Normal Gets You Nowhere (3 page)

4. If it’s happening at the zoo, it could or should be happening for you.
We can learn a lot about natural sexual behaviors by looking at our friends in the animal kingdom. Up to 75 percent of bonobos’ sexual behavior is nonreproductive (these are the power girls of the animal kingdom). Male sea horses, long upheld as monogamous pillars of ocean society and thought to mate for life, were found in 2007 to be promiscuous, flighty, and more than a little bit gay (they also give birth to the babies). Two male lions have been observed fucking each other. Dolphins are known to pleasure themselves by rubbing against the ocean floor. To me, this says that things like homosexuality and masturbation are totally natural.

5. Do not pretend things are happening for you if they are not.
Women are big orgasm fakers. I would venture a guess that 95 percent of the women reading this book don’t even have real orgasms! We’re programmed to tell a guy we’re getting off even if we’re not. You need to figure out your own body. If your hand didn’t work, you’d go to a doctor for help in making it work, right? Well, your sexual health is no different. Experiment with vibrators and eroticism. Make appointments with yourself, so that you can start to get to know your body, since it’s complicated. Seek out information from varied and trusted sources.

If you love someone enough, you can occasionally choose to offer up a shag without getting any result for yourself, but I don’t recommend this as a ritual occurrence. The one thing you
can’t
do is lie. You can’t tell a guy he rocked you out or fake an orgasm to make him feel good. We don’t tell people who can’t carry a tune that they’re great singers, so why would we encourage bad habits and abilities in bed? The good news, I can report, is that your body awakens even more after you have a baby; after I had Ava, I felt like a pinball machine that had only just been turned on. (But don’t forget to ask for some extra stitches on your way out of the hospital to tighten your vagina and make future sex more pleasurable. Yeah, that’s right, your mom’s probably not going to tell you
that
either.)

6. Take no prisoners; and if you do, make sure you untie them in the morning, so they can go to work and make money.
(And vice versa. I mean, let’s face it; there’s nothing worse than having to call in with the truth: “I’m late today because I’m all tied up here at home!”)

7. Lovemaking does not always have to involve a penis and a vagina (or two penises or two vaginas).
Perhaps it means you rub my feet for two hours, and we feed each other. A four-hour lovemaking session isn’t necessarily what I want when I’ve worked around the clock in three cities all week. Learn to be sensual, not just sexual. It’s said that Mary Magdalene washed Jesus’s feet with her hair. Imagine waking up and loving a man so much that you literally express your love and adoration by patiently braiding his hair in floral essences. Alternatively, you could try wearing matching pajamas and eating Orville Redenbacher popcorn on the couch under a blanket while you watch your favorite TV show. These types of offerings can be beautiful and should be booked in your love calendar. (Yes, I believe we need to book our sex rituals with each other the same way we book meetings.)

Bathing, combing each other’s hair, reading favorite childhood stories to each other—there are plenty of ways to be sexy. A lot of married people I know don’t even know about tantra, a practice in which the male doesn’t come, because he wants to hold the sexual energy in his body rather than let it flow out of him. (Translation: if you’re involved in a tantric relationship, you’ll have sex for at least ten hours, but in those ten hours you might stop to have some sherbet or check your e-mail. This is a proper day of lovemaking.)

8. If you’re not getting fucked by midnight, go home.
Recently, one of my friends was in Paris producing fashion shows when she met a famous French deejay. Apparently they really hit it off, because he told her he’d be coming to New York in a few weeks and asked if he could stay with her. Excited, she agreed. She didn’t realize that she’d soon be in the process of changing apartments. So she booked a hotel room for herself and the deejay.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m invited to stay in a guy’s hotel room for more than three days and he’s footing the bill, I infer that sex will probably be in the mix, unless he’s a relative or religious figure. (As I said before, if you don’t want to be in a situation like this,
leave.
) But after three or four days of total confusion, my friend called to tell me it wasn’t happening with the French deejay. I immediately told her she needed to throw down and be honest. “Tell him, ‘If we are not going to have a sexual relationship, or at least an emotional relationship that’s going to lead to a sexual relationship, then you need to leave, because your Frenchness is bumming me out.’ ”

When I returned to my office the next morning, my friend was there, hanging out with one of my publicists, still shocked and devastated by this guy’s behavior. “I want you to go in my office,” I said. “Find those photos of me when I was your age, the ones that no longer look like me. I want you to know that even when I looked like
that,
I thought I was defective—that I was the problem! You have to accept the fact that if this were meant to be, he would have jumped on top of you long ago.”

