Читать книгу Pretty to Think So - Enrique Fernández - Страница 5

Égloga

No me podrán quitar el dolorido

sentir, si ya del todo

primero no me quitan el sentido.

—Garcilaso de la Vega

One of my graduate school professors, a Spaniard, was fond of quoting this verse of Garcilaso. A scholar of Spain’s generation of ’98, he was attracted to the existentialist thrust of the verse, which opposed the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum with I feel; therefore, I am. El dolorido sentir. The pained feeling. Except that in Spanish, feeling is expressed as sentimiento—sentiment. And Garcilaso chose the infinitive sentir—to feel—which indicates a more powerful, muscular essence of the verb. And then he opposes it to sentido, which means sense as well as consciousness. They can’t take away my pained feeling, my ability to feel pain, unless they first take away my sense, my consciousness, my life. I suffer; therefore, I am. Nothing could be more Spanish.

A similar sentiment or feeling or existential thought is expressed in a South American mestizo song:

I would like to cross the river

Without feeling the sand.

I’m free. I’m a master.

I can want.

And that concrete expression of an idea morphs into the singer’s erotic desire, for he has seen a pair of woman’s eyes and he is dying for them.

They tell me they have an owner

But even if owned I want them.

I’m free. I’m a master.

I can want.

No matter that the woman he wants is already taken. He is free to want her. No one can take that away from him. No one can take from him el dolorido sentir. In this case, el dolorido querer. The pained desire, the pained love.

Yes, they can.

Two days ago, the effects of the androgen-deprivation shot a doctor’s assistant had injected under my skin a month earlier kicked in. And now I don’t want. I don’t desire. I’m apathetic, without pathos, without feeling. Ay, Garcilaso. If you were to return, as Rafael Alberti wrote in his beautiful poem, I would be your squire just to hear you utter your sweet Italianate Spanish verse as we rode. But I would have to tell you, mi señor, that your enamored shepherd was wrong. They can take away your dolorido sentir. Just ask Abelard. Did you know about Abelard, mi señor? You must have, you who were so erudite. They castrated him and, zap, no more desire. He was no longer free. No longer a master. He could not want (Eloise). And I, your humble squire, have been humbled thusly. Cut down without a blade but with the point of a needle.

I so desired, mi señor. I was so free, so full of want, so full of pain. But now, freedom, want, pain, they’re all gone. Perhaps I should be thankful. Desire breeds frustration. Frustration breeds neurosis, psychosis—but these will come later, mi señor, many centuries later. Enjoy your freedom from psychology. Your freedom to love and write verse. Soon you will die in battle. No matter. You will be read, quoted, forever. By a Spanish professor at an American Midwestern university, in a graduate seminar on the generation of ’98. The year 1898, mi señor; can you think that far ahead of your own sixteenth century? He will quote your lovesick shepherd and his boast that no one can take away his pain, his love, his sentir. And a young student will remember your words—will always remember them when fortune fails to smile on his love life. Until that day, a larger-than-love-life reversal of fortune gave the shepherd’s words, your words, mi señor, the lie. That day they took away his dolorido sentir.

●

A Dying

The heated state of consciousness that is Eros feels as distant as breathing the atmosphere of another planet. At the beach I see young women in skimpy bathing suits and their curves, their exposed soft skin, the hair falling on bare shoulders, the breasts barely covered by cloth, the loins exposed enough to remind a man of where everything converges. These are all pleasant. Esthetic. Near-nudes in an art exhibit. Delighting my eyes, but no further.

Surprisingly, this condition is not frustrating. Though why should I be surprised? There can only be frustration when there’s desire, and I experience none of the latter. I want not. I am a serene, smiling Buddha with neutered testicles. ¡Cojones! Am I a man? I am alive, I reply to myself.

The big C, I remember John Wayne calling cancer when he had licked it temporarily. But not even the Duke could blast his way out, like he did in The Shootist, a film biography not of the actor but of the role he was identified with, the one that had filled the screen since that tracking shot in Stagecoach closed in on Ringo—the lens going out of focus for a second, a mistake John Ford never fixed with a second take, and I always thought that blur was Death already claiming its territory, blurring the man if not the myth.

The last time I saw Wayne was on TV, at the Academy Awards. Cancer had eaten away half his weight. I wished I’d never seen him like that.

Would I end up like him? The older I got the more I learned of people who had succumbed to cancer. It seemed like everyone eventually did. It seemed that since everyone must die, this was the death that was coming for us all. I felt cancer closing in, like Poe’s Red Death mingling with the guests at the masque.

●

Vivo Sin Vivir En Mi

Three nights ago I dreamed I was making love to St. Theresa of Avila. The sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, despite her divine raptures, was no cloistered nun: She was a church reformer who traveled widely throughout Spain and pleaded her cases before the Crown. Her poetry is deeply religious, addressing her soul’s need to rise to the divine, yet a strong sensuality courses through it. She speaks of her urge to “enjoy” her Lord as if she were a love-hungry bride. Still, in my dream St. Theresa was no sex kitten.

On the contrary, she was, though not ugly, plain. We were in a swimming pool with another woman, a lover in real life whose precise identity faded from my memory as soon as I woke. All three of us had gone for a nude swim. At first, my attention was on the other woman, whose charms I knew. But eventually, I turned toward the saint. Her flesh was pallid, her long hair black; she seemed shy and embarrassed about the situation she found herself in. But there was something attractive about her very plainness and inexperience. And she was not totally reluctant. I touched her. She responded. Somehow we started to make love, or were about to, when I woke up.

What the…! Of all the women I knew or knew about, St. Theresa of Avila? But the dream excited me. I felt sensations I had not experienced for a while. Still, what in the world was I doing with this saint? I didn’t even like her poetry.

●

Buzzkill

I had reached sixty, and yearly physicals gave me passing grades. Only low-level miseries like high cholesterol. Good heart, good lungs. Could be leaner, but I did exercise regularly. And my diet was healthy, nothing processed, plenty of fresh—organic, even—produce.

The exam included blood work for prostate specific antigen—PSA—a protein produced by the prostate. A high number could be a sign of prostate cancer; mine were in the “safe” zone. The only troubling condition was blood traces in my urine. At first, the doctor thought it was a bladder infection, and twice he prescribed antibiotics. But the condition persisted, so he sent me to a urologist.

The exam had included a digital prostate exam, an indignity I always dreaded but which, like all the previous ones, revealed no problems. It was a different matter with the urologist, not exactly a lover with an easy touch. He dug in. It hurt like hell. He found a tumor. He set me up for a biopsy. (The blood traces proved to be a common and harmless seepage into the urinary tract.)

“Sorry to tell you this, buddy, but you have cancer,’’ he told me on the phone a few days later. The uninvited guest had removed his mask.

●

Handle with Care

Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death for American men (the first is lung cancer). In 2008, the year I began writing this, 186,320 American men were diagnosed with prostate cancer, and 28,660 died of it. (The estimated toll for 2016, according to the American Cancer Society, is 180,890 new cases and 26,120 deaths.) One of seven American men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in his lifetime. And many more will have it and never know because they will die of something else.

There is still no clearly defined cause of prostate cancer—or of many other cancers—but environmental factors are suspected. Diet perhaps. The American diet, which has made us big and strong, has also made us fat and susceptible to illness. Genetic risk factors are being investigated with the hope of identifying high-risk individuals who can be monitored more closely.

Despite its scythe’s wide swing, prostate cancer death is not inevitable. A diagnosis, particularly in the early stages, does not ring a death knell. Standards of treatment can work extremely well, while research into new treatments is moving rapidly. Organizations devoted to raising consciousness among men have the goal of no prostate cancer deaths, and this is no mere chimera. The list of high-profile Alpha males who have survived prostate cancer and continue to thrive includes Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, John Kerry and Robert De Niro.

