A Round-Heeled Woman (3 page)

THREE

Triage

And so I e-mailed it in. Right to
The New York Review of
Books.
Along with my payment of $136.50. Oh gosh, what would they think, those smart people who worked for the Review? Would they even print the ad? Did they have rules about using the word
sex
in their ads? Would someone call me on the telephone and admonish me to rewrite in a manner appropriate to so august a journal? What the hell. What was done was done and could not be undone. I felt great. I felt terrific. I walked taller. I looked people in the eye, in the face, in the crotch, anywhere I felt like looking. Sometimes, it seemed to me, they looked back in a friendly manner. My secret—wanting sex with a man I liked—was no longer secret; it was no longer dirty, never had been really, was no longer just mine. I had broadcast an essential truth to the world at large, or small, given the readership of the
New York Review,
and I felt terrifically free and clean and, well, sort of proud. I wanted something and I had taken steps to get it. Yessiree. Or, how about this: I had taken control of my life. Oh yes, I had. We would see how long I could hold this tiger by its tail.

All the while, I went on living my regular life. I taught my seminar at the college. I traveled to high schools to observe and mentor beginning teachers. On Fridays I drove to Planned Parenthood, where I volunteered as an abortion escort. And, of course, there was prison. That was Wednesday, St. Mary's College was Tuesday and Thursday, Planned Parenthood Friday, and, oh yes, I sang in a chorale, that was Monday. Nobody knew that I had created a secret life. Secret Delight came to live inside me and I made it welcome. What would those sanctimonious antiabortion demonstrators think if they knew what I had done? Would they repaint their signs with me as their target? Go ahead, assholes, just leave these pregnant women alone. What would my students think? In my college class? In my prison class? And my friends? Would they remain my friends? I found myself smiling, thinking to myself as I walked down the street, stood in front of my students, brushed past the demonstrators— Have you any idea? Could you even imagine what I have done? Do you know that I am not at all what you think I am? That I am more? And I would chirp and warble very silently, Delight tickling me all the while. The world was fun. And so was I.

From the minute I sent off the ad I knew I would get an answer, probably even more than one, maybe even a lot, maybe as many as ten. But if I got none—and that was a possibility, too—the important part for me was that I did it, that I advertised myself without shame, without remorse, without a shade of embarrassment. So whatever the response, the best part was already done. I smiled a lot in the days before the ad appeared in the
Review
the first week of November. And then there it was: the personals people had not censored it; they had gone ahead and printed it just the way I wrote it. It stood out from all the rest.

On November 8, 1999, here they came—the dirty and the clean ones, the romantic and the mean ones—in a respectable
New York Review
manila envelope, twelve letters inside. My hands shook; my mouth went dry as I drew the packet out of the mailbox. I peered furtively over my shoulder, certain that my neighbors had developed X-ray eyes and would heap their castigations upon me at any moment. Oh, for heaven's sake, I told myself, if you were afraid of what the neighbors might think, you wouldn't have sent in the ad. The trouble was I was sort of afraid of what the neighbors/my mother/grandmother/firstgrade teacher would think. Analysis had done a good job of cleaning me out, but shreds of need, like the need for approval, fragments of all the shoulds and should-nots, personified most terrifyingly by my grandmother, clung to the lining of my psyche. I brushed them away, grabbed the packet, and raced into my cottage.

I could hardly breathe. I began to do triage. As I read, I tossed each letter onto one of three piles:
yes, maybe,
and
no.
My hesitation vanished and I threw the letters as if I were tossing cards into a hat: a flick of the wrist, a wry smile, an arch of the eyebrow, like Robert Mitchum at his coolest. I took a nasty pleasure from zinging unsuitable letters onto the
no
pile. Oh, the power with glory not far behind. Still, the
no
pile was the smallest, this one on top:
“Call me at the office, Monday through Thurs.,
9–5.”
And gave a phone number.

Another
no
came from Giorgio:
“I'm 68 young and eager to
have a relationship with healthy lady like you, and sex hungry.”
Giorgio wrote from Leisure World in Utah.

