Self (9 page)

Once at the McDonald’s near the school, at an unhappy moment of tension, I stood in front of the washrooms with Sonya, sweet Sonya. MEN said one door, WOMEN said the other. I thought, “No, no, this isn’t right. It shouldn’t be this way, not MEN, not WOMEN. It should be FRIENDS and ENEMIES. That should be the natural division of things, one that would better reflect reality. That way Sonya and I could go together through one door, and the others through the other.”

Let us return to the sea. Though for girls it seemed considerably less than a thrill, and certainly never an aesthetic or transcendental
experience, I was always fascinated by the female menstrual cycle. I don’t recall when I first learned of its elements. I think they entered my mind in odd, disconnected bits and it was only after I had acquired a fair knowledge that I suddenly realized the beauty of this monthly blood-letting. It struck me that there was nothing in the human drama so patently fertile as this ability to bleed vitally. I saw it in vivid contrasts of colour. Red from white, red from black, red from brown. That the menses of women who lived together, of the same generation or not, in the same bedroom or not, two or a boarding-schoolful, should become synchronized, like musicians who strike up the Jupiter symphony once they have finished tuning their instruments, was a source of deep wonder to me. I felt there was a latent unity among women, a unity for which I could find no equivalent among boys, try as I might. We were orphans among sisters. A girl could fight and be nasty, mock and degrade, pour forth pure venom from her mouth, cut herself off from everyone — yet still be connected by that melody of blood. Whereas if I cut myself off, I was truly alone. With nothing to tie me to the rest of life except my stubborn stupid metronome of a heart. The controlled randomness of the cycle — that periods could vary in length, in flow, could stop, even, depending on a myriad of factors; that ovaries worked together yet idiosyncratically, one ovulating three times in a row while the other remained idle — reminded me of the physics I was learning: the Big Bang Theory, Newton’s laws, the Theory of Relativity, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Science teachers explained these as referring to the vast cosmos beyond, as if they could so easily disguise what was plain to me: the principles of the female cycle were those of the universe. The cosmos was out there,
and next to me. Sadly, I was beyond this universe, outside it, in the vacuum of vacuums, at most able to contribute a few white comets of sperm.

Sonya’s cycle became an affair between the two of us. We went through the entire female hygiene section of a drugstore once, the only time in my life that I can remember looking at commercial products labelled in English without understanding what they were for. When she had cramps and wanted to go home to bed right after school, I would go with her and lie beside her until her father came home. I thought that if only I could understand the menstrual cycle, this slow, balancing ballet of hormones, this one mystery, I would understand everything. My curiosity became a starvation. I asked question after question of Sonya. In the calm, thoughtful way that was hers, she tried to oblige me with answers. Menstrual cramps in particular baffled me. I knew of cramps from swimming, in the calves, but there, in the lower abdomen — I could not comprehend it. In my body that area was a dull crossroads of organs: legs joined trunk, my intestines sat in the bowl of my pelvis, the bladder filled and emptied and on the edge hung my scrotum and penis. About as unknowable as a suburb. Certainly not the temperamental cornucopia of independent personality that Sonya lived with. I would ask her to describe her cramps to me. Her hands on her belly, looking up at the ceiling, her eyebrows knit, sometimes suffering from a touch of fever, she would try. “Well, it’s like … um … a pulling. Or a tearing. It tears. It’s like a … um … a cramp. It’s a cramp.” We always came back to that word, precisely accurate to her, utterly meaningless to me. I could only observe, making sure that the wet hand-towel on her forehead was fresh.

She once showed me a tampon she had just pulled out of herself. From its white string it dangled in the air between us, like a mouse held by its tail. Her face bore an expression of total disgust. I looked on quietly at this compact cylinder bright with blood. I brought my nose to it. Sonya’s expression went up another notch of disgust. A smell of iron! I was amazed. I had no idea. The earth itself. Pure Promethean rust. I stuck my tongue out, but Sonya gasped and pulled the tampon away. She turned and tossed it into the toilet bowl and flushed, and I watched it disappear in the vortex of water.

