FIDELITY & MORTAL ILLNESS

How would you feel about your mate having an affair if you were stricken with a mortal illness and  uninterested in having sexual relations?

The usual first response for people who love their mates is that their sexual drive would die, too.  But what if your loved one was not hooked up to tubes and drains?  What if they were functioning, yet with death hovering?

In graduate school, I did an internship in a tutorial center.  My boss was a kind and knowledgeable man who loved his wife and family dearly.  She'd had two heart attacks and the prognosis was not good.  You would have never suspected it to look at her.  She was robust and cheery, the affection between them palpable.

At that time, I had no experience with grief of the death-inspired sort, but one of the tutors in our group was dying of leukemia. Everyday he appeared paler and weaker, but he still attended classes and reported for work.  "You can tell his family has made the separation," Dr. Jackson, my boss, said one day after meeting the tutor's family. Responding to my expression, he added, "It's not that they don't love him, but when you know someone is going to die, you go through grief while they're still walking and talking.  You protect yourself from the finality."

"Does that mean you become more feverish about your own life, about living, and everything that that means?" I asked.

"I hope so," he said, "but you also pull back a little.  Your love is there, but a boundary is there, too." That's when he told me about his wife, and how a hardening within him had taken place.

Over a decade later, I hooked up with a cheap bus tour of Italy. The tour was packed with Europeans. . . Germans, Irish, British.  The only Americans were a Sikh family from Silicon valley.  There was also an Iraqi couple.

But it was the Irish couple who fascinated me.  They were in their forties, possibly early fifties. Attractive in a dull, settled way.  The wife was a bit tight-lipped.  Pissed, actually.  The husband was in a constant low-key frenzy trying to please his wife.

After a short time it became obvious that there was something wrong with her.  I decided she was mortally ill, and that this vacation was supposed to be a last hurrah for them.  Not that she ever got sick in front of us.  It's just that his behavior became more frantic at the same time that she glared at all the art and beauty around us.  It looked as if she were saying angry goodbyes to everything, as if she hated the way life just went on ready to skip right by her.

I was wallowing in my European jaunt, one of the happiest periods of my life.  One night in Rome, the three of us had dinner together.  She ordered a lavish meal and didn't touch a bite of it, just jousted with me all night, looking like she wanted to scratch my eyes out.  And not because of her husband (with whom I had no attraction whatsoever), but because I was so damn cheerful.

Death had a grip on her and she had a death grip on her husband, ready to drag him into the grave with her and not because she loved him.  Because she hated that it wasn't him dying instead of her.

Those were my thoughts, then.  Now, even though she was clearly punishing him, perhaps she wasn't dying.  I don't understand the kind of negative vehemence she had, nor do I understand her husband remaining under its power.  Only if she had a death sentence would it make sense for him to stand by her side.  If he'd chosen to seek affection elsewhere, could you blame him?

Why would I think of this now?  Just finished Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which is a treacherous tale of a sick marriage.   The wife in it reminded me of the Irish Wife in Italy and her forlorn husband.  With the passage of time and lessons learned from my own marriage (a happy one, but not without bumps), and my friends' marriages and divorces, I've reconsidered the death sentence I'd given her at the time.  Maybe they were just miserably bound for life.

Sexual Frontiers: A Dental Story

My 30ish, newly married and rather conservative dentist, whom I'll call Dr. Q, reclined the chair in which I sat while his assistant readied the tools of their trade behind me. Dr. Q aimed a bright light at me, and while he examined my teeth, asked me this surprising question, "Are women now the hunters on the sexual frontier?"

Don't you just love it when dentists ask you questions while they have your mouth crammed full of sharp instruments? I've long suspected that they get special training in these oral interrogations. Perhaps part of dental school is a course in the Interpretation of Mumbles.They continue to talk as if a conversation were actually taking place. He continued, close-up and personal, with this story:

A good friend of his, thirty-two, good-looking and divorced, was having lunch atSunset Plaza, a posh area with several restaurants and sidewalk dining for those who like car exhaust with their meals, when three gorgeous women arrived and sat at the table next to him.

"They were young, but legal," Dr. Q said, pausing in his examination, "over eighteen." I looked up into his serious brown eyes, unsure whether I should close my mouth and offer a comment. He continued, his voice full of wonder.

