Sexual Passages

Ah, How I Loved Her. It was an amour fou. Zoom in on Letitia for one moment. Tall, with straight ginger-ale-blonde hair, graceful as an astral projection. Eyes that were, well, Tiffany box blue. In a face so vivid and sensual the glass over her photograph used to sweat. And she was intellectual, witty, eccentric. I first met Letitia at a noncostume party: she wore this big water-heater coil and several brass gaskets on her head. Letitia spoke about Truman Capote. Later she sketched a complex protein molecule cross my cocktail napkin. Later yet, Letitia threw both shoes off, got up on the local Steinway and played Stardust with her feet. Letitia came from Sutton Place and was writing a play that required dice to perform. (For every line of dialog there were six possible responses. Each actor, she told me, would roll and then speak. It made Ionesco seem a social realist.) I was short and insecure: at the age of 19 I thought I needed an intellectual, eccentric woman who would understand (or locate) my finer qualities. I fell hard. But Letitia was steadily dating Rafael, a Hispanic Yale sophomore who looked like Fernando Lamas and did his hair, I think, with Grecian Formula gray to appear more mature. I can be (continued on page 193)Sexual Passages(continued from page 171) tenacious as Simon Wiesenthal, however. For Letitia I became the acrobat of romance. I was an entire ways-and-means committee when it came to love. I wooed her for more than one full year--mostly at a distance. (Even when together, we were at a distance: Letitia was 5'10". I saw much beautiful underchin.) In return, she'd call to chat with me about Kerouac and Webern and DNA. Or drop a pleasant card from Paris. I was rabid with passion by then: I needed a new microchip for my brain, I did so adore her. People would say, "Him--oh, his name is Keith-who-loves-Letitia." And, finally, I stuffed her ballot box, I ran Letitia down. Tribute to my wit and determination and gallant courtship. It also didn't hurt that Rafael had left her for a Brazilian dog handler. A male Brazilian dog handler.

So, all at once, Letitia loved me. So, too, all at once I was ready for The Laughing Place. These things, you see, I soon found out about my Beloved: (1) She could play piano only with her feet. Only Stardust. And whenever, wherever a piano appeared. (2) Her wit was wholly on loan from Esquire and Scientific American, each of which she would more or less memorize. Beyond that twice-per-month exercise Letitia was illiterate as a rock cornish game frog. I'd've been better off just subscribing. (3) Her uncle--who lived in this expensive halfway house (halfway between sanity and being a human baffle plate)--had written the notorious dice play. (4) Her body was, man, weird. Henry Moore didn't do abstract sculpture: no, he copied Letitia from life. (5) She wouldn't wash that body, nor harvest her armpit hair. You know the cliché "By the skin of my teeth"? Letitia ... had ... skin ... on ... hers. When lying next to Letitia I could hear her postnasal drip. (6) And worst. She wouldn't use contraception. Instead she chanted, "We won't get pregnant, we won't get pregnant" in an upside-down lotus position before and after. I was full of dread. The pronoun we seemed particularly dreadful.

Collapsola. Bleaksville. Copious despair. A male Brazilian dog handler would've looked good to me by then. The climax came (or didn't) that December in my parents' summer cabin. I refused to make love by her chanted rhythm method. Letitia went sullen. In reprisal she got squiffed cold on a quart of Canadian Club. No life signs. Consciousness a closed shop. To get her backfield in motion, I went with my famous fireman's carry. All of a quickness, as we passed through the living room, Letitia put on even more weight. What was it? What it was, was, was ... God, from my shoulder height she had grabbed a wrought-iron chandelier. Off balance, I fell hard. With her. Her with the chandelier. The chandelier with a weak roof beam and about 16 pounds of plaster. Enough: I was through romancing that stone. Or almost enough. Letitia had used my toilet and, of course (with all that armpit hair, what else?), had forgotten she should flush. Next April, when I went up to open our cabin, the commode was overgrown with morbid yellow-white fungus. It hung down like Spanish moss. No, like Puerto Rican moss. Some metaphor for lost love, that, lemme tell you.