Or so I thought until I walked into the urologist’s office in Miami, where I live. Sad little old men accompanied by their sad little old wives. Hey, where are the studs? At Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, where I had gone for a second opinion on treatment, it was a slightly different story. Indeed, a lot of the men were older, but at least some were better dressed. One of them was definitely an Alpha. And that was his problem. He wore a tight black leather jacket and tight blue jeans, both clean and crisp. Not much older than fifty, he was in terrific shape. He paced impatiently, talking into his cellphone.

He looked like a man used to owning the street, and, indeed, he was. He was a cop. I could tell his profession by the nature of the conversations I overheard. But, God, how hard it must have been for him to submit to the indignities of this disease! To have his virility threatened, vanished perhaps. That guy’s in a worse place than I am, I thought. I was never that high up the macho ladder, so my fall couldn’t be as terrifying.

The urologist at Sloan-Kettering was reassuring. His surgery would attempt to spare as much nerve as possible. Nerves could be rewired, like an electrician patching up damaged cable. There were procedures and pills to restore virility. All was not lost.

I was not depressed. And I didn’t hinge my manhood on my penis and mix up my power with potency, like the cop who walked up and down the crowded waiting room in the basement of the Sloan-Kettering building devoted to our sick prostates, our fragile manhood.

●

Pretty to Think So

“There are worse things than celibacy, Mr. Shannon,” Deborah Kerr tells Richard Burton in The Night of the Iguana. “Yes,” replies the drunken Episcopalian priest expatriated in Mexico, “lunacy and death.”

Burton’s character was being flip, as usual, and, also as usual, hyperbolic. Death is, in fact, less feared by many men than that unwilled formed of celibacy called impotence. As men age, we become more susceptible to bouts of impotence. It begins with drinking. In our first years of drinking and fucking, we can do both with abandon. But sooner or later, the moment of truth arrives. Trouble is we are used to alcohol putting us—and our partners—in the mood for love. But where, indeed, our partners may be very much in the mood, our penises won’t respond. That is when a man discovers his vulnerability.

I was an eager reader in my teens, and impotence was then just one more bookish concept. I read about it in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. (All the Hemingway I’ve read was in my teens, his novels being the ultimate boy stories.) Jake Barnes, the narrator, had suffered a war injury that rendered him impotent. At the end of the book, he and the alluring Brett are riding through Paris in a cab when “a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic…raised his baton. The car slowed, pressing Brett against” Jake, who can feel her lusciousness but can do nothing about it. She has just told him, “Oh, Jake…we could have had such a damned good time together,” and in the novel’s last words, Jake replies, “Yes… Isn’t it pretty to think so?” The heavy-handed irony of the raised baton and Jake’s bitter reply struck me as subtle and smart.

I was in my late twenties when it first happened in life, not in literature. After an evening of too much food and wine, I became sad and slack in the sack. At that age, however, recovery from excess comes quickly, and as soon as I could, I did. With the passing years, this happened more often and recovery came less quickly, so I was careful with drink, sexuality being a man’s natural guide to temperance.

I thought the day would come when sex would be over, but that seemed such a distant prospect that no crow’s nest I could climb would allow a sighting. I read that in some retirement communities, men were so outnumbered by women that they devoted themselves to the pleasures of their slacker years: getting laid and getting high. At sixty I had no thought of retirement, but when I did, the prospect of spliffs and eager ladies didn’t seem shabby at all.

But the body does say no eventually. In her late years, M.F.K. Fisher gave an interview to the New York Times in which she revealed that a few years before she had lost interest in sex and that recently she no longer cared for food. For the famously sensual gastronome to admit this only meant one thing, I concluded: The end was near. Sure enough, next time I read about her was in an obituary.

Passions for sex and food. Their passing from my life would be harbingers of death, but as Don Juan says in his first appearance on the stage in seventeenth-century Spain, ¡Cuán largo me lo fiais!—what a long time you give me to pay it (my sinning) back. Eat, drink and be merry for Death is far, far away.

Impotence? Yes, libido was declining, but that had its merits. Best of all, age could make a man a good lover. The embarrassment of premature ejaculation was a distant memory. On the contrary, as long as erections held, an older man could be a paragon of virility, allowing a woman multiple orgasms until she tired. Of course, once a man is done, the call of “Again!” cannot be answered right away. Time for pillow talk, dinner, sleep. We rest to engage another day.

But my idyll had ended.

●

Moment

The first time I touched a girl’s bare breast I came in my pants. My bathing suit, really—we were at the beach. I went in the surf and that washed the semen away. And I was not ashamed or even slightly troubled because, well, I was quite drunk. It was a beach party at the end of my first year in college. I was seventeen and still a virgin. But I had a girlfriend. We had passionate kissing sessions, but no touching of breasts or genitals. Not because she stopped me when I tried, but because I didn’t try. Self-consciousness of my inexperience trumped the horniness of a teenage boy. After that night our kissing sessions included baring our chests. I touched, fondled, kissed, suckled her small breasts. But that’s as far as we went. Or rather, as far as I went. She grew tired of me and, in the middle of that summer, she dumped me and took up with an older guy who, I’m sure, screwed her properly. My heart was broken and my desire pounded vainly inside me. It would take what seemed like an eternity, actually about a year, for my heart to heal and sex to be given to me like a precious gift. Still, almost half a century later I remember clearly, in spite of the haze of alcohol, that moment my hand felt her nipple.

●

Digital

A finger up your ass. There is no other way to describe what is, for many men, a troublesome passage.

Sodomy is common among both gay and straight men. For the latter it becomes a prize, like fellatio. In truth, nothing feels more satisfying, at least to this man, than vaginal intercourse in the much-maligned missionary position. Nothing is more complete, more penetrating. Emptying oneself in climax feels total that way. But other orifices beckon. And anal sex is like a treat. Something special.

To give. To receive is another matter. To be penetrated by your partner’s finger at the point of orgasm is part of the heterosexual repertoire, enjoyed by many men, and, like sodomizing a woman, a special treat, the anus holding a privileged position in the body of desire. Still, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

Many men are phobic about being penetrated. Perhaps we associate it with our homosexual fears, the haunting suspicion that, oh no, we might be queer. But even that fear seems contrived and self-conscious. Phobias are primal. We’re either freaked or not. I am.

No rise in sexual heat has ever led me to want a lover’s finger, no matter how tenderly or lewdly inserted. And that phobia is even stronger in the doctor’s office, where sexual heat has never appeared, even in the presence of attractive females.

The digital exam, a finger inserted in the rectum to feel the prostate and detect possible enlargement or tumors, is the subject of jokes. But to many men it’s so far from a laughing matter that they avoid the procedure. And here, at the point of denial, begins the intersection of sexuality and cancer.

●

Palabra

At the time of my seventh hormone injection, my oncologist told me we’d stop after a year and monitor my PSA and testosterone levels. A rise would mean the cancer was growing again and it would be time to restart the shots. What if my testosterone rises but the PSA doesn’t? I asked, eager to return to my libidinous self, or, rather, eager for my libidinous self, person who had left seven months before, to re-inhabit my body and consciousness.

If testosterone rises, that means cancer is back, the doctor said, even if PSA is not way up. I was crestfallen as I did some quick calculations. Will I ever have a sex life again? I asked.

Physicians are not given to terminal answers. I like that about them, for I believe there are no absolute truths—I am agnostic by nature and my years as an academic exposed me to the slippery nature of “truth.” So I wasn’t surprised when he answered ambiguously. Maybe yes, maybe not, nothing is sure. But the look on his face led me to believe the answer was what I feared.

No.

I had entered this treatment with the thought that I’d be a sexual being again.

Erection! I’d already had a dream in which I was erect and was shouting at the top of my lungs, “I have a hard-on!, I have a hard-on!” Except that it was in my first language, Spanish. ¡Se me paró la pinga!

Alas, there was no tumescence when I awoke.

