are alive. Alive.
What can I tell my friend he will miss most? Penetration? That’s how doctors measure the return of potency. Thus, the success rate claimed by nerve-sparing surgery. And, indeed, after the development of that more delicate operation—and after the availability of ant-erectile dysfunction medications—a man can manage enough of an erection to penetrate. Whether he can keep it up long enough for a nice satisfactory go, that’s another matter. But let’s give science its due. You can fuck again.
Yet, though I miss that experience to the point of despair, in my current un-libidinous state, what I miss most is the thrust toward seduction. Before living this way of life, I would have said, simply, seduction. That thrill of raising the level of flirtation to the point where touching and kissing begin, the protracted sweet agony of foreplay, or better yet, the moment when the die is cast. When the clothes are off and the players are in bed, right before sex begins.
By the thrust toward seduction I mean a thrill that may never and, in fact, seldom does, lead to lovemaking. It can be a goodbye kiss that lingers just a second longer than the weight of mere friendship can bear. Or one of the two people telling a story that borders, just borders, on a turn-on. It’s when a conversation turns intimate. When touch is frequently given or frequently accepted. It’s when you know seduction is in the air.
Something innate, probably primal, kicks in, and one starts thinking, aha!, this is going somewhere—later, if it indeed does go somewhere, you can reveal to one another you were harboring the same thoughts. This is when, as the crass saying goes, a man starts thinking with his dick. Never mind the other party is spoken for, and most certainly never mind if you are. Later in the flirtation there will be time to back off as the realization dawns that this may not be the best idea. But in that moment, in that particular speck of time, you feel supremely alive because you are supremely animal. Me Tarzan, you Jane. We both happy sexed-up apes. Not that conscious intelligence has stopped, no, no. On the contrary. The mind is revved up thinking of possible scenarios, and, most of all, what moves and countermoves should be made.
That these moments usually lead nowhere matters little. They are those instants of sexual attraction and acknowledgment. Falling in love ever so briefly. Sensing how the world is a cornucopia of carnal delight.
…and when the warm weather comes, the girls in their summer dresses…
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I Lost It at the Movies
It was through another medium that the rendering of female beauty in Renaissance paintings—those Boticellis, Leonardos and Raphaels—stung me. The movies. Film’s erotic esthetics changed through the medium’s short history—the braless honeys of ’30s films, jiggling softly under silk, are sexy to me now, but when I first saw those movies I didn’t even notice their appeal. My own erotic history at the movies began in the ’50s, in pre-adolescence. Somewhere near the end of the Production Code, films got so overheated by self-censorship that steam came off the screen, but all I have is a vague memory of women wearing slips, a garment that would soon disappear from both films and life. It was in the ’60s that my erotic fixations with actresses began.
I was already a pretentious snob who preferred “foreign” films, so my objects of desire were European. There was, of course, Brigitte Bardot, who practically oozed sexuality, who seemed constructed to excite the male imagination and for no other purpose. God created woman, but Roger Vadim constructed la Bardot. Soon my glance shifted from France to Italy, where the reigning sex queen was Claudia Cardinale. It was not just her gorgeous body but her sweet, soft mouth and baby face that made men—and man-children like me—want her. I dreamed of going to Italy and falling in love with someone just like her.
Then I shifted again, this time to a Frenchwoman who acted in Italian films, Anouk Aimée. So beguiled was I by her that I developed a crush on a (married!) woman in one of my college French classes who resembled her, though I kept my infatuation to myself. Later in life, seeing the films that bewitched me, I found Cardinale too soft and plastic—and I first found her earthy!—and Aimée simply too skinny. Then I found her.
No matter how many times I watch The Conformist, I sympathize completely with Jean-Louis Trintignant driven to murderous complicity over his desire for Dominique Sanda. While other early objects of desire faded in their appeal as I revisited their movies, Sanda remained, on screen, sheer perfection. In The Garden of the Finzi-Continis she drives another man, her cousin, mad with desire, although this admirer, who, like the protagonist in The Conformist, finds his love and lust unrequited, keeps his passion bottled inside. When, after a tennis match, the two cousins seek refuge from the rain in a carriage house and Sanda’s white shirt is soaked, the sight of her nipples makes her cousin, and I, the spectator, practically swoon.
In The Conformist, her character is quite aware of her power, and when she needs her admirer’s help she merely slips down her ballet leotard so he can see her breasts, small, pink-nippled, perfect. If the erotic power of her image on the screen did not fade with time for me, something unexpected happened that made the effect of the passing of time on desire throw me into a spin.
I met her.
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Pour Son Amour
The ninth injection, last week, did not require a conversation with the doctor. I merely went to the office, waited my turn, and bared my ass to the nurse who had been shooting me up with hormones all along. My medical experiences over the past years had made me lose what little modesty I had left and I made a joke about my monthly southern exposure to this young woman. The injection hurt more than usual, but once it was over I pulled up my pants and forgot about it.
Until the fatigue and the hot flashes set in. For most of the week I had little energy and had to interrupt my writing by going to bed and watching TV or napping. The hot flashes are hard to cover up. Fortunately, I live in a hot climate where breaking into a sweat is not unusual. Unfortunately, this is already winter, tropical winter, when it’s only mildly cool and sweating is unusual. Sometimes someone notices. I pay little attention. Women I know who are going through menopause are not embarrassed about saying they’re having a hot flash. But I feel weird about it. Perhaps because they’re the same hormonal upheaval as a woman’s, male hot flashes are just not macho.
The hypersensitive male ego. What a burden. But does that ego reside in my testicles? It would seem so by all the talk about cojones. Or does it reside in my penis? Impotence can lead to an ontological crisis. I can’t make my cojones or my cock work, so I must not be a man. And if I’m not a man, then I am nothing. I don’t exist.
But my testicles are still there, albeit nonfunctional. So is my penis, albeit nonerectile. I often thought the most tragic love story of all was that of Abelard and Heloise. How it saddened me that the man was castrated. Had he just been killed, he would’ve been just one more star-crossed lover. But castrated? That meant he had lost his ability to consummate his love. Or perhaps love at all. Can I love? Can I still be a lover?
Technically, I can still engage in the varieties of lovemaking I have practiced all my life. A woman can have orgasms with the help of my hands or mouth, even if I can’t. But do I want to? At the beginning of hormone therapy, I most certainly didn’t. I don’t feel like it, I thought. I’ve been cut off from libido, just like Abelard. Now, I’m not so sure. Some part of me longs to suck on breasts, but so far I’ve felt a strange timidity about it, different from that early adolescent timidity, which was, after all, a sheer layer of fear over a raging fire of hormonal combustion. No combustion this time. The timidity is about starting something that I may not want to finish. Many a time—and I think most men will recognize this and so will most women—I have started a lovemaking bout, usually a first time, and early on or half way through realized this was not as pleasurable as I thought. For some reason, the chemistry
