I wonder why the hell I was so shy. Because I had loved my father and I was afraid if I felt anything for anybody they would be taken away from me? You can do all that analyzing, and how do you know if it applies or not? But I was shy before he was killed, anyway. I was always shy.
Except in my daydreams. Except in the people I became when I read a book or saw a movie. I was beautiful and dynamic and brilliant in those fantasies. And possessed of remarkable verbal agility.
Sometimes even now I think of positively brilliant things to say. They’re not always lines that would steal a mark from Dorothy Parker, but they’re pretty good. But I don’t say them. I hear them in my head and keep my mouth shut.
I had four dates in high school. It’s surprising I had any at all. I slouched when I walked, my complexion was poor, and I had small breasts. And I was incapable of carrying on a conversation. The boys who asked me out were total losers, which figures. When they asked me out, I managed to tell myself that they were really bright and tall and attractive and crazy about me, and then we would go to a dance or party or whatever it was that the guy absolutely had to have a date for, and we would stand around with nothing to say to each other, and the guy would be short and dumb and pimply and boring, and that was high school. Two of them kissed me good night. I was kissed twice in four years of high school.
In college at least I was more presentable. I stopped slouching. I was as tall as I am now when I was fourteen, and I undoubtedly slouched to avoid looking like a freak, and of course managed to look like a freak with poor posture. By the time I was in college I wasn’t taller than everybody else anymore, and my posture improved. And by that time I had discovered masturbation, and that took care of my pimples. It’s supposed to be the other way around, isn’t it?
My breasts were still small, though. And still are now, and I’m afraid they always will be.
I had a couple of dates in college. I necked a few times. Nothing very heavy. Kissing and touching. I thought necking was very interesting, but I never got excited, never felt any pleasure except a certain amount of ego-gratification out of the discovery that someone thought I was worth necking with.
Then at the end of my third year I met Michael, and a month after we both graduated we were married.
It’s hard for me to remember how that happened. Not that the memory went away or that I’m blocking it. I remember what happened but don’t understand how. We were never in love. I don’t even know if we thought we were in love. I don’t think either of us really thought so.
We never really knew each other at all.
A line I read somewhere: “two straws clutching at each other.” A perfect description of Michael and me. Each of us was the first person who ever paid any attention to the other. We were both virgins, both social outcasts, both uptight silent types. We had two consecutive classes together the second semester of our third year. We had been in the same classes before, I knew his name, he knew my name, we would nod to each other, and now with two classes together we would walk together from one classroom to the other. We must have done that twenty times before either of us said more than hello.
And then we got so we would talk occasionally, but we still hardly ever said anything, either of us. But it became a regular thing. We never put it into words, but it was understood that we would always take that little walk together.
I started working Mike into my fantasies. My finger became his penis. My finger had played a great variety of penises by this time, but never that of anyone I actually knew, actually spoke to. A giant step forward, huh?
The day he asked me out I was astonished. I never expected it. We walked together as usual, and sat through the second class, and as we were leaving he came up to me and asked me all in a rush if I would like to go to a folk-music concert with him that night. I nodded or something, and he said he would pick me up, and I started to give my address, and he blushed and said he knew where I lived, and then he turned and walked away very quickly.
We went to the concert. Hardly talked at all going or coming home. I was convinced I had screwed things up again, and when we were almost to my door he cleared his throat and said it was really great that we were so relaxed with each other, that we could have a good time together without having to prove anything by talking all the time.
So we went out together for the next year. We did a lot of talking about how similar we were and how right we were for each other. And each of us kept completely private during those conversations and during everything else. I don’t know when we both knew that we were going to get married after graduation. I guess we knew it for a long time before it ever came up in conversation.
Do you know something? You could take all of these incidents from our courtship and make a movie out of them, and it would be a genuinely touching story, two ugly ducklings finding each other and both of them turning into swans and getting married and living happily ever after. It would make a beautiful movie, and it would be a convincing one, and you wouldn’t have to change a detail.
And everybody would believe the happy ending.
• • •
The marriage dragged on for two years before ending formally in divorce. It seems to have been unsuccessful from the start. I have known of relationships very much like this one which did not lead to marriage, and which consequently were able to endure indefinitely, with the partners using an excuse—religious differences, economic difficulties, an invalid parent—to keep marriage permanently postponed. In several instances the parties have gone on dating each other exclusively for as long as twenty years; I suspect that if they had ever gotten married, they would have been lucky to last two years.
For Michael and Katherine, marriage meant they were together every night instead of once in a while. It meant the substitution of an unsatisfactory sexual relationship for a temporarily frustrating one. It meant, indeed, that they could no longer look forward to a vast improvement in their relationship as a result of marriage. Their relationship was not the heaven they had hoped for, but very much the same thing they had had for the past year, and on top of everything else, they had to spend all this interminable time together, time they had previously been accustomed to spending in comfortable solitude.