●

Girl Crazy

I don’t remember a time when I did not desire something sexual and female, many years before I knew what sexual things I could do with a girl. This powerful desire ran counter to other aspects of my temperament, which were, and are, for lack of a better word, gay.

I sucked at sports. I slinked away from fights. I did not have a hard body. I loved fashion and books; later I loved art and music. At my all-boys school there were effeminate boys who were bullied heartlessly. This was the ’50s and a Latin culture. Machismo ruled. I feared I might be categorized with the effeminates, and, in fact, I have a vague recollection of a boy telling me I was almost, but not quite, one of them, something that would get repeated throughout my life, when, among mucho macho men, no one could tell whether I was gay or not.

In the end, I wound up telling myself that I was gay in every way but one, and that one was the way that determined whether one fell in one camp or the other: an obsessive desire for intimate contact with female flesh.

When I thought of naked girls, I had genital feelings way before puberty. Like other teen boys of my time, I eagerly sought the photos in skin magazines. When I finally had full sexual contact with female flesh, I lost interest in those air-brushed pictures. The real thing, with its varying textures, was so much more satisfying.

And then there was love. Being in love. Infatuation. Whatever it is was overwhelming. I must now write in the past tense, as if I were the already dead narrator of a magical realist novel.

●

Rain and the Writer

A Jamesian summer afternoon. Rain. A girl. We get wet as we run for cover, holding hands. But no, it’s not James. I have just discovered Kazantzakis, but he’s too intense. Cavafy, perhaps, another Greek I’ve also just discovered, for she is Greek, although she would not be the Poet of the City’s summer afternoon choice. The only writer present here is Hemingway. She knew him.

Papa, as she called him, had just killed himself. She said some bittersweet things about him that made me think they might have been lovers. And me? I was falling not just for her—she was seductive but not pretty—but for all she represented. Greece and the Mediterranean. Sophistication—she was older than I. And the ghost of a writer, the whole romantic Great-American-Writer/suicide/bullfight thing. To sleep with a girl who slept with Papa, that’d be some ménage. Shit, I was inexperienced, so making love to me could not be a dream, and Papa, well, he was, when he died, an old drunk. How good could he have been in bed?

But those are my thoughts now that I’m older than Hemingway ever was. Back then I had no such thoughts, only romance. And romance, I now know, is fueled by hormones. Not that there was a real romance with my Greek object of desire. After a while we didn’t see each other anymore. Did she leave for Greece? Spain? I don’t remember much more. Just unfulfilled longing on a rainy summer afternoon.

●

La Città del Foco

The hot flashes came. The man-tits? Well, I was overweight anyway and I’ve always sort of had them. Maybe I’ve always been a hermaphrodite. The journey to this state of a man in eternal menopause—a minor circle of Hell, I grant, but a circle nonetheless—had taken four years.

First, it was the cancer diagnosis. The urologist called my wife and me for a meeting—I guess this is routine, undoubtedly so she can be there to provide support, or maybe so she can learn right off the bat that she’s not going to get any again, at least not from her old man. He explained the major options: surgery or radiation. He quickly dismissed the latter and endorsed the former—urologists are surgeons so, of course, they favor surgery; radiation oncologists are just that and, of course, as I would learn soon, they privilege their craft.

It was time for a second opinion. A close friend who had undergone prostate surgery a couple of years before sent me to his surgeon at Johns Hopkins, who was also a photographer (my friend’s profession) and a classical pianist. Both activities required a combination of intuition and manual precision. Indeed, when I questioned the doctor about robotic surgery, he replied, “I prefer the knowledge of my hands.” I also had a long telephone conversation with a radiation oncologist whose specialty was “seeds.” These are radioactive particles inserted in the prostate that eventually kill that gland and, therefore, its cancerous tumor.

Surgery, particularly since the development, at Johns Hopkins, of a more delicate technique that spared nerves attached to the prostate, was a favored option because it was supposed to eradicate the cancer and because, should surgery fail, radiation therapy could still be applied. (Sources I consulted insisted the damage done by radiation made subsequent surgery difficult.) Surgery first, radiation second seemed like a good way to go.

On the other hand, the radiation oncologist played up the disadvantages of surgery. The most salient one for most men was impotence. Attached to the prostate are nerves bundles that control erection. When these are removed or severed, a man no longer functions. Plus, the doctor pointed out, urinary incontinence, another unpleasant side effect of prostate surgery, never really went away and a man was doomed to leak. Finally, and most importantly, the oncologist underlined, surgery meant bleeding, and cancer was in the blood.

Cogent arguments all, but the oncologist’s single-minded militancy turned me off. And the urologists I consulted favored surgery. They acknowledged radiation’s efficacy, but some talked darkly about having seen many problems with it.

Still, I was ready to buy the seeds argument when I visited Sloan-Kettering in New York. There, a urologist who had been recommended by a colleague convinced me. Perhaps it was his manner, which fit into the soft-spoken academic tradition I was used to. Or perhaps it was New York itself: having made it my home for years, I felt comfortable there. Or—and this was also so New York—perhaps it was that everyone, beginning with the young man who registered me, seemed preternaturally intelligent. I chose surgery.

There was one more kick. Although surgery might result in urinary incontinence, which my surgeon assured me should go away, radiation could result in a loss of bowel control. Peeing in my pants was one thing. The other, well, gross.

●

Let Lips Do What Hands Do

Sex drove me. Romance drove me. Was there a difference? At various times in my life I thought there was, but now that sex is an absence, I no longer know. Certainly I wanted to sleep with everyone I fell in love with, though not vice versa. Now I’m not even sure of vice versa.

Before there was sex there was making out, long kissing sessions fueled by a need I did not quite understand. And before any of it there were wet dreams and masturbation. The time between the onset of puberty and the loss of virginity weighed on me like a prison sentence, and it felt like liberation when I first got laid.

I was dating someone steadily, an arrangement I had fallen into without much formality though with great pleasure, for she was attractive and seemed to like me. On one of our first nights together we were leaning on a car, outside a party, kissing passionately, when she said, “I’m not going to sleep with you.” Had I been older I might have wondered if she really meant it, but all I wanted to do was to keep kissing, so whatever she said was fine.

A few nights later we were rolling around on her parents’ living room rug, embracing and kissing and panting with desire. She stopped suddenly, said, “I can’t stand this any longer,” and started to take off her clothes. I don’t know how I got mine off. All I remember was the excitement of: This is it! Finally!

Soon I was inside her. When it was over I had to leave—we were both in college but lived with our parents—not before quoting Romeo and Juliet, “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” I left the house, opened my car, but rushed back to her for a last kiss and to cap the quote, “that I will say goodbye till it be morrow.” (Jeez!)

It was only after one more go that she gave me my first lesson. I had responded to the male instinct to penetrate, pump and come. All she did was tell me to change the angle. Her orgasms—a female phenomenon I was just discovering—began. I was an eager student and she a gentle teacher. I don’t know what drove me to open her legs and kiss her—I had already had my fingers there many times. “Where did you learn that?” she asked. Dunno, I replied. Just thought I’d try it. I never told her that our first time I had been a virgin. But I figured she knew.

●

Pedal to the Metal

The first years of sexual activity, or at least my memory of them, were more about romance, seduction and foreplay than actual sex. American culture was making its transition from the ’50s to the ’60s, and I grew up with the notion of male initiative and female reticence. Since the former was fueled by an urgent—throbbing, really—hormonal need, I never stopped to think, as I tried, clumsily, to seduce, where, in a literal sense, my efforts might lead. Indeed, had any of my early objects of desire acquiesced, I would have had no place to offer besides the back seat of a car.

