A Natural History of Love (47 page)

   If
cock
and
cunt
have a quaint and long history as language, they have an equally lush background as instruments for breaking laws, disturbing the peace, and challenging moral codes.

*In classical Latin
vagina
means “sheath for a sword.” Aeneas would put his sword into his
vagina
.

LOVE ON THE EDGE: ADULTERY, EXTRAVAGANT GESTURES, AND CRIMES OF PASSION

For sensitive, refined, affectionate, altruistic folk, we humans can certainly be a savage and sadistic lot. Even knowing what we do about our biological heritage, and having been less than angelic myself at times, even reading the shocking accounts of butchery in Bosnia in the newspapers, I still do not understand in a personal, intimate way how one can feel gratuitous malice, sadism, or the wish to torture another human being, regardless of how much anger or hatred may be bottled up inside. Or even how both complexions of good and evil can rule us simultaneously. Intellectually, of course, I understand only too well.

There have been times and places when committing adultery, for example, was the most daredevil and extravagant act anyone could risk. During the Middle Ages, husbands competed in the degree of cruelty they showed to their adulterous wives. To be less cruel than one’s neighbor was to lose face. Horror stories abound. One lady was forced to embalm her dead lover’s heart and then eat it. Another was presented to a group of lepers, who were invited to rape her. Another’s husband had his wife’s lover butchered and his bones put in a chapel, where she was sent daily to contemplate her crime and drink out of his skull. Only rarely were adulterous husbands punished. The wives risked, at the least, public humiliation (often accompanied by having their hair cut off), and at the most, gruesome torture and/or death. Their lovers risked castration or death. And yet they dallied. They gambled life and limb. They climbed onto the motorcycles of their passion, gunned the engines, and raced toward the edge of a great precipice, leaping into thin air at high speed, never knowing if they would land safely on the far rim. With so much at stake, it’s amazing people risked adultery at all; but they found it irresistible as a drug, one well worth hazarding death or dismemberment.

My backyard contains some living monuments to love’s extremes. Deep in the woods, a large mulberry tree rakes its branches across any passerby. Occasionally I prune it, but that simply encourages it to grow hardier and more compact, and the next season its broad shoulders reach even farther. According to legend, the berries of the mulberry once were white, but turned red after the death of the lovers Pyramus and Thisbe. Neighbors in the cramped warrens of Babylon, the two grew up together, and fell deeply in love, though their parents forbade them to marry. Night after night, they would whisper romantic confidences through a hole in the wall between their bedrooms. Finally, unable to bear even this separation any longer, Pyramus suggested a rendezvous at the tomb of Ninus, beside a mulberry tree both knew. Thisbe crept out first and headed straight for the tomb, but when she got there she startled a lioness at a fresh kill, its mouth dripping blood. As Thisbe fled, the lioness tore her cloak, but she managed to escape. Soon Pyramus arrived, saw her torn cloak and the lioness devouring a carcass, and assumed that his lover was being ripped to shreds as he watched. Agonizing over Thisbe’s death, crazed with despair, he drove away the lioness, then took his sword and rammed it into his side; and blood spurted all over the white mulberries.

Eventually, Thisbe began working her way back to the tomb. From afar, she could see that the lion was gone, and she hurried to await her lover, as planned. But to her horror she found him lying dead on the ground, saw his sword and her bloodstained cloak beside him, and understood at once what must have happened. “Your love for me killed you,” she cried. “All right, I too can be brave. I too will prove my love. Only death could have separated us, but now not even death will keep us apart.” With that, she plunged his sword into her heart and died beside him. As the only witness to this tragic scene, the mulberry tree felt such pity for the lovers that it stained all of its berries blood red, a reminder to passersby of the lovers’ fate, and of the lengths to which people will go for love.

