by Meg Wolitzer
Then she’d gasped and loosened her grip on his poor big hand, saving it from being crushed, and that was that. Michael’s penis remained huge and waiting, almost ticking, it seemed to him, but he didn’t mind, he was hardly in danger of coming. She touched it lightly, idly, while they shared a warmish glass of sink water and sang another couple bars of “Mockingbird,” and then after a few minutes he put the glass down on the night table and they resumed their lovemaking.
Then, in that new phase, there was sudden tension: a question between them that would have to be answered one way or another. He moved on top of her and went inside her quickly, and the sensation of being enclosed and held in place was as pleasing as ever, but despite the fact that he said “Oh I love you, Thea,” and she said “I love you too,” right back, with feeling, it seemed as though she could have been anybody and he could have been anybody. For some reason, he pictured them as two indifferent people in a foreign hotel room. She might have been an illiterate prostitute and he a businessman—that was about how much love really passed between them at that moment in time.
His voice was thick with concentration, aiming for the gratification that was out of reach in the middle distance, the target on which his brain and all the separate muscles in his long arms and legs were focused. His penis wasn’t going to collapse, but nothing would happen, he would never ejaculate, never ever. It was just no good, he couldn’t go anywhere with this. “Nnng” became a battle cry of frustration and then panic, preverbal, encompassing.
Then, finally, he decided it was time to quit. He wasn’t enjoying this now, and she probably wasn’t either. It was like watching a wonderful movie and suddenly realizing that you’re bored, that it’s not wonderful anymore, that you’re restless and want out. Welcome to the city of sexual unhappiness, he thought, here is your apartment. He stopped moving and just looked at Thea, shaking his head.
“You’re stopping?” Thea said.
“Is that all right with you?”
“Sure.”
“It’s just not going anywhere again,” he said. Michael held the base of his penis between two fingers and carefully started to slip himself out. He was aware of a little clicking and popping sound as he left her body, as though there were oiled metal parts stored in there, bolts and braces and wing nuts.
“I thought you were actually pretty close,” Thea said.
“No, I wasn’t. Sorry.”
“Oh. I can never tell if you’re close or not. Men. It’s a great mystery until the moment it happens.”
“No mystery here,” Michael said, all the while thinking that the real mystery was women, who could fake their way through sex and no one would ever know the difference. He wondered for a moment if she had ever faked an orgasm with him, and became suspicious that she had. “I just can’t do it anymore,” he told her. “I’m sorry.”
They lay looking into each other’s eyes, and she appeared untroubled by his failure. “You don’t have to say you’re sorry,” she said. “I’m not upset or anything.”
“Well, I am. Just call me L. Thomas Slocum.” He suddenly envisioned his sister’s freckly adolescent face, glowing brightly before him, and he felt slightly heartened.
“What?” said Thea.
“Nothing,” said Michael. “Not important.”
This particular achievement, in recent weeks, had become so elusive that it had gathered steam in its brief absence, becoming in Michael’s mind the prize of prizes, the thing that surpassed all memories of previous orgasms, those countless, brainless events that had occurred in this bedroom and others before it: in the cluttered backseat of a used silver Hyundai he’d once owned; on a soft, rotting dock in Maine; on a terrace during his junior year in Rome; in a girlfriend’s father’s streamlined RV in a Michigan parking lot; solo in a silky damp sleeping bag under the stars in his childhood backyard, while staring up at the impressionistic freckling of Orion and Cygnus and both dippers but seeing none of it, so lost was he in the profound and trembling moment. Those orgasms were careless, easy; if only he’d known then what he knew now: that pleasure was not endlessly available to anyone, that joy would be snipped away in small confetti-pieces as you got older, that just because you could dream up a female image that inflated your entire body with want, this did not mean it would always bring you satisfaction.