It was when I finally had a girlfriend who not only slept with me but was eager to do so often that I finally faced that dilemma. Indeed, the back seat of a car was a setting—thank God for youth’s limber bodies. And a living room rug. And a grassy meadow. My serious love life did not begin until my girlfriend moved out of her parents’ house and rented an apartment with two other girls. She had a room with a double bed, which we used often and even once broke spectacularly. It collapsed under us as we both reached climax—we had gotten used to one another and would often do this simultaneously. It was a steamy Florida afternoon. And if not the best, it was certainly the rowdiest sex of my life.

●

It Begins

Except for a tonsillectomy at age eighteen, I had spent little time in hospitals. Now I was a regular. It had begun with a routine colonoscopy around the same time my prostate tumor was detected. Then came a cystoscopy and a prostate biopsy, performed on the same occasion by the urologist who had detected the tumor. The cystoscopy, in which a tube is threaded through the urethra and into the bladder, was to determine the cause of the blood in my urine. That double penetration left me so sore that I would tell friends I felt like I’d had sex with a grizzly bear who liked to do everything.

After the biopsy confirmed the tumor was cancerous, I was subjected to endless tests, which have not stopped: bloodwork, X-rays, CT scans, PET scans, MRIs, the pesky digital exams. And I visited hospitals to discuss cancer treatment options with doctors. I was becoming a hospital fly.

The big one was surgery. Curiously, I was not nervous, perhaps because it meant a trip to New York, a city I enjoy thoroughly. And even more curiously, I have pleasant memories from my hospital stay for surgery. Simple reason: dope. From the moment I was shot up with a relaxant before getting rolled into the operating room through my couple of days’ hospital recovery, I was high as a kite. Morphine is the strongest opiate I’ve tried and, man, it’s nice. Not only does all pain go away, but one is filled with a sense of optimism. And everything makes, like, sense.

During my not-unpleasant hospital stay, it helped that Memorial Sloan-Kettering was a wonderful hospital with a caring, efficient and intelligent staff. As soon as I could, I was supposed to get out of bed and walk the hallways, accompanied by a nurse and a traveling stand for the bag attached to the catheter attached to my penis. My first companion was a young West Indian nurse, angelically beautiful. When I had trouble getting myself out of bed she opened her arms and said, “Come to me.”

I fell in love.

Two or three days after surgery—I was too stoned to keep count—I moved to an East Village apartment my wife and I had rented to wait out the ten days or so until my catheter would be removed. The second night there, old friends called to tell me another friend I had not seen in years was in town. And so it happened that less than a week after surgery I was at a downtown restaurant partying with friends, drinking martinis and wine and enjoying a feast. Not a bad way to recover.

But this was just the beginning of my hospital days. For the next three years I would return for tests and, when they showed a rise in PSA, for treatment. I received outpatient radiation therapy every weekday for many weeks. One day I shared the dressing room with a man about a decade my senior who told me he was having both radiation and hormone therapy. The dreaded hormone therapy! Chemical castration! I admired the man’s fight for life, his willingness to undergo what I considered a tragic procedure. And I felt, I confess, sorry for him.

Little did I know.

●

Didn’t It Feel Good

After a few times together, she had me figured out. Knew exactly when I was about to come and, if we were face to face, the old missionary, which was most of the time, she reached under me and cupped my testicles in her hand, giving them ever so soft a squeeze as I ejaculated. Oh my. It felt like she was squeezing it out of me.

And her face. A pouty lower lip that, somehow, gave her an air of Rita Hayworth in her sexiest scenes. Lovely Rita held the key to my predicament. We had issues, not the least of which that the woman who knew just how much to squeeze and when to pout, who drove me wild with desire, that woman did not last. I looked for her in vain, even as we lived together, but she was only there in bed. Other times—not all the time, to be truthful—she became annoyed at my lustful admiration.

I had a book on Dylan Thomas, the poet my generation worshiped. In it was a photo of Thomas and his woman, who bore a passing resemblance to mine. She wore a sweater with a hole in it, which I found irresistibly charming. “That’s what you want me to be,” she told me once in a middle of one of our fights, “the poet’s woman with a hole in her sweater.” Somehow, that riled her. Another time she shot at me with “You want me to be your whore.”

Yes, yes, I wanted to say but didn’t, fearing things would get worse. Through the years, after we parted, I thought she had been unfair. What was wrong with a man wanting his woman to be his whore, as long as it was to be a one-man’s whore, a one-whore’s man. Monogamous prostitution. But she was right in her way. She was who she was, a changeling, like all humans. One day serious and not to be bothered with her man’s hunger for single-barrel sluttiness. The other, squeezing the jism out of me with a prostitute’s trained art—I never had the nerve to ask where she learned that trick, fearing I’d go berserk with jealousy.

My yes, yes would only have echoed that other literary hero of my youth, who dared assume a woman’s inner voice to craft the most famous book ending of his century. A man saying what a man wants a woman to say. Yes? No?

No, Margarita Cansino, my beautiful Latina remade into Rita Hayworth, would say. No, because I’m not even Rita, never mind Gilda. Beautiful Rita blamed her failed relationships on the fact that men wanted Gilda and they got Margarita instead. Who can blame them? Even before she puts the blame on Mame, in her very first close-up, when she flings up her mane—dyed red, her brows shaped to give her forehead a better proportion—Gilda is the woman a man wants. It doesn’t matter that Gilda, like all the femmes fatales, will be no good for a man. The man wants her. I want her. I wanted my Gilda, my poet’s muse. I wanted to dance with the girl with a hole in her sweater. And she was only there for the squeeze.

Perhaps I should’ve been grateful for just that.

●

Down and Down I Go

The Muse, that sweet bitch. She’s the embodiment of everything that men get wrong about women. We should give her up, gentlemen. No wonder so many artists are gay—still, even the homosexual couturiers have Muses.

But she’s the hardest chick to forget, isn’t she? Loves come and go, but the ones that inspired us, they’re the ones that hurt. Macho artists run through them like a straight male dancer through a corps de ballet. But when the male artist runs into what he believes is his real Muse, he stops dead in his tracks and creates, creates, creates. Like Balanchine did with Farrell. Was their relationship sexual? There’s been speculation on that point, but what is clear is that the master choreographer was madly in love and fashioned his ballets for and around her.

In love with the Muse. Pity the man who goes there, for he is in love with an object of his imagination—and that’s the point feminists make, that we guys are in love with, well, ourselves.

Unfulfilled desire is at the heart of Musedom. The most famous real-life Muses were Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura. They never returned their poets’ love, perhaps didn’t even know about it. Unrequited love for a woman who is not who you think she is. What a pickle, petty poet.

Despite, or precisely because of our womanizing, it’s the man who is helpless in love. Love unmans a man. Calderón de la Barca, Spain’s greatest playwright in its Golden Age, called a play about a love-struck Hercules, Fieras afemina amor (Beasts are feminized by love).

Still, we need her, we stupid male creatures. We can’t live without her. Or rather we do live without her but we live miserably. No wonder so many artists blow their brains out.

It was Milton who first got it. His theme was the Fall of Man, and for that he needed her. Oh, it was a convention borrowed from the Romans who borrowed it from the Greeks. But their themes were the wrath of Achilles, arms and the man. The Fall needs her, even if she can’t catch him, Man, as he Falls, just like Yvonne couldn’t catch the Consul in Lowry’s Under the Volcano on his fatal fall down the ravine. Homer needed her, Dante needed her, Petrarch needed her, Milton needed her, Lowry needed her, Balanchine needed her. And all she can do is watch him fall.

Sing, Heav’nly Muse.

●

The Savage God

Even in my darkest nights of the soul, the romantic ones a person indulges in while young, I could not contemplate the now real possibility of suicide by neglect. Always it had been the pistol to the forehead, the jump off the balcony, maybe the overdose. Never the slit wrists—I would’ve fainted as I cut my skin, and what could be less manly than to faint as you’re trying to kill yourself? It’s not that “nooses give” as the poem goes, it’s that my head would fill with horror as I contemplated the pain of hanging—or anything else—to death.

