Sex and electro therapy xxx

I am sitting in a waiting room with my husband of sixteen years.
We are the only couple in the room, which is a great relief: I
want neither to speculate about other couples’ problems nor to
have them speculate about mine. Not to say that Alan and I have a
problem, exactly. Not what you’d call a real problem. We get
along just fine, thank you very much. But these days it’s therapy
this and therapy that for every little thing, and Alan said he
wanted to go, so we’re going.

This is our third session with this sex therapist. Sorry,
“marital therapist,” I should say, but we all three of us know
what the real problem is. It’s sex, or rather, the lack of it.
And if you want to go further, to be perfectly plain, the problem
is me. I am the problem. That much becomes entirely clear after
only two sessions with this man. He tries Alan first, in perfect
confidence that my poor husband is an inconsiderate lover. No
dice. Alan does everything right. He is a textbook A-plus lover.
He is gentle and patient and unselfish to a fault. Nuzzling,
compliments, foreplay, the works. Nothing gets left out. He’s
fine. He’s more than fine. Really, he’s a terrific lover.
Couldn’t ask for better. The therapist looks faintly
disappointed, but takes it manfully.

The second session, he tries Plan B: insufficient communication.
I think I am generally a good sport, but of all the dreadful
things that I have done, this is the worst. Alan holds my hands
in front of the therapist, looks into my eyes, and says to me —
in front of a stranger! — “I love it when you nibble around my
penis.” Even now, a week later, I flush from toe-tip to scalp
just thinking of it. But even this sacrifice is no damn good. We
don’t reach a “breakthrough point,” as our therapist puts it, and
once again he looks at us like a disappointed cocker spaniel.

So here we are again. And this week, we have had homework. Like
children writing essays entitled “What I Did On My Summer
Vacation,” we are to think of our early sexual experiences, good
or bad, and bring them to this session. “What I Did With My First
Lover,” the mental title should be, perhaps, or “That Wicked Man
on the Subway.”

“You’ll put everything on the table,” explained the therapist,
gleaming pinkly, and I had a momentary vision of all of us
writhing and moaning there with our long-ago paramours. I have no
notion of what good this is meant to do us. Poor Alan. I don’t
know how he has the courage to keep rolling over and asking,
night after night. If it were me, I’d have moved to another bed
in the house long ago, or maybe into the warm, welcoming arms of
a nice mistress. And poor me. It’s not as if I don’t try. But I
can no longer find even the tiniest scrap of desire for him. No.
This is therapy; we might as well be honest. I can no longer
stand his touch on my skin, his breath in my ear, the noises he
makes when he’s about to come. I don’t know why, or how it
happened, or even when. The death of desire is more like dying in
a nursing home than like getting run over by a truck.

But I still love him. It’s the damnedest thing. So I have agreed
to therapy, submitted to this gleaming stranger, done my
homework. And I am thinking of it now. Strange to think about
Johnny, while sitting beside Alan in this slightly stuffy waiting
room with the artificial flowers and the horrible painting of the
harlequin.

+++++

I am nineteen years old. I am the third most beautiful girl on
the planet, after Mariel Hemingway and Julie Christie. Johnny
didn’t tell me that. I figured it out for myself one day. My hair
falls to my waist, white-blonde, baby-fine, and absolutely
straight. None of this is natural, except the length, which takes
only persistence. My eyes are dark brown, which is a
disappointment, but I make up for it with perfect breasts and
slender thighs. I look with scorn on my mother, who seems to have
engaged her slowly sagging body in a fight to the death. I am
perfectly in harmony with mine.

There is a constant high electric hum in my head all this year.
It might come from the music I listen to, past the recommended
volume on my speakers, day and night, night and day. It might
come from hunger, from the fact that I live on chewing gum and
diet soda and the occasional late-night pizza binge. It might
come from the uppers and the downers, the bennies and the pot, a
little of this and a little of that, stashed away in plastic
baggies or left out in blue ceramic bowls for our friends,
depending on the cash flow. I would like very much to attribute
it to the war, a high hum of Vietnam sadness, but the war is five
years over.

Johnny thinks it’s probably the sound of sex.

I’m a college girl. About two-thirds of the girls in my classes
look like me, it seems: straight hair and large, stoned,
belladonna-eyes and colorful patches on their jeans. Most of them
don’t know how to take care of their skin. Poor things. They look
a little lost. My roommate was like that, before I moved out. She
cried every night into her pillow, homesick as a goddamn puppy.
She probably still does. But I’m not lost in that crowd any more.
Johnny found me.

Johnny’s not a student here. I don’t know if he ever graduated
from high school. With my parents, this kind of thing would
matter, and indeed there is some part of me that is shocked and
thrilled that I am with an actual dropout. He has abandoned
school for the real world, he says, but he says it without
rancor. I feel no need to follow his lead, to be more real than I
am right now. My parents would be relieved to know it, but I
never speak with them, about Johnny or anything else.

He has a job at a music store. That’s where we meet. I go in for
guitar strings one cold winter day, the best I can afford,
because the cheap nylon ones keep breaking when I play them as
loud as I want to. And there he is, tall and breezy with his long
hair down. I stay in the store most of the afternoon, watching
everything he does out of the corner of my eye and fidgeting with
my hair. He keeps playing different records. I love them all.
When I finally buy my guitar strings, he asks me if I want to
have some dinner with him, and I say “Yes” so fast that I stumble
over the single syllable. In all my life, I will never pass
another music store without wondering whether Johnny is still
standing there, cool and loose, behind the counter.

