An Intimate Life (23 page)

Tom greeted me with a welcoming smile. He was one of only a few therapists in the Bay Area (San Francisco) who were training surrogates and referring clients to them. The field was in its infancy and the training was rapidly evolving. We talked for two hours and Tom asked me questions about my background, my relationship with my family, and my attitude toward sex. We had an instant rapport. I think Tom understood immediately that I was well past the point in my own sexual evolution where I would demonize anyone for having a sexual problem. It would be the first step in our training together. Then Tom asked me to do something that made me suspicious. “Why don’t you take off your clothes so I can see what you’d look like with clients,” he said. Was this his way of hitting on me? Also, I didn’t shave my legs or my underarms at the time. I wondered what he would have to say about that. Our meeting had gone well and I liked Tom, so I decided to take a chance. I pulled my loose-fitting dress over my head and took off my underwear. “You look good to me,” Tom said. I was relieved that he didn’t make a pass at me, but I still thought it was inappropriate. I wanted to be a surrogate, not a fashion model. Did my body really need to be cleared before I could start training? Tom never mentioned another word to me about this, so, if it was a test, I supposed I had passed.

I also began training to be a phone counselor at SFSI. They had established an 800 number for people to call with questions about sex. For one of the first times in U.S. history people could pick up the phone, ask questions anonymously, and get reliable information and referrals for expert help. In my initial interview with a SFSI staffer I was asked a number of questions and several hypothetical scenarios were put to me. For example, my interviewer asked what I would do when callers said that they feared they were masturbating too much. “I would ask them what they meant by ‘too much.’ If they’re masturbating because they are afraid to meet someone or if it’s getting in the way of normal daily functioning, like going to work, I’d refer them to a therapist. If they’re doing it because it’s pleasurable and relieves stress, I’d probably tell them that it’s perfectly natural,” I answered.

SFSI training allowed me to be an effective phone volunteer, and it also augmented my surrogacy education. As part of the training, we watched films of people engaging in a variety of sexual practices and then discussed our reactions to them. We were encouraged to talk frankly and to honestly examine our responses and what they might tell us about ourselves. The movies showed heterosexual sex and both male and female homosexual sex. One showed an older couple—and I mean as old as my grandparents—making passionate love. To my surprise, I got aroused when I watched a film of gay men having sex. When I saw one of a man and woman having anal sex I was both excited and repelled. Taboo can be a turn on.

Through discussions with fellow trainees and SFSI staffers I realized that what was more important than my visceral reactions was my ability to suspend my judgment of the consensual acts I had witnessed, and of the people who called for information or help. It was okay if a particular practice didn’t appeal to me. What would make me an effective educator and sounding board was not the range of my sexual repertoire, but my ability to empathize and maintain objectivity.

A key part of my surrogacy training came when I attended a two-week workshop with Tom at the Department of Public Health in Berkeley. If Tom had made a misstep in our initial meeting by asking to see my body, he had redeemed himself by being so generous with his time and expertise. The workshop was led by a husband-and-wife therapist team who had trained with Masters and Johnson. They laid out the principles and practice of conjoint therapy. Few professionals use this model today because it is not cost-effective, but at the time it was an exciting new form of couples therapy. It was always conducted by a male-female team, and the hope was that both partners in the couple would feel that they had an ally. In the workshop, we got a crash course in anatomy and for the first time I learned the complexity of both male and female genitalia. They showed us the undifferentiated genital chart, which I continue to use in my practice today. It reveals how the fetus differentiates into male or female and the similarities in genital tissue. Much of what Tom and I learned became part of my surrogacy work.

Between my training to be a surrogate and my SFSI training, my knowledge of human sexuality exploded. I realized just how many assumptions and misconceptions I harbored. I met people from all walks of sexual life and many of the biases I held about them were challenged. For example, I always thought people who were involved in sadism and masochism (S&M) had to be pretty unsavory. To my surprise, I learned that they took great care not to cause any real harm during sex play. Ironically, another thing I learned was that it was okay to say no. People didn’t have to continue with or engage in any activity just because they were taking a more open and experimental attitude toward sex. This may not seem noteworthy now, but for someone who grew up in the ’50s it was a real eye-opener to be told that, even as a woman, I had the right to choose or not choose any kind of sex, no matter the circumstances.

