Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [43]
And with you? I ask.
I’m afraid my lovemaking had a dampening, no, a drying effect, he says. No matter how I tried, it was hard not to approach her from a stance of dominance. When making love with me, she became less and less wet. His face is sad for a moment, then he grins. She went off to India. I think she left me for an elephant she learned to ride, or perhaps for a slow, warm trickle of water from a waterfall, of which there were many amorous ones on her Hawaiian island.
I always thought perhaps it was to make sexual love between women impossible that men destroyed their external sexual organs.
I still think that is partly true, says Pierre. But there is also my experience with Queen Anne.
Queen Anne? Your friend was named after Queen Anne Nzingha, the African warrior?
No, he says. After Queen Anne’s lace, the wildflower.
Later on in the hike, stopping at a pipe for water, Pierre still muses. Is it only woman who would make love to everything? he asks. Man too, after all, has external sexual organs. But does man seek oneness with the earth by having sex with it?
You mean Queen Anne wasn’t simply masturbating?
No. She said she never masturbated, except with herself. And even then she was making love. Having sex. Her partner just happened to be something other than another human being.
Was it with Queen Anne that you discovered your duality? I ask.
Yes, he says. Until I met her I was never sexually attracted to women. I imagined all women mainly suffered from sex. Meeting her was a great relief. I realized that even bisexuality, of which I’d always felt myself capable but of which I’d had no real experience, was still, like homosexuality and heterosexuality, like lesbianism, only a very limited sexuality. I mean, here was someone who was pansexual. Remember Pan? he asks, laughing. Well, Queen Anne was Pan’s great-grandmother!
An image of Pan, the Greek god, merrily playing his flute in the forest rises up. His human head rests on a body composed of the parts of many different animals. Clearly his ancestors had related sexually, at least in imagination, to everything. And before him Queen Anne’s ancestors had related sexually to the earth itself. I am really too old to use the expression “wow” gracefully. But “wow” is what I hear myself say. Which makes Pierre laugh again.
But in a moment he has returned to the thread of his thought. In pornography, he says ruefully, this ability of woman’s to take pleasure in diverse ways is projected in a perverted way. I have seen films in which she is forced to copulate with donkeys and dogs and guns and other weapons. Oddly shaped vegetables and fruits. Broom handles and Coke bottles. But this is rape. Man is jealous of woman’s pleasure, Pierre says after a while, because she does not require him to achieve it. When her outer sex is cut off, and she’s left only the smallest, inelastic opening through which to receive pleasure, he can believe it is only his penis that can reach her inner parts and give her what she craves. But it is only his lust for her conquest that makes the effort worthwhile. And then it is literally a battle, with blood flowing on both sides.
Ah, I say, the original battle of the sexes!
Exactly, he replies.
Well, I say, some men turn to animals, and each other. Or they use the woman as if she were a boy.
If you are at all sensitive to another’s pain, he says, grimacing, or even cognizant of your own, not to mention the humiliation of forcing yourself inside someone whose very flesh has been made into a barrier against you, what else can you do?
PART THIRTEEN
EVELYN
FOR YEARS I WATCHED a television program called “Riverside.” It was about a hospital for psychiatric disorders that reminded me of the Waverly. When Amy Maxwell was introduced to me by Raye, and closely resembled the woman who played the tough, compassionate matriarch and physician emeritus of the hospital, I felt immediately relaxed with her. She was elderly, bony and silver-haired, with a mouth full of straight white teeth