Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  When I entered high school in the tenth grade, I began to perceive the tension between my habits of compliance and the dangerous extremes that so drew me in literature. I’d already concluded, while reading Simone de Beauvoir, that sexual intercourse outside of marriage was morally okay, though I didn’t believe I’d have the courage for it. I must have thought it just didn’t happen in a decorous place like Bellevue. If in Paris free sex might follow on freethinking, with us it wasn’t free but premarital—the folly of people presumed not to think at all.

  My parents grasped the Paris precedent. In a skirmish that heralded the total war to come, and in flagrant violation of their long-standing principle that youthful curiosity should never be repressed, they insisted I defer my planned reading of Sartre and books on Communism until I got to college.

  They couldn’t, however, as pillars of Bellevue’s Eastshore Unitarian congregation, prevent me from joining Liberal Religious Youth. Back in Eureka, during my time of faith, their Unitarianism had been a misery to me, though I kept to myself my terror that all five of us would burn, Mother and Father because they were scarcely better than atheists, my sisters and I because the Unitarians don’t bother with baptism. I used to pray that they’d convert to being more like other people, join a church with a minister instead of that ragtag fellowship. Now I prayed for contact with a world of deviants, and respectable-looking Eastshore (which had two ministers, though it still went easy on the sacraments) became my go-between.

  For years Mother had fretted that I wouldn’t be well rounded, had urged me to cultivate “kids your own age.” Now that I’d found some, she tried to put the brakes on, repeatedly insisting that I was still too young, only a tenth-grader, for this or that LRY function. I could attend weekly chapter meetings, held at the church, but those were pretty tame; I wanted stronger stuff. She and Father balked at letting me attend the famous weekend conferences, sponsored by our “Fed”—a loose association of LRY groups throughout the Pacific Northwest, including Canada—which often meant out-of-town travel.

  At least at first (for I later grew devious), my indignation at their inconsistency was keenly felt, not merely rhetorical. They had always appeared to be democratic parents, had boasted of trusting their daughters’ good judgment. Now it seemed to me that their trust had been a sham, because it ceased when I quit choosing precisely what they’d choose. Overnight I made the change from model child to sullen captive and began my lifelong quarrel—a family feud—with liberalism.

  “Uptight” is the sixties word that most appropriately evokes my parents’ fatal inability to smile at the pretensions of the teen bohemia that now commanded my allegiance. Much less could they see George Fava’s point of view; he delivered a Youth Sunday sermon floridly entitled “The Mustard Seed and the Frug—Or, Adolescent Anxiety-à-Go-Go,” in the course of which he played “Hang On, Sloopy” from the pulpit. He credited us anxious adolescents with all sorts of hidden virtues, but Sasha and Jordie mercilessly mocked him, and claimed that the song’s lyrics referred to oral sex.

  Right off, my parents spotted Sasha Grant as an even bigger threat than books on Communism. Their skittishness put me at a terrible disadvantage. Male, with a driver’s license and far more obliging parents, Sasha ranged freely; I was kept on a short, short leash. To top it off, we attended different high schools. I faced the daunting task of appearing available (but not too forward, girlishly eager, or boyishly aggressive) while being guarded by my parents like a princess in a tower.

  Perhaps inspired by my dalliance with Miss Pease, I solved my problem by writing him letters. The first of these was a model of circumspection, as chaste and intellectual a come-on as ever girl addressed to boy. Paradoxically, writing it afforded me a sense of erotic mastery, as though I’d dared to strip to my nakedest desires, but in a situation where I felt far more powerful than in a face-to-face encounter. Vain even then about my sentences as others are about the flesh, I was confident that I sounded interesting. (Meanwhile, I filled up my journal with unabashed self-loathing, deriding myself as a “stupid & foolish little whore” who had vainly “thought I would get away from woman’s idiotic position.”) How very like me, I now see, to start a love affair that way, to intuit, despite my inexperience, that decking out my feelings in carefully chosen language and offering them up in the ritual of a letter would afford me access to an erotic authority such as I rarely enjoy in ordinary life, though I do experience it in certain moments of lovemaking.