Years ago, I found a way. Quaaludes, the wonder drug. A physician friend prescribed them for me to party with, although, in retrospect, I think I used my Rx mostly for the standard medical reasons: anxiety and sleeplessness. Still, it was a good party drug, as long as one did not party to excess or with a mixture of intoxicants. It was easy to lose track of how many you’d taken, and drinking while popping ’ludes was playing Russian roulette. I used them very, very cautiously. But it was a great sex drug, if by sex one means slo-mo encounters, like erotic bumper cars, and possibly, though not necessarily, hitting the bull’s-eye. My doctor friend, who I think had serious issues, once described Quaaludes as a painless means of suicide. If you took enough of them, you fell asleep and died completely relaxed. Years later, when I hit rougher spots, there were no such drugs at hand. But now…

It’s simple, really. All I have to do is give up, which is precisely what I want to do when I get down. Just give it all the fuck up. No more therapy to soothe my head and open my eyes. And, most definitely, no more cancer treatments. I would simply stop my hormone shots and PSA tests and let the devil cells do their work. Eventually, the cancer would kill me. That’s it. No need to screw up my courage to jump off a tall building or pull the trigger—though, of what? I don’t own a gun nor do I know how to use one. Just let it be. Let it be death.

The thoughts came again yesterday as I felt—if that’s the right word—the void between my legs. Everything was there as I had left it, and I could feel it all as part of my body—were you to kick me I’d double over in pain. But just when I thought I was getting used to the lack of sexual feeling, I wasn’t used to it at all. In fact, I was tired of this lack. When I started writing this, it was, precisely, to avoid killing myself. And I was better for it. Writing engrossed me. It was, I thought, the substitute for Eros. But not yesterday. The rest of my life stretched before me like an eternity of sexless blah. And that’s when the thoughts came: Get it over with, give it up, die.

That was yesterday. Today I am writing.

Besides, when I told my shrink about these thoughts of letting myself go and letting the cancer kill me, he said, “Yeah, and it may take twenty more years.” Sobering thought.

●

Fire and Ice

By the time the ice storm hit, the party was over.

The storm that froze Connecticut in the winter of ’73 was the setting for Rick Moody’s 1994 novel and Ang Lee’s 1997 film about an exurban bourgeoisie experimenting with the era’s sexual liberation. The story culminates in a “key party”: the wives pick at random from the bowl where the husbands have dropped their keys when they walked in, and each woman walks out with a new mate for the night. In the film at least—I never read the book—the party is going on as the storm gets worse and the weather—which actually results in the death of one of the local teens—is an objective correlative to the bad karma the sexual shenanigans bring to a head.

As always in an American movie, you play, you pay.

I remember that storm well, for I was living in Connecticut at the time, though no one invited me to that key party.

An ice storm is a weird phenomenon for someone like me whose sense of weather was shaped in the tropics. It rained and then the temperature fell and the water from the rain turned to ice; it seemed to turn to ice even as it rained; it seemed to be raining ice.

Icicles formed on trees and, worst of all, on the wires that brought electricity to our homes. The weight of the ice would bring down tree branches and it would bring down wires that, as in the movie, sputtered live and lethal on the ground. We were all advised to stay indoors until the danger could be repaired. I was living in a house with a fireplace at the time, and since the fallen wires meant we were without electricity and, therefore, without heating, I fed the fireplace to keep my family warm as we huddled in the finished basement, where the hearth was.

Hearth is an exaggeration. I was, as they say, between jobs. Academic jobs. For a while I had to vacate my faculty house—provided for a modicum of rent by my employer—while I looked for a new position. My college-owned home was in an older and more central part of town; the house I had moved to with my family was straight out of the song that decades later would become the theme of the comedy series Weeds. Made out of ticky-tacky and they all looked just the same.

What I would’ve given to be living in a gracious old colonial, where the old fireplace would’ve been up to the task of keeping us warm. Indeed, some of my friends lived in such houses, in the old part of town from where I’d moved. But it was far from my current ticky-tacky subdivision and, in any case, it was dangerous to go outside.

It was not the most fun time my family enjoyed together. And the thought of sexual shenanigans was the last thing on my mind. Not that I hadn’t had my share of them, for, as I said, the party was already over.

No key party, though. Sometime in the early ’70s, I heard of such phenomena, but though a wild promiscuity blew like a hot wind through my circle of friends, we would never have thought of re-pairing in such a random way. Not that we might be troubled by the choice of partners luck brought—in the end, everyone slept with everyone else, or at least it seems that way in my memory. But that’s not how we thought.

We were under the influence of what came to be called, in retrospect, the ’60s, though, in fact, it was the late ’60s and early ’70s—the key-party-people in The Ice Storm were, too, but we young faculty types, fresh out of graduate school where we lived the student uprisings of the late ’60s, were under a more direct influence.

The rise of the counterculture came when I was in graduate school in the Midwest, and it seemed like, from just one year to the next, everything had changed. Artsy, brainy, bohemians, dismissed by fraternity and sorority types as “greenbaggers” because they often carried green burlap book bags, were now “hippies,” and they included the boys and girls in the Greek houses. At the Connecticut college where I taught in the early ’70s, one of the fraternities reinvented itself as a commune.

Mind-altering drugs, long hair and a studied, disheveled style of dress replaced beer, neatness, khaki jeans and pleated skirts and V-neck sweaters. Everyone talked of revolution, which included an upheaval in sexual mores. Touching was good. Sex was good. All you need is love.

In that context, a notion of sexual sharing came to life. It was spread by books like The Harrad Experiment and Stranger in a Strange Land, and buttressed by what was called at the time Third-Force Psychology, a countercultural way of looking at the human personality that valued freedom most of all. All the political movements of the time had the middle name “liberation,” which would be dropped in less idealistic times. Thus, what we call “feminism” was then “the women’s liberation movement.”

Liberation. As a result of May ’68, a Parisian journal was launched with that name. In recent years, it transmuted into a paper aimed at French yuppies. Sexual liberation was fueled, of course, by the randiness of people young enough to be feeling their hormones. But it was also an ideological stand, a belief in, precisely, the notion of liberation.

Thus, affairs, something married folk had always indulged in and were the subject of stormy fiction, from masterpieces like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina to trashy bestsellers and Hollywood “weepies.” But affairs were no longer called that. They were relationships. And relationships, even in the era of “open marriages,” required talk, talk, talk. Where in an earlier—maybe even just a few years earlier—time, dicey relationships could result in tragedy, in our liberated days they resulted in talks that, borrowing from the encounter-group practices some of us had been involved in, meant meticulous analysis of what you feel, I feel, we all feel. Yes, we. For these talks, again borrowing from the psycho-culture of the day, usually involved a group.

In the end, I grew to despise this aspect of a counterculture that was becoming mainstream culture. And I began to think that cuckolded husbands, betrayed wives, crimes of passion, anything was preferable to that endless strained chatter.

“Did you have a lot of key parties?” an acquaintance of some of my old Connecticut friends asked me when we met not long ago.

He was hoping for a good ice-storm story, but I said no, not a single key party; instead, earnest discussions about communal living, open relationships, women’s liberation, radical lifestyles. And, above all, I feel, you feel, we feel.

Now that I feel nothing of the sort that would’ve led me into talking about feelings, I wonder. Would I do it again? Was the sex and love worth it? Yes. But, dear God, did we really have to talk so much shit?

●

Adios

Did I learn anything from a life of love and lust and longing and—that cursed word!—relationships? Nah. Always, always, the engine drove me forward. Until I got frightened or disgusted or bored. Soon enough another object of desire would come into my sight and—vroom!—the engine was off again. And, why not? I’m not ashamed; it would be like being ashamed of being a biped or a carbon life form. The engine was standard. I didn’t order it, any more than I ordered myself. The engine, the libido, the life force. Or let’s call it by its sweeter name. Eros.

