Essays by DAR

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. – Hebrews 13:2

It's not appropriate anymore: I'm happily remarried. It's not even possible anymore: The scourge of AIDS. And God knows it isn’t PC – so please cut me a little slack here, oh wise guardians of the culture: I’m climbing out on a limb. But when I was single and the world healthy, or at least less infectious than it is today, what glory there was in being able to sleep around at will! What an un-bastardizing process promiscuity could turn out to be!

Look here, reader, I’m going to need a little help to keep from sounding like various shades of asshole. Defending libertinism is one of the riskier things to do in today’s puritanical climate. Would you mind if I adopt a high-humble, even sober, tone to loft us above the fray, with nary a dip into real-life misadventure (so don’t get your hopes up)? In additional to a ton of parentheticals, might I also be allowed to employ the somewhat antique verb tense of the pluperfect to effect a three-letter distance from the matter at hand? (The pluperfect, also known as the past perfect, utilizes the quasi-clinical auxiliary “had” to express action before an implied past time.)

Safety first!

For starters, then, a little context.

I had always been what’s known (claustrophobically? a mite defensively?) as a one-woman man. I had been ferociously faithful to my high school sweetheart from the age of 16 to 20 (if ferocity is what it is to forbid my dorm mates from so much as touching our nuptial bed), to my college lover from 20 to 23, and then to my college lover’s best friend, whom I married, till she divorced me seven years later. I found myself at age 30 in a spasm of solitude, with sudden anti-vehemence toward much of what I’d till that point held dear, joint custody of two lovely little boys each weekend at my house in the country, and license the rest of each week to explore what I’d been missing. No rules beyond that. All freedom.

More throat-clearing context. I had always been a naysayer. I had been taught by old-school parents (European bourgeois on one side, Bostonian proper on the other) that restraint was the greater part of glory; that the suitable outlook on the world ought be one of wariness – an arched eyebrow, shall we say, rather than a puckered lip. I was by training and inclination stingy, in other words; conditioned neither to share nor partake. I did not automatically welcome, for instance, the sound of an unrelated woman peeing in a porcelain bowl; it was a bit intimate for my taste. When approaching the naked bent elbow of a woman ahead of me in a traffic line, my general attitude was no.

I was ripe, in other words, for opening up.

By age 30 I was also pestilent, in the sense that Blake meant it when he said, “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.” I had desired for years and been constrained from acting on my desires because of marital conventions and middle-class instinct. Was there a central image that gnawed at me? There’s always a central image. Mine consisted of the memory of a woman who had picked me up hitching on the Mass Pike one summer’s morn, foxy in the style of the day, doe-eyed and leather-jacketed; rolling down the window and smiling up from under her dark lashes, she asked if I'd like to drive. I did, but that’s all I did, and for years she symbolized to me opportunities lost, invitations spurned. At one point on the ride I reached over and fingered the collar of her jacket and she nimbly did the same with mine. It would have been as easy to proceed peeling off her clothes as to disrobe an orange, the textured skin unraveling under my fingertips, the fragrant oil coating my nails. But I chose to do nothing. There were, as there always are, a thousand reasons not to.

I regretted her, and others like her, all through my subsequent marriage, and that regret added up to a pestilence of the heart as well as the blood. Every time I saw a red mark on a mirror I thought it was someone's lip print. Every time I heard a tomcat yowl I thought the world was orgasming without me. And as many married folks know too well, it’s only a few corrosive letters from “regret” to “resent”: even while pleasing my wife, I bore her a grudge for keeping me from the party beyond. My brain was in my cock because both were starved. It was going to take a lot of fucking around to separate and satisfy them. But it was also going to be the healthiest thing I could do.

Healthy? I heard the groans. Yes, I was aware of promiscuity’s bad press. My post-divorce yoga guru, among others, assured me that my aspiration to make up for lost time was sordid. But to her I said this: You know what? I’ve paid my dues. I know what fidelity and commitment are. I’ve been faithful to women in the past and with any luck will be again in the future, but right now I am doing something else: meeting a lot of them fast, interacting with them fleetingly, parting from them cleanly. And in my hectic way, I try to honor them.

