Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  “Charles just looks the question. I shake my head no; then we talk about other things. It’s almost like some kind of ritual.”

  “If you like him so much, why not marry him?”

  Esther brooded over her coffee. She looked up and grinned.

  “He asked me to marry him all through senior year in high school and in college, too. I kept saying, ‘Don’t ask me until you mean it,’ and that I didn’t feel done yet.”

  “‘Done?’”

  “You know grown up. I wanted to have a life, like, be my own person, not like my mother. She just got married and had children and went out to lunch, that Jewish thing,” said Esther, and then she frowned. “I’m afraid I really hurt his feelings,” Esther said, then sighed and tucked a foot under her trim thigh and stretched her other leg out in the space between us. “I’m waiting to meet someone older, somebody who has done some living. You know my mother married my dad when he was much older than her. They were very happy.”

  Esther and gave me a warm and direct look. Was I imagining it, or was that “look” an invitation to the “older man” sitting next to her?

  A hard drive crashed, and Esther had to reboot. So we didn’t join the others in the dining area that afternoon. We split a bottle of wine and shared a porcini and smoked mozzarella pizza in the edit suite. While we picked at the food, Esther turned the pages of the albums. We sat close together on the client couch—exactly as I had pictured us doing.

  Those pictures depressed me as I reflected on life’s passage. I saw the birthdays and Christmases and vacations fly past. In 1983 the Schaeffer family sat in front of a Christmas tree mounded with gifts. Dad looked inscrutable as moonlit water. He had a swollen lymph node, a small cherry of warning on his neck. Creeping, nesting in his resentful body, the spreading cancer silently invaded.

  Year to year the thread of aging flesh screamed mortality one picture at a time. My chest lost tone. On sunny beaches Genie’s breasts got heavier and began their journey to middle age. Lines deepened in the glare of the sun. Jessica moved far away and sent photos of her first child, Amanda, that seemed to come from another planet and left me feeling cheated by the fact that Amanda’s “other grandparents” got to see her every day. Nor did I enjoy leafing through production stills from my movie shoots in Hollywood. Esther turned a page to snapshots of Genie so very gorgeously pregnant with John. Esther turned another page and tapped a photograph of me standing on Hollywood Boulevard in front of the Roosevelt Hotel.

  “That’s the day I did the Wired to Kill distribution deal,” I mumbled.

  Esther nodded and pointed to photographs of Genie’s and my furnished-by-week-or-by-month apartment at the Oakwood complex in Burbank; of Jessica, Francis, and John in the pool; and of the one-room production office in the unfashionable industrial part of the Valley. Casting, props, a production meeting, the first day of the shoot ...

  Esther tapped the pictures with a perfectly manicured fingernail. I longed to slide unseen and guilt-free from that fingernail to Esther’s pink cuticle. From there I wanted to creep to her delicate knuckle, and from delicate knuckle to slender wrist, and from wrist up creamy forearm, past her elbow to Esther’s shoulders and pale neck. I dreamed of paving a passionate path up that smooth column with surreptitious kisses until I reached Esther’s lips and once there, to kiss Esther.

  “Genie always said the script was awful,” I said.

  “Was it?” asked Esther.

  “Yes. But I wasn’t going to admit it, not then.”

  What a dreadful summer that had been, not to mention that in my Wired to Kill year Genie was starting to have problems with bleeding that would lead to that terrible night in the emergency room. I’d been in Lust with my nineteen-year-old star and distracted by flirting.

  I said nothing to Esther about all that but “heard” echoes of conversations with Genie that made my cheeks burn with shame. These “conversations” (like most fights at that time) were really about something else: my sense of failure at having made a film I already knew would be a bust.

  “You don’t understand the business,” I mutter. “If you put your name on this, you’ll regret it later,” says Genie. “We’re staying in LA. Find a school here,” I say. “We should wait and see how the movie does before we pull Jessica out of school in Massachusetts,” Genie says. “No!” I shout. “If I’m not out here, I’ll never succeed. I have to be here. This is where it’s happening. I have to be where it’s at. We’re staying!” “For what we’d get for the house, we couldn’t buy a shack here,” says Genie. “They resent it if you’re not here; don’t make the LA commitment,” I say. Genie folds a T-shirt and quietly asks, “Commitment to what?” “A commitment to the business!” I yell.

