I often told myself, when doubtful of my “personhood,” that if our positions were reversed and Janet had suffered catastrophic injury, I would still love her, still want to touch her, fuck her, still want to be her lover no matter what. And yet . . . I was so changed, and much more doubtful of my existential being than Janet seemed to be. “I am your physical lover, and I want to be your physical lover.” Janet said that to me, exactly that, many times, but still . . .
So she climbed into bed with me, right there in room 120. She closed the door, walked around to the side of the bed, put down the rail, climbed in, and lay down behind me. I was positioned on my side, toward the chair she had been sitting in. She put her arm around me, her hand on my breast, and pressed her body along the length of mine. And there we lay. Because there was every chance of the door opening and someone walking in, we didn’t fall asleep together, not because we were ashamed of being “caught,” but because Janet didn’t want to put the staff in an awkward position. We were both quite sure that getting into bed with a patient would be frowned upon, especially one catheterized and with a gastrointestinal tube. But she did stay pressed up against me for a while, and not a little while. When she got up, she came around to face me, and kissed me, and said, “I am your physical lover.”
I’ve always loved fucking, ever since I discovered love and imperative desire. From tenth grade on, my group of friends and I had been harassed at Huntingdon Area Senior High School—we were “freaks” (in the lexicon of the late sixties). Most of the students were “straight.” Some angry ones felt free to mock and laugh at us in the cafeteria. They made oinking noises when I walked past them in the hall, and shoved the boys against the lockers. As the parking lot emptied out, we’d hear threatening insults yelled from passing cars. I don’t have a clear recollection of the decisive moment when my parents came up with the solution of enrolling me as a first-year student at Juniata, skipping my senior year of high school. While attending Juniata, I could apply elsewhere for acceptance as a transfer student. So the summer before my first year of college, I dropped away from my high school friends to hang out in the company of the woman who became my lover, one of a small group of left-wing, activist intellectuals at Juniata, a few of whom were spending the summer in Huntington before their senior year. How I idealized them! I wanted to be like them. I wanted to be with them.
As it happened, I simply wanted one woman in particular. As summer turned into fall, I started keeping a journal. Despite my friendships, I felt alone in the world, a wearing kind of existential loneliness (I was studying existentialism, so I knew, and I was seventeen years old, so I really knew). Many of the entries were about loneliness, a word I repeated so frequently on the pages of the yellow legal pad that the record is suffused with a sort of pathos, especially because I misspelled the word throughout. Sometime in the middle of the winter, I remember writing, “I wonder if I’m a lesbian,” not a thought that had ever crossed my mind before. My desire to be in Kathy’s company, however, was so insistent that the idea came unbidden.
I forget how it came about, but I went with Kathy to her parents’ home in Delaware for a weekend visit. We stayed in her bedroom and slept together in a double bed. I felt Kathy’s arm twitch as we lay together there, and, thinking she was in distress, reached out to stroke her face. As it happens, she was fine. Her body was moving as sleep overtook her, as I now know bodies do, but then my ignorance abetted my desire. She woke and turned to me, and we spent the night touching and talking and kissing—all pretty chaste, but quite hot enough. I knew I was in love and that I wanted more. I was reaching toward sexual pleasures that I couldn’t then conceptualize, but that I fiercely desired, nonetheless. This was the time of free love, so the fact that she had a boyfriend, and that he lived just down the hall from me (in the “students’ room” my parents rented out), seemed not to matter. She had never had a woman lover. I had had no lover at all. None of that was of any consequence—she had an apartment that she rented with another woman, and a mattress on the floor, and that was enough. All that mattered was kissing and touching, soon more adventuresomely, then lustfully, and the intimacy of private conversation.
