My Life As A Man

became. On the other hand, the intensity of her effort was as moving as anything about her -for in the beginning, she had been altogether content just to open her legs a little way and lie there, a well to pump if anyone should want to, and she herself couldn’t imagine why anyone would, lovely and well-formed as she was. It took much encouragement and, at the outset, much berating, to get her to be something more than a piece of meat on a spit that you turned this way and that until you were finished; she was never finished, but then she had never really begun.

What a thing it was to watch the appetite awaken in this shy and timid creature! And the daring-for if only she dared to, she might actually have what she wanted! I can see her still, teetering on the very edge of success. The pulse beats erratically in her throat, the jaw strains upward, the gray eyes yearn-just a yard, a foot, an inch to the tape, and victory over the self-denying past! Oh yes, I remember us well at our honest toil-pelvises grinding as though to grind down bone, fingers clutching at one another’s buttocks, skin slick with sweat from forehead to feet, and our flushed cheeks (as we near total collapse) pressing so forcefully into one another that afterward her face is blotchy and bruised and my own is tender to the touch when I shave the’ following morning. Truly, I thought more than once that I might the of heart failure. “Though in a good cause,” I whisper, when Susan had signaled at last a desire to throw in the towel for the night; drawing a finger over the cheekbone and across the bridge of the nose, I would check for tears-rather, the tear; she would rarely allow more than one to be shed, this touching hybrid of courage and fragility. “Oh,” she whispers, “I was almost almost almost…” “Yes?” Then that tear. “Always,” she says, “almost.” “It’ll happen.” “It won’t. You know it won’t. What I consider almost is probably where everybody else begins.” “I doubt it.” “You don’t…Peter, next time-what you were doing…do it-harder.” So I did it, whatever it was, harder, or softer, or faster, or slower, or deeper, or shallower, or higher, or lower, as directed. Oh, how Mrs. Susan Seabury McCall of Princeton and Park Avenue tried to be bold, to be greedy, to be low (“Put it…” “Yes, say it, Suzie-“ “Oh, in me from behind, but don’t hurt-!”)-not of course that living on bennies in a Wellesley dormitory in 1951 hadn’t constituted an act of boldness for a society-bred, mother-disciplined, father-pampered young heiress from a distinguished New Jersey family, replete on the father’s side with a U.S. senator and an ambassador to England, and on the mother’s, with nineteenth-century industrial barons. But that diversion had been devised to annihilate temptation; now she wanted to want…Exhilarating to behold, but over the long haul utterly exhausting, and the truth was that by the third year of our affair both of us were the worse for wear and came to bed like workers doing overtime night after night in a defense plant: in a good cause, for good wages, but Christ how we wished the war was over and won and we could rest and be happy.

I have of course to wonder now if Susan wouldn’t have been better off if I had deferred to her and simply left her alone about coming. “I don’t care about that,” she had told me, when I first broached the distressing subject. I suggested that perhaps she should care. “Why don’t you just worry about your own fun…” said she. I told her that I was not worrying about “fun.” “Oh, don’t be pretentious,” she dared to mumble-then, begging: “Please, what difference does it make to you anyway?” The difference, I said, would be to her. “Oh, stop trying to sound like the Good Sex Samaritan, will you? I’m just not a nymphomaniac and I never was. I am what I am, and if it’s been good enough for everyone else-“ “Has it?” “No!” and out came the tear. So the resistance began to crumble, and the struggle, which I initiated and to which I was accomplice and accessory, began.

I should point out here that the distressing subject had been a source of trouble between Maureen and myself as well: she too was unable to reach a climax, but maintained that what stood in her way was my “selfishness.” Characteristically she had confused the issue somewhat by leading me to believe for the longest while that she and orgasms were on the very best of terms-that I, in fact, had as much chance of holding her back as a picket fence has of obstructing an avalanche. Well into the first year of our marriage, I continued to look on in wonder at the crescendo of passion that would culminate in her sustained outcry of ecstasy when I began to ejaculate; you might even say that my ejaculations sort of faded off into nothing beside her clamorous writhings. It came as a surprise then (to coin a phrase appropriate to these adventures) to learn that she had actually been pretending, faking those operatic orgasms, she explained, so as to protect me from the knowledge of just how inadequate a lover I was. But how long could she keep up that pretense in order to bolster my sense of manliness? What about her, she wanted to know. Thereafter I was to hear repeatedly how even Mezik, the brute who was her first husband, even Walker, the homosexual who was her second, knew more about how to satisfy a woman than the selfish, inept, questionable heterosexual who was I.

