The Best of Jack’s Naughty Bits

We are the animals with language and the animals that fall in love and it is our glory and our curse to spend our lives trying to use the one to express the other. Milton called words "dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce" and though we would have them pierce, too often they thud or hobble. It often surprises me that the study of literature has any objective other than to find the most piercing, beautiful, elegant expressions of the fundamental joys and problems of human existence. We are all of us always lacking the right words, and literature is one of the few places where we sometimes find them. Great books are great because they scribble down what most of us wish we could say but probably will never be able to. Literature should be studied not for its history, but for its impact it has on the living present, and it can only do that if the books we teach still have currency in the quotidian realities of students. No book is great in a vacuum, but only for whatever beauty, poignancy and vitality it contains that can be made to make sense to the contemporary reader. We should read Beowulf, for example, not because it is among the earliest works in English, but to find lines like: "Now, for a time, you find glory in your strength, yet soon sickness or sword shall diminish it, or fire’s fangs, or flood’s surge, or sword’s swing or spear’s flight, or appalling age; brightness of eyes will fail and grow dark; then death shall overcome you, warrior." Now that’s pathos!
     That’s why, to take another obvious example, when one teaches the hermetic, staggering, singular genius of James Joyce, it is not enough to say, "He was the most important, original writer in English in the twentieth century," and then begin assigning chapters from Ulysses. Nor perhaps does it make sense even to introduce Joyce with Dubliners or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which, however accessible, are far inferior texts and not what makes Joyce Joyce. In my opinion, students deserve to begin with his letters, especially the racy ones (assuming, perhaps optimistically, a rather progressive classroom). For in a series of notes written to his wife Nora while in his late twenties, Joyce demonstrates what the greatest modern writer in the English language can do in a literary genre most of us have had a go at: the lust letter. And what he does is get nasty — nasty, shocking, and scurrilous, yes, but also real, human, accessible, likeable and, always, brilliant. The Joyce that one finds in the letters is a writer you want to keep reading, a complex figure who you admire and empathize with. This disposition goes a long way toward making you want to read Ulysses — and helping you understand it.
     In the letter below Joyce confesses the impact Nora’s sexy letters have had on him. Stereotypes would have us believe that men don’t get aroused by "mere" words, but anyone who’s ever received a pink, perfumed, prurient bit of poetry knows that’s not the case (and, truth be told, it sounds like Nora was sending some real humdingers). Joyce’s response is the only one appropriate — more! — and the words he finds to express both the simple sentiment and the complex libido that underlies it are sure proof of the power of the pen. In the days before phone sex and Internet chat rooms, this is the way it was done. Or the way it was done right.

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James Joyce to Nora Barnacle Joyce, December 9, 1909

You say [your letter] is worse than mine. How is it worse, my love? . . . You say what you will do with your tongue (I don’t mean sucking me off) and in that lovely word you write so big and underline, you little blackguard. It is thrilling to hear that word (and one or two others you have not written) on a girl’s lips. But I wish you spoke of yourself and not of me. Write me a long long letter, full of that and other things, about yourself, darling. You know now how to give me a cockstand. Tell me the smallest things about yourself so long as they are obscene and secret and filthy. Let every sentence be full of dirty, immodest words and sounds. They are all lovely to hear and to see on paper even but the dirtiest are the most beautiful . . .
     I am happy now, because my little whore tells me she wants me to roger her arseways and wants me to fuck her mouth and wants to unbutton me and pull out my mickey and suck it off like a teat. More and dirtier than this she wants to do, my little naked fucker, my naughty wriggling little frigger, my sweet dirty little farter.
     Goodnight, my little cuntie. I am going to lie down and pull at myself till I come. Write more and dirtier, darling. Tickle your little cockey while you write to make you say worse and worse. Write the dirty words big and underline them and kiss them and hold them for a moment to your sweet hot cunt, darling, and also pull up your dress a moment and hold them in under your farting bum. Do more if you wish and send the letter then to me, my darling brown-assed fuckbird.