I discovered that I liked sex a lot, and the particular closeness that it created for me. I was unashamed that I liked sex with women, and over the next eight years had lots of lovers, in the messy configurations of young lesbian-feminist communities professing non-monogamy, wherein women crossed often, if not often easily, from friendship to sexual partner, and back again to friendship. In those years, I was the one on the move, acting on my desires. Sex offered a kind of instant intimacy that I found both exciting and comforting, and the irresistible, invaluable sense that someone wanted me.
Sex ensured that I was not alone, but as my lover and I slowly passed into day-to-day routine, I’d get interested in someone else. I apparently couldn’t bear intimacy as it crossed over into the regular patterns of an established relationship. I found that I was the one with a roving eye, and unsettled desires, the one leaving, rather than being left. I most likely still couldn’t spell loneliness—but I didn’t need to. It’s only at a great distance from my younger self that I can see patterns emerging that would trouble my adult life, most notably my desire for intimacy contradicted by my (unconscious) fears that familiarity would inevitably morph into something familial. Only after long, sometimes strenuous, often difficult, and certainly belated learning have I been able to integrate my love of sex with intimacy over time.
In Janet, I have a lover who was more than willing to make sex happen even when we were separated by 2,579 miles, as we were at the first. She stopped to leave a message on her way to class at the University of Arizona. “You know, you’re like St. Christina the Astonishing. I read about her last night. She’s a twelfth-century Belgian whose miraculous breasts saved her when she was hiding from her persecutors in the wilderness—she was a virgin—she was starving—and her breasts gave her milk. Some say olive oil. Astonishing, but she’s got nothing on you, baby. I’ll call you again when I get home, sometime around 7:00 your time.” She was on a pay phone next to the place she had just gotten a smoothie. (She was teaching Caroline Walker Bynum’s book Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women.) That evening, I learned that phone-fucking with Janet was hot enough to make me hyperventilate. I’ve long known that my nipples are large and wonderfully sensitive, but it was Janet who discovered their true glory. She made me ecstatic.
My whole lifetime, I had moved through the world with my body, feeling my way, often with great pleasure and always by touch. With Janet, words came unbidden—my desires and my fears, and my hopes and my promises—until talking and fucking were wholly intertwined. With her I remain even now far as far can be from the ascetic Saint Christina, who longed to leave behind her husk of a body to be with God—I’m no saint, but when it comes to nipples, I am most certainly Christina the Astonishing. Breaking my neck destroyed countless neural pathways, but the damage to my body accelerates below my breastbone. I may not be able to sit up without secure support or turn over in bed, but my beautiful and astonishing nipples still can without difficulty stand erect as ever.
Over six years of loving Janet, I had learned a new way of “projecting before [myself] a sexual world,” in the words of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.2 I learned the joy of sex. That is now a hackneyed phrase, but it concisely names a truth about our sexual life. Dialogue heightened sexual pleasure and created a deep knowing. Words matter. I’m so glad we talked as we did those six years we were lovers before the accident. In his study of “the phenomenology of perception,” Merleau-Ponty argues that for humans, being is “a perpetual incarnation.” You become who you are over the course of a life that unfolds as an ongoing interaction with objects and others, from the infant you once were, whose bodily cartography slowly emerged as you were handled by caregivers whose speech washed over you, to the grown-up you are today, drawn beyond reason to one person rather than
another. Sexuality is elemental and irreducible, Merleau-Ponty argues, for sexual desire resists knowing and exceeds explanation. It’s impossible to separate mind and body, sense and sensation, words and things. Merleau-Ponty also declares sex “ambiguous” because you can neither avoid it nor fully comprehend its imperatives. The etymology of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is revealing—“Latin ambigu-us doubtful, driving hither and thither ( < ambig-ĕre, < amb- both ways + ag-ĕre to drive) + OUS.”3 You’re driven you know neither wither nor why, for sexuality is beyond interpretation.
