Sugar in My Bowl (2 page)

When I asked Daphne Merkin to tell me why she contributed to the anthology, she responded that Freud thought art existed to disturb the sleep of the world. “Anything that prods us into greater awareness, especially of subjects that are blanketed in silence or parody, seems to me to be of use. The sexual arena is so often treated as laughable or minor when in truth it is often serious and major,” Merkin said.

I agree. My daughter doesn’t—but then she never encountered a locked rare book room.

The mockery and dumbing down of sex in America is something I have often experienced in response to my own books. This is a particularly American response. Europeans do not snicker at nudity or “wardrobe malfunctions.” There is probably no other society in which one must argue that sex is an important human drive. Its power is simply taken for granted throughout the world.

Of course sex is allied with death. Perhaps that is part of our discomfort with it. Would we be moved to reproduce if we thought we’d live forever? Probably not. The urge to merge is inextricably joined to our knowledge of mortality. Danger is part of the excitement. That may be why adultery still flourishes and why we are titillated by news of others’ adulteries. Risky behavior is thrilling. Walking the tightrope of desire is more spine tingling when the tightrope is stretched over a chasm.

In the end, writing about sex turns out to be just writing about life. There are pieces about childhood sexuality (Anne Roiphe, J. A. K. Andres), pieces about losing virginity (Fay Weldon, Ariel Levy), a fierce short story about sex and illness (Jennifer Weiner), an ecstatic memoir about getting pregnant (Elisa Albert), a tender study of geriatric infatuation (Karen Abbott) and nods to all the stages of life in between. Jann Turner writes about sex and power in her novel excerpt. Rebecca Walker writes about fantasy overwhelming reality. Meghan O’Rourke describes parental secrets and how they mark us.

Barbara Victor writes a short story about sex with the lover her protagonist believes is her last. Honor Moore deliciously contemplates
Story of O
. Eve Ensler writes a dramatic dialogue among women sharing the urgency of sex. Gail Collins responds to the notion of best sex with a hilarious take on the antisexuality of a Catholic education. Jean Hanff Korelitz discusses the paradox of prudishness while writing erotica. Molly Jong-Fast and Julie Klam both confess to the reticence that results from the nakedness of parents, and Susan Cheever celebrates sex with a stranger.

Min Jin Lee awakens us to racism and sexuality. Liz Smith takes us back to Texas sex with kin in the War World II era. Rosemary Daniell chronicles the chaos of sex and alcoholism with an untamed drunken lover. She writes this epilogue at an excruciating moment in her own life. Her son has just died. Susie Bright evokes teenage lust in the era of labor unrest and political protest. Poet Susan Kinsolving writes of mad multicultural love in a satire that reads like poetry. Jessica Winter pokes fun at the scientific approach to sex. And Margot Magowan writes about sex in marriage and its vicissitudes—from vaginal pain after childbirth to a husband’s obsession. She also shows how sex and money are horribly linked.

These approaches are as varied as sexuality itself. Happily, there is no way to generalize about them.

The truth is—sex
is
life—no more, no less. As many of these stories demonstrate, it is the life force. If we attempt to wall it off in a special category of its own, we
make
it dirty. By itself, it is far from obscene. It is just a part of life—the part that continues it and makes it bloom.

Like all books, this one has gone through endless metamorphoses. Its working title was
Best Sex I Ever Had
until I realized that books with
Best Sex
in the title were thick on the ground. After trying out
Wild Nights
and discovering that Joyce Carol Oates had used the Emily Dickinson line for a beautiful book of stories about legendary writers, I turned to one of my favorite traditional blues songs. Bessie Smith and Nina Simone both recorded “Sugar in My Bowl,” a passionate lament of female desire.

African-American female blues artists were, to my mind, the first American feminist artists to sing of unfettered desire. The honesty of the female blues singer puts much second-wave feminist poetry to shame. The directness of the blues’ expression of desire makes the hair stand up on the back of our necks and sends a chill down our spines. This is what poetry is meant to do: tell the truth of human feelings. As one famous blues artist said: “The blues ain’t nothing but the facts of life.” So the blues have this in common with desire. The blues sing of life in all its rawness and energy. Painful, beautiful, and sad, the blues embrace our humanity without shame.