“Honor them?” she smirked. “By taking advantage?”

But this revealed the gaping misconception among those who have chosen to remain sexually cocooned. To me, the idea that I was taking advantage of anyone was patently pre-feminist and patriarchal. Could my partners not say no? If during my sleepover stage I was fortunate enough to find a number of nice women to have slumber parties with, it was only because they didn’t want to sleep alone, either. I didn’t leave anyone feeling they had been taken by a conquistador anymore than they left me feeling had by a jezebel. We left each other feeling a touch more splendid about ourselves. “You have such beautiful wrists, fingers, teeth,” we always told each other, and it was never a line. We did always find beauty to admire in each other. Neither slick nor innocent, we sincerely did honor each other, in our manner, while remaining faithful to none but the idea of all of them – of womanhood and manhood in all its fickle biological vitality.

My gratitude, in fact, knew no bounds. This was, after all, a time in my life when I was smarting. On the most basic level my promiscuity was anesthetic: the application of hormones blocked the hurt. But beyond that, there was the salve of companionship. I turned to my sisters and they were there, opening their arms and hearts to me. I was agog at their generosity. At a time when I was unhappy they succored me. Their giving of themselves in my hour of need was an act of human kindness like none I'd ever received. I think they literally saved my life. What my guru couldn’t grasp was that I treasured them for it, that my love for women deepened during this time of desperation, and that I had never found them more lovely and clever than I did then.

(The fact that I wouldn’t recognize half my saviors on the street, as perhaps they wouldn't me, detracts from the experience not a jot; if anything, it adds to the mystery. We met as proverbial fireflies in the night, flashing our lights, and pleased each other before flitting away. The world today is aglow with critters who may or may not have once buzzed in my ear.)

For their part, I was always moved by how grateful they were for a bit of honest attention, how afterwards they clamored to buy me breakfast or send me home with pot roast recipes for my boys. So eager were they, too, for the warmth of sexual friendship! It reminded me of when I was a newspaper delivery boy and I’d ride my bike from one old lady's house to the next on my route, and I could not get away before each had sat me down to a plate of cookies and cakes and biscuits with multiple vanilla layers. Except that these younger women had awe on their lips. How could it escape anyone that, in the throes of animal passion, the word most often on the lips of both men and women is “God”?

With that loaded syllable, let me hasten to say that I was not the world’s greatest lover, by any stretch. I was passable. Sex was not a letter-graded enterprise, in any case – it always operated on the pass-fail system – and what made me a successful philander was that I was game. The one thing you can’t fake to the opposite sex is interest. Plus this: Success begat success. It’s a knack, like bicycle-riding: Once you achieve that sense of balance, that foreknowledge that it is indeed possible to have a woman place your palm between her legs within five minutes of making her acquaintance, you’re not likely to forget it. And voila, the confidence you bring to future encounters will be self-fulfilling.

The other thing I had going for me was that I minded my manners, never pushing too hard. I let them do fifty percent of the seduction. “Are you reluctant? Then let's go no further,” I’d say, “I’m happy with things as they are.” And we’d laugh, and nibble some figs, and nibble some ear lobes, and soon enough we’d be loving each other again. It worked because it was the truth: I really was happy with things the way they were. So they allowed me all.

Sordid? But surely you know it’s closed spaces that breed fleas, not open ones. Repression reeks. It’s the squirrelly gents in their IBM ties, casting furtive glances around the edges of the strip club, too nervous to come forward and tuck that bill where it needed to be tucked, who had the dirty minds. At the risk of sounding aphoristic, let me say that wild oats that are not sown tend to rot the pouch that holds them. The most nutritive thing to do is toss ’em with an open hand.