© James Joyce

Ah, the hickey. Such a marker, such a brand, more symbolic and defiant even than a tattoo. A hickey says, I’ve been messing around and I’m not afraid to show it, not to mention that I’m also rather crass and probably in deep economic hardship and I’m not afraid to show that either. Being where I’m from, the corn country of Illinois, hickeys were a pretty big part of the social economy of my high school. I remember proud Camaro-drivers in the locker room describing to us, their captive audience of weenies, the necklace of hickeys they had left on their loved ones the night before in the church parking lot. I remember seeing enormous, purplebrownorangecrimson splotches like phantasmagoric blood-sucking sea flowers grafted onto the necks of my P.E. mates. I heard tales of initials being spelled on asses, of hearts crudely sketched, of yellow and brick-colored roads leading from clavicle to cunny, left by the champing lips of rear-seat Romeos. And I thought, This is romance.
     I would not receive my first hickey till senior year — and it proved to be a force of history. But, as Marx reminds us, history is as much farce as it is tragedy, and this tale has equal dollops. It was a summer evening, one of my friend’s parents were away, the party was raging and I snuck out the back with someone else’s girlfriend. We were lying in the wet grass making out and I thought, This is the most beautiful woman I will ever kiss. And then came the voice of her boyfriend. She jumped up and went back while I slinked into the night. The next day, I was to meet friends at the pool. I woke to find a half-dollar-shaped mottled bruise just below my right ear. Impossible to hide. I arrived at the pool to find not only my friends, but the young woman I had been long-courting, the one I really wanted, Junior Miss Right, ready to set her towel down next to mine. And then she saw it. There was no not seeing it, and I knew it. I sheepishly tried to explain, but she didn’t say anything. She just turned, as little tears started to form in her eyes, and went back to the changing rooms. There was never another chance.
     So, marked as my life has been by hickeys, I never really noticed them coming up in the literature I’d read. Not, that is, until Swinburne. Based on the frequency of references, it would appear that old A.C. was not capable of kissing without marking, of osculating without masticating. For this week’s excerpt, I’m going to reprint the examples I found from Swinburne’s most important book of poetry, Poems and Ballads. This may not be a comprehensive list, but I think it’s more than enough to crown Swinburne "Poet of the Hickey."

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Poems and Ballads by A.C. Swinburne

From "Laus Veneris"

Asleep or waking is it? For her neck,
Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck
Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out;
Soft, and stung softly — fairer for a fleck.

[ . . . ]

There is a feverish famine in my veins;
Below her bosom, where a crushed grape stains
The white and blue, there my lips caught and clove
An hour since, and what mark of me remains?

[ . . . ]

Alas! For sorrow is all the end of this.
O sad kissed mouth, how sorrowful it is!
O breast whereat some suckling sorrow clings,
Red with the bitter blossom of a kiss!

From "Fragoletta"

Mine arms are close about thine head,
My lips are fervent on thy face,
And where my kiss hath fed
Thy flower-like blood leaps red
To the kissed place.

From "Dolores: Notre Dame des Sept Douleurs"

By the ravenous teeth that have smitten
Through the kisses that blossom and bud

[ . . . ]

The white wealth of a body made brighter
By the blushes of amorous blows,
And seamed with sharp lips and fierce fingers,
And branded by kisses that bruise
[ . . . ]

The skin changes country and color
And shrivels or swells to a snake’s
Let it brighten and bloat and grow duller,
We know it, the flames and the flakes,
Red brands on it smitten and bitten,
Round skies where a star is a stain,
And the leaves with thy litanies written,
Our Lady of Pain.

Let this be said: I have tasted many of the joys under heaven and found none more reliably luscious than the kiss. Fragile yet potent, combustible, tangy, pushpull and eminently expressive, the kiss has all the upsides of sex and none of the mess. The kiss is a Trojan horse of intimacy, so seemingly innocent, so licit, yet so gut-wrenching, soul-speaking and endorphin-firing at the same time. I am a kiss junkie; I love to kiss, I kiss to love, I’m constantly trying to steal women away from conversations to secret them into back bedrooms for some serious necking. And every once in a while, it actually works.
     My first real kiss came behind the storage sheds next to the junior high school football field. A year or two later, I got one from a popular girl; it was shocking both because I was the most loathed kid in the school, and because her mouth was large enough to encircle mine completely. I mentioned this fact to a "friend," and he told two friends, and they told two friends, and soon she was cursing me through the halls of the school, lowering my social status even further. A more felicitous early kiss came in high school, at the behest of the costume designer for the school play, whose lips had the incomparable collapsing effect of a ziplocked bag of pudding (where are you now, darling? Where are you?). The most bittersweet was a single, slow-planted dream smooch from an angelic beauty who,when I asked her some days later if it was a fluke, said that it most assuredly was. She died in her teens, and that one kiss was all I knew, yet I will never forget her.
     Later life has not ceased to provide me still more astonishing meetings of lips, and many lessons to learn from them. Some women kiss you because that’s as far as they’ll go; others kiss you to decide if they’ll go further. An experienced friend laughed at me when I told her I still occasionally have bad sex, saying that I should know from the first kiss how it will work out. She’s right of course, so now I try to kiss, dance with and see the SATs of all prospective girlfriends before things get serious. The kissing, ultimately, is the most important indicator, for kisses are the vehicle for the joy of fresh infatuation, yet remain a reservoir of warmth as even the oldest loves grow older. And in their ultimate role, kisses can provide indelible proof of love itself. That is the theme of the excerpt below, from William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Ironweed.

