How to Save Your Own Life (19 page)

I uncork a bottle of musk oil to conjure Rosanna. I spread it on my wrist, rub it in, inhale deeply, invoke the genie within, and suddenly it all comes back: the oil-smooth ride of the Corniche, the people staring in at us with a mixture of resentment and awe, the polished parquet floors of Rosanna's writing “studio,” the bentwood furniture, the hanging baskets of ferns, the practically bare rooms, the closet full of rock-star clothes, the bed with its white wicker headboard, canopy, and monogrammed sheets, and what we did there.

I went to bed with Rosanna out of curiosity the first time, horniness mingled with what I can only call “bisexual chic” the second, and obligation the subsequent occasions. It was stylish to have a lesbian affair that year, I thought I might want to write about it, and Bennett was making me miserable. If men were the question, perhaps women were the answer. I had fantasies of setting up salon (if not house) with Rosanna—all very Vita Sackville-Westish or Colette-loves-Missy or Stein-loves-Toklas. We'd take care of each other faithfully, and occasionally bring in men we could share.

The first time we made love, I was chiefly exhilarated by the sense of doing something forbidden and not feeling the earth heave open to swallow me. There was something particularly liberating about breaking that taboo. It was not like losing one's virginity—which had been fraught with guilt and tender tears. And it was not like the first adultery—which had been a roller-coaster alternation of panic and pleasure. How can I describe it? The word
smug
comes to mind. The word
smug,
and the scent of musk. I felt so goddamned superior to all those people who wouldn't dare it; I felt I had gone down on my mother.

Ah, sex. A very mysterious force. Was it Lawrence who said “the more we think about it, the less we know”? I think so. Try to imagine oral-genital relations (as the sex manuals coyly call it) from the standpoint of a Martian or a low-flying UFO pilot from another solar system. How silly it would appear! It would seem like a form of cannibalism, perhaps. And perhaps it is.

What Rosanna was trying to eat through my cunt was my poetry, my vulnerability, my Jewish warmth. What I was trying to eat through hers was her WASP
coolth,
her millions, or perhaps the freedom which I imagined went with them. I had never felt more trapped or desperate in my life than I did that summer. I had tried everything: fame, fortune, adultery, never looking up from the page, living to write, running away, coming back, sitting on the razor's edge. Perhaps Rosanna had the answer. There had to be an answer
somewhere.

I had never before made love to a student. It was against my principles. If I felt guilty for anything, it was for that—not for touching another woman's creamy, slightly rancid-smelling cunt. Yet I was also fascinated by the act itself, seeing my body's mirror-image in another body, not the cosmic crash of cock and cunt, but the lilting, soft, safe, rocking of woman against woman.
Safe.
That was the word I was seeking. Men were lethal; this was
safe.

Rosanna must have sensed my need for safety the morning she appeared. She must have sensed my vulnerability. All year she had been hot for me, had looked at me across the writing-seminar table (also my dining table), wanting me, falling in love with me. To me, she was chiefly a curiosity: mannish haircut, tall stringbean body, Mick Jagger clothes, Cartier jewelry, and that musky smell. I needed no one new that year. I was so locked within that dying marriage; so hopeless about change; so cynical about love, freedom, breaking loose. Rosanna had to hammer her way through my cynicism to make me hear her.

 

The Corniche glides up, a chariot from another planet; Valerian genuflects; and off we go in a cloud of musk and carbon monoxide. At lunch we talk about men, jealousy, marriage, mothers, poetry, Bloomsbury, the vintages of wines. We consume two bottles of Mouton-Cadet—Rosanna's favorite. Or rather, she consumes them and I help a little. Not being Jewish, she has a hollow leg. As I spill out my story of Bennett's betrayal —again!—she takes my hand. I feel mothered, cared for, vulnerable, understood. And I go on drinking wine.

And then the chauffeur is waiting and we go back to her “studio.” How easy everything is with a waiting chauffeur! How little one has to think, to consider, to obsess.

More wine, more talk, hot rock-music at first, then Cole Porter. Rosanna has the situation well in hand. Her face betrays no emotion but calm, and understanding. I am the child again, coming to mother with my scraped knee. Suddenly Bennett is nothing more than a scraped knee! A little injury on the smooth skin of my life.