At risk also of sounding proselytizing (there’s no end of risks to this topic), might I also commend promiscuity for sheer melodrama? After all, no matter how good married sex might be, most monogo-maniacs tend to roll over afterwards and go to sleep. And why not? That’s the privilege of the contentedly mated. But denizens of the demi-monde, whether they choose to be there or they’ve been cast there by fortune, are privy to the flip side of love, the suspense and danger of 2 a.m: the one-eyed chefs sizzling eggs on greasy counters, the limping orphans hawking lottery tickets, the women falling off barstools, the men crying in public urinals, and yes, the red mouths aswim with white sperm, the rats in the dumpsters, the gun smoke in the air....

But here I find myself in danger of romanticizing what was essentially the best education I ever got, outside of a classroom. Sleeping around was equivalent to a round-the-world sail on tramp steamer while memorizing every word of the Review of Books. I learned more about people who happened to be women than I ever knew before. I learned that the impulse to merge applied to them with the same urgency, though not with the same hydraulic pressure as a man. As one woman explained, “We have the same drive but with less force behind it. It’s not as if we have to get something out.” I was doing a bunch of exotic travel writing in those days, and it was doubly edifying to learn the love habits as well as the local cuisine of a culture. With no language in common but sign language, I developed an almost animal kinship with those whose veins pulsed green beneath dusky skin, whose fingernails glowed orange-silver in the half light of night kitchens. Meeting them in Scandinavian traffic jams and Arabian pet stores, I took instruction in the best sense of the word: exploring unknown territory, making contact with the other side. Linked only by a vocabulary we grappled to express, never was it more obvious that for all our differences we were the same species for love.

To say nothing of the solace it brought to have lovers around the world. One could never be homesick, because the familiar terrain of a woman’s body was always there to offer an elemental form of home.

(And what of the guides.

(A small side trip, if you’ll permit me. But the reader should be rewarded for his patience, after all … just one little dip.…

(Ah, the guides. A carefully guarded secret. Did the beautiful and not-so-beautiful women delivered to travel writers by tourism offices to lead us by the hand through the alleyways of foreign capitals, to spoon-feed us exotic grains the likes of which had never before touched western lips, to soothe our muscles after a weary day of inquiring how many golden Buddhas were in the Forbidden City and how many shoes could be shined at the Istanbul Hilton ... did these women really put out? Did the flower of female youth dispatched by foreign governments to instruct us in their laundry habits, to charm us in the ways of their room service and make us privy to their postal scales and partial to their bus schedules ... really do the Down and Dirty? Did the world, that is to say, really operate in so crude and direct a way, so unsubtle a tit-for-tat fashion, a sex payola quid pro quo, a one-hand-scratches-the-other arrangement? – even if you weren't thereafter meant to feel compelled to say something positive about the place, that you could continue to pick and choose your favorite spots around the world anyway, but that everything else being equal this was just one more fillip they were offering to make your stay more agreeable?

(The answer.

(In one word.

(In one syllable.

(But it's too easy a syllable to say.

(It would sound too simple.

(You would hate me for it in the morning.

(I would hate myself.

(yes

(Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Yes the hotel hospitality hostesses of Haiti and the iambic interpreters of Iceland, yes the sisters of the Bora Bora Benevolent Stranger Society and the teenaged trampling queens of Teheran (non-hostage sector). Yes with her mismatched Disney socks, meeting you off the train in Machu Picchu. Yes with her saucy mouth and handcuff key ring, pouring your wine during an x-rated dinner in Auckland. Yes bandaging your middle finger in Addis Ababa, your poor middle finger you'd bent sideways after you'd dived into shallow water and were apparently in need of being nursed back to bed. Yes showing you how the hotel Murphy beds worked in Leningrad, after taking you out at 3 a.m. to watch the bridges open. Yes and yes to the hard-boiled Canadian Mountie who said by way of inviting you into her bunk, "Cmon over and shake a paw." Yes and yes to the tuk-tuk driver in Bangkok who scooped into herself to give you a private whiff, to the mayor's aide in Mexico who called you by the wrong name all night but wept when you had to leave, to the strapping river goddess who said with a wink while lashing you into your raft before guiding you down a grade five Patagonian river, "Come back tonight and I’ll really show you the ropes ..." Yes and yes and yes with apologies to Molly Bloom but if she were alive at the millennium she herself would no doubt be part of the Irish Tourism Council, Beverage Division …)

