I have been home, laid up with a severe case of gout, and so I have had the time to work on this more than in the recent past. I have been gratified, really gratified, by the responses. Thank you.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
What first attracted me to Maria was the way she had no reservations about saying she didn’t like Walt Whitman’s poetry, even though our freshman-year literature professor had made Walt Whitman’s work central to the course. When I told her one day as we were walking out of class that I admired her honesty, she smiled, said something about how most literature professors had more hot air in them than substance and walked off to wherever she had to go next. A few days later, when I saw her sitting in front of the library, the hello I stopped to say grew into an hour-long chat, and after that, for the next two months or so, we met a couple of times per week at a table in the back corner of the Rainy Night House Cafe, where we sat for hours drinking tea, eating bagels and talking. One afternoon, just as we were getting up to leave, Maria said she’d been given a bottle of good wine as a gift, and she asked if I’d like to come to her room that evening to help her drink it. I said I would.
She was already a couple of glasses ahead of me when I arrived, and while I played catch-up our talk turned to a subject I was surprised to realize we’d never before discussed, love and relationships. We circled the question of our own budding involvement warily, letting it drop in and out of the conversation, each of us waiting for the other to risk saying, or doing, something first. Then Maria asked me, “Richard, do you like your body?”
“Yes,” I answered, more because I couldn’t imagine saying no than because I’d ever really thought about it. “Why?”
She got down from her chair and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me. “No, I mean do you really like your body?”
“Yes,” I said again, but before I could ask her how she felt about hers, she leaned forward and asked her question even more emphatically, “You know, are you truly satisfied with every part of your body?”
A small edge of anger sharpened my voice, “What are you talking about?”
Maria smiled to herself, put her hand warmly on my knee and said, “Well, do you think you, you know, measure up?”
Finally, I understood, and I felt a little foolish for not having caught on sooner, but it had never occurred to me that a woman might actually ask this question. I had, as I imagine most young men do at one time or another, taken a ruler to my penis to see how big it was; and I would be lying if I said I did not think about how I might compare to other men or wonder if what I had heard about the relationship between penis size and sexual prowess and attractiveness to women were true; but so far the only girlfriend who’d ever seen me completely naked had been Jennifer, and while she had told me a story about a guy she’d been with whose penis had been so small that she laughed when she saw it, something she deeply regretted, she had never said anything to me about how big, or small, I was.
So Maria’s question, once I understood what it meant, not only took me by surprise; it also confused me. Looking back, I can smile thinking that perhaps the question was an honest one that she had asked at precisely the wrong moment. At the time, however, what I felt was a shift in the subtext of what was happening between us from the mutuality of friendship and what might come next to the adversarial stance of performer and critic. Anything I said–yes, no, maybe, let’s find out–felt like it would be a picking up of the gauntlet she’d thrown down, which I wasn’t interested in doing. On the other hand, to say nothing felt like it would be to lose my chance to be with her, and I really wanted to be with her, so I decided to buy time by turning the tables. “I don’t know. Do you measure up?”
Maria’s face changed immediately. The gently mocking expression with which she’d been waiting for my response vanished, and she searched my face with eyes that were suddenly sad and deeply suspicious. She kept her hand on my knee until she found, or didn’t find, what she was looking for, and then, so softly that I almost couldn’t hear her, she said, “Sometimes.”
Maria got up and went back to her chair. We talked a while longer, trying to recapture the easy banter from earlier in the evening, but we couldn’t. Maria was suddenly unable to look me in the eye, and when I finally stood up to leave, all she did was wave a silent good-bye from where she was sitting. We saw each other on campus a few times after that, but never said more than hello, and Maria had only once to turn and walk the other way as I approached for me to understand that she didn’t want to talk to me again.
When I went home at the end of the semester, I asked the only woman I could think to ask about what had happened between Maria and myself, my mother. This may seem strange to some people, but I’ve always been able to talk with my mother about sex, and I figured I could count on her to give me a straight answer. I was wrong.