There is no explanation of sexuality which reduces it to anything other than itself, for it is already something other than itself, and indeed, if we like, our whole being. Sexuality, it is said, is dramatic because we commit our whole personal life to it. But just why do we do this? Why is our body, for us, the mirror of our being, unless because it is a natural self, a current of given existence, with the result that we never know whether the forces which bear us on are its or ours—or with the result rather that they are never entirely either its or ours. There is no outstripping of sexuality any more than there is any sexuality enclosed within itself. No one is saved and no one is totally lost.4
My “current of given existence” had taken me to Janet’s embrace. After she fucked me, I would lie full-length on top of her, while she held me on her chest and I talked to her. I spoke out of myself, as it were, saying into the darkness fears and desires too fugitive to mention in broad daylight. Fucking was sometimes sublime, and sex was a deep grappling with the human beings we each were, and the beings we were becoming through our sexual and spoken intercourse. It also was great fun. I swore to Janet that I loved every hair on her body—so much hair that it makes tufts at the bends of her knees and under her arms—a profuse surplus. So, in becoming sexualized subjects through our touch and talking, Janet and I lived into an unknown future.
October 1, 2003, began a new life. Thankfully, my desire for Janet is in no way incapacitated. This is not to say that I can get what I want. The spirit is very willing, but the body very weak. I’m her physical lover, as she is mine. I want her desire, and I have it. What I don’t have is her touch. Or rather, my brain registers her touch as a pressure, but my body nonetheless remains out of reach. Not because Janet is unwilling to touch me, or because I shy away from touching her—to the contrary—but my body can’t know how that touch feels. It’s true that the brain is your most important sex organ, but the rest of the body needs to come online when called. Any part of me once innervated from C 5–6 down is now royally fucked up. I have become untouchable.
“It’s like she’s a stone butch,” Janet said to her physician, resorting to simile in an effort to explain how things are. To any woman “in the life,” a stone butch lesbian is a recognizable figure, like Jess in Leslie Feinberg’s much-read novel—she’s a woman who has cultivated “female masculinity” (Judith Halberstam’s helpful phrase) to show herself as strong and capable of sheltering another woman and satisfying her desire, and sometimes to protect herself from feeling vulnerable.5 A femme lesbian understands that her sexual responsiveness to the moves of her partner is what the stone butch desires—the butch woman may not wish to be sexually touched in return, or may wish it but find the prospect too overwhelming. When Janet used the simile “Christina’s like a stone butch,” she told the literal truth by way of metaphor. “Literal” means true “to the letter.” I literally can’t be touched, because my c-e-n-t-r-a-l n-e-r-v-o-u-s s-y-s-t-e-m i-s i-n-j-u-r-e-d, and it’s a fucking tragedy.
When teaching students about figurative language, I tell them that “meta-” is a prefix denoting change (of place, order, condition, or nature), while “phor” is derived from an ancient Greek verb, “to carry” or “to bear.” We can see metaphor as a condensed analogy, with the “phor” carrying an attribute out of its proper place to a different domain where it’s improper, impertinent, out of place, and transformative. In Janet’s simile, “stone butch” is “carried” from the world of lesbian bar culture to denote something about my life with her. By calling me “stone,” Janet metaphorically represented my body’s neurological incapacity as a sexual subject-position (stone butch). That’s a catachresis—a strained metaphor—and bitter irony, considering that I would love to be fucking differently with Janet, if I could. “I’ve never been stone, ever! I’ve always wanted to touch and be touched,” I protested. I nonetheless understood what she was trying to do, and why she would resort to metaphor. Neurological destruction has dealt a phenomenological blow that radiates beyond my body and creates epistemological conundrums that require troping. No wonder Janet reaches for metaphor in order to illuminate an embodied life that’s opaque to both of us, and to cast light upon dark truths that require indirection. Thankfully, language is a renewable resource. So is sex, which—thank the stars above—we both continue to desire.