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From Ironweed by William Kennedy

But then you get [a kiss] like that first whizzer on Kibbee’s lumber pile, one that comes out of the brain and the heart and the crotch, and out of the hands on your hair, and out of those breasts that weren’t all the way blown up yet, and out of the clutch them arms give you, and out of time itself, which keeps track of how long it can go on without you gettin’ even slightly bored the way you got bored years later with kissin’ almost anybody but Helen, and out of fingers (Katrina had fingers like that) that run themselves around and over your face and down your neck, and out of the grip you take on her shoulders, especially on them bones that come out of the middle of her back like angel wings, and out of them eyes that keep openin’ and closin’ to make sure that this is still goin’ and still real and not just stuff you dream about and when you know it’s real it’s okay to close ‘em again, and outa that tongue, holy shit, that tongue, you gotta ask where she learned that because nobody ever did that except Katrina who was married with a kid and had a right to know, but Annie, goddamn, Annie, where’d you pick that up, or maybe you been gidzeyin’ heavy on this lumber pile regular (No, no, no, I know you never, I always knew you never), and so it is natural with a woman like Annie that the kiss come out of every part of her body and more, outa that mouth  . . . and he sees well beyond the mouth into a primal location in this woman’s being, a location that evokes in him not only the memory of years but decades and even more, the memory of epochs, aeons, so that he is sure that no matter where he might have sat with a woman and felt this way, whether it was in some ancient cave or some bogside shanty, or on a North Albany lumber pile, he and she would both know that there was something in each of them that had to stop being one and become two, that had to swear that forever after there would never be another (and there never has been, quite), and that there would be allegiance and sovereignty and fidelity and other such tomfool horseshit that people destroy their heads with when what they are saying has nothing to do with time’s forevers but everything to do with the simultaneous recognition of an eternal twain, well sir, then both of them, Francis and Annie, or the Francises and Annies of any age, would both know in that same instant that there was something between them that had to stop being two and become one.
     Such was the significance of that kiss.

