Sugar in My Bowl (28 page)

My father’s father (Howard Fast) was famous for his communism, Spartacus, and his various exploits with members of the opposite sex around Hollywood. One of my aunts is known at her prep school for being straight then gay and then straight again. A deceased grandaunt of mine was notorious for being one of the most sexually active octogenarians at The Hebrew Home for the Aged.

And what of my parents? When I was but a young girl I wandered into my eighty-year-old grandfather’s bedroom to find on the bedside table the book
Beyond Viagra
staring back at me. Yes, the Jongs, and the Fasts may have little in common but their love of freedom, fear of oppression, and their need for lubrication.

Growing up I knew we were weird. It’s hard not to suspect you are weird when you have a Chinese last name but are a redheaded Jew. It’s hard not to suspect you are weird when you live in a town house with a hot pink door and a dog called Poochini. And then there was the fact that my mother was always wandering around the house totally nude; this could have been a clue, perhaps.

All this railing against familial nakedness begs the question: am I a prude? Well, I dress like the Orthodox (long skirts, no wig), have been held up by Wendy Shalit as a role model, and have been married (to one man) since I was twenty-four. The short answer would be yes. Yes in the eyes of Erica Jong, I am a prude. (Of course Erica Jong did have a threesome with a certain hideous feminist author who could be described as MC Hammer if MC Hammer were a white lesbian. Portia de Rossi she is not. Hell, Andrea Dworkin she is not.)

The truth is my mother and I grew up in different worlds. My mom was born in 1942, in the middle of World War II. My mother grew up in a world where no one talked about sex. Where sex was secretive and sex was racy. She grew up in a world where sex meant marriage. Where women waited to kiss a boy until they were going steady. My mother grew up in a world where a woman couldn’t eat dinner alone in a restaurant, lest she look like a prostitute. She came of age in a universe without easily available birth control, without abortion, without options. My mother wore poodle skirts and twins sets, and had a black-and-white TV. She never witnessed a young Britney Spears pulsating in a bikini musing on her virginity (or lack of).

My nymphomaniacal grandparents were perhaps not typical of their generation, and we cannot discount the effect that my nymphomaniacal grandparents must have had on her.

I grew up in a world that was just the opposite. I grew up in a culture obsessed with sex. My childhood was punctuated by salacious
New York Post
headlines. As a girl I remember watching the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings on CNN. I was sitting in my mom’s bedroom, playing with stickers and asking her what a “pube” was.

The 1980s in New York City were a time of contradictions—a time of limousines riding by homeless people, a time of the richest and the poorest as neighbors, living side by side, stealing from the other. The city was boiling with rage, with fear, with crime, and with sex. Sex was everywhere—from sex crimes like the Central Park Jogger case to Donald Trump’s divorce from Ivana, to sex clubs like the Vault. Back then pornography was on basic cable (it was on channel J). Sex was everywhere.

Sex was piped into our lives through the media. The library was popular because it housed
Tiger Eyes,
which was the dirtiest of the Judy Blume oeuvre. From books to TV, my teenagehood was hugely influenced by the musings of Aaron Spelling with his
Beverly Hills 90210
and
Melrose Place
. I watched reruns of
Three’s Company
—which was filled with innuendo and sexual hijinks that would have been considered pornographic when my mother was a girl. No matter how unsexy a show was, it seemed they always dedicated at least one or two episodes to teen pregnancy or STDs or date rape or some other “sex”-related theme. There was the usual media schizophrenia about sex, but whether it was promoted or profane the topic was still very much in the forefront.

But by 1988 AIDS was just starting to be picked up by the mainstream media. The thing that affected every single girl on the Upper East Side of Manhattan was the AIDS infection of Ally Gertz. Ally Gertz had been a popular girl who had gone to a private school and did everything right . . . Everything right, until she met a cute bartender at Studio 54. She had one one-night stand, and from that she became infected with AIDS. She became a one-woman mission for AIDS awareness. She was a hero, but she was also a victim.