The girls' conversation was giggly and silly, lightening the smoggy afternoon air (authorial conjecture). Turns out they were all nineteen, barely out of high school. Soon two of them rose and left. The remaining female did not look stranded, or scamper off to the safety of a fashionable boutique. She stared right at our hero, and asked if she could join him.

Dr. Q paused, searching for the right words to describe what happened next. Once again, I was uncertain what to do: close my mouth or leave it open. "So did they hook up or what?"

Behind me, the young dental hygienist laughed. Dr. Q joined her and I managed to laugh without dribbling down my chin. This was better than nitrous.

"Yes," he said, "they went to his condo that afternoon and after that she would call him and say, 'I want you to get undressed, get into bed and wait for me." Another pause. Another look into Dr. Q's soulful eyes. I closed my mouth, sure that my dentist was censoring the more colorful things our femme fatale said. 

"She would come over, they would make love and then she would leave. Just like that." Dr. Q could not suppress the amazement in his voice. I thought his friend must be good in bed, but a bit boring, and started to say so, but Dr. Q said, "Open, please," and, "Can you believe it?"

"Wait!" he continued, as if I were leaping to freedom. "It gets better. She tells him one day that she's getting married and won't be able to see him anymore, but that she's going to give his number to her girlfriends."

"I have girlfriends," I said, unselfishly, only it came out "eh hv gullfens." He laughed, the dental hygienist laughed, and I managed a heh-heh.

"So, the tables have turned," Dr. Q said, as if he'd just made an important scientific discovery. "Women are now the pursuers. The users."

The woman in his friend's story certainly seemed to have a plan, but she didn't invent it. I thought of my 19-year-old self when my goal was sexual exploration without guilt or commitment or sentimentality. I initiated an affair with a 32-year old man. My lover had been interesting as well as skilled in lovemaking, and my plan unraveled. I fell in love. That was almost forty years ago. He's been married four times since. I'm still married to the same man. My former lover and I still talk. Life goes on.

"I want to see you in six months," Dr. Q said.

Maybe this time I'll get his friend's number. Any takers out there?

Also at HuffPost Los Angeles

Henry Miller's iPod

So I was helping Mom set up her new iPod, which meant I had to be at her computer, and that’s when she made me read her blog. Before I could escape she’d clicked an icon on her desktop, and the blog came up. I looked away from the screen fast, twisting my neck as far as it would go to look up at her.

“Jeez, you’d think I was asking you to walk the plank. Can you at least feign enthusiasm?”

“I’m just a 15-year-old guy, Mom. What do I know?” Seriously, I accidentally read some of her stuff once. It was about women’s sex fantasies. I couldn’t even look my girlfriend in the eyes for days after that.

“You’re online all the time and when you’re not, you’re reading, thank goodness, and you’re a good writer. Just take a look, and tell me what you think. It’s short.”

Mom thinks I’m brilliant–mature and all that crap–but I have my limits.    

“Is there gonna be stuff about sex?”

The crease between her eyebrows deepened. “Interesting you should ask that. According to my tracking stats on who reads the blog and where they come from, most of my hits seem to be for phrases like pubic hair, masturbation or hot mother-in-laws.” She looked out the window and tapped her cheek, perplexed. “Why is that, I wonder?”

I slapped my forehead. “Did you use the word masturbation in your blog?” No kid should have to ask his mom that.

“Doesn’t everybody?”

She laughed. I looked toward the door of her office, calculating my getaway. She’d decided to be a writer and this small attic space was the only place in the house where she could do it. Mom loved it in here, but I’d have to squeeze past her to get out. Helping her with her iPod was one thing, but reading her blog was asking too much.

I took a deep breath and spoke slowly so she’d understand. “You must have used those words–pubic hair, masturbation and mother-in-law somewhere in your blog.” My voice cracked like an 8th grader’s, “Hopefully not all together.”

Mom got all snobby. “I don’t know anything about mother-in-law’s masturbating,” she said. “I assume they masturbate, and if they don’t I hope they soon start, but what does that have to do with my blog?”

I stared at her, trying to keep my head from exploding. No telling what I’d see on the computer. I raised puppy-dog eyes to her and pleaded, “I have homework. Can I take a look later?”

“And I didn’t write about mother-in-law’s and pubic hair, either, in case you’re wondering.” Defiant, she raised her chin and looked out the window again, probably thinking about how masturbating could change the lives of countless mothers-in-law. Seriously, she’s like that. My friends love her, so I guess she’s cool, but not really.

