Vital Signs

by John Metcalf

  Any logical examination of this evidence must also note that the data in every study are American. Conclusions should, logically, state that the average length, fully erect, of the adult male American penis is such and so. American circumference this and that.

  It is not necessarily quibbling to suggest that the Canadian penis is a different penis. Not to mention the immigrant penis.

  And while I have no particular wish to cast aspersions I do find myself wondering about the reliability and stability of these good doctors; devoting one’s life to such measurement is a strange specialization to choose.

  I cannot but regard this average of six inches as extremely suspect.

  But whatever the truth may be—and does it really matter?—feelings of penile inadequacy are widespread. Even a casual glance through the correspondence columns of any sex magazine reveals the extent of this anxiety and its pathos. The following letter is not untypical.

  I am 26 years old. My penis is only three and one-half inches long when erect and about two inches long when flaccid. I have never masturbated—the one time I tried it didn’t work. I tried intercourse once and think I reached orgasm. Sometimes when I have an erection it feels like I’m going to shoot out urine. I read in a magazine where a man took hormones every day and his penis increased in length. Would hormones help me?

  “No, Mr. A.H. of Pennsylvania,” was the curt reply, “you are too old.”

  The world over, men desire larger members. Certain African tribes suspend weights from their penises at puberty; others thrash their organs with bundles of nettle-like herbs in the hope the swelling will be permanent. The Kama Sutra recommends massage with a liquid made by boiling pomegranate seeds in oil. The Japanese, apparently more concerned with thickness than length, insert their penises into holes bored through heated bricks. Clinics in Switzerland give courses of treatment with vacuum developers; this treatment is used in conjunction with what is described as “double-handed milking massage” with theatrical cream “until the pain becomes unbearable.”

  Enlarging courses using the vacuum principle are marketed in the United States under the trade name Megaphall.

  The Chinese are reported to do things with silver rings.

  Style betrays me.

  An easily written kind of humour, five-finger exercise.

  My heart isn’t in it.

  “Truth,” as my mother always used to say, “will out.”

  It doesn’t matter that all those endearingly innocent American authorities state that an average-sized organ is preferable to one larger-than-average. It doesn’t matter that women claim to prefer organs in the normal range. It doesn’t matter that the average length of the vagina in a sexually aroused woman is only four and one-half inches. It doesn’t matter that I’m married happily, the father of four children. I don’t care what my wife and other women say, have said.

  I have seen Bobby and I know what I know. I KNOW my thing is small. I know that hidden in all the trousers around me are huge organs. In every public convenience, happy extroverts stand back from the urinals, cosseting with justifiable pride members which, to me, seem to fall into the ten-to-twelve inch range while I fumble for it in my underpants, trying to find it, winkling it out.

  I wish I had a big one.

  How neatly the rhetoric of that confession is managed! How prettily worked its repetitions, its movements in and out of italic.

  Lies. Mainly lies.

  So much of my life is spent alone, in silence, creating illusions that, even when I set out to tell the truth, I cannot escape the professional gestures, the hands turned palms-and-backs to the audience, the cuffs pulled wide to illustrate emptiness—then the sudden string of flags.

  I am not confessing here merely to “penile inadequacy” but to the continuing power of that disapproval of and distaste for “self”—for me—to the continuing power of those ghostly commands.

  Wash yourself

  Dry yourself

  Why must in disappointment all I endeavour end?

  * * *

  Within a very short time of leaving home to go to university, I was relieved of my unlovely virginity by a kindly girl from Lancashire. She lanced the infection, cleansed, and healed. And with her laughter and affection flowed away the accumulation of tortured images, dogs strangely joined, dead hedgehogs, the lewd smile beneath the domino.

  I did not love her nor she me; we liked each other. For some years after I came to Canada we exchanged Christmas cards and brief messages until time passed and one of us moved or forgot, or forgot to care.