If this story sounds like that of Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Iseult, it’s because many ancient tales of tragic love contain the same elements: young lovers, forbidden love, a rendezvous to consummate their love, the apparent death of one lover, followed by the suicide of the other, then the suicide of the first. A natural monument often marks the spot. Such stories revolve around the agony of separation, the sexual stimulant of having to surmount obstacles, and the need to prove the sincerity of one’s love.

Not all gestures are so solemn or absolute. Some are culinary—and a few silly. Legend has it that tortellini were created to honor Venus’s belly button: a Bolognese innkeeper spied on Venus through a keyhole, noted the anatomical details, and decided his love was best expressed through pasta. When a mistress of Louis XIV became petulant and jealous, the king decided that only a bold gesture would appease her. Insisting she lie down with her naked breasts revealed, he asked his artisans to cast a mold from one breast and produce glasses in its exact shape, so he could always sip champagne from her bosom. Today we still drink champagne from glasses fashioned after his mistress’s breast.

Why does love require such extravagant gestures? Why do lovers believe that life will be unlivable without that one, particular love? According to the hard economy that guides our lives, the more one pays for something the more precious the goods seem both to oneself and to one’s neighbors. So only a Taj Mahal is capacious enough, only a fifty-carat diamond brilliant enough, only suicide sacrificial enough.

“How was
Phantom of the Opera
?” I overheard someone ask a friend recently.

“To die for,” her friend replied in raptures.

The mulberry in the yard thrives in damp woodland soil. In the spring, the young twigs put out bushels of dark-green, saw-toothed leaves, which feel rough on the top but softly hairy underneath. Smallish green flowers sprout in clusters, and when the coblike fruits appear, songbirds eat them. I often see them sitting on a branch devouring what looks like congealed blood. A milky sap oozes from cuts in the mulberry bark; and in the fall, the leaves glow with a soft amber light.

Scattered around the forest, sleeping narcissus bulbs commemorate the abduction of a beautiful princess. According to one version of the Greek myth, Zeus created the flower to help his brother, the lord of the Underworld, who was in love with Persephone, Demeter’s daughter. One day, Persephone was gathering flowers with her friends when she spied a brilliant blossom across the meadow. Her friends hadn’t noticed it, and she laughed as she ran to discover what it was. She had never seen one so radiant before, with so many flowers bursting from the stems, and a seductive fragrance both sweet and animal. Just as she reached out a hand to caress it, the earth yawned open at her feet, and “out of it coal-black horses sprang, drawing a chariot and driven by one who had a look of dark splendor, majestic and beautiful and terrible.” He grabbed her and held her tight, and galloped away with her to his world of the dead, far from the sunlit joys of springtime.

Leucothoe
, a squat, bushy shrub outside my window, was named after a Persian princess, whose jealous husband chased her off a cliff and into the surging ocean below. Apollo took a fancy to her and changed her into a sea goddess, and, when he tired of her frothy ways, into a sweet-smelling plant. The bright red anemones which will bloom here in the summer take their name from Adonis, who was out hunting one day when a wounded boar turned and gored him in the groin, castrating him. It was an excruciating and deadly wound. By the time his lover, Venus, found him, he was delirious and nearly dead. Weeping, clinging to him, she moaned

Kiss me yet once again, the last, long kiss,
Until I draw your soul within my lips
And drink down all your love.

But, by then, he was far from her words or tears, down in the Underworld where she couldn’t reach him. As each drop of his blood fell to the ground, delicate red flowers bloomed. His severed penis was said to have run off and become his son, the erotic god Priapus.

Soon a meander of purple and plum hyacinths will sprout along a stone pathway near the garage. Hyacinths get their name from a young sweetheart of Apollo’s, a boy he accidentally killed. The two were having a friendly discus-throwing match when Zephyr, the west wind, who wanted the boy for himself but had been spurned, got into a jealous rage and blew on Apollo’s hand so that it slipped. The discus flew off at a freak angle and broke the boy’s neck. Horrified, Apollo pressed him to his heart and wept. As the boy’s blood trickled onto the grass, a single phallic flower grew from it, a beautiful purple column on whose petals two letters spell the Greek word “Alas.”

