Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

* * *

When Alice didn’t show up in class and I asked for information, the girls played dumb, or at least, that is what I guessed. I didn’t know whether the hospital rumor was true, and it seemed silly to perpetuate it, so I went to the source. I called Alice’s house, her mother answered, and she told me that Alice had been ill with severe stomach pains and had been rushed to the hospital, but the doctors had found nothing and had sent her home after a night of tests. When I asked how her daughter was feeling, she said she seemed to be out of pain but was listless and low and refused to go back to class. With all the delicacy I could muster I said that there had been talk about “a joke” on Alice among the girls, and it had worried me. I wanted to speak to Alice. The woman was obliging, even eager, I thought, and I heard in her voice that particular note of maternal fear founded not on evidence but on a feeling.

Alice did not get up for me. I was ushered into her abnormally neat pale blue room, where she lay on top of her pale blue bedspread covered with white cumulus clouds and stared at the ceiling, her arms crossed over her chest like a corpse that had been prepared for burial. I pulled a chair near her bed, sat down on it, and listened as her mother discreetly pulled the door shut behind her. The girl’s face was masklike. As I spoke to her, she didn’t move a muscle. I told her we had missed her in class, that it wasn’t the same without her, that I was sorry she had been ill but hoped she would return soon, once she was fully recovered.

Without turning her head to look at me, she said to the ceiling, “I can’t go back.”

Not telling is as interesting as telling, I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside, can be so excruciating under certain circumstances is fascinating. I pressed her, kindly, but I pressed. All Alice did was shake her head back and forth. I mentioned “the joke” then, and her face broke into an expression of pain. Her lips disappeared as she curled them inward, and I saw a tear dribble from each duct, and because she was supine neither fell. Rather, they sank into the skin of her cheeks.

We are going to leave Alice lying there on her cloudy bedspread with her shiny cheeks. We are going to take a respite, because, although I remained sitting there in person, I left myself for at least half an hour. I took a mind walk. It is not easy talking to a thirteen-year-old who does not want to talk to you or, if she does want to talk to you, must nevertheless be coddled and coaxed and wheedled for the few precious utterances that will resolve the mystery of the crime. To be frank, it’s a bit boring, so we shall dispense with the long and tortured job of getting the words out of the child and return to her once she has produced them.

* * *

Why I thought of that erotic explosion I can’t say. The clouds, the bed, the light that shone through the girl’s window that afternoon, a thick haze of summer illumination — any or all may have done it. Boris had accompanied me to a poetry festival, where I had read to a crowd of twenty (quite good, I thought) and we had wandered about San Francisco in the foggy air. A fellow poet had recommended a massage therapist, a man of sterling quality who altered human bodies with his hands. This was an attractive idea for someone whose crammed and speeding head occasionally lost sight of her body far below. The man’s name was Bedgood. Archibald Bedgood. I am not a liar. It may have been his name that started the whole enterprise. Nothing is certain. Anyway, while Boris waited in the wings (a restful room with New Age music designed to turn all human beings into somnambulists), I lay myself down naked but for a towel covering my rump on Bedgood’s massage bed, with some anxiety, if the truth be told, and the man began to rub. He was methodical, decorous — by some magic the towel never lost its purpose as modest covering. He took each body part individually, all four limbs, feet and hands, back and head, even my face at the end. I had no sexual feelings whatsoever, no erotic leaps or fantasies. I had no thoughts that I recall, but after an hour and a half, Bedgood had reduced me to jelly. Mia was missing, missing in action, so to speak. The person who emerged from the massage room to find Boris snoring on a soft pink sofa had been transformed, just as advertised. She had been remade into a limp, empty-headed, but altogether euphoric being. After rousing Izcovich from his pastel divan, this redone personage (who deserved a new name: FiFi or Didi or Dollface or just Doll) sauntered arm in arm with Husband toward Poetry Hotel, and that is where on the somewhat too soft bed I (or she) was split open, broken into flaming pieces, and transported to Paradise four times in quick succession.

