Sugar in My Bowl (20 page)

As it happened, we split the difference. He agreed to have sex with me, and to the best of my knowledge at the time, he made good on our deal. The experience was so underwhelming, so strikingly devoid of the blissful, painful, or intensely emotional sensations I’d been promised, I wondered what was wrong with everyone for imbuing intercourse with so much import. But I was thrilled to be done with it. I was fifteen years old and I had lost my virginity, ahead of everyone else’s schedule, if not my own. Or so I thought.

For the following year I told anyone who asked that I was not a virgin. I’d had sex, I’d done drugs, my parents were getting a divorce—I was not popular, but you couldn’t say I was prissy. Then, the summer before I turned seventeen, I went to work on the kitchen staff at a hippie sleepaway camp. Every morning I got up early to set up the hot cocoa station; every night I put the chairs on top of the tables and mopped the dining hall floor. In August, I had three days off, and one of the counselors and I got in her battered car and drove through the thick summer air from New Hampshire to Cape Cod.

Her boyfriend was in Provincetown, living out of his van, which he parked in the woods outside of town. We sat with him on Commercial Street while he played music for money and scorched ourselves brown on the beach in the afternoon sun. When night fell, we went with him to a store called Firehouse Leather to meet some of his friends who sold belts and moccasins to tourists. One of them was a tall guy named Austin with a sand-colored ponytail. I noticed he was looking at me a lot, and I didn’t want him to stop. When my friends and I walked away, I turned back and caught him still staring at me, which made us both laugh.

We had a bonfire on the beach late that night. I sat in the dunes with my friend and her boyfriend and the staff of Firehouse Leather, drinking beer and watching a meteor shower flickering in the dark above us. I don’t remember what we talked about, but it didn’t matter. It was clear to all of us that this was special, that we would remember it, and that the night could end only one way: my friend would go back to the woods and I would walk down Commercial Street in the dawn with Austin and get into his bed.

When we had sex, it became clear to me that, in fact, I had never had sex before. What had happened on that futon on Great Jones had been a failed attempt; the young man from NYU had not completed his mission. This, now, was something else. It was uncomfortable, then pleasurable, but most of all it was different. It was different from the plodding loneliness of high school, and from the harrowing, cyclical fights with my parents that had become our routine. It wasn’t boring, and it wasn’t uncomplicated, and it wasn’t like taking acid. It was something that was better to do than to talk about doing. It was a door to another place, another way of being that didn’t have to do with language. It would take me many, many years to understand what I wanted from it, but I was so glad to know it was there.

Austin wrote me long letters that I read by the brown lake back at camp—I think I still have one in a hatbox somewhere. I saw him many times over the years, when I went up to look at the college he attended in Massachusetts, and when I went back to Provincetown for summer weekends in my twenties. We would sleep together once in a while, if we both happened to be single, and sometimes even if we didn’t, until eventually we both grew up and reached the age when you stop wishing you were older and more worldly and start wishing you could be young again.

But he could have been anyone. I wasn’t looking for love, though God knows I needed it. I was looking for myself. I knew so little about sex I imagined I’d experienced it years before this was true. But I knew that sex was a way to discover and communicate who you are. I don’t think I was wrong about that.

Light Me Up

Margot Magowan

A
ccording to Dr. Mayfield, six weeks after the birth, Henry and I were allowed to have sex. I was so excited, I calculated the exact day, which felt at the time, to my mush brain, like doing calculus. When the moment arrived, I practically tore off his clothing. It wasn’t sexual desire. I just wanted to feel like a woman instead of a cow. For a few minutes. Also, and maybe this was the same thing, I wanted to connect with Henry again, feel as if we were something more than co-caretakers of an eating, defecating mini-creature. The no-sex thing kind of stressed me out, because it was so different for us. Since we’d been together, we’d always had a lot of sex.

It was early morning. Our room was full of blue light. Ivy was asleep in the cradle next to the bed. I turned toward Henry, smiling, kissing him, pulling off his shirt and pushing off his boxers with my foot. But while that was all happening, I had a strange, disconnected feeling, like how people describe near-death experiences, as if I were floating up somewhere above my body. When we were naked, I pulled him tight against me, trying to wake my body up.

“You’re ready?” he said, misunderstanding, and then went inside of me.