©William Kennedy

I think it was Umberto Eco who said that he dreaded reading the Bible as a teenager, until he discovered how much sex was in it. He had a point: as early as Genesis 2, God says, "It is not good for a man to be alone" (a belief I’ve long subscribed to), and he makes first the animals, then Eve. I’d rather not comment on the order of these events — the implications are clear to those who want them to be clear — I’d rather point out that Adam gets a partner in Eden faster than most of us would at a sex addict’s convention.
     And such is the nature of the Bible as a whole: couplings are common, incest omnipresent and innuendo aplenty. The Good Book does not lack for good parts, especially the Old Testament — you just have to sift through endless lists of progeny and litanies of the scourges inflicted on the Israelites to get to them.
     Take the story of Abraham and Sarah (originally Abram and Sarai), the second sexually active couple in Genesis. In the course of a few chapters, Sarah, while pretending to be Abraham’s sister to protect him, gets abducted into the Pharoah’s harem (bad Pharoah, bad Pharoah), proves herself to be Abraham’s half-sister, gets released, then gets taken into Abimelech’s harem (who is warned by God not to go near her), gets released, convinces Abraham to have a baby (Ishmael) with the maid Hagar, and eventually has a baby with him herself (Isaac). So much happens so fast in the Bible, that reading it for naughty bits is like trying to distinguish body parts in scrambled adult channels on TV. If your attention wavers for even an instant, you risk missing the enchilada.
     Amid all the wham-bam sex tales in the early books of the Old Testament, the most interesting involve Lot and his daughters. Lot, you’ll remember, was the one man in Sodom that the Lord decided to save from the fire and brimstone. So he sends two angels to Lot’s house to warn him of the destruction and give him instructions for getting himself and his family out of Dodge. Now the inhabitants of Sodom were not called Sodomites for nothing, so when they see the two male angels — certified hotties — going into Lot’s house, they want a piece of the action. "Both old and young, all the people from every quarter" circle around Lot’s house, banging on his door, calling, "Where are the men which came in to thee this night? Bring them to us that we may know them." Among the fabulous euphemisms for sex in the King James translation, "to know" is one of my favorites. I envision a mob of sex fiends hemmed in around Antonio Sabato Jr., screaming, "We want to know you, we just want to know you." You get the point.
     Lot realizes he has a difficult situation on his hands. So he goes out to the throng, locking the door behind him, and says:
     " I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof."
Here is a good example of what can transpire in the course of a few Biblical words. You scan the line, scan it again, and say to yourself, In place of the angels, did Lot just offer the crowd his virgin daughters to do with what they will? I mean, being a good host is nice and all, but that seems a bit extreme. The mind reels — not unproductively — at what would befall the innocents if they were cast to the awaiting wolves.
     Thankfully, the angels intervene. They pull Lot back into the house and blind the Sodomites pressing against the door. Then they facilitate Lot’s exit, with wife and daughters in tow, but, in their flight across the plain, Lot’s wife makes the mortal mistake of looking back (like many of us toward old relationships) and is turned into a pillar of salt.
     Yet the saga of Lot and his daughters is not over. Having fled to the town of Zoar, he eventually becomes afraid and moves himself and his daughters to the mountains. Apparently it’s a little underpopulated up there, and his daughters begin to despair of ever getting nookie. The older says to the younger, "Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve the seed of the father." Ah, the old Get Dad Drunk and Have Him Impregnate Us trick — pretty sneaky, Sis! So on consecutive nights the daughters get Lot schnookered and go lie with him (again, a nice euphemism, though not as good as "come in unto"). Lot, the sod, doesn’t seem to notice either time. Eventually each of his daughters gives birth to a son.
     Now, mind you, all this has happened in the first twenty pages of the Bible (at least in my edition). This is some kind of book. By comparison, the first twenty pages of Best American Erotica 1999 contain nowhere near as much sex, and a fraction of the scandal. True, conventional erotica tends to have more adjective-heavy descriptions of sex than one finds in the Holy Book (the Song of Solomon is the exception, as we will see), but for sheer quantity of nudge nudge, the Bible is up there.
     By and large, the Old Testament is a very weird document, full of bizarre and rather unsavory tidbits that the New Testament tried to smooth over. Even God himself had to be rendered kinder and gentler the second time around, for in the Hebrew books he was forever casting plagues and famines down on the people, and insisting on himself as a "consuming fire" and a "jealous God." In Isaiah 3, for example, the "haughty" daughters of Zion with their "wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go and making a tinkling with their feet" will be smote down by the Lord, and he will discover their "secret parts." Ooh. Best take off those bangles before it’s too late.
     But my favorite Old Testament oddity occurs in Deuteronomy 23, where, in a list of all those who will not make it to Heaven, it is written: "He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord." Rum thing, not only do you have to go through this life without the priviest of privies, but the gates of Paradise are closed to you to boot (and the fact that you can sing a decent falsetto is pretty minor recompense). Yet the intrigue of this passage doesn’t end there: why, in fact, are the memberless or the crushed-testicled not welcome into the New Jerusalem? Interesting question. There are numerous medieval theological debates about whether angels eat and drink, piss and shit (and where it goes if they do), but I’ve never heard anyone ask if they screw. Yet here is evidence that the celestial nightclub serves up more than just juice and cookies. Perhaps this is not the venue to reinscribe us in thirteenth-century scholastic arguments, but the point is still intriguing: if it was just sex the elect were after, the penis would be enough. But if the balls are also necessary, this suggests a certain import to the physical male orgasm itself. To my mind, this complicates Aquinas’ notion that the postprandial material discharge of angels is only a vapor (but not a flatulence, mind you); for even if we agree that angel excretion is but gas, what are we to do with angel jizz? I’m sure Aquinas would have said it was some kind of noumenal hand lotion.
     Even in the briefest of introductions to sex in the Old Testament, no account can ignore one of the most erotic, exquisite texts not just in the Bible, but in the whole history of Western literature: the Song of Solomon. In all the reams of Biblical interpretation, this is the text that has received the most treatment. The reasons are twofold: the Song of Solomon is sufficiently explicit to be embarrassing to the anti-sensuality of the later Christian church, and thus required extensive backpedaling. This is the obvious, confessed reason so many monks spilled their ink on its pages. The other, only slightly less obvious, is that it is very fun to read, and decidedly arousing, especially if the only other thing you’re reading is Samuel and Jeremiah’s accounts of the punishments visited upon the wicked.
     In effect, the Song of Solomon is generally agreed to be a dialogue between two lovers (although I, for one, detect more than two total speakers, but that truly is a debate outside our scope), one called Solomon (not necessarily the famous King who appears elsewhere in the Old Testament), the other his unnamed lover, who, by some accounts, may have written the piece. Orthodox Christian interpretations attempt to downplay the hot and heavy eroticism in the Song by saying that the female lover is the Church, Solomon is Christ and their love is the spiritual union of the material Christian apparatus with the higher spiritual forces.
     Yeah right. The Song begins: "The song of songs, which is Solomon’s. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine." If the point here was supposed to be that the Church wants to merge itself with the love of Christ the Savior, there would have been considerably less distracting ways of saying it. No — the Song of Solomon is a love poem, and the love is a very corporeal one. That it made it into the foundational book of Christianity is a mystery beyond my comprehension. But, like the Psalms, here is a part of the Bible that can be read purely for the love of its poetry.
     I’m touched all the more by the Song for the occasional odd chord it strikes. Such compliments as "thy neck is like the tower David builded for an armory" or "they hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead" have perhaps lost some of their charm in the last few thousand years (a modern adaptation might be: thy hair is like dark-suited businessmen, leaping out of skyscrapers on Black Monday). And there are moments that seem downright overdone: "My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him."
     For the most part, though, the poem’s imagery is most pleasantly evocative. A few highlights: the lover says that her beloved "feeds among the lilies" and that her hands, when she rises up to him, are "dropped with myrrh." And Solomon, meanwhile, says to her, "Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue." And she back to him: "Blow on my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat the pleasant fruits." Heart be stilled!
     Fan though I am, I hadn’t read much of the Bible until I went to graduate school and, on a rather prolonged lark, decided to become a medievalist. As a result, I found myself a late twentysomething pagan having to read the whole of the Good Book. I did it straight through — not quickly, mind you, but steadily. What I discovered between the now worn-off covers of my Red Letter edition corresponded so minimally to what I had anticipated I wondered if I had the right religion. The sex and sexual oddities were only some of the Bible’s unforeseen pleasures (others include the almost James Bond-like coolness of Christ, the beauty of Paul’s prose, the phenomenal stories of Job and Ruth, the bombast of Ezekiel, et cetera.). Having now read the entire Bible multiple times over, I am still a pagan, but I’m all for placing copies in every hotel room. It’s the most influential book in Western culture, and it’s a lot better than TV. n°