“The size of a man’s ego,” my mother told me after I had finished my story, “can be measured by the size of his penis.” To illustrate her point, she related a story about a man who tried to pick her up in a bar she’d gone to with her friends. At first, she refused him politely, but as he grew more and more insistent, she grew more and more annoyed until, finally, having had enough, loudly, so that all the people around them could hear, she offered him the following challenge. If he had a “baseball bat” between his legs, she’d be his for the night. If he didn’t, he should just leave her alone. The man protested that he’d “never had any complaints,” but my mother slapped her palm on the bar and told him that if he had what it would take to have her, she wanted to see it right then and there. If he didn’t…enough said.
Needless to say, the man walked away.
“Only small men,” my mother’s one suggested that this was her final word on the subject, “say that size doesn’t matter.”
I don’t remember anything else about that conversation, except that I understood her story to have been a cautionary tale, her point being that I should not become like the man in the bar. How precisely that point related to my failed evening with Maria was unclear, nor, at least as far as I remember, did my mother do anything to try to make it clear. Now, of course, I can see both in my mother’s story itself, and in the fact that she thought it was an appropriate answer to my question about what had happened with Maria, her own anger at men, and I know enough about my mother’s life to know that this anger is justified, more than justified in fact. I did not know this back then, however; nor did I know it five or so year earlier, when I was sixteen, and she and I were sitting after dinner, either Passover or Thanksgiving, at the dining room table in my grandmother’s apartment and I am telling her about the one and only time I remember my father trying to talk to me about sex, which had happened earlier that day.
We were walking from the restaurant where he’d taken me for lunch to the subway where I would catch the train to my grandmother’s. He put his arm around my shoulder, leaned his head in towards mine and asked, “Do you have a girlfriend?”
I told him no, which was a lie.
“Well,” he responded, “you will soon, and once you start dating, you’re going to run into situations you won’t know how to handle.” He moved a few steps ahead, turned to face me, searched my eyes to make sure I knew what he was talking about. “I just want you to know you can call me.”
“I know,” I said, and the look of relief on his face as he quickly changed the subject to how I was doing in school made me want to laugh out loud. There was no way he could’ve known that I’d already lost my virginity, but knowing that he didn’t know–even though my first experience of intercourse had not been at all a positive one–and realizing how easy it had been to deceive him, made me feel superior, and it was this feeling of superiority that I brought to the table when I told my mother the story. I did not have a good relationship with my father at the time. In fact, I saw him as something of a buffoon, and laughing at his buffoonery–my mother shared this image of him–was one of the ways she and I bonded. This time, however, instead of engendering mutual laughter at my father’s ineptitude, my story opened up a divide between me and my mother that I had never felt before.
“Next time,” my mother was laughing–but the smile on her face was a thin line of contempt, and when she leans forward to tap the polished nail of her right index finger in rhythmic emphasis on the wooden surface of the dining room table, her eyes smolder–”Next time, tell your father you don’t have such problems. Tell him you wear a steel jockstrap. Besides, what does he think he’s going to teach you anyway. You probably know more than he does already.” She laughs again, and I laugh with her, though I am laughing more because I think she expects it than because I think what she’s just said is really funny. Something in her tone, something in the meaning of what she said, made me very uneasy, though I could not name what it was.
///
Fast forward about fifteen years or so. I am in my early thirties and sitting with my father in a very fancy steakhouse in New York’s financial district. It’s the first time we’ve seen each other since my brother’s funeral about ten year earlier, and we are seeing each other only because I have sought my father out. I want answers to questions I have had for a very long time about my parents, about myself, about why my father never tried to get in touch with me and more. We talk for a very long time, and I learn a lot that I did not know, but two pieces of what I learned are especially relevant here. First, I learned that my parents got married because my mother was pregnant with me. My father said that he approached her with the idea of getting an abortion, but she said no. I don’t know why she said no, but this was 1961, before Roe v. Wade, and so it may have been simply that she was afraid of the risks involved in getting an illegal abortion. Whatever her reasons, she and my father decided, once abortion had been ruled out, to get married. They didn’t really love each other, and so, especially knowing them as I do now, I did not find it at all surprising when my father told me that my mother decided she wanted a divorce just a couple of years after I was born.