Today’s newspapers offer equally extreme (even mythic) sagas. A recent revenge scandal involves a highly respected chief judge of New York State, married for forty-one years with four children. Apparently, he was committing adultery with a woman who dropped him for someone else. The judge became unhinged. He began harassing the woman and her daughter with psychotic phone calls and blackmail. When he threatened to kidnap the little girl, the frightened mother notified the police, and thus began a public tale of passion, rejection, and desperation. The judge’s life was in tatters. His ex-girlfriend wanted nothing to do with him, his marriage was a disaster, and the political career he worked so hard at for so many years lay in ruins. Many had been touting him for governor. Having broken the law, he won’t ever be able to keep his job as judge. What interests me about this case, and those of crimes of passion in general, is how love may inspire people to act in ways that are obviously self-destructive. What the judge had to lose was vastly greater than what he stood to gain. Having lost control of his girlfriend’s love, he was willing to make do with controlling her fear. That’s not much of a replacement. He knew what the consequences would be. And yet he couldn’t stop himself.

Spurned lovers sometimes choose imaginative forms of revenge. One woman I know, whose husband left her for a younger woman, took the breakup very hard. It was a social aggression, as well as a blow to her self-esteem. She had defined herself as her husband’s wife; and after the divorce she continued to define herself through him—but now as his ex-wife. She indulged in large and small acts of revenge. For various reasons, she decided to move out of town, letting her husband and his new bride have the house as part of the divorce settlement. It was a large, modern, magnificently landscaped house with many rare plants in its gardens. The summer before she left town, she ripped up all the perennials and planted just enough annuals to enjoy that season. By the time her husband and his bride moved in, they’d find all the gardens dead.

I also know a woman, married to a writer, who left her husband somewhat melodramatically by creeping out of their bed one morning, filling her side of the bed with his books, and pulling the covers up over them. Another woman, when her boyfriend jilted her, dumped a big panful of heavily used Kitty Litter on her ex-boyfriend’s porch, with a note that read:
Consider yourself lucky I don’t raise elephants
. Yet another woman first learned that her boyfriend had found someone else when he called to say he was coming over to pick up his toiletries. That gave her just enough time to take his toothbrush, scrub the toilet bowl with it, then place it neatly back in his kit.

Men are vengeful, too, but they tend to be less subtle and more violent about it. The front page of my hometown newspaper ran this headline today:
MAN ALLEGEDLY DECAPITATES FOUR CATS
. The story explained that a twenty-nine-year-old man, “distraught” because his live-in girlfriend had left him, decapitated her mother cat and its three kittens and then turned on the natural gas in his duplex apartment and threatened to blow up the building. Ultimately, he surrendered to the police and was sent to a psychiatric hospital.

One popular novel about extreme revenge is Fay Weldon’s
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
. An ugly, heavy set, happily married suburban mother of two discovers that her accountant husband is having an affair with one of his clients, a petite, rich, delicately beautiful writer of pulp romances who lives in a fashionably renovated lighthouse. Insulted, degraded, and spurned, the wife christens herself a she-devil and plots diabolical schemes to totally humiliate and bankrupt her husband and his mistress. The schemes all work, and soon the lovers are in deep personal, financial, and professional turmoil. Then she goes one step further and, having sent her husband to prison for embezzling money she had secretly squirreled away in Switzerland, she metamorphoses into his mistress. With the help of massive plastic surgery (which includes having her legs shortened), she becomes the evil twin to her husband’s mistress, who by now has been harassed into an early death. Then the she-devil gets her semideranged husband out of prison, purchases the lighthouse, and takes him to live with her in what had once been his illicit love nest. There she keeps him in poverty and poor health, has lovers while he watches, and generally torments him to the end of his days.