Oh, you crazy bitch (if the widower may take a moment out to address the ghost of his wife), death is too good for you, really.

Why isn’t there a hell, with fire and brimstone? Why isn’t there a devil and damnation? Why isn’t there sin any more? Oh, if I were Dante, Maureen, I’d go about writing this another way!

At any rate: in that Maureen’s accusations, no matter how patently bizarre, had a way of eating into my conscience, it very well might be that what Susan derided as my sexual good samaritanism was in part an attempt by me to disprove the allegations brought against me by a monumentally dissatisfied wife. I don’t really know. I believe I meant well, though at the time I came to Susan there is no denying how dismayed I was by my record as a pleasure-giving man.

Obviously what drew me to Susan to begin with-only a year into my separation and still reeling-was that in temperament and social bearing she was as unlike Maureen as a woman could be. There was no confusing Maureen’s recklessness, her instinct for scenes of wild accusation, her whole style of moral overkill, with Susan’s sedate and mannerly masochism. To Susan McCall, speaking aloud and at length of disappointment, even to one’s lover, was like putting an elbow on the dinner table, something One Just Didn’t Do. She told herself that by making her heartache her business and nobody else’s, she was being decorous and tactful, sparing another the inconsequential bellyaching of “a poor little rich girl,” though of course the person she was sparing (and deluding) by being so absurdly taciturn and stoically blind about her life was herself. She was the one who didn’t want to hear about it, or think about it, or do anything about it, even as she continued to suffer it in her own resigned and baffled way. The two women were wholly antithetical in their response to deprivation, one like a dumb, frightened kid in a street fight who knows no way to save his hide but to charge into the melee, head down and skinny arms windmilling before him, the other docile and done in, resigned to being banged around or trampled over. Even when Susan came to realize that she needn’t settle any longer for a diet of bread and water, that it wasn’t simply “okay” with me (and the rest of mankind) that she exhibit a more robust appetite, but that it made her decidedly more attractive and appealing, there was the lifelong style of forbearance, abstemiousness in all things but pharmaceuticals, there was the fadeaway voice, the shy averted glance, the auburn hair drawn austerely back in a knot at the back of the slender neck, there was the bottomless patience, the ethereal silence, that single tear, to mark her clearly as a member of another tribe, if not another sex, from Maureen.

It need hardly be pointed out that to me hers was a far more poignant straggle to witness (and be a party to) than that one in which Maureen had been so ferociously engaged-for where Maureen generally seemed to want to have something largely because someone else was able to have it (if I had been impotent, there is no doubt she would have been content to be frigid), Susan now wanted what she wanted in order to rid herself of the woman she had been. Her rival, the enemy whom she hoped to dispossess and drive into exile, if not extinction, was her own constrained and terrified self.

Poignant, moving, admirable, endearing-in the end, too much for me. I couldn’t marry her. I couldn’t do it. If and when I was ever to marry again, it would have to be someone in whose wholeness I had abounding faith and trust. And if no one drawing breath was that whole-admittedly I wasn’t, my own capacity for faith and trust, among other things, in a state of serious disrepair-maybe that meant I would never remarry. So be it. Worse things had happened, one of them, I believed, to me.

So: freed from Maureen by her death, it seemed to me that I had either to go ahead and make Susan a wife and mother at thirty-four, or leave her so that she might find a man who would do just that before she became, in Dr. Montagu’s words, a totally “inadequate environment” for procreation. Having been to battle for nearly all of my adult life, first with Maureen and then with the divorce laws of the state of New York-laws so rigid and punitive they came to seem to me the very codification of Maureen’s “morality,” the work of her hand-I no longer had the daring, or the heart, or the confidence to marry again. Susan would have to find some man who was braver, or stronger, or wiser, or maybe just more foolish and deluded-

Enough. I still don’t know how to describe my decision to leave her, nor have I stopped trying to. As I asked at