The Devil Tree (6 page)

•   •   •

As children, Karen and I discovered sex together. We made up nicknames for genitals: chink for hers, bobolink for mine. She wanted to know where my bobolink was when I cycled. Did it lie along the top of the bicycle saddle or fall down on one side? Did it flatten when I lay on my stomach? I wondered how deep her chink was and whether it filled with water when she swam. Could it be sealed by tape? Could she hide money in it? Karen can still remember how one afternoon, as we played in the woods with other children, I put a branch inside her chink. One of the girls told Karen’s mother about the episode, and Karen was spanked. Karen’s mother, taking the fifty-cent piece I had given Karen to store in her chink, said it was dirty money from a dirty boy for a dirty thing. Another time, Karen tried
to snatch my bobolink while I tried to deepen her chink with my hand. At first she screamed; then, as my fingers rested inside her, she grew silent and simply stared at me. Touching each other, we discovered sensations of desire that gave us far more pleasure than any plaything had ever given us. The desire was insistent, and it grew more insistent with each new opportunity for kissing and petting. Exploring each other gave way to feelings that demanded expression, that needed a language of love and devotion we had not yet acquired or developed. And so, to give drama to what we felt, we pretended to be characters from an imaginary fable: Karen was the beautiful and always difficult-to-please Lady Forsythia, and I, Lord Willow of Brook, was her proud though shy lover and defender.

Changing her voice, Karen would telephone my house as Lady Forsythia. Finally Mam’selle d’Arcy, my governess, feeling it was her responsibility to know about my friends, asked me how I had met this Lady Forsythia. “I was introduced to her by her friend, Lord Willow of Brook,” I replied. “They’re lovers, you know.”

Now, even more curious, Mam’selle d’Arcy probed further. “And where did you meet this Lord Willow of Brook?”

“Where else but in the house of Yugo Slav?” I said.

“And who is that Mr. Slav?”

“Yugo Slav? A nice chap from Yugoslavia. He’s also in love with Lady Forsythia.”

Mam’selle d’Arcy was distressed. “You’re so young, and already you know the strangest people, Jonathan,” she moaned.

•   •   •

Although Karen talked freely about herself and described the sex she liked, I could not do the same; often I merely said yes or no to the questions she asked, or, silent, I would simply begin to kiss her, my hands moving over her shoulders and breasts, slowly and hesitantly descending toward her belly and thighs, stroking or kneading, teasing her flesh. Or I would start by sitting at her feet, stroking her calves, kissing and licking the inside of her knees, my hands and mouth grazing her thighs, circling around her flesh until she would start to force herself upon me, insistent and demanding, dictating my pace and the direction of my touch.

Karen once said that it’s one thing if a guy is making it with a girl and she really doesn’t know how far she wants to go and then begins to be afraid and draws the line. But it’s another when a girl sets out to get finger-fucked and gives nothing in return. “Suppose you didn’t want to get laid by a particular guy,” I asked. “Would you still want him to finger you?”

“Why not?” Karen answered. “If I can get an orgasm out of it, I don’t need any real fucking.” She told me she was embarrassed and frightened by me only once, on our first night near the beach, but as soon as she felt my fingers inside her she felt only pleasure. It was the night of her first orgasm.

•   •   •

I remember a night we spent in a motel. Karen, who had downed a glass of straight vodka, was particularly free and abandoned, demanding to be made love to, trailing me even into the bathroom. She insisted on saying aloud all that we did to each other, all that she wanted me to do, and
all that she suspected I never would do. Her onslaught left me, at first, excited, then deflated, too quickly spent. Annoyed with my embarrassment and my reluctance to satisfy her with my hand and mouth, Karen suddenly pushed me away. “You’re hiding something from me, your lordship,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“A fossil in a glass case: yourself.” Smiling despicably, she went on. “Do you recall, sir, how you died? Was it in a battle, in a victory, or were you taken prisoner and tortured to death? Better yet, did you die of an inherited malaise?”

This was my first defeat at her hands, and I’ve never recovered from it. After that, everything seemed to lack spontaneity, as if it were premeditated by an emotionally dead child. Unable to respond, I felt she had infected me with her own deadness.

