What I did like was his thighs, stocked with muscle, and the light hair barely visible beneath the collar of his shirt. What I liked was that gap in his teeth. He paid the check. And after that, when he caught my hand in a public park on the way back to our cars, when he leaned over and gently kissed me, when he asked me where I would like to go, tilting his head, something trembled inside me. I took him to my house.
Back in the wash, night settles. Owls. The flutish, descending song of canyon wrens. Stars brightening. The rock ledge, radiating heat. Bats flutter over the wash. Some bird makes a kind of vibrating sound, high-pitched, almost electronic. Then my phone buzzes. It is a picture of his erect cock.
There are two stories here, one in which I get wet in a canyon and lie down on the warm rock and slip my fingers into my swollen self, or one in which I watch the owls. Both stories are true, although perhaps both can be exaggerations too—stories I tell to characterize myself for different audiences. For between those afternoons in Lexi’s finished basement and this buzzing cell phone, I have been many different people.
The owls, in some way, represent the life I wanted as a young woman, a sort of quiet existence, romantic and velvet-dark, in which sex was a component of love. In which sex was making love, unfurling quietly and slowly, with meaning, on thin air mattresses beneath the stars.
How does one go from this sweetness to the woman who fucks married men she does not much like? I can only say that first it went the other way. How did the cybering girl become so sweet, locked down? Culture had its way with me. The girl who loved cybersex did not go anywhere but inside, hidden behind heavy layers. For years I could sense sex moving inside me, giant and hot, pulsing against the gates, and I did my best to put it away—through judgment, through restriction, using No as my measure of success. This, I know, is an old story. But what is buried sears its way through. If I go back to the beginning, none of this is surprising.
We assume these things do not go together, the owls and the fingers wandering south, but as Sallie Tisdale writes, “the planet itself is laden with sex, marbled with my physical and psychic responses to its parts, made out of my relationship with its skin.” She says, “How we are rooted to the earth through our bodies determines how we see other bodies, and ultimately the earth itself.” What I think Tisdale means is that the romantic pleasure I take from this dusk—the depth of my presence, the sharpness of the details I take in—is not at all different from the way I enjoy my own body, the bodies of others. Which is to say, I am no less romantic than I used to be—only more openly other things too.
On the hike out, I walk with my headlamp off, fumbling by starlight. Even with my bad knee I can pick my way through the sand over the rock. In the side pocket of my hiking pack, my phone buzzes. He came.
I was not raised by swingers or prostitutes but by midwestern Methodists sincere in the idea that sex is appropriate only in the context of marriage—or at the very least love. To be fair, my parents, married for more than thirty years, are the kind of couple who make this seem easy. Growing up, my parents kissed in front of us. They spoke gently. They laughed. They compromised, each of their lives fashioned in balance with the other’s. As a teenager, a friend of mine—whose parents fought bitterly—confessed that my parents alone were her model for a healthy love.
Still, I have begun to wonder whether my parents’ devotion to the sincerity of sex was perhaps just what they believed to be the correct parenting line. No doubt it was an ethics supposed to prevent my own pain and confusion. Perhaps like any good parents, they hoped to usher their daughters, three of them in total, through young adulthood without the kind of mess that sex can inspire—a stew of self-esteem concerns, infection, and potential pregnancy. For this, I cannot fault them.
But as a grown-up I’ve begun to hear stories, and I’m realizing that even my parents likely diverged from love-based sex at some point. Why, then, steer me so intensely toward the idea of abstinence until marriage? Were their own sexual experiences outside wedlock negative? Have they, afterward, categorized them negatively because they feel like they’re supposed to, while attending to the memories privately with nostalgia or a wry amusement? I wonder how many of us are pretending we fit, holding publicly to conventional moral standards while pursuing (or stumbling into) our true interests. As Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá discuss in Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships, if we all pretend we don’t have—or want—sex outside the common narrative, the common narrative remains: as a thick, muscled force that makes people question their desires, their “normalcy.” How damaging this is depends on the way someone experiences such secret desires, the way they judge their own ability (or inability) to deny such cravings. Years ago I carried a toxic shame, spitting hot judgment at others out of my anger toward myself. While of course there are those who truly want what’s considered “normal,” those people are not me. And so it is critical to me that I honor these desires, that I fumble my way toward them. I learn how this works; I find my way into strange spaces with strange men. I set my own boundaries, I check my intuition. And in the end I get myself quite happily fucked.
