The Argonauts (11 page)

Do you want to be right or do you want to connect?
ask couples’ therapists everywhere.

The aim is not to answer questions, it’s to get out, to get out of it
.

Flipping channels on a different day, we landed on a reality TV show featuring a breast cancer patient recovering from a double mastectomy. It was uncanny to watch her performing the same actions we were performing—emptying her drains, waiting patiently for her unbinding—but with opposite emotions. You felt unburdened, euphoric, reborn; the woman on TV feared, wept, and grieved.

Our last night at the Sheraton, we have dinner at the astoundingly overpriced “casual Mexican” restaurant on the premises, Dos Caminos. You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more “male,” mine, more and more “female.” But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.

Many women describe the feeling of having a baby come out of their vagina as taking the biggest shit of their lives. This isn’t really a metaphor. The anal cavity and vaginal canal lean on each other; they, too, are the sex which is not one. Constipation is one of pregnancy’s principal features: the growing baby literally deforms and squeezes the lower intestines, changing the shape, flow, and plausibility of one’s feces. In late pregnancy, I was amazed to find that my shit, when it would finally emerge, had been deformed into Christmas tree ornament—type balls. Then, all through my labor, I could not shit at all, as it was keenly clear to me that letting go of the shit would mean the total disintegration of my perineum, anus, and vagina, all at once. I also knew that if, or when, I could let go of the shit, the baby would probably come out. But to do so would mean
falling forever, going to pieces
.

In perusing the Q&A sections of pregnancy magazines at my ob/gyn’s office before giving birth, I learned that a surprising number of women have a related but distinct concern about shit and labor (either that, or the magazine editors are making it up, as a kind of projective propaganda):

This question confused me; its description of labor did not strike me as exceedingly distinct from what happens during sex, or at least some sex, or at least much of the sex I had heretofore taken to be good.

No one asked,
How does one submit to falling forever, to going to pieces
. A question from the inside.

In current “grrrl” culture, I’ve noted the ascendancy of the phrase “I need X like I need a dick in my ass.” Meaning, of course, that X is precisely what you
don’t
need (dick in my ass = hole in my head = fish with a bicycle, and so on). I’m all for girls feeling empowered to reject sexual practices that they don’t enjoy, and God knows many straight boys are all too happy to stick it in any hole, even one that hurts. But I worry that such expressions only underscore the “ongoing absence of a discourse of female anal eroticism … the flat fact that, since classical times,
there has been no important and sustained Western discourse in which women’s anal eroticism means
. Means anything.”

Sedgwick did an enormous amount to put women’s anal eroticism on the map (even though she was mostly into spanking, which is not precisely an anal pursuit). But while Sedgwick (and Fraiman) want to make space for women’s anal eroticism to
mean
, that is not the same as inquiring into how it
feels
. Even ex-ballerina Toni Bentley, who knocked herself out to become the culture’s go-to girl for anal sex in her memoir
The Surrender
, can’t seem to write a sentence about ass-fucking without obscuring it via metaphor, bad puns, or spiritual striving. And Fraiman exalts the female anus mostly for what it is not: the vagina (presumably a lost cause, for the sodomite).

I am not interested in a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics, of my anus. I am interested in ass-fucking. I am interested in the fact that the clitoris, disguised as a discrete button, sweeps over the entire area like a manta ray, impossible to tell where its eight thousand nerves begin and end. I am interested in the fact that the human anus is one of the most innervated parts of the body, as Mary Roach explained to Terry Gross in a perplexing piece of radio that I listened to while driving Iggy home from his twelve-month vaccinations. I checked on Iggy periodically in the rearview mirror for signs of a vaccine-induced neuromuscular breakdown while Roach explained that the anus has “tons of nerves. And the reason is that it needs to be able to discriminate, by feel, between solid, liquid and gas and be able to selectively release one or maybe all of those. And thank heavens for the anus because, you know, really a lot of gratitude, ladies and gentlemen, to the human anus.” To which Gross replied: “Let’s take a short break here, then we’ll talk some more. This is
Fresh Air
.”

A few months after Florida: you always wanting to fuck, raging with new hormones and new comfort in your skin; me vaulting fast into the unfuckable, not wanting to dislodge the hard-won baby seed, falling through the bed with dizziness whenever I turned my head—
falling forever
—all touch starting to sicken, as if the cells of my skin were individually nauseated.

That hormones can make the feel of wind, or the feel of fingers on one’s skin, change from arousing to nauseating is a mystery deeper than I can track or fathom. The mysteries of psychology pale in comparison, just as evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.

Our bodies grew stranger, to ourselves, to each other. You sprouted coarse hair in new places; new muscles fanned out across your hip bones. My breasts were sore for over a year, and while they don’t hurt anymore, they still feel like they belong to someone else (and in a sense, since I’m still nursing, they do). For years you were stone; now you strip your shirt off whenever you feel like it, emerge muscular, shirtless, into public spaces, go running—swimming, even.

Via T, you’ve experienced surges of heat, an adolescent budding, your sexuality coming down from the labyrinth of your mind and disseminating like a cottonwood tree in a warm wind. You like the changes, but also feel them as a sort of compromise, a wager for visibility, as in your drawing of a ghost who proclaims,
Without this sheet, I would be invisible
. (Visibility makes possible, but it also disciplines: disciplines gender, disciplines genre.) Via pregnancy, I have my first sustained encounter with the pendulous, the slow, the exhausted, the disabled. I had always presumed that giving birth would make me feel invincible and ample, like fisting. But even now—two years out—my insides feel more quivery than lush. I’ve begun to give myself over to the idea that the sensation might be forever changed, that this sensitivity is now mine, ours, to work with. Can fragility feel as hot as bravado? I think so, but sometimes struggle to find the way. Whenever I think I can’t find it, Harry assures me that we can. And so we go on, our bodies finding each other again and again, even as they—we—have also been
right here
, all along.

