by Cathy Alter
“I hope you’re hungry!” I sang, even though I knew he probably wasn’t. There was no need to ask him how he was feeling. “I slaved all day over a hot stove for you.”
“Everything smells delicious, pet,” he said.
We sat down and clinked forks. “Here’s to hoping this is not the last of Cathy’s forays into the kitchen,” toasted Karl.
I sat back and watched them take their first bite. “Mmm, mmm,” they both said, delivering the verdict. Richard winked at me and patted my knee. I smiled at him and took my own taste of the jerk chicken. It didn’t take long before my mouth was on fire. I turned to Karl and saw that sweat was dripping down his face. I turned back to Richard and saw that he had since drained his glass of ginger ale.
“Oh shit,” I said. “It’s too spicy.”
Tears were now streaming out of Karl’s eyes, but he kept on eating, mopping his face with one hand and feeding himself with the other.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I just started laughing.
“Should we call out for pizza?” Karl said, and began to cough. “Fuck!” he coughed. “I think I’m burping up flames.”
Richard, who was now laughing so hard he was hiccupping, held my hand under the table. “I’m sorry,” I said. “This was probably the worst thing I could have made for you.”
“Pet,” he said, heroically picking up his fork, “everything is perfect.”
At that moment, I truly saw the value in learning how to cook, no matter how disastrous the results. It was the reason we were all sitting here together, laughing and holding hands. I was amazed that such a small gesture could provide me, at least for this one brief moment, with so much fullness.
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Booty Calls
karl was definitely pro–cooking month. He informed me that I was less neurotic when I used the magazines for productive endeavors—to him, “anything that doesn’t have to do with feeding into women’s insecurities about how all men are evil cheaters.” If Karl was satisfied with my new skills in the kitchen, I was about to deliver a one-two punch and knock his socks off as I took my act into the bedroom.
Which begged the question: with sex-on-the-brain magazines like Cosmo flashing me in the face month after month, why was I continuing to demurely sidestep the elephant in the boudoir?
Bad knees, I supposed. They were what kept me from any activity that required bending, squatting, or lunging. My knees were also the reason I avoided most of the positions depicted in Cosmo, especially the ones with “Cowgirl” in the title.
But ultimately, I think I spent the prior months attending to other business before, ahem, getting down to business because, contrary to what a hankering for cubicle sex suggested, I was actually shy. Past relationships, the good ones, all shared one curious paradox: the more I trusted and loved someone, the more repressed I got. Let me explain. I think I’d make a great one-night stand. I’d go as crazy as I wanted—wax dripping, spanking, role playing—because I’d never have to see that person again. In a way, Bruno was just a string of one-night stands, a disastrous basis for a love affair. I did things with him that I had never done with anyone else (sex in the hallway of my apartment building comes to mind) and will never do again. Our relationship, which was based on recklessness instead of being grounded in normal activities like laundry and actual conversation, was completely unsustainable.
But with someone who really mattered, a man whom I imagined was in for the long haul, a man like Karl, I was going to have to hold conversations as mundane as our monthly budget in between all of the dirty talk. This was a hard concept to wrap my mind around. As of yet, I hadn’t figured out a way to successfully marry my virgin/whore routine. And I thought Karl deserved to have a dirty slut in his bed every once in a while.
Just the other night, Karl had asked me, postcoital, if I still enjoyed sex.
“Is there something I’m doing to suggest that I don’t?” I questioned, even though I had just spent most of our love-making focused on what I was going to wear to work the next day.
“No.” He sighed. “You just seem tired, that’s all.”
He was right, of course. Early on in our relationship, I took pleasure counting the frequency of how often we had sex—we averaged around four times a night. Which had rendered me a different kind of tired. Lately, I was the kind of tired that presented itself as lazy.
It was time to spice things up. But truth was, I was extremely uncomfortable with the idea of receiving my carnal education from a magazine like Marie Claire, whose survey this month revealed that nearly half of their readers (45 percent) would rather have sex with their favorite celebrity than win a Nobel Prize. ( What about sex with Linus Pauling?) The thought of relying on Cosmo was even more distressing. I had already made the mistake of appropriating one of their moves way back when I was desperate to make Glen, the cowhide guy from next door, fall in love with me.