Dusting myself off, here: back on track. Yes, well, I also learned the answer to a grand question: Why does sleeping around cause some people to become what Saul Bellow has referred to as “fucked out,” while others become enlarged? It goes to the very core of experience Blake was talking about. Why do some people become intellectually exhausted from college, while others are sparked to greater curiosity? Why do some people come out of a Matisse exhibit rubbing their eyes with fatigue, while others come out exalted? In the course of my meanderings I ran into an old college chum in a social at the D.C. Holocaust Museum (yes, and they groped atop graves during the Black Death, too). This woman had been something of a sexual profligate, scoring all my college friends before going on to bed most of the leading figures of the anti-war movement. Common wisdom would dictate that by middle age she look haggard, spent of her precious life juices. But she looked radiant, more like 30 than 50; living proof that, at least in her case, the use-it-or-lose-it attitude trumped the notion that we had to carefully apportion our energies. Maybe it came down to what you believed in. If you subscribed to a world view of deprivation and paucity, that’s what you ended up with. If you believed you had boundless riches and using them only created more, then that was what you got. Moisture begets moisture, as Aristotle said.

But nothing I learned was more rejuvenating that this: The secret that life ought to be effortless, that striving in matters of the heart was unbecoming, when not self-defeating; and that the proper way to accept love was to catch it as easily as a chameleon catches a raindrop rolling off a leaf. Stick out thy tongue and receive.

After such knowledge, I had access. I had open sesame. All was apparent to me, even when (especially when!) I was all wet. With one peek at the downturn twist of her smile, I imagined that the haughty restaurant hostess tended to get sore in the sack, and that she took out her revenge on her landlord, of all people, by pissing in the gin bottle she left behind when she decamped, so that he would never know what he was drinking. But she had her trove of blisses, too! With one listen to how gracefully she clicked shut her cell phone after saying good night to her baby twins, I imagined how deliciously ammoniac the soft underskin of her hard-working knee would smell, fruit gone slightly rancid, like a tropical nightclub with only some of its windows open. I may have been wrong – I was probably always wrong! – but it didn’t matter. I had developed the gift of empathy.

Yes, I had opened up. Stripped of the protective shield of a spouse, I was in a raw state of receptivity. If my nature as a younger man had been to stop my ears from the overly-familiar sounds of my compatriots, promiscuity forced me to listen. It was an act of enforced humanity, to not exclude but to attend to the triumphs and tragedies befalling my bedfellows. Women were willing to pool their woes with mine – and such woe to pool! I wept the night a nurse whose husband had abandoned her told how her two-year-old daughter would climb into bed with her each morning to give her a back rub the way she used to see her father do. “Mo, Mommy?” she would ask. “Mo?”

It was democratizing. I sampled a cross-section of humanity I otherwise wouldn't have. I became unsqueamish, the way you do when you go to a square dance and you relinquish the idea of washing your hands between each partner. Doe-see-doe – that’s the fun of it! It reminded me of when I was first learning to drink, as a 19 year old studying theater in Dublin, and I was clambering down the stairs of a squalling pub behind a great drinking poet who had to clutch the brass rail for balance. Rather than seek to avoid his germs, I aimed to clutch where he did: We were all in this together! I was entering into the great animal condition the way a cat will roll in the warm morning sunshine for the sensual exuberance of it, for the festive purrability of it So was I allowing myself to arch my back and be on the receiving end of a great gift: of being a critter in the prime of life.

