by Howie Gordon
The set was a private home in Marin, I met Danielle. She was pretty. She was also young and wild and fairly discombobulated by the time I showed up on the set. We had some plot dialogue to contend with before we had to put up or shut up with the sex. I figured that all worked in my favor. It gave me more time to recover from my earlier orgasm. Director Eli went over my part with me.
I was to play a Mexican gardener whom real estate agent Danielle mistook for a wealthy patrician interested in buying the property. She seduces me thinking it will lead to a sale. It was silly porn by the numbers, par for the course.
This was Danielle’s second attempt at the same scene. She was eager to get it done. I wrote in my diary:
I got aroused, but it was weak. I lost my hard-on a few times and mercifully, got it back each time. Much sweat later, I spilled some seed on Danielle’s tummy and thought immediately about getting paid. I knew I had dared to skate on thin ice and that I was lucky to have not fallen in.
Chapter Forty-Three
Around the fifth month of that first pregnancy, Carly and I hit a really big snag. I was in the midst of another dry spell of no movie work and our sex life at home had become a dismal mess.
I asked myself, “Do you think I should be afraid to write embarrassing things about myself?” And I answered, “I don’t see how you could write anything else.”
Confessions of a Pregnant Husband
After examining my wife, the good doctor had calmly assured us that our sex life could continue until very late in the pregnancy. “Unless, of course,” he said, “you should encounter some discomfort.”
Well, I knew he was going to say that. I’d already read it in all the books. I was just stalling for time.
Carly looked over at me apprehensively. I could not meet her gaze. Under a smiling mask, I was a man in a panic trying stubbornly to bluster my way through the confusion.
Well, yes, Doctor, I should have said. We have encountered some difficulty in our sex life. We don’t have one anymore and I think that I’m about to explode!
But I didn’t tell the doctor that and my wife joined me in the conspiracy of silence. Unwilling to play our little psychodrama in public, we made the good show of being the happy couple as we gathered up our things and left his office. He was actually the wrong kind of doctor anyway. Looking back, we didn’t need the obstetrician-gynecologist for Carly, we needed a shrink for me.
It was the fifth month of our first pregnancy. The problem was that I had already lost my lover to my child and the kid wasn’t even born yet. Welcome to parenthood. It’s not what you would imagine either. I was the one insisting that we not have any sex!!
Can you believe that? I sure couldn’t. It made no sense to me at all. I was so horny I was ready to burst. Oh, we still slept together in the same bed, but we didn’t touch anymore. When her foot would drift over and touch mine under the covers, I’d pull mine away. Do you know what my mother would have called that? “Cutting off your nose to spite your face!” Hi, mom!
How did I allow myself to get twisted into such a pretzel of conflicting emotions? I wasn’t sure, but I knew it had gotten to the point where I couldn’t find my own ass without a seeing-eye dog.
Sex and pregnancy, there was the joker that just about destroyed our marriage. We humans have been making babies since the days of Adam and Eve. You’d think that we’d pretty much have it all figured out by now, right?
It just seems to be our human nature, that each generation must rediscover the wheel for itself. Each couple having that first baby seems doomed to act as if they were the first people on earth to ever give birth. Carly and I were no different.
In the beginning, it was all strawberries and cream. After twelve long months of trying to conceive, we finally got the word that the magic had taken place. We were pregnant and we glowed.
It was one of those events in life that felt like we had at last reached the finish line. For about ten seconds. Holy shit, we were pregnant! Everything was just getting started.
There were wonderful and excited phone calls to parents, relatives and friends. The International-Hand-Me-Down-Baby-Network soon began leaving gifts at our front door. We had to sign up for doctors and classes. The baby’s nursery had to be planned. Construction and painting had to happen. We felt like it all had to be done by tomorrow because the baby was on the way. It was a time bursting with creative energy.
This initial euphoria eventually yielded to a more practical approach as we settled down to pace ourselves for the nine-month marathon into parenthood. We wanted the baby. We were going to have the baby. We felt blessed.
Prior to any thoughts of children, Carly and I were basically on a once-a-day sexual program. The old saw went, “A day without wine is like a day without sunshine.” Well, we pretty much felt that way about sex. It was the highlight of our day. Orgasm was very important to both of us. Variety was encouraged to be part of this program and we both shared responsibility for orchestrating our fantasies into mating rituals.
As we continued into the pregnancy, however, our sex life began to change. In deference to her changing body, we seemed to have the sex more and more to accommodate her needs. I had the task of remaining passionate without offending her rapidly changing body.
At first, I thought nothing of it. Like most pregnant spouses, I suppose, I had never loved my wife more.
As the weeks passed, though, sex became more and more difficult for us. Instead of increasing her arousal, my touch frequently made her flinch. It was not a pleasant experience for either one of us to encounter. I became hesitant about touching her. Her breasts became so sensitive that a stiff breeze seemed able to make her jump. Her body’s need for orgasm totally disappeared. All of our old, well-established sexual rhythms and patterns became useless.
To my shock, guilt and disappointment, the more my wife’s belly grew, the less interested I became in having sex with her.
