Sugar in My Bowl (26 page)

WOMAN
1:     Embarrassing

WOMAN
2:     Sometimes it’s

“You’re beautiful”

WOMAN
3:    or

“God, your ass”

WOMAN
2:     “Your skin”

WOMAN
1:     And sometimes it’s so insanely funny

It’s ridiculous

(They all become hysterical)

WOMAN
2:     But mainly it takes longer

It’s all preparation

WOMAN
3:    You lose track of who begins

WOMAN
1:     Who’s on top

WOMAN
2:     Who got more

WOMAN
3:    Who’s inside who

Reading of O

Honor Moore

1.

I avoided it. Never even saw a copy of it all those years. But it lay there, beneath my young woman feminism. A curiosity. A taboo.

Written by a woman, I heard. To entertain her husband.

A friend of mine met her in Paris. Pauline Réage. She was small, a literary woman who wore glasses. She came into the room, her face obscured by a hat.

The marvelous name was a nom de plume.

2.

In a dark apartment near St. Germain, a woman hands a sheaf of pages to a man wearing a suit.

3.

I had returned to the city after years in the country and for a few months lived in a loft at the border of Little Italy and SoHo. I was writing and it was winter, and as snow fell outside I described it. Meticulously. How it fell on the roof of the church across the street. How it dulled a red door that led from the roof to god knows where. How something that had looked yellow in sunlight in falling snow had no color whatsoever.

I was having a love affair after years of involuntary abstinence. I was still “a woman” I had discovered.

I thought of myself as in the process of having a sexual awakening.

I thought of myself as “a girl at fifty.”

4.

The first time I was alone with him, we stood at a small distance from each other and I trembled. When I saw him again I scarcely recognized him. It was not how he looked that had caused me to tremble.

Because circumstances proscribed the dimensions of the affair, restraint became its method. For instance, he never came to see me in that loft at the borders of SoHo and Little Italy.

Or lie with me in that bed. It was built of dark wood and highly polished, the bedclothes were white, and its surface stood high, at an unusual height from the floor.

5.

One night after seeing the film based on Proust’s
Time Regained,
I returned alone to the loft. I had in mind to choose a book, and there it was.
Story of O
. I pulled it from the shelf: on the white cover, a characterization by Eliot Fremont-Smith of the
New York Times
: “A total, authentic literary experience.”

The critic’s name brought back the room where I began to write in 1972. The American edition had appeared in 1965, the year I lost my virginity.

In the country I had lived alone and taken care of an old house. Which made me strong, as did writing a long book. By the time I moved back to the city, I was weary of my strength and its requirements.

6.

“ . . . they notice, at one corner of the park, at an intersection where there are never any taxis, a car which, because of its meter, resembles a taxi.

Get in, he says.

She gets in. . . .”

7.

Even now, without the book in hand, I can see the cool interior of that automobile, the green of trees through the window as the driver makes his way out of the city. Also, I have the sensation of the leather upholstery, how it sticks to the nakedness of her buttocks.

And can recall the feel of the man sitting next to her.

8.

Now a man wearing a mask is entering the woman’s cell in the château at Roissy. With chains, he secures her wrists to the wall above her bed. And fits her neck with a wide leather collar.

The mechanisms are mercilessly described. “They had clasps, which functioned automatically like a padlock when it closes, and they could be opened only by means of a small key.”

The click of her mules as she walks the tiled corridors, her pale flesh reflecting the fire in the hearth of the library where she is presented, the men with their drinks circling her, making their crude remarks. And then she is whipped.

9.

I feel myself abruptly frantic, a woman enraged at being kept from her pleasure. I toss the book aside.

Hot blur of white bedclothes, black night out the window, the burning, my own fists pounding the mattress beside me, the rising torso, a fury of moaning no one can hear, so thick are the walls of the old loft building, and afterward the fumbling for it, the book written by a woman in Paris when I was a child, its yellowed pages beneath the reading lamp.

Again and again.

10.

Which shocked me.

11.

She wears the taffeta gown caught up at the waist: in the back to reveal her buttocks, in the front to expose her “belly.”

She is not the only woman in the château, and she is not permitted to speak to the others, nor they to her. Like the others, she is directed to keep her eyes lowered, and if she meets the gaze of any of the men who “use” her, she is beaten.

The word “mule” and the idea of that kind of unsecured shoe enter my erotic imagination.

Riding crop. The whip with several knotted lashes. The one fashioned of bamboo and leather.

It is the year 2000, and there is no talk of torture in the news.

12.

If I were a feminist critic, I would note the narrator’s presence at the opening of the novel, as in: “Then, when her blindfold was removed, she found herself standing alone in a dark room, where they left her for half an hour or an hour, or two hours, I can’t be sure . . .”

I would put forth
Story of O
as a novel with a marriage plot, in which the heroine chooses self-actualization over domesticity.

Or the narrative of a saint’s life that culminates in martyrdom.

13.

When I have watched pornographic films, I have been aroused but also disgusted, but no matter how “disgusting” the events that befall O, her story does not disgust me.

As she bent, I bent. As she prepared, I prepared. As she was beaten, I was beaten. As she was fucked, I was fucked. As she was denied, I made her accommodation.

14.

“ . . . O tried to figure out why there was so much sweetness mingled with the terror in her, or why her terror seemed itself so sweet. . . .”

15.

Such is the understanding of sexuality—as something beyond good and evil, beyond love, beyond sanity; as a resource for ordeal and for breaking through the limits of consciousness—that informs the French literary canon that I have been discussing.

Story of O,
with its project for completely transcending personality, entirely presumes this dark and complex vision of sexuality so far removed from the hopeful view sponsored by American Freudianism and liberal culture. The woman who is given no other name than O progresses simultaneously toward her own extinction as a human being and her fulfillment as a sexual being.