I began to wonder: why did I choose a woman who cannot give of herself, whose love triggers in me a sense of competition and then makes me want to retreat? I see a ludicrous picture: it is after midnight; Jonathan James Whalen, the gray-haired, prematurely aged scion of Wealth, Health, Power, & Freedom Unlimited, is lying alone in his bedroom in his palatial home. Earlier in the day he has bragged to his psychiatrist that he has never conceded to a woman, yet Karen, his wife and the only woman he has ever desired, has for years preferred to sleep in a separate bedroom.

At one of Karen’s parties, I talked to an attractive middle-aged woman, a contributing editor of
Branching Out
, a women’s magazine. After telling me that she was in charge of her magazine’s weekly report on sexual relationships, she said, “I’m going to stay away from you; otherwise Karen will think you’ve fucked me.” About an hour later, in the hall, she brushed against me, kissed my cheek, and said, “I think you ought to know that I want
you just for sex; let’s leave the high life to Karen—she’s so good at it!” She didn’t attract me at all, but the notion that I attracted her aroused me. As I kissed her on the mouth, Karen walked in, took one look at the two of us, and turned away.

The guests wouldn’t leave, so we drank beer and told stories until two in the morning. Karen ignored me the entire time. When everyone else had finally left, she turned to me and said, “Go ahead, fuck the bitch.”

In bed, I was confident that I could change her mood. I hugged her. Sitting up, she slapped my face. “Cut it out,” she shouted, “or I’ll kick the shit out of you! Let me sleep.” I felt humiliated. Karen’s slap reminded me of a whore who once hit me when I told her she wasn’t good enough for the price she was asking. In her tough, fuck-the-world way, she gained sexual control over me as a compliant woman never could, and I desired her even more.

The next day on the phone Karen said she wondered whether she should keep on seeing me, since obviously I had something serious going with the woman editor. To make my life seem as eventful as hers, I lied and told her she was right. When she asked if I was in love with that woman, I said, “No, but I’m not detached. To be with her and inside her, to have her all over me—it’s impossible for me to screw and remain detached.” I went on and on.

•   •   •

Before I left America, there were other men around Karen; among them was David, an actor with a larger-than-life quality. Stick your dick out the window and screw them all, on the table, on the carpet, against a wall, hump and jump and kick and lick—that was David. Once, in front of
me, Karen, who was high on pot, said to him loudly enough for me to hear, “I would like to fuck you, sweetheart, until, until. . .” Then half joking, she dragged him into the bathroom and slammed the door. After a few minutes the two of them came out laughing, and when she asked him, “Will I see you again?” he answered, “I don’t know. That depends on how bad you want it.” I stood there—watching.

•   •   •

As a boy I had once received a note from my father on the subject of feelings.

You’ve apparently told your governess, Jonathan, that your feelings were hurt when I refused to let you travel on the company plane to see me in Washington. You and I both know that “hurt feelings” is nothing but a dodge for imposing one’s will on another person. Your feelings are no more easily hurt than the feelings of anyone else.

When Karen fucked David practically in front of me, that was evil, but according to some theologians evil is the raw material of spirituality. Was Karen’s act a way of prompting my rage and humiliating me for my self-control, or was she counting me out by deadening me even more? Was she giving in to desire, or to despair?

•   •   •

From the back seat of my limo I spotted Karen walking along Madison Avenue. I asked the driver to slow down and I watched her for a while. Casting quick glances at her reflection in the shop windows, she walked without a trace of slouch, her stride even, shoulders square, chest up, weight forward, arms and hands at ease, at times brushing her hair off her forehead and neck. As long as I have known her, Karen has been checking and rechecking the state of her image, as if it had a will of its own and could one day leave her. Equally on the street, at home, in a disco, or at a photographer’s studio, Karen is fascinated by her own surface. She is a perfect symbol of our visual age.

In a disco, at her every step, mirrors split, enlarge, and multiply her image. If she adores disco dancing, it is only because it allows her to exhibit herself and observe herself at the same time. No matter that the endless beat deadens conversation, for her partner is usually as involved with his image as she is with hers. For me, dancing is an expression of elementary courtship, a crude pretense of sexual restraint, a publicly approved opportunity for exhibitionism. I have always hated dancing, and now I simply refuse to engage in it, although I don’t mind watching others—particularly Karen—throwing themselves all over the place for my amusement.