A good therapist might have said, “Because he feels responsible, for having made her pregnant, he is even more sensitive and vulnerable to her feelings of resentment. Whatever goes wrong in the pregnancy will seem to him as though it is his fault.”
I would have said, “Bingo!” to that, pal, but we weren’t seeing a therapist. And as far as sex was concerned, I had lots of desire, but less and less of it was for my own wife! Oops! Yes, I was having fantasies about other women! Almost all of them! I was mentally undressing them in elevators, at the supermarket, on the street.
What is it with these elevators? That’s a recurring theme in here.
Don’t bother me now, I’m on a roll. I was daydreaming about the neighbor’s breasts. I was imagining Carly’s friends without their clothes on. I wasn’t acting on any of these impulses, mind you, but my dick was definitely looking everywhere. The guilt was enormous. It seems my timing couldn’t have been worse.
As our sexual encounters at home became more and more like another chore that I had to perform, I simply started to withdraw from her. Hell, I had just finished twelve months of incredibly passionless, medically-directed-technical-like sex in order to get pregnant. Now that we were finally there, I just didn’t want any more exercises in obligatory sex. The thrill was gone and I was having trouble faking it.
Naturally, being a man, I kept all of this to myself while the frequency of our sexual intercourse dwindled.
All of his loneliness, the good therapist would have observed, and his resentment about being displaced can get turned in on himself. Although he may wish he could be angry or show some outward sign of resenting the intrusion of the pregnancy, he must remind himself of his own responsibility for it.
No one seems to care what a father-to-be is going through. His wife or mate has her hands full with her own adjustment. It seems that her parents and even his parents are more concerned about her. All their friends ask her how she’s feeling.
It’s a shame I didn’t have this therapist as my tennis partner at the time. He could have saved us a world of tro
uble. Alas, all I had was me and I had painted myself into a corner. I seemed determined just to sit there and wait until the paint dried. I wrote in my diary:
Frankly, chums, I’m ready for a long boat ride to the Ukraine.
My salad has been tossed so much lately that it’s starting to look like guacamole.
On the darker side of pregnancy, it is awfully hard to be Sir Galadad, the perfect husband, on a 24-hour call. It’s been five months and I have ignored every call of the wild that has come my way in the name of decency, true love and the nuclear family, but I’ll tell ya what, kids, the gas shortage has come home. I feel like I have three kind words left for my wife and they are, “See you later!”
I’m ready to go to Europe and come back after the baby is born.
This doesn’t seem too real to me as a possibility, but not much does these days except service — husbandly service. The biggest surprise of the pregnancy so far is how turned off I’ve become to having sex with my pregnant wife.”
It was the pattern in our relationship that if one of the partners hit some kind of sullen bump and withdrew their affections, they were allowed about three days to work it out by themselves. It was usually me and at the end of that time Carly would do the confrontation and ask the appropriate questions.
We would try to act like the best friends that we were and create a back room where we could both go to find out what they were doing out there with their lives. It was a concept that had worked well for us in the past, but this time around, the results were not so great.
I met her first attempts at understanding me with stiff-armed rejection. When she continued pressing, I finally confessed that I had absolutely no desire left to have any more sex with a pregnant woman. I said that it just turned me off completely.
Did you ever hear words coming out of your own mouth that you couldn’t quite believe yourself? That’s where I was stuck. I was like ice fishing on a frozen lake without any hole. I was arguing passionately like I knew what I was talking about and yet, I couldn’t quite find the way to get at the real stuff underneath the surface, but I didn’t let that stop me. I blustered on.
There’s an old phrase in psychology that “in stress, we regress.” Well, believe it. I found myself dusting off my old sixties and seventies anti-monogamy speeches. As you might well imagine, Carly turned to utter mush. She was not overly thrilled to hear that I was actually entertaining the idea of having other lovers at this particular point in our relationship.
In an elevator?
Oh, shut up! I felt like a total slime, but I really didn’t know what else to do anymore. I was exploding internally. Desperation was talking. I just wanted to keep her at arm’s length. I kept my own comfort in my journal:
This pregnancy has my responsible-mate button turned up to 99.9 and Carly has gotten very used to it. It’s only five months down and four to go. Even then, the old ways are over. There’s no return to normal. We’re going to be having a baby living around here.
It makes me dizzy. I’m just doing a lot of shaking my head and hanging on.
I could use a weekend of oblivion with a couple of Las Vegas hookers and what I get are more natural childbirth classes and books about newborns. My life is one giant should. I’ve been doing pretty well on all the tests, but, seriously folks, I’m ready for a break.
The problem is that Carly doesn’t get any breaks. She can’t put her belly on the shelf and say, “I’ll be back Monday,” so, I’m shamed into sticking with it too.
I don’t know what we’re going to do about sex. Putting myself into a pregnant woman is one of the most redundant experiences I have ever encountered. I have no taste for it. They say that love can move mountains. Well, it better because unless our sex trip gets a little bit more harmonious, I hate to even think about it.
Obviously distressed, Carly could not long endure my stubborn requests to be left alone sulking, skulking, and spewing poison. When she decided that she wanted to probe my insides, there weren’t too many forces in the known universe that I could use to stop her.