The second thing I learned came in response to my asking why my father thought my mother was still so angry at him, even though they had been divorced for nearly thirty years. I once tried to ask my mother the same question. This is the conversation we had, as I recorded it in my journal later that day. In response to my asking why she was still so angry at my father, my mother said, “I’m not angry at him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I think I’m more angry at myself.”
“Why?”
“For talking myself into marrying him in the first place.”
“Why did you marry him?”
“I though I was in love.”
“You thought?”
“Well, I convinced myself…”
“And?”
“And that’s why I married him.”
“Why’d you get divorced?”
“He bothered me.”
“He bothered you?”
“He annoyed me.”
“In what way?”
“He couldn’t hold up his end of a conversation.”
“What do you mean?”
“He always talked in circles.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he would talk about the same thing over and over again, constantly repeating himself, circling back over the same idea like a vulture waiting to descend on a carcass. Then you’d point him in another direction, and he’d do the same thing with that topic. It was infuriating.”
“What kind of a father was he?” It was a question I’d never asked before.
“I don’t think he was much of a father at all, either before or after the divorce.”
“Okay, but what kind of a father was he?”
My mother paused to think, “Well, he did change your diapers; I have to give him that. And he played with you guys—”
I reminded her that I’d seen the pictures of him feeding me and suggest that, at least as a father, it didn’t sound like he was too bad.
“But I was always the disciplinarian,” she told me, pausing again and sighing, “I guess I just didn’t have much respect for him.”
When I ask my father the same question, he tells me about how, not long after he’d moved out of our apartment–which is ironically just a couple of blocks from where I live now–but before their divorce was final, he called my mother to ask if he could come over and talk, to see if they could work things out. She said okay, but once he got there, everything went wrong. He would not go into the details of what happened, though. All he would say was, “Something happened that shouldn’t have happened.” Even when I pressed him to tell me what he meant, all he would do was repeat those words. “Something happened that shouldn’t have happened.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “And, you know, Richard, your mother was the kind of woman who could goad a guy into it.”
Clearly, in other words, whether it was rape or some other form of assault, my father did some sort of violence to my mother. When he told me that, a lot of things began to fall into place, not only her comment about the steel jockstrap, with its allusion to the idea of a chastity belt, but other things my mother used to say to me as well.
If you look quickly at a picture of my father when he was younger, and if you didn’t already know you were looking at him, you might think you were looking at me. We look that much alike, and the resemblance made my mother very uncomfortable. “Grow your beard,” she started telling me almost as soon as hair appeared on my face, “You remind me too much of your father.” Even when I was well into my late twenties and early thirties, my mother sometimes has difficulty with my clean-shaven appearance. Once she even threatened—her tone was joking of course—to exclude me from a family portrait she was planning unless I grew my beard back. I didn’t; the portrait never materialized.
Now, I of course don’t know if the portrait really never materialized because I didn’t grow my beard back, but it is in my memory a telling coincidence that represents the stance my mother, as a parent and as a woman, took towards me, as a child and as a man (or a boy becoming a man), throughout most of the early years of my life: She did not want me to grow up to be like my father, not only in terms of the character traits she found so objectionable in him, but in terms of my body as well. Once I hit puberty, I was, I was becoming, I would eventually be, physically, sexually, a man, a man who looked very much like his father. She did not want to face me across the gender gap my growing up would inevitably open up between us. A man was what I had no choice but to become, and yet a man was precisely what my mother did not want me to be.