I took to sports and exercise at puberty in tandem with my discovery of masturbation. If my body could deliver such pleasure, it was worth cultivating. Over the years, in addition to the simple activity of walking, I have practised swimming, judo, cycling, squash, tennis, running, cross-country skiing, climbing, hiking and canoeing. But the exertion that gave me the greatest satisfaction during my teen years was weight training. Even before I saw my first weight room, I used to lock the door to my bedroom and place two volumes of encyclopedia on my back and strain my fourteen-year-old body to five push-ups. When I saw the muscle room at the YMCA I knew instantly that these machines would assure me a body much better than Britannica could. I eyed with envy the men who were in this room. They had such smooth, bulging muscles. I watched their power pushes and their power grunts. In the showers I spied on their beautiful bodies.

I began to venture into weight rooms, at first waiting till a machine was free, absolutely free, before daring to use it. If a man happened to come up unexpectedly, I would finish quickly and scurry away. He would move the weight pin from
the one or two lead bricks I managed to push to the twenty or thirty he could handle.

But I persisted and my confidence increased. I learned the proper ritual, never failed to do my twelve to fifteen minutes of stationary bicycle, did the number of repetitions that would build muscles of a spongy bulk, always exhaling on the exertion. I became familiar with weight-room etiquette, with my rights and responsibilities. There was never a machine that I didn’t carefully wipe with my towel after I had finished with it.

My ambition was large: I wanted a body, and especially a chest, like the ones I saw in the showers. I worked all round, devoting particular attention to my pectorals, deltoids and abdominals. The result was a chest that pleased me — not large, but well proportioned and nicely shaped. Only my legs seemed irretrievably thin, however much I exerted my quadriceps and calves.

I never saw girls in the weight rooms that I frequented, and rarely women, but this didn’t surprise me. It was only boys who had to create their bodies through strenuous efforts. Girls, it seemed, acquired theirs naturally. Only later, at university, would I see women pushing weights.

I must say that I have never regretted these hours of slow sweaty exertion. I forgot my acne and my other woes and I looked down on a body that felt to me lean and nimble, strong and supple. There’s a tightness of frame, a lightness of foot, that you feel when you are fit — it’s wonderful. Every pound I lifted, mile I ran, hour I skied, lap I swam, every limit of my physical capacity I pushed, I felt that I was reaching for life, that it was all expanding not just my lungs or this or that muscle, but my very vitality. A feeling much less powerful
than, but still akin to, what I felt when I gushed sperm into tissue paper.

My discovery of the sin of onanism was fortuitous. I was alone in my room, a volume from a series on sexuality in my lap, my penis in my hand. The volume was the fourth and last in a series and was intended “For Late Adolescents”. I suppose the authors strove to be didactic and clinical. Nothing doing. My imagination turned the book into racy erotica. Every significant word — penis, erection, vagina, breasts, penetration — danced in my mind like an obscene stripper. My favourite cross-sectional diagram was of The Man and The Woman doing it. They were reduced to their relevant essential parts, the rest being mere outline, and I loved the snug fit of those parts; not only were the vagina and uterus in cross-section, but the penis and testicles also, so the connection between the testes and the ovaries was direct, clear and leakproof, something that pleased the plumber in me. I also gazed at length at the cross-section of The Erect Penis, magnificent in its size and intent. My favourite frontal diagram was of the female internal parts, that unmistakable triangle of uterus with flourish of fallopian tubes and ovaries, a soothing shape I still see in vases with wilting flowers, or beasts and their horns. When I read of the
Voyager
space probe, which would drift off into the infinity of space after exploring Jupiter and Saturn and which bore a plaque for the possible perusal of alien eyes, I thought that, in addition to the greetings in a hundred and fifty languages, including whale language, and the various scientific data, NASA should have added this anatomical Golden Mean, perhaps a little simplified, to say, “We are the people of this shape.”

