He is not talking on his cordless phone, or his mobile, neither is she, he does not trust phones that are not wired, he says, but when she asks him why he says, I’ll tell you sometime, not on the phone. He was once a bureaucrat, does he know something or is he just bizarrely careful? Paranoid, even.
But now they are talking about an article in a magazine he gave her, called ‘The Rehabilitation of Onan’. It’s actually to begin with about myths of masturbation. She thinks these myths are one of the most tragic and cruel tricks ever played on children. The article says it all started in 1710 when a quack called Bekker wrote a tract about it, Onania, saying that the consequences of masturbation were retarded growth, priapism, gonorrhoea, fainting fits, epilepsy, consumption, loss of erection (priapism and loss of erection? Both at once?), premature ejaculation and infertility. Women were only likely to suffer hysteria, imbecility and barrenness.
It’s terrible, she says, people have got enough brains not to believe such rubbish, in the sense that they don’t stop doing it, but they still believe a bit, so they’re worried about it, they do it but it makes them miserable, when it ought to be a pleasure.
The article mentions Tissot, a Swiss doctor, who reckoned that the body is in a state of continuous decay, drastically exacerbated by any kind of activity, and that sexual activity is by far the worst kind. The loss of one ounce of sperm is equal to the loss of forty ounces of blood, Tissot said. So semen must not be wasted.
People still have that sort of idea, he says. Look at all that business about footballers and cricketers. Should they have sex the night before the big match? Or should they save themselves?
I think sex re-energises you, not the opposite, she says. This is one of her regrets; she misses the pleasure, the abandon, of making love to him, and as well she loved the sense of being full of energy that it gave her. Young, and light of foot. This makes her think of one of her favourite lines, which always fills her eyes with tears: So light a foot will ne’er wear out the everlasting flint . . . Juliet, who will die soon, running to be married.
Hereditary insanity is another one of the side effects of masturbation. No problem for Clare, she is well past menopause, no more danger of passing this on to her children. But will she be safe? The logic being, lunatics often masturbate, so masturbation will turn you into a lunatic.
Of course it won’t. She can see logic’s clunking failure in that proposition. And she knows how rational she is. Sadly, bleakly rational, she has no choice, given the way her mind works. But her body is still rebellious. And her heart aches. It’s full of grief, for all her lost lovers, but most for her lost husband. She wonders if she will ever get not to think of him for a whole day. A whole hour. She misses the way sex made grief splendid.
Tissot recommended clean living, healthy exercise, light meals, cold baths, as the best antidote to masturbation.
The ideal of the English public school, the former lover says.
The writer of the article has dug up some weird facts. A German called Vogel suggesting infibulation of the foreskin. (And we think it is only women who have suffered genital mutilation, she says. What about being circumcised, he says, who isn’t.) Some English fathers fitting their sons with small penis cages, a kind of boyish chastity belt. Sometimes lining the cages with spikes. And there was an apparatus which would ring a bell in the kitchen if the youth had an erection in the night.
I wonder what would happen then, she says.
Maybe the under-parlourmaid was sent up to do something about it.
You wish, she says.
I bet the lad did. It’s a nice thought, tweeny sent up to relieve the young master.
More like papa with a cane.
Now, the article goes on, the Catholic church has calmed down, masturbation is not such a sin, really. A Vatican spokesman says: We are not saying fine, go ahead and enjoy yourselves. It is still objectively wrong, but subjectively it might not always be sinful.
He gives a delighted shout of laughter. Objectively wrong but not always subjectively sinful. What on earth does it mean?
Isn’t it a casuistry? Typical Vatican.
The next day he rings her again. I’ve found a nice footnote to our masturbation conversation. He always has a reason for ringing.
So have I.
What?
Oliver to whom she writes everything that happens to her including interesting conversations though she is a bit elliptical about what is going on—someone is in love with me, she said, and he replied, I am not surprised—Oliver has told her that in gaols in Western Australia prisoners were made to wear great rough leather gloves, thumbless mittens, to stop them playing with themselves.
Isn’t that gruesome, she says.
She hears the hiss of his breath. A pained laugh. Maybe they got to like it.
Makes me think of scrubbing your nipples with a nail brush when you’re pregnant.
Good god. Why?
Supposed to toughen them up for breast feeding.
Did it?
Dunno. But it was certainly horrible. I think it was one of those things that were fashionable for a while. Awful con tricks, but just about everybody falls prey to that sort of sadistic fashion at some time—like all the cholesterol dieting stuff. A bit earlier, a bit later, you’d have missed it. Just hope you don’t die of it in the middle.
Mm. What doesn’t destroy us makes us strong. Now, listen to this. This is Voltaire on the subject. It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity . . .
Vice of chastity! I like that.
. . . and it’s a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan and girls to the waning of their colour.
I must remember to get some blusher.
I haven’t noticed you losing your rosy colour. Of course, he says, in his didactic mode (she always falls in love with men who like to practise their pedagogy on her, she likes listening to them, though she doesn’t always take the trouble to remember what they say, so they can tell her again), of course, he says, and Voltaire doesn’t seem too aware of it, in the Bible the sin of Onan isn’t actually about masturbation.
