The Naughty Bits (8 page)

from
Serve It Forth

M. F. K. FISHER

How gentle can a touch be? How delicate? Fine questions, in my opinion, for though I’ve heard that eros can be delivered in boxes and blows, it can also be communicated through spiderweb tracings of skin on skin. Euphues, the title character of England’s most popular book of the sixteenth century, expressed a desire to “dine with the Epicures and fast with the Stoics.” This is my sentiment regarding most things: embrace both ends of the spectrum, straddle every divide, be yourself and not-yourself as best you can. And so with touching, to know force and control, yet to manage delicacy and precision. To touch or be touched with pure certainty in a way that negotiates the razor-line limen between contact and noncontact: that, to me, is sexy as hell.

It’s hard not to think of delicacy and eroticism when reading the prose of M. F. K. Fisher. The preeminent American food writer treats her topic as Melville did whales: till it expands to include the very universe. With a Ginsu wit worthy of Dorothy Parker, Fisher writes of snails and spuds, soufflés and schnapps. She also manages, in deft flicks of her pen, to pillory first her taste-blind countrymen, then her back-biting adopted French neighbors, and, finally, everyone in between. And still more enticingly, there is a saffron tinge of sexuality that runs through her work and infuses everything, leaving you hungry, aroused, and completely in love. This is why, by way of introduction, I spoke of the gentlest touch, for the delicate precision of Fisher’s writing beckons and beguiles, never making the analogy of food to sex explicit, but letting it slowly seep into you like the smell of garlic roasting. Where
Tampopo
trumpets, Fisher whispers. Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat . . . I remember that Al looked at me very strangely when he first saw the little sections lying on the radiator. That February in Strasbourg was too cold for us. Out on the Boulevard de l’Orangerie, in a cramped dirty apartment across from the sad zoo half full of animals and birds frozen too stiff even to make smells, we grew quite morbid.

Finally we counted all our money, decided we could not possibly afford to move, and next day went bag and baggage to the most expensive pension in the city.

It was wonderful—big room, windows, clean white billows of curtain, central heating. We basked like lizards. Finally Al went back to work, but I could not bear to walk into the bitter blowing streets from our warm room.

It was then that I discovered how to eat little dried sections of tangerine. My pleasure in them is subtle and voluptuous and quite inexplicable. I can only write how they are prepared.

In the morning, in the soft sultry chamber, sit in the window peeling tangerines, three or four. Peel them gently; do not bruise them, as you watch soldiers pour past and past the corner and over the canal towards the watched Rhine. Separate each plump little pregnant crescent. If you find the Kiss, the secret section, save it for Al.

Listen to the chambermaid thumping up the pillows, and murmur encouragement to her thick Alsatian tales of
l’intérieur.
That is Paris, the interior, Paris or anywhere west of Strasbourg or maybe the Vosges. While she mutters of seduction and French bicyclists who ride more than wheels, tear delicately from the soft pile of sections each velvet string. You know those white pulpy strings that hold tangerines into their skins? Tear them off. Be careful.

Take yesterday’s paper . . . and spread it on top of the radiator . . . After you have put the pieces of tangerine on the paper on the hot radiator, it is best to forget about them. Al comes home, you go to a long noon dinner in the brown dining room, afterwards maybe you have a little nip of quetsch from the bottle on the armoire. Finally he goes. Of course you are sorry, but—

On the radiator the sections of tangerine have grown even plumper, hot and full. You carry them to the window, pull it open, and leave them for a few minutes on the packed snow of the sill. They are ready.

All afternoon you can sit, then, looking down on the corner. Afternoon papers are delivered to the kiosk. Children come home from school just as three lovely whores mince smartly into the pension’s chic tearoom. A basketful of Dutch tulips stations itself by the tram-stop, ready to tempt tired clerks at six o’clock. Finally the soldiers stump back from the Rhine. It is dark.

The sections of tangerine are gone, and I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl, that crackles so tinily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp just after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell.