I believe the article was called “Find His Seven Secret Pleasure Triggers.” According to Cosmo, the region just above the bow of his lips was a hotbed of pleasure. Ditto the pathway along his jawline, the outer area of his nipple, and the inside of his thigh. But with Glen, my particular area of concern was the region just north of his package.
Glen had always been a bit of a Pesci, a term my friends and I reserved for guys who, à la Joe Pesci in Casino, manhandled a woman’s head down to their crotch as a helpful hint. But I remembered thinking, as I peeled off Glen’s microfiber boxer-briefs (the only kind he wore), tonight, Cosmo Cathy is in charge.
I also remembered thinking that I had to act quickly. I was afraid Glen would come to his senses and wonder what I was doing poking around on his belly trying to locate, through a haze of bourbon, the “feel-good minefield,” which Cosmo described as a narrow strip of skin between his hip crease and just above his pubic hair.
“Make like a cat,” I recalled, spreading my palm over the center of Glen’s groin, just between his hipbones. I imagined Raymond, my adoring cat, kneading his favorite blanket. I wasn’t really sure whether to pull my fingers in a horizontal or vertical motion. So I tried it both ways. As I was concentrating on my inner kitty, I felt one of Glen’s hands brush against my, uh, paw. I took it as a sign of encouragement. Until he did it again. But I was undeterred. This was one of Cosmo’s 101 best sex moves of all time, after all. So I continued doing my pawing and even added in a bit of the Pesci. It was the equivalent of simultaneously patting my head and rubbing my stomach. After a few minutes, Glen reached down, picked up my hand, and placed it on the bed next to his thigh. When I wrongly assumed that he, in awe of my catlike prowess, just wanted to hold the hand of a sex goddess, I just switched to my other hand and resumed pawing.
“Can you not do that?” Glen called down from the headboard. “It’s really irritating.”
Remembering the sting of Glen’s critique made me hesitant to pick up the same playbook that had once steered me so off course. I wasn’t so game on being a cat or a cowgirl—but I wasn’t so sure I was happy just rooting for myself either. I was just getting to know myself outside of the bedroom. Who I was between the sheets was even more of a mystery to me.
It’s been clearly established that my mother contributed both positively and usually negatively to my physical and emotional sense of self. But I cannot blame her for doing any damage to my sexual identity. As far back as I can remember, she was a lusty role model. She once told me that when she was a little girl, she overheard her parents, my heavenly grandparents, having sex. Instead of being as repulsed as I was by the mental image, she admitted that she couldn’t wait to start having sex for herself because it sounded like so much fun. ( In turn, when my five-year-old brother asked what making love felt like, she calmly replied, “It feels like having your back scratched,” a sensation he could easily understand. “That’s what I thought,” he said, shrugging.)
In seventh grade, when I was struggling with a home-ec sewing project, I asked her if she knew how to tie a French knot. “No,
” she candidly replied, “but I know how to French kiss.”
In ninth grade she encouraged me, already close to six feet tall, to dress in tight jeans and to go braless. When we went shopping for my prom dress, she asked the saleswoman at Lord & Taylor if she had “anything sexy for my daughter.”
Regardless of her own sexual enlightenment, I remained quaintly in the dark. For a long time, I thought kissing was sex. And when a boy in my advanced placement English class posited that I was frigid, I had to ask my mother the definition of the word. ( I’m pretty sure my classmate didn’t know what it meant either.) My mother was horrified that someone would call me that and assured me I wasn’t—a kindness for which I have never thanked her. And when I told her, on the eve of leaving for freshman year at college, that my friends and I had made a pact to remain virgins until our wedding nights, she laughed her head off and said, “I give it one semester.” ( It actually took three.)
