Susan had dated scores of boys and men, but those were the only ones she had ever cared about to let do anything but kiss her or feel her breasts. A girl friend who used to sleep at her house had taught her how to masturbate when she was fifteen. They would lock her bedroom door and finger fuck each other until they both came. They tried tying on top of each other and rubbing, but were never able to have an orgasm that way. Once she had learned how, Susan masturbated often, usually in bed, and usually lying on her stomach, which made her orgasms more, intense, when she pressed herself into the mattress. She sometimes fantasized about Hollywood stars, but seldom about anybody she actually knew. One day she found out that her favorite masturbation figure, a big he-man type, was as queer as a three-dollar bill. She was crushed about it for weeks.
"Do you think that's a scarlet past?" she asked.
"I wouldn't exactly call it scarlet," I said. "Maybe slightly pink."
"I wonder why I never wanted to use my mouth on anybody before you."
"Because you were looking for me, but I wasn't there yet," I said.
"Sucking is a healthy and normal instinct of loving that we foolishly sublimate as we grow up. But some women, usually women of great sensitivity, like you, need an emotional attachment, and you never had that kind of feeling for the other men you've slept with."
"What you did to me with your tongue, from, behind?"
"Yes?"
"I wanted to do it to you, but I was afraid."
"Of what I might think?"
"I guess. I've never wanted to do that before, either. I never even thought about it before."
I folded her into me. "We have time, baby, time for everything. You can do whatever you want to me, no matter how unsanitary you used to think it was. Because it's us now, your body and mine, and there's no such thing as dirty, no such thing as you can't, no such thing as shame or embarrassment. That's all over with, now."
"Can I fart anytime I want? she asked.
"Sure," I laughed, "but try to keep your ass out of my face when you're doing it."
"I promise," she said solemnly.
I awoke Monday morning to the aroma of hot coffee and cinnamon toast. Susan was already dressed for school, bright and perky, cleaning a few dirty dishes in the kitchen.
We had breakfast and talked about the new wave of New York Jewish writers spewing out plays and bestsellers like corn from the husking machine, establishing Jews as the country's new intellectual elite. Although it was true that almost half of American Jewry lived in New York and environs, Susan and I had both felt a sense of detachment from their writings. None of it seemed relevant to the way we thought or felt. Their world was distant and isolated from us. Like ants in a kitchen sugar jar, their myopic preoccupation with their immediate surroundings led them into a false assumption that the sugar jar was the kitchen.
We both were third generation, thoroughly assimilated Americans. We knew about as much Yiddish, learned from our parents in bits and pieces, as any Irish nightclub comedian. Never in our lives had either of us tasted anti-Semitism.
Religion had fascinated me, and in addition to my sparse bar-mitzvah training I had read a great amount of all of the major religions, comparing as I went. My general conclusion was that all religions, Judaism included, were ancient bullshit upon which institutions were founded which now existed simply for the purpose of propagating their own existence. Their reason for being was that they were there to be. How difficult it was for mankind, from his little dot in the back acres of the cosmos, to look up and say, "I am alone. I am here due to a combination of accident, chance, and probability, and I am all there is."
I was an atheist, and Susan believed in what she called a Universal Force, but not in a personal God or in any organized religion.
Yet the State of Israel, just four years old held a peculiar fascination for both of us, not because of cultural ties or heritage but from the standpoint of curiosity. We wanted to see these tough Jews, farmers and herdsmen, refugees and professionals, who had somehow kicked the shit out of an invading army and had established a state. We wanted to walk the land, to meet and talk with the people, and beneath it all we wanted to understand why, nonreligious and assimilated as we were, we felt this attachment for a place we had never seen and people we had never met.
We made a vow that during the coming summer vacation we would go to Israel to see and feel whatever it was we thought we might see and feel.
I was sitting naked at the small dinette table. Susan came over and sat on my lap, to hold close once more before I dressed and we had to leave for school. But it was too new, too fresh for us to just hold each other. She hiked up her long dress, pulled the crotch of her pants to the side, and, working herself slowly, she settled down on me, pushing me inside of her.
"Come in me," she said. "I want to feel you between my legs all day. I want to stand in class and see you sitting there with all of the others, and have the marvelous secret that your sperm is warm and alive inside my body."
"And then I realized that it was because Susan loved me, loved me as myself, and not the orgasms. I realized
that she was putting me under no pressure to perform, the only one who had never done so, because she knew that I could please her, and knowing that, it was no longer important to her. It was me and our feelings for each other that were important, and physical release had become secondary. The fucking machine could retire with a clear conscience.
She slid up and down on me fully, using her feet, planted firmly on the floor on either side of me, to push herself. This time I didn't fight it; I didn't grab her waist and use pressure to keep her from going so fast, or from using the full length of me. I didn't fight so that she could be pleased, because I understood that that wasn't the point anymore. Instead, I did what Susan wanted. I let her move as she wished; I let the voluptuous waves of pleasure she gave me build, one upon the other, until in a blaze of sensation I poured out into her. And when I did, she kissed my face all over, so joyful was she to give and to demand nothing in return.
I showered, shaved, and dressed while Susan made jokes about it all dripping down out of her, and that if I were to stick my head under her dress I would drown. And that day in class and from then on we had our secret looks, our eyes delivering silent, loving messages while our mouths discussed things completely irrelevant to what we felt. Often, as she stood there in her grandma disguise, I wondered what the class or other teachers would think if they knew my sperm was still damp in the crotch of her panties and drying in streaky crusts over the soft skin of her thighs. Over the next two months our relationship continued to grow, and as it grew our sex became no less important to us, but secondary. I made another discovery: if sex is fulfilling and satisfying to two people it becomes accepted into their total life in its proper proportion, as simply one facet of a much greater whole. Only when sex is not satisfying, when its failures cause doubts and frustrations, does it assume importance out of proportion to its place in a relationship. Like anything else that's desired, if you have it you don't think about it; if you don't have it you occupy yourself with trying to get it. Susan and I had it.
Many evenings we stayed home. I studied and Susan corrected papers, promising me an A only if I deserved one and joking that some students would go to any length to get a good grade from their teacher. Then we would listen to music, read, and talk until we were sleepy. Susan did the cooking, I did the dishes, and we both cleaned house. We were happy, living our lives and loving each other in gratitude and appreciation for what we had.