He spilt his seed upon the ground, she says. Isn’t his sin the frustration of conception, isn’t that how the Catholic church interprets it?
Yes, they do, he says, but . . .
Terrible useless method, she says. I got pregnant once, doing that. And horrible for both the people concerned, I love it when . . . I love being come inside, and it’s so hard to pull out in time, and dangerous.
He could come in your mouth.
Why do men always want to come in your mouth?
Why not?
Ha. Anyway, I was good at getting pregnant. Very fertile. A bit scary. But I was also a bit prone to miscarriages. Had one that time. Do you know, she says, I’ve been pregnant five times? Five times, and two children. Imagine if I had five children.
Would you like that?
Yes. Easy to say now, I suppose. But I think a lot of children would be nice.
Now she and this lover are triply infertile: her tubes tied, his vasectomy, her age.
Interesting, isn’t it, she says, you had a vasectomy, I had my tubes tied. Neither of us asked it of our spouses. We submitted to the knives.
Shows what good and generous people we are.
Or not the ones with the power.
You’re a bit preoccupied with power, aren’t you. I don’t think I was ever powerless.
Weren’t you? People thought I wasn’t, but I don’t know. Not wanting to do things, talk about things . . . there’s great strength in that. He hated the thought of a vasectomy, couldn’t bear it, so I got done instead.
How old were you?
Thirty-eight. Old enough, I suppose.
I was twenty-nine.
It certainly was good not to have to worry about pills and foams and all that junk. Remembering to make sure you had them. Though of course it did fill you with desire. I mean, thinking you shouldn’t, becaus
e you didn’t have the necessary, and how you longed to. She sighs, recalling a night travelling in France, when she was using something called Delfen foam (silly spritely name) and she’d run out, how overwhelmed they were, how sweet the longing, how sharp and poignant the fear. Not another baby, not now, not at their age.
Anyway, she says, you were telling me about Onan.
Oh yes. Well. It’s really about Old Testament marriage laws. Onan had an older brother, who was a bad lot, so God killed him. As was God’s wont in those days. According to these laws Onan was supposed to take his brother’s wife and father children on her, for his brother’s sake, sort of surrogate descendants for his brother. And Onan didn’t want to do that, so he spilled his seed on the ground, in order not to impregnate her. God wasn’t too impressed with that either, and killed him as well. But it wasn’t anything to do with masturbation, not unless you think that fucking a woman without intending to make her pregnant is a kind of masturbation.
Hm, she says. She likes the way he can remember these things.
And it’s not even really about contraception, it’s about that certain law that Onan broke.
Of course, she says, the wily old Catholic church can always cite scripture for its purpose, even if it’s slightly twisted scripture.
She gets out her Bible concordance, which was a present from her first lover, so she tells people. (What sort of contraception did they practise, she asks herself, it’s all so long ago and vague. Withdrawal again, probably, and it must have been just luck that she didn’t get pregnant then. Making love on a cliff above the sea, and never enough time.) Well, the concordance wasn’t really a present, he lent it to her and she never gave it back, he could have been annoyed, but she’s always seen it as a gift from him, and precious, as itself, enjoying its usefulness. And when she writes to Oliver and confesses, he says, I know you have it, I have always been glad that you do.
There are an awful lot of references to seed in Cruden’s Concordance of 1761, all meaning offspring, progeny, descendants, heirs; and prosperity depends on them, so cursing them is a terrible thing. Considering God is so close, and given to slaying, it is this world not the next that needs to be populated. That is what the law is about: population. Not wasting a fertile woman. God is chopping so many of his people off, those left need to keep procreating in this. Onan knows that the seed will not be his, the child will be considered his brother’s child, so when he goes in unto his brother’s wife he spills it—it again—upon the ground.
There is a gloss in the Genesis reference, to the New Testament, where Mark tells the story of the Sadducees questioning Jesus about this kind of law. There were seven brothers, say the Sadducees, the first one married a wife, and died childless, so the next brother took her, and so on. Right down to the seventh. All died. Then the woman died.
An unlucky family, her lover remarks. Seven brothers and all dead. And no children?
Maybe it was the wife that was infertile.
Anyway, this is a story about a trap. Jesus is asked, Therefore, in the Resurrection, whose wife will she be, of the seven?
This question-trap is because the Sadducees don’t believe in the Resurrection.
Jesus’ answer is: Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures nor the power of God. For in the Resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.
Aah, says her lover, her not-lover, does that mean there is no sex in heaven? When sex is the nearest most of us come to bliss on earth. What will heaven offer us that is better?
Foie gras to the sound of trumpets. Oh, she says, you know you don’t believe any of this. You know you only believe in bliss on earth and this is all there is.
I do. But what about you?
I’ve told you. I don’t know. I think we don’t know. That that’s an appropriate way to be. But I don’t believe Geoffrey is just nowhere.
There is his seed . . .
How is that better for him than dying childless? When he was alive it might have comforted him, but if there really is nothing else how is it helping him now?