“Just read my latest entry,” she said.

It was a flash about an affair a woman (I wonder who?) had a million years ago with some old fart while she was in college. Years later when she’s also an old fart and he’s somehow still breathing they talk on the phone and she fantasizes about their former sex life.

“Nice.” I stood to leave. She backed up about a millimeter and I had to lean backward in order to skinny past her, making me trip on the chair leg and bump into the filing cabinet. I don’t know how she works in this dump.

“Wait a minute, will you, and tell me what you think?”

I rubbed my shin trying not to look at her. “Again, Mom, what do I know?”

“You’ve read Tropic of Cancer,” she said, “more than once.”

Mom and I have argued about Miller’s writing. I like him. She doesn’t. She probably thinks I read him just because of the sex, but I don’t. Miller was having an adventure in Paris. The sex just happened along the way.

“That’s different. Henry Miller wrote actual books.”

Her smile collapsed. I felt like shit, but, well Miller was an artist, doing the dude thing every chance he got. I planned to live like him someday starving for my art in some attic somewhere. I would update Henry Miller. He probably had horny chicks surrounding him nonstop. I bet Anaïs Nin could load and unload his iPod like a pro. My face felt hot. Mom was staring at me. I still held her iPod. I dropped it on her desk and wiped my hand on my jeans.

“Do you have a fever?” Her hand felt icy on my forehead. “You look flushed.”

“It’s hot in here. I gotta go.” She moved the back of her hand to my cheek, all standard operating procedure. Next thing she’d want to take my temp and discuss whether I’d had a bowel movement recently.

“What keywords should I use?” she asked instead, apparently no longer interested in my health. “C’mon, you know everything about computers.”

“I don’t know everything. I’m surprised ‘sex with old farts’ isn’t a popular search phrase for your blog.” I edged closer to the door.

“That wouldn’t be good,” she said and stared at her computer with a worried look, like maybe it could write her sex stories on its own. Then she looked at me and smiled. “Unless, the searcher was an old fart agent or publisher.”

I was almost at the door. “Agents and publishers probably have special porn sites only they know about.”

She laughed. “Yeah, and maybe if you’re published in The New Yorker they might give you the password. I think I can expand this piece and use it in my novel.”

“Yeah, Mom, keep plugging. It’ll happen.” She settled into her chair and studied her manuscript. The sun slanted in through the dormer windows highlighting dust motes circling her head, and I thought of Miller again, cigarette smoke curling around his head, poor and happy writing in his attic.

I was out the door and pounding down the stairs, Miller’s sexual escapades and Mom’s story alternating in my brain. At the bottom I looked up to the attic. The echo of her keyboard clicks flowed into me like the soft beat of rain on the roof of a Parisian garret.

Also at Mamalode and Huffington Post.

The Real Inside Passage

The Inside Passage haunts me, the sheer mass, muscular and domineering, the allure of frozen quiet shattered with a crack, more ominous than usual because of all the global warming talk. People walk the decks at all hours thinking ponderous thoughts, another kind of Inside Passage. I wanted to be hammered by weather when I was out there, pummeled by a shiatsu of wind and rain. I wanted to get laid every day, have my Inside Passage explored, assaulted, maybe even enjoyed as a safe haven. Cruising is a rite of passage. So is marriage. And turning fifty (not me, but HLH, in whose honor we gathered). The cruise was the cruise was the cruise. Not to be missed.





Hmm . . . yummy fog. Please envelope the ship, let the motors go still so I can hear the electric snap of ice, the hungry lap of water as I walk the decks blindly bumping into other sightless voyagers, perhaps hearing breathing behind me. I turn. The breathing becomes a soft moan. A rustle. "Now," someone says, and, "there."

Lovers out in the open, but hidden by the fog, secret parts lubricated by a salty mist.





My husband doesn't understand why I wanted this photo from the children's playland on the ship.

It's sinister. You could leave a body in the well for an innocent child to discover.














Two of my fans.

It's past ten at night. Note the windows in the rear of the photo.

The midnight sun. One of the best things about this cruise.

I don't wear a watch. I relied heavily on the elevator floors to tell the day of the week (anyone have a picture of that?), and I had incredible energy.


Would a vampire made in the frozen northern reaches of the world be able to tolerate light?