—SUSAN SONTAG, 1967

16.

One Christmas I dined in the restaurant in Paris, where, in a private dining room, Sir Stephen had shared O with two other men.

17.

It must have been dawn when I finished the book, but I do not remember the light or whether it was still snowing.

“Down on your knees,” says my lover on the telephone.

Trembling, I picture myself there.

And then we laugh.

Going All the Way

Liz Smith

I
n 1939, my birthplace in Texas wasn’t the metropolis complex that it is today—a huge hub for international travel with museums, art galleries, fashion, insurance, oil, and the cattle “bidness” at the center of it.

Back in the 1930s, Fort Worth was still a small town, complete with streetcars and a uniformed cop on every other corner. The country had begun emerging inch by inch from the Great Depression that had crushed America after the stock market crashed in 1929.

Even insular Texans were beginning to be aware that this was a dangerous world and a bunch of thugs called the Nazis were about to march into Poland and throw the world into chaos. I even recall some months later, my high school class experienced our French teacher, weeping that the Germans had paraded down the Champs-Elysées in Paris. We cried with her, for Paris was a city of our dreams where American talents such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein abounded and impressionist art reigned supreme. We knew about Paris—it was where women danced bare-breasted in the Follies Bergère.

On the other hand, life in Fort Worth was provincial and insular, full of misplaced western pride and obsessions with football. Racism and southern paternalism still beset the great state of Texas (Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights advances lay far in the future) . . . A demagogue Catholic priest, Father Coughlin, was forever on the radio preaching hatred. (There was no such thing as being politically correct.) We didn’t listen; we preferred Walter Winchell, Jack Benny, and “The First Nighter” hurrying to his seat in the little radio theater off Times Square. . . . Women had not joined the workforce as they would when World War II became a terrible fact of life. In fact, women were still second-class citizens, having only won the vote nineteen years earlier.

It was a world where my narrow-minded grandmother believed in a hard-shell kind of Baptist religion that frowned upon men and women in bathing suits swimming together and disapproved of ballroom dancing. This was too rigid even for my devout mother. My grandma used to make dresses for her neighbors for two dollars apiece but once turned down a chance where the dress pattern was sleeveless. “No decent woman would wear a sleeveless dress,” she opined. (Shades of wardrobe malfunction!) My father was broad-minded, liking jokes, gambling, and dancing. But even he was shocked to see a woman smoking on the streets. And he felt pregnant women should stay at home and not be seen. My mother once said, “
Sex
is the ugliest word in the English language.”

We kids thought “sex” was a delicious if forbidden idea. We could read and did read the classics. We had even heard that in France, a woman named Coco Chanel had created a sensation wearing trousers at the beach. Women in pants, in Texas! Never, unless she was contributing to a cattle roundup.

So now you have the idea of my youth in Fort Worth, Texas. Let’s now introduce sex and bring us into the present tense.

I’m sixteen. I’m dating for the first time—really. The locale is Fort Worth, Texas, pre-World War II. We drive around in cars, we eat in cars, we neck in cars. We never go “all the way.” We girls are more concerned with getting to the famous Fort Worth Casino on Lake Worth, dancing to Tommy Dorsey’s visiting orchestra—or somebody else famous on tour. There’s a skinny kid fronting for Dorsey; name of Frank Sinatra. He’s good and it’s all very romantic.

I’m trying to break away from the Southern Baptist environment that has dominated my life. My secret passion for show biz glamour and my family’s embedded church life are warring with one another.

On many nights I am double-dating with my favorite cousin, a charming guy who is a little older than I am. I’ll call him X in order not to smear the family names. X is cute and funny and snappy, full of jokes and one-liners, a marvelous dancer and storyteller. He always drives the car with one hand and makes the gearshift go into place, manipulating it with his knees. He starts any evening we go out as a foursome by wisecracking, “Well, what do you want to do—first?” I know what he means but I just giggle.

I was always mad about him, but he has really cute adorable girlfriends and he is so appealing. I am invariably more interested in what he’s doing in the front seat of the car than I am in whomever I’m with in the backseat. I feel I amount to a big disappointment and I know my dates never measure up, as I’m forever equating them with X.

Comes a soft Texas night when we’re not going out. We’ve had a family picnic in the Smith backyard where our mutual grandparents live. But everyone else—adults and children have segued off to a Wednesday night party at the local church. X and I are just sitting in sling chairs, looking at the starry Texas skies. We’re listening to Glenn Miller coming over the radio from the kitchen.

We have ended up side by side, not saying anything. The rest of our cousins, siblings, and adults have gone. “What you say, kiddo?” asks X, lighting a cigarette. (He’s too young to smoke but he would live into his eighties anyway, so what did we know back then about the dangers of smoking?)

“I don’t know, Bub,” I answer. He leans over and kisses me softly on the cheek. This is a far cry from his usually jokey manner. “Ya know, kid, I really love you. We always kid around and we’re with other people, but it’s you I’ve got my eye on. They don’t know where we are tonight, so let’s stay here under the stars and make out.”

I am so shocked I can’t speak. It’s as if he has been reading my tiny mind. “Okay,” I say slowly. He gets up, he goes off and comes back with an old quilt and a couple of pillows and spreads them on the ground. He pulls me down on top of him, and I feel him hard against me. I think I might faint. I’ve been around boys and my brothers all my life, but I’ve never paid any attention to their fooling around. I guess I didn’t want to know too much.

Now I know. X and I start kissing and he really knows how—slow, sweet, and tender. Fabulous. So that’s what this is all about? Hmmm, it makes practicing kissing with my girlfriends seem absolutely idiotic.