It’s a standby among parlor-room conundrums: If you had to be deprived of all your senses save one, which would you keep? Taste, perhaps, if you were Paul Prudhomme and lived down the block from La Tour d’Argent; or smell, if Carolina wisteria bloomed outside your bay windows; some would say hearing, transfixed by the rapture of Beethoven or Bessie Smith; but most people would cling to sight, "the prime work of God" (as Milton called it after he lost his), and hope to fight back the haunting darkness.
     Not I. For my money, if I could only retain one means of interacting with the world, it would be touch. Touch, soft like the powder on a moth’s wing, the cool parabola of a slow-traced finger along my brow. I imagine myself blind as Borges, reading the Braille dots that circle a nipple or stroking the soft harp strings of down on my lover’s belly. Deaf as the desert amid the seesaw scissoring of body on body, hearing through contact the syllables of joint and sinew, learning through movement the grammar of friction. My brain is full of visual images I won’t soon forget; the jukebox of the mind contains innumerable tracks; I can recall the smell and taste of my favorite things almost at will; but of touch I require a constant transfusion. Something about touch defies memory — it is diffuse, complex and difficult to render in language. Aristotle was probably right that we receive all our knowledge through our senses, but touch is the only one I trust, and sex the language in which I’m least willing to lie. Fingers working like self-aware brushes on the electrified canvas of skin, a hundred million Hooksexup endings in constant communion with the brain — that is the source of touch’s appeal.
     We’ve all temporarily experienced what it would be like to have only one sense (at least under ideal circumstances): headphones on and eyes closed, surrendering to the tweeter and woof, or full-mouthed and chewing, head thrown back in communion with the flavor of a morel. With porn, especially, we limit ourselves to a one-sense experience, even if more would be merrier. Internet smut is the worst: sitting unfeelingly in a desk chair, gazing through the blue flicker to unreachably distant, odorless, 2-D bodies gathering themselves in their pixels for our delight, the crotch and the eye connected by a single, throbbing Hooksexup — not how I’d prefer my arousal. I don’t think I’m alone in this opinion. Among allies in the cult of contact I think I can number the great Argentine writer, Julio Cortázar. Cortázar’s chef d’oeuvre, the avant-garde novel Hopscotch, contains one of my favorite love scenes in modern literature. He paints it in a few hundred words, and in all five senses, but it’s clear that touch is sovereign. Two eyes, two ears, one tongue, one nose, ten fingers. See what I mean? Reach out.