Good night, sweet princess, and flights of B-52s send thee to thy rest. Well, so, I probably disappointed her just as much.

•

This is, to be sure, a rather catastrophic example of Where Love Has Gone. Nonetheless, romantic passion, I suspect, imitates human biological life exactly--it will begin the inevitable death process about one half second after birth. I don't mean to sound pessimistic and bring on a cluster headache when next you tongue that special woman. Natch, there are love relationships that age, so to speak, like Marlene Dietrich or Sophia Loren--and I am a very happily married man (italics mine)--they can be mature, wise, patient, sweeter than old briar-bowl caking. But, for those exquisite transports that make us fire out as some blood-doped sprinter would, they have a certain predictable oxidation rate. In fact, cheap gutter pipe has about the same rust factor. Moreover, there is a distinct pattern. I call it The Five Ages of Love.

The Five Age format can be applied to all character traits. Take, for instance, her clothing.

Or apply the formula to his high-explosive snore.

In Age One he's Jacques Cousteau on her unprobed coral reef. She might be Magellan rounding his mysterious Horn. This is the Age of Revelation. Listen, we all have Life Stories, don't we? Even those of us who are boring as a shoe tree. I mean, something must've happened to you in those 20 or 30 years. Try to remember. So his father claims to have discovered the color beige in 1928 but didn't patent it. So her father was a major Nazi war criminal who hung around playgrounds mostly until his deportation back. In this stage we are interesting by default. His first totaled car, her first out-of-body experience, his first appendix removal, her first dysmenorrhea. Some people can dine out for a month on The Life Tale. Some lives are exciting enough to be featured at Great Adventure. Some wouldn't fill the fare drawer of a gypsy cab. But long or short, dull or scintillating, they'll all seem new.

And by now everyone here should have a decent game bag worth of effective one-liners. Her sharp quotation from Nietzsche. His down-home phrase for sex that grandpa used back in Nebraska. Me, at 42, I can talk for 11 days straight without having to paste up any original thought whatsoever. Intellectual Meadow in a Can you could call it. Also, she makes one dynamite recipe--Ragout of Controlled Substances, say. He is welcome at one special restaurant: the waiter there doesn't get instant glaucoma when he waves for service. Gift giving, too. We all have at least one can't-miss, unique present. (For a while, I handed out Orgasmatrons--had 76 of them in payola after my last sex-aid article. Women got good vibes from me.) And we all make love--if not well, somewhat differently. She shaves her pubic hair into a dollar sign. He can put top spin on his downstroke. She has that swell whimper of completion. His cuttle-bone duck-hooks to the right. Given some chemical attraction (and I assume that) all this will seem as exotic as Buffy Sainte-Marie and her Indian mouth horn. Romance, however, eats up new material faster than The Tonight Show. You can write this axiom down: repetition is the murderer of love.

But, for that time, you'll hear with your entire body, as a snake's flicking tongue can hear. The ulcer is cured. Life becomes a barrier-free environment. I once fell in love so absolutely I thought throughout that First Age the woman had platinum-blonde hair. (Some clown must've put petroleum jelly on my lens, I guess. She was a dark brunette.) Once my wife had a crush--at their first kiss she fainted, hit pavement head on and spent that night in the emergency room. (She didn't even stagger for me, but....) Your world has been reprinted in 30-point type. Air and sky are on steroids. Arm over arm you slide step into The Second Age.