The days of the assumed orgasm were over. Tonight he’d foolishly gotten into bed with Thea Herlihy, the woman he loved, as though it might finally happen the way it was supposed to. Even though, for the past month, sex with her had become what it had been tonight: impossible, or at least impossible to finish. But it had seemed symbolically important to try once again, for in the morning he’d go off to the office as usual, and then at the end of the day he’d take a car to the airport, where he would fly off on his trip, and it would be nearly a week before he and Thea would sleep in a bed together again.
Michael was going to Naples, Florida, specifically to the gated community of Laughing Woods, an Indianesque name for a surprisingly nonugly series of condominiums where his father, Paul Mellow, lived with his third wife Elisa, or was it Elise? Michael still wasn’t sure. He was going because his mother had asked him to, and Michael almost always deferred to her, this sixty-seven-year-old dynamo who made batches of translucent red- and green-pepper jelly each Christmas and taught a course in human sexuality to freshmen at Skidmore College, during which she famously put a condom on a banana—although obviously these freshmen could have clothed that banana in latex with their eyes closed. Despite the embarrassment factor, which of course had always been there when it came to his parents, Roz Mellow was his mother, and though she could be manipulative and emotional, she’d been good to him, and he had to try to help her.
Almost two years from now, Pleasuring: One Couple’s Journey to Fulfillment would celebrate its thirtieth anniversary, and the original publisher had proposed reissuing the book. There had apparently been a fierce in-house debate about it before the Mellows had been contacted. Surely, said one of the older editors, the book was a fossil, a scarab that revealed traces of a lost civilization known for its moments of intimacy, of privacy, long before it had all been lost forever to the roaring eruption of electronic porn, with its nonstop availability, sites with names like pussylicker.com and fuckbuddies.com and orgasm.org, all of which someone, somewhere, proudly took credit for designing, and its wet pink moronic graphics that drew the eye to the glow of the screen night after night after wasted night.
“That’s exactly why we need the reissue,” countered a young and surprisingly ardent Chinese-American editor named Jennifer Wing, whose rise in the company had been swift. “We need,” she said at a Monday morning editorial meeting, “to remind people of the lost world of love.”
What was considered graphic back in 1975, what was considered shocking—those simple images of a man and a woman in a white bed—were rendered almost moving over time because of their unmistakable intimacy. After all, it was the same man and woman in all the pictures; there they were, those two, shaggy and sweet, imperfect but dedicated, always fired up when they were together, always ready for something new, always returning to the same white bed.
“So what if the book is a fossil?” said Jennifer Wing to the other sleepy and still wet-haired Monday morning editors. (She herself had been up since dawn rehearsing her talking points with her boyfriend.) That could be an added bonus commercially; it could make readers yearn for what no longer exists. In order to keep the book relevant, though, to keep it “cutting edge,” a phrase that a suspiciously celibate senior editor named Marge Fenner used without a whiff of embarrassment, everyone agreed that there would need to be a new introduction and several chapters that would take into account, among other things, the imperative for safe sex and, more obliquely, the idea of “good lovemaking in an age of terrorism.” (What did that mean? Michael had wondered: Wrapping your penis in duct tape?) Such caution would have been unimaginable, unnecessary, a futuristic nightmare dreamed up by some sc
i-fi nutball back in the creaky year of 1975.
There would have to be a new set of illustrations for the reissue, too, Jennifer Wing had said when she first telephoned Roz Mellow. Those old drawings were almost ridiculous now, particularly the long, tangled head of hair that the artist had given to Paul and the crushed white vinyl go-go boots that Roz had worn in one drawing that accompanied a brief text about fetishism. There would be new models posing, an up-to-date young man and woman with strategic piercings and a slightly mussed and sardonic look about them—a sexy, skinny couple who were somewhat appealingly disaffected, but who hadn’t made the trajectory from love and lust into coldness and contempt for each other, the way the Mellows had over time.
