Sex and Death in the American Novel

by Martinez, Sarah

  He leaned in and slid his cool hand under mine. “I am not your brother, Vivi.”

  “I know that,” I said, frustrated that I couldn't articulate myself, “but he made himself miserable. He was so unhappy and it was so pointless.”

  “Not to him, I would imagine.”

  I sat for a moment, liking the feel of my hand in his, warming in the glow of the evening, two glasses of wine, roast beef and apple pie for dessert.

  “I guess what I mean, what I'm saying badly, is that I want you to be happy…that matters to me,” I let that sink in, then said, “Life is really short you know.”

  He laughed then and released my hand. “I know it. Do you know it?”

  “Is that a dig at my choice of subject matter?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry. That came out wrong.”

  “I mean that life is too short to spend it working on something that isn't any fun. How many hours a day do you work?” I asked.

  “Probably a good eight.” He paused. “Not that I am actually writing the whole time. Since my parents died—”

  “They're both dead? I mean gone…I thought it was just your mother?”

  He squeezed my hand and removed it from the table. “It has been a long time. I am okay now. Really. My father died a few years after my mother. I was in college. That was probably when I really got serious.”

  “But you've been publishing since you were seventeen I thought.”

  “Yes. That. Well…”

  Here my brother's voice intruded for the first time in a while. He was like Dad…and then my brother's awed impressed voice in the car on the way to see Jasper in Montana, back when he was just an idol—another wordy moron. He's been writing since he was seventeen. He published in the New Yorker when he was nineteen.

  “What I mean is that I didn't need to get lost anywhere, for a long time, like you do in a novel, until my father passed. Probably losing my mother got me started. She was always encouraging me anyway, reading to me like we talked about before.” He paused and gave an uncertain look.

  “Go on,” I said. “Now I finally get to hear about you.”

  “She taught high school English. Grammar, reading, these were all important to her, sort of like how church is important to some people. Literature was everything to my mother.”

  “Sounds like my house,” I said. He scooted his chair closer toward the table and I leaned in. “Back to your parents though. I want to hear this.”

  He tipped his head first to the right and then the left. “Not much more really. Every time someone died that was close to me, I think I slipped deeper into my work, deeper into trying to capture something about what it means to be alive.” He made fists in the air to annunciate his words.

  “Yes! I mean, I get that, but why do you always scoot past the important stuff?”

  “Do I?” He crossed his arms.

  “Well, not in real life, but in your books.” I was starting to feel like I did when I was on the hot seat before my father, like I only had a minute left before he lost patience and stopped talking.

  “What do you mean?” Jasper gave me the same patient look, like he was waiting for a light bulb to go off.

  “Well, like you hardly cover sex at all. Sex is a huge part of what it means to be human. If you're not having it, you're thinking about it…” I sat on my hands.

  “I am?” A wide smile accompanied this remark, and soft gentle eyes.

  “…or a lot of people are anyway. My thought is that in the books that are fun to read, all the big topics are covered. The Seven Deadlies you know? Why is it you and my brother and all these other bigwigs tread over the interesting stuff, and bury it behind all these overwritten descriptions?”

  Those same patient eyes. “Is that what I've been doing all this time?”

  I drummed the table with my fingers. “Shit. I am fucking this all up.”

  Jasper's forehead furrowed. He looked around the room and put his hands across the table again. “Listen. I know my work and your work and your brother's work are like this big elephant in the room, at least to you. I made peace with who I have decided to be a long time ago.” As if I hadn't. A pebble-sized knot of resentment stuck in my throat; I shoved it down and pasted the most contrite look on my face I could muster.

  I shook my head and tried to speak.

  He continued. “I think I know what you're saying, but listen. To me, the experiences that make up being human are more here,” he pointed to his temple, “and here,” he pointed to his heart, “not focused in only one place where I only spend a microscopic amount of my time.”

  I made a show of shaking my head sadly. “Truly tragic. Real talent wasted all these years.” When his expression didn't change I pointed my eyes toward the ceiling, as if to say I conceded the point, at least for now.

  Jasper leaned back in his chair. “When my mother died, I was trying to explain what it felt like to be me. To be lonely in that particular way. When that piece got published in a small paper in Omaha, my father started really pushing me. At first probably I was a novelty, with my age and all. Then I took that momentum and really started to see what I could do. People expect boys, especially teenage boys, to be these mindless idiots, focused only on sex and fighting. I wanted to prove that wrong, and as soon as I started looking around, there was too much to examine. Why people engage in so much hypocrisy without having the slightest inkling that they are doing it? Wars, corporate conspiracies, genocides…all these are very specific and easy-to-spot instances, but what about the small things?”

  “Like what?”

  Jasper twisted up his mouth and pursed his lips before he began again. “Well, here's one instance. A woman that lived across the street from us was this major environmentalist. She harped on the importance of recycling long before anyone else in town was doing it. She had no problem, however, spraying her yard with all sorts of pesticides and fertilizers, substances that no doubt went straight into the water system and contaminated the water table.”

