The Summer Without Men (13 page)

Authors: Siri Hustvedt

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women

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?)

When Columbus spied the Mount of bliss,

He stopped and asked himself, “What is this?”

A button, a pea?

An anomaly?

No, silly man, it’s a clitoris!

* * *

Alice’s confession was not coherent, but it was possible to piece together a narrative after it was over. She spoke to me and to her mother, Ellen, who was admitted not long after the bean-spilling began. My eyes moved from child to mother as the girl shifted from barely audible whispers to choked admissions to hoarse gasping sobs. I noted that the mother’s face functioned as a vague mirror of her child’s. When Alice spoke softly, Ellen leaned forward, her eyes intent as her lips registered every insult with tiny movements. When Alice cried, Ellen’s eyes grew smaller, a wrinkle appeared between her brows, and her mouth tensed into a thin straight line, but she did not weep. Maternal listening is of a special kind. The mother must listen, and she must empathize, but she cannot identify entirely with the child. This calls for an enforced remove, a distance acquired only by steeling oneself against the story being told. The knowledge
they have hurt my child
can easily summon a brute response, something on the order of
I will tear those little tarts into a thousand pieces and gobble them up for dessert.
Watching Ellen, I sensed that she was resisting the desire for grisly vengeance, and I realized that I liked her—both for her rage and for blocking it.

Alice had been receiving ugly messages for quite some time. “Skank” and “Ho” had appeared regularly as text messages, as had the highly original commentaries “You think you’re so smart,” “Go back to Chicago if it’s so great there,” “Ugly slut,” “skinny weird bitch,” and “Fake.” All anonymous. As for my cabal of girl poets, Alice admitted that they had been on again and off again with her, one day confiding, the next, cold. They reeled her in and they cast her out. When, after weeks of misery, she confronted them with the bald statement “What did I do?” they snickered, rolled their eyes, and chanted “What did I do?” over and over again. It pained me especially to think of Peyton among the tormenters. Then photos of a naked Alice standing in front of her own mirror at home had been posted on Facebook—blurry images taken with the spy’s cell phone through a crack the blind. The poor kid snuffled hard when she coughed up this humiliation. She had taken the pictures down, of course, but not before the damage had been done. The memory of my changing body at thirteen and the achingly private, protective feeling I had had for my newly swollen breasts, three pubic hairs, and the mysterious red lines that appeared on my hips (which I discovered only two years later were stretch marks) made me squirm with discomfort. The bloody tissue narrative was garbled, but eventually Ellen and I understood that Alice had gotten her period just before my class and had been unequipped and too shy to ask any of her “friends” for a pad. She had stuffed her underpants with the Kleenex she was carrying in her purse (always on hand for her allergies), but when she walked into the room, one slightly bloody tissue had dislodged itself from her shorts and fallen to the floor, at which moment Ashley had grabbed it and then, pretending to understand all at once what she had touched, had thrown it on the table and begun to squeal the word
gross.
The most recent ruse, the one that must have induced the stomach pains, involved the message from the desired boy, Zack, who had arranged to meet her at the park near the swings at three. That must have been where Alice was off to when I saw her bouncing down the sidewalk after she left class at two forty-five. Upon her arrival, however, there was no Zack. She waited half an hour and then, realizing that something was wrong, sat down on the grass, put her hands over her face, and cried. When the tears came, so did the jeers and laughter from behind a tall fence that bordered the park. The invisible hooting girls berated Alice for her fantasy that a boy like Zack would even look at her. This was, it seemed, the most recent “joke,” the one Alice hadn’t been able to “take.”

Despite its particulars, Alice’s story is depressingly familiar. Its basic structure is repeated, with multiple variations, everywhere all the time. Although occasionally overt, the cruelties are most often hidden, surreptitious jabs to shame and hurt the victim, a strategy most often adopted by girls, not boys, who go for the direct punch, blow, or kick in the groin. The duel at dawn, with its elaborate legalisms, its seconds and its paces; its mythical reincarnation in the Wild West when black hat and white hat face off with their six-shooters; the plain old let’s-take-it-outside fisticuffs between two male disputants, who are each cheered on by a rooting faction; even the playground brawl (young boy returns home beaten bloody to face Father, who says, “Son, did you win?”)—all are granted a dignity in the culture that no female form of rivalry can match. A physical fight between girls or women is a catfight, one characterized by scratching, biting, slapping, flying skirts, and a scent of the ridiculous or, conversely, of erotic spectacle for male enjoyment, the delectable vision of two women “going at it.” There is nothing noble about emerging victorious from such a squabble. There is no such thing as a good, clean catfight. As I sat there looking at Alice’s sad, red countenance, I imagined her socking Ashley in the jaw and wondered if the masculine solution wasn’t more efficient. If girls banged each other over the head instead of plotting nasty little games of sabotage, would they suffer less? But that, I thought, could only happen in another world. And even in that improbable world where a girl could dust herself off after a wrestling match with her nemesis and declare victory, what good would it do?

By the time I said good-bye to them, Ellen had managed to coax her big girl onto her lap. Mother and daughter were enfolded in the beanbag chair, where Ellen had bitting alone only minutes before, listening to Alice’s saga of intrigue and deception. Alice buried her head in her mother’s neck, and her long bare legs and feet hung over the side of the chair. Ellen’s hand was moving up and down her daughter’s back, slowly and rhythmically. Behind the two, I noticed a row of the child’s dolls on a shelf. The impassive porcelain face of one of them stared at the wall behind me. Another poppet had a faint smile on her pink lips. A woman doll in a kimono stood rigidly at attention. An antique baby lay on her back with her arms in the air. The chorus, I said to myself, and they began to stir and move their lips in unison. I saw their teeth. The old magic trembled inside them all for an instant,
animus, élan vital
. On the sidewalk as I made my way “home,” I had a wild thought:

But I can no longer stand in awe of this,

Nor, seeing what I see, keep back my tears.

As my feet moved, one in front of the other, my gait jogged loose the source. It had arrived courtesy of the doll chorus.
Antigone.
I smiled. A tragedy for a travesty, but still, I said to myself, there is grief. And who is to measure suffering? Which one of you will calculate the magnitude of pain to be found inside a human being at any given moment?

* * *