Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [60]
But though it looks foolish or even disgusting, Vinnie presently found, sex feels wonderful. She didn’t find that odd, since it is the same way with food: an oyster or a plate of spaghetti is far from attractive in itself. The solution to the problem was simple: you either make love in the dark or shut your eyes. Of course, this hasn’t always been possible. In graduate school she once broke up with a most attractive man because the wall opposite his bed was one large gold-framed mirror salvaged from a demolished building nearby. Vinnie managed to keep her eyes closed most of the time, but she couldn’t help opening them once in a while; and then the sight of her own thin white legs wrapped around her friend Paul Cattleman’s brown hairy back filled her with a deep embarrassment that almost wholly quenched her pleasure.
While she was growing up Vinnie often heard the minister of her parents’ church say that love (the married sort, of course) was a God-given blessing. Vinnie herself is not religious, though she is somewhat superstitious, and she does not blame the human reproductive process on anyone. But if she were to imagine the sort of God who might have arranged it, he would hardly inspire veneration. She sees one of those fat, undignified, naked bronze deities that are occasionally offered for sale in Oriental shops, whose human avatars are worshiped by the least stable of her students. Some little plump godling, with a limited imagination and the giggly, vulgar sense of humor one sometimes sees in young children.
Before she left America, Vinnie had rather dreaded the prospect of being without physical love for six months, and anticipated with anxiety the frustration and/or unsuitable incidents it might bring into her life—the necessity of calling too desperately on fantasy affairs. But as it turns out, she has been less often painfully troubled by desire than in the past, perhaps because of her age.
Even in her fantasy life, she has noticed, professional recognition has of late tended to replace romance. As she drowses over a book, or lies among her pillows drifting into sleep, public bodies rather than private ones approach her. She accepts their advances as warmly and graciously as before, but now in a vertical rather than a horizontal position, and clad not in her best black nightgown but in the black gown and colored silk hood appropriate to the recipient of various prizes and honorary degrees. It annoys Vinnie that she is enough a woman of her generation to be rather ashamed of these imaginings when fully awake. Among her feminist students they would be thought far less embarrassing than the other sort of fantasy; even admirable. But Vinnie has been brought up to believe that though a man may work for wealth or fame, a woman must labor for love—if not that of a husband or children, at least that of a profession.
No, Vinnie doesn’t miss sex as much as she had feared. What she misses is the affectionate and romantic side of love, insofar as she has known it: the leisurely walks in the woods, the exchange of notes, the rapid concealed half-caress at the crowded party, the glance across the lounge at the faculty club, the sense of sharing a complex, secret life. But she is used to missing all this—she has been short of it almost all her life.
And here in London she thinks of it rather less often, for there is so much else to entertain her. Tonight, for instance, she’s going to the English