It was this contempt that had made Paul Mellow say no. No, he said, he didn’t want the book back in print again; no, he wanted nothing to do with his ex-wife Roz, nothing to do with that time in their lives. He had once loved her to distraction, had thrown his entire self into loving her, as all the children well knew, and look where it had gotten him. Besides, he said, he didn’t need the money that the reissue would bring; his wife Elise/Elisa had her own inheritance, which took care of the upkeep of the Laughing Woods condominium and allowed Paul to do little more than contribute essays to journals and psychology magazines. Paul was also well aware of how much Roz wanted the book to appear again, how much she missed the talk shows and the sexuality panels with their academic imprimaturs and the articles in weekly newsmagazines that would show photos of the young and burnished and vigorous Mellows, and then show them old, him with his paunch and the beard that used to be black and devilish but was lately gray and faintly, disturbingly Amish, and this made him say no with even more conviction.
“Go see your father,” Roz had said on the phone to her son Michael in desperation a few weeks earlier. “Show him the new plans for the book that Jennifer Wing sent me, the new introduction, the layout. It looks so jazzy. Maybe he’ll change his mind. He won’t listen to me, God knows.”
“He’s in Florida. I can’t just pick up and go,” said Michael. He started to ask her why she hadn’t tried to get one of his siblings to go instead, but then he stopped himself, for he knew the answer. Holly was barely in the family anymore, but instead was a strange hologram living with her creepy doctor husband and their child Buddy out in L.A. This was her decision, made over time, and no one in the family entirely understood it. She needed to be separate from them, and perhaps then she could feel okay. So Holly wasn’t an option. And Dashiell wasn’t very nice to their mother, though he spoke to her often enough. Which left Claudia, who would definitely have gone to Florida if asked, though she wouldn’t have had any effect on their father whatsoever, for she wasn’t a very persuasive person. Claudia was kind and very obedient, practically subservient, which never really made sense to Michael, for she was idiosyncratic, too, and surely she had some backbone, didn’t she? No, in relation to their parents, she didn’t. She was the only one of the children who still lived alone and who hadn’t settled into a full-fledged career, and because of this she was the most invested in their parents’ lives.
Silence peppered and stuttered Michael’s phone conversation with his mother. She exhaled loud and long, and at one point she choked up for a moment or two. By the time the call ended, he had told her okay, okay, I’ll go there, I’ll talk to Dad for you, don’t worry about it, Mom. His mother must have known that he would cave. It wasn’t only that she was so insistent—she was certainly that, and always had been. But it was also that most grown men had a soft spot when it came to their fathers. Most grown men, it seemed to Michael, turned into patsies, big babies in bonnets with stubble, pushovers, whenever their fathers’ names were invoked. Roz Mellow knew this, and though she didn’t know some of the specifics about her older son’s adult, private life—his depression and his frustrating sex problems in particular—she knew he would go.
Frustration was a fairly recent sensation for Michael Mellow; he was used to getting things, and in the urban life he lived, he rarely had to wait for what he wanted. Oh, there were waits for public transportation each morning and evening and for your coffee to be announced like royalty as it arrived on the pickup counter at Starbucks, but these were merely components of the common dance, the trivial crush and stretch of the city life you’d chosen. If you didn’t like this life, you could always live like the rest of the country, taking your pick among big landlocked states where there was no waiting of any kind.
But waiting endlessly to have an orgasm was mortifying and intolerable. Somewhere along the way, the fast build of excitement Michael had taken for granted during sex was replaced by a neutral state, then an unexciting one, and then it felt as though he were sawing away at a piece of wood that just would not fall off. Finally he would give up, go into the bathroom, and stare at his vaguely anaphylactic penis with the baleful, disapproving look of a parent with a balky child.
“Look, it doesn’t matter,” Thea reminded him now in bed.
“Yes it does.”
“You can beat yourself up about it if you want, but to me it really, really doesn’t matter,” she went on, and then she sat up and switched on the gooseneck lamp on her night table, picking up the Xeroxed script of the play she was rehearsing, which was based on Freud’s famous patient Dora, herself a chronic depressive who was a collection of complaints, a sexual disaster. “I don’t see why you get so worked up over this,” Thea went on.
