by Cathy Alter
“If you’ve done your homework,” promised Beck, “you’ll find something miraculous beginning, like the first tiny green crocus shoots emerging from the snowy earth.”
Well, something would definitely be shooting up.
“What’s all this?” said Karl, walking into the bedroom and finding me camped out on the bed, reading the box’s product brochure and running the feather up and down my leg. “Just lie down and enjoy the show,” I smiled, sweeping the feather across his side of the bed.
I squirted a big gob of Love Liquid into my palm and got to work. I straddled his waist and rubbed my hands together to warm up the gel. One of Cosmo’s “Sex Goddess Secrets” was, “They engage in liquid lust.” According to these deified sources, “adding store-bought moisture can boost the sensation, no mater how turned on you are.”
“Yuck,” said Karl as I rubbed his stomach. “This stuff stinks.” I had forgotten he was picky about smells. I couldn’t try any new perfume without first getting his olfactory approval. I distracted him by putting my finger in his mouth and giving him a look like the lead model in the sex goddess article. “Forget about how it smells,” I commanded. “Do you like how this tastes?” I whisper-asked, waiting a beat before adding, “Karl.”
This was the number-one tip from Cosmo’s second sex feature this month, “7 Ways to Make Him Ache for You,” which was aimed at rekindling the fires of the early stages of romance. “As lovey-dovey as pet names make him feel, they still don’t compare to the electrifying rush your man gets when his name crosses your lips,” wrote Colleen Rush.
Karl already knew this tip. He often whispered my name in my ear as he pressed himself closer and tighter. Even though I loved hearing his soft voice filling my head, I had never been much of a talker during sex. I once slept with a guy I had known in college. He had been a minor celebrity on campus for having a recurring role on The Young and the Restless. We reconnected in New York City a few years after graduation, and went out on a couple of dates. When we finally slept together, he narrated his entire performance, Harry Caray–style: “Now I’m putting it in, now I’m taking it out, now I’m putting it back in, and now I’m coming.”
Still, I wanted to say something. I considered sex talk part of the desensitization. “Karl,” I began again, lightly drawing my lubed finger along his lower lip. “Is it good?”
“Oh my god,” he said turning his head, “it tastes like Goo Gone.”
By now, I felt as if a piercing knife was going through my knees. I rolled off him and reached for the spicy oriental love oil. “You should like this,” I said, pointing to the word oriental and giving him a wink. “Karl.”
“What are you planning on doing with that?” He looked concerned.
“Whatever you want, Karl.”
When I unscrewed the cap, the overwhelming smell of Big Red chewing gum burst forth, causing my eyes to water.
“Holy crap,” said Karl, sitting up, “that’s lethal.”
“Don’t you want to know how it tastes?” I knew I was curious.
“What, are you trying to torture me or something?” I hadn’t told Karl about sex month. I figured he’d be pleasantly surprised when I pulled out the kind of tricks I was actually trying to demonstrate at the present moment.
“I wasn’t planning on it,” I said, “But I could, if that’s what you’re into.”
This comment caused us both to crack up. “And what the fuck is this for?” Karl asked, picking up the plume.
“Tickle your ass with a feather?”
“What?”
“I said, ‘Particularly nasty weather.’” This was my father’s favorite joke.
We lay naked on the bed, laughing and sniffing all the Karma Sutra’s foul odors. Why didn’t any of my magazines suggest some hearty guffawing as an aphrodisiac? What about a tip for playing the sexy fool? It was what made my stupendous failure with edible massage cream so much more palatable. Even if I couldn’t wrap my ankles around my ears, I was still flexible enough to realize that getting over past rejections was just another step toward conquering an aftermath of displaced fears.
“Just so you know,” said Karl, aiming the feather under my nose, “I’m a simple guy with simple tastes.”
“And what simple thing would you like to do now?”
“Take a shower and wash this shit off of me.”
Predictably, no one wanted to hear about sex month. When I was concentrating on other months, I was information central for my girlfriends. One night, I had dinner with two sisters from Chicago who spent the entire meal pummeling me with questions about hair products, eye makeup and, of course, men.
