Dale was great in both sex and affection, the most complete woman I was graced to know, and consistently charming, thus the poems which she elicited and merited, a piece of my heart. Tracy was superlative in sex, off the charts, surpassing the wildest dreams of a sex maniac. In military terms, in an epic poem of thousands of soldiers, and through a ten year long war, she would have been the ‘Achilles’. But she was a one-nighter, piercing you through the heart in a single stroke upon first encounter, finishing you off. So that ended all else, every wonderful thing that might happen in love between a man and a woman, the man dumbstruck on the ground. I really do think that it would have taken a real Achilles or Alexander to match and mate her.
Sanita, my ex-wife, falls into a different bracket. She was beautiful in feminine charms and certainly in love with me at first but drifting away over time, our differences in her view too great to bridge or reconcile as a married couple. Our first year (in and out of bed) was great, our second lukewarm, as an indifference grew in her, an alienation slowly increasing over the next five years and ending in her complete frigidity and departure from me.
Most of the rest of my half-dozen or so sexual affairs I can describe quite succinctly as ‘greeting cards’. They were one night stands. A few lasted several days. They were pleasant to receive, unexpected, and the message inside always brief and not soliciting a reply. There was a finality to them. These women opened up to me like I opened the card. A few, like Christina’s and Annie’s and Pat’s said: “Have a wonderful trip, goodbye.” Others, like Laurel’s and Maggie’s said: “Thanks for the wonderful time we had.” I suppose Low River’s was: “Have a merry Christmas.”
But you can’t reply to a greeting card. They’re a one way message of love, signed, but with no return address. They’re too brief to reply to. They were pretty, some even perfumed. But what do you do with such a card. You keep it on a mantel a few weeks, look at it fondly a few times, but sooner or later it ends up in the trash, discarded, a sad end of an affair where no real communication ever took place, and what went through the woman’s head was very different than what went through mine. But we’ll never know. It was sex between two parties with different motives and didn’t last, leaving only a memory of vague, conflicting feelings left behind, that soon vanished.
To cover everyone there’s one more class of sexual encounter I’ve had, deservedly at the very bottom of the list. Those wordless, always drunk-hazed and drug-driven animal acts, forgotten the next day or week, (often gladly) along with the name of the partner, without so much as a goodbye in the morning as one stumbles to the coffee pot with a headache. I suppose I’ve had a half-dozen of these but it doesn’t matter, any more than the hangovers I might recall.
There is one last class, sex with Mary Beth. But it wasn’t sex as her mind wasn’t there. She wasn’t there. It was wordless and meaningless, except for all the kindnesses shown her the next day and concern for her welfare, in exchange for a brief, warm feeling.
I know this stratifying of sex appears ‘infantile’ to women. But it’s to distinguish ‘sex’ from ‘love’, two very different and commonly confused or combined words. To most men sex is a huge factor to any continuing relationship. Besides a need, it’s their main way of showing love. Sensitive, human men never participate in sex without the passion of love, (in beasts it’s just lust). Women can engage without the slightest passion or feeling, spreading their legs and closing their eyes, with a final: “Are you done yet?” Many women never work at it. They might show affection in other ways, as Sanita did with me, which kept us together for eight years. But a disinterest in sex is a dagger to the man’s heart, slowly sinking in. Sex is the ultimate expression of love and when one partner grows cold and neglects it, it’s only a matter of time before the other walks away.
The other factor that holds a man entranced in a woman is her physical beauty, especially her face. This topic deserves a book, because in every other set of things compared and discussed by men, there are conflicting judgments and opinions, but also ambiguities and doubts in one’s mind, good points and bad in the things compared, with the scale tipping back and forth and the prize hard to decide and debatable, questions like: whose the greatest athlete, best writer or finest artist, opinions endlessly debatable in a bar or at a poker table. But on the question of the female face, every man knows in his own mind, right away, the sure winner.
Tracy looked strikingly similar to my T.A. in the Hebrew course I took seven years earlier. It was a summer, intensive workshop, ten weeks long, and ten hours of study each day, to teach ancient Hebrew. I’d already done the one’s in Latin and Greek and this was the third, taught only at Berkeley on their model. The renaissance scholars I read said this was the finishing touch to knowing the ancient world, thus the most famous school back then, in Louvain, was called the ‘Collegium Trilingue’ the college of three languages.