The experience deserves commentary, not a word of which forwards any conventional notion of Romance. Post Bedgood ministrations, any person — no, I amend that — any person, bird, beast, or even inanimate object (provided it wasn’t cold) could have sent me flying into the higher regions of erotic experience. The lesson here is that extreme relaxation promotes pleasure and extreme relaxation is a state of nearly complete openness to whatever comes along. It is also thoughtlessness. I began to wonder whether there were people who lived their lives loose, easy, and fairly blank much of the time, whether there were Dollfaces out there in a kind of permanent sensual transport. I once read about a woman who had regular orgasms brushing her teeth, a report that astonished me, but which after Bedgood began to make some sense. A toothbrush might hae done it.

Only a couple of years ago at a discussion group on sex and the brain, I was SHOCKED when a colleague of Boris’s assured me that in the animal kingdom — or, rather, in the female side of the animal kingdom, in other words, in the whole animal queendom — only human women experience orgasm. When I expressed my amazement, Boris and five other male researchers at the table concurred with Dr. Brooder. We two-leggers could do it but no other animals. In males, of course, prowess went all the way down the mammalian ladder. Male arousal has deep biological roots; in women it’s just a fluke, an accident. From a purely physiological point of view, this struck me as absurd. My primate sisters, who shared so much of my equipment, upstairs and downstairs, had no fun during sex! What did that mean? Among our four-legged cousins, only the males experienced joy? While I argued my point, Boris glowered at me from across the table (I had been admitted as a special guest). A couple of books and several papers later, I discovered that the smug six were dead wrong, which meant, of course, that I was dead right. In 1971 Frances Burton verified orgasm in four out of five of the female rhesus monkeys in her lab. Female stump-tailed macaque monkeys experience orgasms regularly but most often with other females, not with males, and when they come, the simian ladies cry out just as we do. Alan F. Dixson, the author of Primate Sexuality: Comparative Studies of Prosimians, Monkeys, Apes, and Human Beings, writes that they express their rapture in sounds reminiscent of Mrs. Claus: “Ho, ho, ho!” I used those three verbal ejaculations when I confronted the old man with my evidence. “Ho! Ho! Ho!” I said, slapping down two tomes and six articles, all marked with Post-its.

Why, you may ask, did the no-fun theory for girl apes become so well known that all six guys at the table had swallowed it as a matter of course, even though the primates in question have clitorises, as do ALL female mammals? Onan, if you recall from page 66, was punished for wasting his seed. He was supposed not to cast it on the ground but to put it somewhere — inside a woman. This is the waste-not-want-not-for-children argument. But unlike Onan, who can’t inseminate anybody without orgasm, Onan’s hypothetical woman (the woman he should have been inside) can conceive without having the big O, a fact recognized by Aristotle but forgotten for centuries. In 1559 Columbus discovered the clitoris ( dulcedo amoris ) — Renaldus Columbus, that is. He sailed into it during one of his anatomical voyages, although Gabriele Fallopius disputed this, insisting that he had seen the hillock first. Permit me to draw an analogy between the two exploring Columbuses, Christopher and Renaldus. Their disclosures, less than a hundred years apart, the former of a body of land, the latter of a body part, share a familiar hubris, one of hierarchical perspective. In the case of the new world, the viewer looking down is European. In the clitoral case, he is a man. Both the peoples who had been living on “New World” soil for thousands of years and, I dare say, most women would have been stupefied by these “discoveries.” That said, the clitoris remains a Darwinian puzzle. If it’s not needed for conception, WHY is it there? Is it adaptive or nonadaptive? The shriveled-up little penis (nonadaptive) view has a long history. Gould and Lewontin argue that clits are like tits in men, an anatomical leftover. Others say no; the pleasure pea serves an evolutionary purpose. The battles are bloody. But, I ask you, what matters adaptation or size if the blessed little member does the job? Before we return to our story, I leave you with the immortal words of Jane arp, a seventeenth-century Englishwoman and practicing midwife, who wrote of the clitoris, “It will stand and fall as a yard doth and makes women lustful and take delight in copulation.” (Women, I contend, their simian sisters, and, awaiting further research, probably other mammals, too. Further subcommentary: Doesn’t the seventeenth-century use of the measurement yard for penis strike you as a bit of an exaggeration, unless the yard then was not the yard now?)