I am straying from my point. At the age of which I am speaking, I went through this volume with wide open eyes and a beating heart and not a thought about the befriending of space aliens. I mention words and various diagrams that jumped out at me; these were only a prelude. What opened my eyes the widest, made my heart beat the hardest, were the photos. Black and white, headless, artless, bodies that could only be called ordinary — these photos couldn’t have been more clinical had they been of corpses in a morgue. Still, the nudity of these boys and girls, men and women, excited me deeply. To this day I remember the Adult Woman; I only wished I could see her face. I was sorry there wasn’t a single shot of an erect penis, adolescent or adult. I longed to see this pure expression of male desire, still couldn’t quite believe that such an extraordinary thing could be.

My pleasure at this stage was visual. Occasionally I brought my penis into the show, pressing its softness against a picture that I particularly liked, but usually it was a simple bystander, no more. If, of late, I had involved it more in my enjoyment of the book, it was only because its new, slow growth of dark hairs made it more interesting to me. There was still no real connection between it and the pictures.

But one day my hand happened to start a to-and-fro motion with my foreskin. I don’t know where the idea for this came from. I was not searching for anything, and I had certainly not received any advice. It was a common act of genius.

The motion was distinctly pleasurable. I continued it, somewhat increasing the speed. Rapidly I had a taut erection, a new state of affairs. But I didn’t stop to consider it. A strange physical tension, a compelling ache, drew me on. “This is
quite something,” I thought, breathlessly, not knowing what I was doing, where it would lead.

I lay back on the bed. I half-closed my eyes. “Oh, this is
really
quite something.”

Faster still.

Then, in a spasm of physical tension, a response both fresh and ancestral was triggered by my body for the first time. A sort of convulsive exaltation overcame me, a rapture that pulsed through me in five waves, each one cresting in an explosive white gush from my penis.

When it was over, I stared, drop-jawed and astounded. The stuff was all over my hand, my shirt, the book, my face, my hair, the wall behind me. It had a smell, a colour, a stickiness like nothing I had ever seen.

I had
no idea
such pleasure was possible. My God, how could it be a secret?

For a fraction of a second I wondered if this was normal. Quickly the thought vanished. If this was abnormal, then I was joyfully bound for the nether depths of abnormality. I looked again at the sperm-splattered book. Its authors suddenly became great, winking jokesters, going on so seriously about human reproduction. I laughed. So this was part of it. What a truly wondrous thing! Positively unearthly. A revelation. No wonder the earth was overpopulated.

I cleaned up meticulously, though I could do nothing about the wrinkled spots on the page where the sperm had had time to seep in. I put the book back in exactly, precisely the position I had found it. I went to take a shower. This matter would have to be researched further, investigated, pursued. Why, right now, in the shower.

Upon my discovery of masturbation the universe once again split into two. There was the human and there was the ecstatic. The task was simple: to accommodate the two. All my life I have sought to do this. Mostly I have failed.

I met Sonya at a time when I was still hugging the walls of the school corridors, hoping to be invisible. Classes were just over and I was nervously on my way to being happy away from school. My hand was reaching for the bar of the double metal doors, for freedom, when I heard a breathless question behind my back.

“You speak French, don’t you?”

She was a girl in my grade but in a different class. She had short brown hair and brown eyes and a very slight down moustache. She was a little out of breath. She must have been running to find me.

“Yes, I do.”

She smiled and diverted her eyes. “Gem le frawnsay. Say la ploo bel long doo monde.”

Amidst the Anglophone intolerance that reigned in the capital of my country during the years I lived there, where those who spoke two languages were despised by those who spoke only one (and poorly at that), she was the only person my age I met who saw French as an oral alchemy, able to gild instantly the most ordinary, leaden communication. That I spoke the language fluently turned me in her eyes into a magician of the highest order. Upon her request, commenting on the weather, I would say, “Le temps est très froid,” and through this alternative way of saying things I would transform the reality of the nasty cold weather and she would warm up to it. Her own French, beyond her simple declaration of
love for ir, was aatrocious, mired as it was in a quagmire of tortured syntax, criminal grammar and non-Gallic vocabulary. But I am thankful Sonya didn’t have better teachers or more practice, for if she had she might have been less enamoured of the language and we might never have met.