It isn’t like I never had sex with anyone before. Once, when I
was a senior in high school, there was this party, and I danced
and danced with Stanley Bell, and then we went into his room and
we did it. Afterward, we went back, sticky and a little woozy, to
the party. It helped to keep the boys quiet, I agreed with my
high-school friends, but it was less fun than the parties were.

But Johnny is different. I have dinner with him, and we talk all
night. This isn’t high-school talk, this is the real thing:
politics, religion, racism, freedom, the press, the War. I am
high as a kite on white wine and Johnny. His face is hazy through
the cigarette smoke. It’s hot in his apartment, with the steam
radiators making startlingly loud knocking noises. When he takes
off his T-shirt, it seems natural enough. When he takes off my
loose top, the gesture seems equally natural, but incomplete. I
reach behind me, elbows akimbo, and unhook my bra. He draws it
down my arms, touching my skin with his palms, his fingertips,
the backs of his hands. My skin is electric with his touch. My
nipples are rising to meet his rolling, squeezing fingers.

Johnny is tugging now at my jeans. He isn’t touching my body, not
even through the fabric; he is only rocking the material back and
forth, delicately, over the skin. There is a sound in the room,
louder even than the music, and it is coming from the back of my
throat. I am far higher, tighter, tenser, than when I touch
myself, silently, in the dark room while my roommate sobs into
her pillow. Candles flicker around us. He licks my nipple and
takes another drag on his cigarette.

Johnny is in no hurry. He takes me apart, piece-by-piece, and
builds a delicate house of cards. Should it fall — should I
gasp, or open my eyes in recognition — he begins again. His body
is long and lanky and muscular. It is a long, surprising,
flung-open, exploratory night, during which he smokes cigarette
after cigarette. At the end of it, near dawn, I find that he is
holding my wrists, pinning them to the pillow above my head. His
cock is sliding in and out of me, hard, fast, rough. It is so far
from hurting me that I think I can never get enough. I strain my
hips up toward him and tug uselessly at my wrists.

More, I shout, or I think I shout, over the music. More, oh
Christ, oh Johnny, don’t stop.

He doesn’t stop. And so I start, and am myself helpless to stop.
I can taste his skin on my tongue, and the white wine, and the
cigarettes. I can hear the music and my own cries, and his soft
sounds in my ear. But all this is lost, utterly drowned,
sea-deep, in the breaking waves of my orgasm. I come and come,
long helpless rippling waves, my eyes shut and my face turned and
buried in one immobilized arm. I have no time or breath even to
worry that I will be unable to stop coming. I am only capable of
pleasure, or I might be a little afraid.

And when I finally begin to spiral down, I hear a tiny, high
electric hum in my head.

It does not go away for a year and three months, until Johnny
leaves me one day, without warning, for an Italian girl called
Teddy Cabrini. There are no faints or fits, no screaming matches.
I understand by then that we are not what my parents would call
“really suited” to each other. You can’t work in a music store
forever, and I was never waiting for a diamond ring from Johnny,
not really. It wasn’t about that with us. It was about the heat,
the slow spin of the room, the hum in my head. He takes the
amplifier with him, along with most of the drugs. I lie on our
bed and listen to the perfect silence. I wonder what our
neighbors will think now that he’s gone.

I wonder what I think, myself.

+++++

We are called, at last, into the therapist’s office. Another
couple is leaving just as we go in. They don’t meet our eyes, and
I don’t try to see their faces. Even if I know them, I don’t want
to know who they are.

It is Alan’s turn first. I know his story. He is going to tell
about his babysitter, the one who said she’d show him her
fourteen-year-old breasts if he took down his Boy Scout’s shorts.
He was eleven, probably old enough not even to have a babysitter
at the time, but his parents were nervous that he’d destroy
something, and look what happened. It’s not as if it was
traumatic. But I suppose it would count as formative. He tells
the story as he usually does, a slightly lascivious sideshow tale
for the guys. The therapist nods and smiles, nonjudgmental. I
wish he would just give up and judge, already.

My turn. I close my eyes a moment and think of Johnny. He had
such a fine, long, lean body, over mine and under mine. And long,
sensitive fingers to match, grasping my wrists until they
bruised, gathering my long blonde hair, cupping my ass as he
licked and licked and licked my pussy.

So I tell them about Stanley Bell and the high school party.

The therapist is pleased. We both have our experiences “out on
the table.” We are now equally vulnerable, he says, and can
expect great things. Alan looks absurdly eager. I am eager only
to get out of there.

All afternoon, as I move about the house, doing my usual tasks
and preparing dinner, I find myself watching Alan out of the
corner of my eye. He is watching me out of the corner of his. I
dread nightfall, the evening news, toothbrushing, bed.

In bed, with the lights off, Alan comes close to me. Instead of
turning away as usual, I take a deep breath, as if undersea
diving, and put my arms around him. As he touches me, hesitantly,
for the first time in months, I find my mind drifting again to
that first night with Johnny. Suddenly — and it is a surprise
for both of us — I am responding to Alan.

“Touch me here,” I whisper, and he does. I am less in the present
than in the past, tasting cheap white wine and hearing for the
first time in twenty-five years that high electric hum that is
for me the sound sex makes as it drives past.

When we are finished, Alan holds me sleepily and touches my hair.

“I’m so glad we went to this therapist,” he says. “I love you so
much.” He falls asleep not long after that. I can feel his warm
breath on my shoulder.

I lie staring in the dark. It is perfectly quiet. My lips form
one word, over and over.

Johnny, I am saying. Johnny.