  For me, sex and text were already closely linked through my habits of inferring the erotic world from books and of rehearsing and dissecting secret feelings in a journal. Like my hope that sex could be radically transformative, this link between writing and desire would also become a theme of my later life with women. For now, the written word was a way of deciphering my identity as a modern heterosexually active girl—which I saw, of course, in keeping with the times, as timeless, a version of some universal feminine destiny. I wanted to see it also as universally human, but my ambition to go everywhere the boys went coexisted with the insidious belief that women were fated to unhappy difference, and furthermore that eroticism, more than brains or uterus, was the thing that sealed that fate.

  Like many an adolescent—probably most in my generation, just before the explosion of sex in the visual media forever altered the terms of my culture’s fantasy life—I used certain passages in fiction simultaneously to inflame and to inform. I hoped to learn not only what people did but which of those things might be counted real and normal. My memory is cluttered with deathless prose like the moment in Exodus where Ari kisses Kitty’s breast, and she, though aroused, refuses him, saying, “‘I don’t want to be made. I guess I was just overcome by the moonlight.’” At the same time, I definitely got the erotic buzz from certain “queer” passages involving my male heroes. Carlo and Dean communicating intensely, T.E. Lawrence captured and tormented—I wished to insert myself into these scenes, though it was plainly impossible that a woman should be present.

  The whole business was circular in a way that my bookishness perhaps intensified, but that points to a deeper irony in the common concept of sex-as-nature. That concept, to which I wholeheartedly subscribed, involved me in frequent consultations of authorities who I hoped would tell me how to fulfill my erotic destiny. I didn’t think to question why it shouldn’t just emerge without a fuss, why consciousness and memory had to be poked and prodded, why I needed to worry about distinguishing authentic desires from possible counterfeits. And I do seem to have worried quite a lot, for the suspicion that desire might be a mirage, a mere reflection of things I’d read, forms a recurring theme in my adolescent journals.

  My sex was made of words as much as flesh. For now, I was stuck with the visions of male authors. Later on, my becoming a lesbian would be all bound up with the hope that women could write the book.

  My cul-de-sac was in an area known as Lochmoor, one of the newer metastases of our aggressive little suburb. By contrast, Sasha and his folks and an uninteresting sister occupied an older two-story frame house on Mercer Island. In summer, we could swim off their dock. Mr. and Mrs. Grant had a modest flare for good living that seemed cosmopolitan, faintly decadent, compared to what I knew. Yet Mr. Grant worked for Boeing, like so many Seattle-area fathers. I think he had served in the navy during World War II. Sasha said he kept Trojans in his dresser drawer. He was often seen with a transparent drink in hand, a white-filtered L&M in the inevitable ashtray, gazing out over the water with a narrow-eyed expression that discouraged interaction, which was okay with me. I was wary of the lively sarcasm that lived inside his world-weary shell. “Hard-bitten” is a term that occurs to me to describe him. At the time I couldn’t see what he and Sasha had in common.

  Mrs. Grant, a small, plump woman who taught in a Montessori school, had gone to Columbia University. Though she was a mother and nothing glamorous, I imagine this background impressed me, as did the fact that M.F.K. Fisher had a place on her kitchen shelf. (In my hou
se we dined from the Betty Crocker Cookbook, and a clove of garlic was considered radical.) Sasha made me read Fisher’s Gastronomical Me; that and Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities were the two works by women that he admired sufficiently to include on the syllabus of my crash course in being his lover, concubine, and all-around companion. I was taught to roll my own tobacco and cannabis cigarettes, act sober even when very, very stoned, and respect his obsession with steam railroads and old sailing vessels and Civil War military strategy. He cultivated a romance of outmoded technology and the male culture that went with it.

  I thought that his terrible relationship to school (where I couldn’t stop excelling, no matter how I misbehaved) was a mark of intellectual seriousness. It seems to me now that he was in search of a style, much more than he was ever attracted by ideas. He was adamant about his aesthetic philosophy, and persuaded me to buy expensive black leather riding boots that came to just below the knee and were impossible to walk in and generally useless for anything outside a riding academy or a fancy European brothel. His notion of courtliness was to inform me in a letter: “You’re getting prettier every day. Soon I’ll even turn away from a Friendship Sloop to look at you.”