“Ow!” I yelled, pushing him off, my elbow jabbing into his chest. I felt as if my vagina were on fire.

“What’s wrong?” he said, reaching his arm out toward the headboard, trying to regain his balance.

“It hurts. I don’t know. “

Henry lay back on his side, looking down at me, one arm across my breasts. Just that was painful, his arm lying there, when I’d always adored the weight of it, of him.

“I had a C-section— why would it hurt down there?”

He shook his head.

“I thought that’s why movie stars scheduled them—they don’t want anything messing with their vaginas.” I smiled at my reference to my
Us Weekly
obsession, which drove him crazy. But I was scared. I felt as if my body had closed up, gotten hostile. “Do you think something happened to me?” I said. “Do you think they cut a nerve?”

“No, Juliet, hypochondriac. Your body’s gone through a lot.”

“But Mayfield said six weeks. It’s been six weeks.”

He brushed my hair across my forehead with his fingers, tucking it behind my ear. “How much did it hurt?”

“So much. And it’s not just that it hurt. Before that, I wasn’t into it. It felt like something was happening to my body, but not to me.”

He looked sad and confused.

“It’s not about you,” I said, touching his arm, my favorite part of his body. “ It’s not your fault.”

“Okay,” he said, sounding unsure.

“I don’t know what’s going on. My body doesn’t feel like my body. I can’t explain it.”

We attempted sex a few more times over the next month, and it always felt horrible. I tried to calm myself— maybe I had a yeast infection. But I had no other symptoms.

I’d been counting on sex to make me feel better, the way it always had, my whole life, just by relaxing me, making my body feel good, just that at least. It wasn’t only the pain that alarmed me. It was the lack of feeling, nothing where something used to be, coming home to a robbed house. Henry’s touch seemed invasive, aggressive. Not just his dick. Wherever he touched me. My whole body felt hypersensitive. I wanted the gentlest contact. The kind of feather touch I thought I hated, that tickled me and made my skin crawl. Usually, I liked to be pressed hard or grabbed tight. But now I craved cuddling, no dirty sex talk, but a paternal or maybe a maternal kind of love.

There were other differences I noticed in myself. Sex, or even just blatant sexuality, on TV disgusted me—watching reality shows’ horny drunks or all those women shaking their asses in videos. Previously, even when I didn’t like something that was on, I often got sucked in, fascinated, curious, analyzing, trying to figure it all out. Now it was just gross.

If I came across a porn channel while flipping through the remote, I actually got nauseated. My reaction to it was so extreme, so physical, I worried I might team up with an army of right-wing suburban housewives from the Bible belt to launch an antiporn crusade.

Sex was becoming something I just didn’t get, like looking at food after you’ve had a big meal and you can’t imagine ever being hungry again. I didn’t pick up sexual innuendos or imagery. Once, while Ivy was sleeping, and I was looking at a magazine, I saw a photo of a woman licking an ice cream and I got my queasy, porno reaction. When I saw her giant tongue on a red, wet Popsicle and made the obvious sexual connection, I realized I hadn’t been aware of that kind of stuff for a long time.

That was weird, because I’d made a whole career out of picking all that up, highlighting semidisguised, accepted, ubiquitous misogyny. I was an assistant professor of cultural studies at UC Berkeley, and one of my skills, exploited in both my dissertation and my book (if I ever finished it) was my ability to spot phallic symbols and “vaginal” ones too. I even won kudos from my dissertation panel for pointing out that the latter had never been assigned a literary term. The sexual semiotics were so obvious to me, I didn’t understand how people could miss them. The very first time I saw the Joe Camel ad, when I was twelve, I couldn’t believe they’d created a cartoon face out of a penis and two fat, droopy testicles. Of course, a lot of people caught on eventually, but when they finally banned that pervy camel, they said it was because he was an animated character, appealing to kids. None of those congressmen seemed bothered that his face was a penis.