•

This is the age of intimate and electric surprise. Together you make sheet lightning in bed. She will give head with such fierce, innocent zeal that your seven-inch nondairy creamer ends up chapped. And she can respond. If, as Dr.Ruth West-heimer has said, "Un orgasm iss like a schneeze," your woman must have sexual hay fever. Both bodies are miraculous: the way her teeth overlap, that cute hair on his ear rim. You exchange shy, secret knowledge. Her menstrual cycle will go on his desk calendar with A and B for alternate ovaries. (A can cause violent breast bloat. B tends to be latish.) She has bought an inflatable sea-serpent ring for his cute, plump hemorrhoid. Sex becomes the universal solvent in which every depressing thing--grief, fear, disappointment, Mario Cuomo--will vanish. You possess her: you say These-tits-are-mine (and maybe there is some narcissistic inversion in that thought). Both are daily astonished. This spectacular woman, whose Gestapo father spent his American exile under a kiddie swing, has been given to you.

The Second Age, furthermore, is one of glamorous self-reflection. You are seen, as it were, in a rose-colored mirror. She has become this-otherness-that-is-also-you. (And may even care for you more than you care for you.) A woman whom I loved would cry when she saw me. Why? Because I was so beautiful. (No, Eraser-head, she didn't take lithium.) Each rock tune from that period is laminated as if it were a little Blue Cross card. And, more important, you both declare intellectual détente. He may be the worst sort of born-again atheist, while she has to cross herself after belching. She may be an eagle freak, though he thinks nuclear waste should be dumped in Yellowstone. They don't talk about it. They don't need to talk about anything. They can spend the night, wordless, grooming each other like gibbons in a tree.

By nature Age Two, more torrid than an Indian sweat lodge, doesn't often last long. In fact meltdown will begin soon on: Age Two is ready for Graves Registration the moment both he and she first say, "I love you." Language has delimited passion. English is imperfect inasmuch as we have no more superlative verb than that old trull "love." "Adore" cloys. "Worship" is theologically unsound. "Cherish" belongs on a Mass card. Say "love" and you've gone all the way linguistically--repetition and lame-duck status follow. All we have left is heavy breath and something that may resemble the dance language of honeybees. Deflation. Strain. Letdown. Sure, it might last a month--more, maybe, if she is married and can get out only when Mr. has gone to his fiber-diet class. But lovers want more of each other. They want to cavort for that gracious, accommodating mirror again and again. Before long your Life Story is all used up, and you've begun on Ernest Hemingway's.

•

The Third Age can still reach a flash point or two. But by now both have begun wearing psychological cool-down suits. He and she see each other more often: maybe they've moved in together. The World--job, ex-wife, social obligation--will assert itself again. They start killing two birds with one stone, and the two birds are them. He will drag her along when his car has a mufflergram. She hopes he won't mind playing hook-womb over the swivel chair in her study carrel at Columbia. Love is magnificent but time expensive. And you won't get a Guggenheim for it.

Familiarity can breed some cheap delight, though. (Just before it breeds a lot of cheap contempt.) At least temporarily, housework and personal hygiene may become romantic as Mayerling. He will learn how she, dear kiwi bird, inserts a vaginal sponge into her warm lagoon. She will kiss his Speed Stick--and rub it behind one ear so she can remind herself of him at the office. He will learn how to cook tripe (though not why). She will actually watch while he shaves and applaud when the razor has slid safely over that hazardous chin cleft. This may engross--for some short time--but it's like being backstage at an abortion clinic. The illusion won't last. It might be poignant to know that Rumbledumbkin has a hammertoe (until now he wore one white sock even in the shower). And, imagine, Punchbowl keeps her 90-mile-per-hour hairdo in place with a pound of Scotch tape before bed. Imagine, imagine. Yet he is no longer loved by that sensuous fashion model--what was her name?--but by someone with irritable-bowel syndrome and flashes of dullness. She is no longer loved by that suave, $200,000-per-year ad exec--but by some corporate clip-bender to whom his boss said last Tuesday, "If you don't stop flat-dicking it, Tom, you'll end up with the Railway Express account." Right, uh-huh, no doubt, sure, that mysterious Other can still give back a validating, brilliant self-reflection. Except now he or she isn't so mysterious anymore--just another dumb arch support like you. May as well love yourself at that rate.