“How do I get Andy to listen to me when I talk?” asked Moira, who had just passed the D.C. bar. “I feel like he’s always tuning me out.”
“What about a guy who says he’s ready for a relationship, and then just falls off the face of the earth?” added Moira’s sister Cassie, a stage actress who had recently broken up with a guy who was more in love with his BlackBerry.
My male friends, on the other hand, were completely baffled. One afternoon I visited Glen at his design studio, a second-floor walk-up that displayed his leather goods (or his “lifestyles,” as he referred to them, with a straight face). Glen had conveniently forgotten that we had ever seen each other naked, and I had since acquired a fiancé, which had made the idea of a friendship at least a little possible. Glen was in the middle of trying to sell a hide rug to our friend Jim, a gregarious financial adviser who was moving to London. I entertained them with a synopsis of Cosmo’s Sex Hall of Fame story, explaining the mechanics of moves like the Sit ’n’ Spin and the Lusty Lotus.
“Did you do everything all at once?” wondered Jim. When I informed him that I had only performed a few, one at a time, he interrupted me.
“That’s cheating,” he complained. “You have to do all of them at the same time. Otherwise you’re not really following the article correctly.”
I wondered if Glen recognized his own bust in the Hall of Fame—if, at any point in my raunchy narration, he remembered the night he was being pawed and kneaded, courtesy of the very magazine whose tips I was now using on Karl.
I read something in Self that had a surprising impact on me. In an article about body confidence called “Feel 100% Sexy,” Natasha, a self-proclaimed “big girl,” revealed that “not everyone is going to think I’m sexy, but there’s going to be someone. And I only need to date one really great guy, not a thousand.”
Natasha’s wisdom made me weep. Maybe it was because I was reading her words right before shopping for my wedding dress, and I was feeling blessed to have found my one really great guy. Or maybe it was because I was going shopping with Richard, whose pancreatic cancer had been downgraded, after a series of biopsies and specialists, to pancreatitis, which meant he was going to live (on a diet of bland food that certainly wouldn’t involve my jerk chicken), and I was feeling incredibly thankful and overjoyed in general.
As I got into Richard’s humongous Ford Expedition, I considered what Natasha might find sexy about herself. I imagined her with long, pre-Raphaelite hair, chesty, with an admirable five-inch cleavage. And I thought about my own physical virtues, especially now that I was going to dress them up for my wedding day, which was now nailed down for the end of September. In their Love and Lust column this month, Cosmo’s “Blow-His-Mind Tip” was to “Play Up Your Hottest Asset.” I once asked Karl if he was a leg man, since I thought that compared to the remaining choices, ass and tits, my legs were higher ranking. “I like it all,” he said diplomatically. “But you do have the sexiest back of all time.”
This had been a surprise. Since I never really spent much time looking at myself from that angle (except to check for panty lines), I hadn’t considered the erogenous possibilities back there. I knew I had one dark freckle, like a beauty mark in the middle ( pointed out to me not by a lover, but by a dermatologist). And I could feel the way Karl dragged his fingers again and again down my spine, or
rested his hand on the small of my back as we walked down the aisles of the grocery store. Still, ever since he had pointed out his predilection, I had made extra efforts to expose as much of my nape, shoulder blades, and the V-shaped slope downward—as weather permitted anyway.
“What are we in the market for, pet?” asked Richard while I buckled my seat belt.
“Something that looks just as good coming as going.” He had lost a lot of weight; he looked so fragile sitting behind the wheel, like a kid who’s allowed to sit in the driver’s seat while Daddy pumps the gas. I leaned over and gave him a kiss on his cheek. He smelled like cocoa butter.
Richard and I hit all the fancy stores in Chevy Chase. I wasn’t interested in looking like a bride with a poofy white dress and layers of tulle. I heard my mother’s voice as we stepped into Christian Dior. “I’m getting married,” I told the saleswoman. “What do you have that’s sexy?”
