before me like an eternity of sexless blah. And that’s when the thoughts came: Get it over with, give it up, die.
That was yesterday. Today I am writing.
Besides, when I told my shrink about these thoughts of letting myself go and letting the cancer kill me, he said, “Yeah, and it may take twenty more years.” Sobering thought.
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Fire and Ice
By the time the ice storm hit, the party was over.
The storm that froze Connecticut in the winter of ’73 was the setting for Rick Moody’s 1994 novel and Ang Lee’s 1997 film about an exurban bourgeoisie experimenting with the era’s sexual liberation. The story culminates in a “key party”: the wives pick at random from the bowl where the husbands have dropped their keys when they walked in, and each woman walks out with a new mate for the night. In the film at least—I never read the book—the party is going on as the storm gets worse and the weather—which actually results in the death of one of the local teens—is an objective correlative to the bad karma the sexual shenanigans bring to a head.
As always in an American movie, you play, you pay.
I remember that storm well, for I was living in Connecticut at the time, though no one invited me to that key party.
An ice storm is a weird phenomenon for someone like me whose sense of weather was shaped in the tropics. It rained and then the temperature fell and the water from the rain turned to ice; it seemed to turn to ice even as it rained; it seemed to be raining ice.
Icicles formed on trees and, worst of all, on the wires that brought electricity to our homes. The weight of the ice would bring down tree branches and it would bring down wires that, as in the movie, sputtered live and lethal on the ground. We were all advised to stay indoors until the danger could be repaired. I was living in a house with a fireplace at the time, and since the fallen wires meant we were without electricity and, therefore, without heating, I fed the fireplace to keep my family warm as we huddled in the finished basement, where the hearth was.
Hearth is an exaggeration. I was, as they say, between jobs. Academic jobs. For a while I had to vacate my faculty house—provided for a modicum of rent by my employer—while I looked for a new position. My college-owned home was in an older and more central part of town; the house I had moved to with my family was straight out of the song that decades later would become the theme of the comedy series Weeds. Made out of ticky-tacky and they all looked just the same.
What I would’ve given to be living in a gracious old colonial, where the old fireplace would’ve been up to the task of keeping us warm. Indeed, some of my friends lived in such houses, in the old part of town from where I’d moved. But it was far from my current ticky-tacky subdivision and, in any case, it was dangerous to go outside.
It was not the most fun time my family enjoyed together. And the thought of sexual shenanigans was the last thing on my mind. Not that I hadn’t had my share of them, for, as I said, the party was already over.
No key party, though. Sometime in the early ’70s, I heard of such phenomena, but though a wild promiscuity blew like a hot wind through my circle of friends, we would never have thought of re-pairing in such a random way. Not that we might be troubled by the choice of partners luck brought—in the end, everyone slept with everyone else, or at least it seems that way in my memory. But that’s not how we thought.
We were under the influence of what came to be called, in retrospect, the ’60s, though, in fact, it was the late ’60s and early ’70s—the key-party-people in The Ice Storm were, too, but we young faculty types, fresh out of graduate school where we lived the student uprisings of the late ’60s, were under a more direct influence.
The rise of the counterculture came when I was in graduate school in the Midwest, and it seemed like, from just one year to the next, everything had changed. Artsy, brainy, bohemians, dismissed by fraternity and sorority types as “greenbaggers” because they often carried green burlap book bags, were now “hippies,” and they included the boys and girls in the Greek houses. At the Connecticut college where I taught in the early ’70s, one of the fraternities reinvented itself as a commune.
Mind-altering drugs, long hair and a studied, disheveled style of dress replaced beer, neatness, khaki jeans and pleated skirts and V-neck sweaters. Everyone talked of revolution, which included an upheaval in sexual mores. Touching was good. Sex was good. All you need is love.
In that context, a notion of sexual sharing came to life. It was spread by books like The Harrad Experiment and Stranger in a Strange Land, and buttressed by what was called at the time Third-Force Psychology, a countercultural way of looking at the human personality that valued freedom most of all. All the political movements of the time had the middle name “liberation,” which would be dropped in less idealistic times. Thus, what we call “feminism” was then “the women’s liberation movement.”
Liberation. As a result of May ’68, a Parisian journal was launched with that name. In recent years, it transmuted into a paper aimed at French yuppies. Sexual liberation was fueled, of course, by the randiness of people young enough to be feeling their hormones. But it was also an ideological stand, a belief in, precisely, the notion of liberation.
Thus, affairs, something married folk had always indulged in and were the subject of stormy fiction, from masterpieces like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina to trashy bestsellers and Hollywood “weepies.” But affairs were no longer called that. They were relationships. And relationships, even in the era of “open marriages,” required talk, talk, talk. Where in an earlier—maybe even just a few years earlier—time, dicey relationships could result in tragedy, in our liberated days they resulted in talks that, borrowing from the encounter-group practices some of us had been involved in, meant meticulous analysis of what you feel, I feel, we all feel. Yes, we. For these talks, again borrowing from the psycho-culture of the day, usually involved a group.
In the end, I grew to despise this aspect of a counterculture that was becoming mainstream culture. And I began to think that cuckolded husbands, betrayed wives, crimes of passion, anything was preferable to that endless strained chatter.
“Did you have a lot of key parties?” an acquaintance of some of my old Connecticut friends asked me when we met not long ago.
He was hoping for a good ice-storm story, but I said no, not a single key party; instead, earnest discussions about communal living, open relationships, women’s liberation, radical lifestyles. And, above all, I feel, you feel, we feel.
Now that I feel nothing of the sort that would’ve led me into talking about feelings, I wonder. Would I do it again? Was the sex and love worth it? Yes. But, dear God, did we really have to talk so much shit?
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Adios
Did I learn anything from a life of love and lust and longing and—that cursed word!—relationships? Nah. Always, always, the engine drove me forward. Until I got frightened or disgusted or bored. Soon enough another object of desire would come into my sight and—vroom!—the engine was off again. And, why not? I’m not ashamed; it would be like being ashamed of being a biped or a carbon life form. The engine was standard. I didn’t order it, any more than I ordered myself. The engine, the libido, the life force. Or let’s call it by its sweeter name. Eros.
“And then Eros took over,” says the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, as a way of explaining his dalliance with a student, a dalliance that readers of the brilliant South African will recall borders on rape, prefiguring the novel’s central incident. Eros is always taking over. Coming together over me. And one learns nothing from Eros, other than it’s there and it’s powerful and, yes, yes, it’s sweet.
It was only when the doctor told me, sorry to tell you this, buddy, you have cancer, that I began to learn. First, because death was, as I said, unmasked. Soon after, in his office, when he told me I’d be impotent, boy, did I start learning fast. Or rather, did I start questioning. What the hell has this been about? But I wasn’t done yet. I was only experiencing fear as an intellectual exercise. Until,