  From the loss of my virginity onwards, my sexual career was much as any other man’s and of no particular interest to anyone but myself. Sex, thigh, and breast, which had seemed to shimmer and beckon like the gilded domes and minarets of an unattainable and mirage city were now, to my surprise, a fairly ordinary part of my life. Everything in the garden was lovely until anxiety intruded once again—this time in the form of a book.

  I was about to say that the book was called—but its title, I find, is gone. And its author. Even its appearance. I think it had a yellow cover and was by Van de-Somebody. Dutch-sounding name. But what I do remember very clearly was its insistence that women derived no pleasure from intercourse unless they attained orgasm and this depended on the stimulation of the clitoris.

  To a neophyte, as I was then, this insistence was disturbing. I didn’t know if I had ever induced an orgasm, wasn’t quite sure what one was. And the nature and location of the clitoris haunted me for years.

  But the book was quite plain on the subject. It said:

  “The shaft of the penis must at all times be kept in contact with the clitoris.”

  I thought about that sentence for a long time. The book was, after all, a manual, and it was written by a doctor. I tried to reconstruct the various anatomies which I’d felt under bedclothes and covers, and if the clitoris was where I thought it was supposed to be, and if vaginas were where they were supposed to be, I was left with only two possible solutions to the problem this sentence posed: either I was deformed, or I’d had the misfortune to have had sexual intercourse with four deformed girls.

  I researched the clitoris: it was variously defined as “a miniature penis,” “an external, erectile organ,” and “a hooded member analogous to the male organ of generation.” According to some authorities, it had erections and a kind of foreskin. Some authorities stated that it was the size of a pea, others the size of a large pea. Some just said it was “miniature.” One authority stated that clitorises the size of the first joint of the thumb and which protruded through the outer lips were not uncommon.

  When I first came to Canada, I bought a book in a United Cigar Store called Clit Hunger, published by Nightstand Books, but it was not illuminating.

  The spontaneity of my sex life was ruined by my anxiety as I groped about trying to find this pea—or thumb-sized organ. It proved as elusive as a bird of paradise.

  I never have actually seen one. I grudgingly admire direct men, those who milk their nursing wives into a cup of tea, or the explorers who take a flashlight to ladies’ nether parts, but I am too shy, too unwilling to risk giving offence. My wife, too, is shy and sexually rather reserved—“modest,” I suppose, would be the old-fashioned word, and I have come to approve of modesty.

  (Though now, if I ever think about the subject at all, I would like to see a thumb-sized one, just once, just look.)

  And then after the Clitoris Anxiety and the Shaft and Clitoris Anxiety, both before and after marriage, came new Anxieties as the fashions changed.

  The Simultaneous Orgasm Anxiety.

  The Clitoral versus the Vaginal Orgasm Anxiety.

  The Multiple Orgasm Anxiety.

  It was all mildly depressing.

  Marriages were breaking up around us; women were leaving their husbands for electric toothbrushes.
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br />   Now, of course, things are different. Most nights we’re both too tired or I go to bed early while Mary is out canvassing for the NDP, or I stay up writing while she goes to bed with a book. Saturdays are usually our day because of Sunshine Saturday on ABC. The two younger kids usually get up at about 6 A.M. and sit gazing at the blank TV screen waiting for the cartoons to start. Mary, who always wakes up before me, makes a jug of coffee and brings it into the bedroom. I always drink three cups. I am not sure whether or not she is aware that this pressure on my bladder stiffens my resolve.

  We have no time for lengthy foreplay, by-play, toe-sucking, ice packs, orgasms simultaneous or multiple—we have exactly the amount of time that Sunshine Saturday allows before the next commercial and the demands for more toast or Wheaties and Jane trod on Peter’s tractor and Peter took Jane’s hockey cards and today is Saturday and if it’s Saturday isn’t Saturday allowance day?