I hope these fictions, memoirs, and dramatic monologues do the same. There is nothing to be ashamed of in being fully human.

E
RICA
J
ONG

A Fucking Miracle

Elisa Albert

I
can’t say for certain, but I think it happened in Toledo. Late April, and the weather was glorious. As per usual in Spain, the vegetarian lunch offerings left much to be desired.

“I hate this,” I said, eating my umpteenth olive, eyeing yet another piece of Manchego, dipping still more white bread in olive oil. For weeks I’d been subsisting on little else, and I was homesick for health food stores, tempeh, vegan bakeries, pleather, like-minded friends. My beloved tried to ignore me and enjoy his fried squid. Ham hocks lined the windows and hung from the ceiling, complete with small plastic cups for carcass-juice runoff.

His silence profoundly bugged me: you love a vegetarian, you at least fake outrage at vegetarian roadblocks, right?

“Do we really have to have this conversation again?” he wondered aloud, soaking up fish juice with a crust of bread and eyeing the
jamón
longingly. To his credit, he had abstained from the pig and listened to my complaints for weeks.

“Should I just pretend I’m psyched about my third bread-and-cheese meal of the day? My pants don’t fit, and I’m not even enjoying the ride.”

He sighed.

I might have learned my lesson with my college boyfriend, a midwestern defensive lineman. “I can’t believe you expect me to kiss you after you eat that,” I once mused, watching him masticate a juicy cheeseburger. He threw the burger away and didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night. Why am I fated to love carnivores?

Admittedly, I was being a pain in the ass. Pouting my way out onto the street I went for it, relationship jugular: “You don’t care about me.”

He stood in silence for a moment before throwing up his hands and stomping away, turning around only briefly.

“
Fuck
you.” This from a man so generally kind and even-keeled that the worst I’ve otherwise heard from him in the way of withering commentary goes something like “S/he means well, but . . .”

I burst into tears, and we spent the rest of the afternoon locked in argument, sitting miserably on a stone path by the side of a church. Clusters of tourists tried not to stare.

Later that night, in our room at the Parador overlooking the city, we made amends. And—wonder of wonders—a baby.

It could, of course, just as well have been a few days later in Madrid, after an afternoon at the Prado, our feet aching. Or a couple of days earlier in Sevilla, flamenco in a tiled courtyard with ivy snaked around the balconies. Or back home in Teruel the following week, in the now-romantic-seeming basement apartment where we spent the spring. Those were busy, amorous weeks, so I’ll never know for sure. But I like to think it happened in Toledo. Weary from conflict, overlooking the famous city wherein Jews and Christians and Muslims once enjoyed a golden age of peaceful, productive coexistence, we had ourselves a nice, mature talk and celebrated our mutual love and understanding by getting naked.

We’re not an overly contentious pair, though I have been known, for no good reason, to stir shit up on occasion. It’s the way things go with us: I am damaged and have issues (see also: “you don’t care about me”), he is well adjusted and forbearing (isolated “fuck yous” aside). No, that’s not quite right. He has his issues too, but maybe because he’s a guy or maybe because his parents aren’t divorced or maybe because he’s a few years older than I, he keeps things more or less together. Whereas I, often, do not keep things more or less together. Regardless, he is wise and funny and good and humble and steadfast, with twinkly eyes and the body of a swim team captain. His hands are strong, he keeps everything in perspective, he is musical, and he has an enormous vocabulary. Which is to say: I can hardly believe it most of the time—my luck, this ridiculous bounty!—but he is
mine
. When my depressive neuroses bump up against his strong-silent-type stoicism, I am invariably convinced he is going to leave me. When he declines to leave me, much nude rejoicing is in order.

Weeks went by before I knew I was with child (“
Embarazada!
” read the results from the local hospital after I finally realized my irregular period was actually a no-show, went to the
farmacia
for a pee stick, and set out in search of further confirmation), but hindsight is potent, so that night in Toledo has taken on a magical cast.

I know how that sounds. Procreative sex is the height of normative sexual activity, the glory of professional, amateur, religious sexists the world over, and the scourge of the radical feminism that comprised my adolescent imagination. Freedom from it is fundamental to the possibility that a woman can do as she pleases with her life, body, self. It’s taken eons to liberate us from reproductive sex, from the notion that sex can only be a means to an end (the end being a
baby,
of course; not an
orgasm
).

