Sugar in My Bowl (9 page)

Yeah, I was. I cried harder letting him pull out of me than when I’d hidden under his basketball sweats in the Valiant. Daylight was breaking. He got up to get me another whiskey and a ginger ale. I asked him if I could roll a joint, and he tossed me a Baggie from under some Emma Goldman autobiographies on the floor.

“What are you reading her for?” I asked, licking the Zigzag.

“I’ve been reading Emma since I was a draft dodger.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. How’d you do it?”

“I wore a dress.”

“Like Phil Ochs?” I threw the sheets off. “Or like a Teamster girlfriend singing the ‘Draft Dodger Rag’?”

“How can you be old enough to know that song?” he said.

“I’m not.”

I started it, and he caught up to me on the second line:

“Yes, I’m only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen

“And I always carry a purse.”

I reached out for him with my scabbed-up hand. “I’m not eighteen, but I know a lot of things,” I said. “You underestimated me—well—I guess I thought you were an asshole, too.”

“Yeah, you got that right,” Stan said, and took a drag on the Thai stick. “How old
are
you?” He exhaled. “No, don’t tell me.”

I wouldn’t. I couldn’t stand to lie apart from him. I was an infant; I wanted him to cradle me and never let my toes touch the ground.

“How can I leave next week and go off to Detroit without you?—
shit
!” I said. I straddled his lap and blew a smoke ring. His blue eyes landed right in the center of my target. His cock grew hard again underneath me.

Everyone, everyone but Stan and a couple others, was heading to rural Michigan for “cadre training.” This was the first moment I hadn’t craved to go away. I never wanted another day to break.

“You’re going to be fine,” he said. “You gotta go,” he said, taking the doobie from me. “There’s not a man alive who’s not an asshole—that’s all you need to know—but you’re gonna be okay.” His hard-on started to soften.

Why’d he have to go and say that? Fuck, Stan.

Didn’t he get it? I would tell him I loved him right then, but I knew that wasn’t cool.

Instead, I moved his hand between my legs again, and the wetness shut him up.
Feel how I feel.
I leaned down to take his mouth in mine and make all the nonsense stop.

Absolutely Dangerous

Linda Gray Sexton

I
t was during a low, slow, hazy afternoon that I discovered a new desire in myself, and urged my lover, without words or any kind of communication, to play a brand-new game. We hadn’t planned it, and neither of us had ever before experimented with erotic asphyxiation. I had read about it, and been vaguely horrified, as the practice seemed dangerous beyond reason. Why do something if you know it might kill you? I could not imagine any sexual act compelling enough that I would be willing to take the chance.

Why did the chilling statistics matter so much to me initially? One thousand people dying every year is not so many, not when compared with the figures for heart attack, breast cancer, or even car wrecks. Still, it struck me as a ghastly figure, because to die willingly, from any sort of sex, seemed suffused with depravity. Sex and death, so closely tied in some ways: the loss of self; the offering up of one’s body like a sacrifice upon the temple of the bed. Why dare death?

At first other things had been enough. There had been the sex with my panties pushed aside and my butt hiked up on the bathroom’s tile countertop, as we watched our rhythm in the wide three-angled mirror. There had been the night I struggled, feigning helplessness, as I let him bind me spread-eagled to the bed and use a long black dildo that we had secreted in our sex toy box the day before. There had been the day I dressed up—or didn’t dress—and arrived at his house naked beneath an ankle-length black raincoat; I got spanked for that one, bent over the sofa, which was, of course, my intended purpose.

These episodes were certainly good sex, exciting sex, sex getting even better. But what about the best ever? That had to qualify in some other, magical way, complete with elusive, overwhelming qualities that weren’t present in any of the other intimate encounters. Somewhere in the time that spanned the loss of my virginity to a postmenopausal woman of fifty-five, was the answer. And it didn’t take me long to identify it.

As I look back, with some longing, to the episode which
does
qualify as the best, I think part of it was the element of surprise itself, the lack of the known, the idea that this was something we had never dared do before. And, perhaps most important, it was that this kind of sex was absolutely dangerous.