One day in the midst of all this, she just announced that she plainly refused to accept my right of privacy in this situation any longer. I responded by putting an ashtray through a double-hung window to keep her at bay. Whoa, Nellie, this was definitely a no-no and “one toke over the line, sweet Jesus.” It sure gave me a lot to think about as I cleaned up all the broken glass and had to replace the window. I was fucked up.
There was help out there, I guess. I don’t know why I didn’t seek it. John Wayne lives, I suppose! A man was supposed to be able to take care of his family. A man was supposed to be able to take care of himself. It seemed like I was failing on both counts and just trying hard to ride out the storm.
The ashtray through the window alarmed us both a lot. It revealed the depth of my chaos and the passion of my frustration. My wife’s resolution after much argument, pain and grief was to accept my proposal that we weren’t going to have sex again until after the baby was born. This was supposed to be a victory for me. It wasn’t. It was dumb. Even I knew that. It made no sense. A murky distance developed between us. It was like back in the old days when we were courting and still had secrets from each other. Our whole relationship seemed to be on trial.
Despite her tears and over her protests, I arranged a time-out for myself to go have a lost weekend with a hooker-type I knew. I thought of it as just calling the plumber to get my pipes cleaned. Carly didn’t think of it that way at all. She was crushed. In the past, she would have just gone out, picked up some other guy, and matched me tit for tat. With her swollen belly, it wasn’t like she could play the game the way we used to.
When the time came for my date with “the plumber,” I ended up canceling. I called my own bluff and came up empty. I got in deep enough to see that I didn’t really want to have sex with another woman, I was in enough trouble already with the woman I had. We passed that weekend in some kind of suspended animation, barely talking to each other.
Then one day, not long after, for reasons known only to God and a few of her cousins, the clouds just parted and the sun finally came out. I woke up early one morning to go off and do some job interview and just stared at Carly while she slept. I missed our love.
Her breathing was fitful and uneasy. I stroked her hair and she calmed. I tried to imagine what the baby looked like napping in her belly. A warm flood of emotions washed over me. Something that had been badly out-of-whack was falling back into place. I wanted to hug and kiss her all over. It had been far too long. I had loved this woman above all others so much so that I had made her my wife. Now, she was carrying my child. I popped. The tears came, but I had to go. I had to leave. She slept through the whole thing. I left her this note:
“Hey, this was the part where he totally panicked. I love you. I’ll see you later.”
When I got home that night, I swallowed a lot of pride and confessed all my sins. I was tired of all the constant worrying about the pregnancy. I was incredibly scared about us having a baby. And most importantly, I was frustrated and angry at the way the pregnancy had dealt her such a controlling hand in everything, especially in all of our acts of intimacy.
A powerless man does not many boners make. You can quote me. I explained that I couldn’t quite seem to put together my lust with her pregnant body.
The road back began with love. I loved my wife and I loved that we were going to have a baby. I just got a bit lost in the jet stream of such a miraculous comet.
When it came down to the nitty-gritty of our having sex, we had to throw out what almost ten years of being lovers had taught us. It no longer applied. Okay, we had to go back to square one and learn how to touch each other all over again. After all, it was still “us.” We could do this. Yes, there were grateful hugs and tears.
That night, Carly put on some trashy negligee and we laughed and squealed like we hadn’t done in months. Love had us laughing again. We were ready to go on.
Most people
think of the nine months of the pregnancy as the time it takes for the baby to develop, but the lovers need that time too, to begin becoming parents. There is such a wondrous bubble of intimacy that surrounds the creation of a new life between a man and a woman. Old ways are exploded and new ways must be found.
We grew into something way beyond the basic lust that it had taken for us to start our baby’s life. Our full energies seemed to get soaked up into making each other feel safe and ready to become parents. It was clear that the nine months provided a growing time for everybody. One marvels at the Creator’s plan and rightfully so. We had jumped our five-month’s hurdle. We were ready to keep right on going.
When a man learns his wife is pregnant, the good therapist says, “he is likely to feel a flood of differing emotions. One of his first reactions may be a feeling of exclusion. He may even be fearful of losing a kind of closeness with her.”
Feelings of being excluded are real ones for a young father-to-be. Not only is his wife likely to withdraw some of her energy and attention from him but she also becomes the center of everyone else’s attention. Everyone is concerned with her, her health, and her feelings. They all want to take care of her. He is almost alone. No one asks him how he’s doing in this period of adjustment. It can fuck him up!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, now, you tell me. Well, better late than never.
Chapter Forty-Four
At seven months pregnant, Irresistible came along. It was a big budget picture being produced by Sandra Wynter and written and directed by her husband, Eddie Brown, and it was right on time.
“Summer” and Eddie were probably the best husband and wife team in the business. I had auditioned for Summer before. At Annette Haven’s apartment in San Francisco, she had read me for 1001 Erotic Nights. Summer offered me a part in that, but she didn’t want to pay my rate. I agonized over it. I wanted to work for them. But if I didn’t hold out for my rate, no one besides Spinelli was ever gonna pay it. She wouldn’t budge. In the end, I bought her some red roses, gave her kiss, and said, “No, thanks.”