  * * *

  Last night the Waldmarks came to dinner. These dinners are a ritual, an observance ritually celebrated every two or three weeks—at their house or ours—and last night I cooked three wild ducks. Gerry was one of the first friends I made when I came to Canada; we were postgraduate students together, and for a year shared an apartment which was noted for its flow of girls, its spaghetti, and extraordinary gin-based drinks, which Gerry invented on Fridays. The friendship still endures. The evening had progressed, as it always does, with talk of old friends, old times, and Gerry insisting that early in the morning he’ll be off skiing, taking a much-needed break from work and Alice and children and then, red-faced with exertion, Gerry always tries to stand on his head and Alice cries out, reminding him of his bad back, and his body wavers until he falls down. And then shouts of goodbye in the late street.

  I woke early this morning, as I often do if I’ve had too much brandy to drink the night before. Drink used to render me unconscious, but now brandy seems to make my heart knock in my ears and I’m wakeful, drowsy, then stirred by sweating dreams and wake with unpleasant clarity. Mary was curled asleep, only her black hair visible on the pillow; I don’t know how she doesn’t suffocate. Her hair is touched now with grey which she used to dye but now does not; I asked her not to. The digital clock that I dislike clicked again and it was 6:03. I decided to get up and clean the dishes and the kitchen from the night before. It was still dark. I felt not too bad, slightly hung-over in spite of the aspirin, possibly still slightly drunk. It would get worse as the morning wore on. I eased out of bed, put on my bathrobe and closed the bedroom door behind me.

  My knitted slippers still make me feel silly.

  The sleep of others seems sacred. Perhaps, all too often, I can only express my love by washing dishes, shopping, saying it with flowers. I am no Heathcliff. In certain moods of self-loathing I feel I have become what my mother would have called “a good provider.”

  I went into the kitchen and closed the door to contain the noise and face the aftermath of duck.

  I stared out across the sink into what would be the back garden, when the blackness paled, and looked at my reflection. I still felt odd—as though a few of the less-essential wires in my head were loosely connected. On mornings such as these my body forces itself on my attention in ways it never did before. I started on the roasting pan, scraping out dollops of congealed fat with a wooden spoon and plopping and smearing them onto an old newspaper. And something—wires disconnected, night thoughts, dreams perhaps—something about the duck fat, its opaqueness, its bland, dull surface, made me think of Gerry. Our friendship too was set, congealed. We all knew what must be avoided. We always talked about the past, things that happened twenty years and more ago, old wounds, old friends, old grievances, the two who were already dead, as though we could only be comfortable in mythology, in events upon which time had imposed some imaginable order. We seemed to live there more brightly than in our present, with more enthusiasm than we would in our imaginable future.

  I drink too much, Gerry drinks too much, we all do.

  I am more aware than I was of my heart and its mechanisms. I still felt uncomfortable, aware of its beating in my temples. And in my troubled sleep I had dreamed again the same dream, always the same, precise in every detail. I don’t know what it means; it needn’t so far as I can see, mean anything. Each part is as significant as any other.

  The dream is a dream of journey.

  It always starts on a railway station in England during the war. I am standing by a slot-machine which dispenses Nestlé chocolate bars but there are, of course, no chocolate bars because the war is on. The machine is dirty, its glass panel through which one might have seen the stacked bars is shattered, the brass handle you pull to get out the chocolate is tarnished almost black.

  I am journeying to visit a friend. When I arrive in the town in which he lives I go to his house. My knock is not answered. The door is unlocked. I go in and find him hanging. The rope is brand new half-inch manila, almost yellow, stiff and varnished. His face is as I have always known it, calm, composed. There is no violence.

  On the mantelpiece is an engraved invitation card with a deckle edge. It is an invitation to me from my younger brother to a civic reception in his honour.

  I am in a taxi drawing up to the Town Hall. There is a red carpet, a footman. I am wearing evening dress. When I go in, I find porters in livery stacking chairs, stripping and folding linen tablecloths. They wear white, buttoned gloves. The reception, they tell me, ended an hour ago.