I brought into the fitting room a floor-length pale gray silk charmeuse gown that had so many covered buttons down the left side, I asked Richard to join me. Other than a zillion small buttons, there was no other ornamentation. A modified cowl rested just off my shoulders, and the back draped suggestively low. It was cut on the bias and molded to my body; I was happy I had started exercise month in January.
“Oooh,” said Richard as he secured the last button and took a step back to survey me. “Very Rita Hayworth.”
The dress did have that old Hollywood glamour look and the color was a definite bonus. I knew Joy would appreciate it if my dress weren’t the color of death. And I thought my own mother, who had agreed to help me pay for the dress, would applaud my sophisticated retro taste. She had always imagined me getting married in a vintage white suit and dramatically brimmed hat, which she thought was, for some reason, very Italian.
“Get real,” was what she said when I told her about the $2,600 price tag. I had put the Dior dress on hold while Richard and I hit another store, a small decades-old boutique owned by a real dame named Harriet Kassman. By the end of our day, I had narrowed the competition down to the Dior and another dress, a Bob Mackie–influenced va-va-voom number with a back that dipped all the way to the crack in my ass. “Very red carpet,” proclaimed Richard. It was a pale green floral print, and the bottom was slit all around, like a plastic-flapped curtain at a carwash.
“Come down out of the clouds,” my mother had continued as I tried to argue my case. I didn’t even tell her that the red-carpet dress was $2,950.
“Aren’t any of these places having a sale?” she wondered. I could hear my dad in the background repeating the price of the Dior over and over like a nut in a mental institution.
I told her about another dress I had seen at Kassman’s store, by the same French designer (whom I had never heard of ), with the same stunningly low back. This dress was bolder in color, with fuchsia and pink flowers cascading down the front and silver embroidery at the waist.
“How much?” my mother asked, sounding like she was bartering in the Cairo bazaar.
“I think it was around five hundred.” In revealing the sale price, I knew I had lost the retail battle.
“Could you learn to love the five-hundred-dollar dress?” She sounded like the Godfather. “Could you get behind this dress?”
It did have a nice behind, after all. Karl would enjoy the view—and appreciate my not blowing our honeymoon fund. “I guess so,” I agreed.
“Then hang up with me,” she instructed as forcefully as one of my magazines, “call the store, and charge it.”
It took me a few days to get excited about my wedding dress. Not because I hadn’t learned to love it, as my mother had hoped, but because I realized why I was so hesitant to buy it in the first place. My first wedding dress, a traditional ivory lace, had been on sale. I guess I didn’t want this wedding to be discounted as well. To me, the dress represented how much my marriage to Karl was worth to me. I just didn’t want to feel cheated out of what I finally, FINALLY thought I deserved.
I didn’t want to get my wedding dress off the sale rack because I wanted to do everything differently this time. And that’s why this dress was so tied to sex. Married sex. The only kind I had grown to despise. So much so that I had eventually refused it, slamming my legs shut and making up every excuse in the book until my ex eventually just stopped asking. The thought of sex had sickened me, since by that point in my marriage I was more mother than unfettered wife, and it would have been grossly oedipal. Eventually, I accepted the fact that I had no libido whatsoever, that if I ever wanted children, I’d have to lie back and think of England.
But then, Bruno changed all that. And perhaps that was what made me more grateful to him than I should have been.
And so what would married sex be like with Karl? Would I be casting the die with this marked-down wedding dress, or breaking the mold with the help of Cosmo? In the coming weeks, I tried most of the sex goddess secrets, the biggest hits being:
PUSH THE PEAK
At the moment of climax, incorporate a small but powerful move to heighten the experience. Squeeze his thighs with your hands when you’re on top, kiss him hard, or arch your back so that your breasts thrust up against him in missionary position.
DOUBLE THE PLEASURE
If he’s on top, tug his hair with one hand while kneading his butt with the other.
I actually combined the two and did the thigh grabbing with one hand and the hair pulling with the other. Karl likes to cut his hair close to the head, so it was a little like tugging at sisal carpet, but he seemed to enjoy the two-handed play.