“And then Eros took over,” says the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, as a way of explaining his dalliance with a student, a dalliance that readers of the brilliant South African will recall borders on rape, prefiguring the novel’s central incident. Eros is always taking over. Coming together over me. And one learns nothing from Eros, other than it’s there and it’s powerful and, yes, yes, it’s sweet.

It was only when the doctor told me, sorry to tell you this, buddy, you have cancer, that I began to learn. First, because death was, as I said, unmasked. Soon after, in his office, when he told me I’d be impotent, boy, did I start learning fast. Or rather, did I start questioning. What the hell has this been about? But I wasn’t done yet. I was only experiencing fear as an intellectual exercise. Until, in a matter of hours, in an operating room, fear transitioned from the intellectual into the experiential.

I had just come off general anesthesia and was stoned as a goose on sister morphine. The last thought on my mind was Eros. Indeed, the opiate embrace was so much sweeter. But I had crossed the threshold. Or, rather, it had been crossed for me. Crossed out with a scalpel. (The surgeon told me they had tested the saved nerves and they worked, which conjured an image of me lying on the operating table, my belly slit open while a doctor applied an electric prod to the mangled nerves and my penis shot up.)

It would be a while before I was recovered and straight enough to think of impotence. I found, to my surprise, that I could masturbate and climax, albeit without erection. What do you know? Right after I got home I started taking an anti-erectile dysfunction medication because the prostate surgeons at my hospital believed in what they called penile rehabilitation. Oh, God, if there’s anything that needs rehab it’s a man’s penis. Even after I stopped believing in the sins the celibate Christian Brothers at my school warned me about, I knew my dick had done its share of sinning, not because fucking was dirty but because we men are often irresponsible.

The pills gave me a headache rather than an erection. It just didn’t seem worth it. On my first post-op visit, and before I had fully experienced the dull ache in my head that no medication could soothe, the doctor told me there were options but they were “more invasive.” Invasive! I had already been invaded every which way. I was against all invasions, Iraq’s, my body’s. No, thanks.

A couple of years later, interrupted by bouts of radiation therapy, I was ready to be invaded. Every time I saw a man between a woman’s legs in a movie sex scene I was racked with nostalgia. I wanted that back. A doctor told me the direct injections of anti-erectile medication were nothing but a tiny sting, nothing like the big needle I imagined having to plunge into my penis. Not long after I decided to ask for the shots that would restore my virility, a PSA test came back rising and hormone treatment was in order.

Goodbye, penis injections. Hello, eternal limpness.

Adios, amor.

And it was then, and only then, that I really began to ask myself serious questions. To probe my consciousness and write it down. To figure what the fuck was going on when it was precisely fuck that could not go on.

The thoughts came in a tumble, like clothes tangled in a dryer. Order, chronology, they meant nothing. Like Billy Pilgrim, I had come unstuck in time.

●

Wow

A friend, some ten years younger, is on his way to Johns Hopkins to have prostate surgery. When a routine physical showed a spike in PSA, he began calling me. No tumor had been detected and he hoped it was a sign of something else. But no. It was cancer. Then he began talking to me about the choices. Radiation vs. surgery. If surgery, open or laparoscopic, manual or robotic.

In the end, a distinguished surgeon who worked with all procedures advised him to go the straight open route. And so he did. Three days from today he will go under the knife. Then he will deal with the catheter—we talked about this as well. Then, with incontinence. And, when his body has recovered from the trauma of invasion, when the incontinence is merely a casual drip, he will have to deal with his penis.

For all our swagger and tough talk, I don’t think we men think a lot about our dicks. The joke is our dicks do the thinking for us, the other head we think with, the one that makes the wrong decisions. But it’s not true. It’s not the penis. It’s the libido, Eros, a life force—even though it’s been known to lead to murder. I see an attractive woman and I don’t think, man, would I love to get my penis into her. Granted, men may say that to one another, but that’s just macho bluster, something we have far too much of, and, frankly, it may have served a purpose once upon an evolutionary time, but I can’t see the point in my own life. No. I see an attractive woman and I feel…attraction. I don’t stop to think about it, though I may stop to appreciate the sight and the feeling. At some point I may fantasize, but it’s a full-body, not a penis, fantasy. In all my years as a male—only transsexuals like Tiresias and Jan Morris could say that and really mean it—I only gave my penis full attention once. And then, I was on drugs.

It was in the New England woods and I was tripping on mescaline. I had to take a leak so I left the company I was with and stepped out of sight, unzipped my fly and pulled it out to pee. How fascinating, I thought in my psychedelic haze. My penis looks like a very exotic fish. In fact, it’s quite beautiful in a strange way. Then, wow! The flow of urine began. OMIGOD! Is this intense or what? I could barely take it, in that heightened way that hallucinogens mix pleasure with something close to pain. If pissing is this far out, what about fucking? That, I realized then, was completely out of the question. A release of urine was nearly killing me with intensity. Orgasm would take me over the edge. Le petit mort, indeed.

And that was the first and last time I thought seriously—well, as seriously as one can while tripping—about my penis. Until now.

●

Promesa

At the supermarket deli counter, an old lady is getting pushed by her grandson in one of those combination grocery cart-wheelchairs. Another customer, obviously a neighbor, greets her and asks about her health. Out comes a torrent of maladies, meticulously described in graphic medical language. I was hoping to get a half-pound of sliced ham, but her talk of punctured ulcers and broken ribs banishes my carnivorous instincts. I leave without my ham, put away the other meats I have bought, and comfort myself with a vegetarian dinner of pasta and tomato sauce.

For some time I had noticed how old people talked constantly about their medical life. My mother, for instance, devotes much of her conversation to her pacemaker, her medications, her visits to sundry doctors. She is in her late ’80s and I count myself blessed by her long life. We get along fabulously, and in the long car trips we take together when I go fetch her—she lives in northern Florida, and for the past three years she will no longer fly alone—we talk endlessly about family lore.

But the medical talk! It’s different when my sister and her husband do it. They’re nurses, and they indulge in shop talk, some of it quite graphic. I don’t mind it. Why? Perhaps it’s because it’s not their ailments but their jobs. Perhaps because I will never be a health professional but I will, I am, an older person afflicted with ailments. And I fear it is becoming a subject of conversation, instead of esthetics, jokes, politics, even sports, which I know little about. Here I am retelling for the umpteenth time the history of my prostate cancer. I am doing it here, in these pages, but I have also done it out there when people want to know—usually out of fear—about the subject.

And I have friends who have had it or just found out they have it or have some indicators that they might have it. So we talk about it. The markers. The treatments. The side effects. I hear myself telling an old story I’m bored with. Worst of all, I see myself falling into the category of the old lady at the deli counter, of the old patients I sometimes share a doctor’s waiting room with, the ones who go on and on about their illnesses and treatments. Out loud to others, too often regardless of whether anyone is listening.

Here I am. I am them. Obnoxious Sick Geezers R Us. God help me. I am trapped in a circle of Purgatory I used to find disgusting. I still do. I disgust myself. But what is one to do? One is ill, with a life-threatening disease, terminal perhaps. Why should that not absorb one’s attention? I try to cling to concepts of manners and class and gentlemanliness. But they fall by the wayside, as I become obsessed with my illness, its terrible fears, its unhappy side effects, its hope for cures that may be as unsubstantial to my agnostic soul as apparitions of the Virgin.

But no. I will gladly cash in my agnostic soul for a cure. I have heard of miraculous priests who have cured cancers. Were I to find one and have him make the cancer, zap!, gone, and the potency, whoa!, return, I have sworn I will give up my lapsed status and become, for the first time since childhood, a practicing Catholic. Ave Maria.

●

In the Secret Parts of Fortune

I started taking yoga lessons. Like therapy, this is something I’ve needed all my life, and in recent years, everyone from astrologists to neurologists has recommended it. Breathing—I’ve been told I breathe badly. Stillness. Meditation. Om.