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from Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, translated by Gregory Rabassa

I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you.
     You look at me, from close up you look at me, closer and closer and then we play cyclops, we look closer and closer at one another and our eyes get larger, they come closer, they merge into one and the two cyclopses look at each other, blending as they breathe, our mouths touch and struggle in gentle warmth, biting each other with their lips, barely holding their tongues on their teeth, playing in corners where a heavy air comes and goes with an old perfume and a silence. Then my hands go to sink into your hair, to cherish slowly the depth of your hair while we kiss as if our mouths were filled with flowers or with fish, with lively movements and dark fragrance. And if we bite each other the pain is sweet, and if we smother each other in a brief and terrible sucking in together of our breaths, that momentary death is beautiful. And there is but one saliva and one flavor of ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water.

©1966

It is a curious moment in history when the steamiest literature you can get your hands on is a Congressional investigation and the male protagonist is no Fabio, no stablehand on the Chatterley estate, but the President of the United States. For despite what Ken Starr might have us believe, his Report was written as, and is certainly meant to be read as, a love story. It has all the components of the pinkest romance novel: the oblique promise of l’amour propre is continually proffered in the resiliency of Monica’s naïve optimism. And bad Bill’s responses are marked by the diffidence and resignation of a man who sees the writing on the wall. We see him committing the classic error of forgetting that there was a mind behind the convenient lips, a heart within the heaving chest, of seeing Monica Lewinsky not as a person, but as an appliance. Thus the abstraction of his responses, as if what was transpiring involved historical chessmen or universal allegories, not flesh and blood humans. When she suggested she might tell if he didn’t treat her better, he rejoined, "It is illegal to threaten the President of the United States." Now this is a phrase I could never imagine saying to a lover (and not only because I might have inhaled); it confuses self and office, man and symbol. Lovers’ quarrels are not resolved by consulting the Constitution. Bill, stick in hand, was clearly trying to scrape off the unfortunateness he had stepped into. And Monica, meanwhile, persisted in her hopes, questioning if he really knew her, asking him if he wanted to, only to be silenced by his kisses. Kisses that said, in effect, "Dear girl, don’t you know that real emotions are not permitted on the stage of a Trauerspiel? Identity is unimportant here; a hand is moving you. I am that hand . . ."
     I myself have come to fear such encounters, where an atavistic urge or momentary impulse leads me into temptation, or into tempting, a woman but a decimal of my years. And, like decimals, it is hard to remember that they are also wholes, and harder still to remember that they might see you as larger than life, or larger than you are. The easily won, never asked for heart is worn like a lodestone, a mantle of lead we try to wriggle out from under. I feel for Clinton because it’s hard not to wield power, to not feel and lust for the very act of wielding, and then to shrink beneath the burden of its consequences. Power scripts its own abuse. And thus I feel for Lewinsky too. For it is all too easy to come under its spell. To say, as she did again and again, "Even though he’s a big schmuck . . ."
     And we, the American people, will we not in the end permit this to pass, murmuring to ourselves the very same sentiment?