My governess allowed me to watch TV for no more than five hours a week, and I spent my adolescence almost entirely without seeing it. Most of my American contemporaries, however, by the time they graduate from high school, have watched about twenty thousand hours of television, an equivalent of nine years on the job. As a result they’re poor talkers and are easily fatigued by conversation. In constant need of adolescent distraction and entertainment, they find silence, reading, and solitary reflection synonymous with boredom. The disco, that noisy grave of human interaction, becomes the clinic for their never-ending withdrawal from an incurable addiction to television. The
disco is their ideal playground: it kills language, it shrinks time, and it chops up awareness.

•   •   •

Many of my friends in India were mystics who believed that only by physical, moral, and emotional experiments can one discover one’s intimate nature—and the nature of intimacy.

From them I learned that as a man can ejaculate without having an orgasm, and have an orgasm without ejaculating, so is he also capable of reaching one orgasm after another. To obtain such freedom and control, I mastered a technique of tightening and relaxing my pelvic muscles; I learned to cut off the flow of semen at the point of orgasm, allowing the pleasurable release of the climax to take place freely yet sustaining the tension and rigidity needed to maintain my excitement.

Later, my friends volunteered another revelation. A man who knows what he is after, they said, should never rely on pleasing his woman by just playing with her clitoris and fucking her. He must be able to keep his woman lying on her back while he, placed between her thighs, slowly pokes his hand, palm upward, inside her, and with his fingers following the delicate curves of her vagina, probes for the secret love-spot hidden on the abdominal side of her canal, between the pubic bone and the lump of the cervix. Through forceful squeezing and tapping of that love-spot the man can cause his woman to secrete a milky love-juice, which, during an all-powerful orgasm, she will ejaculate—as a man ejaculates—through her urethra. To many Indian mystics that juice is the woman’s own semen, not much different in its substance from the semen of a man.

On dozens of occasions Karen has willingly submitted to my bringing her to this type of orgasm; on many other occasions she has reached spontaneous climaxes without,
as I once crudely told her, lifting a finger off herself. In response, she said that a man who comes but cannot go is hardly her idea of a perfect lover; that, in fact, she considers my ability to hold off my orgasms, or to go through a series of them, a hang-up as morbid as the control it requires.

Now that I no longer depend on opium to slow me down sexually, I regret that I left India before learning how to deaden or—should I wish it—even eradicate my sexual urge. For even though sex is a veritable well inside me that drains me as I draw from it, ever since boyhood I have allowed it, several times every day, to absorb most of my energy.

One night she slid her hand along the inside of my thigh, and when, uncertain of her need, I didn’t react, she turned away and said, “Good night, ice cube, maybe we’ll clink against each other during the night.” It was as though she’d forgotten how many times she had turned me down, as though, despite her apparent abandon, she weren’t the most self-controlled and self-absorbed being I have ever known.

Another time, at the peak of our lovemaking, just before her orgasm, when with every fiber of my being I hung on to her and whispered I loved her, she pushed me away. “You’ve distracted me again,” she snarled. “I’d better do it myself.” And she propped herself against the wall, her legs spread wide, her hands buried between her thighs, probing her flesh. With her face flushed, her eyes vacant, her lips parted, she looked as if she were posing for a photographer, isolated from him only by the floodlights. Her fingers speeded up their frenetic search, her hands probed deeper, a grimace appeared suddenly on her face; gasping and moaning, she brought herself to orgasm, curled up into herself.

•   •   •

You might be pleased to know, Jonathan, that this week two of our board members and your former trustees have been called to high posts in Washington. James Abbott has been chosen to be Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, and Charles Sothern has been nominated by the President to be Secretary of the Treasury. Other members of the board have also had changes in their lives. Walter William Howmet, once your father’s closest associate and an architect of our corporate growth, who has been until now chairman of the board, has also assumed the responsibilities of chief executive officer. Stanley Kenneth Clavin, another close friend of your father’s and a member of the board, has decided to retire from his post as company president. Mr. Clavin says that with younger leadership emerging in almost every major division of the company, the new management should be free to work as a team. His place will be taken by Peter Baudley Macauley.