The wife changes her mind. We meet halfway, at the Shell station beside the main junction of a tiny town. When I pull up next to his red car, he looks over, grins. We meet in the space between our cars and kiss like we love each other. He taps his pelvis into mine.
“There’s law enforcement all over this town,” he says when he pulls back. “Border patrol, sheriffs . . . could actually be hard to find a spot.”
“We could try for a pullout somewhere,” I said. “These are rural roads.”
“Could,” he says. He shrugs. Then he glances into the back of my car. “Oh, your seat’s even down,” he says. “Your car may be dirty, but it’s got more room. You have a blanket.”
“I do indeed have a blanket,” I say. I grabbed it because I had a feeling this would happen.
“Dirty, but with character,” he nods.
We head south in my station wagon, around the bend from the pizza place, through the bulk of the vineyards. The grasslands are shining a sharp white in this dry season, in this late-afternoon light. He’s telling me why he’s hung over this time. It seems he’s always hung over. He tells me about all the military guys razzing this one other guy, who’s into Jesus, who’s into monogamy. They were telling him he should find some sluts with them tonight, because there’s things you can do with those sluts that you wouldn’t want to do with your wife because you’d degrade her. They were kidding, he says—they just wanted a rise out of this guy—but I kind of hate him for even joking like this. The words roll a little too easily off his tongue. The Jesus guy, he said, left with two “morbidly obese” women. “Someone’s gonna have a guilt hangover tomorrow,” he sings. I laugh hollowly. I focus on the road.
If I were true to one part of myself, I couldn’t be true to another part. Which is to say, if I want to fuck this man in five minutes, it’s a good idea to be amenable.
We turn onto a few dirt roads, thinking we’ll pull over, but they deliver us to someone’s house. We turn back. We try again. We coast one rise after another, trying to calculate the likelihood of traffic. The car chatters over washboard. The main thing is, we don’t want to get arrested.
He is my first married man, or the first I have actually fucked. The others, professors and postdocs in the earth sciences, caught me at a particularly tender time, when I craved partnership and love too much. We went on long, meandering dates, sometimes awkward, in which I drank Irish coffees late at night and tried to decide whether or not there was chemistry as the men scooted closer to me near the bar. And if there was chemistry, I had to ask myself if I could swallow the fact of the wives. Sometimes I could not.
You understand, to connect to them too much was dangerous. They were married men. I build dikes around the edges of my own desire, to direct the waters: these suitable candidates for love, these not. The ideal was always that
someone would be Such A Good Friend while also containing some disqualifying factor. Something to steady the heart. The ideal was that once the dynamics were established, I wouldn’t have to worry about things growing in the wrong direction.
More often, though, I allowed myself to sleep with men for whom I felt just the right level of contempt. Some combination of flaring arousal and disgust. Men with whom I could chat enough, men with whom I could laugh enough. Men about whom I could say, “Of course not!” to my friends, and still fuck the shit out of them.
Contempt is not a word we like. Contempt means disregard for, disrespect for. Contempt finds one beneath consideration. Contempt finds one deserving of scorn.
To act out of contempt initially inspired self-loathing, a warm, sickening rush of shame. Even as someone leaned in to kiss me, I was dismissing them, and this seemed unforgivable, I think because I bought into the idea that there are only two kinds of relationships in this world: those grounded in a sort of perfect love and those that are not (that should, accordingly, be disbanded immediately, or hastily cleaned up, atoned for).