That’s why we have to live our lives to the full now. Have all the pleasurable experiences we can.
Then come and fuck me, she wants to say.
She says, You know, the cat brought a mouse in the other day. A present. Carrying it in gently in her mouth, through the cat door. Let it go and it ran off, goodness knows where. Useful cat, brings in mice, instead of getting rid of them. Anyway, I thought of that mouse, and me sitting at the word processor, and making coffee in the plunger, and talking on the telephone, and that mouse could have seen me doing all those things and not had the slightest inkling of what any of them meant, could not even begin to see that I was doing them, let alone what they signified. So, maybe, we understand our world no better than that mouse does. We run around in it, survive—the mouse squeaked a terrible squeak of terror, but it was alive and perfectly functioning—but we don’t understand it.
Well, we can certainly believe what gives us comfort.
I’m not saying that for comfort. I’m saying it because it’s a good image of how the world might work.
We’ll never know.
If you’re right, we won’t, she says. But I like to think that death might be some kind of understanding.
You may not like it. You might end up in one of Dante’s circles. In limbo, or worse, down with the adulterous lovers endlessly wailing.
Hell’s an image.
But Dante’s is a very good one.
Remember Manning Clark . . . quoting Dostoevsky . . . saying he wanted to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for.
Some of us think we know.
Hubris, she says.
They have been talking for more than an hour. It is time to stop. Take melancholy leave. He will be late for the dentist. She is sorting letters to give to the National Library under the tax incentives for the arts scheme. Letters and papers, mostly from the eighties, strange to see her life in these second-hand pieces of paper. Cool documents, mostly, rejections, acceptances, requests, invitations. Some a bit more passionate. But mainly the shapes and outward manifestations; her real life is elsewhere.
She should write him a love letter. He is as nervous of words on paper as he is of cordless telephone calls.
the thirsty cat
CLARE WAKES UP IN THE NIGHT and hears the cat lapping a saucer of milk by her bed. Lap, lap, lap, very regularly its rough little tongue rasps against the china saucer. It’s a thirsty little cat, and the saucer must have quite a lot of milk in it, for the sound continues for a long time.
At first she was puzzled by this, for she had left no saucer of milk. Her daughter goes to bed with two glasses of water, one covered, for herself, the other for the cat, who likes to forage her drinks. But Clare never takes water to bed. If she is thirsty she gets up and goes to her bathroom for a drink. So she lay and listened, wondering where the milk could have come from. Until she realised it was not a cat drinking but her bedside clock, ticking.
But even though she now knows that this is what the sound is, still when she lies in bed awake it is the sound of a cat lapping that she hears. And thinks of her life as a saucer of milk, and knows that one day that so comfortably regular greedy little tongue will run out of milk, or perhaps will get tired of lapping, and stop.
not like a loser
WHEN CLARE’S LOVER TOLD HER about existentialism and how its central idea was that the universe was indifferent to humanity, at the very least, if not actively hostile, she objected to this as a world view. But events made her think of changing her mind.
She’d had her share of anguish, she wasn’t denying that. But until recently anguish had been resolved. More or less happily. She knew that her novels had moderately bleak endings; quite happy, but not entirely so. Happy is the word that keeps occurring, because happy is what endings are supposed to be. One she finished by allowing some characters a happy beginning. Everyone deserv
es at least one, she said. But endings aren’t usually happy. The real end of the novel is death, as it is the real end of life. Who was it said all life is a preparation for death? The novel that ended with a happy beginning was a hundred-year novel, so a lot of people died, sometimes in ways that are described as tragically, but the overall feeling was of death as something natural, normal, part of the way that life goes on. But that is death, the end of life, whereas her novels end in contingency, in compromise. In characters becoming sadder as well as wiser, and you have to hope that the wiseness makes up for the sadness. They tend to learn that the price is higher than they might have thought, and that you can’t escape paying it. In one novel she had intended to kill off all her main characters, either that or turn them into vegetables, which is a kind of living death, but they dug in their toes and wouldn’t let her do it. She often explained in writing workshops how it was they dug their toes in; they simply made the whole novel stop. She couldn’t get it moving until she offered some other fates, then they all quite gladly went along with her. To ends that were much less glamorous, exciting, final, than death and idiocy, needing to make the most of small kindnesses, and affection, and the momentary beauty of lemons in a blue bowl.
And yet despite all this she managed to believe that the universe was benign. She realises with a shiver of embarrassment that she had somehow supposed that if she behaved well the world would treat her well. Though maybe she shouldn’t feel so embarrassed, the world had treated her well, and she couldn’t think of anything she’d done that was actually morally wrong, well, not anything major, although if she thought of things that she’d failed to do she could find cause for reproach there. So there did seem to be a kind of correlation: behave well and you will be treated well.
But then she found herself paying the price of her husband’s early death. Of course you could say that it was Geoffrey who’d paid that, but if he was right that was just a moment of annihilation, waited for indeed but still in life and knowing love, while she is paying the price of his death over and over. When she thought of the cost of this she began to wonder about benign.
The Fog Garden Page 8