The heart is becoming a lousy hunter, but poor Punchbowl and Rumbledumbkin, they've gone public and that may redeem their self-prestige. Until next Friday at least. The dimming mutual reflection can be cable-boosted by some small external publicity. They are an item in their old neighborhood. He won't even mind when someone says, "What can she see in that decrepit tuft hunter? Must be worse than getting laid by Mr. Bill." Family, friends are exchanged, and, first off, this will intrigue both, like being given citizenship in a little kingdom--His People, Her People. Mistake. Unknown origin is part of successful myth, and even Vishnu would've given up godship if confronted with his baby-picture album. Not to mention other disconcerting events. Her father may ask delicately whether he can, um, handle an epileptic seizure. Then slip him this old leather tongue depressor with big toothmarks in it. Or he may come out of the John, fly open. And Mother, as though by long reflex, may zip it up. From inside. Of course, a best friend will say, "You're with her now? Does she still go, 'Aaaah-aaah-aaah,' when you finger her little whoopie wart?"

•

Vanishing prairie time. Time to get in the old bunker. There's this bench warrant out for your happiness. You need a salaried crisis theologian in the bedroom. Affection and warm complacency (Age Three) are turning to vulgar disillusionment (Age Four). The passage may be subtle, so here are unmistakable signs.

Love hemorrhages in Age Four. Everything is letdown, discontent, general Sag Harbor. He--a big first, this--will pass gas audibly (until now he went out to the incinerator when major flatulence was upon him. Neighbors had begun getting suspicious). And last night she ripped a panty shield off her crotch--another audible rrrr-ip. Both no longer buy Binaca. He doesn't do a discreet bank shot off the bowl side when urinating: rrrr-ip, he gives his leak, doesn't take it. At bedtime she will put her retainer in. (Should she get a lousy overbite for love? Just try to soul kiss Ms. Plastic Palate.) He's wearing baggy boxer shorts again. So long to that bikini stuff. Her period lasts longer. His hair is leonine but rather less attractive on the soap cake. She reads aloud from an article about vasectomy. Much more petroleum jelly is being used: symbolic of the prevailing friction. At last, abruptly, she begins to gag in mid-blow job. And will retch all over his pubic hair.

"It's just too damn big. It is, darling," she says. Ho! A miracle! A very miracle! How did it get that way all of one sudden? Familiarity is your best penile enlarger.

Where once, leaving for work, he would wave and blow kisses and walk backward down the hall, now a door will slam and it doesn't even wake her. She has started hiding her diary--some unpublishable comments in there by this time. The possessive pronoun is evident: your, yours, my, mine, mine, mine. One cup will remain unwashed in the sink for a week--neither can recall who drank out of it. Closet space is a matter to be adjudicated by the World Court. No more intellectual détente, either. He will call her little Rasputin because she sent a Christmas card with the Holy Family on it. In retaliation she prays aloud for his "unregenerate soul." And will give up smoking to gain moral advantage. They feature in each other's jokes. He has taken to wearing a Walkman around the house. Various impatient tics surface. He will burp her, pat-pat, on the shoulder when they embrace. She has developed a short, censorious laugh when he begins to speak in company. She will buckle up--the law, you know--instead of sitting close, hand on his knee, as they drive. Neither has been unfaithful, but both would like to catch the other hard at it. Notes appear. "Could you please rinse a milk glass after you use it, xxxooo?" "I'll be out, so would you please use the kitty scoop now and then, oooxxx?" Those aren't hugs and kisses, they're the diagram for some slow-down basketball play.

Worse, dissatisfaction has turned them both into Augustan wits.

He: Your religion is so damn vulgar, what say I give you a chocolate Jesus for Easter?

She: Your soul's the size of a White Castle burger.

He: You know who you are--you're the broad in the horror flick, the one who always falls down and sprains her ankle when Wolfman is after her.

She: You have the inner life of Richard Nixon.

Either: Your mother is so masculine, I bet she doesn't even have a maiden name.

