Another Insane Devotion Read online

  In the first sentence of the preceding paragraph, the operative word, the word that lends it force, is “never.” The women I would never have sex with. Had any of those women been available to me—had I been available to them—I doubt I would have felt much of anything. I could have overheard them talking about their orgasms. Their charge was the charge of the forbidden. In an earlier time, I might have spoken of those women as forbidden fruit, in keeping with the tradition that links sexual transgression to the prototypical transgression of the first human beings. A difference is that in Genesis, the prohibition against eating from the Tree of Knowledge is not in itself arousing. God warns Adam against eating its fruit, and Adam doesn’t think about it; he’s too busy naming the animals. Not even slutty Eve would have conceived a yen for that fruit if not for the serpent telling her how delicious it was, and so rich in antioxidants. Only in the erotic sphere do prohibitions have the opposite effect, giving their objects the sheen and perfume of the most wonderful fruit that ever hung from a branch—not the hackneyed apple, which is so often woody or mushy and whose hard core gouges the palate, but the grape, as is written in the Zohar, or the fig, which when split open so resembles a woman’s sex. What you can’t have is what you want. Because I knew their outcome—because I knew they would have no outcome—my encounters—or, more accurately, my sightings—always had an elegiac quality. It may not have been that different from what the very ill and the very old feel as they do things for what they suspect will be the last time: the last time they walk through the park; the last time they sit beneath a chestnut tree and watch the sunlight streaming through its leaves; the last cup of strong coffee; the last time someone they love combs their hair. What I felt for those women wasn’t just desire, which by itself may not be enough to make you sag against the cheese counter at the Fairway; it was mourning.

  During this time I got an assignment from a tony sex magazine to write a story about a woman who goes around the city looking for a zipless fuck. It was basically an occasion for a photographer to take pictures—I mean good pictures, suitable for National Geographic—of half-dressed models pretending to have sex in different semipublic locations. There was no real reason for me to be there. I just liked the leggy photographer. She specialized in rockers, and she treated me as if I were Wayne Coyne, an aging, second-tier celebrity whose second-tierness was exactly what made him hip. We met in what was nominally a strip club. Under a recent city ordinance, however, it had become illegal for women to show their nipples in public, so all the venue could offer was some sad girls in bras jogging dully in place on a platform behind the bar, ignored by everybody. “Do you know what the chicks who work in these places call them?” the photographer asked me. It’d been years since I’d heard anyone use the word “chicks.” “Stopless bars.”

  “Not tipless bars?”

  She laughed in my ear. “That’s good. I’m going to tell that to somebody.”

  We collected the female model, who was a friend of hers, and took taxis from one location to the next. At each stop, our protagonist would pose with a different partner, a waxy corporate mannequin, a bike messenger with a mane of tumbling black curls, a bouncy exotic dancer who kept snapping off backbends. The night got hotter and more humid until, as we were hauling our gear between locations, the sky burst with a biblical roar, and we were pummeled with what might have been lead shot. For the rest of the night, we did our work to the drumming of falling water. We went from the photographer’s apartment building to a boutique hotel on the Upper East Side and back to her apartment. By then it was early morning, and we were all exhausted. The model could barely prop herself up on some pillows to fondle the exotic dancer. When the photographer told her she could get dressed, she let out a groan of relief and called her boyfriend to come pick her up. I stayed behind to help with the lights. Outside it was still raining. “You’re never going to get a taxi,” the photographer told me. We looked at each other. Her eyes were blue but looked black because of her makeup. I don’t remember whether F. was down in the city that night. She may have been traveling. Regardless of where she was, she’d put no pressure on me to come home and would be unlikely to question me too closely even if I were to walk in while the neighborhood parents were seeing their kids off to preschool in the street below. This reticence is one of her most attractive features, and also one of her most unnerving. In somebody else, it might indicate a fear of learning something unpleasant, but I think F.’s reticence has more to do with her sense of dignity, her fear of debasing yours or sacrificing her own. In either case, I wouldn’t have to lie.

  Still, I left. I could say that I was thinking of the vows I was supposed to recite in another few months or that between the photographer and F. there was no choice. But, really, who was asking me to make a choice? (The allure of infidelity—one of the allures—is the allure of not choosing. You can have both.) It may be more correct to say that I had too vivid a picture of how I’d feel on waking up next to the photographer, how anxious I’d be to get away, and how anxious I’d be not to seem too eager about it, which would—I knew this from earlier occasions, before I met F.—make me stay later and later, until she’d either gotten the wrong impression or was good and sick of me. It may be that much of my loyalty to F. arises from my sense that she is the only person I wouldn’t, to one extent or another, want to get away from when I woke beside her in the morning, not because she’s the person I’m sanctioned to wake beside but because of all the people I might wake or have woken up beside, she is the only one with whom I can feel alone, as in the Frank O’Hara poem that ends, “You are emptying the world so we can be alone.”