For reasons almost incomprehensible to me now, I cried a little when our first ultrasound technician—the nice, seemingly gay Raoul, who sported a little silver sperm-squiggle pin on his white coat—told us at twenty weeks that our baby was a boy, without a shadow of a doubt. I guess I had to mourn something— the fantasy of a feminist daughter, the fantasy of a mini-me. Someone whose hair I could braid, someone who might serve as a femme ally to me in a house otherwise occupied by an adorable boy terrier, my beautiful, swaggery stepson, and a debonair butch on T.

But that was not my fate, nor was it the baby’s. Within twenty-four hours of hearing the news, I was on board. Little Agnes would be little Iggy. And I would love him fiercely. Maybe I would even braid his hair! As you reminded me on the drive home from our appointment,
Hey, I was born female, and look how that turned out
.

Despite agreeing with Sedgwick’s assertion that “women and men are more like each other than chalk is like cheese, than ratiocination is like raisins, than up is like down, or than 1 is like 0,” it took me by surprise that my body could make a male body. Many women I know have reported something of the same, even though they know this is the most ordinary of miracles. As my body made the male body, I felt the difference between male and female body melt even further away. I was making a body with a difference, but a girl body would have been a different body too. The principal difference was that the body I made would eventually slide out of me and be its own body. Radical intimacy, radical difference. Both in the body, both in the bowl.

I kept thinking then about something poet Fanny Howe once said about bearing biracial children, something about how you become what grows inside you. But however “black” Howe might have felt herself becoming while gestating her children, she also remained keenly aware that the outside world was ready and waiting—and all too willing—to reinforce the color divide. She is of her children, and they are of her. But they know and she knows they do not share the same lot.

This divide provoked in Howe the sensation of being a double agent, especially in all-white settings. She recalls how, at gatherings in the late ’60s, white liberals would openly converse “about their fear of blacks, and their judgments of blacks, and I had to announce to them that my husband and children were black, before hastily departing.” This scene was not limited to the ’60s. “This event has been repeated so many times, in multiple forms, that by now I make some kind of give-away statement after entering a white-only room, one way or the other, that will warn the people there ‘which side I am on,’” Howe says. “On these occasions, more than any others, I feel that my skin is white but my soul is not, and that I am in camouflage.”

Harry lets me in on a secret: guys are pretty nice to each other in public. Always greeting each other “hey boss” or nodding as they pass each other on the street.

Women aren’t like that. I don’t mean that women are all back-stabbers or have it in for each other or whatnot. But in public, we don’t nod nobly at each other. Nor do we really need to, as that nod also means
I mean you no violence
.

Over lunch with a fag friend of ours, Harry reports his findings about male behavior in public. Our friend laughs and says:
Maybe if I looked like Harry, I’d get a “hey boss” too!

When a guy has cause to stare at Harry’s driver’s license or credit card, there comes an odd moment during which their camaraderie as two dudes screeches to a halt. The friendliness can’t evaporate on a dime, however, especially if there has been a longish prior interaction, as one might have over the course of a meal, with a waiter.

Recently we were buying pumpkins for Halloween. We’d been given a little red wagon to put our pumpkins in as we traipsed around the field. We’d haggled over the price, we’d ooed and ahed at the life-sized mechanical zombie removing his head. We’d been given freebie minipumpkins for our cute baby. Then, the credit card. The guy paused for a long moment, then said, “This is her card, right?”—pointing at me. I almost felt sorry for him, he was so desperate to normalize the moment. I should have said yes, but I was worried I would open up a new avenue of trouble (
never the scofflaw
—yet I know I have what it takes to put my body on the line, if and when it comes down to it; this knowledge is a hot red shape inside me). We just froze in the way we freeze until Harry said, “It’s my card.” Long pause, sidelong stare. A shadow of violence usually drifts over the scene. “It’s complicated,” Harry finally said, puncturing the silence. Eventually, the man spoke. “No, actually, it’s not,” he said, handing back the card. “Not complicated at all.”

Every other weekend of my pregnant fall—my so-called golden trimester—I traveled alone around the country on behalf of my book
The Art of Cruelty
. Quickly I realized that I would need to trade in my prideful self-sufficiency for a willingness to ask for help—in lifting my bags in and out of overhead compartments, up and down subway steps, and so on. I received this help, which I recognized as great kindness. On more than one occasion, a service member in the airport literally saluted me as I shuffled past. Their friendliness was nothing short of shocking.
You are holding the future; one must be kind to the future
(or at least a certain image of the future, which I apparently appeared able to deliver, and our military ready to defend). So this is the seduction of normalcy, I thought as I smiled back, compromised and radiant.

But the pregnant body in public is also obscene. It radiates a kind of smug auto eroticism: an intimate relation is going on—one that is visible to others, but that decisively excludes them. Service members may salute, strangers may offer their congratulations or their seats, but this privacy, this bond, can also irritate. It especially irritates the antiabortionists, who would prefer to pry apart the twofer earlier and earlier— twenty-four weeks, twenty weeks, twelve weeks, six weeks … The sooner you can pry the twofer apart, the sooner you can dispense with one constituent of the relationship:
the woman with rights
.

For all the years I didn’t want to be pregnant—the years I spent harshly deriding “the breeders”—I secretly felt pregnant women were smug in their complaints. Here they were, sitting on top of the cake of the culture, getting all the kudos for doing exactly what women are supposed to do, yet still they felt unsupported and discriminated against. Give me a break! Then, when I wanted to be pregnant but wasn’t, I felt that pregnant women had the cake I wanted, and were busy bitching about the flavor of the icing.