Soon after, someone decided that talking about sex would keep kids from having it, or if they did have it, they would have it safely. People were always asking me if I wanted to talk about sex. I endured hours of school sex education lectures. I went to a very progressive middle school where they had our eighth grade classes go out to the local CVS to buy condoms. The hippy ideal behind this misadventure was that if we were not embarrassed we would be more apt to go off and buy condoms and use them.

My two dorky best friends and I bravely walked down West Eighty-eighth Street. We bravely went into the drugstore. My friend Stephanie was not the type to suffer fools gladly. So as we giggled insanely she took the bull by the horns and bought the prophylactics.

Later we unzipped our backpacks and placed the condoms in the center of the large wooden table. The teacher congratulated us for our courage and ability to remove money from our wallets. We then proceeded to open the condoms and put them on bananas. Even at the tender age of twelve we understood how profoundly misguided our teachers were. We weren’t stupid idiots. We knew how to go into a store and buy things. Most of us smoked at least a few cigarettes a day by twelve years old. We weren’t short bus riders. Kids have unsafe sex because they think they are invincible not because they are too stupid to buy condoms. It did not create a class of safe-sex zealots, as I think our teachers might have hoped. It did however make sex seem somehow unsexy.

I am my mother’s worst bourgeois nightmare. I live on the Upper East Side. I have three children—all by the same man! I never slept with a man who wore cowboy boots. I have never been to a sex club. I have never had a Dominican divorce. I did, however, go to rehab, but that is for “the most drugs I ever had” anthology or possibly “the where did my teens go” anthology. I am a low-rent yuppie, shuttling my children back and forth to the various and sundry activities and involving myself in the Parents’ Association. I am the person my grandmother and mother would have watched in silent scorn. I sometimes tell my children that my most important job is taking care of them. I am not saying that I am a better mother than my mother. In fact, I am probably a worse mother than my mother, but I am a more traditional, or should we say, repressed mother than my mother. For example, in this book the great and talented Julie Klam tells her daughter to call her vagina her front. She shows this as an example of her repression. I call this an example of her brilliance.

Maybe I would have been more slutty, if I hadn’t grown up watching my mother saunter around our town house au natural, past the pictures of naked lesbians fooling around. Or maybe it was all the book readings I went to growing up. Or possibly it was the trauma of sitting through my mother’s fourth wedding and listening to my mother call my stepfather a “horny Boy Scout.” It was a phrase I did not soon forget. In fact it still haunts me to this day.

There is also a slim but real chance that this is just who I am. That growing up surrounded by sex did not make me a prude. Though it is true that my mother’s generation needed to rebel, to free themselves. Whereas my generation was already free. There was no need for us to fight the power because we were the power. We were the advertising dollars that the consumer goods industry fought for. We had all the rights we needed and possibly more. We didn’t need to fight for birth control. We didn’t need to fight for the right to choose. We didn’t need to fight for the right to vote. There was no reason for us to feel guilty about having sex before marriage. There was nothing to fight against. We didn’t need to burn our bras, so we burnt our CDs. And perhaps that’s why I’m neither a lover nor a fighter.

Kiss

A Short, Short Story

Erica Jong

W
e had known each other for twenty years. There had always been electricity between us. But we were friends not lovers. We loved to flirt, to come to the brink and part. He lived in Rome and I in New York.

We first met because we had the same gallery. It was owned by a woman with sour crimson lips who always seemed to be sucking a lemon. Her mother had named her Hermione. She hated it and changed it to Hermes—the name of her gallery. She was tall, had a big nose, and wore outlandish hats—priceless creations of felt and feathers that looked like flying raptors. Her nails were long and bloody. Her perfume was an overpowering mixture of tuberose and jasmine, privately blended.

But she knew how to bring the best critics in—if there is such a thing in critics. And though she took an obscene percentage (50 percent plus expenses) she got the highest prices.

When I met Lorenzo he was married and he still is married—but to a different wife. When I met him I was married to X and now I am married to Y. But none of that matters to the story.

I didn’t like his work though it sold ferociously. He made enormous sculptures of roly-poly beasts—bulbous Bambis, obese dancing bears, inflated blue Babars.