“Because it’s become a chronic thing.”
“Why don’t you get them to switch your drug? They come out with new ones every day, don’t they?”
“I already got switched once,” Michael said. “It’s a real pain to go off it and start something else. It takes weeks to build up in your blood. And anyway, this one is working.”
It seemed to him that his inability to have an orgasm anymore gave Thea some mean little burst of pleasure. But this interpretation made no sense, for Thea loved him. Still, she seemed to grow inordinately relaxed in the presence of his dissatisfaction. Her voice took on a certain lilt. She said things like, “Oh well,” and “It doesn’t matter, Michael,” and he believed it; for her, it didn’t matter at all.
Thea Herlihy was one of those women who had solutions to a variety of problems, and when occasionally she had no solution, she became at first philosophical and then cheerfully indifferent. She herself could have an orgasm in about three minutes, if you provided her with a vigorous little clitoral rubdown and a few slightly sinister suggestions of things you might do to her. Thea had an even temper, which was accompanied by a kind of androgyny, which made her seem more complex than perhaps she was. She looked French, and brave but wounded, though really she was from Marblehead, Massachusetts (“Mobblehead,” she still pronounced it), and she had never been particularly traumatized during her twenty-eight years. Her dark blonde hair was cut like Mia Farrow’s in Rosemary’s Baby, and she wore pencil-legged jeans that came down to the middle of her calf, and men’s shirts in Easter shades of pink and yellow, which no man he knew would ever wear. Her eyeglasses were bewilderingly expensive; it was her one indulgence in an otherwise fairly frugal life.
She was an actress who worked often and possessed an Equity card, but who hadn’t yet made it big. She took parts in plays that paid almost nothing, but still she slogged on, earning a name for herself in a marginal universe of cold little theatres in the far west 20s of Manhattan, where actors bundled themselves in woolly layers on stages that were just bare platforms, and valiantly rehearsed their Sam Shepard or David Mamet, little puffs of condensation coming out of their mouths as they barked their terse and elliptical lines. Because of her haircut, Thea had played Joan of Arc more than once, and though she didn’t yet know it, the Dora play Hysterical Girl would open and close as quick as a clam, and within the next few months Thea would be cast in a successful regional children’s production of Peter Pan, and end up staying in the play—in the green tunic and tights and Tyrolean hat, fully wired for flying—for the better
part of a year.
Michael had seen Thea in every production she’d been in since they’d met, bringing her wet paper-wrapped lilies and freesia from Korean delis and waiting in a corner of the communal dressing room while she spoke in actors’ shorthand with the other cast members, or sat before a cracked mirror with a tub of cold cream. Offstage she wore no face paint of any kind. In bed with him she never left streaks of makeup on the sheets, as other women had done before her. There was a physical purity and grace to her, the kind of quality people associate with actresses, dancers, and young grade-school teachers.
“I’m going to go for a walk,” he said now, not really knowing what else to do with himself. A body in motion tended to stay in motion; he was churning, unfinished. Maybe he’d get a hamburger at the 24-hour coffee shop around the corner. Maybe he’d just walk.
“Oh, what for? It’s late,” she said. “And it’s cold.”
He hesitated, and then realized she was right, it would do him no real good to go out. It was January, snowless but brutal outside. A street cleaner rolled along Amsterdam Avenue, leaving behind a wet slug-trail that immediately froze over, and while ten years earlier there might have been a knot of teenaged boys sharing a joint on a corner even in this weather, they’d been scared off by a crack-down mayor, and so they were off in their own homes now, smoking individual joints in their bedrooms with the windows wide, night air pouring in. Michael thought back to himself as a teenager, as a child, and it was like thinking about a death, for that person with the waves of black hair and endlessly replenishing orgasms had certainly disappeared. An abduction had taken place in the night, seemingly noiseless.