My mother’s openness and somewhat relaxed ideas about my virginity did nothing to unlock my legs. Her words were of little solace compared to what the boys were saying about me. And it was their cruel and incisive language that I appropriated as my own. In elementary school, I overheard some older boys talking about me. “She has a nice body,” said the ringleader, a popular boy with dark hair and a puka bead necklace, “but her face is nothing much.” The other boys all nodded in agreement. “Yeah,” they said. “Nice body but ugly face.” (At summer camp the following year, another boy would sign my autograph book with, “You have one of the most interesting faces I’ve ever seen.”)
The poor reviews continued to roll in. In college, a year after my mother predicted, I lost my virginity to a guy on my hall, an eerily quiet coke fiend named Phil whose nightly head-butting parties left him with a swollen forehead and a pair of black eyes. A week after my deflowering, I was sitting at his desk doing homework when I noticed a note Phil had scribbled down on the corner of his desk mat. It read, “Just one month at college and all I have to show for it is a painful blow job and a bony fuck.” It would take me another year to screw up the courage for oral sex, so I knew who I was in Phil’s dry assessment.
There was the guy who told me I kissed like a fish, the boyfriend who told me I had no ass, another who told me I had interesting breasts (again, that horrible word!), and another, a Brit, who, every time I initiated sex, called me a “horny little bitch.” Delivered in his clipped tone, this was not a compliment.
The labels stuck. Like the layers of wallpaper found in old homes, if I managed to peel one off, another era of tender pain was just underneath.
Normally, historical dismantling would have been the perfect project for Dr. Oskar. He and I could have gotten in there with our scrapers and gone to town stripping away all the man-made perceptions that had colored and influenced my own hang-ups. But ever since I ruined his halibut lunch by telling him about my ex-husband’s midnight snack of boogers, I had viewed Dr. Oskar as a bit of a shrinking violet. Maybe it was unfair of me to think that Dr. Oskar couldn’t handle a little sex talk without blushing himself on fire, but for the life of me, I just couldn’t imagine sitting down on his couch, staring him in the eyes, and announcing, “It’s time I fucked my fiancé like a porn star. If only I wasn’t so scared.”
Or maybe I was the one who couldn’t handle the embarrassment. Dr. Oskar probably had way more perverse patients than me. The loud talker with the time slot ahead of me clearly LOVED FUCKING, since that was usually what he was yelling about when I arrived for my sessions. And once I heard a woman with clear transference issues adopt a flirtatious widdle-girl voice. “Oh, wrats,” she said before exiting his office, “is it time to go alweddy?” Perhaps at this point in his career, Dr. Oskar had heard it all and found even the most extreme fetish to be pretty run-of-the-mill stuff.
Luckily, magazines made easy confessors. This month in O, Martha Beck, creator of the Index of Dread and my patron saint of camping, was back with another saving grace. In “Here’s Looking at You, Kid!” Beck offered a much-needed course in self-appreciation. When we derive our sense of self-worth from someone else, (“turning it over to some longed-for or long-suffering lover,” wrote Beck) eventually that person—whether a friend, a parent, or a partner—will disappoint us. “Realizing that we’ve surrendered our self-esteem to others and choosing to be accountable for our own self-worth would mean absorbing the terrifying fact that we’re always vulnerable to pain and loss.” But good looks, according to Beck, were not lodged in physical appearance. Rather, “it’s the mind that mixes up beauty and acceptability, that misperceives the cause of emotional pain, and sends us down the class IV rapids of self-loathing.”
I wasn’t the only one going to bed with Karl. My interesting boobs, bony body, and fish lips were also tangled up in the sheets. “If you’ve ever let yourself feel lovable and lovely, only to be deeply hurt, you may see accepting your body as a setup for severe emotional wounding,” explained Beck. “After all, you let down your guard before and look what happened! You’ll never go there again.”
But of course, I had to go there again. And again and again, if Karl had anything to say about it. The first step, wrote Beck, was trusting that I was lovable. “I’m not asking you to do it all the time, or even in large doses,” Beck assured. “I’d just like you to experiment with a new mind-set, a few minutes at a time.”
Getting it into my head involved taking out a sheet of paper, providing written examples of six of her listed scenarios, and pushing my mind to “attack its own protective strategy of self-denigration.” Beck suggested this would take approximately ten minutes. But after spending nearly half an hour racking my brain and trying to come up with examples of occasions when someone loved or praised you, even though you didn’t look perfect, I was convinced my regression would take a lot longer.