One absolutely invaluable skill I learned was how to listen. This was tough because I love to talk! In both my SFSI and surrogate training I had to learn how not to jump in, but rather give people the space they needed to say what they wanted to say. This made me a better surrogate, but it also made me a better wife, mother, and friend.

I became part of a wonderful, intelligent, and supportive community of people who were questioning, sharing, and seeking genuine knowledge about sexuality. I was on my way to a meaningful career, making lasting friendships, and, frankly, having a hell of a lot of fun.

One thing we didn’t discuss was safe sex and the use of condoms. Because of my Dalkon Shield nightmare I was at very low risk of getting pregnant. In this pre-AIDS era the greatest fear was herpes. Most other STDs could be cured with a stiff dose of antibiotics. I knew this not just because of all of my recent training, but because five years earlier I had a brush with venereal disease when one week after the swingers party in Concord, we got a call from our host: The diva had gonorrhea.

11.

more than a client: bob

I
n 1979, the Canon AE-1 was a camera that any serious amateur photographer would have been happy to own. When my client Bob handed it to me, along with its motor-drive accessory, I had to use both hands to hold it. It weighed probably five times as much as my Instamatic, and its lens was ringed with number sequences that looked like some kind of code.

“I can’t accept this,” I said.

Just a few minutes ago, Bob had sat in the bathroom chatting with me while I took a shower. When I closed my eyes to rinse the shampoo out of my hair the room went quiet. I opened them and he was gone. I stepped out of the shower stall, towel-dried my hair, and wrapped myself in a terrycloth robe. “Bob?” I called. Just as I walked out of the bathroom I saw him coming down the hall toward me with the camera in his hand.

“It’s way too generous,” I said.

Bob blinked back tears.

“I really want you to have it. You’ve changed my life, Cheryl, and this is my way of saying thank you. Please, let me do this.”

I knew why he had chosen a camera. In one of our early sessions Bob had told me about his love of photography and how he had set up a dark room in his closet at home. I mentioned that I had missed capturing so many precious moments in my children’s lives because I didn’t have a reliable camera or much skill in using the one I had.

“Bob, this is so sweet, really, but I wouldn’t know how to use it.”

“I could teach you,” he said quietly. “How about I come down here on my day off and show you. It’s easy. We can go to the park and take some outdoor shots.”

“Hmmm, I guess so. Okay, let’s do it.” I said.

With that, I made a date with one of my clients. That was the last of our eight sessions together and a personal relationship had tentatively bloomed alongside our professional one for the last few weeks of our work together.

Because of his work Bob was almost always my last client of the day. We started our sessions at around four in the afternoon and he normally stuck around afterward, talking to me while I showered and got made up in my office bathroom before he walked me to my car.

When he first came to see me, Bob was thirty years old, four years my junior. He had a friendly face framed by wavy, shoulder-length hair. He was ruggedly handsome. Perhaps it was the pensiveness in his eyes or the way he hesitated before he crossed my office doorway, but the first thing I thought when I saw him was that he had a gentle soul.

I sensed his nervousness the minute he walked in, so I made small talk. As we chatted, I saw his anxiety abate a little. His shoulders dropped and he let his back, which he had held as straight as a pool cue, relax to the point where he allowed himself to lean back in the overstuffed chair across from me.

During our first session, I’d asked Bob to tell me a little about his sexual history.

The shyness I saw in him had been with him for as long as he could remember. It was one reason why he didn’t have a girlfriend in high school. Another was that he had facial scarring caused by acne that made him too self-conscious. At times it seemed like he was the only boy in his high school who was too awkward to reel in a girlfriend. He was quietly attracted to many of the girls at school and more than once he watched wistfully as a friend paired off with one of his secret crushes.