I never did pursue it after this course. I was the only non-Jewish participant in a class of twelve. Even the teachers wondered why I was there and when I told them, they had no idea of such history. But I did enjoy reading a few pages of Genesis and Job and Ruth in the original, and could perceive it was as poetic as Homer. But this pales for me to being in such close proximity to our T.A. four hours each day, going the rounds of our desks to take in her ring free hand each student’s homework, or quizzes, standing a foot from me and looking straight down at me with her beautiful eyes, commenting in her sweet voice on my good grades. I doted on her then and in my dreams for months after. For she had a perfect, unforgettable beauty. They had the same short, raven hair, the same height, slimness, shapely breasts, voice, feminine deportment and an amazing similitude of face.
But after that delicious night in Tracy’s embrace, in the days after, their similarities being so hauntingly close, I began (in my mind’s eye), to compare the two beauties carefully, so as not to confuse them in my dreams. It took only minutes. The Jewish T.A., though her image was a little faded over time, (like an old photograph) won the contest of beauty decisively. It was something in her cheekbones, just slightly more pronounced, that gave her the advantage, definitively, in that remembered comparison of faces, and the golden statue, my imaginary award, was handed to her.
But then I pondered: why do we rate women’s looks so exactly, putting them to the test and scoring each with a grade, and that grade ridiculously precise and final? It would be like a mark given on a test score with three decimal points past the dot. ‘Tracy, you just rated a 9.723 in facial beauty. Someone else topped you by a hair. You lose’. Yet that’s the way we are. Here’s a proof. Put the pictures of the top ten highest paid models or actresses in the world, (or any set of ten living or iconic women’s faces) in front of a panel of men, any men, and I guaranty you each man will pick out his favorite within one minute. And it will always be a decisive winner, a no questions asked hands down winner, not the same for each man, but in each man’s mind clearly and indisputably the fairest.
Why do we do this? Each woman has outstanding qualities of beauty, physical and spiritual, but we pick one as the best and relegate the others to a lower sphere. Why couldn’t I place both Tracy and the T.A. on the same pedestal of beauty and admire them equally? The T.A. might have been a total ‘dud’ in bed, and a terrible partner in every other way. But that’s not the point. It’s the face that strikes the brain and with that image a man’s mind is completely bewitched, an abject slave, with no escape. It’s a disease in men’s minds of constant comparison, and the comparisons in the end are always invidious, with nine losers for every one winner. Women, I apologize to all of you, and Tracy, I doubly apologize.
These thoughts didn’t change my views of women. I knew there were all types, with all degrees of faults and talents, pluses and minuses in every department of character, body and mind. But I put them out of my mind after her and pursued none. Just as in her case, the only relationships that happened to me after that, for the next nine months, were when some woman pushed me against a wall and initiated it. I was engaged by some, in bars or friends’ homes, and talked for hours with then. I was attracted to others and talked away even more hours, usually high on speed. Tina was one I’d try to corner in some room at the Warehouse at 3 a.m., or Claire, Bruno’s girlfriend, because they were both so intelligent in conversation, but not love interests. I was just fascinated by their female perspective of life.
But I was always, all my life, passive at passes. Bones and Kim, Harry O., and several other friends of mine could charm a newly met woman right out of her pants within hours. I watched it over and over, often from a chair away, wondered at it, but never practiced the art. They’d lean right into a woman’s face, inches away, and charm her with a mesmerizing force of words, pearly teeth and looks, or a song and guitar, hypnotize her and reel her in, starry-eyed, to bed. But it wasn’t in my character to do that. I considered it manipulation, deception even. And I didn’t want to wake up to the look of a woman feeling deceived, regretful or ashamed. But it’s more than that. I didn’t have the urge my friends had. I’ve used the word ‘oversexed’, so I can honestly call myself ‘undersexed’. I had so many other things on my mind that ‘getting laid’ was low on my social agenda. Now falling in love and admiring female beauty were high on my list of interests and when they struck me unexpectedly my first reaction was something like mute astonishment. Then my imagination would kick in with a whole slew of possible outcomes, good and bad, freezing any action.
I often waxed poetic on a bar stool or at a table late at night, with men and women, speed aided, full of drink and eloquence. But it was as if I were talking to myself or just letting my thoughts flow out, with never an ulterior motive or even a thought as to its effect on others. That time I read those poems to Laurel in my garage, I was just as much or even more caught up in my enthusiasm for the poems themselves. She was just the excuse for me to re-read them again. I do admit that with Diane, having seen the result with Laurel, I did read the same ones to her, with the ulterior motive to enamor her, and it worked that night. But I always had my priorities, my self-respect and that directed my actions, and bedding a woman was low on my list. I was too intellectual for some Casanova-like life. The evening with Christina is a perfect example of this. But I was always mesmerized by the female face, equating its beauty to a miracle. I still am, and I’ll probably die envisioning one, my closest concept of heaven.