The point is, we can put these situations on Freud, or we can put them on cultural differences, but we should
not
put them on our hotel bill.

9. If you’re sleeping with a married man, you’re helping him stay married.
A married man will never leave his wife for you. If you had asked me twenty years ago whether men or women end most relationships, I definitely would have said, “Men.” And in my two marriages I spent a lot of time wondering whether I was keeping my husband happy enough. But I now have enough life experience to know that when a man finally commits to a chick, he may eventually cheat on her with her best friend or drive her crazy eating Doritos on the couch all day like a sack of potatoes, but he is
never
leaving, regardless of how much he can’t stand her. He will always make her lower the boom. And even then she probably won’t be able to get rid of him! I mean, Spencer Tracy wouldn’t leave his wife for the great Katherine Hepburn, despite the fact that they spent thirty years together and costarred in nine films!

Years ago, after my first husband, Ronnie, made me kick him out,
*
I met a really beautiful German rock star, who was in the INXS of Germany. I could hardly believe my good luck. He was blonde, funny, great in bed and had the hottest south German accent I’d ever heard. To top it all off, he lived at the Chelsea Hotel. I mean, can you say
Traum,
baby? Within two weeks, we’d embarked on a massive love affair. We traveled together and hung out with each other’s friends, and every night after working in the studio, where he was recording an album with my musician friend, he appeared at my apartment on Hudson Street in the West Village.

One day about a month into our relationship, I ran into a friend of mine named Nico, who always knew everyone’s business. Nico mentioned that he’d heard I was dating this German rock star and wondered if I knew he had a three-month-old baby at home in Germany,
with his live-in girlfriend
. I felt as though I’d been hit in the head with a ton of bricks while being kangaroo-kicked in the heart. There was just no way. Nobody could fuck me so hard and so pure and be so corrupt at the same time.

“It can’t be the same guy,” I said, shaking my head. I was about to learn that men have an amazing ability to compartmentalize. (FYI, so do women, but we’re not talking about us right now.)

“Why don’t you ask him?” Nico suggested gently, almost daring me.

That night, when the rock star knocked on the door, I opened it only halfway.

“Hey, babe,” he said.

“Before you come in, I have a question for you,” I said accusingly. “Do you have a girlfriend? Better yet, do you have a
baby
?”

He nodded. “Yeah,” he replied, with a slight tinge of annoyance that said,
How inconvenient you’re finding out about this in the middle of our wild love affair.

That’s when I swung my fist and punched him harder than I’ve ever hit anyone in my life. Then I slammed the door in his face.

Outside, he banged and pleaded in vain. “Come on, we need to talk about this,” he said.

I just sank to the floor and cried and cried, vowing never to speak to him again.

The truth of the matter is, you just never know what’s going on with people. I believe that even if a guy tells you he’s separated, divorced, or about to get a divorce, it doesn’t hurt to do a little digging around on the Internet or even pay a few bucks for a background check. I mean, there are just so many different family systems out there today. It’s not enough to just ask if he’s married; you may need to come up with five or six ways to find out whether he’s in a relationship! Does he live with another human being besides his child? Is he in
any
sort of ongoing sexual relationship with someone to whom he is not related?

I’ve actually been forced to learn this lesson more than once. Five years ago, I’d become an eco-dater, meaning I was only sleeping with people I’d already slept with in the past. It was around then that I reconnected with my ex-boyfriend Jimmy, whom I’d dated on and off since 1991. We’d both had kids with other people, but he told me he was no longer intimate with his son’s mother, with whom he was still living “platonically” in L.A. And guess what? I fucking believed him! That’s right, at thirty-five years old, ten years after my affair with the German rock star,
I believed him!