I’ve enjoyed my fair share of unhealthy sexual encounters; there are several last names I can’t recall. Suffice it to say that, like the all-too imitable Carrie Bradshaw, I’ve probably slept with more men than Princess Di but fewer than Madonna. What could be less transgressive than loving consensual heterosexual sex within a committed relationship leading to the exalted birth of a beautiful baby boy? And what fun is sex if it’s not at least a little transgressive? But wow: Getting pregnant at that particular moment in time, with that particularly beautiful man, after a stupid quarrel in Toledo, was a fucking miracle. So to speak.

Normally fertile couples have only a 25 percent chance of conceiving at the peak of the cycle. And we—a forty-three-year-old man and a twenty-nine-year-old woman with polycystic ovarian syndrome who’d been fairly malnourished in vegetarian hell—can’t really qualify as a normally fertile couple. At fifteen I was matter-of-factly informed by a prick endocrinologist that I’d likely never be able to have children, and I spent the following fifteen years grief-stricken by imagined barrenness, babies the altarpiece of my longing. I screwed my way through my twenties with impunity, using condoms until I knew my partner well enough to eschew them, braced for who-knew-what kind of IVF nightmares. It’s chilling to think, now, about all that unprotected sex. I used to joke ruefully about it. The upside of infertility: no worries! If I couldn’t be an effortless earth mother, I’d be a husky, world-weary, glamorous sex object instead: forgoing birth control, never staying the night, dragging on a cigarette, beholden only to myself, unfettered by the concerns of regular copulaters. Perhaps I’d shed a lone, picturesque tear for my never-to-be offspring on the subway ride home. Fun was had by all, make no mistake, but I’m blazingly lucky I never found myself facing single motherhood or abortion or STD. I was married for a minute in my early twenties, and the possibility that I might have gotten knocked up then haunts me still: a near miss, stark skid marks in the rearview mirror.

General fertility wisdom holds that a woman is more likely to get pregnant when she’s had an orgasm. More blood flow supposedly makes for happier, healthier spermatozoa and egg. And, more to the point, why would nature want us reproducing with a partner who can’t make us come? So assuredly we had a
good
good
time reaffirming our mutual adoration in Toledo.

We had talked about kids, about when we’d like to start “trying” to have them (code, I imagined, for stressful, routine sex). We thought we might “think about” starting to “think about it” in the months to come. I worried about what “thinking” about “trying” might entail, anticipating a long, hellish road to nowhere. Did we really want to go down that road? Where would that road end? My body wouldn’t work properly. Crushing disappointment was inevitable. This narrative became part of my identity, the way I envisioned the trajectory of my existence. I lived with its vaguely sad hum. But fine: I wanted to accept it and move on, preserve our dignity and hormonal imbalances and become one of those fabulous world-traveler couples, resigned to childlessness, nurturing all our nieces and nephews and friends’ offspring with joy. Maybe there was an upside to parenting only ourselves, remaining relatively well rested and well ironed. Children were not going to magically appear in my uterus.

We went home to Teruel, the spring wore on, my pants continued not to fit, and I chalked it up to too much bread and cheese, not enough kale and quinoa. It didn’t cross my mind that I might be pregnant. I, after all, could not
get
pregnant.

It was early June when I emerged from the bathroom in the basement apartment with the pee stick in my shaking hand. “I’m pregnant,” I said, grinning like a lunatic. Then I repeated it, elated and terrified. “I’m
pregnant,
” the word a shimmering new planet: glowing, marvelous, and whole, a thing to behold, there all the while. Then he was grinning too, and laughing, and saying “
Really?
”, and we sat on ugly rattan barstools staring at each other, just looking at each other like that, grinning, for I don’t know how long.

Astonishingly, unbelievably, there
was
no “trying,” no fertility ordeal, no crushing disappointment. Just a good old-fashioned romp with my lover after a quarrel, and now I’m typing one handed while bouncing my sleeping boy in his bouncy chair, singing him a ridiculous song that goes “this is the way we bouncy-bounce, this is the way we bouncy-bounce, this is the way we bouncy-bounce, all the livelong day.”