Now I see that even my friendships contain moments of distance. I do not mean to say that the contempt we contain, which flares in us, need always be visible to others or acted upon, but I do know that its existence can be of use. The kind of contempt I am praising is but a sliver, a powerful small thing, which holds a space, preventing inappropriate enmeshment. (Too much contempt, of course, and one simply does not call.)
These men too dismiss me. If our relationship is to be just sex, they necessarily must acknowledge what I am not. Contempt is a marker of the kind of situation where such a delicate balance is possible. If not the foggy risk of love, the creeping risk of hate. In a body such as mine—insistent, hungry, clear in its requests—if I am to have sex more than once a year, I will inevitably be confronting one or the other of these potential imbalances.
What is easy to forget is the way bodies grow tenderness. We like to think that humans arrive at a kiss only when tenderness is already present, grown from emotional encounters or situational closeness. But in fact a kiss can grow tenderness, as though from a seed. Do not confuse the presence of contempt with the absence of kindness. With men like this one, especially. The tenderness of the body calms my reactivity toward him. It draws a kind of sweetness out of us, it builds an intimacy from our very tissues. From the touch of mouth to neck, from hand to hip. We lie together afterward, leg over leg, and laugh about small things, relieved, drawn into mutual sweetness.
We fuck with a tender contempt. Or we fuck tenderly, and contempt mediates.
We climb over a rise, and then, what I want to see: a Forest Service sign. I have a right, like any American, to fuck on public land. I pull the car over. Its front faces a ranch with a big two-story cabin-style house. He seems nervous. I am thrilled.
I’d pictured us making out outside the car in the wind, to build more heat, but he wants to get right into the hatchback. I acquiesce, stepping out of my cowboy boots, spreading the blanket onto the scratchy gray floor of the folded-down seats.
I lean down, to slip open his buttons with both hands and mouth.
He fucks me in the hatchback. It has to be a hundred degrees in there, the sun pouring through the windows. Sweat pools in gray drops on his forehead. Only one falls on me before he brushes them away with the back of his hand. Our bodies slide around on each other. I hold his hips against me. Finally his face clenches. It is over. The windows of the car are fogged. “Like Titanic,” I say, moving like I’ll run my hand down the wet window, and he rolls his eyes.
“If you’d said that during, I’d have killed you.”
We crack the doors. Fresh, cool wind pours over our bodies. We are dry in moments.
“It’s so nice not to have to put in extra effort,” he says as we drive back to town. And I laugh.
“Yes,” I say. He puts his hand on my thigh.
I could have used an orgasm, but I don’t actually care. I’m leaving the country at the end of the week; his training will end, and he’ll move to Seattle. I suspect we’ll never see each other again. I love that this does not concern me.
On the way home, I buy jalapeño chips at the Shell station and crunch loudly on them while I drive. I lick my fingers and absorb the salt. I feel delicious. I feel amazing. The whole valley is coated in perfect desert light, the high rolling hills covered in a white sheen.
GEORGE STEINER
The Eleventh Commandment
FROM Salmagundi
The eminent logician W. V. O. Quine invoked “blameless intuitions.” Such are the best I can offer.
Hostility to Jews, or Jew-hatred, is as ancient as Judaism itself. The oppression of Jews, attempts to ostracize them from prevailing society long predate the analysis in Josephus’s Contra Apionem. Contempt, hatred, violence against Jews and Jewish communities never cease. Can we spell out some of their invariants?
The origins of monotheism are manifold and hybrid. They direct us to the solar cult in the Egypt of Akhnaton; to the ironic speculations of Xenophanes (if cattle had a God he would wear horns). Diversities of monotheism can be made out at diverse points and legacies in the ancient Middle East, in Iranian pieties. Within Judaism the adoption of any strict monotheism is gradual and marked by mutinous reversions to archaic pluralities. There are “sons of God” and manifest traces of polytheism in the Psalms. Local, tribal sanctuaries long persist. The Prophets engage them in fierce polemics. Relapse into idol-worship and pagan sacrificial rites is a perennial threat.