There must be someone, though, who knows what I mean. Probably everyone does, because of his own eatings.

from
Ironweed

WILLIAM KENNEDY

Let this be said: I have tasted many of the joys under heaven and found none more reliably luscious than the kiss. Fragile yet potent, combustible, tangy, push-pull, and eminently expressive, the kiss has all the upsides of sex and none of the mess. The kiss is a Trojan horse of intimacy, so seemingly innocent, so licit, yet so gut wrenching, soul speaking, and endorphin firing at the same time. I am a kiss junkie; I love to kiss, I kiss to love, I’m constantly trying to steal women away from conversations to secret them into back bedrooms for some serious necking. And every once in a while, it actually works.

My first real kiss came behind the storage sheds next to the junior high school football field. A year or two later, I got one from a popular girl; it was shocking both because I was the most loathed kid in the school and because her mouth was large enough to encircle mine completely. I mentioned this fact to a “friend,” and he told two friends, and they told two friends, and soon she was cursing me through the halls of the school, lowering my social status even further. A more felicitous early kiss came in high school, at the behest of the costume designer for the school play, whose lips had the incomparable collapsing effect of a Ziplocked bag of pudding. (Where are you now, darling? Where are you?) The most bittersweet was a single, slow-planted dream smooch from an angelic beauty who,when I asked her some days later if it was a fluke, said that it most assuredly was. She died in her teens, and that one kiss was all I knew, yet I will never forget her.

Later life has not ceased to provide me still more astonishing meetings of lips, and many lessons to learn from them. Some women kiss you because that’s as far as they’ll go; others kiss you to decide if they’ll go further. An experienced friend laughed at me when I told her I still occasionally have bad sex, saying that I should know from the first kiss how it will work out. She’s right, of course, so now I try to kiss, dance with, and see the SATs of all prospective girlfriends before things get serious. The kissing, ultimately, is the most important indicator, for kisses are the vehicle for the joy of fresh infatuation, yet remain a reservoir of warmth as even the oldest loves grow older. And in their ultimate role, kisses can provide indelible proof of love itself. That is the theme of the excerpt below, from William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel,
Ironweed.

But then you get [a kiss] like that first whizzer on Kibbee’s lumber pile, one that comes out of the brain and the heart and the crotch, and out of the hands on your hair, and out of those breasts that weren’t all the way blown up yet, and out of the clutch them arms give you, and out of time itself, which keeps track of how long it can go on without you gettin’ even slightly bored the way you got bored years later with kissin’ almost anybody but Helen, and out of fingers (Katrina had fingers like that) that run themselves around and over your face and down your neck, and out of the grip you take on her shoulders, especially on them bones that come out of the middle of her back like angel wings, and out of them eyes that keep openin’ and closin’ to make sure that this is still goin’ and still real and not just stuff you dream about and when you know it’s real it’s okay to close ’em again, and outa that tongue, holy shit, that tongue, you gotta ask where she learned that because nobody ever did that except Katrina who was married with a kid and had a right to know, but Annie, goddamn, Annie, where’d you pick that up, or maybe you been gidzeyin’ heavy on this lumber pile regular (No, no, no, I know you never, I always knew you never), and so it is natural with a woman like Annie that the kiss come out of every part of her body and more, outa that mouth . . . and he sees well beyond the mouth into a primal location in this woman’s being, a location that evokes in him not only the memory of years but decades and even more, the memory of epochs, aeons, so that he is sure that no matter where he might have sat with a woman and felt this way, whether it was in some ancient cave or some bogside shanty, or on a North Albany lumber pile, he and she would both know that there was something in each of them that had to stop being one and become two, that had to swear that forever after there would never be another (and there never has been, quite), and that there would be allegiance and sovereignty and fidelity and other such tomfool horseshit that people destroy their heads with when what they are saying has nothing to do with time’s forevers but everything to do with the simultaneous recognition of an eternal twain, well sir, then both of them, Francis and Annie, or the Francises and Annies of any age, would both know in that same instant that there was something between them that had to stop being two and become one.