That day, I put his hands up and around my throat, and, seeming to intuit what I meant, he began to squeeze. The lack of oxygen made a fiery bow of my body, bent back on itself, as one orgasm after another after another rippled through me. Behind my eyelids, a rainbow of shimmering colors sucked me down into the center of my body and then out again into my fading consciousness. I was helpless before my lover and, more important, before myself. As the tatters of my self faded beneath a wild abandon, I was unable to tell him to stop. I turned myself over to him, entirely.

At this time in my career, I was working on my fourth novel,
Private Acts
. Writing fictitiously in this book was the closest I could come to admitting, via an imagined heroine, without embarrassing myself totally. I wanted to write something that spoke frankly about sex between men and women. Even so, after publication, friends would ask, “How did you find out about such sex?” And I would answer, lightly, “Imagine, imagine, imagine.” I wasn’t willing to take responsibility for what I had craved, or what I had done. Of course, in those days, with the exception of a few who were audacious, women writers did not often touch the topic of sex bluntly. When I used words like
fuck
and
prick
and
come
, I was scolded and even reproved for having stepped over some invisible but impenetrable barrier into inappropriate language. Those words belonged to men, and even my feminist friends criticized me for having used them.

“Gratuitous!” some said.

“As gross as men usually are!” claimed others.

“What about John Updike? Or Philip Roth?” I countered, thinking of masturbation into a piece of liver, or a woman convinced into drinking her lover’s urine. What I was writing about seemed downright tame.

“You’re not John Updike or Philip Roth,” they pointed out. “You’re a woman.” I watered down my manuscript, but a few original concepts stayed with me, even though the original worksheets, in all their sweet glory, are in a cardboard box up in the attic, yellowing sheet by sheet while their words fade with age.

Yet, again and again, the editor who had bought the novel forced me to hide the true intention of my prose, even though the title of the book,
Private Acts,
most surely described the subject. I made as few of the changes as I could. All the time I was rewriting, I thought of the love I had had for this man, a man who had helped me to reveal something new about myself, to myself. Accepting him and what we had done felt imperative: I loved him without wanting to change him or our act. Could I protect that sort of love, that sort of gift, and even my detailed descriptions about what had drawn us together, while still pleasing my disgruntled editor and my horrified friends? Ultimately I did get some of what I had so wanted to include, even though it was not the way I had originally written it, because, in the end, my editor had forced me to dilute it. My heroine simply slid sideways across either side of the mattress so that the pressure of her lover’s hands on the bed made an oxygenlike deprivation occur, a deprivation that made her orgasm even more intense than any other she had ever experienced.

Now, I still remember a few words and lines that had been different in the first versions of the novel. But most of the scene-altering revisions still stand in the text below. The scene still describes great sex, but it describes it in a dishonest way. In accordance with my memory, I have now changed a few things back to the way they were before my editor began to chip away at my intention like an angry sculptor: the words
cunt, prick, tongue, fuck, eats,
cut then, now are once more present. Today, I restore in parenthesis a few details and words that were the most critical to me, and which were not used. Most important, while trespassing over the editor’s boundaries in the second to last line, I clarify the idea that a mattress slipping sideways cannot suffice for hands around a throat.

As is their habit, they have already been here for several hours. In this lull, they rest before returning to feast on one another. He rubs his face, slowly, back and forth in her [
cunt,
] then moves up, spreading her wetness across them both, over their bellies and thighs. Their pubic hair is matted, glistening. He enters her quickly. She comes again as he presses in to fill her, bucking her hips up in a shudder that travels throughout her body. In the last few weeks she had discovered that during a long interlude like this, it is possible for her to climax [
come
] many times, over and over, and from nothing more than a single touch or a single entry. No longer does she require a lot of time or hard work or manipulating in just the right spot. His mouth alone on her nipple or on the back of her neck or his fingers or his voice—any of it can bring her off. She looks up into his eyes and sees that the golden iris is now just a rim against the white, a sun setting into the oblivion of pleasure. He moves faster and faster until he is just a blur inside and above her, part of her. His motion casts her sideways on the mattress; her head falls over the edge, the blood rushes up [
behind her eyes
]. His chest is flushing red, his hands grasp and clutch either side of the mattress [
her throat
] on either side of her neck. [
and he squeezes
]. The window behind him throws light over his body and sets him on fire.

