An Intimate Life (5 page)

In surrogacy work the victories are small and incremental. It may not sound like much, but Mark had made definite strides. He was able to sustain an erection a little longer and he had grown more comfortable with himself and his body. Even though he couldn’t use his hands without my help, he learned to work with his mouth and tongue to pleasure me. That started in the first session when he took my breasts into his mouth, and by the last he had progressed even further. With luck, this would come in handy with a future partner.

Three weeks later on a hot July day, Mark and I met for our last session. Dixie yelled “come in” when I knocked on the door and she led me into yet another bedroom in the apartment that had a pile of clothes in one corner and a desk with an imitation Tiffany lamp that gave off an amber light in the other.

“You brought the mirror again,” Mark said when I entered the last of the borrowed bedrooms where I would see him.

“I’d like you to see your penis hard.”

I undressed Mark and myself. Mark’s penis was again already erect, so I took the mirror to the side of the bed to give him a view of himself aroused.

After he motioned to me that he was finished looking, I climbed into bed next to him.

“What do you think, seeing your penis this time?” I asked.

“I think it’s alright, really alright,” Mark said and smiled.

I held him for a few minutes and then he asked if he could taste me. I knelt over him and slowly lowered my vulva to his mouth. He kissed it softly and then pushed his tongue in. He swirled it around my inner labia and pushed it into my vagina. He moved it in and out rapidly and then sucked with his lips. He kissed my clitoris. It felt wonderful. After a few seconds I pulled back and brought the breathing tube to his mouth. I was aroused. When Mark signaled that he was done, I moved the breathing tube back to the respirator. I snuggled up next to him and circled my leg over his hips, feeling his penis poking into my thigh.

I put a condom on Mark and then brushed my finger around the head of his penis and squeezed the shaft lightly. Then I straddled his body so that his penis was inside of me. I began languorously moving up and down. My vagina started to flutter. I had also reached a high level of arousal. I slowed down to prolong the Plateau stage for both Mark and me. I breathed in and out and then remained still, asking him where he was on the arousal scale. “About eight,” Mark said. I kept still for another minute and then lifted myself up so that the shaft of his penis was partially outside of my vagina. Then I eased down and pulled up again. Mark orgasmed. He had stayed aroused and inside of me longer than he had in any of our past sessions. Even after he came Mark remained hard enough for me to move up and down again and achieve full orgasm myself.

He asked almost immediately if I came. When I told him I had, he beamed.

“Do you need more oxygen?” I asked.

“No. I actually don’t,” he said. “If only this counted as respiratory therapy, maybe I could get SSI to pay for it.” We both laughed.

Polio had caused Mark’s chest to be misshaped. It tented up a little and was hairless. I leaned forward and tenderly kissed it. Mark gulped and I grabbed the breathing tube. “No,” he sputtered. I realized that he was crying. “No one’s ever kissed my chest,” he said. Then my eyes filled with tears. “It’s about time they did.”

Mark stayed in touch with me on and off for years after our final meeting, and I was delighted when, in 1994, eight years after our first session, he called to let me know he had met someone. Susan first became aware of Mark by reading some of his poetry online. She was so moved by his words that she emailed him. An online relationship was born and soon it evolved into a real-life one. Mark was tickled that his fear of never finding anyone had been proven wrong, and he was thrilled to have entered the relationship with some experience behind him. “Thanks to you I didn’t have to say I was a virgin,” he said.

2.

the sin under the covers

M
y work has given me enough stories to fill this and any number of other books. Some, like Mark, center on people with extraordinary lives and challenges. But most are of those who grapple with more straightforward concerns, like erectile dysfunction or premature ejaculation. When I chip away the particularities and personal eccentricities, I almost always find that much of what they struggle with on the deepest levels are issues few of us would find alien. Loneliness, anxiety, fear, guilt, or shame about sexual feelings, low self-esteem, poor body image, and body ignorance are just a few in the constellation of all-too-common issues that I see every day.

My career as a surrogate now spans close to four decades and includes hundreds of clients. I consider myself blessed to have found this profession when I did and to be able to know that what I do changes people’s lives for the better. It has been a long and rich career. When people ask where and when I started, I answer 1973, in the San Francisco Bay Area, but that’s only partly true. Really, it started at least two decades before and three thousand miles east of California.

The city of Salem, Massachusetts, lies sixteen miles north of Boston on the coast. Salem Neck and Winter Island extend out from it like two fingers stretching into Salem Sound. By the time I was born in 1944, Salem had been cleaved into ethnic neighborhoods. The Polish, Italian, Irish, and French Canadian communities were largely composed of the descendants of immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth century to work in the city’s textile mills.

My family members on both sides made their way from France to Canada and then down to Massachusetts, bringing their French language and customs with them. Luckily, they also brought their recipes. My great-grandmother on my father’s side was a wonderful cook. When we went to her house, mouth-watering aromas of French food greeted us as soon as we crossed her door—including her specialties: cipate, a casserole layered with vegetables, meat, and pastry dough; creton, a pork pâté; and bouef bourguignon.

