.) Properly calorically prepared, like a marathon runner, he will be able to perform thousands of thrusts over the course of the act, creating in the willing and intimately aroused woman a stimulation that cascades upon itself, becomes orgasmically undeniable. The man must know his own capacity and have abstained from sex beforehand for a period of time long enough that he achieves an erection readily; however, he must not have abstained so long prior that ejaculation simply bursts from him uncontrollably.

  Essential, too, is the woman's awareness of the man's passion; he must be similarly delirious with pleasure yet supremely conscious of the woman's feelings. It is not that he is subordinating his own pleasure to hers; rather, that her pleasure is his pleasure.

  What happens if all these conditions are right? The woman begins having orgasms without any effort at all; her body convulses ecstatically beneath, in front of, or above the man's—perhaps she is licking his neck or one of his fingers, perhaps he is sucking her breasts, and even as she completes one orgasm she is aware of the possibility of another, for the man has not stopped his motion, and the woman, though having just achieved orgasm, is desirous of another, of more; aroused by her own capacity and, with no anxiety about her lover's generosity or ability to continue, she begins to feel the same urgency as a moment before, the same flooding ripple of pleasure. In this state, she will continue to have orgasms every few minutes, the muscles of her torso clenching in contraction. She may wish to pause and catch her breath before starting again, or she may have one orgasm begin as soon as another ends, even rapid clusters of them that render her almost psychically destabilized. She is silent, she is loud, she is fierce, she is sweet, she is peaceful, she is frenzied; she cycles through these moods, then back again in no particular order. Strange things pass through her head: music and faces and sounds, she forgets herself, she remembers everything, she sees death and babies and her father; she smells a forest or an ocean. Her lover changes from one man to other men to any man to the devil to a god to an animal to a heavy, hot-breathing ghost. She loves him, now and forever, yet hates him with finality. She fears his superior strength yet knows she is stronger. She moves from waking to dream to nightmare and back. He is her master, he subjugates her, he wrecks her vagina with his great pounding force. He is her plaything that she may suck in and push out, his penis merely her toy that she controls with her wish. She is tight inside but aware of great spaces. The room is dark but full of light. She desires that he destroy her, but himself as well. Finally they have had more than they imagined, they are not just sore and exhausted but losing themselves, their consciousness. She will cry out for his climax, urge him, even wiggle her hips and squeeze him. She prefers that he exhibit his pleasure—in shivering breathlessness, perhaps, or with a straining, roaring spasm that leaves him collapsed in her arms or she in his, the two of them washed up on the shore of complete release, in emptiness that is full.

  Such an all-obliterating copulation, though enormously pleasurable, later becomes problematic for her, because it is unforgettable. The woman knows herself well enough to know that she is not like this with most men, few in fact. There's no good explanation for it; this man is neither this nor that, exactly; rather, it's quite complicated. This is disturbing to her and she resists knowing it, because she knows that when she leaves him or he leaves her, she may encounter disappointment in subsequent encounters with new sexual partners. She knows how she has hidden anger and disappointment
in the past, and she suspects she may have to hide these feelings in the future.

  The woman knows something else, too: Her capacity for such immense sexual pleasure is so threatening to most men and to some women that she needs to be careful talking about it; men will anxiously resent the woman's awareness (as well as experience) of such pleasure, while, paradoxically, some women will deny that such pleasure is possible, calling it fantasy or erotica, since it requires a kind of subjugation to the man's force that is emotionally too risky or politically incorrect; other women will resent the woman if she provides an intimate description of her pleasure because they, the other women, suspect they are incapable of such enjoyment, or that, if they are capable of it, the men available to them can't provide it. She is, therefore, a kind of outlaw. The woman knows, too, that in reality only a small percentage of men and women are capable of such pleasure; when she considers that such capacity will not correlate with other areas of compatibility (interests, intelligence, education, age, etc.) as well as the difficulty that men and women generally have in achieving even reasonable sexual pleasure, she sees how truly rare is such an interaction.