  It may also be that I realized that the photographer wasn’t sending me sexual signals so much as observing professional etiquette. Feature reporters have to pretend they’re fascinated by everybody they interview, and maybe people who photograph rock stars have to keep up the impression that they’re aroused by everybody on a shoot, even extending the courtesy to writers. I could say that being present on a sex shoot had an effect opposite to that of looking at the resulting photographs. It was too much process. When I think back to what I saw through the photographer’s viewfinder, I recall the highlights on a man’s pecs, the inky Möbius of a twisted bra strap, the fraught synapse between an upright nipple and a suppliant tongue. How many angels might waltz in that gap. When I think back to what I saw in front of me, though, I remember the photographer making her model friend sit up for a shot rather than lie back because if she lay back her tits would pancake to the side. The model was tired, and she complained, but I could see the photographer was right.

  She was right about taxis too. The whole way home, one after another skidded past me, stuffed with grateful passengers or with its “Off Duty” sign burning like a brand. I had to walk blocks before I found an empty one, and by then I was so wet I might as well have saved myself the ten bucks.

  In both cats and humans, it’s mostly the male that roams in pursuit of sex. The rule, however, isn’t ironclad. Many years ago I had a friend whom a teenaged diving accident had left a paraplegic. He couldn’t get hard-ons. He once came to me upset because he’d learned that just before they got married, his wife had had sex with another man. She’d wanted to know if she could bear to go the rest of her life without fucking, and she knew of no way to be sure without actually doing it, as it turned out, with a neighbor in their apartment complex. She’d decided she could. Somebody else might have treated this as grounds for divorce. My friend stayed with his wife. A few years later, he was surgically outfitted with a penis pump that enabled him to have intercourse as often and as long as he wanted. He and his wife were happy for many years until he died from complications from his old injury.

  “Do you want to know what I felt then?”

  “I’m not sure I want to know.”

  “I felt desire.”

  At some point on the night of September 29, I went into my office and tried Skyping F. at the residency, which was how we’d bee
n talking. The phone, or I guess the computer, rang in that strange, wet way, as if each ring were a bubble rising through hundreds of feet of green-black water from the hold of a ship sunken on the sea floor. In my mind, the horizontal distance between us translated into a vertical distance. I was the one at the bottom. No one answered. Well, where F. was, it was long after midnight. She’d probably shut down her laptop for the night.

  Earlier in the day, she’d sent me an e-mail that ended with a question about the financial tidal wave that had begun sweeping the world a few weeks before, snatching up trillions of dollars in its rush. She wanted to know if we were going to lose our retirement savings. “Possibly yes,” I wrote back now. “I’ll tell you more yesterday. Bruno told me that Biscuit’s been gone for 2 days, and I’m sick with worry. I’m waiting to hear more from him—Sherri’s been helping him look for her—but I may fly up there this weekend to see if I have better luck.” I was already thinking of going up to New York to look for Biscuit myself.

  It’s only on rereading this message that I realize I typed “yesterday” when I meant “tomorrow.”

  A while after we had Biscuit spayed, I became conscious of a high-pitched whine that seemed to be coming from just outside my office. I thought it might be somebody doing construction down the block or a disturbance in the phone lines. But I couldn’t figure out what kind of power tool would make a sound like that, steadily, for hours on end, and when I called the phone company, I was assured that their lines had never been known to whine. F. came into the room, listened quizzically in that way she has, standing very still with her small, dear head cocked to one side, and then said she thought the sound was coming from inside the house. “You’re crazy,” I told her. Then I put my ear against the wall. I recoiled as if it were on fire. Up close, the sound was enveloping. It wasn’t a whine; it was a drone, shrill enough to make the hair on my arms stand on end and at the same time inward, meditative, monastic.

  The wall was infested with bees. F. worried about being stung, but I thought it more likely we’d be driven mad, or I would be; I was the one who worked in that room. Now that I knew what was making it, the hum, which before had been merely puzzling, gave me the creeps. I asked the landlord for advice on driving out an infestation of bees. “Drive them out? Jesus, you don’t ‘drive them out.’” He was large and red faced, and his politics were to the right of the emperor Nero’s, but I respected his industry and lack of bullshit, and I think it amused him to see somebody who worked with his mind proposing to drive out vermin. He came over, drilled a hole in the Sheetrock, sprayed in some industrial-grade bug killer, then capped the hole with a butterfly screw. We waited for the humming to stop. It didn’t. Outside the window I saw a dark plume of bees issue from the side of the house like smoke and hang in the air, but it was just a detachment from the main colony. We pulled out the screw and quickly jammed the bug spray can’s nozzle into the hole before bees could pour out of it and added a few more lethal squirts. This time, the humming seemed to get louder. It sounded angry. I told my wife, “We’d better not go outside.” Biscuit had jumped up on a chair and was staring with interest at the screw in the wall. F. picked her up. “And keep the cats in.”