Salem is a place with deep ties to and constant reminders of its past, especially the Salem Witch Trials. The Witch House, home of Judge Jonathan Corwin, one of the judges appointed to hear some of the first charges of witchcraft in the late seventeenth century, still looms eerily at the corner of North and Essex Streets. Gallows Hill, where around twenty innocent women were hanged after being caught in the crosshairs of hysteria and religious fundamentalism, isn’t far from my childhood home. These days the city capitalizes on its history for tourism dollars and witchcraft kitsch abounds, but when I was growing up witches were no Halloween marketing ploy. To my child mind, they were very real. They served as warnings to stay on the right side of God—or at least the Church.

I was the first child born to Virginia and Robert Theriault. Almost two years later, my brother David came along; eight years after that my brother Peter arrived. With his job at the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, my father earned enough money for my mother to be a full-time homemaker. He started out as a salesman selling advertising for the yellow pages and later became a manger. Unlike most of his counterparts in management, my father didn’t have a college degree. He did, however, have a gift for art and for gab. Both of which helped him in his selling days. As he talked up particular ad opportunities for clients he would draw out what they would look like, bringing them to life on the sketch pad he took on all of his sales calls.

For the most part, my family was made up of hardworking, decent people. Many of them were inclined toward generosity and, for the most part, they were a lively and fun bunch who delighted in big family dinners, music, dancing, storytelling, and laughter.

Growing up, the person I was closest to was Nanna Fournier, my grandmother on my father’s side. She was funny, intelligent, and kind, and she was crazy about me. One of my earliest memories is bolting out of my stroller so I could run into her open arms. She also had a sharp fashion sense, and as I got older I was the only girl I knew whose grandmother gave reliable advice for looking hip.

For all of their merits, my family members were also people of their times. They were steeped in a rigid Catholicism and a pre-women’s movement mentality about the proper role of women. A woman’s job was to look pretty, win a stalwart husband, and then be a doting wife and mother and make a comfortable home.

My mother took this job seriously. Impeccably neat, slim, well-coiffed, and—frankly—obsessed with appearance, she never cut anything less than an attractive figure. She also kept an immaculate home and was often frustrated by what she considered to be a lack of appreciation on everyone’s part. As good as she was at it, I don’t think my mother ever enjoyed being a homemaker. She was often angry, and, in retrospect it’s easy to see why. The Valedictorian of her high school class, this bright and capable woman must have secretly yearned for more and felt unfulfilled with the endless cycle of cooking and cleaning and childcare that made up her days. At the time, though, all I knew was that no matter how perfect she or the house looked, my mother always seemed dissatisfied. “Didn’t anyone notice . . . ” she would say in exasperation after polishing the floor or washing the drapes or performing some other thankless domestic task.

When it came to sex, the religious, cultural, and social forces of the time converged to create a code of silence that could only be breached to issue harsh judgments and condemnations, usually aimed at women who had in some way transgressed. On one occasion my mother made it a point to note a woman in town, a former classmate of hers, who was “loose.” From the tone her voice I could tell that being loose was something very bad. Before I was even sure what it meant, I knew that I never wanted to find myself in this category of women.

My mother couldn’t even say the word “vagina,” much less talk about anything that might go into it. To her, it was a “hoosie,” and that was only when she absolutely had to refer to it. As for sex education, or at least what passed for it at the time, they left that to the nuns and teachers at St. Mary’s Immaculate Conception Elementary School, which I entered when I was five.

In second grade, my class started receiving training to make our first Holy Communion and preparing to make our first confession. The Baltimore Catechism served as our manual to all that was good and holy. Sometimes I was afraid to even look at this hallowed book, with its diffuse picture of Jesus and his sad, benevolent eyes staring out at the fallen world from the cover.

We learned the difference between mortal and venial sins and I had my first introduction to the sins of impurity. We were taught that touching “down there” was one of the gravest of mortal sins. It was a particular affront to God and anyone who did it was corrupting body and soul and risking eternal damnation. This conjured up all sorts of terrible hypotheticals. What if you touched down there and then died before you could confess? Of course, you would be hell-bound. I vowed never to touch myself in an impure way. I would keep my soul pure, even as I flailed in the temporal world.

Soon after starting school it became clear that something was different about how I learned. Much later, when I was an adult with two children, I would be diagnosed with dyslexia, but at the time my difficulty in learning how to read, write, and do math was taken as defiance, laziness, or just plain stupidity.

My classmates learned how to put sounds together and decode words and then sentences with what seemed like barely any effort. I was stumped by one-syllable words like “dog” and “cat.”

My mother enlisted herself in the effort to help me learn how to read. She promptly went out and purchased a series of “Dick and Jane” books and we had regular tutoring sessions after school. Each day we sat at the kitchen table and I would try to read the adventures of Dick and Jane and their dog Spot. My mother was no more enlightened about dyslexia than my teachers and less patient than some of them. I don’t know if she thought it would prompt me to learn faster, or if she was frustrated, or if she thought I was willfully misunderstanding basic concepts, but she resorted to physical punishment.