Paradoxically, it is with the loss of secular power and the destruction of the Temple that a rigorous monotheism asserts itself. This assertion entails a singular, unsparing exigence of abstraction. It posits a deity which prohibits any iconic figuration. There is to be no imagining of God in any incarnate or mimetic forms. His internalized presence is as blank as the desert air. Ethical imperatives are not conceptualizations of divinity, but footnotes to His inconceivable “thereness.” He “is what he is,” insubstantial as is the fire in the Bush.
These prescriptions challenge, indeed contradict, deep-lying, as it were, organic impulses and needs in the human psyche. Common man feeds on representations, as Schopenhauer taught; understanding seeks out the concrete. The imperious negations in Jewish monotheism have been known to elicit repulsion, indeed terror, in the gentile. There is something radically human in Pompey’s revulsion when he confronts the total emptiness of the Holy of Holies. Christological trinitarianism, the teeming Christian iconographies of the God-family, the legions of saints and graphic relics embody a vehement dissent from authentic monotheism. They people the imagined reaches of eternity. As Nietzsche noted, the pagan world and its Hellenistic-Christian derivatives crowd nature—the nymphs in the brook, the elves in the forest—with benign or demonic presences. These are busy in the everyday. Judaism leaves man almost monstrously alone in the face, not to be imaged or conceived of, of a Deity, of an absent immediacy which has had no personalized meeting with God since Baruch.
One asks: do certain constants in Jewish moral and intellectual history relate to this vexing apprenticeship of abstraction, of abstention from the iconic? These are eminently manifest in Spinoza. In the wholly disproportionate contribution of Jewish thinkers to modern mathematical logic, to set-theory, to mastery in chess. Do they have affinities to the development of atonal and twelve-tone music? Schoenberg’s idiom seems peculiarly apposite to the central definition of the Almighty in Moses und Aron: “unimaginable, inconceivable, invisible.” Consider Kafka’s resort to the silence of the sirens or Wittgenstein’s celebrated injunction at the close of the Tractatus invoking a necessary silence in respect “of that of which one cannot speak.”
The hell of the concentration camps defies linguistic means of description and comprehension. The systematic torture and elimination of millions renders somehow obscene the pretense to a verbalized epilogue. Even the mourning which comes closest—that of Paul Celan, of Lanzmann—fal
ls short of the incommensurable. Horror is, or should be, struck speechless. Can one “think” the Shoah, where “thought” inescapably is concomitant with articulation, even entirely inward? There may therefore be contiguities—how could it be otherwise?—between the incommunicable “zero at the bone” which is Auschwitz and the legacy of abstraction, the inspired nihilism at the bitter core of Sinaitic monotheism. Have such contiguities scandalized and provoked?
A second motive of detestation, documented in antiquity, is Judaism’s claim, already Abrahamic, to the status of a “chosen people.” In the liberal West, Jewish fears and profane ecumenism have queried, debated, attenuated the meaning of such divine predilection. Ought it not to signify “a people chosen to suffer,” to be a witness unto God’s universal regard for all men and women? But despite such a pacifying gloss and such apologetic good sense, the archaic postulate of uniqueness, of a neighborhood to God more proximate than that allowed to any other ethnic community, persists. It hammers away beneath a rationalist, even humorous surface (Ronald Knox’s “How odd of God / To choose the Jews”). The claim has never ceased to infuriate non-Jews. In the genesis of Nazism it triggered homicidal imitation and parody. Today the allegories of election are operative in the aspirations to divinely underwritten promises of homecoming and territorial sovereignty instrumental to Zionism. Add to this the tradition whereby the dying Moses asks God that henceforth the divine epiphany should be granted solely to Israelites. Contested by Amos, this plea for uniqueness is reiterated in such apocrypha as the influential Testament of Job. “Let intimacy with transcendence be ours alone.” An awesome arrogance can be inferred.
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