Several months into our bicoastal relationship, I flew out to California to shoot an ad campaign. When I invited Jimmy to come, he told me to pick him up on the corner of his street. (Here’s a tip: don’t ever agree to pick anyone up on the corner.) As I drove up, my phone rang. “
Hit the pedal!
” he screamed. “Don’t stop driving! Go, go, go!”

Before I knew it, I was being chased down Wilshire Boulevard by a silver soccer-mom Volvo station wagon.
Oh fuck,
I thought.
It’s Jimmy’s wife.
(Here’s another tip, sisters: a married woman who is not sleeping with her husband
will not chase her husband’s lover down Wilshire Boulevard at ninety miles an hour in her silver hatchback soccer-mom Volvo.
Translation: wife is still sleeping with husband, boyfriend is a liar, and you are in danger.)

I stomped on the pedal of my rented SUV and tore off with the Volvo hot on my tail, weaving through traffic, trying to make a right turn while keeping my speed up. Eventually I lost her, which is when I had to admit Jimmy’s behavior was affecting my work. I was now late to my shoot. Fuck him!

If you have the bad luck of entering a relationship with someone who’s still in the process of leaving his last one (or hasn’t yet), I suggest you put on your listening ears. He will probably try to tell you his ex-wife or girlfriend is crazy or, better yet, hysterical, a word that is derived from a term meaning “in the uterus,” and go on to describe her faults. What he’s actually about to give you is a list of everything that’s wrong with
him
. It may sound at first as though the woman is in fact out of her mind, but there’s a good chance a lot of the problems she’s complaining about are the ones you’re about to inherit.

When my first ex-husband’s fourth wife—did you get that?—called me years after my divorce to complain about him, I was antiquing in southern Virginia with my daughter. It had been years since I’d been married to Ronnie—I was now a happily single mother—but hearing this woman talk about him made me feel as though my divorce had been yesterday. “He won’t let me take his car; he’s saying I should have thought to get my own tires changed. He looks like the Wolfman. He’s chasing me around saying he’s going to kill me!” she moaned. I mean, it was basically a play-by-play reenactment of my own breakup with my husband! Yes, Virginia, history and our lovers’ bad behaviors tend to repeat themselves.

It was just this past year, while working on this book, that I told Ava’s father, an Italian, the story of the German rock star and me, and how I confronted him on that fateful night. Ilario started laughing in his beautiful Italian accent.

“That’s funny,” he said. “That’s the difference between an Italian and a German man. A German man will tell you, ‘Yes, there is a baby,’ ” he said. “An Italian man will say, ‘Baby? What baby?’ ”

10. Just because you’re great lovers doesn’t mean you’re going to live happily ever after.
News flash: there is a huge difference between being great lovers and being partners. Just because a guy can throw down and fuck your brains out does
not
mean you’re going to be able to grocery shop together and get your bills paid. Yes, sex is superimportant, but it’s a small part of partnering. We shouldn’t call someone our partner or even our boyfriend if they’re really just our lover. Sometimes in life, you’ll have a lover who is not meant to be a partner. And sometimes it’s okay to just enjoy having a lover for a few years. We need to figure out the reasons we want a relationship, anyway. In some cases, we just want someone to baby-sit us, because we don’t want to be alone with ourselves.

This was the case when I married my second husband, Jeff. I had just been signed to a deal with Atlantic Records at the time, meaning I had a lot of time on my hands (I mean, what was I supposed to do all day? It only took me a few minutes to write a song!) and very little money, a lethal combination. It wasn’t long before I’d ditched the record deal and started my own company, though, while my husband remained a struggling actor. He’d always say things like, “We’re partners, baby.”

Oh really?
I’d wonder.
How exactly are we partners? You’re doing exactly what you want, which is working on your acting career, which generates no money for this house, while I’m earning cash, going to the grocery store, cooking the food, and doing all the other things that have been considered feminine responsibilities for thousands of years, only to be told I’m escalating and need some rest!