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From The Starr Report
December 31 Sexual Encounter

     According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President had their third sexual encounter on New Year’s Eve. Sometime between noon and 1 p.m., in Ms. Lewinsky’s recollection, she was in the pantry area of the President’s private dining room talking with a White House steward, Bayani Nelvis. She told Mr. Nelvis that she had recently smoked her first cigar, and he offered to give her one of the President’s cigars. Just then, the President came down the hallway from the Oval Office and saw Ms. Lewinsky. The President dispatched Mr. Nelvis to deliver something to Mr. Panetta.
     According to Ms. Lewinsky, she told the President that Mr. Nelvis had promised her a cigar, and the President gave her one. She told him her name — she had the impression that he had forgotten it in the six weeks since their furlough encounters because, when passing her in the hallway, he had called her "Kiddo." The President replied that he knew her name; in fact, he added, having lost the phone number she had given him, he had tried to find her in the phonebook.
     According to Ms. Lewinsky, they moved to the study. "And then . . . we were kissing and he lifted my sweater and exposed my breasts and was fondling them with his hands and with his mouth." She performed oral sex. Once again, he stopped her before he ejaculated because, Ms. Lewinsky testified, "he didn’t know me well enough or he didn’t trust me yet."

January 7 Sexual Encounter
     [W]e made an arrangement that . . . he would have the door to his office open, and I would pass by the office with some papers and then . . . he would sort of stop me and invite me in. So, that was exactly what happened. I passed by and that was actually when I saw [Secret Service Uniformed Officer] Lew Fox who was on duty outside the Oval Office, and stopped and spoke with Lew for a few minutes, and then the President came out and said, oh, hey, Monica . . . come on in . . . And so we spoke for about ten minutes in the [Oval] office. We sat on the sofas. Then we went into the back study and we were intimate in the bathroom.
     Ms. Lewinsky testified that during this bathroom encounter, she and the President kissed, and he touched her bare breasts with his hands and his mouth. The President "was talking about performing oral sex on me," according to Ms. Lewinsky. But she stopped him because she was menstruating and he did not. Ms. Lewinsky did perform oral sex on him.
     Afterward, she and the President moved to the Oval Office and talked. According to Ms. Lewinsky: "[H]e was chewing on a cigar. And then he had the cigar in his hand and he was kind of looking at the cigar in . . . sort of a naughty way. And so . . . I looked at the cigar and I looked at him and I said, we can do that, too, some time."

January 21 Sexual Encounter
     "I was feeling a little bit insecure about whether he had liked it or didn’t like it . . . I didn’t know if this was sort of developing into some kind of a longer-term relationship than what I thought it initially might have been, that maybe he had some regular girlfriend . . . "
     According to Ms. Lewinsky, she questioned the President about his interest in her. "I asked him why he doesn’t ask me any questions about myself, and . . . is this just about sex . . . or do you have some interest in trying to get to know me as a person?" The President laughed and said, according to Ms. Lewinsky, that "he cherishes the time that he had with me." She considered it "a little bit odd" for him to speak of cherishing their time together "when I felt like he didn’t really even know me yet."
     They continued talking as they went to the hallway by the study. Then, with Ms. Lewinsky in mid-sentence, "he just started kissing me." He lifted her top and touched her breasts with his hands and mouth. According to Ms. Lewinsky, the President "unzipped his pants and sort of exposed himself," and she performed oral sex.

February 4 Sexual Encounter and Subsequent Phone Calls
     The President telephoned her at her desk and they planned their rendezvous. At her suggestion, they bumped into each other in the hallway, "because when it happened accidentally, that seemed to work really well," then walked together to the area of the private study.
     There, according to Ms. Lewinsky, they kissed. She was wearing a long dress that buttoned from the neck to the ankles. "And he unbuttoned my dress and he unhooked my bra, and sort of took the dress off my shoulders and . . . moved the bra . . . [H]e was looking at me and touching me and telling me how beautiful I was." He touched her breasts with his hands and his mouth, and touched her genitals, first through underwear and then directly. She performed oral sex on him.
     After their sexual encounter, the President and Ms. Lewinsky sat and talked in the Oval Office for about forty-five minutes. Ms. Lewinsky thought the President might be responding to her suggestion during their previous meeting about "trying to get to know me." It was during that conversation on February 4, according to Ms. Lewinsky, that their friendship started to blossom.
     When she prepared to depart, according to Ms. Lewinsky, the President "kissed my arm and told me he’d call me, and then I said, yeah, well, what’s my phone number? And so he recited both my home number and my office number off the top of his head." The President called her at her desk later that afternoon and said he had enjoyed their time together.
March 31 Sexual Encounter