Rosanna excuses herself, goes to the bedroom, comes back wearing a caftan slit to the waist and lots more musk. The top of the caftan opens when she sits down next to me on the couch. I see her small pointed breasts and want to touch them. She sees me looking and reads my mind. She takes my hand and guides it to her breast. The nipple is bumpy and wrinkled, but the underside is smooth, cool, sleek. Rosanna strokes my hair, then my cheek, then she tilts my chin upward so she can kiss me. I feel I am kissing my mirror-image, smooth womanlips, a trifle thin, cool, safe.

Here is a woman who addresses her letters “Dear Heart” and signs them “Fondly”; she makes love the same way—as if it were a course taught at boarding school. Does my heart pound and my cunt drip because of the exhilaration of breaking a taboo? Because I am hot for Rosanna? Who can possibly tell? My husband is a Freudian analyst who takes a harsh line on bisexual shenanigans. That's certainly part of the thrill.
He'd kill me if he knew.
Bennett has never much liked going down on me; Rosanna loves it. I lie there trying to think and trying not to think, trying to suspend judgment and judging like crazy, trying to justify and feeling no need to justify.... All these feelings rush at me at once. Meanwhile, she is gently nibbling my clitoris with her perfect, capped teeth, sliding one manicured finger in and out of my cunt, and stroking my nipples with her other hand, on whose fourth finger she wears a seal ring with her family crest. “Rush-Poland” meets the DAR! Brownsville meets Lakeshore Drive! Central Park West meets Beekman Place!

I shut my eyes and try to feel nothing but sensation, wine blurriness, and the concentric rings of pleasure in my cunt—but, inevitably, there is something more. She is probing the center of my Jewishness; I am being raped by old money. That slim finger sliding in and out of my wet, warm cunt belongs to a Mayflower descendant! That cool mouth eating my Jewish pussy is the mouth of the WASP Midwest, the mouth that made America great, the mouth that ate up the goodies of America and itself remained thin, the mouth that roared! But the roar is coming from me. I am moaning, crooning, ooohing my pleasure. The mouth of the American Jewish Bard singing the passions of WASP America! What Sam Goldwyn did on celluloid, what Saul Bellow does in ten-point type—I am doing here in bed with Rosanna (or so I rationalized at the time).

It was fun. She adored me, was an expert cunt-eater, and had lots of class. It was also very high-toned. It seemed less sexual somehow than cultural. Vita Sackville-West was big that year—and Rosanna wanted to be a contemporary Vita. It almost seemed she should be brought a silver finger bowl (with rose petals floating in it) after touching my cunt. And Irish linen napkins to wipe her fingers with. And, after that, some scrumptious dessert.

But then I had to reciprocate. Or anyway I
felt
I had to. That was more of a problem.

Oh let me be some ancient epic poet (or some Eighteenth-Century Mock-Epick one) and invoke the Muses of Bilitis (Vita, Virginia, Gertrude, Alice, Sidonie Gabrielle, Missy—even our contemporary Kate, Robin, and Jill) before embarking on this one! God help me, I am about to tell about my first impressions of cunt-eating and risk the wrath (wrisk the rath?) of mine sisters: Gentle Reader, it did not taste good.

Art and politics, politics and art. Strange bedfellows. Stranger still than Rosanna Howard and me. Can any feminist dare tell the truth about cunt-eating in this day and age? Do I dare— knowing I will be attacked from both sides—attacked by the gents for being too ballsy, attacked by ladies for being not ballsy enough?

I
tried.
I put my best tongue forward and took the plunge.
You'll get used to the smell,
I told myself. I said to myself,
Self, you smell the same;
but it was not much use. Rosanna took forever to come, and my nose felt like it had spent its entire life in there. I was nibbling her clit as she had done for me, sliding two fingers in and out, trying not to think of the smell, the hairs getting stuck between my teeth, and the fact that my wrist was getting tired from moving back and forth, forth and back. How long had it been? An hour? Two? I began to sympathize with Bennett's not wanting to go down on me; I began to understand what it meant to be a man, fumbling around—is this the right place or is
that?
—getting no guidance from one's subject (who is too polite and ladylike to tell) and wondering, wondering if she is going to come now, or now, or
now
—or
has
she already, or
will
she next summer, or
what?
Help! I need some guidance. This is uncharted territory. If I keep sliding these two fingers in and out and revolving my tongue on her clit and nibbling with my teeth, will she eventually come? Will she come by 1984? Will she tell me when she does? Do WASPs moan? I know that Chinamen
don‘t—but
do
WASPs?
Goddamn my cosmopolitan family (who would never dream of telling me to stick with my own kind). Why didn't they warn me? Why didn't my mother every say: “WASPs don't moan in bed”? Therefore, it is impossible to tell
when
they reach orgasm. Or
if
they do.