  “You mean you want to invite ‘The Business’ into your heart as your Personal Savior?” asks Genie with a friendly smile. I don’t acknowledge the peace-offering smile and decide to keep fighting. “Why are you dragging me down by shoving Mother in my face?” I scream. “Your per-diem stops next week. What do we live on while you recut?” Genie calmly asks. “I’m in a fucking first-dollar position after the Limited Partners!” I bellow. Genie stands up, then glances down. The hem of her dress is crimson. “Shit, I’m bleeding again,” Genie says very matter-of-factly.

  What is so ironic is that my wannabe affair with Esther was invaded by Mom! First, my mother’s good example and instructions regarding Monogamy and Continuity held sway, but—and here’s the amusing perversity of the situation—even when I was chatting Esther up and being titillated by some of our racier talks, I’d slip in a little moralizing. Once a Schaeffer, always a Schaeffer, I guess.

  “Why don’t you date more?” I asked during one of our lunches.

  “Jesus, Frank, why not ask a personal question?” Esther said and laughed.

  “I mean since Charles. What do you mean ‘Mr. Right’ has to be ‘different’?”

  “Older and wiser, I told you.”

  “I thought you didn’t date because you refuse to sleep around like your friends down on the Cape?”

  “You remember everything!” Esther said and laughed. “I should never have told you that.”

  I rubbed my hands in mock glee.

  “Give me the juicy details,” I said.

  Esther leaned back and turned her face to the sun. It was a freakishly hot day for late November, almost seventy degrees. We were sitting on a bench in the parking lot eating our lunch surrounded by mounds of dirty melting snow.

  “Mmmmm! That sun feels soooo good!” said Esther.

  “Move to Florida.”

  “Yuck!”

  “Jessica would be jealous,” I said squinting up at the sun.

  “Why?”

  “It’s dark for twenty hours a day in Finland at this time of year.”

  “I thought Scandinavia was so nice and all,” said Esther.

  “Please,” I asked, holding up my hands in a prayerful begging gesture, “please give me the juicy details!”

  Esther smiled and adjusted her dress. The turquoise ribbon of her bra strap that I’d been fixated on for the last half-hour vanished. My heart sank. I was enjoying that strap mightily.

  “Okay. We just go down and rent the house for two weeks, okay? Some of us stay the whole time.”

  “How long have you done this?” I asked.

  “Each summer since college, I go down for two long weekends a year.”

  “You said they have sex. Tell me about sex!”

  Esther laughed.

  “I’m not telling you about the private lives of my friends. I should never have said anything about it.”

  “P-p-p-p-please!” I said doing my best Roger Rabbit imitation.

  Esther laughed.

  “They, we, go to this bar.”

  “A singles bar?” I asked in mock horror.

  “Nothing like that. It’s a regular place, clam chowder, you know oars nailed to the ceiling, all that ye old, ye old. Some of the other girls maybe meet someone at
the bar. In the morning I see the men they bring home. End of story.”

  “Where?”

  “Do I have to spell it out? Jesus!”

  “What’s the point if you’re not specific?”

  Esther laughed and shifted to face the sun. The turquoise strap reappeared.

  “I’m not listening through walls,” said Esther. “The first I know anything is in the morning; you know, you’ll see the guy leaving or something.”

  “Is that awkward?”

  “It is if he hangs around, wants coffee or something.”

  “So these are one-night stands?”

  “I guess.”

  “Sluts!”

  Esther gave me a playful shove.

  “Don’t you dare talk about my friends that way.”

  “Sluts!”

  “They are not!”

  Esther shoved me again. As she swiveled, her dress was pulled a little askew. Esther’s bra strap stood off her collarbone, accentuating her small-boned shoulder.

  “If it’s not sluttish, why won’t you do it?” I asked.

  “I don’t, that’s all.”