At that time I was doing canvases of cunts—open cunts, closed cunts, bleeding mutilated cunts. It was the 70s. I was a guerrilla—and also gorilla—girl.

He pretended to love my work and I pretended to love his. Actually, he loved my breasts and I longed for his huge unseen penis.

How did the kiss begin?

We were in Palm Beach with our spouses. There was a large party made by some billionaire on his five-hundred-foot yacht. Lorenzo and I were wandering about, looking at the Picassos, Braques, the Koonses, the Boteros, when suddenly in the dark of the titanic teak deck he kissed me. That kiss was a promise. It lingered fizzily like a jazz riff. It tongued my clit without touching it. It gave me chills and hots simultaneously. It changed us. From then on we knew there was something more between us.

But his new wife was fiercely jealous; they seldom spent nights apart. She had been married to a player—her second marriage to the corrupt Italian politician—and she was wary. She told Lorenzo if he ever cheated they were through.

Lorenzo was not a beautiful man. He had wild, kinky orange hair and a reddish salt-and-pepper beard. He had huge agate eyes and an aquiline nose and he was not tall but he exuded sex. You knew this man loved sex and appreciated women. You just knew. If I could bottle that, I’d be rich.

The kiss changed the equation. When he next came to New York he set himself up in a downtown penthouse hotel suite with a sauna and a built-in lap pool. He invited me over.

In the elevator, panic struck. I knew that if we consummated this flirtation something would shiver between us, possibly even tip over our marriages, but I pretended not to be scared.

He greeted me with vintage champagne and fresh chocolate-covered cherries. We ate and drank and spoke haltingly. Then we retreated to the couch, wrapped our arms around each other, and began to kiss. It was a kiss that went back to the birth of the universe, the making of the stars, the sculpting of humans out of clay. It was a mitochondrial kiss in which generations were born, died, and were buried, in which trees leaped out, bloomed, fell and rotted, and gave birth to new forests. It was a kiss that moistened oceans, grew the universe, swirled through the cosmos. His tongue, my lips, my tongue, his lips, everything merged in the waters of the womb of his mother, the penis of his father, the souls of his grandparents.

A kiss can be an IOU, or the end of a love affair. A kiss can last for eons. A kiss can be longer and stronger than a fuck. A kiss has a history and a future.

But what was its future? In the first ending we go to bed, are deeply disappointed, and never see each other again.

In the second ending, we go to bed, discover lifelong passion, and turn our lives upside down, saddening spouses, children, parents. But I have chosen an alternate ending. I get up from the couch, run to one of the many glamorous marble bathrooms to pee, dress quickly, then I sneak out the door of the suite.

Now I can keep his kiss for the rest of my life.

Acknowledgments

T
hanks to the indefatigable Amanda Lensing, my assistant for word processing, research, appointments, et cetera; Julia Cheiffetz, living proof that Barnard girls are the brainiest and cutest; Katie Salisbury, who works her butt off; Barbara Victor, who read proofs with me and lived through the crises; Bob Miller, who persuaded me with great enthusiasm; Amy Berkower, who thought
Why not?
and did the contract with you know who.

Kisses to my live-in lawyer, KDB. Every writer should sleep with a lawyer—especially in the age of Amazon, if not amazons.

And to my contributors: Hugs, kisses, and no more fear. Women who write about sex
still
get no respect—but we don’t give a damn!

—EMJ, March 2011, New York City, my hometown.

(I’d rather be in Rome.)

Contributors

Karen Abbott
was born and raised in Philadelphia, where she attended sixteen years of Catholic school—a tenure that gave her an appreciation for all things Magdalene and a finely tuned sense of guilt. Her first book, the
New York Times
bestseller
Sin in the Second City,
tells the true story of two sisters who ran the world’s most famous brothel.
American Rose,
her portrait of the legendary Gypsy Rose Lee, was published in January 2011 in honor of the ecdysiast’s 100th birthday. She often gives her job description as “Chronicler of Whores and Strippers” and feels as if she were born several generations too late.