(Self-fulfilling, did I say? Everything gave me erections – little onions that melted in my mouth; face veils; a phone solicitor’s lilt; opening a can of salmon; talk of money; fishnet stockings on the shiny pages of the Times Magazine; being asked out to dinner – everything but my fellow males, about whom I strictly maintained squeamishness. But as the epiphany with the above Irish poet demonstrates, I might have found a similar rapture with men, too, if I’d been so inclined. At least acknowledging that I had a penis – what the ever-rowdy Tibetan monk Drukpa Kunley joyously called “the flaming thunderbolt of wisdom” – meant accepting that my father and brother and stockbroker and all my other mates had them, too. Halfway to enlightenment, I suppose.)

And so driving through the snow on a country road I’d never been on before, I entertained the ecstasy that I could pull into driveway after driveway and it wouldn’t matter that each house was the wrong house, because in each house there was a woman in the front window made beautiful simply by being there, in the warmth. Or not! I felt welcomed by women everywhere. Laughing, with my hands gluey with the spermicidal jelly of a dozen rubbers which kept bursting in my pockets from the cold – or not! – I would glide along the female contours of the FDR Drive to a spot between women’s apartments at 2:30 in the morning; on one side she’d be doing her laundry naked, on the other side she'd be pirouetting on her toes before retiring for the night. Henry Miller said that if only once in his life he could glimpse a woman giving herself that private smile in the mirror before blowing out the candle, he would die a happy man (or words to that effect). Surely the right attitude for those who have been vouchsafed such bounty – again and again! – should be one of soulful thankfulness.

Some fancy line for a slut, eh? But such is the unpestilent place I find myself today: my cock and brain at a surgical remove from each other. Having had my chameleon’s share of matings, I find myself able to sit in caf?s with other men talking about art if we choose, or the price of turpentine, without needing to check out each woman who passes. Or if it’s a woman I’m sitting with, to speak with her as she wants to be spoken to: as a human being rather than a female human being.

Phrased this way, even my yoga guru eventually came around. She decided it was Tantric – that I had achieved a desire-free state by acting on my desires, becoming free of lust through satisfying it. In other words, it was only because I had fucked around so assiduously – with so much dedication and industry – that I could put the nonsense behind me. The redemptive power of promiscuity: the left-hand path to nirvana: getting it out.

And now, since the pluperfect seems to have served its purpose, let me presume in present tense to address how it is for the most important woman in my life – not my guru but my second wife. I daresay my unpestilence offers dividends to her: I am less smug than if I’d stayed in an ivory tower, less judgmental, more compassionate. She doesn’t seem to mind having a man of experience – she never wanted a virgin. She likes that my hankering is now down to a minimum, that I can be truly faithful because I’ve finally forsworn the Mass Pike fox. Neither thorny with envy nor knotted with regret, I’m easier to live with because I’ve achieved a level of contentment, knowing that the energy I spent with her sisters was some of the most exhilarating and life-affirming I ever spent on this planet – though no one may know it but a few beings and me.

It was the long way around to not being a bastard, in other words. Some people can get there by more direct means. This was my way.

Most of all, I’m less a pain in the ass because I’m not enslaved by feverish wonderings about how this one might kiss, how that one might moan. Like someone who can gauge the flavor of a tea by sniffing its leaf, I pretend that I have at least a small idea of what I’m choosing to pass up. I’m still curious, of course, but in an idle, non-compulsive way. The main thing I find myself wondering is where they are today, those fireflies of the past; if they are content, how they deal with getting older. And this, always: how many angels were in the mix. Because some surely were.

Indeed, the devotional component is never far away. In fact, you know what flips my switch today? Performing an act of generosity: the thought of buying a niece a blue cashmere sweater, the impulse to apologize to my wife for a rash word. What we could call the turn-on of magnanimity, the eroto-spituality of kindness, the sexuo-generativity of aging. Munificence gets me hard; giving is just as good as coming. When I was 30, the ecstasy was something we mated to achieve. “God, God, God,” we would say, because God seemed so near our nerve endings. Now the gratitude is of a different order. I get older and say “God,” at last, with a proper awe.