by Jan Clausen
A poem I wrote at this time spells out what I clearly viewed as the tragic contradiction between enjoying sex with men and being effective in the world. Entitled “The Heart and Stomach of a King,” it is premised on the notion that the virgin queen, Elizabeth I, must have been “a lover of women” because “once having blessed the ruler above her” (I meant to invoke what I took to be the usual response to heterosexual satisfaction), she would have been unfitted to perform her own acts of rule.
Some time after losing my own virginity (it seems so much more a process than a single act, but in any event, it was eventually accomplished), I found out that being on top enhanced my pleasure markedly.
I had my first orgasm in the choir loft of Lake Forest Park Unitarian Church, on the northern outskirts of Seattle. I’d just turned seventeen and was about to graduate from high school. As so often happened in those days, we were making love in company—paired monogamously enough, yet plunged into the atmosphere of an orgy. It was the second night of a Fed conference. Sasha and I were in a sleeping bag, Terwilliger and Annie next to us. Sasha had come once already that night and now entered me as I lay on my stomach. He reached his hand underneath and massaged between my legs, moving dreamily, in no hurry.
At first I was only going along with it. Then, suddenly, I was there.
“Did you come?” he whispered, after, “or only come close?”
I knew it was an ambition of his for this to happen before I left for college. I’d been telling him it didn’t really matter, that I enjoyed the things we did anyway. “I came,” I said. It was somehow a very private moment. I felt gratitude, but not to Sasha, exactly. I experienced no sensation of defeat, as I’d supposed the queen would do. Quite possibly I’d modeled her reactions on those of Mailer’s militant Denise Gondelman when bested in bed by the wily narrator of “The Time of Her Time.”
My journals offer abundant evidence of my precocious obsession with sexual authenticity. An entry I wrote soon after joining LRY, inspired by a fleeting crush on Reverend Fava, who counseled me on my problems with my parents and dropped hints about my resemblance to an old girlfriend of his, reflects the concern that my sexual thoughts might have been a figment of my desire to be desired: “it is one thing to fancy oneself in love, which is more or less common to all adolescents, and another to be so bookish that one cannot even have sexual desires, but must fabricate them and pretend they are real. (I know perfectly well I have read enough Freud and Jung to be capable of doing this.)” Later on, as I explored my attractions to women, the concern that these desires might be a mere effect of reading would recur in strikingly similar terms.
Neither at age fifteen nor for many years after did it occur to me to question this division between the supposedly real, legitimate impulses, the pure desires, so to speak, and the presumed impurity of overheated imaginings. I swallowed whole a dubious distinction that seems like common sense because it’s so ubiquitous, so widely reinforced by the paradoxical habit of turning to cultural authorities (elite and vulgar authors, self-help gurus, pornographers, members of the clergy, psychoanalysts, scientists) to explain what “real” desires ought to be. We persist in efforts to square the circle of sex, not merely configuring actions to some ephemeral ideal, but hoping to experience this convergence as the truth of our deepest nature.
The assumption of a split between some deep truth of sex and mere appearances affects men just as much as women. It is implicated, for instance, in the sorry history of efforts to fix an unambiguous border between the so-called normal and abnormal, between hetero- and homosexuality. (Thus Mailer’s “hero” Denise retaliates by informing her hostile lover that his relentless cocksmanship is nothing more than a desperate effort to “run away from the homosexual that is you,” a not implausible supposition if the truth of sex is a hidden truth.)
Yet the assumption that sexual appearances deceive remains crucially inflected by gender. My fifteen-year-old’s anxiety about the degree to which I might be swayed by the desire to be desired is implicitly a question about a feminine sexuality. I am worrying that I’ll simply turn out to be a typical woman of my class and period, my feelings an effect of what other people want. I’m afraid I can’t distinguish between men’s lust and my own. I am hoping against hope that I’ll learn to negotiate the treacherous terrain between object and subject. In my own view, I risk being doubly inauthentic, swayed to “unreal” sexual feeling both by suitors and by books, the latter possibly a special shame for a woman, whom intellect renders freakish under the best of circumstances.
