The Naughty Bits (3 page)

Both Halle and Sethe were under the impression that they were hidden. Scrunched down among the stalks they couldn’t see anything, including the corn tops waving over their heads and visible to everyone else.

Sethe smiled at her and Halle’s stupidity. Even the crows knew and came to look. Uncrossing her ankles, she managed not to laugh aloud.

The jump, thought Paul D, from a calf to a girl wasn’t all that mighty. Not the leap Halle believed it would be. And taking her in the corn rather than her quarters, a yard away from the cabins of the others who had lost out, was a gesture of tenderness. Halle wanted privacy for her and got public display. Who could miss a ripple in a cornfield on a quiet cloudless day? He, Sixo, and both of the Pauls sat under Brother pouring water from a gourd over their heads, and through eyes streaming with well water, they watched the confusion of tassels in the field below. It had been hard, hard, hard sitting there erect as dogs, watching corn stalks dance at noon. The water running over their heads made it worse.

Paul D sighed and turned over. Sethe took the opportunity afforded by his movement to shift as well. Looking at Paul D’s back, she remembered that some of the corn stalks broke, folded down over Halle’s back, and among the things her fingers clutched were husk and cornsilk hair.

How loose the silk. How jailed down the juice.

The jealous admiration of the watching men melted with the feast of new corn they allowed themselves that night. Plucked from the broken stalks that Mr. Garner could not doubt was the fault of a raccoon. Paul F wanted his roasted; Paul A wanted his boiled and now Paul D couldn’t remember how finally they cooked those ears too young to eat. What he did remember was parting the hair to get to the tip, the edge of his fingernail just under, so as not to graze a single kernel.

The pulling down of the tight sheath, the ripping sound always convinced her it hurt.

As soon as one strip of husk was down, the rest obeyed and the ear yielded up to him its shy rows, exposed at last. How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-up flavor ran free.

No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.

How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free.

from
Hopscotch

JULIO CORTÁZAR

It’s a standby among parlor-room conundrums: If you had to be deprived of all your senses save one, which would you keep? Taste, perhaps, if you were Paul Prudhomme and lived down the block from La Tour d’Argent; or smell, if Carolina wisteria bloomed outside your bay windows; some would say hearing, transfixed by the rapture of Beethoven or Bessie Smith; but most people would cling to sight, “the prime work of God” (as Milton called it after he lost his), and hope to fight back the haunting darkness.

Not I. For my money, if I could only retain one means of interacting with the world, it would be touch. Touch, soft like the powder on a moth’s wing, the cool parabola of a slow-traced finger along my brow. I imagine myself blind as Borges, reading the Braille dots that circle a nipple or stroking the soft harp strings of down on my lover’s belly. Deaf as the desert amid the seesaw scissoring of body on body, hearing through contact the syllables of joint and sinew, learning through movement the grammar of friction. My brain is full of visual images I won’t soon forget; the jukebox of the mind contains innumerable tracks; I can recall the smell and taste of my favorite things almost at will; but of touch I require a constant transfusion. Something about touch defies memory—it is diffuse, complex, and difficult to render in language. Aristotle was probably right that we receive all our knowledge through our senses, but touch is the only one I trust, and sex the language in which I’m least willing to lie. Fingers working like self-aware brushes on the electrified canvas of skin, a hundred million nerve endings in constant communion with the brain—that is the source of touch’s appeal.

We’ve all temporarily experienced what it would be like to have only one sense (at least under ideal circumstances): headphones on and eyes closed, surrendering to the tweeter and woof, or full-mouthed and chewing, head thrown back in communion with the flavor of a morel. With porn, especially, we limit ourselves to a one-sense experience, even if more would be merrier. Internet smut is the worst: sitting unfeelingly in a desk chair, gazing through the blue flicker to unreachably distant, odorless, 2-D bodies gathering themselves in their pixels for our delight, the crotch and the eye connected by a single, throbbing nerve—not how I prefer my arousal. I don’t think I’m alone in this opinion. Among allies in the cult of contact I can number the great Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Cortázar’s chef d’oeuvre, the avant-garde novel
Hopscotch,
contains one of my favorite love scenes in modern literature. He paints it in a few hundred words, and in all five senses, but it’s clear that touch is sovereign. Two eyes, two ears, one tongue, one nose, ten fingers. See what I mean? Reach out.

I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you.

You look at me, from close up you look at me, closer and closer and then we play cyclops, we look closer and closer at one another and our eyes get larger, they come closer, they merge into one and the two cyclopses look at each other, blending as they breathe, our mouths touch and struggle in gentle warmth. . . . Then my hands go to sink into your hair, to cherish slowly the depth of your hair while we kiss as if our mouths were filled with flowers or with fish, with lively movements and dark fragrance. And if we bite each other the pain is sweet, and if we smother each other in a brief and terrible sucking in together of our breaths, that momentary death is beautiful. And there is but one saliva and one flavor of ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water.