In late 1968, just as he turned twenty, Bob was drafted into the army; after a year of training, he was sent to Vietnam, where he was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division as a parachute rigger. It was October 1970 when he took his R & R in Bangkok, where prostitution was legal and regulated by the government. The short flight to Thailand was full of raucous and horny young soldiers. Bob sat in quiet excitement and thought about how he would soon accomplish something that he felt was long overdue: losing his virginity. He felt a combination of apprehension, anticipation, and giddiness about this impending rite of passage.

When he arrived in Bangkok he checked into a hotel, unpacked, and then headed into the steamy night. He soon found a taxi driver who drove him along the well-traversed route to a local “massage parlor.” As he opened the front door of a nondescript building, Bob was led by the Mamasan through a dimly lit hallway that spilled into a large room. There stood a small crowd of other GIs with big grins on their faces gazing through a one-way mirror at several scantily clad women perched on plushly carpeted bleachers. They were casually reading or chatting with one another, each with a number pinned to her blouse. “Fifteen, twelve, eight, seventeen . . . ” The soldiers rattled off their choices. It was a scene he could only think of as bizarre and it jolted his middle-class American sensibilities to the core. When it was his turn, Bob quietly selected a lovely, mature-looking woman and paid the Mamasan $25 for twenty-four hours.

He flagged a taxi and went back to the hotel with the woman, whose name was Chamneon (pronounced Chom-Nee-In). Once in his room, she slowly and confidently began to undress herself, while Bob tried to fill the awkward silence with small talk. Bob took off his clothes and they got into bed. Chamneon was exotically beautiful. He had fantasized the whole way back to the hotel about making love to her. They kissed softly and then passionately, their tongues darting around each other’s mouths. He cupped her small breasts and ran his hands along her smooth back and stomach until he got to her vulva. He fingered her clitoris and she wrapped her long fingers around his penis, which, to Bob’s dismay, seemed like it had gone to sleep. What was going on? he wondered. It wasn’t like he couldn’t get erections. He masturbated as much as any healthy twenty-year-old male. Why now, with a willing and naked woman next to him, did his penis remain flaccid?

He reached for his Thai-English phrasebook and thumbed through it frantically. He wanted to tell Chamneon that he would just need a minute or two. He said a few garbled Thai words to his perplexed date. In retrospect he saw how comical this must have looked, but at the time he was too embarrassed and confused to find anything funny about it. He lay with his arm around Chamneon. He tried a few more times to get hard, but each attempt ended in frustration.

It turned out that Chamneon spoke a little English. Bob discovered this as they talked for much of the night. He learned that she was a twenty-five-year-old single mother to an eight-year-old girl. She had left a physically abusive husband and now supported herself, her daughter, and the rest of her family with the only job available to her. Bob started to feel real warmth and sympathy for Chamneon.

While he was disappointed about not losing his virginity, he tried to keep his perspective. He was, after all, in a foreign country with an unfamiliar culture and language. He was with a prostitute who, most likely, was relieved by his glitch. He would give himself a break for his failure and try again.

The next evening Bob returned to the brothel. He ran into some of the same servicemen he had seen the night before, but unlike them he wasn’t there to sample a different woman. He paid to have Chamneon for the rest of the week. He enjoyed her company as she showed him around the enigmatic city.

Chamneon took Bob to The Grand Palace, The Temple of the Reclining Buddha, and the stunning beaches on the Bay of Bangkok, where they walked in the surf. Each night when they returned to his hotel room, he tried unsuccessfully to get an erection and have intercourse. Soon the week was over and he returned to Vietnam still a virgin.

“I often wonder what became of Chamneon,” Bob said.

“Did you try again with anyone else before coming home?”

“No, I was too discouraged. I took another R & R in Australia, but stayed away from the prostitutes. I was probably the only one of my friends who did.”

Shortly thereafter, with his two-year commitment to Uncle Sam fulfilled, Bob found himself on a chartered jet with 150 other ecstatic GI’s heading back to “the world.” He had plenty of time for reflection on the fourteen-hour flight.