“That was new,” he told me one night, after I “squeezed from within.”
Even though I was proud of myself for taking a few mattress risks, I couldn’t help but think that great sex was about totally letting go. I didn’t want to think about it, plan my attack, or memorize step-by-step instructions like I was preparing for a test in auto shop.
Looking for a different kind of connection, I decided to give Karl the questionnaire found in Glamour’s “The Bedroom Diaries,” where three couples wrote down answers, reprinted in their own handwriting, to a list of inquiries ranging from the frequency of their sex to foreplay techniques and favorite sex accessories.
In a sort of He Said/She Said duel, Jason thinks their sex usually lasts twenty minutes. Karen, using blue felt pen, writes over his answer, “No! It’s longer.”
Pea thinks that she and Monté have sex four times a day. In red pen, Monté writes, “I wish!” and replaces Pea’s 4 with the number 2 and changes day to week.
I was curious to see where Karl’s and my answers overlapped, where they diverged, and where they suggested we didn’t know each other at all.
“I just emailed you some questions,” I told Karl.
He noticed the issue of Glamour on my lap and rolled his eyes. “Oh, no.”
“Come on.” I laughed. All along, Karl had been such a good sport. “I’m going to answer the same questions and then we can compare.”
This seemed to pique his interest. “What are the questions about?”
“Sex.”
“Oh, boy,” he said, heading off to his computer, which was in our bedroom. “I’m going to nail this one.”
I heard his desk chair slide back and the creak of him sitting down. Then, after a few minutes, the rapid clicking of keys.
I sat down at my computer and started typing the way I often journaled—free-form, no self-editing, just a loose, stream-of-conscious mind purge. I’d estimate it took me ten minutes to complete twenty questions.
“Are you almost done?” I called in to Karl.
“No,” he called back.
“What question are you on?”
“Number two.”
He was taking this pretty seriously. I reviewed my own answers to see if I could elaborate on any.
“Now are you almost done?” I had already watched one episode of The Real World: Key West marathon and was about ten minutes into another. “Now what que
stion are you on?”
“Number eight.”
I wondered if I was the guy in the relationship. While Karl was quietly composing sonnets to me in the bedroom, I had barreled through the questions as quickly as possible, with, I was afraid I’d soon learn, even less sentimentality.
Finally, Karl came out of the bedroom and wiped his brow in a display of fine exertion.
“Okay,” he said. “I just emailed you back with my answers.”
As I sat down to read his answers, I was startled by how similar they were to mine. We had even used the same phrases in some instances. Responding to We usually go to bed wearing…, we had both written BIRTHDAY SUITS. We agreed on the frequency of sex (seven times a week), the duration of sex (one hour), our favorite sex accessories (our tongues), and, eerily, our favorite thing to do after sex—SNUGGLE TOGETHER, wrote Karl, UNTIL CATHY GETS UP TO PEE. We had also both had identical answers to You’d never know it by looking at us, but…. Wrote Karl, WE SOMETIMES ACT LIKE STUPID KIDS. Wrote I, WE BEHAVE LIKE A COUPLE OF 9-YEAR-OLDS WHEN NO ONE ELSE IS AROUND.
What struck me even more, though, was seeing myself laid out so exquisitely on the page. Karl followed I love her:… with EVERYTHING. REALLY. I WANT TO EAT MY GIRL UP ALL OVER. I LOVE HER BRAIN, TOO. As far as the sexiest thing I did? GOODNESS KNOWS, he wrote, I GET EXCITED JUST LOOKING AT HER EYES PEEKING OUT OF A MOTORCYCLE HELMET!
Every one of his answers was a little love story. THE RELATIONSHIP HAS TAUGHT ME WHAT HOME IS, began one answer. I SPEND MOST OF MY TIME IN BOXER SHORTS AND BLACK SOCKS [Mmmm. Sexy!]. I’M A CLOSET COUPON CLIPPER AND CATHY LIKES TO WATCH THE REAL WORLD.