  I recall my years with Sasha—I was eighteen when they ended—like a graph of sex that might be plotted on two coordinates: the things we did, the places where we did them. As with kids everywhere, our erotic life was homeless, though toward the end, when I’d been away at college and we knew his mother wouldn’t hassle us, we’d sometimes fuck in Sasha’s room with its splintery floor and elaborate graffiti of Celtic knotwork and quotations from Nikos Kazantzakis inked directly on the walls.

  Before that, our venues were legion. There were frequent parking sessions—both their romance and discomfort heightened by the Northwest winter rains, with their distinctive permeating chill and gloom—in either the Morris Minor or Sasha’s parents’ station wagon, the back seat of which folded down to make a hard shelf-like bed. One time we were using this handy accommodation in a vacant lot near Eastshore Church when a car pulled in behind us, its high beams like a searchlight. My first terrified thought was of a lovers’-lane slasher.

  “Heat,” Sasha groaned, and started buttoning his Levi’s.

  The cop surveyed us with his flashlight, shook his head at our explanations. (Officer, we were talking. We got sleepy. We just lay down to take a little nap.) I trembled lest he decide to call my parents, but in the end he let us go.

  More than any other symbol of our nomadic lust, I think of the so-called goat shed, a shack at the edge of Sasha’s parents’ property, overrun with blackberry vines and booby-trapped with broken glass, but with a tiny loft to which one perilously ascended via a makeshift ladder, to recline on a stained mattress and make out by candlelight. From this remove, the fire danger in that shack seems nearly as alarming as all the other risks—pregnancy, bad trips, poisonous chemicals in our drugs, arrests for possession, accidents from driving stoned—that we worked up to running over the seasons of our angst. Sasha made much of my inexperience, doling out new challenges (Dexedrine, fellatio) as he thought I could handle them.

  I had no standards in those days for how pleasure ought to feel, and yielded frequently, half-anxious to comply, half-wanting to see where any new sensation might lead. I wish I was on some / Australian mountain range, my idol Bob Dylan jeered. Like him, I hoped for a change, however random, so I’d drop six bitter No Doz at school between second and third periods. I’d sit still in a pitch-dark closet, trying to ratchet my mind to some Zen plateau of no-thought. I’d let Sasha hold a burning cigarette to my bare back.

  We spent many an evening in that goat shed while ostensibly in Seattle at a movie theater. Sasha would park the car a short distance from his house; there wasn’t much chance his parents would spot it in the winding lanes of their neighborhood, which was slightly overgrown and shabby and far more sophisticated than the recently bulldozed tract where our developer was considered sensitive for sparing a few Douglas firs. My own parents, I thought, wouldn’t dare investigate as long as I had a plausible cover story. I read reviews of the movies I’d said we were seeing and tried to make it home more or less on time.

  Fittingly, horribly, my writing betrayed me. At the end of sophomore year they searched my room, located my secret journal, read that I was thinking of having intercourse—a step that seemed to me like a natural progression, though without it, precisely due to its deferral, I was enjoying sex as hot as any I’d know for years to come—panicked, suspended my contact with Sasha, and packed me off to a psychiatrist, whom I treated like a probation officer. In the end, of course, I was stronger than their panic, being ferociously single-minded. There wasn’t a lead-lined coffin in all of Bellevue that could hold me.

  Hot sex: that reigning cliché of our time, like family values or free markets. What does it mean to say that our sex was heated?

  There was no shape, no resolution—I want to say no form—to what we did in the goat shed all those months that I was technically a virgin. Nobody came, which made it rarely egalitarian, and masochistic, and irresistible, like being condemned to burn in paradise. It was hallucinatory in its endlessness, its improvisatory Ornette Coleman energy. (Nobody came, I’ve always naively assumed; only now does it occur to me that Sasha probably went home and masturbated, a skill I didn’t acquire until I’d been with a woman.) I’d read Norman Mailer’s “The Time of Her Time,” and James Baldwin’s Another Country, and knew that orgasms were considered significant, but all the tricky metaphors couldn’t explain why if you’d never experienced or even witnessed one.