  I am by a broken Nestlé chocolate-bar machine again. Again another journey. Again the door is unlocked. Another friend hangs from a length of manila rope. Again the invitation card stands on the mantelpiece and again I am too late and find the liveried porters dismantling the festive chamber.

  Sometimes in the dream I seem to be angry with my brother, sometimes I feel nothing. I wonder why he figures in this dream? I have not seen him since I left England and we never write. I did not even see him when my father died. I was not at home when the telegram arrived—I was in Eugene, Oregon, teaching a summer-school session to afford whatever had to be afforded—repairs to the house, the car, the furnace, clothes for the children—and by the time phone calls from Mary traced me and airline schedules had been checked, it was too late. And my father was buried.

  In a file under F, in a file marked Father, I have all the letters he ever wrote me. There are seven. They were never sent from home but always from somewhere on an infrequent holiday. They all start off with depressing ordinariness. They are addressed to My Dear Boy and signed Your Loving Father.

  One starts:

  The weather here is fine. We are, praise God, in good health.

  Another:

  The Lord has granted us good weather.

  But then come his typical outbursts of eccentricity:

  Here they pretend not to know how to boil eggs. I have given the strictest instructions—I could not have been more explicit. I can only conclude that this is done to aggravate me.

  Another said:

  Your mother constantly remarks upon the views. I have requested her NOT to remark upon views but to no avail. I am not blind. She desires me to take photographs of these views; this I have refused to do. God has given us memories and if we cannot remember what we have seen then it is not memorable. I have explained this to her.

  There are many Germans.

  How I wish I had known him.

  The bare branches of the lilac tree outside the window began to appear, stark in the blue blackness. I searched for the Brillo pads; Mary always puts things in different places. Scraps of the skin of the duck proved almost impossible to remove.

  When my mother died, I did go back to England. It wasn’t filial piety or respect. I think, secretly, I wanted to be sure. I wanted to see the coffin with my own eyes and hear the earth thudding onto the wood. What would her words have been? Laid to rest? Gone to her reward?

 
The minister of the church she’d attended, a Heepish creature, asked me if I would read from the Scriptures; I gravely declined and he hastened to understand my feelings. There were floral tributes and the singing of hymns. She had, an ancient uncle assured me, fought the good fight.

  This time, ironically, my brother was away, somewhere in Greece on holiday, unreachable. It was left to me to dispose of immediate matters. She had been living in a small town in Kent. I wandered about that house for two days, touching, looking, feeling strange. It was all gone now, all finished.

  The clothes neatly folded in all the drawers; the stink of lavender. Little silken bags of lavender. I gathered up all the little bags and burned them. The net gloves. Them too.

  The same pictures from twenty-five years before when I’d left. The picture of Peter Pan she’d tried to keep hanging in my bedroom. The Light of the World—Christ with a lantern. Holman Hunt, was it? Anonymous landscapes. Few books—some volumes of popular devotion, the autobiography of a vet, a life of Wesley, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers.

  In her bedroom, on the dressing table, still the remembered objects of childhood. The ebony hairbrush. A strange little ebony pot with a screw top with a hole in the top which was for putting hair into from a comb or brush before throwing it away. An amazing object—obviously common thirty or forty years ago, but now as oddly antique as a sand shaker for drying letters. Formidable hairpins and hatpins, brooches fussy with little coloured stones.

  In a kitchen drawer, neat piles of ironed rags.

  A bureau contained scissors, glue, and large scrapbooks in various stages of completion. They were haphazardly full of pictures of holly, mangers, Christmas trees, lanterns, candles, carol-singers, Pickwickian coaches and ostlers, etc. all cut from Christmas cards and intended for the missions in Africa. I was struck by some of the pictures that had taken her fancy—one in particular, I recall. A kitten sitting in a shoe. Harsh people are often sentimental.