• • •
For a long time I tended to blame it all on sex. On his inability to satisfy me, on my frigidity, on some general incompatibility. On the fact that we were both so inexperienced. We were virgins when we got married. We had used the excuse that it was too inconvenient—we both lived with our parents, he didn’t have a car, there was no place to go. Of course, the real reason we waited is that we were both terrified.
But we excited each other a great deal when we petted. A couple of times I almost came. And I was able to feel passionate. After the wedding, after the fiasco of consummation, after we were screwing on a vaguely regular basis, I hardly ever got excited. When I did, it didn’t last, and it didn’t lead anywhere.
I wonder how similar we were. I wonder if he used to masturbate all the time, or if I was the only one.
Masturbating. I wish they had a nice word for it. It sounds like the way I always used to think of it, all furtive and unpleasant and slightly soiled. Though God knows there must have been something about it I liked . . .
In Such Good Friends, the narrator wrote how she used to masturbate after she made love with her husband. Or when he wasn’t home. It sounded very mechanical, as though she was doing certain manual things in a certain way in order to have an orgasm as quickly and, I don’t know, as bloodlessly as possible. With me masturbation was always as much mental and emotional as it was physical. I would fantasize. I would run a little drama through my mind. In fact, the way I discovered masturbation was that I had gotten into the habit of having sex fantasies, usually elaborating afterward on an erotic scene I had read in a novel, improvising on it and building it in my mind. And after I had been doing this for a time and enjoying it, there was one time that I was very excited, and I guess inches
from orgasm, and I touched myself and it felt good and I touched myself more and came.
I never really stopped doing this. I didn’t become a maniac about it, rushing into the lavatory between classes or going through any of that Portnoy routine. It was something I did once a night, lying in bed under the covers, part of the ritual of going to sleep. Wash hands and face, brush teeth, get in bed, turn off the light, play with myself—that’s an even worse expression than “masturbate”—and then go to sleep.
As far as my feelings about it were concerned, I guess the word is “ambivalent.” Of course, I felt guilty about it. Doesn’t everybody?
But I didn’t think guilty about it. I don’t know if you get the distinction or not. As you know, I read a lot about sex. As far back as the last two years in high school I read a great deal about sex, everything from good realistic novels to paperback pornography to nonfiction studies. We had a line of paperbacks in the store, and I would borrow anything I wanted and put it back on the rack when I was through with it. My mother never paid any attention to what I read. She never paid any attention to anything.
So I knew that masturbation was normal, and that everybody did it, and that it wasn’t physically harmful, and that, if anything, it was more harmful to want to do it and not do it. Still, there was this feeling that it was a little dirty. And also the usual line was that masturbation was normal, but that excessive masturbation was unhealthy or abnormal or I don’t know what. How much was excessive? It’s like the joke about the kid who heard it would make you go blind, and he decided to stop when he needed glasses . . .
I never stopped. Throughout going out with Michael. And after the wedding, when I took it for granted that I would stop, I found out I still wanted to do it. So I tried not to want to, which never gets you anywhere, and then I just tried not to do it, and eventually I would give in, and in no time at all it was a nightly thing again, just the same as before. Except that now the guilt was total. Here I had a perfectly good husband to make love to, and I was getting no satisfaction from him, and getting the same old satisfaction from my hands.
I really hate to keep going into all this. It was a bad marriage, and we were both bad for each other, and virgins shouldn’t be allowed to get married; nobody that age should be allowed to get married, and the only thing halfway good about the whole thing was that we didn’t have any children. It would have been so easy to do that routine of trying to save the marriage by having a child. If Michael had suggested it, I probably would have gone along with it, because I felt so guilty about my own role, so much the failure. Thank God he never came up with the suggestion.
• • •
After the break-up of her marriage, Katherine resumed living with her mother. She had been living and working in Manhattan previously; now, to save herself a subway ride, she took a less demanding and less rewarding job as a typist and filing clerk in an insurance agency in Brooklyn. On several widely spaced occasions she went at night to midtown Manhattan and drank in several bars until she picked up a man and had swift anonymous sex with him. Each occasion yielded considerably more enjoyment than her marital relations, and once she reached orgasm, a feat in which she took considerable pride. Yet on that night, as on the others, she masturbated immediately upon her return home.
While her mother lived, Katherine’s life settled more and more into a rather rigid pattern of fantasy and frustration. On the one hand, she became increasingly resigned to a barren, loveless, unstimulating life of dull work and permanent loneliness. On the other hand, her fantasy life played an ever more prominent role. She never attempted to increase the frequency of her masturbation, limiting herself to one self-induced orgasm per night. “But I would actually try to hold it off as long as possible. When I felt myself on the verge of coming I would slow down and change the rhythm, so that I could start the build-up all over again. I imagined everything. Wild things that I couldn’t possibly do, that I would never want to do, that would turn me off in real life but were enjoyable in fantasy. Torturing and being tortured, murder orgies. I used to worry that I had a potential for this sort of thing within me, or otherwise I wouldn’t get off on it in fantasy. But I’m sure that’s not the case. That sort of thing is exciting to me only as long as it is very definitely not real.”