  “But they do?”

  “That’s their choice.”

  “And you’re saying you don’t judge them?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But in your heart you’re calling them sluts, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “The fact you don’t fuck around implies some kind of moral value judgment,” I said, more or less parroting one of my father’s favorite discussion lines—minus the word “fuck” of course.

  “It’s just what a person’s comfortable with.”

  “Say I’m ‘comfortable’ with rape?” I said, while groaning inwardly at the fact that I seemed destined to forever slide back into old territory. I was doing my best to both flirt and “push Esther to the logic of her presuppositions,” as Mom would have called it.

  Esther glared at me.

  “Consenting adults, Frank.”

  “So between ‘consenting adults’ there is no behavior you disapprove of?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Ever?”

  “Right.”

  “Frozen gerbils up the ass?” I said, going well beyond what would have been in the script that Mom or Dad used when trying to “push a nonbeliever to consider that, just maybe, God has given each of us an innate sense of Right and Wrong,” as Mom often said.

  “No problem, though I believe we should respect animals’ rights, too.”

  “Having an affair with a married man?”

  Was that an extra beat before she answered? I hoped so! And then with a sense of disappointment, I realized she’d only paused because she was chewing and had to swallow before answering.

  “He should keep his commitments, but I mean if his marriage is coming apart, what can I do?”

  The midlife-crises version of me sighed. Esther had just come close to inviting me to say that my marriage was failing. It wasn’t. And the rush of Love I’d felt (Love and Guilt) as I looked at those pictures of Genie pregnant rose up, wagging a finger in my face.

  “Kiss her!” screamed My Penis, sensing an opportunity slipping away.

  Mom placed roadblocks in my brain of a kind that have prevented me from traveling down a path that would have inexorably led away, and possibly prevented me, from arriving at the stage of life where I now live in peace two doors down the street from my beloved Lucy and Jack. You see, what I learned about monogamy from my mother wasn’t found in Bible verses but in her life.

  My mother wanted her life to be replete with drama, sweep, and poetry. The Swiss Alps, the craggy coast of Liguria, New York City, and Big Sur were Mom’s favorite places. All through my childhood she talked about “the Big Sur redwoods and majestic hills cascading down to the ever-rolling foamy Pacific crashing again and again onto that amazing rocky coast.” People, too, had to be “amazing” to interest Mom. Though she was kind to everyone, she favored people imbued with poetry, drama, and/or tragedy. She didn’t care about measuring people by wealth or what she’d call “worldly accomplishment.” Sure, my mother liked meeting wealthy people because they could write a check to L’Abri for that new chalet Mom “just knew” God was leading her to buy so that couples coming to L’Abri would have a place to stay or for whatever else she’d decided L’Abri needed. That didn’t mean she liked that person personally, which brings me to my mother’s almost-affair.

  The individuals my mother admired most were what she called “artistic types.” Creativity was Mom’s favorite word, followed closely by Continuity. Those two words, or should I say the meaning my mother gave them, came into conflict when my mother fell in love.

  I’ll call him Noel. He was a poet, an “artistic type” par excellence, and wealthy (he’d inherited a fortune). Noel also was kind, well traveled, young (about thirty), and sensitive, and he owned a ranch in California on the Pacific coast. In fact, he owned a chunk of Big Sur, with many acres of redwoods, enough moss, bark, rock, sand, sun, and water to provide a lifetime’s supply of materials for my mother’s flower arrangements.

  Noel bought my mother expensive Japanese ceramic bowls for her floral creations. He wrote her poetry. He was tall. He looked pleasingly pale, thin, and ascetic. Noel’s skin had that delicate, almost translucent quality that most men possess only in the crook of their arms, where veins run close to the surface.

  Noel took walks with my mother. He wore sandals he’d made himself and had pictures of a log-cabin-style home he’d built on his ranch, “with his own hands!” as Mom never tired of telling me. And Noel traveled the world intermittently between visits to L’Abri that stretched over a three-year period. I was about ten years old when he’d first arrived, and Mom was in her early fifties and looked as if she were in her thirties. Mom was also married to a man who left the dancer, poet, lover-of-Chinese-art in her unfulfilled. And Dad hit my mother. If anyone had an excuse, Mom did.