In recent years I’ve speculated that the chronic misery of my high school and college years stemmed partly from my unconscious resistance to becoming a woman on the terms available to me, terms that contradicted my prior vision of myself as independent and competent. Rereading my journals, I’ve confirmed this view in all but one crucial aspect: there was no anesthetic to ease this rite of passage. The shock, the struggle, were completely conscious.
From an entry written on Christmas Day 1965, a week after Sasha tried to kiss me:
Right now I’m reading African Genesis, one of my presents. It has given rise to some terribly gloomy reflections. Before I thought “woman’s role” was conditioned; now it turns out to be even worse—instinctual. That’s awful, but the worst thing is that I sense it in myself. It’s an awful, horrible trap. I’m going to grow up to have a husband and brats. Oh God, now I know how right I was when I said women are whores. “Sexual specialists”; but what I can’t understand is: why did the man’s specialization (territoriality) get involved with art and science and philosophy and women got left as what they are? Maybe George [Fava] has an answer—he’s read the book.
Oh, it’s so awful to feel cut off from the human race, or the only part that matters. It’s not just an idea I got from a book; I’ve felt it before, and the book brought the feeling back. To think that when two males are together (pick the obvious examples, George and Sasha) they think, here’s someone I can communicate with (remember Sasha’s first letter—“. . . For the pure joy of talking and shooting the breeze I prefer boys so far, cause they are more kindred souls and still retain the soul of their sex” (I’m not quite sure what “retain the soul of their sex” means)). And when they talk to me, they think, oh here’s a whore. This is not to implicate men in any way; why shouldn’t they recognize us for what we are. Why does that sex have to be wasted on so many worthless boys? God, I love myself, and I am the individual . . . so why must I now have the bad luck, the underdog’s role. I can’t stand that position.
Remember in On the Road when Dean Moriarty and [Carlo Marx] have intense long conversations and reveal everything? I thought that was magnificent. With whom could I imagine myself doing such a thing? To be sure, not a woman. It would have to be a lover. But notice that in Kerouac it’s always the men exclusively who have the relationships. Some of them are homosexuals (I would be too, in those circumstances—they’re the only ones who love in those books), the rest content themselves with brothels and cheap affairs. (T.E. Lawrence explained Arab homosexuality by saying that the women were nothing, only with a man could there be a “spiritual” as well as physical relationship.) So I’ll never have that, what I want . . .
Both the reader and I are a universe away from this very young writer, who feels so alone, whose self-loathing is so stark, who automatically turns to men and books written by them for help in her predicament, as in a horror story where the fleeing, bloodied victim makes a beeline for the killer’s door. My tour through her old-fashioned gender isolation illustrates a precept central to my adult life: certain problems simply have no individual solutions, can be addressed only when people act politically. There is much that the U.S. women’s movement didn’t cure, much that it hasn’t even tackled—so many kids still drowning, “cut off from the human race.” But for me, for the despairing, furtively hopeful child I was, it did come in time.
When I wrote that Christmas entry, my fate was sealed, and I knew it. T
hough I hadn’t actually crossed the bodily Rubicon, I’d chosen: I wasn’t to be a virgin queen. That very knowledge accounts for the force of my lament, whose pessimism is entirely characteristic.
Yet I soldiered on, and that, too, is typical. Bent on a course that I feared would ruin me, I still felt partly like my sturdy presexual self, the girl whose brain was her fortune, who could be anything. Valiantly I worked my intellect and pen, trying to solve the problem of being a woman.
FOUR
Proverbs of Hell
We have the experience of an I not in the sense of an absolute subjectivity, but indivisibly demolished and remade by the course of time. The unity of either the subject or the object is not a real unity, but a presumptive unity on the horizon of experience.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception
I BROKE UP WITH Sasha by long-distance telephone at the start of my sophomore year at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Throughout my freshman year, while he remained in Bellevue working at a boring job and dealing dope on a modest scale, we’d thought of ourselves as slouching toward matrimony. All the same, I’d obtained from my “dorm mommy”—the older student charged with riding herd on the inmates of my picturesque, ivy-covered residence hall—the name of a gynecologist who would prescribe the Pill, my first reliable contraception. I told myself that it would come in handy when Sasha and I got together over breaks.