Like vegetarianism, yoga is something I avoided in my hippie years, perhaps because I wanted to retain something of the barbarian inside me, the Caribbean Caliban. But now I have begun. Thoughts race through my mind as I breathe and stretch and twist or just lie still. Suddenly, it’s torsos. Female torsos, but only torsos I see in my mind’s eye, no breasts, no pudenda. Only the frontal stretch of the lower chest and the abdomen. And they’re sexy torsos. The first one to flash is taut, almost muscular, like those of the ladies I see at the gym. Or some women I’ve known who were into fitness. In truth, I prefer softness. And soon enough, those appear in my consciousness as well. What to make of this quirk of desire? I want the torsos. I want to kiss them, lay my head on them, feel them. Only in sculptural remnants from the classical era have I seen torsos fetishized. And yet, haven’t they been objects of desire for me in my love life? Perhaps their images surface now because a lovely torso can be adored without a need for virility: There is nothing to enter.

I am a torso man, if a man at all.

●

Doodly—Ah—Bah

Today I drove a friend on his first post-op outing. His catheter was removed yesterday and he is feeling liberated—it’s troubling to walk around with a bag full of your own piss strapped to your leg. We go to a popular Cuban restaurant and afterward to a cigar factory depot to pick up his favorite smokes. I suggest a nice smoking room nearby where we can sip coffee and rum and light up, but he declines. That would be pushing it, he says.

I remember the weakness that follows surgery and I am reminded of how I have mended. Back to my old self. Well, no. Besides the absence of sex, there are the moments, sometimes whole days, of inertia induced by the hormone therapy. Plus irritability and depression. Last night, I had to leave my house and go for pizza at a local parlor; I just couldn’t stand being around my family and was afraid to lose my temper for no reason at all. Then I woke up in the middle of the night seized by fear. Of? Death, I think. The drama queen inside me wants to shout, “I’m dying of cancer!” Fortunately, the irritability, the fear and the depression all pass. And I think of myself as a cancer survivor instead. I’m in remission. The therapy is working. Though for how long?

My friend is in good spirits. It has been a domino effect. A mutual friend was diagnosed some years ago. He regaled me with detailed tales of his illness, surgery and recovery, and kept reminding me, like a Cassandra I did not want to hear, that I may have it, too. He would help me out with all he knew, he said, even if I thought I already knew all he knew because he had told me time and time again. When I was diagnosed, I felt like I had lost some sort of wager to him, one in which his bet was that I would have prostate cancer and he could guide me through.

And now it’s our friend, the third in our triad of prostate cancer victims. It’s the last one who now calls me to ask about the surgery, the catheter, the recovery time, the incontinence. Impotence? We haven’t even gone there. When you’re pissing in your adult diapers, getting it on is the last thing on your mind.

I put on a good face, the very example of a success, a survivor. In truth, I’ve told no one except my immediate family—and now the world—that neither surgery nor radiation eradicated the cancer and that I go every month for a hormone shot that has turned me into a eunuch. For all they know, I’m a Viagra-assisted stud. When they read this, they’ll know.

But the first member of our triad seems cured. And the third one told me his biopsy showed he was clean—mine didn’t. Perhaps I’m the third man on the match, even if I was the second. In any case, all three of us are alive. Alive.

What can I tell my friend he will miss most? Penetration? That’s how doctors measure the return of potency. Thus, the success rate claimed by nerve-sparing surgery. And, indeed, after the development of that more delicate operation—and after the availability of ant-erectile dysfunction medications—a man can manage enough of an erection to penetrate. Whether he can keep it up long enough for a nice satisfactory go, that’s another matter. But let’s give science its due. You can fuck again.

Yet, though I miss that experience to the point of despair, in my current un-libidinous state, what I miss most is the thrust toward seduction. Before living this way of life, I would have said, simply, seduction. That thrill of raising the level of flirtation to the point where touching and kissing begin, the protracted sweet agony of foreplay, or better yet, the moment when the die is cast. When the clothes are off and the players are in bed, right before sex begins.

By the thrust toward seduction I mean a thrill that may never and, in fact, seldom does, lead to lovemaking. It can be a goodbye kiss that lingers just a second longer than the weight of mere friendship can bear. Or one of the two people telling a story that borders, just borders, on a turn-on. It’s when a conversation turns intimate. When touch is frequently given or frequently accepted. It’s when you know seduction is in the air.

Something innate, probably primal, kicks in, and one starts thinking, aha!, this is going somewhere—later, if it indeed does go somewhere, you can reveal to one another you were harboring the same thoughts. This is when, as the crass saying goes, a man starts thinking with his dick. Never mind the other party is spoken for, and most certainly never mind if you are. Later in the flirtation there will be time to back off as the realization dawns that this may not be the best idea. But in that moment, in that particular speck of time, you feel supremely alive because you are supremely animal. Me Tarzan, you Jane. We both happy sexed-up apes. Not that conscious intelligence has stopped, no, no. On the contrary. The mind is revved up thinking of possible scenarios, and, most of all, what moves and countermoves should be made.

That these moments usually lead nowhere matters little. They are those instants of sexual attraction and acknowledgment. Falling in love ever so briefly. Sensing how the world is a cornucopia of carnal delight.

…and when the warm weather comes, the girls in their summer dresses…

●

I Lost It at the Movies

It was through another medium that the rendering of female beauty in Renaissance paintings—those Boticellis, Leonardos and Raphaels—stung me. The movies. Film’s erotic esthetics changed through the medium’s short history—the braless honeys of ’30s films, jiggling softly under silk, are sexy to me now, but when I first saw those movies I didn’t even notice their appeal. My own erotic history at the movies began in the ’50s, in pre-adolescence. Somewhere near the end of the Production Code, films got so overheated by self-censorship that steam came off the screen, but all I have is a vague memory of women wearing slips, a garment that would soon disappear from both films and life. It was in the ’60s that my erotic fixations with actresses began.

I was already a pretentious snob who preferred “foreign” films, so my objects of desire were European. There was, of course, Brigitte Bardot, who practically oozed sexuality, who seemed constructed to excite the male imagination and for no other purpose. God created woman, but Roger Vadim constructed la Bardot. Soon my glance shifted from France to Italy, where the reigning sex queen was Claudia Cardinale. It was not just her gorgeous body but her sweet, soft mouth and baby face that made men—and man-children like me—want her. I dreamed of going to Italy and falling in love with someone just like her.

Then I shifted again, this time to a Frenchwoman who acted in Italian films, Anouk Aimée. So beguiled was I by her that I developed a crush on a (married!) woman in one of my college French classes who resembled her, though I kept my infatuation to myself. Later in life, seeing the films that bewitched me, I found Cardinale too soft and plastic—and I first found her earthy!—and Aimée simply too skinny. Then I found her.

No matter how many times I watch The Conformist, I sympathize completely with Jean-Louis Trintignant driven to murderous complicity over his desire for Dominique Sanda. While other early objects of desire faded in their appeal as I revisited their movies, Sanda remained, on screen, sheer perfection. In The Garden of the Finzi-Continis she drives another man, her cousin, mad with desire, although this admirer, who, like the protagonist in The Conformist, finds his love and lust unrequited, keeps his passion bottled inside. When, after a tennis match, the two cousins seek refuge from the rain in a carriage house and Sanda’s white shirt is soaked, the sight of her nipples makes her cousin, and I, the spectator, practically swoon.

In The Conformist, her character is quite aware of her power, and when she needs her admirer’s help she merely slips down her ballet leotard so he can see her breasts, small, pink-nippled, perfect. If the erotic power of her image on the screen did not fade with time for me, something unexpected happened that made the effect of the passing of time on desire throw me into a spin.

I met her.