Wilson's address—Gramercy Park in New York—was in his favor; not so
“I'm 72 and very horny.”
I have never been fond of the word
horny.
It did its job when Shakespeare used it to designate a cuckold. But people didn't use it in that way anymore, and it had an ugly sound to it. Horns could hurt. I did wonder about Wilson's age: his seventy-two seemed so much older than my sixty-six, and with all these letters (and more and more to come) I could afford to be picky. I got uppity. Would Zeus notice?

Still, I decided, age alone was no basis for rejection. That's exactly the basis on which I have been rejected many times. The bank, given my age, refused my request for a loan when, in my first year of renting, I found a small house I wanted to buy. The loan I could get—based on my future earning power—would have been a very small one and the down payment would have had to be enormous. On the street, the eyes of the young and not so young slid by me. I look my age. Nobody but someone even older than I wants to look my age. Nobody wants to be my age. I am too close to death for younger people to want to pay attention to me. People think it a great compliment to say to me, “You certainly don't look your age.” Well, what should my age look like? And if I did look my age, would I be unbearably ugly? Should I stay inside the rest of my life? Because I wasn't going to look better, not ever. So, really, was I going to do the same with the men who answered my ad? No. It would take more than the age of the writer for a letter to hit the
no
pile. So it wasn't Herb's
“Have Viagara, will travel”
that consigned him to the
no
pile; it was its brevity.

In the days to come, letters in their respectable manila envelopes packed my mailbox. Rob, age thirty-eight, sent a photograph of himself fully and frontally nude, save for a pair of sunglasses balanced on his nose. He was tall and naked and his penis stood erect. I hadn't seen a naked man in years, more than ten, and then I just peeked through my fingers. I turned the photograph over. He had included several three-by-five-inch cards on which he had printed, in blue ballpoint ink, a poem undeniably his own:
“Actually, old people make me sick/they really know
how to shrink a dick/they're rude, obnoxious, pathetic, and gross/but the
guts you displayed I dig the most/Your notice is actually rather romantic/
What is your strategy? (to make my pants frantic).”

Larry, from Michigan, promised specific delights
: “If you were
my wife I would give you oral sex several times per night, as well as kisses,
hugs, fondling, stroking and intercourse (whichever way you like). I would
suck your clitoris and rub my dick inside your cunt. I would do it during
the night and in the morning and matinees.”
He signed his promises
“With the utmost respect.”
I relegated Larry to the oblivion of the
no
s.

Hal's letter, its typed messages single-spaced, jammed onto two pages, looked as nuts as Hal probably was:
“I'm writing you,”
he said,
“because I like sugar on my big ground mincemeat pie.”
And
“My hero is Little Black Sambo: I watch those tigers of ambition churn
themselves into butter at the bottom of my tree. . . . I'll warn you of my politics: I like all rebels against tyranny, privilege, and intolerance who perish
before tasting the poisonous fruit of victory and power: all weak peoples are
apt to cherish a sense of superior virtue, corresponding to the crimes they
have been powerless to commit.”
And on a personal note,
“A letter from
you, and I'll spend more time with warm glaciers and cuddly icebergs.”
Hal proclaimed himself to be in his early seventies. That's right, I thought, you're right out of the early seventies and holding.

Carl lay in the
maybe
pile. His first sentence was in his favor:
“Your ad is highly enticing and your objective is complementary to mine.”
The third sentence was not:
“I'm a married white male . . .”
No, no, no. But then,
“During Viet Nam I served as a naval officer aboard ship
in combat waters.”
Well, maybe. No, no, Jane, he's married.

I would answer all the letters in the
maybe
pile, explaining that, while I appreciated their efforts, I lived too far away to suggest a next step. “Alas”—I made sure to include the word
alas
in all the letters, confirming the portrait I had painted of myself as a well-read, articulate, essentially old-fashioned lady. Okay, so maybe not “lady,” not with an ad like that. “Woman”—that's what I wanted to be and what I wasn't. My idea of being a woman required a man. I could be a person all by myself, I could be an adult, I could be a mother, and I was all of those. And I suppose I could claim to have been a woman once upon a time since I had, after all, been married, though my marriage had not been one to enhance my womanliness. Finally, I am not a man so I must be a woman. Weak, very weak. I wanted to be a woman for real now. To be that, I needed a man who would fuck me.