—translated by Gregory Rabassa

from
Falconer

JOHN CHEEVER

Some fiction, seeking to shock, asks you to visualize the most extreme acts of human behavior. Other, more confident narratives demonstrate that the extreme doesn’t reside at the margins but at the center of who we all are, not in monstrous aberrations of humanity but in the unknown, perhaps best unexplored, innermost natures of each of us. We see tapes of wartime atrocities and can’t help wonder what made it possible for ordinary men to become concentration camp guards. Could it happen to you? Of what are we capable? Few of us want to know. But it’s not only the possibility of evil that we are afraid of; more personal questions can be almost as daunting. Would you drink urine in the desert? Or eat human flesh if starving? We never know for sure what capacities we have inside us—or what desires. How perverse are we at heart? Would you be able, or under certain circumstances even want, to have sex with an animal, a child, a corpse? It seems unlikely, but how would you know? All these questions can be speculated on, but we’ll never really be certain. The possibility can’t be denied, and that’s what creates fear. For many men, the threat of homosexuality creates just such an anxiety. In a bunker, in prison, in an orgy, could you take pleasure from another man? Would you succumb to temptation, to desperation? And if so, would you find yourself liking it? John Cheever’s great prison novel,
Falconer,
dives unflinchingly into the heart of these questions. At every turn, Falconer acknowledges, without glorification, the sexuality that permeates the men’s prison. Whereas writers like Genet portray prison sex like scenes out of
Tom of Finland,
Cheever is as gentle as Tom’s of Maine. He’s at his best, and most subtle, when he depicts how homosexual encounters occur among men who the rest of the time act straight. The waspy married protagonist Farragut has an extended affair with a fellow inmate; there is a urinal trough where the men line up side by side to masturbate (which includes one of the most ample descriptions of the range of human penises anywhere); and, in the scene below, the little-liked candy-fat Cuckold tells his story of the first time he crossed over. His response is a poignant combination of resistance and resignation, a slow—and eventually happy—acceptance of what lies within.

“I scored with a man,” said the Cuckold. “That was after I had left my wife. That time I found her screwing this kid on the floor of the front hall. My thing with this man began in a Chinese restaurant. In those days I was the kind of lonely man you see eating in Chinese restaurants. You know? . . . The place, this Chinese restaurant, is about half full. At a table is this young man. That’s about it. He’s good-looking, but that’s because he’s young. He’ll look like the rest of the world in ten years. But he keeps looking at me and smiling. I honestly don’t know what he’s after. So then when I get my pineapple chunks, each one with a toothpick, and my fortune cookie, he comes over to my table and asks me what my fortune is. So I tell him I can’t read my fortune without my glasses and I don’t have my glasses and so he takes this scrap of paper and he reads or pretends to read that my fortune is I am going to have a beautiful adventure within the next hour. So I ask him what his fortune is and he says it’s the same thing. He goes on smiling. He speaks real nicely but you could tell he was poor. You could tell that speaking nicely was something he learned. So when I go out he goes out with me. He asks where I’m staying at and I say I’m staying at this motel which is attached to the restaurant. Then he asks if I have anything to drink in my room and I say yes, would he like a drink, and he says he’d love a drink and he puts his arm around my shoulder, very buddy-buddy, and we go to my room. So then he says he can make the drinks and I say sure and I tell him where the whiskey and the ice is and he makes some nice drinks and sits beside me and begins to kiss me on the face. Now, the idea of men kissing one another doesn’t go down with me at all, although it gave me no pain. I mean a man kissing a woman is a plus and minus situation, but a man kissing a man except maybe in France is a very worthless two of a kind. I mean if someone took a picture of this fellow kissing me it would be for me a very strange and unnatural picture, but why should my cock have begun to put on weight if it was all so strange and unnatural? So then I thought what could be more strange and unnatural than a man eating baked beans alone in a Chinese restaurant in the Middle West—this was something I didn’t invent—and when he felt for my cock, nicely and gently, and went on kissing me, my cock put on its maximum weight and began pouring out juice and when I felt of him he was half-way there.

“So then he made some more drinks and asked me why I didn’t take off my clothes and I said what about him and he dropped his pants displaying a very beautiful cock and I took off my clothes and we sat bare-ass on the sofa drinking our drinks. He made a lot of drinks. Now and then he would take my cock in his mouth and this was the first time in my life that I ever had a mouth around my cock. I thought this would look like hell in a newsreel or on the front page of the newspaper, but evidently my cock hadn’t ever seen a newspaper because it was going crazy. So then he suggested that we get into bed and we did and the next thing I knew the telephone was ringing and it was morning.”

from
“One Thing, Baudoin”

THIBAUT DE CHAMPAGNE

A twelfth-century French poem by Thibaut de Champagne asks an important and difficult question: When alighting on your beloved’s doorstep, what should you kiss first, her lips or her feet? Although the question seems a little dated by the last eight hundred years of sexual relations, the issue of how best to express devotion is not yet cut and dried. Devotion is a dicey thing; different women require different kinds of signs, and anybody who wants a fast and steady rule might as well stay home memorizing it; it ain’t gonna be worth much in the real world.

For a long time, I was obsessed with a not dissimilar question: which should you kiss first, a woman’s breasts or between her legs? Now conventional wisdom tells you that one kisses the breasts before—in Monty Python’s fine phrasing—“stampeding toward the clitoris.” But it was precisely that conventionality that irritated me back in those years when I thought the bedroom a fine site for personal politics. So I made it my one-man mission to invert the conventional kissing narrative and refuse to kiss the breasts before crossing the Mason-Dixon. This form of political resistance met with no small confusion from the women so implicated, you can be sure. As we were all in college, my partners were a bit too young to know to say something along the lines of “Son, what in the bejesus are you up to muff-diving me before you give my sweet rack the slightest consideration?” But that’s really what I needed to hear. Because, and I say this to would-be iconoclasts everywhere, sexual conventions evolved that way for a reason. A bit of prepping goes a long way, and gentle/rough breast attention—however anticipated—is still welcomed by most women. Although I thought that my partners would think of me as a truly independent-minded lover, unfettered by everyone else’s precedents, Lewis-and-Clarking my way up the proverbial flood, no, they just thought I was a twit who didn’t know what the hell he was doing. And they were right.

One thing I want to ask you, Baudoin:
If a true, loyal lover
Who has loved his woman a long time
And long prayed that she’d take pity on him
Is written to and told to come to her
In order to finally do what he wishes,
What should he do first to please her
When she says, “Welcome, my love,”
Kiss her on the mouth or the feet?