  Noel used to bring me interesting curios from his journeys, including a snakeskin and several exotic South Sea seashells for my collection. Meanwhile, Mom treated Noel to many extra prayer meetings, and Noel made it very clear he loved my mother. Years later Mom told me he asked her to marry him several times.

  Noel was my mother’s second (and last) chance to enter into the poetic and free life she’d craved, free of her parents’ theology at last, free of her youthful latching on to Dad (they’d met when Mom was eighteen), free of L’Abri and cooking meals for thirty to forty people a day, free of being Edith Schaeffer. Noel was Mom’s chance to start over as Mei Fuh (beautiful happiness), the wistful little girl who had left China with a world waiting to discover her.

  I vividly remember the trouble Noel caused. I was home for the three-month summer vacation from boarding school when all hell broke loose. I remember that period of our lives, 1963 or thereabouts, as a time when there were more fights than usual between Mom and Dad. Mom was very frank about what was happening, both on the phone and in letters (I was in boarding school), not to mention when I was home for vacations. Later Mom referred to this patch of our family history as “That Difficult Time.” She even somewhat managed to sanctify it as part of God’s Plan inasmuch as Mom pointed out, “Satan must have known that Fran and I were about to write our books and take The Truth to a huge new group of very needy people because Satan was doing everything he could to ruin L’Abri before that happened! No wonder we had such a struggle!”

  In other words, Noel wasn’t all her fault since her temptation was part of some vast spiritual struggle. But Mom’s label of That Difficult Time hardly covers it. Dad threw a heavy brass vase at my mother one Sunday afternoon after church. He’d been screaming at her for over an hour, and she was (untypically) screaming back. Mom rushed into my bedroom with a deep cut on her shin and slammed and locked my door behind her. She asked me to call a taxi (we had no car) and not to tell anyone. When I got back to the room after making the call in the downstairs hall, Mom sent me to the ba
throom for bandages. There was blood pooling on my cracked linoleum floor.

  I accompanied my mother to Dr. Clerc in Villars, the ski resort on the mountainside above our village. I remember watching as the doctor trimmed a sliver of yellow fat protruding from the inch-long, to-the-bone gash just below Mom’s knee and then put in five stitches. Mom told me to tell anyone who might ask about the bandage that she’d tripped on the front-door steps and fallen on the boot scraper.

  That night I sat on the edge of my bed clutching the souvenir Zulu spear my sister Sue and her husband, Ranald, had recently brought me as a gift from their South African honeymoon. I swore to myself that if I heard Dad yelling at Mom or hitting her one more time, I’d kill him. But that accident—and it was an accident because, as Mom explained, “your father did mean to throw something, but didn’t mean for it to hit me on the shin because I leapt the wrong way into the arc of the projectile”—sobered Dad up. For several months the so-called Difficult Time eased up. And soon Mom’s special sensitive friend left L’Abri, never to return.

  Whatever Mom and Dad were or weren’t doing with the men and women they very obviously had crushes on from time to time—Dad clearly favored certain young women over others—they did their best to set their children on a monogamous path. They extolled the virtues of family life and, above all, of Continuity. Of course, they added a needless theological gloss to what I think is a commonsense biological/psychological fact: Humans are programmed to be jealous nest-makers who (usually) don’t like to live alone or be cheated on.

  I think that my parents were right about the benefits of monogamy because I think that their beliefs happened to tap into the larger reality of evolutionary psychology. I don’t agree with Mom and Dad’s God-Will-Hate-You-If-You-Sleep-Around theology of monogamy, but speaking in practical terms (and with apologies to Winston Churchill), I do believe that monogamy is the worst form of all sexual relationships, except for everything else that has been tried. Brain, Penis, Vagina, and Heart may bicker among themselves, but I think that kindness and common sense should win the genitals-versus-brain debate whenever possible. Hurting your partner’s feelings is stupid.