Once, way back, when I was in my twenties, I sat in the No Name Bar in Sausalito drinking beer on a Saturday afternoon. Out of nowhere, a man neither young nor old passed by our table and said to me, “You're a beautiful woman.” And he left. No one ever said that to me again, and never, but for that brief moment, would I ever feel it. The men I would know as my life continued might think I was beautiful or a woman or even both, but none of them would ever say it. And so I wasn't. But now, now, I was on my way to becoming a woman. It was too late for me to be beautiful, but, well, look at all these letters! All these men! One of them was sure to make me a woman. I squirmed into the cushions of my futon.

Here is a fragment of a poem by Ted Kooser called “Daddy Longlegs”:

. . . If mine,
it would be the secret dream
of walking alone across the floor of my life
with an easy grace, and with love enough
to live on at the center of myself.

Sometimes, I have been able to do this: to walk alone . . .
“with
love enough/to live on at the center of myself.”
I will say that walking alone and living at the center of myself is my desire, my goal, if you will. So what, exactly, was I doing sending messages in bottles to hundreds of men?

I wanted to be the woman I was never able to be, a woman who delights in intimacy with a man, not fears it. I wanted to be touched physically and emotionally. I wanted to be rich—I was greedy—in the ways of the flesh. I wanted to get fat on the bounty of men. I wanted to unleash (honest, I did) my passion. These guys had no idea who they were going to get. And all the while, I knew that, in reaching out for a full life, I could not choose, would not get, only the good parts. A full life was just that, pleasure and pain, joy and despair. I knew that from the beginning. I just didn't know the form they would take.

The
yes
pile was the biggest. I was enchanted. These men knew how to write. They even knew how to spell, and I had no trouble tossing onto the big pile letters with sentences like
“There is a chance you live in Tupelo and su fer from a wasting disease. So
please tell me.”
Yes! And
“I have written poetry, built stone walls, edited
books, dealt with ministers of government . . . am a free man, and reasonably comfortable financially.”
Yes! I was tempted to say yes to Brad,
“. . . a retired surgeon, working as a consultant in the city,”
but I couldn't imagine myself undressed in front of a forty-something man, no matter that he was
“looking for a connection
(
of several sorts
)
with
an older woman.”
I wrote Brad, declining on the basis of geography, a decision I would come to regret when not so many months hence I found myself in New York City, on a street not far from Brad's, crying into my mitten over a man whose letter had been a
yes
and to whom I had become a
no.

The letter I answered first came from a woman.
“I'm a woman
too, just turned 60 and have some dark moments about it. Seeing ads like
yours
(
there aren't many
)
remind one that it's not over yet. Best of luck—
I'm sure you'll find what you want, with that courage!”
I wrote back my thank-you, ending with
“Placing the ad didn't take much courage. It's
the next step.”
I had no idea what the next step would be.

The second letter I answered came from England. It was from Paul, age fifty. I flicked the letter toward the
no
pile—fifty was just too young, England too far—and then a sentence caught my eye:
“My partner died of cancer earlier this year. We had been together
many years, and we had a wonderful, loving relationship. She was 15 years
older than I and died at the age of 64. Many people did not approve of the
age di ference, but we had a full and energetic sex/love life which showed no
signs of diminishing until she was too ill to enjoy such pleasures.”
Paul had included two photographs of himself, one leaning against a very full bookcase gazing thoughtfully (and very attractively) into the camera. I felt his sadness and answered,
“I am sorry for your loss.
From what you describe of your relationship, you were fortunate to have
found each other. Those who disapproved were of course simply envious.
May your life be rich again.”
And in the way that I began to develop and refine as I wrote to one man after another, I threw in a tease.
“I plan to be in England next fall. . . . If you are still a free man,
perhaps we can meet.”