  The killing took almost three days. When it became clear that spraying inside the house was only displacing small numbers of insects, the landlord sent over some workmen to drill holes in the outer wall, especially in the insulation around the chimney. Then they tore off a soffit and sprayed there. Even with the windows shut, the house stank. We worried about our central nervous systems, and about the cats’, which were more sensitive. Every time Biscuit raced across the floor for no reason or rolled onto her side and tried to disembowel a table leg with her hind feet, we thought the worst. The humming mounted; the bees stormed out in greater numbers, like cavalry making sorties from a besieged fortress. The workmen sweltered beneath the July sun in padded jackets and canvas gloves. The cats clamored to go out. At some point the extermination began to take effect. Soon there were no bees by the back door. Then, in a coordinated assault, the landlord drilled a second hole in the office wall, and the two of us sprayed in more bug killer in unison. Along with the cans of Bee Gone, he’d brought along a sprayer, the kind with a pump that you see in old cartoons, with no markings on it, but he didn’t use that yet.

  The buzzing surged, and for a moment it was as if we were inside a huge electrical transformer. A curtain of insects blackened the air from above the window almost to the ground. The landlord threw the window open and worked the pump of his archaic sprayer. The curtain fell. It fell all at once, as if cut loose from an invisible rod, with a soft patter. Afterward the yard was crunchy with tiny, desiccated corpses. I worried that Biscuit would eat them and be poisoned, but she steered clear of them. She may have been repelled by the stench of whatever it was that had come out of that unmarked canister or simply been uninterested in something that was already dead. Unlike dogs, cats have no taste for carrion.

  I have stated my problem with the term “forbidden fruit”—I mean its association with the apple of the Tree of Knowledge, which probably wasn’t an apple at all. Adam and Eve may have eaten that fruit in spite of God’s injunction, but they didn’t eat because of it. The true forbidden fruit may be the pears Augustine writes about in the Confessions. He was sixteen. They grew on a tree close to his family’s vineyard in Thagaste, and neither their color nor their flavor was special:But late one night, having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was—a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden.

  Augustine, by the way, believed that before the Fall, sex was a purely voluntary act and not the tortured impulse it has been ever since. Adam willed his erections the way somebody wills a handshake. When he did, however, he was probably being more than just friendly.

  The Animals in the Garden of Eden

  This is a Gnostic legend from the early Christian era. Because God created Adam and Eve as vegetarians (“Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food”), they really had no need of the animals over which they had been given dominion, not even the beasts of burden, for they could get all the food they wanted without plowing, and they had no possessions that had to be carried. Nor did the animals need people, and so in those first days they kept mostly to themselves. The only exceptions were the dog and the cat. The dog already liked humans—Adam, especially, who threw him sticks—and the cat was curious about them. They were so outlandish. Of all the creatures in the Garden, they alone had no fur and walked upright on their hind legs, and whenever they saw the cat, they made a sound that in time he understood was meant to make him come to them. Sometimes he did.

  And so on the day Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the dog and the cat were nearby. When Adam took a bite of the fruit Eve had given him, the dog came closer, wagging his tail and grinning as if to ask, “Maybe something for me?” And Adam tore off some of the fruit and gave it to him. It was the first time a human had fed an animal by hand or, indeed, fed one at all. Now the cat came up to them. He did it only out of curiosity, but the woman thought he was hungry, so she took a piece of the fruit, a small piece because it was so sweet and so nice and already she was inflamed by a feeling no one had ever felt before—greed—and held it out in her hand as the man had done with the dog. The cat approached and sniffed the fruit, his tail flicking, but he wouldn’t eat it. No one thought to lay the fruit on the ground—where the cat still might not have eaten it—and in the next moment the woman gave in to her greed and ate the fruit herself, sucking the pulp from her fingers and sighing because she wished there were more. The cat watched her.

  Then God came, and they knew what they had done. He
sentenced the people to unceasing toil and the pangs of childbirth and, saving the worst for last, death. Then he looked at the dog and the cat. What was he going to do with them? The dog, sensing trouble, hung his head and began to whimper. The cat looked up at God. I don’t know if it was the dog’s crying or the cat’s unblinking gaze that softened him. “Well, I only warned those two,” God said to himself. “Those people.” It was the first time that anyone had ever spoken in a voice filled with disgust. He looked at the animals. “How were these ones supposed to know? The poor, dumb creatures.” And so they were spared everything except death. That was nonnegotiable.

  But from then on, the Lord added, the animals’ fate would be tied up with that of the humans, for if they hadn’t taken part in the humans’ sin, they had still been its witnesses. He asked them what they wanted to do. The dog said, “Let me go with the people, even out of Paradise, and wander with them over the earth. I’ll help them get their food, and I’ll sleep with them by their fires, and when the woman has babies, I’ll stand guard over them, for they are weak creatures.” And God said, “Good dog! Go with my blessing.”

  But the cat didn’t want to go with the people. He liked them well enough, but it was the Garden he was attached to, its high, soft grasses, its encyclopedia of smells. “Let me stay in this place and be its familiar spirit until you see fit to let the man and the woman back in. When you do, I’ll be there to welcome them.” And God said, “Good cat! Abide here with my blessing.”