  “So? She was inconsistent?” Again, he was making my point. Boring.

  “Something about that bugged me. I couldn't not write about that.”

  He took a sip of his coffee. I put my elbows on the table and rested my head in my crossed hands, and he gave a look like he was pleading for something before he began again. “So a few months later it hit me. She thought she was doing the right things. I am convinced of that. So was it laziness, self-centeredness, what? How can a person be that committed to something and be that inconsistent? Miss what's right in front of their face? After I noticed that, I started to see it everywhere. I thought if I could identify the thing, whatever it was that makes us miss entire rational parts of our thinking, feeling lives, maybe I could explain something no one had ever addressed before, at least no one I had read. See, for me, all your Seven Deadlies had been—and still are—covered over and over by people who are much better at it than I am. I felt like I had an insight that was all my own and I ran with it to see how far I could go.”

  I smiled. Yes. I knew what that was like. “Now that you put it like that.” I wanted him to ask more, probe further, maybe I was ready to tell him about Boy in a Box, but right then he shook his head and said, “Anyway. I am boring the hell out of you, aren't I?”

  “Okay, here's another thing,” I said, tapping my fingers on the tabletop. “Since I've met you I feel this mixture of wanting to impress you, wanting to make you impress me and not knowing how to be. Very new to me. I don't think I've been this thrown off by a guy since Eric told me he was gay.”

  He made a show of being serious, narrowing his eyes, nodding and steepling his impossibly long fingers beneath his chin. He sat like that waiting for me to go on.

  “So I just don't know how to be while I'm here. It was easier when I was at home. I had my own work schedule, my own time to myself. Are you going to work in the morning?”

  “Probably should.”

  “Okay, then I will too.”

&n
bsp; He gave me a puzzled look then and I sipped my coffee, wondering myself what I was getting at.

  Though Tristan had already explained that Jasper avoided television, I still had to ask, “So you don't even keep one, like, in the closet?”

  He looked confused for a moment, then understanding dawned and he shrugged. “Why is that so weird?”

  “I don't know anyone who doesn't own a TV. I know plenty who have sworn off of it, watch it in fuzzy signals when they eat dinner, use it mainly for DVDs, but nobody who just doesn't have one.”

  “I did that for a while, I craved it. I watched more than I should have, I didn't read. I got depressed.”

  “Depressed?”

  He gave me a look then, like he knew I wouldn't understand. I swept my mind of any thoughts, fixed my eyes on the space between his eyes, and stopped talking, making a point of listening to what he said. He fiddled with his spoon, his thumb along the underside of the scoop, his forefinger tracing the top edge. For a second he looked like Superman getting ready to tell Lois Lane he was really the hunk she was in love with, like he had something up his sleeve but was also afraid of what was going to come of it.

  “It is depressing…I don't want you to take this like I am lecturing.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, everything on TV is presented from one person's limited view. You have someone else telling you what's funny with the laugh tracks, what's sad with the music they play in the background, and what's important with the silences. It's all so canned. To enjoy any of it I had to turn the critical part of my mind off.”

  “I do that with books all the time,” I said.

  He smiled, twisted his head. “Though even in a badly written book there is usually more going on than just the surface story. You also get the details that present the author's world to you, and in that you get to really connect to another mind. If you don't get one piece, there is something else. What I hate is how our entire culture, as it has been influenced by television, only presents a very commercial version of life, as if that's all there is, as if there is only one type of person in the world, or worth watching.”

  “You make excellent points.” I took his hand and traced one long blue vein. “Still I can't imagine life without my Dexter or Battlestar Galactica.”

  “This TV discussion reminds me of something you are always talking about.” He leaned forward, working his forefinger and thumb around his saucer, rotating it one way and another, watching it, like the dish was dictating his words to him. His words were directed toward the table when he began to speak.

  “It's like you, Vivi.” His eyes met mine.

  “What is like me?”

  “I really want to say this but I'm afraid you won't take it the right way.”

  He took a gulp of coffee.

  I laughed. “What could be so bad?”

  “It's not, it's just sometimes I say things that make women…sometimes I say stupid things.”

  “Okay, we're in the Zone.” I motioned from behind me a few inches, and swept my hands over his general area. “For the next five minutes, anything you say will be as if you are speaking to a stranger. I won't judge. How's that?”

  “You know that I watch you when we're together right? When you…you know…” He took another sip of coffee, cleared his throat and plowed on. “There's this look you get, this way you…and when you are dancing. There's this look on your face, as if you're just gone, and so beautiful, so totally at one with something I couldn't even describe. Your face just glows, you're in a place I wish I could be. Your chest, it's perfect, and your ass, it's like, well, you have this shape, like a violin, or something better even.”

  I started gnawing on my thumbnail, but stopped in the interest of not looking like I was affected.

  “Now if I were to put you on TV, all of that would be gone. All we would see is how you don't fit some ideal, of…do you see what I mean?”

  I nodded again, finally understanding his concern.

  “And if someone would be able to try to show the rapture in your expression, the pure beauty, the way you enchant, well…it couldn't be done. Words barely suffice, but at least come closer.”