Slowly, though, after I had closed my eyes for a while and envisioned myself time-traveling through life’s high points, I remembered one time last month, when I was on my off-day for shampooing, when a coworker saw me in the bathroom and remarked, “Your hair looks so pretty today.” When she complimented me, I immediately zoomed back in time to when my grandfather was alive. Whenever he’d see me, he too, would admire my hair. “Did you wash it?” he’d always ask. When I was in seventh grade, I went through a brief period when I protested all forms of soap and water, and I think my grandfather was relieved to see evidence that I was actually bathing.
Obviously, people through time must have told me I looked nice even when I was feeling fat or had a huge zit on my chin, and I was sure Karl had told me he loved me on days when I was curled in the fetal position with period cramps, but I couldn’t come up with any more concrete examples. “If you’re deeply mired in self-loathing,” wrote Beck, “it might take you a while to come up with examples for a given topic.” But I didn’t think poor self-esteem had anything to do with my failure to come up with more anecdotal evidence. It had more to do with why Madonna refused to read any of her own press. She was afraid that she’d only remember the negative reviews.
For her next question, Beck wanted me to come up with examples of people you’ve loved even though they didn’t look perfect.
I thought about my ex-husband and his hundred-pound weight gain. Did I stop loving him because he had gotten fat? No, I didn’t think so, although I still asked myself whether his bloated appearance wasn’t a contributing factor to our demise. It had created a barrier, after all. But there were other walls, invisible ones that were more imposing and unforgiving. And when Karl, who knew of the weight gain, asked if I’d kick him to the curb if he ever got fat, I didn’t think twice before insisting, “No, of course not.” Come to think of it, I had seen Karl looking pretty grisly, hair matted down after being in his helmet or sitting on our couch in a stained wife beater, contentedly clipping away at his toenails. “I love you,” I had told him when he pushed his pile of discarded nails into my open palm for disposal.
The next one was easy: stunning people wh
o act so awful. I wrote “Bruno” down before I even finished reading they begin to appear ugly. I remembered his first day at work, when he shook my hand and I swooned. Or the early stages of our sexcapades, when I looked at him and announced (so stupidly), “You have forever ruined my attraction to any other man.” In the last months, though, I had begun to appraise him as coolly as a livestock buyer. “His eyes bug out,” I noted, “and his chin recedes like a failed aristocracy.”
I began to have fun with this exercise and came up with famous people who are dazzling despite physical imperfection. Anjelica Huston popped into my head. So did, inexplicably, Stephen Hawking.
By the time I was done with the last one—women who are so perfectly at ease with themselves that they set a new cultural standard of goddessness ( hmmm, I wonder what Beck’s subliminal message was here, considering she writes for Oprah)—I was ready to drop some emotional shields. Going through Beck’s exercise didn’t help me create a new self-concept; her questions just made me realize that I had been already building, over the past year, a pretty decent place for myself. Maybe the construction would never be completely finished, there was always work to do, but what I had to offer, inside and out, was solid enough.
Karl was in for a treat. The final step in Beck’s exercise was to take my new and improved self out for a test drive. “Go out in public and pretend for, say, half an hour that you’re lovely enough to be loved,” Beck suggested. “No, go to a coffee shop and have a tasty beverage.”
Instead, I opened up my Kama Sutra Bedside Box and pulled out an array of edible treats. A few months previously, while I was working on a story for Self about the advanced measures a woman might employ to get herself in the mood for love, a PR person had mailed me a small wooden box whose outside had been faux-finished to resemble a Victorian jewelry chest with chubby-kneed cherubs and purple garlands decorating every available surface. Inside, however, was a whole other story. There were trial-size tubes of Love Liquid, a pot of Vanilla Crème Massage Cream, edible Honey Dust with its own feather applicator (a white plume that looked like the one that was used to sign the Declaration of Independence), and something called Oriental Oil of Love, which according to the label promised to be spicy and tingly. It was a sample case that a traveling salesman might bring to a floozy convention.