He pushes himself into the main artery of her body and she dances outward; blackness clouds her eyes until all she can see is his face silhouetted against the sun, rushing away from her [
as the dark increases
]; all she can feel is the pounding of his body into hers. In the fever of [
the growing
blackness
], she starts to climax [
come
], again, harder than ever before: merged with him she has ceased to be herself alone. The waves break in her head and in her body and she can’t
(she won’t)
stop him. She would die now, all of her sex, and nothing else. She wants to go out on high, seized [
by her sex
], swept through the glass and up into the sky.

A cry, from far away, hoarse, raw. He shudders and slumps against her. His hands release the mattress [
her throat
]. She picks her head up, her lungs expand, fill with cool air, her vision clears. Her head still spins.

My urgent need to describe this kind of sex so blatantly in the novel was immense. I had discovered something important about myself—and undoubtedly about others—and I desperately wanted to write about it. I wanted to talk about it with every woman I knew; I wanted to hear that others had felt the same thing; I wanted to know I wasn’t sick or strange to have experienced this kind of pleasure. I wanted to see it as an act of love and have that belief validated. And to fail to write about it in a novel so filled with sex was to fail the book and all its vital meanings.

Eventually my lover left, and I went back to more conventional sex. But I never forgot the intensity of the experience I had discovered with him on a mattress in a hot attic, stealing those few hours before my children came home from school. Over the next few years, I thought of him often, but eventually work took me from one coast to the other, and being in a new place helped me to forget those long and languorous hours spent in afternoon sex.

And then the bizarre intervened. One evening the phone rang and I heard a familiar voice on the end of the line: my old lover of so long ago had tracked me down. Now, he was moving to the exact area in which I had staked a claim for a new life. The man with whom I had experienced the best sex I’d ever had was once again within reach.

“I have incredible news,” he said, with a boast in his voice. “You should probably sit down.”

“I’m fine standing,” I answered, figuring that he was about to tell me he had a new wife and a child in tow.

“I’ve had SRS.”

“Which is what?”

“SRS,” he answered, “is sexual reassignment surgery.”

“Sexual reassignment surgery?” I repeated, still not really understanding.

“I’m not Steven anymore. I’m Stephanie.”

I couldn’t think of a thing to say. A vague picture flew through my mind of penises being lopped off, replaced by patchwork vaginas.

“Can’t you hear it in my voice?” he asked. “Don’t I sound more feminine?”

I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of saying so.

“I’m gorgeous now,” he said. “I’ve got long black hair, beautiful breasts, legs that go on and on. I have a lot of men in my life. A lot.”

Long black hair? All I could think of was how bald he had been. Beautiful breasts? All I could think of was his muscular chest. Long legs? He had only been five foot nine.

“And all my parts work just right,” he said, lightly, in his now recognizably higher-pitched voice. He knew it was an indiscreet revelation, but I had the sense that he just couldn’t wait to tell me that particular.

“So when can we get together?” he asked. “How about some ‘girl’ shopping.” He giggled. “It’d be fun.”

I made an excuse, hung up hurriedly, and sat on my bed, stunned. What upset me most? The fact that he was now a woman? Or the fact that though he’d once again come within reach, I’d never ever have that indescribable sex again?

Over the next year he called me repeatedly. I didn’t want to see him. I was having a lot of trouble meeting men—in contrast to his brag of many partners. Mostly I spent time trolling through the online dating services, once in a while trying to find a partner, without much success. So how was he, a woman who was not really quite a woman, having so much success in the world of dating?