  I stuck my bottom lip out. “So you're saying I'm not pretty like Audrey Hepburn or one of those Law and Order babes?”

  He leaned back with a miserable look on his face.

  I held his eyes for a second and said, “You really think that's all I would care about, the way you think I look naked?”

  “I don't know…” His face changed from hopeful to afraid until he settled on stony.

  I smiled. “I guess I can dig it,” and fluttered my hands in his general area. “You are so funny. My skin's so much thicker than you give me credit for.”

  He looked frustrated again. “But that's just it, there shouldn't be anything you would be upset about. See if there weren't so many images…so many expectations…fake breasts…that weren't so screwed up, my saying that wouldn't matter and it would be all good.”

  “You're right.” I said this, marveling that he could understand so much about people and be such a tight-ass in so many other ways.

  “So why do you only spend a few lines on the shape of your female characters? Only a line or two about the act of sex itself? You obviously put thought into the subject…”

  “I leave that up to the reader.” He readjusted himself. “And when two people are together, it is a private thing. When I read it as a reader, I feel weird about knowing how one thing affects a person, it's like I'm in their skin.”

  “What about when you describe the experience of eating a handful of blueberries?”

  He stared. “That is different.”

  I called on my years of watching my father. I didn't say anything, just let him sink, still waiting for an answer, letting him get it together in his own time.

  “It's a different experience…”

  I opened my hand and brought it down on the table for emphasis. “Yes. Sex, like eating a blueberry and every other aspect of being human, involves all the senses if done right—to show how one experience is similar, how it may be different. I can describe the taste: bitter, sweet, possibly chemical if I haven't washed the berries. My hands: sticky and dark stained. The tiny little seeds that get caught in my teeth, under my tongue. There isn't much smell with a blueberry but there's something…maybe fresh and earthy. I can describe how the feeling of hunger may dissipate, or get stronger depending on how many I eat and how hungry I was, how empty my belly was.”

  “Yes, and I will know what it feels like to eat a blueberry.”

  “Don't you already know that?” I asked him.

  “Of course, but it makes me feel less alone, less isolated to know that someone else has had the same experience, the same feeling. And having someone describe it so well,” here he gave me a smile I had to admit made me glow inside, “makes me grateful for the fact that you will take the time to share it with me.”

  I lifted my eyebrows and fixed him with the best blank look I could. Wasn't it obvious?

  He shook his head then. “You know what I mean.”

  “Do I?” I said, sounding just like my mother, though she would be making his arguments. I had perfected this argument with her.

  He grinned and said, “Is it enough to just hint at the graphic stuff. I know where you're going from there. There's no reason to draw it out or dwell on the details. I like it better when the author knows how to build up to it, and when things start to happen they let the curtain fall as it were, leaving the rest up to my imagination. I can use the information the author gave me to go as far or stop, as my mood and inclination dictates. To go into all the description is to cheapen the act.” Here he held up his hands. “In my most humble opinion.”

  “So it would be better just to say I ate a big fat blueberry and then I was full.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Exactly.” He bent over and rolled his hand in the air. “As you like it.”

  We sat and watched each other for
a few minutes until I said, “So, I'm shaped like a violin.”

  He leaned over the table, speaking in a low voice, holding my eyes: “Not just any violin, a Lady Tennant Stradivarius.” He broke the gaze, shook his head, looked around for a second, trying to find the right words. “Wait…No… No. Have you ever heard of a del Gesù?” I shook my head. He spoke as if to himself, “Yes, that's better, those are much rarer.” He leaned back, satisfied with himself that he'd gotten his description just right.

  I flashed to my brother's face in the car that night, and I said, “You know what my brother said?”

  Jasper shook his head.

  “Three little lines. He was very impressed that that was all you needed to describe sex.”

  Jasper shook his head. “I'm sure it was more than that,” but he smiled at the compliment. We both knew my brother was right.

  He held my gaze for long minute before he said in a softer voice, “To look at one, you might not know that, but to play it, to listen to it, you would be sure.”

  I sighed and we went home.

  I lay awake long after he went to sleep, my mind turning in the direction of the safety of home, only this time, I wasn't in a hurry. A bright sliver of light fell across the bed, and in its glow I studied the details of his face. I watched his eyes move back and forth under his eyelids, counted the downy hairs on his nose, pointed almost too much, but as it was, it fit his face, his nostrils opened wider at intervals, and his mouth dropped open every few minutes, then closed again, as if he was aware of himself even as he slept. I lay my head on the pillow and for a moment I studied the curvature of his ear, the ridges and dents. For a while I listened to him breathe, steady intakes and outflows. At one point he turned toward me and absently rubbed his face along the top of my arm. He'd been smooth earlier in the evening; now there was the slightest scratch on my skin. I did not move away from it; I became very still, hoping not to wake him. When his breathing became even again, I rested my chin on the side of his head and lost myself in the sounds that drifted in through the window; car alarms going off, people hollering or laughing, and slamming doors.