Such was the significance of that kiss.

from Sexing the Cherry

JEANETTE WINTERSON

With its live-in livestock, death carts in the streets, and manor lords who could sleep with your betrothed and tax you as much as they felt like, the Middle Ages was a hell of a time to live. But as history moved along, things got a little better: the blanket was invented (what took them so long?), peasants could start owning land, and a lighter form of literature emerged to go alongside all the religious poems and heroic epics—comedy. Comedy had existed in Greece and Rome, but it didn’t flourish again until the Dark Ages had brightened and Europe approached its eventual Renaissance.

What comedy did obtain in the later Middle Ages jibed well with the culture of the time. Oft I have written of the medieval sense of humor, of its excesses and exaggerations, its vulgarity, its sense of the absurd. Where in today’s culture we have
Dumb and Dumber,
the Middle Ages had gross and grosser, with Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Rabelais outdoing one another with tales of the scatalogical and obscene. When their characters weren’t having their asses rammed with red-hot pokers, they were falling into full latrines or standing beneath rivers of urine.

But what has become of comic saturnalia in the literature of our own hygienic times? T. C. Boyle’s raucous novel, Water Music, evokes the roguery and raunch that survived the Middle Ages into England’s eighteenth century; John Kennedy Toole’s bloated Ignatius J. Reilly is a self-conscious throwback to the medieval in a variety of unappetizing senses; but nowhere do we find a character more truly Rabelaisian in proportion than the Dog Woman of Jeanette Winterson’s
Sexing the Cherry.
Set in England in the years leading up to and just after the Restoration,
Cherry
is a nice tale of a boy and his mother—and what a mother! The Dog Woman proves to be larger than an elephant, louder than a thunderclap, keeper of fifty-plus hounds, and beholden to none but them and her son. She is an architectonic force, and never more than in her disastrous encounters with the less fair sex. The excerpt below is her account of a man’s attempt at pleasuring her. Confronted with her not-negligible womanhood, he finds himself not quite up to the task. Sounds like he would have been happier reading theology.

Whilst Jordan was away I discovered from time in the brothel that men’s members, if bitten off or otherwise severed, do not grow again. This seems a great mistake on the part of nature, since men are so careless with their members and will put them anywhere without thinking. I believe they would force them in a hole in the wall if no better could be found.

I did mate with a man, but cannot say that I felt anything at all, though I had him jammed up to the hilt. As for him, spread on top of me with his face buried beneath my breasts, he complained that he could not find the sides of my cunt and felt like a tadpole in a pot. He was an educated man and urged me to try to squeeze in my muscles, and so perhaps bring me closer to his prong. I took a great breath and squeezed with all my might and heard something like a rush of air through a tunnel, and when I strained up on my elbows and looked down I saw I had pulled him in, balls and everything. He was stuck. I had the presence of mind to ring the bell and my friend came in with her sisters, and with the aid of a crowbar they prised him out and refreshed him with mulled wine while I sang him a little song about the fortitude of spawning salmon. He was a gallant gentleman and offered a different way of pleasuring me, since I was the first woman he said he had failed. Accordingly, he burrowed down the way ferrets do and tried to take me in his mouth. I was very comfortable about this, having nothing to be bitten off. But in a moment he thrust up his head and eyed me wearily.

“Madam,” he said, “I am sorry, I beg your pardon but I cannot.”

“Cannot?”

“Cannot. I cannot take that orange in my mouth. It will not fit. Neither can I run my tongue over it. You are too big, madam.”

I did not know what part of me he was describing, but I felt pity for him and offered him more wine and some pleasant chat.

When he had gone I squatted backwards on a pillow and parted my bush hair to see what it was that had confounded him so. It seemed all in proportion to me. These gentlemen are very timid.