And then there was love. Being in love. Infatuation. Whatever it is was overwhelming. I must now write in the past tense, as if I were the already dead narrator of a magical realist novel.
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Rain and the Writer
A Jamesian summer afternoon. Rain. A girl. We get wet as we run for cover, holding hands. But no, it’s not James. I have just discovered Kazantzakis, but he’s too intense. Cavafy, perhaps, another Greek I’ve also just discovered, for she is Greek, although she would not be the Poet of the City’s summer afternoon choice. The only writer present here is Hemingway. She knew him.
Papa, as she called him, had just killed himself. She said some bittersweet things about him that made me think they might have been lovers. And me? I was falling not just for her—she was seductive but not pretty—but for all she represented. Greece and the Mediterranean. Sophistication—she was older than I. And the ghost of a writer, the whole romantic Great-American-Writer/suicide/bullfight thing. To sleep with a girl who slept with Papa, that’d be some ménage. Shit, I was inexperienced, so making love to me could not be a dream, and Papa, well, he was, when he died, an old drunk. How good could he have been in bed?
But those are my thoughts now that I’m older than Hemingway ever was. Back then I had no such thoughts, only romance. And romance, I now know, is fueled by hormones. Not that there was a real romance with my Greek object of desire. After a while we didn’t see each other anymore. Did she leave for Greece? Spain? I don’t remember much more. Just unfulfilled longing on a rainy summer afternoon.
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La Città del Foco
The hot flashes came. The man-tits? Well, I was overweight anyway and I’ve always sort of had them. Maybe I’ve always been a hermaphrodite. The journey to this state of a man in eternal menopause—a minor circle of Hell, I grant, but a circle nonetheless—had taken four years.
First, it was the cancer diagnosis. The urologist called my wife and me for a meeting—I guess this is routine, undoubtedly so she can be there to provide support, or maybe so she can learn right off the bat that she’s not going to get any again, at least not from her old man. He explained the major options: surgery or radiation. He quickly dismissed the latter and endorsed the former—urologists are surgeons so, of course, they favor surgery; radiation oncologists are just that and, of course, as I would learn soon, they privilege their craft.
It was time for a second opinion. A close friend who had undergone prostate surgery a couple of years before sent me to his surgeon at Johns Hopkins, who was also a photographer (my friend’s profession) and a classical pianist. Both activities required a combination of intuition and manual precision. Indeed, when I questioned the doctor about robotic surgery, he replied, “I prefer the knowledge of my hands.” I also had a long telephone conversation with a radiation oncologist whose specialty was “seeds.” These are radioactive particles inserted in the prostate that eventually kill that gland and, therefore, its cancerous tumor.
Surgery, particularly since the development, at Johns Hopkins, of a more delicate technique that spared nerves attached to the prostate, was a favored option because it was supposed to eradicate the cancer and because, should surgery fail, radiation therapy could still be applied. (Sources I consulted insisted the damage done by radiation made subsequent surgery difficult.) Surgery first, radiation second seemed like a good way to go.
On the other hand, the radiation oncologist played up the disadvantages of surgery. The most salient one for most men was impotence. Attached to the prostate are nerves bundles that control erection. When these are removed or severed, a man no longer functions. Plus, the doctor pointed out, urinary incontinence, another unpleasant side effect of prostate surgery, never really went away and a man was doomed to leak. Finally, and most importantly, the oncologist underlined, surgery meant bleeding, and cancer was in the blood.
Cogent arguments all, but the oncologist’s single-minded militancy turned me off. And the urologists I consulted favored surgery. They acknowledged radiation’s efficacy, but some talked darkly about having seen many problems with it.
Still, I was ready to buy the seeds argument when I visited Sloan-Kettering in New York. There, a urologist who had been recommended by a colleague convinced me. Perhaps it was his manner, which fit into the soft-spoken academic tradition I was used to. Or perhaps it was New York itself: having made it my home for years, I felt comfortable there. Or—and this was also so New York—perhaps it was that everyone, beginning with the young man who registered me, seemed preternaturally intelligent. I chose surgery.
There was one more kick. Although surgery might result in urinary incontinence, which my surgeon assured me should go away, radiation could result in a loss of bowel control. Peeing in my pants was one thing. The other, well, gross.
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Let Lips Do What Hands Do
Sex drove me. Romance drove me. Was there a difference? At various times in my life I thought there was, but now that sex is an absence, I no longer know. Certainly I wanted to sleep with everyone I fell in love with, though not vice versa. Now I’m not even sure of vice versa.
Before there was sex there was making out, long kissing sessions fueled by a need I did not quite understand. And before any of it there were wet dreams and masturbation. The time between the onset of puberty and the loss of virginity weighed on me like a prison sentence, and it felt like liberation when I first got laid.
I was dating someone steadily, an arrangement I had fallen into without much formality though with great pleasure, for she was attractive and seemed to like me. On one of our first nights together we were leaning on a car, outside a party, kissing passionately, when she said, “I’m not going to sleep with you.” Had I been older I might have wondered if she really meant it, but all I wanted to do was to keep kissing, so whatever she said was fine.
A few nights later we were rolling around on her parents’ living room rug, embracing and kissing and panting with desire. She stopped suddenly, said, “I can’t stand this any longer,” and started to take off her clothes. I don’t know how I got mine off. All I remember was the excitement of: This is it! Finally!
Soon I was inside her. When it was over I had to leave—we were both in college but lived with our parents—not before quoting Romeo and Juliet, “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” I left the house, opened my car, but rushed back to her for a last kiss and to cap the quote, “that I will say goodbye till it be morrow.” (Jeez!)
It was only after one more go that she gave me my first lesson. I had responded to the male instinct to penetrate, pump and come. All she did was tell me to change the angle. Her orgasms—a female phenomenon I was just discovering—began. I was an eager student and she a gentle teacher. I don’t know what drove me to open her legs and kiss her—I had already had my fingers there many times. “Where did you learn that?” she asked. Dunno, I replied. Just thought I’d try it. I never told her that our first time I had been a virgin. But I figured she knew.
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Pedal to the Metal
The first years of sexual activity, or at least my memory of them, were more about romance, seduction and foreplay than actual sex. American culture was making its transition from the ’50s to the ’60s, and I grew up with the notion of male initiative and female reticence. Since the former was fueled by an urgent—throbbing, really—hormonal need, I never stopped to think, as I tried, clumsily, to seduce, where, in a literal sense, my efforts might lead. Indeed, had any of my early objects of desire acquiesced,