The brilliant writer Angela Carter conjures a sexual world of a “thousand and one Baroque intersections of flesh upon flesh” in her collection of perversely refigured fairytales, The Bloody Chamber. In so doing, she silently quotes the title of a collection of ancient and medieval stories from the Middle East, Persia, and South Asia, A Thousand and One Nights, also known as The Arabian Nights.6 All those stories share the same framing device. A king marries a virgin, beds her, and preemptively executes her the next morning, before she has the chance to be unfaithful. Scheherazade avoids this fate by beginning on the wedding night to tell him a story, but leaving off before the end of her narrative. The king’s curiosity to know what happens spares her, so the next night she does the same, and lives on to tell another, and another . . . so Scheherazade lives on and the king’s desire remains lively. If sex is like language, so is language like sex. Each has a structuring system (grammar, the body) and a seeming infinity of possible statements one can make (sentences, sex acts). Both are most alive when energized by the speaking subject. Both have their reference books and guides to good usage. Most importantly for me, sex and language are both alive and enlivening, and link the life I’ve lived already to the living that opens before me. I need access to what once was, if I am to brave what is to come.
13
Supply
and Demand
“And how do you think all these things that you want are going to get done?” Janet said sharply. “Just tell me how they’re going to get done.” She was wheeling me through the living room one evening not long after I’d been discharged from the hospital, and we were fighting. A week before, a huge backhoe had made a big, muddy hole of our backyard, uprooting recently planted flower beds in the process. Just that afternoon, an enormous cement truck had (astonishingly) backed up into our driveway and had poured the cement for the foundation of the addition we were building so as to accommodate my paralyzed life. This was no longer the house we had bought, nor the yard we had enjoyed. I was not myself, and we were not leading the life we had envisioned. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just want it. I want it.”
At that moment, I wanted the window shade in the front window of the living room to be straightened, because it bugged me when the shades weren’t evenly positioned. I wanted to know if the mechanism was in some way damaged. I wanted it to be fixed. The misalignment didn’t bother Janet, she may not even have noticed it, but now I was asking her to add the shade to the endless and ever growing to-do list that she carried around in her head. I was demanding her labor, and I was driving her crazy, as she was making patently clear. Yet all the fight went out of her when I said, “I want it,” without any further justification. Janet loved me for my ardent desires and my direct action, including my work of homemaking. I wanted to be able to keep the household as I had been doing before I was hurt—and I couldn’t, an enormous loss for me. She knew as well as I did how accustomed I was to acting on my desires.
I did the fix-it jobs. I figured out how to make things work. I loved using my father’s tools, all of which came to me. When Dad died, Jeff’s paralysis had long sin
ce undone his grip, and, besides, he had his own (now unused) table saw in the basement, and his own (unused) toolbox. When we moved into our house with its quasi-finished basement, I bought a big piece of pegboard and hung everything up:
two sets of box wrenches, metric and imperial
two sets of combination wrenches, metric and imperial
two sets of hex keys
a monkey wrench
a set of slot screwdrivers
a set of Phillips head screwdrivers
a claw hammer
a ball-peen hammer
a rubber mallet
three vice grips, large, medium, and small
The socket wrenches (metric and imperial), spark plug wrench, ratchets, adjustable wrench, pipe wrench, drills, bits, wire cutter, wire stripper, and all the rest I had in a big red toolbox, and I arranged the hardware on shelves—task light and extension cord, screws, nuts and bolts, brackets, hooks, replacement doorknobs, and suchlike. I can see the tools clearly even now, arranged before me in memory.
I have a certain stubbornness that served me well when I was working on a job. When we moved into our house, we counted thirty-two windows, so we bought thirty-two window shades. Each had to be mounted. I started on the job when Janet was away, planning to finish it before she returned. Three windows later, I was frustrated by an angry blister starting on my palm, so, remembering my father’s adage “the right tool for the right job,” I went to the hardware store and bought an electric screwdriver. Later that day, much later, I stood back and observed my handiwork with Janet. “Wow—you did all that! Look how great that color is up against the paint we chose,” she said admiringly, kissing me. “You’re so butch and I’m so lucky.”
A Body, Undone Page 12