●

Pour Son Amour

The ninth injection, last week, did not require a conversation with the doctor. I merely went to the office, waited my turn, and bared my ass to the nurse who had been shooting me up with hormones all along. My medical experiences over the past years had made me lose what little modesty I had left and I made a joke about my monthly southern exposure to this young woman. The injection hurt more than usual, but once it was over I pulled up my pants and forgot about it.

Until the fatigue and the hot flashes set in. For most of the week I had little energy and had to interrupt my writing by going to bed and watching TV or napping. The hot flashes are hard to cover up. Fortunately, I live in a hot climate where breaking into a sweat is not unusual. Unfortunately, this is already winter, tropical winter, when it’s only mildly cool and sweating is unusual. Sometimes someone notices. I pay little attention. Women I know who are going through menopause are not embarrassed about saying they’re having a hot flash. But I feel weird about it. Perhaps because they’re the same hormonal upheaval as a woman’s, male hot flashes are just not macho.

The hypersensitive male ego. What a burden. But does that ego reside in my testicles? It would seem so by all the talk about cojones. Or does it reside in my penis? Impotence can lead to an ontological crisis. I can’t make my cojones or my cock work, so I must not be a man. And if I’m not a man, then I am nothing. I don’t exist.

But my testicles are still there, albeit nonfunctional. So is my penis, albeit nonerectile. I often thought the most tragic love story of all was that of Abelard and Heloise. How it saddened me that the man was castrated. Had he just been killed, he would’ve been just one more star-crossed lover. But castrated? That meant he had lost his ability to consummate his love. Or perhaps love at all. Can I love? Can I still be a lover?

Technically, I can still engage in the varieties of lovemaking I have practiced all my life. A woman can have orgasms with the help of my hands or mouth, even if I can’t. But do I want to? At the beginning of hormone therapy, I most certainly didn’t. I don’t feel like it, I thought. I’ve been cut off from libido, just like Abelard. Now, I’m not so sure. Some part of me longs to suck on breasts, but so far I’ve felt a strange timidity about it, different from that early adolescent timidity, which was, after all, a sheer layer of fear over a raging fire of hormonal combustion. No combustion this time. The timidity is about starting something that I may not want to finish. Many a time—and I think most men will recognize this and so will most women—I have started a lovemaking bout, usually a first time, and early on or half way through realized this was not as pleasurable as I thought. For some reason, the chemistry between the two of us was off. Still, I soldiered on, as do women who think, what the hell, I’ve come this far, might as well fuck him, even if it’s for the first and last time.

But even the thought that I may want to begin the beguine is new in this strange passage of my life. Could it be that my manhood does not reside in my genitals, but elsewhere? That I am libidinous beyond libido? I have not turned sweeter since my chemical castration (neither did Abelard, for that matter). I feel fatigued by the shots, but I don’t walk down the street any more or less badass than before—not that I often tried on that persona. And I feel as capable of harm as ever, perhaps even more so because the ordeals of the past six years have stripped me of layers of fear. I could join the army, go kill like any good old boy. And sometimes, when my condition sparks in me not the self-pity that leads to suicidal thought but the anger that leads to homicidal ones, I wish for war, for an automatic weapon in my hand and an enemy target I can annihilate. Fortunately, I don’t think this way for long.

Like Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City, I am a lover, not a killer. Where is Susan Sarandon and her heavenly breasts?

●

Screen Test

Angelic. In those movies where I desired her, installing myself in the position of the male protagonist—a confluence of what Roland Barthes called desire in the text and desire of the text—Dominique Sanda looked like an angel, even more because she had an edge of the perverse, which in The Conformist is more than an edge. And just like one can never possess an angel, this hapless spectator could never possess her angelic beauty. Or so I thought in the days when I toiled as an academic, far from cinema’s glamour, though admiring it as a lifelong viewer—addict may be a better word—and an occasional scholar and professor of film criticism. A professor of desire.

But then my career changed. I became a cultural journalist and began meeting those demiurgic creatures of the entertainment media, like musicians and actors. In most cases the meetings were professional: I was interviewing these people for newspaper or magazine articles. In a handful of cases, the meetings grew into warm acquaintances and even friendships. And always, at least while the interview lasted, I did my best to make a brief friendship of it. Some of these meetings were with attractive women, and I steered my libidinous impulses toward the work of connecting with my subject. It was a kind of flirtation, all the more exciting because there was no acknowledgment of anything but work. Still, I couldn’t help notice that Spanish actress Assumpta Serna, for example, was wearing no bra under her light and loose summer blouse when I interviewed her. When it came time to write, I harnessed my desire to my keyboard.

However, meeting an angel is something I never imagined. And meeting a post-angelic angel, well, that was, as Gabriel García Márquez said in another context, beyond imagination.

The very Assumpta Serna I had interviewed in 1986 apropos of her leading role in Pedro Almodóvar’s Matador, played the seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Maria Luisa Bemberg’s 1990 biopic Yo la peor de todas (I the Worst of All). That year, the film was shown at the Havana Film Festival, which I was covering for a magazine, but Serna was not in attendance.

Director Bemberg was there, as was the actress, older than Serna, who played her Mother Superior: Dominique Sanda. Frankly, I was not paying much attention to this film—I confess I have yet to see it—and was interested, instead, in Sidney Pollack, whose movie Havana was premiering in Havana. I got myself invited to a glamorous luncheon for some of the movie directors and stars attending the festival. And that’s how, at an outdoor table in the Marina Hemingway, an unabashedly sybaritic yachting playground in socialist Cuba, I found myself sitting close to Pollack, whom I would corner later for an interview, and across from his fellow director Paul Mazursky, a genial fellow who asked the woman seated next to me, “How is Bernardo?”

I forget how she answered the Bertolucci query because I was struck dumb by the fact that the woman next to me was the cinematic love of my life, Dominique Sanda. Years had passed since she had driven both Jean-Louis Trintignant and me mad with desire in The Conformist. She had aged, though not badly. Her body was still lean and taut, her face appealing. She was, I must say, a beautiful woman in early middle age.

But she was no longer an angel. Gone were the soft baby cheeks, that perfect face that only Raphael could have conjured. I could not see her eyes for she was wearing sunglasses, as was I under the tropical sun. I did my best to ignore her, to stop thinking, fuck, I’m sitting next to Dominique Sanda! So I paid attention to Mazursky’s chatter, a kind of hip Borscht Circuit wit, and I pursued Pollack, with whom I managed to spend the rest of the afternoon.

Still, I was haunted by the two Sandas. The perfect beauty on the screen, with her angelic face and nipples so enchanting they could turn a man to Fascism and murder. And the older yet still beautiful woman about my age sitting next to me. Despite my efforts to ignore her, I heard things she said that went straight into the file in my brain where details that have a bearing on sexuality are kept. She was, I realized, quite aware that she was no longer the world’s most beautiful woman. She commented—to Mazursky, not me—that this morning she had felt quite sure of herself, she felt strong and beautiful, and went out for a walk around the hotel—the Habana Libre, formerly the Havana Hilton, one of the grand hotels of the pre-Castro gambling era—full of confidence, even though, she admitted, no one recognized her. Thus, I concluded, her self-esteem had sagged now that she was no longer a puff-cheeked cherub. I took note. This is a woman who could be seduced by a man skilled at stroking the female ego. In other words, by me.

I also concluded, from her comments to the director, that she was rather lonely in this festival, in this city. A lonely, vulnerable woman I had desired for a good part of my life…alone!…in my hometown! Even as I tried to concentrate on my work as a reporter, a bird of prey inside my consciousness was sharpening his talons.

The luncheon passed, the afternoon passed, the full day and night passed. The following day I went about the business of reporting my story. I was returning to my hotel room at the Habana Libre after lunch when, in a crowded elevator, I found myself, once again, next to Dominique Sanda. I said hello and mentioned we were sitting next to each other the day before. She apologized for not recognizing me because I was wearing dark sunglasses. The elevator was rising to our separate destinations as she took a good look at me. The way a woman looks at a man.