Despite my virtuous plans, I soon began to experiment, in ways encouraged by the mores prevalent in my new surroundings. I never got the hang of recreational fucking—just the social maneuvering surrounding it left me feeling invisibly bruised—but I kept hoping to. I considered that it was my right. If men could get their rocks off, why couldn’t I? Thus began a time in my life when sex began to seem like a major way to know the world, to take it in, consume it. (Meanwhile, I would begin keeping a notebook in which I repeatedly copied a caveat from William Blake: “If less than All cannot satisfy Man, More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul.”) So there was Noah, a freshman who hardly ever spoke, but beamed mystically on all and sundry. There was John, a skinny poet, old to still be in college, who talked about my body with a critic’s eye for detail, noting the unusual length of my pubic hair, the buoyancy of breasts pumped up by synthetic hormones. And there was Wes, whose bedside copy of Sex and Racism in America posed a challenge he preferred to leave unspoken, late at night and drunk after a Black Student Union party.
Between my guilt about Sasha and my acute self-consciousness, these transactions were tense and pleasureless for me, yet they seemed like accomplishments. Having slept with one boy, I’d still felt almost virgin. Now that I’d put several casual bedmates between myself and innocence, I could answer a bolder yes to Jimi Hendrix’s famous query: “But first, are you experienced?”
Summer took me home to Bellevue, confession and reconciliation. Sasha I recall as bitter but resigned; quite possibly he himself had “fooled around.” At work he’d made a new fringie friend—a hippie in updated parlance. Sasha and I and Billy and Billy’s wife went camping in the Cascades, dropped acid in an alpine meadow near the tree line, watched geometric patterns form and gently undulate against volcanic rock. I remember driving to Billy’s house, a pretty hovel in the country somewhere down near Mount Rainier, overrun with wild grasses and blackberry vines, with a small dark rapid river bordering the property in back, and wanting to have sex, and prodding Sasha to inquire if we could use the bedroom, and feeling afterward, though nothing was said, that I’d behaved indelicately, that a woman needs be careful how she displays her appetites.
I see us talking in his mother’s kitchen. His parents were away, we had the house to ourselves, we’d smoked a joint and now were fixing something to eat. Or I was fixing it. He was talking about our future: “When we’re married, you’ll be at the sink washing dishes, wearing a skirt, no underwear. I’ll come up and take you from behind.” Did this strike him as a romantic thing to say? I accepted it as a teasing compliment, but felt queasy underneath. So far, my education hadn’t proposed much in the way of an alternative to the career of sexy domesticity that he fantasized for me.
Not until I was back at school and being noticed by a junior named Ansel Geertz, a sociology major and frequenter of the upscale psychedelic scene, did I acknowledge how badly I wanted to cut my tie to Sasha. For some reason, now that I was out in the world (if, indeed, cloistered Reed could be counted as the world), our attachment felt confining in a way it never had when I’d been stuck in my cul-de-sac while he went off on beat adventures.
The fact was that Sasha and I, despite our common disaffection, had never really been on the same trajectory. The first two years I’d known him had been a pretty good time for him. He was living at home, had “wheels,” as he put it, didn’t have to have a job. He numbered among his friends the cream of teen bohemia from Vancouver, B.C., down to Tacoma and points south.
And he had me. Don’t think I haven’t thought of that. I was intelligent and loyal and pliable to a point, but that’s only half the story.
I was drawn to his unhappiness, the irrevocable disappointment that he masked with his trademark sneer and an elliptical speaking style in which immaculate cool met incipient paranoia. It was because of that chance to minister to him (I would put my mouth to the wound, fearlessly, and draw out the poison) that I achieved the intimacy I’d dreamed of.