And then comes the horrid moment--the moment of Gratuitous Honesty. We all have at least one special vulnerable place. She, for instance, is insecure about her flat-chestedness. And he, in anger, will say, "I see your push-up bra missed this morning."

He, for instance, is insecure about his athletic ability. And she, in anger, will say, "Christ, your reflexes are so bad, you couldn't even manage a knee-jerk opinion." You both swallow and apologize immediately. Immediately is a half hour too late.

Your magic mirror has broken. You've gone through the looking glass and found New Jersey. No, more than that--you see your own disreputable flaws in her, something we could all do without. Drunk, she will go on and on and on like the roller towel in a men's room. As you do. He, too, can never get butane into a lighter. As you can't. Both are more pompous than double-crostic answers. You're compatible is what. A match made in the Rust Belt. You're furious at her for reminding you of what you are. Who could love such a person? Time to announce the banns of emotional separation.

•

Age Five is a segment from Mondo Cane. No need to describe it. You live in a big cloud of methyl isocyanate. Both will pay the price for hyperbole. After all he or she was once -est everything: dearest, handsomest, sexiest, wittiest, closest, cute-as-a-Hershey's-Kiss-est. None of those were lies back then in Ages One through Three, but now they're harder to follow than Greg Louganis off the high board. Fear of loss will become fear of being saddled with. Conquest is harsh responsibility. Clingingest, slovenliest, dullest, low-life-est. No blame should inhere: you both signed up for this passionate tag team. And yet there is that acid bitterness of thwarted (if unrealistic) expectation. Put joy into the burn bag and gain some more weight. Didn't you know that such emotional heightening could never be sustained? Death of a love. Details at 11.

Well, you're thinking, this schmuck must have tenure in the Cynicism department by now. Not so: a useful lesson can be picked up from my diagrammatic narrative of love's alpine slide down to despair. And many people--though their instinct may be unconscious--have caught on to it. Take Ages One through Five and, if you can, reverse the order. Put Four and Five first--then follow with One, Two, Three. Although careful passion may sound like an oxymoron, start looking around for that man or woman whom you've already known at his or her miserable worst. A year ago, a decade ago, yesterday, whenever. At school or work, in church, next door. People whose objectionable habits are familiar to you. With whom you've shared intimate, if not sexually close, space. For it is that cataclysmic, blind free fall from Age One to Age Five, more than anything else, that taxes the frail wet-strength of rapture.

Moisten a digit and file through your page-loose address book from 1969. Dig up old college-alumni magazines, corporate Rolodexes, mastheads, playbills, block-association rosters, affinity-group memberships. Recall that jerk whom rejected your ad campaign for the K-9 Sani Pad account? He was bright and charming, even though he did legwork for an Anti-Fluoridation Party candidate. Remember that arrogant girl who sat next to you at NYU? She went around looking like someone with a frozen tampon in, but she was très foxy. That atheist, Republican, environmentalist prig you disagreed with on the church-roof committee? Send some sudden flowers. A suggestive Christmas card. Ring up. Think for a minute: how many good marriages do you know (I have about eight in mind) where two people met long before they met? People who say cheerfully now, "Yeah, we were at USC together, but he was doing this ridiculous vaudeville stretch strut through life at the time. I never thought of him that way." "Yeah, you were so haughty, I wouldn't have touched you with a ten-foot Czech." Start with Age Four, declare the mistrial first and surprise each other. Someone with whom you've already been unshaven, cheap, flatulent, fat, drunk, impatient and boxer-shorted. Whose cat has gone in your briefcase at least once.

Meantime, of course, if you hear that siren tune--don't lash yourself to a mast. Love at first sight may become hate at first slight. Passion might end in punitive damages and disgust. But, for the duration, allahu akbar, strike a medal and ride it to paradise. And, yes, Letitia, I do still love you.

"Her body was, man, weird. Henry Moore didn't do abstract sculpture: no, he copied Letitia from life."