In some of the fantasies she was a participant. More often she was not, and the performers were strangers. In her mind she created their personalities, wrote their dialogue, directed their actions and reactions. One female character became an obvious alter ego, recurring frequently. The girl, Susan, was bisexual and polymorphously perverse, capable of obtaining full sexual enjoyment from any sort of sexual act, and always ready for more. Susan, of course, was everything that Katherine was not, and everything that Katherine yearned to be.
• • •
Susan—I can still picture her, she’s still someone I know—was a tawny blond with tits like cantaloupes and devastating legs, and she could pick up a soda straw with her snatch. And of course she was brilliant and outgoing and warm, and after she had fucked men into a coma, they fell totally in love with her and wanted her to stay with them forever, but Susan didn’t stay with anybody.
I started believing in reincarnation about that time. Did quite a bit of reading and decided that souls had to go somewhere because of laws of conservation of matter and energy, so it was logical to believe they went into other bodies. I think people believe in reincarnation not so much because they’re afraid of dying as because they want the chance to be somebody else. According to the usual line, you can’t remember anything from one incarnation to the next, so what would it matter if it was the same soul or not? I think the hook is the desire to believe you’ll have a chance to put on a new personality. Reincarnation is the ultimate new start everyone wants and nobody ever gets.
I wanted to come back as Susan, naturally.
I don’t know what would have happened if my mother hadn’t died when she did. It’s horrible to be grateful for the death of a parent, but I can’t help it. Maybe I would have started to reach out on my own anyway. Maybe, but maybe not. If she lived another twenty years and I stayed in that apartment another twenty years—God!
She had a heart attack one afternoon and died in the hospital that night. If she had recovered and gone on living as an invalid, I would have had the perfect excuse to stay in my shell forever. No way out . . .
I paid the funeral expenses and sold the store for not much more than the funeral cost. But there was insurance. Twenty thousand dollars. A complete surprise to me.
I moved to the Village, a studio walkup a few blocks from here. I got a job very similar to my Brooklyn job in a real-estate and insurance office on Bleecker Street. I put the money in a savings and loan and forgot about it.
Almost everything sexually active that happened took place after I joined the therapy group, but I’m not sure how much credit the group can take for it, because I was heading in that direction anyway. The first step, if you can call it that, was that I started going to Times Square and buying pornography. Books, for the most part, and sometimes sets of photographs and those magazines from Denmark. Some of those stores also sell sex devices, and I wanted desperately to buy a dildo and didn’t dare. And a couple of times I dropped quarters into those idiotic machines and watched peep shows. But this was very difficult for me, even buying books was difficult, because all of the customers are always men, and I felt very uncomfortable.
Then shortly after I started therapy I bought an issue of Screw at a newsstand here in the Village. There was a lot about the paper that was just stupidly offensive—there still is—but I got off on it in a big way, especially the personal experience articles and the personal ads. The articles were the most honest writing about sex I had ever read outside of a few serious novels. In pornography, you know, everything is perfect. Nobody ever has bad breath or pimples or can’t get it up. These articles were real, and that made them both more and less exciting.
The ads were my major fan
tasy trip. Couples seeking couples, guys seeking guys or gals, people looking for all sorts of freaky sex. And that was before they stopped their policy of printing phone numbers, so all you had to do was pick up the phone and make a call.
I thought about that, day in and day out. I read every issue over and over for weeks, and each time I would pick out the ads I really wanted to answer, and I never made the calls. I always put it off. I had reached the point where I told myself I would definitely do it sooner or later, but I kept deciding on later instead of sooner.
Finally—and I couldn’t swear that it was or wasn’t a direct result of group therapy—I made a phone call. The ad was something like “Discreet gentle male guarantees satisfaction to any woman. Will do whatever you want.” And a phone number.
So I called him. It sounds so simple, and it should have been, but I dialed his number halfway through a dozen times before I finally forced myself to go through with it. He was very nice on the phone, said he was in his forties and divorced and his main source of pleasure was giving pleasure to women, especially those who had a tough time sexually. I arranged to come up to his place, and then when the time came, I chickened out.
An hour and a half after I was supposed to be there I decided it was unfair to leave him on the hook like that, so I called him, fully expecting him to tear my head off over the phone. But instead he was completely understanding.
“What’s the matter?” he said. “Your husband come home unexpectedly?”
I had told him I had a husband.
It was the kindness and patience that hit me. I said, “I don’t have a husband. I’m a completely screwed-up phony and I didn’t have the guts to come over.” And then I started crying like an idiot.
Beyond Group Sex: Doing Their Own Thing (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 4