Having no sexual desire anymore confused me about Henry. I didn’t know what he was for. I knew that sounded awful. It was awful. I couldn’t believe I was thinking such mean, horrible thoughts—a new mom. But it wasn’t just that he couldn’t give me orgasms. He couldn’t breast-feed either. He didn’t make much money. He’d forget to pick up diapers. He didn’t buy the vibrating chair or the baby monitor, or any of that endless baby paraphernalia you need, until I asked him to about a hundred times. He’d forget to pay his cell phone bill, which was huge, never dealing with signing up for a cheaper plan, so my calls would go straight to voice mail. I saw his flaws everywhere, the way I used to see phallic symbols. Maybe I’d made a horrible mistake getting into this marriage thing. How had my life changed so fast anyway? Was it lust that got me here? A broken condom?

The first time I saw Henry, about two years prior, I wandered into his lamp store in the Mission. He made these crazy, beautiful lamps, and he was so intense about them, bent over them with a million tools that looked exactly the same to me, but later, he explained, were all slightly different; it’s all about how they’re angled. I’d never been attracted to a blond guy before, but it was his gray eyes that hooked me, the furrow between them shaped like a backward
K
. I wanted him to study me the way he did those lamps, with that kind of focused attention, as if I were that fascinating and complicated, unusual and beautiful; make him figure out how to light me up.

He didn’t even notice me when I walked into his store, and I have to admit, that was part of the initial attraction. Bored in bars from New York City to Austin, I’d make seduction a game: could I make the guy totally absorbed in something else become absorbed in me? Could I make him have sex with me again and again and be late for work? Miss work altogether? Miss a plane?

“This is so pretty,” I said, pointing to the lampshade Henry was working on. He was weaving together copper strands in loose, wiry braids over an exposed yellow bulb, all of which cast sharp, black shadows across the walls like giant spiderwebs. “How much is it?”

“It’s not finished yet,” he said, twisting some copper so it hooked over the wrought-iron, pentagon-shaped shade.

“Isn’t it almost done though?” I said. “I could wait.”

He looked over at me, shook his hair out of his face, and smiled.

At some point, watching him all hunched over, I said something like, “Are you OK? Don’t you want to sit up?” I walked over to him. “That position looks so uncomfortable. Let me rub your head for a while.” I reached out and touched his neck and then his hair. I gave him the most incredible neck/head/hair massage, intended to relax and arouse him all at once. I was successful.

I hit on Henry that day, it’s true. But it was Henry who fell in love first, who came to adore me and told me so all the time, who wanted to be exclusive just three weeks later and then wanted to marry me. By the time he officially proposed with his grandmother’s ring, a daisy chain of pavé and yellow diamonds, seven months later, I was in love with him too.

Marriage had never been in my life plan or dream or whatever. Nor had kids. My parents had a bitter divorce, I loved my work, and I wasn’t into the whole commitment thing. But I was so infatuated with Henry that I’d started to wonder what it would be like to make a baby with him. He came from a huge Catholic family; he loved kids, and kids loved him back. So I told him I’d think it over. Then the condom broke. He agreed to get married in Vegas, after the morning sickness had passed, just him and me. That plan won me over.

For our honeymoon, my mom gave us a gift certificate for two nights at a five-star hotel in Santa Barbara. But we decided to save the trip for when I wasn’t pregnant and the baby was old enough to leave with a sitter. I wanted to go when I could feel sexy in my bikini and drink margaritas by the pool, worry free.

But now, six months after my wedding, up at 3:00
A.M.
nursing Ivy, I was starting to obsess about that hotel. A place like that could be just what Henry and I needed, a change of scene and some real romance. How could you not have great sex at a place like that? I got up and went to my desk, digging out the brochure. My mouth dropped open as I looked at the glossy photos, fantasizing about the clean towels, the room service, and the giant TV. The resort seemed to offer everything I craved. I was breast-feeding 24/7, why not do it with an ocean view? When Henry woke up the next day, I told him I wanted to go as soon as possible, convincing him it would be good for us.

When we arrived, the concierge gave us flutes of champagne and then we got a ride on a golf cart to our room. The suite had billowing curtains opening onto a balcony overlooking the ocean. There was a giant bed with a white comforter on a shiny, blue tile floor, like a puffy cloud in a perfect sky. There was another room with panoramic windows, a huge fruit bowl on a glass coffee table, and a crib for Ivy. While she slept there, we used the two-headed shower and then got in the sunken tub together. Henry stretched out across the whole bath, his arms and legs spilling over the sides like an overgrown plant.