  What I cared about was the thing itself: desire. I was quickly learning everything about it, though still ignorant of “sex,” with its “technique” and “satisfaction.” To me, these official skills and benefits were purely secondary. What mattered was that it seemed as if the attachment that Buddhist teachers exhort us to overcome, that we live in banal fragments every day, had been gathered and distilled and rendered down to its essence, as the stigma of the crocus is rendered to make saffron, or electromagnetic radiation is focused by a laser. Only wanting the wanter mattered.

  I still feel this way sometimes.

  Of course it was uneven, like anything in life. We were clumsy, and clumsier because we tried to act proficient. I worried about producing proper feminine responses, avoiding anything unwomanly. Precisely what classified as womanly behavior had become a serious puzzle at that volatile moment (so different from today?) when women were being exhorted to express sexual feelings without becoming too demanding, too threatening to men. We believed quite solemnly in something called “frigidity,” preferring not to notice how the ancient legend of the omnivorous vagina lurked in its shadow.

  Sasha had to be the teacher. We both expected it.

  The first time he opened his jeans and made me touch his yearning cock, I felt a flicker of surprise to think he’d want to demonstrate the workings of such a bizarre apparatus. My ambivalence had less to do with my personal relation to its peculiar bulk than with the unsettling thought that half the human race must be similarly burdened.

  Of course I was terrified of pregnancy, a disaster so total I couldn’t envision it concretely. My life would be over, I’d have to have the baby. People say that adolescents believe themselves invulnerable, but it definitely wasn’t true in my case. I agreed with my timid parents that life was dangerous; we just differed drastically as to what to do about it. It didn’t help that I’d lost my purchase on the future (as usual, Bob Dylan had the words for it: your gravity fails / And negativity don’t pull you through). A year or two ago I’d burned to accomplish great things. Now I couldn’t think of anything worth doing.

  I despaired of equaling the bravery of men, who scored the dope, drove the vehicles, hitched up and down the coast, heard from their draft boards the minute they turned eighteen. By now I knew there were some interesting girls, like Sasha’s friend Naomi of the memorable hair, who had met Allen Gi
nsberg. She’d recently been busted, sent away to live in Tucson. I suspected Sasha of being a bit in love with her, and I couldn’t blame him. I myself thought her beautiful. Tending characteristically to eroticize my rivals, I wrote wistful poems about her, and about another girl I thought he favored.

  Then there was Annie Monk, who was Ned Terwilliger’s girl-friend. Ned was from Vancouver, one of Sasha’s best buddies, so Annie and I frequently found ourselves making out in adjacent sleeping bags. Annie had a girlfriend named Cordelia; I’d heard them making plans to move to Salt Spring Island, way up in the Canadian San Juans—away from all the bullshit, Annie said. I didn’t know how to talk to such independent girls, or why they’d want to bother with me.

  I tried to match the boys toke for toke (though too much marijuana tended to make me paranoid), swallowed my jealousy of Sasha’s other women, shut up about my fear the times we didn’t use a condom.

  There was no HIV. There was no HIV. There was no HIV.

  The fact that it took about a year of energetic lust for us to arrive at the point of needing contraception had as much to do with Sasha’s uncertainty about sexual mechanics as with my own nervousness. We engaged in a complex, largely tacit negotiation: of course I burned to do this famous thing, yet was in mortal fear of it. In any event, I was supposed to hang back. We required the excuse of Sasha’s urgency.

  On a few occasions he tried and couldn’t find the opening (or so it seemed to me, scared and embarrassed as I was, and with only the sketchiest idea of what was supposed to happen). Once he blamed the problem on his being high on speed. Eventually, he brought up the theory that I might have been constructed at some peculiar angle. This was cruel—I half believed him—and not unprecedented. Too often I took the weight of his bad feeling, as when he joked about inviting Ned Terwilliger to screw me: “It would do you good, and I’m not up to it.”