Ah. A shudder shakes her pelvis. She is moving toward my mouth rhythmically, faster and faster. It's going to be all right! She's going to come! Whooppee! I won't seem like a pig seeking only my own pleasure! I won't be a female-chauvinist pig!

False alarm. The pelvis has stopped, the shudder has stopped, my heart is about to stop.

“Rosanna?” I asked weakly. “Was that okay? Did you come?”

“It's okay,” she says. “I don't mind.”

“Did you lose it, did you miss coming?”

“It's all right, dear heart, really.”

“You didn‘t,” I say, my heart sinking, my wrist aching, my mouth full of hairs. After all that, no orgasm. I feel like a boob, an inept lover, a befuddled man in bed with a frigid woman. For the first time in my life I can identify with the athletic, exhausted hero of “The Time of Her Time.” Oh dear. I really am in a bad way if my very first lesbian experience makes me think of Norman Mailer!

“I don't mind,” she says, smiling down at me, “I really appreciate your trying.”

And then I seem to understand it all, the war between the sexes, “selfish” man and “unselfish” woman, the role-playing, the pillow diplomacy, the mattress
mishegoss
that has reverberated down through the centuries to the detriment of us all. Man or woman, vibrator or shower spray, I come in three minutes flat. If I don‘t, I am angry, resentful, snarling, biting, mean. None of that “I don't mind” stuff for me; my feelings are right there up front. My cunt growls, howls, bays at the moon.

But Rosanna “didn't mind,” she said. And after that, making her come was my personal challenge. I was going to
find
a way to make her come. If I had to become the Rube Goldberg of dildos, the Thomas Alva Edison of vibrators, the Luther Bur-bank of elongated fruit—I was going to make that WASP cunt come!

 

The Corniche took me home. I was not yet sufficiently daring to spend the whole night there with Rosanna. Back home to my husband—whom I hated, but with whom the fucking became ever more exciting as I interposed between our rigid bodies my anger at him—and now my lover Rosanna.

I was back at her house first thing in the morning, with my book bag, my manuscripts, my toothbrush. Not that I ever stayed away all night—but I pretty much lived there on and off for the next couple of months. Rosanna tried to persuade me to go away with her. She had a vacation house in Aspen which she wanted me to share with her that summer. But I was torn. I was still, in my half-assed way, trying to sort things out with Bennett —and besides, I wasn't so sure I wanted to be alone with Rosanna for a whole month. Bennett would have “let” me go—in his usual resentful, guilt-inflicting way, but did I really want to? It seemed to suit my purpose better to divide myself between Bennett and Rosanna. Days with her, nights with him. Writing in her apartment, drinking red wine, retiring to the white-wicker canopy bed (so she could go down on me tenderly —and I could go down on her desperately). Later we'd drive around the city in the Rolls with the top down, enjoying the impression we made, in our identical rock-star jeans-suits, mutual scent of musk oil, conversations about Roethke, Virginia Woolf, Neruda. I helped her revise her poems, and she comforted me about my fits of jealous rage. We were good for and to each other. There was real friendship there—or at least the stirrings of it.

But bed was the problem. I pounded away with dildos, Coke bottles, green plastic vibrators from Japan. A big one in the cunt and a little one in the ass. All the colors of the rainbow. I put cucumbers covered with ribbed condoms in her cunt and bananas covered with French ticklers. I bought a shower spray that vibrated and we took long baths together. It was never any good. She'd always come right to the teetering edge of orgasm, and then draw back, shivering, shuddering, weak in the knees. She never blamed me, though. She was much too polite for that. She was always extremely gracious about not coming. And yet, as time went on, I began to believe her cunt was an unconscious anti-Semite.