With certain lovers, the most important ones, I’ve felt a kind of scary expertise, a sense of meeting needs in the way some chemicals do, snapping into receptors awaiting them in the brain. I’ve enjoyed a secret, unseemly confidence that I can do this better than anyone else they’ll ever find. And I’ve known the leeching guilt of breaking the promise—only you—contained in that communion, and thinking afterward, when my ministrations have healed nothing, that sucking wounds is the work of vampires, not angels of mercy.
Sometime in the early eighties, Leslie and I saw The Hunger. It features a beauty named Miriam (played by Catherine Deneuve) who turns out to be a serial lover in vampire’s clothing. Part of her seduction is the promise that her partners will be immortal; in fact they do live a long time by human standards, but eventually succumb to accelerated aging and are stowed away in coffins in her attic, while Miriam carries on with her latest conquest. She visits the remains from time to time (they’re not exactly dead, just in zombielike bad shape) and scatters vague endearments. At last they rise and advance horribly upon her, like proletarians uniting to smite the class enemy.
Instantly, I saw myself in Miriam. And I’ve never forgotten. That silly movie stuck with me as an apt metaphor for something sinister in my practice of passion. Exaggerated, yes, yet somehow recognizable.
But it’s never simple damage that attracts me in the first place. With my first love, I had felt an erotic tug in the direction of social ascent, for in LRY’s little circle of fringie wannabes, being Sasha Grant’s girlfriend was the near equivalent of dating the class president or being pinned by the star quarterback.
After we graduated, Sasha must indeed have felt like the high school athlete whose triumphs are behind him. He’d contrived to flunk his draft physical, via one of those recipes that male adolescents used to trade in the manner of young women exchanging helpful hints on how to provoke a miscarriage. You starved yourself to the point of collapse, then drank gallons of coffee, something like that. For good measure, he admitted to homosexual tendencies. It worked, and he could count himself lucky, his future out from under the cloud of death or exile that fiercely shadowed even middle-class young men (not the group, by and large, that would fill the body bags) through those years of grinding slaughter. But he didn’t seem to be in a celebratory mood. However unenthusiastic he was about further schooling, I knew he envied my admission to a famous “hippie college”—Reed’s image in our circle, despite its stuffy curriculum. Ever since we’d been together he’d been telling me, with the mixed emotions sometimes displayed by uneducated parents toward college-bound childre
n, that I, with my good grades, had a future to consider, and mustn’t blow it on a ne’er-do-well like him.
I read such comments as an oblique reproach: as usual, my intellect was a gender problem. Sasha was hinting that if I really cared for him, I wouldn’t show him up by exercising my flair for the life of the mind, a life he regarded with a painful mixture of yearning and resentment. My old notion that our bargain of romantic sex would allow me to go where the boys went had turned out to have an alarming flip side: Sasha’s woman shouldn’t venture where he couldn’t, or wouldn’t.
His was a subtle appeal, pitched to a frequency to which my feminine training had rendered me keenly sensitive. Ignoring it felt brutal, for I knew he was in trouble. I’d watched him, in a rage, injure himself “by accident”; I’d heard him insist, alarming even his gruff dad, that he liked to do nothing, he liked to think of nothing. So when he grudgingly enrolled in an obscure Midwestern college, I felt relief, diluted with a touch of jealousy at the thought that he’d have a whole new world I wouldn’t know.
I couldn’t acknowledge the fact that I’d outgrown him. I couldn’t bear the wave of pity that washed over me at the thought of our no longer being together. It felt like the murder of innocence, not merely the end of an affair. In a symbolic transformation I’ve begun to analyze only many years later, now that the pattern has surfaced in other relationships, the prospect of our ceasing to be Jan-and-Sasha had come to stand for a range of losses, might-have-beens, and nevermores—the aching fact of loss itself.
I headed back to Reed with our understanding intact. Sasha planned to drive to school in Ohio via the northern route, through the Canadian Rockies, but got arrested at the border when an inspection of his car turned up his stash of marijuana in the trunk.