     According to Ms. Lewinsky, the President telephoned her at her desk and suggested that she come to the Oval Office on the pretext of delivering papers to him. She went to the Oval Office and was admitted by a plainclothes Secret Service agent. In her folder was a gift for the President, a Hugo Boss necktie.
     In the hallway by the study, the President and Ms. Lewinsky kissed. On this occasion, according to Ms. Lewinsky, "he focused on me pretty exclusively," kissing her bare breasts and fondling her genitals. At one point, the President inserted a cigar into Ms. Lewinsky’s vagina, then put the cigar in his mouth and said: "It tastes good." After they were finished, Ms. Lewinsky left the Oval Office and walked through the Rose Garden.

Ms. Lewinsky’s Frustrations
     Continuing to believe that her relationship with the President was the key to regaining her White House pass, Ms. Lewinsky hoped that the President would get her a job immediately after the election. "I kept a calendar with a countdown until election day," she later wrote in an unsent letter to him. The letter states: "I was so sure that the weekend after the election you would call me to come visit and you would kiss me passionately and tell me you couldn’t wait to have me back. You’d ask me where I wanted to work and say something akin to ‘Consider it done’ and it would be. Instead I didn’t hear from you for weeks and subsequently your phone calls became less frequent."
     Ms. Lewinsky grew increasingly frustrated over her relationship with President Clinton. One friend understood that Ms. Lewinsky complained to the President about not having seen each other privately for months, and he replied, "Every day can’t be sunshine." In email to another friend in early 1997, Ms. Lewinsky wrote: "I just don’t understand what went wrong, what happened? How could he do this to me? Why did he keep up contact with me for so long and now nothing, now when we could be together?"

February 28 Sexual Encounter
     According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President had a sexual encounter on Thursday, February 28 — their first in nearly eleven months. Wearing a navy blue dress from the Gap, Ms. Lewinsky attended the radio address at the President’s invitation (relayed by Ms. Currie), then had her photo taken with the President. Ms. Lewinsky had not been alone with the President since she had worked at the White House, and, she testified, "I was really nervous." President Clinton told her to see Ms. Currie after the photo was taken because he wanted to give her something. "So I waited a little while for him and then Betty and the President and I went into the back office," Ms. Lewinsky testified.
     In the study, according to Ms. Lewinsky, the President "started to say something to me and I was pestering him to kiss me, because . . . it had been a long time since we had been alone." The President told her to wait a moment, as he had presents for her. As belated Christmas gifts, he gave her a hat pin and a special edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
     Ms. Lewinsky described the Whitman book as "the most sentimental gift he had given me . . . it’s beautiful and it meant a lot to me." During this visit, according to Ms. Lewinsky, the President said he had seen her Valentine’s Day message in the Washington Post, and he talked about his fondness for Romeo and Juliet.
     Ms. Lewinsky testified that after the President gave her the gifts, they had a sexual encounter: [W]e went back over by the bathroom in the hallway, and we kissed. We were kissing and he unbuttoned my dress and fondled my breasts with my bra on, and then took them out of my bra and was kissing them and touching them with his hands and with his mouth.
     And then I think I was touching him in his genital area through his pants, and I think I unbuttoned his shirt and was kissing his chest. And then . . . I wanted to perform oral sex on him . . . and so I did. And then . . . I think he heard something, or he heard someone in the office. So, we moved into the bathroom.
     And I continued to perform oral sex and then he pushed me away, kind of as he always did before he came, and then I stood up and I said . . . I care about you so much . . . I don’t understand why you won’t let me . . . make you come; it’s important to me; I mean, it just doesn’t feel complete, it doesn’t seem right.
     Ms. Lewinsky testified that she and the President hugged, and "he said he didn’t want to get addicted to me, and he didn’t want me to get addicted to him." They looked at each other for a moment. Then, saying that "I don’t want to disappoint you," the President consented.
     For the first time, she performed oral sex through completion. As a final note, I want to mention in passing the similarity between the section of the Starr Report quoted above and my excerpt from Garcia Marquez’ Autumn of the Patriarch from some time back. I’m not saying that Clinton gets his sex ideas from his confessed favorite author, nor am I suggesting that he even read the book. It seems much more likely that a man in his position wouldn’t have time to read entire novels and would have to resort to abbreviations, brief selections that would highlight his favorite bits . . . Now I wonder where he’d find those?